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Reading Slothfully

I was told in elementary school that I only could read at half the speed for success in college. Oh well, one benefit of slow reading is you get to live with the characters a longer period of time. I read in a vain attempt to better understand people. At my other homes, I'm known as a spouse, pop, guy in the choir, physical chemist, computer/web dilettante and child-care provider. In theory, I'm a published author, if you consider stuff like Quenching Cross Sections for Electronic Energy Transfer Reactions Between Metastable Argon Atoms and Noble Gases and Small Molecules to count as publications. I've strewn dozens of such fascinating things to the winds.

Currently reading

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas
Jules Verne
The Spirit of the Border
Zane Grey
Ramona the Brave (Ramona, #3)
Beverly Cleary
The Underground Man (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard)
Ross Macdonald
Delilah of the Snows
Harold Bindloss
Mrs. Miniver
Jan Struther
Betsy-Tacy Treasury (P.S.)
Maud Hart Lovelace
A Christmas Carol
Charles Dickens
The Way Some People Die
Ross Macdonald
Envy of Angels
Matt Wallace

A Gentleman in Moscow

A Gentleman in Moscow - Amor Towles My brother used to be a journalist in Moscow during the reign of the Soviet Union, so he has some interest in Russia and its history. This book essentially follows the history from about 1922 until 1954 or so by following the life of Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, who was living in a fancy hotel in Moscow, The Metropol, under house arrest from about 1922 on. For some reason, the Soviets didn't feel that the Count was enough of a threat to execute him or exile him to Siberia.

As we begin, a 9-year-old girl, Nina Kulikova, comes over to him and makes friends with him. She's allegedly under the supervision of a nanny, but the nanny seems uninterested. So Nina begins showing the Count all the ins and outs of the hotel. She has a pass key and knows the way to all the most secret interior places.

Count Rostov also makes friends with some of the hotel staff, including the fancy chef Emile Zhukovsky, the Maître d’ Andrey Duras, and bar tender Audrius.

Well, as time goes on, the Count begins working at the hotel as the head waiter. At some point Nina grows up, goes off and has a daughter. But then her spouse is sent to Siberia for something or other. So she brings her daughter to live with the Count in the Metropol until such time as she, Nina, can come back for her. And so on. Oh right, at some point early on, the Count has a one-night stand with a famous actress, Anna Urbanova. But, she reappears a number of years later, no longer quite so famous, and they begin a regular relationship.

It's a pretty interesting story, a sort of microcosm of life under Soviet rule, but all carried out within the gentlemanly, civilized walls of the Metropol.

Devil in a Blue Dress

Devil in a Blue Dress - Walter Mosley This is the first of the Easy Rawlings books, it seems. I started the series somewhere down the line, and then pretty much read to the end. So, I decided I should begin in at the beginning.

It's around 1948 or so, and Easy has just got out of the Army. He’s living in Los Angeles and just got laid off from a job at an aircraft factory. He needs money because he bought a house and needs to come up with mortgage payments. A sort of friend, who runs a bar suggests Easy do some work for a white man, DeWitt Albright. It seems that DeWitt wants a young woman found, one Daphne Monet. Allegedly, Albright wants Easy to find Daphne for a Mr. Todd Carter, a politically connected tycoon of some sort. But there might be more going on.

Well, some seemingly peripheral folks end up dead and Easy is shaken down by the cops, trying to pin something on him. He does find Ms. Monet, but she is a young woman running from some demons in her past. Easy’s violent best friend, Raymond Alexander, aka Mouse, sidles up from Houston and gets involved. And so forth. It’s a pretty engaging yarn. Perhaps too much sex and drinking for this elderly, repressed Calvinist, but that’s pretty much unavoidable these days, unless one is into Amish romances (who knew there was such a thing?).

Betsy and Tacy Go Over the Big Hill

Betsy and Tacy Go Over the Big Hill - Maud Hart Lovelace, Lois Lenski Well, the books I've been trying to read were so awful, I took up the third in the Betsy-Tacy series. Now, Betsy, Tacy, and Tib are 10. Being 10 is special, because one now has two digits for one's age, which means grown up. Only people like my late mother ever get to have three digits.

Anyway, Betsy, Tacy, and Tib fall in love with the young king of Spain and decide one of them should be queen. They choose Tib. But, their older sisters, Julia and Katie want to have a queen for themselves, the Queen of Summer. So, there's a huge fight.

Somewhere along the way, Betsy, Tacy, and Tib make friends with a little girl in Syria Town, Naifi. It seems there is an enclave of Syrian refugees in their valley. Eventually, they learn that Naifi is of "blood royal", back in her country anyway. But, she's come to America to be an American, so they must contrive to make her coronation a typical all-American celebration with flags and singing the Star Spangled Banner and so forth. Imagine that! A century ago, we accepted refugees into our country, made them feel welcome, and helped integrate them into society.

It's all rather a heart-warming story. I hope soon to find something more adult that is worth reading, but if I keep coming up with crap, I'll gladly revisit Betsy, Tacy, and Tib in their next adventure, during which they'll be 12.

Betsy-Tacy and Tib

Betsy-Tacy and Tib - Maud Hart Lovelace, Lois Lenski Well, I got so turned off by the books on my kindle that I decided to read another Betsy-Tacy book. This is the second one. The three friends are now 8-years old at the beginning of the book. That's three friends because, at the very end of the first book in the series, Tib Muller was added to the twosome of Betsy Ray and Tacey Kelly.

So, basically, we have three little girls who are best friends and who have lively imaginations. They have fun times together. That is fun times as would be likely for little girls some 120 years ago. So, they have picnics, form clubs, practice being dirty beggars, cut each other's hair, make ungodly messes, and so forth. They also get stuck with learning some things about housekeeping and, while trying to be good for a change, they learn how not to be good.

They liked to talk about God because one was a Baptist (Betsy), one a Catholic (Tacy) and one an Episcopalian (Tib). Back in the old days, children were reasonably ecumenical, it seems. Interesting because there was a fair bit of ecumenicism in my town 20 or 30 years ago, but in recent times the Baptists and Catholics most decidedly don't want to have anything to do with the Congregationalists and Methodists, and the Episcopalians and Unitarians have pretty much drifted off into their own, vague worlds. In some ways, we're regressing as a society.

Anyway, they thought that they might become "good" if they added a pebble to a bag around their necks every time they did something naughty. But then, it became rather fun adding the pebbles, so they got increasingly naughty, and got their younger siblings, Margaret (Betsy's little sister) and Hobbie (Tacy's little brother) involved. Naturally, they got into trouble in the end and had to search for other ways to become "good".

Well there's more, but it was a fun book, especially given the dreck I'd picked up previously that I wasn't able to finish.

Master of the Mill (New Canadian Library)

Master of the Mill (New Canadian Library) - Frederick Philip Grove I started this sometime in June, I believe. After about 15–20% of the book, I couldn't take it any more. I've read other books by Grove and liked them very much, but this one was too dry, and I couldn't for the life of me tell where it was going. I picked it up off and on a couple times more, and finally decided to give up. Life is too short to read boring crap.

Betsy-Tacy

Betsy-Tacy  - Maud Hart Lovelace Betsy Ray is almost 5. She has an older sister, Julia, but no friends on her street of her own age. She lives in a small town in Minnesota around the turn of the 20th century. Then a family moves in across the street and they have a 5-year old girl as well. Her name is Tacy Kelly and she's very shy. But soon, at Betsy's 5th birthday party, they become best friends and have many adventures together, making a house and/or store in a piano box, going visiting in their mothers' clothes and leaving their cards, having picnics up the hill, playing paper dolls, and so forth.

The book is rather simple and more suited to young girls than elderly, repressed, Calvinists. But still, I had fun reading this. It hearkens back to a time when life was simpler, or at least so we thought, and these days, I could do with reading about simple goodness and joy in life. I'm not sure how much further I'll delve into the Betsy-Tacy series.

The Chequer Board

The Chequer Board - Nevil Shute It seems that Jackie Turner is having medical problems. From time to time he passes out, cold. It's related to a medical problem he picked up in the war some ten years previously when he got shrapnel embedded in his brain. He had spent quite some time recovering from the wound in hospital in Cornwall. But his ward was actually a prison ward. Jackie had made some sketchy deals while in the military. Another of his mates, Duggie Brent, had murdered a man in a fight over a woman. A third, Flag Officer Morgan was just there because there was no place else for him. He didn't need to be imprisoned. The fourth was an American, Dave Lesurier, who was African American and was charged by his southern, white officers with rape, because he was "walking out" with a white, British woman, Grace Trefussis.

Well, anyway, to help with his recovery, the other people in Jackie's ward were tasked with reading and talking to him. Over time, he developed quite a fondness for them all. So, when Jackie is told that he likely has only a year to live, he decides to go on an investigating tour to see what happened to his mates from the prison hospital.

It's quite an interesting tale. Morgan had been shot down in Burma and eventually took up residence there and married a Burmese woman. Duggie Brent eventually became a butcher in Cornwall. Dave Lesurier stayed on in Cornwall and eventually married Grace Trefussis, the woman he was accused of having raped.

There was quite some meditation on racism in this book. It seems that there was a group of African-American troops in Cornwall who got along just fine with the local population until a bunch of white American troops were deployed to the region. Then problems arose. Then too, people in Britain couldn't imagine that Morgan had voluntarily taken up with a Burmese woman, and figured he was a brain-damaged beach comber.

Dr. Nightingale Follows a Canine Clue

Dr. Nightingale Follows a Canine Clue - Lydia Adamson The best part of this book is the cute corgi on the front cover (yes, I actually read a dead-tree book). The book is ok, but basically just throw-away reading. That makes sense, the plot is so implausible that it was clearly written as an act throw-away writing.

So, Dr. Nightingale is a veterinarian in the Hudson Valley some distance north of New York City, in cow country, or at least what used to be cow country. Her best friend, Rose is found murdered with two of her three dogs. The third dog, the corgi, is found running free in the woods where Rose and her two German shepherds were buried.

Dr. Nightingale tries to figure out who dunnit. I dunno, It didn't do much for me.

The Murder Monster

The Murder Monster - Emile C. Tepperman Classic pulp. Not great, but entertaining enough. Bummer that the rendering into ebook format was so poorly done.

I gather there is a host of pulp books featuring Secret Agent X. This is one of them. "X" is a master of disguise and takes on a number of personna. He can also mimic the looks and mannerisms of known people when necessary. He's also independently wealthy and absolutely abhors criminality and crime. He's dedicated his entire being to erasing crime. He has a network of private detective agencies and agents who do his bidding. None of them knows exactly who he is. He deals, always, in some disguise or another. Something like that.

So, in this book, at the end of a football game between a bunch of collegians and the inmates of a prison, "someone" manages to collect up the 25 most ruthless killers in the prison and carts them off in a truck. They all vanish.

Next thing one knows, there's a host of robberies featuring "robot killers". Sometimes they show up with an ungainly monster. The monster speaks in a metallic voice and has a finger that shoots a stream of gas at people, which upon contact causes the people to be engulfed in flames. The police are, of course flummoxed. People who might have pertinent information get incinerated in spectacular fashion. But, doggedly, Agent X and his minions eventually track the Murder Monster to his lair, eliminate him and disarm all the robot killers so that they can be returned to prison.

Strangers on a Train

Strangers on a Train - Patricia Highsmith I managed to slog through about 11% of this book. It's really not very interesting. Two dull young men meet on a train and eventually began to complain about their mutual problems. One has a spouse who sleeps around and is now pregnant with someone else's child, but not much interested in giving a divorce. The other is the wastrel son of a rich man who hates his father because said father won't come across with a huge, unwarranted settlement. Something like that. So, they begin to plan the perfect murder scenario, one where each murders the object of hate of the other, but having no motive, and having the one who does have a motive well out of town, they should be able to get off scott free...or something.

I dunno, if I want to read about muddle headed assholes with a sense of entitlement, I can read the news.

The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches

The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches  - Alan Bradley So, it seems that the body of Flavia de Luce's mother, Harriet, has been found in a glacier in the Himalayas and is to be returned to their estate, Buckshaw, for a proper interment. When the train rolls into the village, someone gets crushed under the wheels of the train just moments after the victim gave Flavia a weird, coded message.

So, we have the mystery of how Flavia's mother died and on top of it the new death. Did the man merely trip and fall under the train or was he pushed? Is there some vague relationship between the newly deceased and Flavia's mother, who had been gone some ten years? Well, Flavia tries to figure these things out, while also trying to work out a chemical approach to revivifying her mother.

I dunno, it was ok, but the weakest so far of the half dozen Flavia de Luce books I've read.

The Instant Enemy

The Instant Enemy - Ross Macdonald Yet another good Ross Macdonald. It is rather convoluted, and has some weirdly tangled family relationships, but fun and quite good.

Lew Archer is hired by Keith Sebastian to find his daughter Alexandra (Sandy), who apparently has run off with a rather wild boy, Davy Spanner, along with her father's shot gun.

Davy has had rather a troubled time of life. It seems that he was found by the train tracks, at the age of three, next to a decapitated corpse. The corpse was presumed to have been his father, but it was unclear whether he was murdered or committed suicide. Davy's mother vanished about that time and he was brought up by foster parents.

Anyway, Archer digs into Davy's past, finding a high-school guidance counselor who keeps trying to help, finding the ex-cop who was supposed to have investigated the railroad accident, finding a woman who appears to have taken Davy in—gave him a sort of job and housing. Has she also taken Davy into her bed?

Well, there are lots of other loose ends which may be related. It seems that Keith Sebastian's boss's father was murdered on the beach around the time Davy's dad met his fate at the hands of the train; Keith Sebastian's boss himself seems to have a rather controlling mother, and so forth. Oh yeah, the boss is kidnapped, perhaps by Davy and Sandy.

Well, it's convoluted, but rather fun, as is generally the case with a Ross Macdonald novel.

Murder on the Links

Murder on the Links  - Agatha Christie This book was so boring over the first third I thought I might have to kill myself. Then it improved somewhat, only to go to hell over the last 15% or so. The 3* rating should have a - [minus] appended.

So, it's a Poirot story as told by Capt. Hastings. It seems that a very rich man, M. Renauld, is fearful and writes Poirot to come to France to get/keep him out of trouble. But when Poirot and Hastings arrive at the man's villa, he is found to have just been murdered. He's lying in an open grave out on a golf course with a paper knife sticking into his back.

So, the suspects pile up. Perhaps the son, Jack, perhaps the jilted lover of Jack, Bella Duveen, perhaps Mme. Renauld, perhaps a gang of masked thugs, .... It seems that M. Renauld has a sketchy past and has recently begun to be blackmailed by the woman in the villa next door. Apparently they have some secret together buried some 20 years in the past. The woman's daughter has bewitched Jack, so perhaps she's involved. Or, perhaps the private secretary. It could be anyone. Then to make things more fun and confusing, there's a French policeman, M. Giraud, who is full of himself and who goes out of his way to insult M. Poirot. Given that Poirot is one of the world's supreme narcissists, that doesn't sit well, and M. Giraud must be taught a lesson.

Anyway, as you can tell by this garbled mess of a review, the book is rather a garbled mess. When it's not boring you to tears, it's tossing in all kinds of weird coincidences and improbably red herrings. I dunno. I didn't care much for this and will probably avoid Christie for a while. To be fair to Christie and Poirot, I have rather enjoyed the videos my spouse makes me watch with her.

A Wrinkle in Time

A Wrinkle in Time  - Madeleine L'Engle Somehow, when I signed up for to read this book, I didn't realize that it was written for middle schoolers, nor that it was a sort of classic in its day some 50+ years ago. I'd passed on from middle school by then. I just got overwhelmed by all the buzz regarding the movie that's recently come out and figured I should check out the buzz.

I have mixed feelings about this book. I really liked the beginning, and thought I'd have a good time reading it. But as the book progressed, I found it increasingly boring. I'm guessing that the writing was a bit weak, and the descriptions didn't fill in the chinks very well. Then too, I got increasingly pissed off by the idea that people who wear glasses are unattractive. I know it's a common meme in culture, especially culture some 50+ years ago, but I find it tiresome. I have too little imagination to understand why no one "makes passes at girls who wear glasses". Personally, I always thought girls could look adorably cute in glasses, especially red heads.

Anyway, our heroine, Meg Murray, feels like a fish out of water most of the time. She's unattractive (she thinks) and doesn't do particularly well in school, except in math. People make fun of her because her father has gone missing some year or so previously and because her 5-year-old little brother is "weird". He's actually kind of an idiot savant, but people seem to think he's retarded because it took him a while to begin speaking. When he did speak, he had a rather large and colorful vocabulary.

Anyway, little brother, Charles Wallace, has made friends with some "entities" in a haunted house, Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Which, and Mrs. Who. They get Charles Wallace to gather up Meg and another boy, Calvin O'Keefe, who is a popular jock at school, but rather a misfit at home. The three of them go off on a quest to fight against the darkness and bring back Meg and Charles Wallace's father. They sort of time/space travel through the medium of something called a "tessering".

I dunno, it didn't do a lot for me. It's better than a 2* book, but not so good as my view of a normal 3* book. So, were it possible, I'd rate it **+, or 2½*s. Whatever, I won't be reading any more of this series any time soon.

The Thirty-Nine Steps

The Thirty-Nine Steps - John Buchan We have had a season subscription to our local community theater group for as long as we've lived in Reading. Recently, they did an adaption of this novel of Buchan's, which was an early spy thriller, or something. Now that I have "mature" hearing, I didn't get a whole lot of the dialog. Much of it was in appropriate dialect, i.e. Scotts when in Scotland, working class London for the local milkman and so forth, which didn't help my hearing impairment. The dialogue also came fast and furious, as they were playing this as a comedic farce. Even though I didn't know what was going on much of the time, it did seem rather funny. So anyway, I figured I should check out the original. Unfortunately, there was enough of a gap between seeing and reading, that I'm not sure how faithful the play adaption was.

Whatever, this was a reasonably fun book, if perhaps a bit silly. Buchan makes it clear in his introduction that the book was meant to be pulp fiction, only vaguely plausible, but not totally impossible. I guess that's what the working class folks liked reading on their bus rides to and from the factories a century ago.

So, we have a young man, Richard Hannay, who made a fortune in Africa and has come back to Britain. He's bored out of his mind. His upstairs neighbor suddenly shows up and spins a tale about how he is a "dead man", meaning he has to pretend to be dead because some German spies are coming for him. He knows the secret of their plot, which will be unveiled in about two weeks' time, but he can't tell the authorities until the last minute. Something like that. So the guy wants to hide out in Hannay's digs.

Well, next thing you know, Hannay comes home and finds the guy had been stabbed. Hannay has to flee for his life. This involves hiding out in Scotland. The only problem is that the "bad guys" are on his tail almost immediately. He can't hide in the moors because they have an airplane. He can't hide in the villages because the bobbies are trying to arrest Hannay for the murder of the guy found stabbed in his study. So, we have all kinds of improbably escapes, and meeting up with weird characters, and Hannay's taking on different disguises, and so forth. Eventually, at the last minute, they catch the bad guys and save Britain from war (for a bit, anyway, WWI broke out shortly after this book was published).

Well, I just discovered that the play I saw was an adaptation of an Alfred Hitchcock movie. The plot has some similarities to this book, and many differences. Whatever, it was a fine book for light reading, and short enough that even one who "reads at only half the speed required for success in college" could finish it in a reasonable period of time.

Fruits of the Earth

Fruits of the Earth - Frederick Philip Grove, Rudy Wiebe Every once in a while, one's gotta read about pioneers, right? Well I do. Perhaps it's because I discovered a few years ago, that my great grandparents would count as pioneers. Who knew? My great grandparents were pioneeers in the U.S., and here we're talking pioneers in Canada, but still pioneers on the prairies. Yes, they had prairies in Canada and they also had folks heading out west to homestead on the prairies.

In this case, we have Abe Spalding. He scouts out a part of Manitoba and eventually settles his claim on a spot of land that is vaguely higher than that around him. It seems that Manitoba has horrific floods in the spring, when the snow melts and the rivers flood. The slightly higher land drains more quickly and one can plow and plant more quickly. This is important in Manitoba, because the growing season is rather short.

Well anyway, Abe is a work-a-holic and is constantly working to improve things, to acquire more land and so forth. The less successful farmers hire themselves out to Abe so as to make enough to get by. As time goes on, the more families move in, schools are built, roads improved and so forth. So, basically, we have a story of the development of the Canadian prairies. We also have the story of Abe's success, and perhaps not-so-much success in his personal and family relationships. After all the hard work, Abe keeps coming back to the question, "what is this all for?"

A most fascinating book.