Reading Report for July/August 2024

Did a LOT more reading than writing this last 30+ days.

Finished Dr. Who novelization “The Romans.” Amusing but not as funny as “I Claudius.” Nonetheless fun. Best line: “Quo Vadus TARDIS affair.” Perfect idea to do this as an epistolory novel, through journals, memos, letters, diaries ect.

Read some of “The Cat Who Covered the World” by Christopher S. Wren.

Read (well listened to) M. R. James’ story “The Wailing Well” for James’ birthday. He intended his stories to be read aloud to his friends and this one was written for a troop of Eaton Boy Scouts.

Am bumming through A.A. Milne’s poetry books “When We Were Very Young” and “Now We Are Six.” Actually very good, touching and fun. Didn’t see all that last time I read through them when I was about eight years old.

Read two stories by Jack London: “The King of the Greeks” and “The Lost Poacher.” Both written early in his career relating his life as a “rollicking young adventurer in San Francisco Bay.” and published in 1905 when he’d been “asked to write stories for young people.”

“King of the Greeks” is full of the sights, sounds and feel of 19^th Century San Francisco Bay. “Lost Poacher” is set along the coast of Japan in the late 19^th Century. Both stories collected in Irving Stone’s “Jack London, His Life, Sailor On Horseback.”

Read Kaje Harper’s weekly stories off her Facebook page. Always excellent!

Read J. Scott Coatsworth’s weekly installments of his new serial “Down the River.”

Read three stories I can’t talk about yet for an online workshop I’m in.

Finally finished Robert A. Heinlein’s “The Rolling Stones.” Loads of fun! Wish he’d done a full-blown sequel. (Some of the characters are seen or referenced in his other novels.)

Heinlein’s “Juveniles” (YA Books today) are masterpieces. His accurate depiction of how to calculate how to get to places in the Solar System is a marvel. His description of everyday life on a very small Martian Moon and the clever idea of Mars as kind of a dump with expensive, crappy motels for the tourists is brilliant and funny.

Heinlein’s use of humor is understated and flows naturally from the characters. It is never forced and while other writers might have taken the opportunity for slapstick (zero gee anybody?) Heinlein keeps the humor genuine. He told a friend he found domestic comedy “harder to write” than “revolutions and blood.” Nonetheless, Heinlein pulls it off. And while the focus is supposed to be on the twin boys Castor and Pollux (yes!) most of the family gets time in this especially Grandmother Hazel, sort of an outer space Grandma Walton.

My only complaint is a few old attitudes about women’s roles, yes from Heinlein! (This was the very early fifties, remember!)

Read one of Howard R. Garis’ stories about Professor Jonkin, a wacky inventor he wrote about in the early 20^th Century.”Professor Jonkin’s Cannibal Plant” is the only one of the four listed that has been reprinted and I lucked out and had the book; “Science Fiction By Gaslight,” edited by Sam Moskowitz in 1969. The story is sort of a spoof of all the man-eating plant stories that proliferated once upon a time. Sort of a proto Audrey II with the professor feeding it slabs of beefsteak. I’d love to find the other three stories, I hope they are just as funny. Garis was impossibly prolific; he created “Uncle Wiggly” and wrote a daily story about him for the newspapers for decades. He was also busy with the Stratemeyer Syndicate and wrote the (not as funny as Jonkins) Tom Swift books for years, as well as a bunch of other series for children. (I saw one of the “Baseball Joe” books in a used store once. Didn’t buy it!) Swift never grabbed me. Check out Garis’ bibliography on Wikipedia, it’s jaw dropping!

Read a little of Arthur Conan Doyle’s early Gothic novel “The Mystery of Cloomber.” So far it’s not quite the gripping story Doyle would write later. Also read his story “The Bully of Brocas Court.” Great fun! Doyle’s knowledge of boxing (he’d boxed in college) is used to great effect. Of course, the kicker to the story is given away by the fact that the anthology I read it in had a theme and I could see where it was going anyway but still great fun! Doyle at his best as a storyteller here.

Read some of Ellis Parker Butler’s “Philo Gubb, Correspondence School Detective.” Yes, still funny. And I may have called him “Philo Grubb” in an earlier entry.

And I finally finished ‘Nathan Burgoine’s “Triad Magic,” which deserves it’s own post and a Goodreads review! A suspenseful paranormal page-turner. Magic, mystery and romance (and some history!) set in a well-defined version of Ottawa, Canada.

Now I want to read the first two books in the series!