Good Reads meta-data is 317 pages rated 3.66 by 3,658 litizens.
Genre: Satire.
DNA: D.C.
Verdict: Reality.
Tagline: They beamed him up, but not for long.
TV Host is the Prince of D.C., then…. His smug ever so polite attack journalism irritates a minion in an deep state agency so secret it may not exist. In a fit of pique Minion hits the keyboard and things are never the same for Host again, nor for Minion. Host’s wealth, his status, his influence, his marriage, his friends, his sponsors, his home, all are soon lost. But like Phoenix he rises to become leader of the Abductees Alliance. Yes, you read that right. The little Green Men got him and he is going to make them pay.
Meanwhile, rejected by the deep state for his ill discipline, Minion joins forces with Host to reveal…. But wait, it is not that simple….
Christopher Buckley
It is a satire on the D.C. establishment, but how can one parody what is already absurd. Buckley tries very hard to do so and does succeed in landing some stingers, but by and large, read today, it seems understated.
Oh, and when it is finally resolved the plot holes are big enough to accommodate the starship Enterprise.
Yes, of that Buckley, born with a silver keyboard in hand.
Good Reads meta-data is 255 pages rated 3.91 by 663 litizens.
Genre: Magic Unrealism.
DNA: North Woods; Species: Vermont.
Verdict: Picturesque.
Tagline: They went thatta way!
The escapades of the ever optimistic Quebec Bill and his coming of age son Wild Bill told in episodes. Many involve the unseen border between ‘Canady’ and US in the news now. Different taxes, different laws, different religions, different languages, different women, different police, are all reasons to cross that boundary, even in depth of winter. Some of their adventures defy one or more laws of nature, but suspend disbelief and go along for the roller coaster ride. Think of it as a cousin of Latin American magic realism with snow, ice, sleet, floes, sheer, piercing winds, hungry critters, and other wintry delights.
Quebec Bill comes up with one fantastic scheme after another, and each one…fails more spectacularly than the one before, but his glass remains half full.
***
This was Mosher’s first novel in the sequence of Kingdom County. I had read four or five others before I backtracked to this one. Ripley, the book explains a lot about both the Vermont Country Store and Bernie Sanders.
I couldn’t help thinking how fragile the ego of some readers must be when I read the comments on Good Reads from those who scored this book ‘1.’ They seemingly cannot let go enough to suspend disbelief. ‘Tant pis,’ as Quebec Bill might say. I have heard it said that it takes all kinds but I can’t see why in many cases.
Make Russia Great Again (2020) by Christopher Buckley.
Good Reads meta-data is 220 pages, rated 3.68 by 2,145 litizens.
Genre: Satire.
DNA: Old Money.
Verdict: Ugh!
Tagline: It has happened (t)here.
A fictional account of the 7th Chief of the White House Staff in 3 years, as part of his rehabilitation in a Federal prison. Told absolutely deadpan. The author’s delight is obvious in having the great manure pile all to himself and he feasts on it. And it is sharp and deadly, but…well, reality is worse than fiction. Intended as a Swift satire, reality has overtaken it since publication. The most garish, stupid, outlandish, vile things in the book seem childish compared to what has happened since.
All those Dr Frankensteins, large and small, who created this monster with votes and donations in the mistaken belief they could control it, will be proven wrong. It is an old story, quite unknown to fools, that the monster always bites the hand that feeds it. Since that is the closest hand, it starts there.
Enuf said.
Buckley has a long list of novels to his credit and I might try another when the dust settles from reading this. Starting with Little Green Men.
Good Reads meta-data is 278 pages, rated by 3.67 by 2,278 litizens.
Genre: Krimi.
DNA: Finland.
Verdict: Deep and dark in the forest primeval.
Tagline: Vroom!
Much more serious than any of his I have read before. Deep and dark in the deep and dark north woods 20 miles from the 1944 imposed border with Russia.
Hero is a pastor (though which church and who employs him is left in the clouds, but probably Lutheran) in a small community among the lakes and forests. He tries his best, though like Miguel Unamuno’s Father Emmanuel he has lost the vocation. A few years earlier he volunteered for service as a pastor with a contingent of Finnish soldiers deployed to Afghanistan. That experience marked him.
First he had to extend the compulsory military service training he had done earlier with additional training in hand-to-hand combat and desert survival. In the field he went along on patrols and saw things that, well, if God let this happen, then he had no use for that God. He also got shot with some long term consequences.
But he does not advertise any of this, not even to his new wife. Most the villagers take him at face value, a well meaning but insipid fellow. Nice enough, but not a buddy among the manly elk hunters, loggers, fishermen, woodsmen, trappers, and the other hardy souls who endure 20 hours of darkness 6 months of the year.
Then comes the meteor! Yep. Act of God or what? From heaven or the devil’s spawn? Or both?
There are some exhilarating scenes of F1 driving that set the tone. Most of the early material plays into the plot, though the plot is, to this reader, overdone, as is the cynical ending. But I did finish it and I am glad I did.
I never did get what happened to the gym owner or why such an elaborate set up was needed.
Amo, Amas, Amat, and More (1985) by Eugene Ehrlich
Good Reads meta-data is 329 pages, rated 3.80 by 188 litizens.
Genre: Reference.
DNA: Latin.
Verdict: nihil obstat.
Tagline: ab initio.
Reading a history of Latin last week reminded me of this well-thumbed book on the desk reference shelf, and so, in an idle moment, I retrieved it. It is an alphabetical list of Latin tags. It has a detailed index for seekers of the right phrase.
It makes an important distinction, that partly justifies the exercise, between the translation of a Latin idiomatic phrase and its meaning. The example is ab asino lanam, literally ‘wool from an ass.’ Ehrlich renders it equivalent to the English idiom, ‘blood from a stone.’ The meaning is that the impossible cannot be done. That is a salutary reminder that some of those magisterial Latin tags come from the barnyard.
The cover boasts an introduction by William F. Buckley, Jr. What wise and witty things might this über maven offer to those of us who do not have the good fortunate to be him? Hmm, 0 is the answer. It runs to just over a page and is mostly about his favourite subject, himself. What a surprise.
Considering that the book has been in print for 40 years, I expected more raters on Good Reads. The WorldCat lists in 1445 libraries in 13 editions. By contrast Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin is found in 800 libraries.
Good Reads meta-data is 275 pages, rated 3.42 by 857 litizens.
Genre: Not-fiction; Subspecies: Therapy.
DNA: British.
Verdict: Utopia?
Tagline: From Rousseauean to Hobbesian.
Author had a mid-life crisis at 40; quit his prestigious, high-paying job, sold his nice cottage, and went bush. Influenced by a steady diet of doomsday and gloomsday reading and viewing, Author decided to see what it would be like to live without civilisation for 18 months.
Though the word ‘utopia’ appears with references to Thomas More and Vasco de Quiroga,* the experiment was explicitly not utopian in that there was no masterplan, ideology, aspiration for perfection, but rather a trial-and-error approach; emphasis on error. Author supposed that a small number of volunteers, about a dozen, would take themselves off to the wilderness and by good will and common sense they would cooperate to survive and prosper. Huh? Yep. How did he get to be 40 if he was that naive? That is what he thought. He financed the project from the cottage sale and slowly recruited others to live rough in the Scottish Highlands. Yep. They would be an autarky and autonomous. As if.
Is it then any wonder that the book opens with the author in a psychiatric hospital reflecting on this experience. Indeed the whole book itself seems to have been a therapeutic exercise. Interspersed with a chronological account of the experiment are discussions with his therapist.
He discovered that Jean-Paul Sartre (p 184) was right about other people. Six, eight, ten people gather and Author proposes that each night they discuss and decide what to do tomorrow. One says that is oppressive. Another asserts spontaneity will suffice without this exhausting organisation. A third says this or that needn’t be done at all. A fourth suggests praying to the Great Spirit. Another is passive-aggressive silent. And so on. After six months of this, Author is losing his grip and running out of money. He wanted to get away from it all only to discover that ‘all’ came along for the ride.
There are several references to Henry Thoreau but none that mention either the income he had from the family business of pencil manufacturing to buy what he needed for his forest living or the fact that while in the woods, in the best tradition of college boys, he sent his laundry home for his mother to do. She also sent lunch to him everyday in that forest deep and dark.
Dylan Evans
There is no index nor a map, or any illustrations.
*On Quiroga (1475-1565) see Toby Green, Thomas More’s Magician for an account. In short, Father Quiroga tried to institute a modified version of More’s utopia as described in Utopia with natives near Mexico City. That connection probably explains why one edition of More’s Utopia has cover art depicting the Aztec Mexico City. Regrettably I have never been able to find a specimen of this edition, seeing only internet pictures.
Good Reads meta-data is 242 pages rated 3.65 by 426 litizens.
Genre: Novel.
DNA: Brit
Verdict: Who cares.
Tagline: Who dunnit?
A story within a story, as Hamlet has a play within a play. It is 1990 and a middling middle aged civil servant is directed to look into the accidental death of a middling middle aged civil servant in 1974 who had fallen to his death on a Sunday from an upper level of Admiralty House.
Since Victim had no business being in Admiralty House at any time, let alone Sunday, the coroner’s court had recorded an open verdict. Accordingly, an air of mystery surrounded this death, and periodically a lazy journalist in search of a scandal rakes it up. To anticipate the next iteration of that chestnut, Middling is to prepare a briefing. In the best fictional detective tradition he tries to retrace Victim’s steps in his last months when he was seconded to a new unit, established by an incoming government, on the ‘quality of life’ when that phrase was ubiquitous, meaning everything and nothing to any and everyone.
A philosopher was appointed chair the Quality of Life Committee and she and Victim start to prepare the terms of reference…, and never get beyond that. She turns the occasion into a tutorial in which she quizzes Victim on the quality of his, Victim’s, life. This is revealed to Middling in a cache of cassette recordings, which Middling then uses to eavesdrop on their many and extensive conversations. Since neither is adept at using the recorder they record just about everything, and then just about nothing.
As Middling listens he grows to identify with Victim as his professional veneer falls away in the tutorial and he reveals more and more of his self to Chair, and she reciprocates. This illicit affair is consummated in the attic office they are using, and his death is a result of (hard to believe) circumstances that occur there, thanks to a number of coinciding plot devices.
The title is a metaphor for the unusual and exhilarating experience the two have of their sexual liaison.
In the vicarious experience Middling has of their flight he reflected on his own laboured existence which continues. By the way, I never did quite figure out what become of the Chair. Maybe I nodded off on that pages.
It is a nice parody of an Ordinary Language philosophy tutorial. Note to the uninitiated ‘Ordinary Language’ philosophy was ‘ordinary’ to the same degree that ‘Reality television’ is ‘reality.’ It was the dominant mode of English philosophy for two generations after World War II. In it ‘ordinary’ language use was subjected to a pitiless analysis of infinite regress. It dominated my own graduate education.
The Chair is feckless and more than a little naive, and Middling’s reaction to her is very civil service, trying to curb her enthusiasms and manoeuvre her into the safe and sane channels, but, well, the self-analysis she elicits from him crumbles that prim and proper facade.
Michael Frayn haș published many books to much acclaim.
Good Reads meta-data is 288 pages, rated 4.11 by 409 cinematizens.
Genre: Non-Fiction; Species: Mountain magic.
DNA: Vermont.
Verdict: More, please.
Tagline: ‘Very little that people do is in any way understandable!’
Adopted orphan boy Frank Bennett grows up in Kingdom Country (Vermont) along the unmarked Canadian border in the household of an acerbic Catholic priest (who does not sexually abuse him despite his dog collar). Father George is the recognised but unofficial historian of the locale and the designated peacemaker among the many ley lines of conflict that riven the village.
Frank’s coming of age is told in episodes in which he participates, often as little more than an observer of the absurdity of life and its satisfactions. The telling is timeless but perhaps the early 1950s.
While the bulk of the small population is steadfastly safe and sane, shopping at the Vermont Country Store and voting for Bernie Sanders, within their ranks are eccentrics like young Molly Murphy and her desperate and eventually successful effort to run away and join the circus where her nerveless dare devilry can thrive. More troublesome is Foster Boy Dufresne, an idiot savant if ever there was one, who seems jinxed starting with that name ‘Foster Boy.’ Then there is the wannabe gypsy fortune teller Louvia de Banville who has a bad word to say for and about everyone and yet is always there to help when help is needed in fire, flood, accident, or worse.
Aside from the Irish and the Canucks, the village is also home to Abel Feinstein, a tailor, who will not take one step back and Sam E. Rong who took the Statue of Liberty’s motto literally.
Frank long wanted to follow Father George into the priesthood, but, well, there is that girl with bluest, dancing eyes who teases him mercilessly and then disappears back to Quebec for months at a time.
Howard Frank Moshere
It is not Lower Rising, Staggerford, Lake Woebegon, or Yoknapatawpha county, and certainly not Mayberry, but it is its very own God’s little acre. Mosher published ten novels set in this cleft between the Green and White Mountains where on some nights the bright lights of Montreal can be seen reflected in low clouds; where the endless forests are dark and primeval; the lakes crystalline; and weather as taxing as the people.
The Year of Blue Snow (2013) editors Mel Marmer and Bill Nowlin.
Good Reads meta-data is 351 pages, rated 3.77 by 13 Philly Phanatics.
Genre: Non-fiction; Species: Baseball.
Verdict: It still hurts!
Tagline: Perfect hindsight.
Cold weather came early and a curtain of freezing snow fell on warm summer dreams when Chico Ruiz stole home on 21 September 1964. So the end began, after leading the National League for 150 days, World Series tickets already printed in the city of Brotherly Love (and are now in mint condition on Ebay where I got mine to fulfil a vow I made in 1964), the bottom fell out. This tale of woe is the baseball season of the Philadelphia Phillies, a sect which I followed as devotedly as any believer in miracles. Then came the fall of the curtain and no cognitive dissonance could disguise the crush of reality.
This compendium offers brief and anodyne biographies of every member of this team on the roster even if only for a few days, including coaches, radio announcers, general manager, and owner. The groundskeepers are not included, though one is pictured. These sketches were compiled from the biography project of the Society for American Baseball Research web site, from whence comes the neologism ‘sabermetrics.’ It is a bland biographical reference work in the main. Most of these individuals have Wikipedia entries from the same source, like manager Gene Mauch, Congressman Jim Bunning, Chris Short, Ed Roebuck, Tony Gonzales, Rubén Amaro, Dick Allen, John Herrnstein, John Callison, Art Mahaffey….
At the back it includes several essays second guessing with the unerring perception of fifty years of hindsight every move, starting lineup, call, and choice during the downfall. Management decisions, roster changes, use of relief pitchers, catchers, pitch selections, signals to bunt, rotation, stolen base attempts, steps off the first base bag, and more are considered in a forensic investigation to find fault, apportion blame, and mourn. The result is thoroughgoing but superficial. For even more gruesome detail see John Rossi, The 1964 Phillies (2005). Then there is Greg Glading’s unintelligible 64 Intruder (1995). This latter seems to have been translated from Klingon by a Romulean.
Although the most fatuous assertion, with statistical analyses and diagrams, proves that Ruiz should not have tried to steal home. None go quite so far as to say that he did not steal home, but that will surely come in our world where truth is fiction and fiction truth, as the Post-Modernist of Hollywood have it.
The fact is the St Louis Cardinals had more stamina, and they had Bob Gibson. Enuf said!
Ruiz acted on Fate’s initiative, not the manager’s. A runner on third in the 6th inning of a scoreless game with two outs and the team’s best hitter at bat down two strikes means stay put. According to that same conventional wisdom the pitcher used a windup not a stretch. And yet…. At that moment the Phillies were leading the league by 6 1/2 games. Yet they finished third by losing this one and the next 9 games in a row, ten straight. Two wins in those 10 would have been enough. Even one might have led to a playoff game. At the time it was the longest leading margin that late in the season to fail but fail it did.
Pedant’s corner: ‘Blue snow’ is a rare optical effect of deep and dense snow drift seen in slanting light. In this case the remark is attributed to Gus Triandos, number two catcher for the team. He meant that it was a rarity for a team like the Phillies to do as well as they did, when a number of average players combined to have exceptional seasons. Certainly, it is true that this season was a career best for several of them, hereafter the only way was down.
On the experience of the failure, one of his teammates likened it to swimming in a long, long lake for a long time and then, within sight of the further shore, cramping and drowning. That was Octavio Rojas, outfielder.
That capped a summer in which my first serious girlfriend unexpectedly dumped me, I was fired from my summer job I knew not why, I broke my arm through my own stupidity, my first car bit the dust after two weeks, and there was no joy from Mudville to salve those wounds and woes, but rather it compounded them.
Anni Ultimi (2011) by Allan Scribner and Douglas Marshall, eds.
Good Reads meta-data is 181 pages, rated 3.89 by 18 litizens.
The book consists of the two editors’ introduction and commentary on Seneca (4BCE – 65AD) the Roman Stoic thinker, imperial advisor, speech writer, exile, essayist, satirist, together with a selection of Seneca’s letters concerning old age, retirement, and death. Born from Seneca the Elder in Cordoba Spain where I once saw a statue of him, he lived most of his adult life in Rome.
Seneca knew how to talk a good game: the letters selected are replete with insights, pearls of wisdom, and sound reasoning. Seneca sees nothing to fear in death since it extinguishes consciousness just as we were before birth. We knew no pain, suffering, or fear before we were born, so there will be none in death.
Old age has its infirmities, and if we dwell on them, they are magnified. Ergo, best to soldier on as though on campaign. (Truly the voice of a man who was never a soldier.)
Retirement signals a state of equilibrium. One is no longer striving for things. Ergo, now one wants nothing. (Was his retirement funded by a defined benefits superannuation scheme as mine is?) Each day of life is a celebration of the senses. In retirement keep learning, observe the world around, appreciate the skills of others, and put things in perspective.
This is the same Seneca who was complicit is several of Nero’s murders, like that of his mother Agrippinna, nor did Seneca scruple to amass enormous wealth during Nero’s reign.
If anyone wonders about the connection between this person and the Great Hill People of Western New York, there is none. The Dutch called then Sinnekars and when the English arrived that became Seneca. So says Wikipedia.
Scribner has published a series of krimis set in the Rome of Marcus Aurelisius and I have read at least one with satisfaction.
