#books

Winner of the World Fantasy Award in 1975, "The Forgotten Beasts of Eld" is a truly lyrical, magical book. Back in those days most fantasy wasn't much more than retellings of "The Lord of the Rings" with a few gender or race-swaps; they were, pretty much without exception, awful.

Patricia McKillip considers this her LOTR copy, but I don't see that at all. This is the story of Sybel, a sorceress and the last of a line of wizards. Her sorcery consists primarily in summoning unique magical beasts to her service. They include:

"BOAR CYRIN Keeper of Wisdom, who knew the answers to all riddles... save one.

THE BLACK SWAN OF TIRLITH Who had carried a king’s daughter from the stone tower of exile.

GYLD Green-winged Dragon who dreamt for eons over the cold fire of gold.

FALCON TER Immortal Lord of Air, who had torn to bloody pieces the seven murderers of the wizard Aer."

All serve Sybel, who spends her time seeking lost knowledge of rare magical beasts...until she seeks in the wrong wizard's library, and finds herself the hunted rather than the hunter.

There's love, betrayal, revenge, death, and redemption here. It's a relatively short book, but very full and extremely well-written with a thoughtful depth of feeling to it. It's also, unusually (for those times and these) a singleton; no sequels were ever published. Nor written, as far as I know.

You can borrow it for free from the Internet Archive, but personally I'd say this one is well worth owning.

archive.org/details/forgottenbeastso0000mcki_x1p4

Happy reading! 🤓📖

#Books #Bookstodon #fantasy #BookRecommendation

This is one of my "secret lore" books; my oldest friend introduced me to it when I was in my early teens. He also introduced me to "The Young Ones", "Young Lust Magazine" (it's a parody), and a LOT of comic books. He ended up working at Marvel and DC later on, although not at the same time.

"Those of you who remember how great it was to be a little kid, gang, don't •remember• how it was to be a little kid..."

Drawn and written by the brilliant Gahan Wilson, this book is one of the most accurate representations of what childhood was really like that I've ever seen. Which is probably why it's also the funniest.

The Kid (as he's referred to) is an ordinary kid with the usual experiences. His parents don't understand. His friends (some of them, at least) are idiots. And he WANTS things so desperately much. Toys, and candy, and comic books...

Individual strips of "Nuts" appeared in National Lampoon during their golden era. The book was rare; I treasured my copy. Luckily you can borrow it for free from the Internet Archive. And there are PDFs of it out on the high, seas, too. I'm sure the Kid would understand.

archive.org/details/nuts0000wils_q2w6

Happy reading! 🤓📖

#Books #Bookstodon #humor #ComicStrip #BookRecommendation #BookRecs

Are there any books that made you a different person? Particularly when you were a kid or young teen? There were for me, and this was one of them. The funny thing is that it was •written• by a teen, too: Harry Medved was 17 years old when he wrote "The Fifty Worst Films of All Time".

Specifically it had a HUGE impact on my sense of humor. It covers fifty films which, if not STILL the worst of all time, are certainly still among the worst of the worst. You probably haven't heard of most of them, although some are so awful that they've earned a sort of perverse immortality and even fans. Of course the book was written long before MST3K, but it has much of the same spirit: a twisted enjoyment of the biggest flops, the stupidest scripts, the dumbest concepts, and the most painful acting.

At least a few of these films were also given the MST3K treatment years later, such as "Santa Claus Conquers The Martians" and (I think) "Robot Monster". You can probably find them on YouTube or the Internet Archive.

Each film gets a thorough (and thoroughly funny) writeup, including stills, plot summaries, "Unforgettable Performances", "Immortal Dialogue", the story behind the film, and more.

One example from "The Ambushers" (1967) starring Dean Martin:

MATT HELM: Oh, when you say you're a “38” you ain't just kidding! LINDA: It’s not a gun, Mr. Helm. It’s the new weapon they gave me, developed right here in our labs. MATT: Developed pretty well, too! LINDA: May I point out... MATT: You already do! LINDA: ... that that’s why you're here. To become familiar with our latest equipment. MATT: You're right. An agent should always keep •abreast• of the times!

Feel free to cringe.

This is the book that CREATED bad film fandom. It inspired MST3K, as well as two excellent sequels and a lot of other professional film mockers. Its cultural impact has been enormous.

I've only ever seen the book as a large paperback; I have a copy, of course. But it was never released as an ebook. Luckily it's available to borrow for free online at the Internet Archive, every bad film buff's best friend!

archive.org/details/fiftyworstfilmso0000medv

Happy reading! 🤓📖

#Books #Bookstodon #Humor #Movies #Films #BookRecommendation #BookRecs

This is one of the most precious books I know. It's one of the rare books which brings tears to my eyes every time I finish it. In other words, it's one of the three books which are closest to my heart.

Kipling has a bad reputation as a colonialist author, these days. In fact he's been despised in some circles for many decades now. But "Kim" is the novel which shows that even a colonialist can be a human being with a very human love for the culture of the colonized.

"Kim" is the story of a boy in 1890s India: Kimball O'Hara, the orphaned son of an Irish soldier and an English nanny. Growing up as a native in the city of Lahore, no one except he knows that he's not a native—and he doesn't care about it himself. He lives for fun and excitement, known to the people of the city as "The Little Friend of All the World".

"He sat, in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zam Zammah on her brick platform opposite the old Ajaib-Gher⁠—the Wonder House, as the natives call the Lahore Museum. Who hold Zam-Zammah, that 'fire-breathing dragon,' hold the Punjab, for the great green-bronze piece is always first of the conqueror’s loot."

Incidentally, Kipling himself grew up in Lahore. His father was the curator of the Wonder-House of Lahore, a museum. And Kipling included his father and the museum itself at the start of the novel.

Kim meets an ancient Tibetan lama who has left his monastery in the Himalayas to find a sacred river. The two become friends and travel together across India; the sheer richness of the many cultures that Kim experiences as he travels across India and up into the lower Himalayas with the lama is mind-blowing. Kipling paints the India of the time with such passionate depth of feeling that it serves as a character in itself. The variety of peoples and customs is simply amazing. Ever since I read this book I've wished I could travel to India in that time.

But "Kim" isn't just a travelogue. There's adventure, intrigue, espionage, humor, and one of the most perfect coming-of-age stories ever written. Kim is drawn into the "Great Game" of spying between the European powers, and is educated as an agent by masters of the craft.

What can I say? It's a deeply moving and beautiful book. And you can download it for free in all the major ebook formats from Standard Ebooks.

standardebooks.org/ebooks/rudyard-kipling/kim

I've often thought that "Kim" is proof that a book doesn't have to be science fiction or fantasy to be breathtakingly exotic and magical, while retaining a core of incredibly touching humanity.

Happy reading! 🤓📖

#Books #Bookstodon #HistoricalFiction #Classics #Adventure #ComingOfAge

I was on a train to Edinburgh for a short break and rapidly running out of pages of Zoe Schiffer's book Extremely Hardcore. Not wanting to carry two large hardbacks with me, I'd left my copy of Character Limit by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac back home; now I was going to need something else to feed my appetite for Twitter meltdown reading material over the next few days. There was a book I'd remembered reading a particular review of citing its lack of any sort of insight but at least it was about the Twitter buyout. And it was long enough ago that I figured there was a good chance by now I'd be able to pick up a cheap paperback of it to fill the void. That book was Ben Mezrich's Breaking Twitter and, now having finished it, I wanted to write a cautionary warning to anyone else tempted to buy it.

Before tackling the main issue of the author being generally sympathetic to Musk, there is another major stumbling block with this book. Despite the numerous Amazon reviews praising it as well-written, it didn't take long for the alarm bells to start ringing about the style of writing. Already in the second paragraph of the prologue, Esther Crawford is introduced with the sentence, "Esther had her laptop open in the front of her, the screen casting a cone of light across her porcelain skin." This is maybe an improvement on her later being described as, "a beautiful implement, like a high-quality torque wrench or an elegantly tuned slide rule," but immediately I could tell I might struggle reading this after all. And sure enough the book is full of this overwrought, tortured prose - often each chapter starts with some laboured, unnecessary description of a character or scene (and is usually completely imagined by the author rather than being based on the actual truth) but at least sometimes, over the course of the chapter, he thankfully runs out of steam with this writing style. He also at times tries to suggest a half metaphor without actually giving it any meaning - there's a chapter where he goes on and on about squares within squares within squares but without any sort of significance or meaning. Or another chapter where he's seemingly so amazed by Musk's mother being a model that it jams his caps lock key and causes him to list out celebrity names in all caps for a couple of pages for no reason.

Maybe Mezrich's opinion of Musk at least slightly falters over the course of book (at one point he counters the suggestion that Musk is afraid of the FCC by saying that he definitely seems scared of something by the way he surrounds himself with bodyguards and his general paranoia about (and treatment of) Twitter employees) but his general admiration and repeated references to his "genius" are a bit difficult to stomach. When Musk went off on a monologue about buying Twitter to improve society and further civilisation and even talking about aliens at his first all-hands meeting, Zoe Schiffer reported engineers responding with, "what the hell is going on? I thought this guy was meant to be a genius?" Mezrich's take on the same meeting seems to be that Musk genuinely bought Twitter with intent to further civilisation and the belief that he could. Early in the book he states that Musk "knows how to tweet" yet one of his biggest meltdowns comes when he fails to grasp why his banal Super Bowl tweet ("GO EAGLES") garners less attention than the US president's which includes not only a photo but also a playful message about being deferential to his wife. We're also unfortunately subjected to a load of Musk's tweets from a World Cup match which fail to offer much more interest than the incredible insight of "GO EAGLES".

Perhaps the most egregious example of fawning comes when describing a video call where he says Musk, if he wanted to, could the see the code of the video-streaming software for the webcam flowing down the screen as if he were a character in The Matrix (no, seriously). And in the chapter about the stalker following Grimes, he forgets to mention that there was no evidence of @ElonJet@mastodon.social being used by this person and Mezrich seems to think that all the action taken (banning Jack Sweeney, journalists critical of Musk/Tesla, links to Mastodon etc) was done out of genuine fear for his son's safety rather than it rather obviously being an excuse to silence people and accounts he didn't like. Hilariously, at the end of the book, there is a tweet from 20 Dec 2022 saying Musk will "just run the software & servers teams" after the appointment of Linda Yaccarino as CEO. This paperback was published in June 2024 but it was probably already apparent even when the hardback was published in November 2023 that the new CEO was just for show and that Musk was still fully focused on using Twitter as his own plaything rather than running the "software & servers teams."

The only saving grace of this book is that it's hilariously bad enough to at least be entertaining ironically. If you are looking to spend money on a book about the Twitter takeover that is actually well-written and insightful then I'd highly recommend reading Extremely Hardcore instead.

#BenMezrich #BreakingTwitter #books #bookReviews

Fathers and Sons by Turgenev (Richard Freeborn translation) is an interesting character study of Bazarov, a self-proclaimed nihilist in the backdrop of the ideological differences between the “fathers” and “sons”. The “fathers” and “sons” in the title refer to the two different generations of the liberals and the nihilists, respectively. The ideological differences between the two generations, as depicted through the clash between Bazarov and Pavel, constitutes one of the major themes of the novel. It also looks at the inevitability of the generational gap between the sons (Bazarov and Arkady) and their respective fathers, and the futility of trying to reject emotions.

The book is short and has a very simple plot. It opens with Nikolai Petrovich awaiting his son Arkady's return from university, whom he receives accompanied by his friend, Bazarov who aspires to be a country doctor. It soon becomes clear that both youngsters subscribe to the philosophy of nihilism, in which Arkady considers himself to be Bazarov’s “pupil”. According to them “nihilist” is: “‘He is a nihilist,’ repeated Arkady. ‘A nihilist,’ said Nikolai Petrovich. ‘That’s from the Latin nihil, nothing, so far as I can judge. Therefore, the word denotes a man who … who doesn’t recognize anything?’ ‘Say, rather, who doesn’t respect anything,’ added Pavel Petrovich and once more busied himself with the butter. ‘Who approaches everything from a critical point of view,’ remarked Arkady.....nihilist is a man who doesn’t acknowledge any authorities, who doesn’t accept a single principle on faith, no matter how much that principle may be surrounded by respect.’" Frequent clashes ensue, especially between Bazarov and Arkady’s uncle, Pavel Petrovich, who finds Bazarov’s rejection of principles absolutely loathsome. Their exchanges regarding their philosophical differences were quite interesting to read. I especially found one of their exchanges, in which Bazarov was forced into a corner, quite thought-provoking:

""I see,’ interrupted Pavel Petrovich, ‘I see. Meaning you’re convinced of all this and have decided for yourselves not to do anything serious about anything.’ ‘And we’ve decided not to do anything about anything,’ Bazarov repeated sombrely. He had suddenly grown annoyed with himself for having talked so much in front of this lordly gentleman. ‘And just swear at everything?’ ‘And swear at everything.’ ‘And that’s called nihilism?’ ‘And that’s called nihilism,’ "

Bazarov rejects any form of emotions, art and philosophy as “romanticism” and hence just nonsense. Strangely, someone supposedly accepting only cold hard facts had this to say about science: "I’ve already told you that I don’t believe in anything. And what’s this thing called science, science in general? There are sciences as there are trades and vocations. But science in general doesn’t exist at all.’" About love and romance: “.... And what’s all this about the mysterious relationships between a man and a woman? We physiologists know all about these relationships. Just you study the anatomy of the eye—where’s all this enigmatic look, as you call it, come from? It’s all romanticism, nonsense, rubbish, artiness…” In this quarter, he is brought to his knees by Anna Sargeevna Odintsova, whom they first meet at a ball. Odintsova is a beautiful, self-possessed, intelligent woman, previously acquainted with Arkady’s parents, that Bazarov ends up falling in love with. According to Bazarov, "If you like a woman’, he was fond of saying, ‘then try and get what you can. If you can’t, well, no matter, give her up—there are plenty of fish in the sea.’ but then, “....he found he hadn’t the strength to ‘give her up’. His blood was set on fire as soon as he thought about her." He felt disgusted to recognise such romantic feelings in himself. In my opinion, Bazarov is just a very young man gifted with intelligence but afflicted with extreme intellectual arrogance. The characters of both Bazarov and Odintsova are quite well-drawn. Arkady initially comes across as Bazarov’s sidekick, looking up to and almost blindly following his teacher's philosophy. However, as the story progresses, he starts to think for himself. He also starts to see Bazarov’s self-conceit more clearly and moreover why he likes to keep Arkady around: "‘Look, mate, I see you’re still bloody silly. We need Sitnikovs. I—know what I mean?—I need such cretins. It’s not for the Gods, in fact, to bake the pots!’ Aha! thought Arkady—and it was only at this moment that the entire limitless depth of Bazarov’s conceit was revealed to him—So you and I are the Gods, are we? That’s to say, you’re the God and maybe I’m the cretin?"

One of the things I really liked about this book was how beautifully the father-son relationship from the father’s POV was depicted, in the case of Nikolai Petrovich and Arkady. This was Nikolai contemplating the generational gap he was observing between him and his son: "For the first time he was clearly aware of the rift between him and his son. He had a foreboding that with each passing day it would become greater and greater. It turned out that he’d spent days on end one winter in St Petersburg reading away at the latest works of fiction all for nothing; all for nothing had he listened to the conversations of the young men; all for nothing had he been overjoyed when he’d succeeded in inserting his own word into their bubbling talk…..He walked to and fro a great deal, almost to the point of exhaustion, but the sense of peril within him, a kind of searching, indefinite, melancholy disquiet, would not lessen. Oh, how Bazarov would have laughed at him if he’d known what was going on inside him at that moment! Arkady himself would have condemned him. Tears, pointless tears were forming in his eyes, in the eyes of a man of forty-four, an agronomist and landowner—and that was a hundred times worse than playing the cello!"

On the whole, this was a quick and pleasant read featuring interesting characters. My only gripe was not getting to read the internal monologues of characters in typical POV style because of which they felt more distant. #books #bookreview #russianliterature #turgenev #fathersandsons