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Post by Confessor on Sept 6, 2022 12:27:35 GMT -5
The Victorians by A. N. Wilson.  I wanted to read a well researched, single-volume overview of the Victorian era and A. N. Wilson's The Victorians seemed like just the book for me, judging from the reviews I read of it on Amazon. It attempts to cover the entire era in a strictly chronological format, with 43 chapters grouped into five parts moving from the 1830s through to the end of the 1890s. All the big names from British Victorian history are here, with vivid sketches of figures such as Benjamin Disraeli, William Gladstone, John Ruskin, Florence Nightingale, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Browning, Lewis Carroll, and Queen Victoria herself, along with plenty of other luminaries. The book also focuses on the ordinary people of Victorian Britain and the astounding social and economic progress they witnessed across the decades of Queen Victoria's reign. Overall, Wilson manages the herculean task of taking in the full spectrum of the age's events in a single book pretty well, but with such a broad focus it is perhaps predictable that it is also a bit hit and miss. I found The Victorians to be a bit stodgy in some places, while rivetingly fascinating in others. Wilson is also in love with his own vocabulary and will take any opportunity to use an archaic or little-known word or Latin phrase when he could just as easily use a much more commonly known one. I mean, I have a pretty good vocabulary myself, but I can't think of another book that has sent me reaching for the Oxford dictionary or Google as often as this one did in order to determine the meaning of a word. That said, Wilson is a good writer and he fills his book with tons of interesting anecdotes relating to politics, culture, literature, war, fashion, commerce, and the monarchy, with a huge cast of Victorians famous and obscure. Yes, I felt that some parts of the book were a bit of a slog, but I certainly learned a lot about the era that I didn't previously know.
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Post by berkley on Sept 6, 2022 14:19:51 GMT -5
The Victorians by A. N. Wilson. I wanted to read a well researched, single-volume overview of the Victorian era and A. N. Wilson's The Victorians seemed like just the book for me, judging from the reviews I read of it on Amazon. It attempts to cover the entire era in a strictly chronological format, with 43 chapters grouped into five parts moving from the 1830s through to the end of the 1890s. All the big names from British Victorian history are here, with vivid sketches of figures such as Benjamin Disraeli, William Gladstone, John Ruskin, Florence Nightingale, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Browning, Lewis Carroll, and Queen Victoria herself, along with plenty of other luminaries. The book also focuses on the ordinary people of Victorian Britain and the astounding social and economic progress they witnessed across the decades of Queen Victoria's reign. Overall, Wilson manages the herculean task of taking in the full spectrum of the age's events in a single book pretty well, but with such a broad focus it is perhaps predictable that it is also a bit hit and miss. I found The Victorians to be a bit stodgy in some places, while rivetingly fascinating in others. Wilson is also in love with his own vocabulary and will take any opportunity to use an archaic or little-known word or Latin phrase when he could just as easily use a much more commonly known one. I mean, I have a pretty good vocabulary myself, but I can't think of another book that has sent me reaching for the Oxford dictionary or Google as often as this one did in order to determine the meaning of a word. That said, Wilson is a good writer and he fills his book with tons of interesting anecdotes relating to politics, culture, literature, war, fashion, commerce, and the monarchy, with a huge cast of Victorians famous and obscure. Yes, I felt that some parts of the book were a bit of a slog, but I certainly learned a lot about the era that I didn't previously know.
I assume it covers culture and the arts so I'm wondering, did it raise your interest in any books to try from the Victorian era?
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Post by Confessor on Sept 6, 2022 15:36:58 GMT -5
The Victorians by A. N. Wilson. I wanted to read a well researched, single-volume overview of the Victorian era and A. N. Wilson's The Victorians seemed like just the book for me, judging from the reviews I read of it on Amazon. It attempts to cover the entire era in a strictly chronological format, with 43 chapters grouped into five parts moving from the 1830s through to the end of the 1890s. All the big names from British Victorian history are here, with vivid sketches of figures such as Benjamin Disraeli, William Gladstone, John Ruskin, Florence Nightingale, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Browning, Lewis Carroll, and Queen Victoria herself, along with plenty of other luminaries. The book also focuses on the ordinary people of Victorian Britain and the astounding social and economic progress they witnessed across the decades of Queen Victoria's reign. Overall, Wilson manages the herculean task of taking in the full spectrum of the age's events in a single book pretty well, but with such a broad focus it is perhaps predictable that it is also a bit hit and miss. I found The Victorians to be a bit stodgy in some places, while rivetingly fascinating in others. Wilson is also in love with his own vocabulary and will take any opportunity to use an archaic or little-known word or Latin phrase when he could just as easily use a much more commonly known one. I mean, I have a pretty good vocabulary myself, but I can't think of another book that has sent me reaching for the Oxford dictionary or Google as often as this one did in order to determine the meaning of a word. That said, Wilson is a good writer and he fills his book with tons of interesting anecdotes relating to politics, culture, literature, war, fashion, commerce, and the monarchy, with a huge cast of Victorians famous and obscure. Yes, I felt that some parts of the book were a bit of a slog, but I certainly learned a lot about the era that I didn't previously know. I assume it covers culture and the arts so I'm wondering, did it raise your interest in any books to try from the Victorian era?
It did actually, yes. Particularly H. R. Haggard's King Solomon's Mines, The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald, Tom Brown's School Days by Thomas Hughes, and a couple of Rudyard Kipling books: The Jungle Book and Kim. It also made me want to read more of Lord Tennyson's poetry. |
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Post by berkley on Sept 6, 2022 19:31:20 GMT -5
I assume it covers culture and the arts so I'm wondering, did it raise your interest in any books to try from the Victorian era?
It did actually, yes. Particularly H. R. Haggard's King Solomon's Mines, The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald, Tom Brown's School Days by Thomas Hughes, and a couple of Rudyard Kipling books: The Jungle Book and Kim. It also made me want to read more of Lord Tennyson's poetry.
I haven't read all of those but I think they're good choices and will probably lead to more exploration. Haggard wrote several other iconic adventure novels, in particular She, and pretty much all of George MacDonald's fairy tales are good reads - and were influential on people like CS Lewis and Tolkien. I haven't read Tom Brown's School days but have always meant to since reading the Flashman books back in the 1970s or '80s.
I recently read the Jungle Books and found them excellent, though a little up and down, like any short story collection (not all the stories have to do with Mowgli or even have an Indian setting) - I recommend finding an edition that contains In the Rukh, which was the first Mowgli story Kipling published: it isn't part of the Jungle books and is about Mowgli as an adult, seen through the eyes of Europeans, which makes it even more fascinating. The Oxford paperback has it in an appendix. I haven't read Kim, but it's on my list. Kipling was a master story-teller and so prolific that it's hard to know where to start with him sometimes.
Tennyson also wrote so much it's hard to pick out just one or two things. I went with another Oxford paperback collection but that means getting The Idylls of the King as a separate volume since most collections don't include the whole of it. I'm going to have to re-read a few things soon.
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Post by Confessor on Sept 7, 2022 3:36:17 GMT -5
It did actually, yes. Particularly H. R. Haggard's King Solomon's Mines, The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald, Tom Brown's School Days by Thomas Hughes, and a couple of Rudyard Kipling books: The Jungle Book and Kim. It also made me want to read more of Lord Tennyson's poetry. I haven't read all of those but I think they're good choices and will probably lead to more exploration. Haggard wrote several other iconic adventure novels, in particular She, and pretty much all of George MacDonald's fairy tales are good reads - and were influential on people like CS Lewis and Tolkien. I haven't read Tom Brown's School days but have always meant to since reading the Flashman books back in the 1970s or '80s.
I recently read the Jungle Books and found them excellent, though a little up and down, like any short story collection (not all the stories have to do with Mowgli or even have an Indian setting) - I recommend finding an edition that contains In the Rukh, which was the first Mowgli story Kipling published: it isn't part of the Jungle books and is about Mowgli as an adult, seen through the eyes of Europeans, which makes it even more fascinating. The Oxford paperback has it in an appendix. I haven't read Kim, but it's on my list. Kipling was a master story-teller and so prolific that it's hard to know where to start with him sometimes.
Tennyson also wrote so much it's hard to pick out just one or two things. I went with another Oxford paperback collection but that means getting The Idylls of the King as a separate volume since most collections don't include the whole of it. I'm going to have to re-read a few things soon.
Oh yeah, now you mention it, Haggard's She was another one that I mentally earmarked to investigate at a later date, as a result of reading this book. Thanks for the recommendation of finding a copy of The Jungle Book with In the Rukh in it. I'll definitely bear that in mind. I'm a big poetry fan, but I've never investigated Tennyson any further than a handful of his most famous poems -- you know, the kind of poems that might appear in a general collection of verse, such as "Morte d'Arthur", "The Lady of Shalott", and "The Charge of the Light Brigade". |
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Post by berkley on Sept 7, 2022 12:18:32 GMT -5
I haven't read all of those but I think they're good choices and will probably lead to more exploration. Haggard wrote several other iconic adventure novels, in particular She, and pretty much all of George MacDonald's fairy tales are good reads - and were influential on people like CS Lewis and Tolkien. I haven't read Tom Brown's School days but have always meant to since reading the Flashman books back in the 1970s or '80s.
I recently read the Jungle Books and found them excellent, though a little up and down, like any short story collection (not all the stories have to do with Mowgli or even have an Indian setting) - I recommend finding an edition that contains In the Rukh, which was the first Mowgli story Kipling published: it isn't part of the Jungle books and is about Mowgli as an adult, seen through the eyes of Europeans, which makes it even more fascinating. The Oxford paperback has it in an appendix. I haven't read Kim, but it's on my list. Kipling was a master story-teller and so prolific that it's hard to know where to start with him sometimes.
Tennyson also wrote so much it's hard to pick out just one or two things. I went with another Oxford paperback collection but that means getting The Idylls of the King as a separate volume since most collections don't include the whole of it. I'm going to have to re-read a few things soon.
Oh yeah, now you mention it, Haggard's She was another one that I mentally earmarked to investigate at a later date, as a result of reading this book. Thanks for the recommendation of finding a copy of The Jungle Book with In the Rukh in it. I'll definitely bear that in mind. I'm a big poetry fan, but I've never investigated Tennyson any further than a handful of his most famous poems -- you know, the kind of poems that might appear in a general collection of verse, such as "Morte d'Arthur", "The Lady of Shalott", and "The Charge of the Light Brigade".
Of the famous ones we read in school, I think my favourites were Ulysses and Break, Break, Break. When I read that anthology a few years ago, one that stood out from the things I had never read before was The Voyage of Maeldune, based on an Irish legend but mostly made up by Tennyson.
This may not be to your tastes, but I love Loreena McKennitt's musical setting of The Lady of Shallot, though I've never got into any of her other music.
(edit:) forgot to add, She is one of my favourite books, I think it's right up there with Dracula and Frankenstein among 19th-century genre creations.
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Post by Prince Hal on Sept 9, 2022 7:22:14 GMT -5
berkley"Ulysses" is an old favorite of mine. Still love reading it. The one we always used to study in school at the start of a poetry section was "The Eagle." And though probably only a Victorian novel by dint of its publication date,Kipling's Captains Courageous, which he wrote hen he lived in Brattleboro, is another wonderful story.
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Post by wildfire2099 on Sept 9, 2022 10:32:53 GMT -5
Joy In Tigertown
by Mickey Lolich and Tom Gage
The Tigers were my first team I rooted for in baseball, even though I've always lived in Boston. Perhaps it was just being a frontrunner as a little kid, and wanting to be different, but the 80s Tigers team was my team until they all go old and retired.
Because I was into the Tigers in the 80s, of course I knew about the previous great Tigers team in the late 60s. Mickey Lolich, being a chubby left handed pitcher(as I hoped to be when I was 10) was naturally my favorite, but I only knew about him through stats, and that he didn't really get along with Denny McLain, so I was super excited when this book came out.
The book itself is a bit all over the place, and is JUST Mickey's personal experience, he (or the author that assisted) doesn't really get into the season or the background much, only his experiences. While context in sports books is always nice, and sometimes the best, part, in this case his stories really shine through. He really seems like a cool guy to talk to, and the way the book is written, you feel more like you sat down and had dinner with the guy rather than have read a book.
I'd say if you're looking for the story of the 1968 Tigers, there are better sources, but if Mickey Lolich is your guy, this is a fantastic book.
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Post by EdoBosnar on Sept 11, 2022 4:41:20 GMT -5
Wind from the AbyssJanet Morris, 1978  Book three in the Silistran quartet – my reviews for the first two can be found here and here. So, I noted in the review to the second book that a character appeared basically out of nowhere to set up this book: his name is Khys, and he’s the supreme leader of Silistra’s priestly order who essentially rules the planet – which came out of left field, because until he’s introduced, there’s no indication that there’s a central ruler, but rather a bunch of largely autonomous polities (city states more or less), nomadic tribes and so forth. In one of the appendices at the end of this book (yes, now besides glossaries, there are appendices as well…), we learn that Khys is many thousands of years old, i.e., he was a genetic engineer in Silistra’s ‘before times’ (i.e., before some still undefined planetary disaster) who was one of the researchers that discovered the treatments for longevity. However, Khys wields godlike powers as well, displaying telepathic, telekinetic and possibly pyrokinetic abilities, and he can teleport himself and others and do a bunch of other stuff as the story necessitates. That’s because he’s also half-alien, his father being from the same race as Estri’s (even though previously, in the first book at least, the impression is created that Estri is unique in that regard). Anyway, in the first two chapters, almost the entire first third of the book, Estri is living with Khys in his palace on the shore of a mountain lake in the north. She’s had her memory wiped – Khys did so to make it easier to bed her and get her pregnant (the reprehensible sexual morals in these books are nothing if not consistent). This all happened before the opening of this story, though, and it’s simply recounted – to sum up, the child was taken from her almost immediately after birth and is being cared for by others. We don’t even learn his name until the last few pages of the book. Eventually Estri gets her memory back, and the much of the rest of the book involves her trying to resist Khys (together with Sereth and Chayin – see my review of the 2nd book), even though there’s often pages of her inner monologue in which she professes some symphathy for Khys and his burdens of power (yuck). Otherwise, not much happens here: much of the book is either Estri’s inner monologues or pages and pages of discussions between the various characters (and sometimes they read like knock-off versions of the discourses in ancient philosophy texts). The only real action is when a group of off-worlders kidnap Estri and take her off-planet briefly before she’s taken back by Khys. Then there’s a confrontation with Khys in which Sereth dispatches him, followed by a lengthy denouement, in which, among other things, Sareth and Chayin fall into their old pattern of treating Estri like crap and berating her even though there was no way they would have been able to deal with Khys without her. The book’s title, by the way, is a phrase that’s often repeated throughout these books (its rooted in the pseudophilosophy Morris developed for the story); basically it means a premonition of unavoidable danger – the way it’s usually used can often be translated in normal speech as ‘I’ve got a bad feeling about this.’ Otherwise, though, there’s a very lengthy definition of its full meaning in the glossaries at the end of the first two books, complete with citations from the planet’s old philosophical texts that really don’t shed any additional light on the phrase.
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Post by Confessor on Sept 11, 2022 9:10:23 GMT -5
I know you've not been terribly impressed with some elements of these Silistra books, EdoBosnar, but I've gotta say, the I love the cover artwork on all three volumes so far. Really good '70s fantasy cheesecake paintings. Who is the cover artist? |
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Post by EdoBosnar on Sept 11, 2022 11:50:27 GMT -5
I know you've not been terribly impressed with some elements of these Silistra books, EdoBosnar , but I've gotta say, the I love the cover artwork on all three volumes so far. Really good '70s fantasy cheesecake paintings. Who is the cover artist? The covers are honestly the best thing about these; in fact, I think what got me to buy them a number of years ago was a brief (and to my mind, misleading) review that made them sound like some kind of racy, cheesy sword & planet books, which included images of the covers that reinforced that impression. As I hope my reviews are making it clear, they are anything but. Anyway, to answer your question, the covers I posted are by Boris Vallejo (High Couch of Silistra) and Lou Feck (Golden Sword and Wind from the Abyss). The latter two are from a third printing of these books in 1981, for which Feck did all of the covers. Feck's cover to High Couch looks like this:
The first & second printing cover of The Golden Sword is credited to Bob Larkin:
There's no artist credited for the first/second printing cover to Wind from the Abyss (although it looks that it might be by Larkin as well):
There was another printing of all four books in the mid-1980s with art that made them look more like fantasy books and that weren't nearly as suggestive as these. (By the way, I hope everyone can see these covers - I linked them from the Internet Speculative Fiction DB.)
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Post by Confessor on Sept 11, 2022 14:28:13 GMT -5
^^ Niiice. Thanks for sharing those and the artist info. I probably should've recognised Boris Vallejo's work on the first cover, but can't say I've heard of Lou Feck. Great covers from Feck though.
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Post by Deleted on Sept 14, 2022 23:13:40 GMT -5
It had been some time, and the mood struck me that the time again was now, so I've started on a reread of the Lord of the Rings, finishing the Fellowship of the Ring earlier this evening.  This is the first time I've read this edition though. I picked up this edition with the slipcase sometime in the mid-90s, but when I moved halfway across the country in '03 I trimmed down my books by eliminating things I had in multiple editions, and this was the edition I kept (though I miss the cover art on some of the other editions I had). I hadn't reread the trilogy since I moved out here (my last reread was just as the Fellowship movie was coming out before I left CT) though I have reread the Hobbit twice since I have been out here. I find it oddly disturbing that as many times as I have reread these (and I read it nearly once a year between 1981 and 1994 or so) that my memories of the story have come to conform more with the movies than the book itself, and I had forgotten the details on many of the parts that were omitted from the movies. It was a joy to rediscover them though. -M |
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Post by Confessor on Sept 15, 2022 19:24:33 GMT -5
It had been some time, and the mood struck me that the time again was now, so I've started on a reread of the Lord of the Rings, finishing the Fellowship of the Ring earlier this evening. This is the first time I've read this edition though. I picked up this edition with the slipcase sometime in the mid-90s, but when I moved halfway across the country in '03 I trimmed down my books by eliminating things I had in multiple editions, and this was the edition I kept (though I miss the cover art on some of the other editions I had). I hadn't reread the trilogy since I moved out here (my last reread was just as the Fellowship movie was coming out before I left CT) though I have reread the Hobbit twice since I have been out here. I find it oddly disturbing that as many times as I have reread these (and I read it nearly once a year between 1981 and 1994 or so) that my memories of the story have come to conform more with the movies than the book itself, and I had forgotten the details on many of the parts that were omitted from the movies. It was a joy to rediscover them though. -M I'm a big fan of the LOTRs movies, but the books are on a whole other level of excellence. I completely understand why certain things from the books were left out of the film or on occasion changed slightly, but some of those missing elements are also some of my favourite parts of the story. The whole Old Forest/Tom Bombadil part would be a good example of that. I actually began re-reading The Two Towers again this evening for the umpteenth time. I don't know if I'll read all the way through, but I love dipping in and out of these books at various times. They're like gourmet-quality literary comfort food to me. |
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Post by wildfire2099 on Sept 15, 2022 20:24:25 GMT -5
I should re-read them at some point.. the last time I did, I found them a slog honestly... I think it's the writing style. It's funny, about 2 years ago a re-read the Sword of Shannara for a book club.. I LOVED Terry Brooks as a kid. I didn't realize at the time how much a blatant 'homage' to LoTR it is at the time.
My post today is a different re-read...
Second Foundation
by Isaac Asimov
After I read the 1st two Foundation books, I was surprised to find I had very little recollection of this one.. all the cool stuff I enjoyed in the series had already happened. Now I remember why... this one isn't very good. Asimov attempts to write a girl as the main character, and it's not pretty. Sometimes she's a manipulative flirt that can get anything she want from any man(Which is a bit weird, since she's 14), and sometimes she's a scared girl desperate for protection. Then when she does finally do something good, they reveal it wasn't REALLY her, which was disappointing. Now that I've read this one, I vaguely remember in the other books (written MUCH later, which never goes well), entries from her book replace the encyclopedia Galactica entries in the chapter headings... her name seemed familiar, though I had forgotten she was a little girl in this book.
Then there's the Second Foundation stuff... if you spend any time thinking about it, it makes NO sense whatsoever that they let the Mule do anything, The big reveal at the end I think was meant to be a big shock, but it felt like a big meh... and I definitely didn't remember it. I definitely think I can just read the 1st two next time I have the urge.
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