Answer Hazy, Ask Again!

Will
by

Christine Bernard (Goodreads Author)

Yorick's review

Oct 09, 2019  ·  edit

liked it

bookshelves: audiobooks, fantasy, thriller

I was given a free Audible audiobook copy of this title for an honest review.

This book according to the stars, is pretty good. It reads like a Twilight Zone episode, and I really like Twilight Zone. Will, the title character finds a Magic Eight Ball in a hole-in-the-wall used bookstore/novelty shop. He buys it for nostalgic reasons and races out of the store because the clerk creeps him out.

At first it seems like a normal kids' toy, but soon, its answers start having more direct impact / connection with Will's world. After that, things get weird and ominous. It drew me into the story. Like watching a horror movie, I found myself thinking the equivalent of, "Don't open that door!"

It's an entertaining read. I can't really say more about the story without leaving spoilers. If you like stories that were in The Twilight Zone, you'll like this book. If you really don't know anything about The Twilight Zone, let me say that the book is mysterious, eerie, and is a look at what a normal person might do under unexplainable circumstances. You might not want to read it alone at night. Or maybe that's the best time for a shiver!

Where Loyaties (and various characters) Lie

I was given a copy of this audiobook for free for an honest review.

Where Loyaties Lie by Rob J. Hayes, narrated by Matthew Jackson.

Pros: Exciting story with gripping (and grasping!!!!) characters. The sea is salty, the battles are brash and bashing. The characters are conflicted. The sex is part of the plot, not merely gratuitous.The actions moves from plans to battles and negotiations. The protagonist Drake is mixed in his actions, yet he is following a prophecy that was passed along by his brother. His brother also sends a woman with magical powers to watch his back. Keelin Stillwater didn't really want to follow Drake, but the circumstances seem to give him no other choice. So he does. They are pirates, so they both do exciting piratical deeds, but they both try to live with themselves. So like many a contemporary situation, "it's complicated"--which is definitely good.

Cons: I'm not really over-joyed at the Narrator. Matthew Jackson's voice keeps taking me out of the story into noticing his accents and projecting volume. There is graphic sex. I think it manages to stay outside porn, but it's close. Imagine scenes from the movie Flesh and Blood with Rutger Hauer and Jennifer Jason Leigh, except fewer minutes in the acts themselves. This will be off-putting for some listeners, and a feature for some listeners. The last negative to mention is that this is book one of a two book series. It ends with two and possibly three cliff hangers. While the book is very good, it is not stand alone. Not even a little bit.

Still, this reader / listener will be getting book two to continue the story.

Elizabeth Gilbert's fine fiction.

City of Girls is great, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. Nevertheless, I am such a push-over for narrators--reliable or unreliable--that I like the main character / narrator even though I might have second thoughts about her in real life. And she wouldn't care a pin about my opinion in real life either. So that's me sorted!

I was given a free ebook version in exchange for an honest review. I liked it so much that I bought the audiobook from Audible.

But this book is worth your time and your book credit. The narrator is lively and contrary and full of life, both in spite of and because of choices that she makes. The people she knows and comes into contact with are interesting and convincing. Even though some of the issues addressed in  the book are informed by a current mindset philosophy, I find them convincing because it's happening in pre- and post WWII New York theater environment. So things that might seem unconvincing happening among residents of Levittown, PA, seem more than plausible in New York at the time.

Vivian Morris (in her 90s) receives a letter from a young woman, asking her what Vivian was to her father. Thus, the reader is hooked into discovering what Vivian was / is to the young woman of the letter and her father. All the rest of the adventures and descriptions--most of which have nothing directly to do with the mysterious father--are shared in answer to that letter. On the one hand, that's a writing gimmick. In this case, it works well and doesn't feel as artificial as it sounds.
Through story events Vivian shares her developing philosophy of life, love, and human existence: convincing without seeming didactic or preachy. This book is worth your time and pays off in hours of enjoyment.

Straits of Hell = Pages of Paradise

Pages of Paradise may be a misnomer, trying to be too clever, but Straits of Hell (Destroyermen series #10) is an excellent book. Full disclosure, I received a free ebook pre-release copy for a fair and accurate review. However, by way of evidence of sincerity, I bought the audiobook from Audible.com. It's good enough to own twice, and I expect to re-read it, as I have done with previous titles from Anderson's Destroyermen series.

Matthew Reddy and his surviving Destroyermen are now stationed on different ships around the Alliance Fleets in this alternate Earth. They are battling on two different fronts with allies from indigenous peoples as well as humans from other arrivals from other time periods in Reddy's earth's history.

Enemies similarly include Japanese from World War II, where the old Asiatic Fleet destroyer USS Walker came from; sentient reptiles called Grik; and other humans from different Earths in the past, relative to World War II. The writing about these groups and their thoughts actions just grabs this reader and yanks him along. These enemy characters are complicated, not mere cardboard cutouts to provide opposition in the plot.

Obviously, at number 10 in the series, much has happened before the events of this book. All things being equal, I'd recommend that readers start the series with book 1, Into the Storm. Nevertheless, if a reader is willing to start "In medias res," this book can carry the extra weight. What are characteristics that make this a compelling and worthy read?

As mentioned before, the characters are interesting and complicated. They are put in dire situations and have to overcome being outnumbered, plans that are more clever than they expected at the time. Another facet of these books is research and re-development of technologies that existed in the World War II time frame, but were unknown in the alternate Earth that the Destroyermen arrive at. Much of the technology has been developed in previous books, but the struggle to improve and manufacture items needed for war goes on as a plot thread. Finally, showing characters working hard to create a more ideal civilization including multi-species interests and entertains.

Straits of Hell is worth your reading time and your book dollars--as is the rest of the series.

First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

This novel is a thriller with a time travel twist. North's narrator, Harry August, doesn't travel in time using technology, but some unexplained phenomenon of his person sends him back to his own birth after his death. Every time. And each time he gets sent back to his own birth to re-live his life, he remembers the events of his previous life. Others exist in the future and in the past with this same looped-life quality. Because their lives overlap slightly--one person being a child when another person is old--they can send messages up and down history.

The problem occurs when one of these multi-lived people decides to change history and brings technological advances into existence earlier than they normally arrive. Then he starts killing permanently others with returning lives who would oppose him.

The reader learns the hard-knock wisdom that Harry August picks up in his serial lives and waits to find out if August will be killed permanently by the Other who is trying to manage human history and destiny through his own lives.

This is an exciting read, even if a much less exciting review.

Cauldron of Ghosts--Third book in the Crown of Slaves series taking place in the "Honorverse" of David Weber

This book is very good--action, suspense and favorite characters.

Action--fights on a small enough level to follow individuals--space ship takeovers, urban fighting in defended and booby-trapped buildings, and cargo "truck"-jackings gone sideways.

Suspense--will the characters be caught or will they succeed? Will they die? Will they Die AND succeed? The reader in the moment is kept guessing.

Favorite characters--Anton Zilwicki, Victor Cachat, and others from the Crown of Slaves segment of the Honorverse are all here doing their characteristic mannerisms; dangerous, insane plans; and forlorn hope actions. The one exception to known character similarity is Andrew Artlett who acts younger yet more thoughtful than his appearance in Torch of Freedom.

In any case, there's a lot to love in this volume and a reader's favorite villains to hate as well--from bit-part slavers to (literally) evil genius father & sons.

Full four stars from me! The only thing that kept it from being five stars for me is that (as other reviewers of the David Weber Honorverse books have complained about a couple of other titles) is that in this book several paragraphs are taken word for word or nearly from the second book in the Saganami Island series, Storm from the Shadows. Since the scene takes place in both books, it's understandable, if not  justifiable. I found it only a little disconcerting.

Nevertheless, for readers who enjoy the Honorverse or for readers who just enjoy good space / spy / military adventure stories, this is a four-star read that they will want to dive into. Like a number of individual books in a series, it may not be the best volume to jump into from a standing start, but it does read well on its own, and for first time readers, the repeated paragraphs won't even be noticed, because they fit perfectly in this story.

For fun and adventure, read this book!

The Sea without a Shore by David Drake, review

The Sea Without a Shore by David Drake
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Drake pours on the adventure and gives readers an excellent time.

The Sea without a Shore by David Drake is the latest (#10) in the Daniel Leary / Adele Mundy space navy series. Drake keeps things fresh in this adventure of the duo in the Cinnabar Navy--RCN as all the insiders call it. Because this is one of a series, and because the author has said he tries to make it possible to start the series from any one of the books, this book has some passages that readers familiar with the series will either welcome as familiar friends or feel some level of annoyance with the repetition of stuff they already know. Mine was the familiar friends reaction.

David Drake (as his author's note explains) takes earth minor historical events and recasts them as a plot framework for Leary & Mundy to work through in different planets and star systems. It's a technique that works very well for me. The author is able to take his characters through multiple adventure scenarios without becoming repetitive (except in as much as some have found the explanations of the Matrix or Leary or Mundy's personal history repetitive, as mentioned above).

In this book, they are not acting as official RCN members. They escort the son (formerly a ne'r do well, but now reformed) of Adele's civilian boss to a planet where there's a revolution going on, where the son hopes to find a buried treasure to help his side buy weapons and win the revolution. They don't know if there really is a treasure, but they set off to help--with Adele having a related secret mission that she doesn't share with Daniel or anyone else!

In one sense, it's a well-known pattern for fans of the series--Daniel & Adele are given a nearly impossible mission, Daniel thinks up a bold and sly plan, and Adele gets normally inaccessible information and fools the opposition. This may sound simple and mundane, especially after nine previous novels in the series, but once again, for me, Drake pours on the adventure and gives readers an excellent time.

I've read all his books in the Leary & Mundy series more than twice! and I expect to do the same with this volume.

View all my reviews

All Men of Genius

All Men of Genius by Lev A.C. Rosen
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book stands on its own, but as you've no doubt read in other reviews / previews, it's also a mashup of Twelfth Night and The Importance of Being Earnest. Related to Oscar Wilde's personal issues, and the masquerade / hidden (sexual) identity in Twelfth Night, All Men... has alternate sexuality as plot points. None of it is "R" rated, I think, but perhaps a strong PG-13.

Readers with tenaciously held convictions regarding traditional sexuality may be more or less offended. Readers with less concern with those matters will not be bothered.

The story involves Violet Adams who wants to attend the premier science institution, Illyria College, where only men are accepted as students. She pretends to be her brother (the names of the character and the college are deliberate, not to say obvious allusions to 12th Night). All Men of Genius is not a pioneer after 12th Night using sexual disguise as a plot device. For example, in the first Alanna book in the series by Tamara Pierce, the plot point is exactly the same with all the complications involved for a teen girl trying to pass as a teen boy.

Along side the difficulties and confusions of Violet's progress in science academics is also the couples / mating "rituals" in an alternate Victorian England. This too, is well done. Like much of science fiction, it speaks to issues of today's culture through a lense of an alternate time.

The struggles involved in invention, discovering and fighting an elitist scientific club's plan to take over England and then the world provide page turning thrills. Many readers will finish quickly to appeaase their desire to discover "what happens next".

View all my reviews

A Riff on Jonathan Swift

Jonathan Swift wrote, "He was a bold man that first eat an oyster."
Polite Conversation. Dialogue ii. cited in Bartlett's Quotations.


I would say, "They are bold persons that first use e-readers in their 60s or 70s." In a way, I find the situation also analogous to walking--it seems simple and self-evident when one is doing it and has done it for a while, but the interplay of all the muscles and signals from the brain and the inner ear are quite daunting when one considers them as a list of things that need to happen in coordination. In e-reader land, the list of tasks to be accomplished at least once before they can start reading a book on the handheld machine can be annoying if not daunting.

Item 1. A person needs an online relationship (account) with the company that sponsors / subsidizes / sells the E-reader. If she doesn't have one, this is not necessarily "intuitive" to set up. And she still doesn't have any library ebooks yet.

Item 2. A person needs an "Adobe Digital Editions" I.D. and / or he has to register / authorize his e-reader with the email address from item 1 above. And he still doesn't have any library ebooks yet.

Item 3. A person needs to download and install on her computer and / or her e-reader Adobe Digital Editions, Overdrive Media Console, Blio reader app, or the OneClickDigital Media Manager. In the case of Adobe DE and Overdrive MC, she has to authorize those apps with the email address from items 1 and 2 above (which should be the same email address; I'm just saying...) And she still doesn't have any library ebooks yet.

Item 4a. A person needs to navigate the particular library ebook interface (another technical term) to choose a book, check it out and download it to the desktop, laptop, or e-reader.

Item 4b. Downloading the ebook may involved saving it to the desktop computer, laptop computer or the e-reader itself. If he downloads to one of the traditional computers, he will have to know how to move the ebooks to his ereader using his USB cable; if he downloads straight to his e-reader, he will have to be connected to wireless and know how to connect his ereader to that.

Providing that everything went smoothly without electronic or physical obstacles intervening, she may have a library ebook title now. Understandably, that's a lot of new stuff to get what one used to be able to just walk in the door and pull off the shelf. If you're are showing your father, grandmother, older friend or other relative how to navigate this process, be patient but not condescending. If it doesn't go smoothly at first, you may have to overcome something scary as oysters. Once they are reading on the machine, they should be happy as clams!

bon mots and bagatelles

Gene Wilder's short novel (176 pages) The Woman Who Wouldn't is an amusing and tender tale about a musician who has a break down during a concert and subsequently goes to a sanatorium in Badenweiler, Germany. The story takes place in 1903, includes visits with Anton Chekhov who is there dying of consumption.

Without writing any spoilers, I can only say that the book has a lovely sentimental touch. Some may indeed find it ultimately too sweet, but it pleased me and made me cry. Interestingly enough, it even has a couple of sex scenes, but they're not pornographic nor erotica in nature. I think that's a little difficult to pull off. They are also intrinsic to the story; short as the book is, extra- gratuitous words aren't really there.

If we have to give it stars, I'd say 3 out of 5. It's worth reading. I'm doubtful that I'd read it a second time--not because it was bad, but because I've done that now. And part of the impact of the book is in going through for the first time and experiencing it as it develops. But be fair: I don't read many mysteries a second time either and they're perfectly fine reading the first time.

Finally, if you have the chance, listen to the audio book read by Gene Wilder himself. As both an actor and the author, he catches everything just right with his voice.

What might the Brits be reading? or How the other half reads.

associative surfing on the web

For a reason I don't remember and can't explain, I ended up on the British Council (registered charity!--remember Paul McCartney's lyric, "If I ever get out of here, THOUGHT of giving it all away / to a registered charity...") Contemporary Authors page.

I learned about an interesting author named Craig Raine. He's a poet and a literary critic. Raine has done a couple of books about T.S. Eliot--In Defence of T.S. Eliot, Hardcover: 608 pages
Publisher: PICADOR (2000)
ISBN-10: 0330375776
and
T. S. Eliot (Lives and Legacies Series), Hardcover: 224 pages
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (November 13, 2006)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0195309936

The fact that he admires Eliot and (by report, I haven't read Raine yet)has poetry techniques in common with Eliot have really attracted my interest. I'll put a hold on a Raine's collection of his poetry and see what I think.

From that web page (the Contempory Authors page) I found this link

Which as you may be able to see is something like a readers' advisory web page for people to find book titles from U.K. authors.
http://www.encompassculture.com

Anyway, I found this whole coney trail amusing and interesting and leading as ever to other things.

It cudda been another "Who's on First?"

"I'd like to find a book," said a child patron softly.

"Sure, what would you like?"

"Once I Ate a Pie."

"You ate a pie?"

"No, I ate a pie!"

"[I so could have run with this!]oh, okay. Once I Ate a Pie. Our copy is checked out. But I can put it on hold for you."


"No thanks. I'll check back later.

:-)

It's alive!! It's Ah Liiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiivvvvvvvvvve!

Not to get all mushy and inspired, but sometimes you just remember why you wanted to be here in the first place.

A young patron comes in and asked if we had Dr. Dre-the Biography. I said we did have the book, but it was checked out.

"It's checked in elsewhere in the system. I can put it on hold and it should be here for you in three to five days."

"Okay. Sure. Do you have any other biographies like that?"

"I've got 46 in the county. Did you want just what's here, what's in?"

"Yeah, just what's in the building."

"Okay. I've got thirteen here."

"Wow. Could I see that? I didn't think you have those kind of books. [about Rap performers] Where are they?"Then I showed him where they were. Whoooooo hooooooooo!!! Seriously, that sent a jolt like a triple espresso in a brewed cup of coffee right through my veins.

(And even though I have no personal desire to read ANY of those books, it's just an emotional rush to have them here and be able to surprise a patron who wanted one. [No doubt for a school assignment, but even that doesn't matter. We had the books!])

Just because we can read don't mean you can order us around.

I'm sure there's a reasonable explanation for this.

I have a longer post, but first, this Quiz result!

Thanks to a colleague for the quiz location. I parodied the cover from a book on Amazon.

What Kind of Reader Are You? Your Result: Dedicated Reader You are always trying to find the time to get back to your book. You are convinced that the world would be a much better place if only everyone read more.
Obsessive-Compulsive Bookworm
Book Snob
Literate Good Citizen
Fad Reader
Non-Reader
What Kind of Reader Are You? Create Your Own Quiz

Re reading the Greats, and not.

Nearly everyone has something they learned or thought wrong as a child that they later discovered was mistaken. One of the things I had mistaken included the idea that boys and girls had different left and right arms. (When my mom was teaching me left from right, she'd be facing me, and we'd have opposite right arms and left arms. She never realized I didn't get it. Imagine my surprise when I got to 1st grade and saw while saying "The Pledge" that the girls placed their same hand over their hearts as I did mine.

The teacher explained when I asked her that every one's right and left are the same.)

Another idea I had wrong was the belief that one could only read a book once. Because then you'd read it. Other things were like that--if you thought didn't like a vegetable or some food, you'd have to try it, but once you tried it, you didn't have to eat it again. Or movies: once you'd seen a movie, then you'd seen it. You could remember it, talk about enjoying it, but you didn't go back. (Although one could play songs over and over and over again, which I did--which nearly drove my father to violence...)

One summer when I was reading through books like a paper shredder. Not that I tore or shredded them really, but I was just zooming through the pages and moving on. I played the same album while I read a book, and then I'd change the music when the book was over. I didn't really think much about it until I read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. I enjoyed that book so much that it colored the album I was listening to. To this day, that music makes me think of reading Tom Sawyer. And when I was finished, I completely stopped and breathed a sigh: I had finished Tom Sawyer, and it was great and I could never read it again, because I had read it now.

There were so many things to see and to read (and still are, for all that) that I didn't even realize until years later that one could see a movie a second time or more if it was really good, and one could read a book a second or third time or more. What fun! What a surprise for me!

Since that discovery, I've read a number of books more than once, and a couple books as regularly as annually or bi-annually. But I've never re-read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. I know I could. I've known I could for many years now. But that first reading was so perfect, so intensely sweet and irreproducible that if I did re-read the book, like a river, it wouldn't be the same book any more. Although concerning books I had been mistaken about not being able to read more than once, this one experience of reading I'm saving as the perfect one.

What are you reading over and over?

These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users(as of 10/2/07). As usual, bold what you have read, italicize those you started but couldn't finish, and strike through what you couldn't stand. Underline those on your to-read list. Add an asterisk to those you've read more than once.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
*Crime and Punishment
*Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
*Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
The Odyssey
*Pride and Prejudice
*Jane Eyre
*A Tale of Two Cities
*The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Iliad
*Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
*Great Expectations
American Gods
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault's Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein--I've tried reading this more than once, but I couldn't finish it any of the times.
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
*The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
*Sense and Sensibility
*The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver's Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
Dune
The Prince
*The Sound and the Fury
Angela's Ashes : A Memoir
The God of Small Things
A People's History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
*Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
*Slaughterhouse-Five
*The Scarlet Letter
*Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
*Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an Inquiry into Values
The Aeneid
*Watership Down
Gravity's Rainbow
*The Hobbit
White Teeth
*Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

You always wanted to know

If Sherlock Holmes got infected and became a Zombie,

He'd be a clever cadaver.

Another Imaginary Book: The Duesenberg Diary

Ernesto Guevara--Ché to much of the world--was among other things a diarist. He wrote The Motorcycle Diaries which were adapted into a 2004 flim of the same name. Also published after his death was a collection called The Bolivian Diary or The complete Bolivian diaries of Che Guevara, and other captured documents, edited and with an introd. by Daniel James.

The Duesenberg Diary fits in between those two and is a record of Guevara's travels in a Duesenberg Straight Eight across one Autumn until the rains led to mud over the running boards and Ché had to climb out the window and abandon the car. After that, it's pretty much off to the revolution.

Imaginary Book

Twilight of the A-Pooh-Calypse-Oh!

A Story of the End of the World and Latin Dancing
For the Very Young!
By Timothy Sparrow.