Eccentric Flower:200911/Mixed Media

Or, How My Leisure Time Has Been Recently Spent, by Columbina, Grade 6

WORDS

Laurie R. King. The Beekeeper's Apprentice/A Monstrous Regiment of Women/A Letter of Mary/The Moor/O Jerusalem/Justice Hall/The Game/Locked Rooms.

Gulped these at the rate of about one every 1.5 days, except for Locked Rooms because it started off with the haunted-by-dreams-oh-what-can-they-possibly-mean trope and that got me to put the book away for two weeks. Should have trusted King better. Some people will find these unbearably cheesy*, or will stumble over the central romance between the protagonists. I say that these books are written with surprising delicacy - if you don't believe me, think of all the ways they could have gone wrong. Also, I was never convinced that there could plausibly be any romance involving Holmes, one of the most asexual characters ever written, until I read these - if that's not praise I dunno what is. Or maybe I'm just biased/defensive because I empathize so strongly with Mary Russell and all aspects of her personality? Dunno.

* I adore prof-pangaea but I haven't forgiven this or this even now, and *I* thought Hammett was well-used and the Wimsey cameo was so well-done it had me smiling from sheer joy for hours. However, I admit that Locked Rooms was the weakest of the lot so far, for several reasons given in the comments to that first link (which is spoilery, by the by - you have been warned). I have not read the newest one yet. If it's also weak I will conclude she has run out of steam. P.S. to the prof: no offense.

Mike Ashley, ed. The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Adventures.

There are very few fanfic universes where it is so easy to cross the line into professional publication as the Sherlock Holmes one. (Holmes being in public domain doesn't hurt a bit, of course.) I'm sure that for every good bit of Holmesiana that gets into numerous print collections, there's ten bad ones, but I don't see much of those. (Unlike some latter-day fandoms, Holmes fanfic doesn't seem to have a wide web presence, even though it's arguably one of the oldest fanfic fandoms in existence.) The ones in this collection are mostly pretty good. My ultimate acid test on Holmesiana is, "I could have done better." I said that about maybe half the stories here, but it wasn't fatal for most of those. I can enjoy any number of things while secretly believing I can do them better.

Carole Nelson Douglas. Chapel Noir/Castle Rouge.

I needed more strong-female-protagonist-Holmesian novels after I ran out of Laurie King, so I went back to where I left off Douglas' Irene Adler books, not quite remembering where or why I left off. Finished Chapel Noir even though I realized about halfway through I'd already read it; got to the end and remembered why I hadn't continued. I hate it when novels just leave off. If you're going to tell a story that's across multiple books, fine, but I expect each book to have a reasonably self-contained arc with some sort of resolution. Even The Empire Strikes Back had an ending.

That said, Castle Rouge (which I mostly read during jury duty off-times) wasn't bad at all, but I don't understand why the author seems resolved to keep her narrator character Nell from having her romance/getting a clue. To have things not work out with her beau-whom-she's-too-naive-to-realize-she's-attracted-to yet again not only is frustrating, but defies plausibility considering how much more worldly this char has gotten about everything else in her life. I don't like it when an author puts her thumb atop a character to keep her from evolving. Also the ending was indefinite again. I have bought Spider Dance and Femme Fatale, and will read them, but if Nell doesn't get some of what she deserves soon, I'm going to wax wroth. (Note to prof-pangaea: These you can pick on. Douglas occasionally writes like a romance novelist who's been left out in the sun too long.)

WORDS NOT HAVING TO DO WITH SHERLOCK HOLMES IN ANY WAY

Edward Dolnick. The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century.

I may have written about this one and Public Enemies already; I forget. This is a fascinating book if you are interested in art forgery; I am, so I cannot really estimate how dry it will be to other readers. I think it's interesting regardless, but one can never tell. This is the main reason I don't talk about my nonfiction reading much or make nonfiction recommendations. Anyway, the gist is, there was a major art hoax involving Vermeers and a painter named Han van Meeringen. The thing is, van Meeringen wasn't a particularly gifted forger; any amateur looking at his fake Vermeers today can see they are fakes. This is the story of how the history of the paintings was manipulated, and how people and art-world politics were exploited, to create the idea that the paintings were Vermeers - an idea which took hold so strongly that any number of high-placed people didn't realize the emperor had no clothes, as it were, even with the facts staring them in the face.

Bryan Burrough. Public Enemies.

Although I got this on the "books that were made into movies" table at my local bookstore, the movie with this title bears little resemblance to the book. This is the true story of a number of gangsters who were all operating in the United States at the same time: John Dillinger, George "Machine Gun Kelly" Barnes, Charles "Pretty Boy" Floyd, Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, the Barker brothers (the idea of Ma Barker as a criminal mastermind was a fabrication of the FBI to cover up their killing her), and Lester "Baby Face Nelson" Gillis. All of this activity happened - opened, closed, played out fully - entirely in the timespan of just two years - 1933-34 - and along the way led to the founding of the modern FBI and the rise to power of J. Edgar Hoover. The decision to cut from character to character chronologically, interweaving stories, is necessary but a little distracting; but it isn't fatal. This book dispels a lot of myths and should be required reading for anyone who's ever wondered how and why we have made a legend in the United States out of the actions of some occasionally brutal, mostly uneducated criminals in a time of vast poverty and despair. No other nation on earth has a gangster mythos.

Frederic Brown. Space on my Hands.

I bought this (first-edition hardcover in mint condition!) along with similarly pristine firsts of Robert Bloch's Pleasant Dreams and the original Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (Arkham House, 1969, August Derleth, ed.). I would prefer not to tell you how much I spent on the three altogether, but I will tell you that the three-digit price for the latter book was a bargain, and you will not find it at any online bookseller in the original 1969 1st with intact dust jacket for that little money. (It has been reprinted many times.) I'm not in the habit of buying books to collect; I buy books to read. But I simply could not resist.

Anyway, I haven't finished the Brown book because Brown was a master of the short form without peer, and I save up these little word bombs for when I need them. Each of these stories hits hard; makes you sit back and say "wow." In short, I am rationing them, and I will be sorry when they're gone.

Andrew Roberts. The Storm of War.

This was my main reading for the last couple of weeks. The cat enjoyed reading it with me, although he has absolutely no grasp of military strategy. I had been looking for another approachable general history of World War II, to contrast with my John Keegan version, and The Economist thought quite well of this one. This book discusses the war primarily through the filter of military decisions at the top, not battlefields at the bottom (although there are some parts which are notable exceptions, like the description of the brutal close fighting at Stalingrad, all the more poignant - if that's the word I want - because taking/losing control of the town was not really important strategically for either side). In particular, it concentrates on the decisions of Hitler and his generals, and what large mistakes were made by the commanders on either side and when. A good book - I don't know if I would tell someone to read it as their first World War II book, but it would be on the short list.

There is one catch: The publisher apparently has not gotten the word that we live now in a world where staggered release dates are neither sensible nor enforceable. The book will not be published in the US until next year. If you are interested in it I advise you to order it through amazon.co.uk.

MUSIC

King Oliver. Alligator Hop and The Legendary King Oliver.

This guy was basically the inventor of New Orleans style brass-based jazz. He taught Louis Armstrong, who said "If it had not been for Joe Oliver, jazz would not be what it is today." I bought one of these collections mostly for "Wa-Wa-Wa" after I couldn't get it out of my head one night and needed a copy, but the rest is pure joy too. Mind you, these will not be for everyone. Many of the compositions sound exactly like they could be the soundtracks for early black-and-white Mickey Mouse cartoons. I happen to like those best of all.

Wilbur de Paris. Marchin' and Swingin' plus individual tracks.

The problem with Wilbur de Paris - and it is a very mild problem to have - is that his band's best tracks are scattered across ten different albums, and thus I have bought a fair bit of his material piecemeal but no one album stands out for full recommendations. Not that any Wilbur de Paris is bad, but his best tracks have a peculiar sound which allow you to recognize who's performing them from any given five-second sample. If you are utterly new to his work, download "In a Persian Market," "I've Found A New Baby," "Martinique," "Waiting for the Robert E. Lee," and "Change of Key Boogie" for starters. Or buy Sounds of New Orleans Vol. 2, which is a collection of various artists but is uniformly excellent, and contains some of his best. You need more old-school New Orleans jazz in your life. Yes, you do.

Pete Seeger. Songs of Struggle and Protest, 1930-50.

I bought this mostly for "Aimee McPherson," but the others are good too (or I'd have just bought the one track). Problem is, it's mixed so low that even when other songs in my MP3 list are at loud volume levels, these are almost inaudible. I need to run them all through processing to boost the volume but haven't had time to do it yet.

Janis Joplin et al. Janis Joplin's Greatest Hits.

Because I didn't have any on CD. Why is her voice so compelling? It sounds like utter hell a lot of the time and yet ....

Pink Martini. Splendor in the Grass.

A very serene album with no standout tracks - I'm not going to be pulling anything off this like I did "Sympathique" and playing it for anyone who'd hold still long enough - but very good and sometimes very clever (like the paired songs, one for each point of view from a couple disenchanted with one another, extremely different from one another and yet both based on the same Schubert piece musically).

Matthew Sweet and Susanna Hoffs. Under the Covers Vol. 2.

Not quite as lovable as Vol. 1, which concentrated on the earlier half of the sixties, this is more late-sixties and early-seventies stuff, an era which musically I like far less. However, as usual they manage at least one or two tracks I like far more than the originals, notably "I've Seen All Good People" and "Beware of Darkness." "Gimme Some Truth" would have made that list except that nothing will ever compare to Sam Philips' cover of it, ever. Also, the tracks where Matthew sings are far more tolerable here to me than on the earlier collection, for some reason.

Spike Jones et al. (Not) Your Standard Spike Jones Collection.

It's a set of the recordings he did at Standard Transcriptions, get it? OK, so what is a transcription?

In other words these are what radio stations actually played before the advent of tape. The sessions for these transcriptions were always very rapid-fire (ten numbers per session; the usual Victor session was four). Furthermore each side of the disk held several tracks (and the band had to record the entire side perfectly in a take). Because of the purpose of these discs, Spike and Co. recorded a much wider variety of material for them (covers, old standbys, a fair number of non-comedy tracks) that you'll never find on their commercial recordings. Thus this material is more varied and fresher (they didn't record commercial versions of some of these tracks until years later), but also rawer, than the more typical Spike recordings. This collection is only for Spike fans, but for Spike fans, it's three disks of material that's irreplaceable. I have a lot of Spike discs and only had about a third of this material in other places.

Ry Cooder and Manuel Galban. Mambo Sinuendo.

No, this isn't new by any means, but it's almost the only disc in my entire collection I can put in and simply listen to over and over on repeat and just have it wash over me blissfully without my ever getting tired of it.

VISUALS

I h'aint watched anything but the last of my B/W "Saint" episodes, an occasional "Honey West," and new Mythbusters episodes on Wednesday nights. Last three movies seen: Up, Ponyo, Inglourious Basterds. They were all pretty good.

GAMES

Torchlight was already discussed in this space. I shan't repeat myself. Not playing it at the moment because Dragon Age: Origins is eating all my solo game time, although I can only play it in short doses; short doses are what I have. World of Warcraft continues to occupy my evenings for the immediate future; Mel and I are almost to Icecrown and once that's done we can finish up and go back to LOTRO where we belong. Assuming we can still remember how to play it.