I think I'll get this. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0593655036/?tag=imwan-20

I've finished the six Dune novels and have started reading Surrender by Bono from the band U2. It's enjoyable so far.

Any Human Heart by William Boyd. I have owned this book for many years (I think it was sent to me during a short lived book club membership at about the turn of the millenium) and it followed me from home to home since then. I started it yesterday and finished it today - 500 pages. That's the first time I've done that with a novel since I was a teenager. Needless to say, I recommend the book.

Okay so Surrender was interesting and informative but didn't make me any more of a U2 fan (I like some of their songs but not many). He's had an interesting life, though.

Next up is Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama.

Brilliant book. Don't bother with the sequels, because they are poor. Like The Matrix, it really helps to just imagine the sequels never happened.

Just finished "The Wind in His Heart" by Charles de Lint. A fantasy novel set in New Mexico. One of de Lint's best.

Just starting "The Essential Wrapped In Plastic: Pathways to Twin Peaks" by John Thorne, co-editor of the Twin Peaks fanzine, Wrapped in Plastic.

Two books from early childhood (That's some 50 years ago now!) that I very recently rediscovered. The Penguin That Hated the Cold, by Barbara Brenner, tells the story of a cold-natured penguin named Pablo and his efforts to escape his Antarctic homeland for a warmer clime. Eventually one of his hare-brained schemes succeeds in transporting him to a tropical island paradise. You have to feel happy for him, although he is shown violating some laws of physics in the process (And where, in his snowy wasteland home, did he find a tree to chop down for firewood?). For some reason this goofy story was a favorite of mine when I first read it about a half-century ago. It still brings a big smile.

The Monkey in the Rocket, by Jean Bethell, is about a monkey named Sam, who flies in space after passing a bewildering series of tests involving centrifuges and such. This was not a favorite. I remember it mainly because I saw it at a doctor's office when I was about five. Our mother picked it up and read it to us to try to distract us from worrying about getting one of those immunization shots that made doctors' offices such a place of dread.

Then, perhaps a couple of years later, I was browsing through our family's New Book of Knowledge encyclopedia set and saw a photograph of a rhesus monkey named Sam, in an improvised "space suit," being prepped for launch. The book had been based on a true story! Sam was one of our earliest astronauts, and the first-ever occupant of a Mercury capsule flight. I have since learned that he enjoyed a long retirement, and would have still been very much alive when I first read about him in the 1970s. Incidentally, he was dubbed "Sam" because he was studied by the School of Aerospace Medicine.

Zeppo:The Reluctant Marx Brother by Robert S. Bader shines a light on the least funny (onstage,at least) of the four,and much of what's exposed isn't very flattering to the man.He did have clout outside of his family,at least;he once punched out a mobster and got away with it.

I'm still reading The Guitar Circle by Robert Fripp...it's a slog but an interesting one.

The Time Machine, by H.G. Wells. This is one of those early stories where Wells pretty much invented what would become a popular science fiction concept or sub-genre. It's also a fine example of a pioneering story that's not just of historical interest--it also still holds up very well as a story. While more recent time travel stories might delight fans with their intricate and clever use of time paradoxes, alternate timelines, etc., they've never surpassed--perhaps never even matched--this great original. It's just that good.


The Invisible Man, by H.G. Wells. Another of Wells' great originals, though invisibility isn't as fundamentally important a science fiction concept as time travel. The early part of the story contains a good deal of knockabout comedy. Things get more serious as we see more and more evidence of what a dangerous sociopath the Invisible Man really is. He's responsible for at least two deaths, likely a third, maybe even a fourth, makes a determined attempt on the life of a fifth man, beats up several innocent people, and commits assorted other crimes as he tries to cover his tracks and impose his will on others. There are several harrowing descriptions of the Invisible Man victimizing others, and a wincingly brutal climax where he's finally cornered and gets what he has coming to him. The whole fantastic story is firmly grounded in the real world of everyday contemporary Britain. Another example of some of a sub-genre's very best work coming right at the beginning.


I read both of these as a kid in a collected volume of the "Educator Classic Library" series. These books, which came out around the time I was born in the late 1960s, reprinted unabridged classics like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Black Beauty with (not very impressive) illustrations and copious marginal annotations to explain unfamiliar words and concepts for young readers. I found a copy of the same edition awhile back, so my re-reading includes the experience of seeing the same illustrations and annotations. I found myself recalling details all the way through The Invisible Man, so I must have read it pretty well all the way through back in the day. Evidently 12-13 year old me did a good bit of skimming with The Time Machine. I did still recall parts of it.

Last month I found a whole set of four 1970s paperbacks for a series by Niel (NOT Neil) Hancock called The Circle of Light. The volumes were Greyfax Grimwald, Faragon Fairingay, Calix Stay, and Squaring the Circle. I'd been challenged to read a trilogy I'd never read before, and went one better with this unfamiliar tetralogy.

The cover advertising copy, as with most fantasy of the 1970s, invokes Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. And you can definitely see the influences. It's set on a world called "Atlanton Earth," involves a desperately important magical McGuffin carried by a little fellow (A dwarf in this case), and there are wizards, elves, and armies of wicked Orc-like monsters. The heroes also include a bear and an otter, whose bachelor existence, along with the protagonist dwarf, in the early stages gives the first part of the story a kind of Wind In the Willows vibe. Rather weirdly, this heroic fantasy world's armies fight mostly with repeating rifles and artillery that appear to come from around the 1890s. Even the "Orcs" carry rifles. Even the ELVES do!

It was all pretty readable, but the author's prose, nice enough in places, can't hold a candle to Tolkien's. I couldn't make heads or tales of the climax. Apparently it all turns out in the end, and nobody seems too sad about the numerous warriors who have just been killed in the vaguely-described fighting. The cosmology of Atlanton Earth and its adjoining worlds is hard to figure out. Wikipedia says that the whole thing is supposed to be some kind of Buddhist allegory.

If you're a big heroic fantasy fan looking for something different, this might be up your alley. It was apparently reprinted in the early 2000s. My 1970s original paperbacks were cheap enough at a used bookstore.

Never saw the word tetralogy before, thanks now I have a new word.

A very handy word when you're faced with a trilogy that just won't quit. I first saw it in a review of Frank Herbert's fourth Dune novel--his trilogy had become a tetralogy.

I've even written a tetralogy before. And have been hung up on the second part of another one.

Original Sin by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson.

Finished over the weekend, s good read for anybody interested in the subject.

Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts.

I picked this up in a charity shop, having never heard of it before and found it brilliant for at least three quarters of its length. It tells the story of its author's life but in novel form, from escaping from prison in Australia to living in the slums of Mumbai, to fighting alongside the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan. An incredible story, and, if he isn't quite the writer he thinks he is and the last quarter becomes a little too tidy, the overall impact is still very powerful.
There also a TV series, I found out. I might give it a go, although its reviews are mixed.