Where Neil Schools Us on Some Stuff

Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries by Neil deGrasse Tyson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This has been my before-sleep short read for a few weeks. With forty-two short essays, many of them just 6 or 7 pages long, it's ideal for the sleepy brain. I liked it quite a bit. 4 stars.

These meditations on the big bang, on black holes, on the spaces between stars, and many other physics and astronomy questions are conversational little tidbits that don't break a lot of new ground (especially as I'm reading it 20 years after it was published), but I still found something in literally every essay that was new to me or made me think about something a new way. A scientifically literate reader will already know most of this, and I think I'm pretty well along on that scale, but there are still things he brings into each of his essays that inform me and amuse me and make the reading meaningful. The best fun in non-fiction like this is learning new things.

His voice comes through perfectly clear in the whole thing (which is a plus or minus, depending on the reader's take) and his tone is almost always light, joshing, and, IMO, pleasant. That's the right approach for this kind of popular science. It's not the deadly earnest, erudite tone of Richard Dawkins (who writes great books but is hardly tolerable in person--and has made himself disagreeable the same way JKR has). Nor is it the wide-ranging, surprising, and wandering musings of Stephen Jay Gould (who is greatly missed). Neil deGrasse Tyson is a very smart man in his own right, but he takes a different tack in media, including this book, and I think it's very successful. He wants to explain things to a broad audience in a way that entertains while it educates. He keeps the learning curve very gentle here, the cognitive demand relatively low, but that was his intention, and the way he makes it work may be his genius. In another's hands, this could be a much tougher and much less engaging read.

The only place the author gets a little sharp--deservedly so--and a little less charitable is when he's protecting science from fuzzy religious thought, like creation versus the big bang and similar topics. I think he's earned the right to be just as firm on the topic as he wants. And I don't think it detracts from his amiable, laughs-at-his-own-jokes tone that he gives us though almost every page.

If this fails to dazzle, it nevertheless amuses, and it's full of good science information. I learned a lot more than I would have guessed in these essays on familiar topics. Easy 4 star rating. If you're in the mood for non-fiction but want just bits here and there, just a chunk per day, this is a good choice to put on your bedstand. And if you're lucky like me, you'll find it at a little bookstore for a couple dollars. A steal.

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Where Joliffe Goads the Bad Guy

A Play of Knaves by Margaret Frazer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I've been enjoying this series and the related Frevisse series. This is the 5th I've read, and they've been consistently (to me) right around 4 stars, maybe 4.5. I liked this one even more, and don't feel like I'm being charitable to say it's a 5 star read.

In this historical mystery set in the 1400s, we find Joliffe and the other players being sent to visit a village that has secrets or some difficult undercurrent troubling the people. Their patron has some interest in the matter, so they go away from their normal route to perform in the area and snoop out what's going on. Turns out, there's a lot, and it's all tangled in family histories.

What I like is that Joliffe is getting more and more unapologetically direct in investigating leads and working out secrets to solve the mysteries that they wander into. He's not a detective, but he's intelligent, inventive, bold, and a bit defiant on the inside. He doesn't do it all alone, and the story is about the whole troupe as well as the villagers, but Joliffe's development and activity is the most interesting part of the story.

There are some pretty evil bad guys here, and it's good to see the mystery solved and their evil plots stamped out. That's always fun. And our hero gets to be the crucial factor in that solution, which for me is absolutely necessary in mysteries like this. I lost a little focus and spaced some of the details, like the corners on the overlapping love triangles, but the author gives us a a satisfying conclusion that solves everything satisfactorily, both emotionally and plot-wise. (It might be nice to see the actors get thanked by some folks they've helped, but I can let that go.)

A good series--getting better as we go. Recommended.

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Where Lyndaraxa is Very Bad

Almanzor and Almahide, or the Conquest of Granada by John Dryden
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

[This is a review of the second play, The Conquest of Granada, Part II. I already rated and reviewed the first part. Goodreads lumps both parts together, unfortunately.]

I'm enjoying Dryden more than I expected, and I liked this play more than the first. More closure, more drama that I care about, more movement. Like so many old plays, I feel like I'd do better to study the background and try it again, but life is short, and there are a lot of things still to read for the first time...

I'm not generally a fan of rhyme in poetry, let alone drama, and Dryden's plays are made up entirely of rhyming couplets, or heroic couplets. I didn't expect to be okay with that choice, though I think it works. He's more recent than Shakespeare of Marlowe or some others who moved away from rhyme, which makes these plays feel older than they are, but perhaps the reason it feels appropriate is that the setting for this pair of plays is 15th century Spain, over 500 before present and about 180 years before they were written (~1670). They should seem old, then, and old-fashioned.

The first play is mostly about the civil war between two Granada families or clans, all of them Muslim Moors. The second continues that to some degree, but under threat from Ferdinand and Isabella trying to oust the last remaining Moorish rulers from the peninsula. In Dryden's version, the civic disunity, personal ambitions of certain individuals, and straight-up treason of one character lead to the downfall of the small state.

The real villain of the story is beautiful Lyndaraxa, the sister of the leader of the Zegry family, who entices one man after another to try for the throne with the promise of marriage, a promise that she withdraws when their plans fall short. She wants to be queen, and will ally herself with whoever can bring it about, regardless of the crimes they need to commit to achieve it. Her lies and tricks are as shocking and effective as Iago's lies in Othello. In the end--spoiler--she joins with the invading Spaniards, opening the way to Granada with the promise of being queen. Further spoiler--she gets her way for about 5 seconds. Her death, after so many lies and tricks leading straight to war and the deaths of many, is one of the most satisfying in drama.

Another entertaining revelation comes right at the end, when we discover that the hero Almanzor is the long-lost son of a Spanish duke who he once did a service for (in part I). Additionally, the beautiful but principled Almahide is widowed when her jealous husband the king dies. She was loyal to him, but really loved Almanzor, and will marry him after her grieving is through. These take some of the sting out of the tragedy.

I thought it was pretty fun. I'm curious how it would sound on the stage, if it would sound natural or sing-songy with so much rhyme. For reading, though, I found meter worked quite well--much to my surprise.

Recommended for curious readers--though it might be nice to do the reading with more resources than I took advantage of. Maybe team-read. Or--just jump on in. See what you think.

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Where Maddock Follows Clues in the American Southwest

Cibola by David Wood
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Pretty good. Not my favorite, but I'll read another by this author.

This is a pulp fiction adventure, like a modern-day Doc Savage or something, and it works pretty well. I've liked two previous books by this author. Somehow, this book didn't work as well for me, and I read it sporadically. Too much stopping and starting makes it hard to love a book, and this is probably more entertaining if read straight through, but it didn't hold my interest that well.

It's a good setup for a story--a genuine lead on Cíbola and the seven cities of gold--taking the story to the American southwest and a quest for lost artifacts, both aboveground and below. To a large extent, it works, but I don't really like sequential stories like this, where they find one thing which leads to another and another, like a shopping list. The last third is pretty fun again, as is so often the case, and I bet if I'd read it in bigger chunks closer together I'd have liked it more.

I often like digging up 1920s or 1930s pulp fiction, and that's pretty fun, and this is probably better than that in just about every way, so it's still recommended if you have a taste for such stories. Many readers gave it a 5, so I might be the wrong guy for this particular title.

Anyway, a 3 is still a recommendation--if cautious. Take a look for yourself.

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Where Charlie Gets Friggin Dolphins

Starter Villain by John Scalzi
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Very entertaining book.

I always like John Scalzi. It feels like he's using straightforward, plain language, but nobody makes me laugh more. The dialogue, the tone, the clever, smart-ass quips--never jokes--kill me. Scalzi taps into the zeitgeist in a way nobody else quite does, and he makes it work for him.

I almost gave this a 5, and still could, but it feels a little smaller than some of his other books. Lots of fun still, but I wish he gave his MC more to do. He's a good character, but his role could have been played by almost anyone. Except for a few good scenes with the other villains and some stuff with the dolphins (I won't give more spoilers than that) he doesn't contribute a lot.

That's alright. It still works.

I kinda wonder what genre this really is. I read it like SF, but it's not really. Speculative fiction still, I guess. Satire, for sure. Closer to a James Bond novel than SF, though. And again--that's alright. He can write in any genre and I'll read it.

A regular dude getting tossed into the role of a super-villain, having to face other rich villains, is a clever idea, a novel-worthy idea. Giving him friggin dolphins and friggin smart cats is just too funny.

If you like Scalzi, or if you like SF (is it SF?) that also makes you laugh, this is your book. And he's got others.

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Where Kennedy Uses 1910 Science

The Dream Doctor (Craig Kennedy, Scientific Detective by Arthur B. Reeve
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is like New York's answer to Sherlock Holmes, except this detective is much more interested in electrical gadgets.

I enjoyed it, though it's pretty much just old pulp fiction. That's not a negative--I like pulp fiction, as a rule, and part of the pleasure in reading this is seeing what it reveals about tastes and interests of the time, meaning American readers around 1910 or so. The people wanted detectives, of course, and they like modern science. Strange to think of the early 1900s as modern, but it was.

[It does suffer here and there from the unfortunate attitudes and language of the time period.]

Kennedy uses recording devices, x-ray photography, a blood pressure device, and lots of things I didn't think existed 110 or 120 years ago. Some of it is kinda fanciful, but a lot of it is real--just much earlier than I thought people knew about it.

This book is basically a bunch of short stories stitched together, which makes it very breezy and fast-paced. I thought that was fine. A reporter is following him for a story, like his Doctor Watson, recording all of his exploits. I thought it was fun.

This stuff is all available as free ebooks. I'm reading it from an old bunch of hardcovers, which is more fun IMO, but the books are still out there. This isn't fine literature, but I recommend it and the others in the series for readers who are driven by curiosity as much as literary interest.

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Where It Might be King Arthur

Grave Goods by Ariana Franklin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I enjoyed reading this and found lots to like, and though I have some issues, I have to give it a 4 star rating. 4 with an asterisk.

This is the second book I've read in this series--out of order--and since I only kinda liked the other one I put off starting this one for a long time. I liked the mystery and pacing of this one better, though I still don't really like the main character. I keep trying to figure out why; she's just the kind of investigator I usually love.

[I wrote a very positive review of that book at the time. It's strange, because it's not how the story sits in my memory. I can't explain beyond recognizing that literature is complex, and we can both like and dislike a book at the same time.]

There are several mysteries layered here, and they're all interesting to me. One is to identify a pair of bodies found after an earthquake in Glastonbury that locals think are actually Arthur and Guinevere. Another mystery is to determine who started the fire that destroyed the abbey, as some poor men (who claim had nothing to do with it) are being blamed. Additionally, Adelia's friend has gone missing on the road and may be dead. And lastly, some other remains and artifacts are discovered which may actually touch on the Arthur legends.

Lots to do.

Adelia works with an Arab man who pretends to be the doctor that she actually is, and she travels with her daughter and a servant. She's independent and educated and driven to solve questions surrounding murders and deaths by accident. That's awesome. I find her hard to take, though, and (this is the asterisk part I mentioned above) it seems like she's grouchy and rude and difficult when there's no reason for it. I like that attitude fine when she's dealing with rotten people, but even when the people are reasonable, friendly, and decent, and she wants help or information from them, she is abrasive and short and demanding. (I can't figure out if the author means for us to read her this way, perhaps to make her more complex and real, or if this is just how the author is?) It gives me second-hand embarrassment the whole way through. She seldom shows gratitude when she gets help or says thank you; she's just as likely to expect further assistance, and demand it, but still not in a nice way.

I dunno. I like her role and biographical details some of the things she represents, but I don't like her, and it makes it harder to like the stories she's in. Even though the book was pretty entertaining, with a good plot, a good mystery, and making great use of historical details, Adelia is off-putting to me--like the Eastern European woman my wife and I pass on the sidewalk almost every morning while we're walking the dog, who only frowns at us when we say good morning to her, even after years of bumping into her over and over and over. (It's a campaign now. I won't be deterred.) : ) A little kindness, a little friendliness goes a long way....

Anyway, I liked the book. Others would probably like it, too. I have a third title from the series already on hand, and I'm debating whether I'll read it or trade it in. I have other series where I can cheer on the MC with greater pleasure. I just keep hoping I'll figure her out.

We'll see.

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