[X] My Assistant

[Decrepit]

I'm currently 20% into a reading of the Kindle e-book edition of The Curse of the Mistwraith, book one of Janny Wurts' The War of Light and Shadow series. I'm blowing hot and cold on this one. To be fair, I'm still battling a severe reading slump and find it hard to maintain focus for any length of time. Since finishing my last read, which I surprisingly devoured, I've abandoned book after book. None lasted as long as CofM has. I'll stick with it as long as I can, and hope for the best. It certainly won't be the first book I've read this year that took awhile to get in to, then became quite enjoyable. Assuming that's what happens with CofM. <crosses fingers>

[Decrepit]

I DNF'd Wurtz' The Curse of the Mistwraith. What I read of it made no impression on me. So little impression that, resuming reading following breaks, I frequently couldn't recall who the characters were or what they had been doing.

Two or three other books were set aside due to lack of focus. I'm not necessarily abandoning any of them for good. They simply don't suit me at the moment.

What finally captured and kept my interest was the Project Gutenberg e-book edition of Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis, as translated by David Wyllie. I consider it akin to Hemingway's The Son Also Rises in that, aside from being well written, I can't quite figure out why I like it as much as I do.

As to what I'll take up next, who knows?

This post has been edited by Decrepit: Dec 14 2022, 10:22 PM

[SubRosa]

I have been diving into a lot of audiobooks that I have taken from YouTube. There are a ton of people like Edward E French and Ian Gordon from Horror Babble who have put up readings of classic science fiction and horror stories. I have been playing them back and saving them as mp3 files, then copying them to my mp3 player to listen to while I do work around the house.

I listened to Who Goes There? by William W Campbell. I read it years ago, so it is not something new. But it was interesting to compare it to the various The Thing movie adaptations.

Algernon Blackwood's The Willows and The Wendigo are also old favorites of mine that I have gotten reacquainted with via this method. Granted, the create he describes in the Wendigo is not a Wendigo. But it is interesting nonetheless.

I tried Arthur Machen's The Three Imposters. But I just could not get into it. It is too fragmented a story, made up of nearly a dozen other, smaller stories, which don't seem to really connect very well. In fact, it is hinted that some might be false. The Novel of the Black Seal and the Novel of the White Powder are in there, and I have read them each as standalone stories before, so I will probably do that, and just skip of the rest of the book.

I also dived into some of the Carnacki stories of William Hope Hodgson. These have been pretty good. I love his electric pentacle, and the whole idea of a magical detective. I also like how not all of his cases turn out to be magical in nature. Some turn out to be hoaxes, that he foils without even the help of a group of meddling kids.

[Decrepit]

At 1959 yesterday evening, 15 Dec 2022, I concluded an initial read of Project Gutenberg's e-book offering of Arthur Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet, the debut of Dr Watson and Sherlock Holmes. It at first didn't impress to me, but got better as it progressed. Then, at a chapter change, it morphed into something else altogether. After reading much of the first morphed chapter, I became all but convinced that whoever prepared this e-book had been working on multiple projects and somehow managed to graft part of a totally different title into the Doyle.

I shut down the Paperwhite and returned to the computer to look at the ASiS in its HTML browser version. There, where it is fast and easy to scroll between sections, I saw that the seemingly foreign material is no mistake. Satisfied that it would all make sense at some point, I returned to the sofa and resumed reading. Sure enough, only a few pages beyond where I left off, a few name-drops expose the connection twixt what I was reading and the book's arching storyline. What's more, now that the dust has settled, that assumed foreign material has proven to be my favorite part of the tale. The book's closing section sees a return to Watson and Holmes and the conclusion of the case they investigate.

A good read, especially its middle "foreign" section. Believe it or not, this is my first exposure to Holmes and Watson in written form, though I've seen and enjoyed quite a few of their adventures via movies and television. As to Doyle, it's too soon to say. My only exposure to him is this book and a DNF of The White Company earlier this year, which I might resume at some point.

This post has been edited by Decrepit: Dec 16 2022, 08:57 PM

[Decrepit]

At 0349 this morning, 18 Dec 2022, I concluded an initial read of British author Kenneth Grahame's 1908 children's novel The Wind in the Willows. My copy is a free Project Gutenberg download. I came across this book due to its inclusion in a YouTube booktuber's "10 (or was it 12?) Must-Read Modern Classics" video. I don't see it as a must-read, but it was enjoyable. It takes place on an alternate earth, where animals live and behave much as we humans do, and indeed mix with us on occasion. This world didn't always make sense with itself to me. For instance, much is made of these animals' love of meals. Prepared, cooked meals no different from ours. Meals that include such staples as ham and rabbit.

Another oddity. One of the four lead animal-characters, a toad, is imprisoned in a human jail. He eventually escapes by gaining the sympathy of a certain human female, who has him dress as a washerwoman to slip past the guards. This washerwoman is a relative of the human female, thus human herself. In the book's world, human and animal sizes are the same as on our earth. How did the toad fit into human clothes and fool his jailers into thinking he himself was human?

Speaking of the toad, he/it put me in mind of Tom Sawyer as portrayed in the latter part of Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Self-centered and self-serving, out for his own pleasure regardless of the harm it sometimes causes others.

A good read, but again, for me not a top-10 (or 12) must-read.

This post has been edited by Decrepit: Dec 18 2022, 02:52 PM

[Decrepit]

At 1729 this afternoon, 20 Dec 2022, I concluded a fifth read of Elric of Melnibone, book one of Michael Moorcock's The Elric Saga. Last read at the very end of Dec 2006, its first read occurred Feb 1986, soon after my switch from predominantly non-fiction to almost wholly fantasy. Though I still own my original paperback, this reading took place on my Paperwhite, an omnibus edition of the first four Elric books bought on sale at Amazon a while back. I had not intended to tackle it this year, but fell victim to a severe reading block that I thought I had put behind me a few reads ago. Four or five initial reads ended almost before they began, due to an inability to focus. Knowing that Elric would almost certainly hold my attention from the start, I reluctantly committed myself to it.

As to the book itself, there's little point in me rehashing its plot and merits. It's a well-known commodity, after all. Instead, I'll relate a quirk of mine. Since first picking up this title, I can't for the life of me remember whether its titled character is named "Elric" or "Erlic". While typing this post my old paperback rests beside me, so I can double-check that I type the correct name. It wouldn't surprise me in the least to check back later and discover that I got it wrong at least once.