When we last saw Monty Bodkin he had just left the employ of the Earl of
Emsworth for that of one Percy Pilbeam, private investigator, despite
being wealthy in his own right. The circumstances were entirely due to
his wish to marry Gertrude Butterwick, whose father had stipulated that
no damned drone would marry his daughter and required her intended to
have held down a paying job for at least a year before the nuptials.
Having been fired from his previous two jobs, Monty had taken the
precaution of paying Pilbeam a thousand pounds to give him the post. And
so everything looked rosy at the end of Heavy Weather.

Alas, and alack, the course of true love ne’er ran smooth, and especially
not at sea, as Monty discovers in the course of a trans-Atlantic cruise.
Gertude has broken the engagement, he knows not why, and embarked on a cruise
to the United States to forget him. Monty, of course, comes along; faint
heart and fair maid, and all that. Also on the trip is Reggie Tennyson,
a friend of Monty’s from the Drone’s club; Reggie’s brother Ambrose, the
writer and employee of the Admiralty; the well-known starlet Lotus
Blossom, once the beloved of Reggie but now the fiance of Ambrose; Ivor
Llewellyn, the movie mogul; and his sister-in-law Mabel. Also starring
in the action are one stuffed Mickey Mouse doll, a diamond necklace, and
an over-familiar cabin steward named Peasemarch, and a plethora of wheels
within wheels.

I could wax rhapsodic about how good Wodehouse is, but you’ve heard that
before; take it as given. I enjoyed it thoroughly.

I was given this many years ago, and found it while working through the
bookshelves. It’s a somewhat scholarly treatment of the subject of time
machines from the physical, philosophical, theological, and science
fictional points of view, and includes a vast bibliography. It’s
somewhat slightly interesting, and if the subject of time machines
fascinates you more than it does me you might want to see if you can
scare up a copy.

But if not, not.

Fifteen-year-old Alexander Cold’s mother has cancer and is going to a
special clinic with Alexander’s father; he and his sisters get dispatched
to live with aunts for duration. In Alexander’s case, it means that he
accompanies his eccentric, acerbic Aunt Kate on an expedition to the
farthest reaches of the Amazon River, in search of a murderous
sasquatch-like creature called “The Beast”. Ultimately the expedition
encounters an Indian tribe, the People of the Mist, who have always
eschewed contact with outsiders–and also with “The Beasts”, a race of
creatures the People of the Mist worship as gods.

There’s a lot to like in this book; once Allende gets past the first
couple of chapters, which are completely atrocious (I nearly stopped
reading, and only continued because my sister gave me the book for
Christmas and I wanted to give it the benefit of the doubt) she’s
quite a good storyteller. I’m at a bit of a disadvantage, reviewing this
book; I’ve never read anything else by Allende, and according to the dust
jacket this is her first book for young readers. Thus, I don’t know
whether the awful beginning is typical, or whether she forgot to write
“down” after she’d gotten a couple of chapters into it.

But be that as it may, there’s a lot to dislike, too. I’ll start with
the character Ludovic Leblanc, egotistical anthropologist and blithering
idiot. He’s the only scientist in the party, and he’s an imbecile, less
interested in what’s before his eyes than what’s in his books. He’s not
at all suited for life in the jungle, and he seems to know nothing about
it–and yet, he was chosen to lead this expedition because of his vast
experience in the field. He’s as two-dimensional as a playing card.

Okay, he’s a badly written character. But it’s the attitude that bugs
me–as I say, he’s the only scientist. All through the book, the message
is “think with your heart, not your head.” I’m not one to downplay the
importance of feelings and intuition, but not using your head is just stupid.

And then there are the People of the Mist, who are portrayed as living a
sylvan, idyllic life without modern goods, without modern thoughts,
without modern technology. Really, we’re asked, why should they change?
Their system has worked for them for thousands of years. They are happy,
says Allende. Again, we have the pluralistic, post-modern message: our
way is no better than theirs.

In a word: hogwash.

I have three children. Just minutes before my second son was born, the
heart rate on the fetal monitor dropped to nearly zero–the umbilical
cord was wrapped around his neck. The nurse immediately got Jane to stop
pushing, and got her breathing oxygen. Meanwhile, she did what she could
to get the baby to shift position. It worked–she got him untangled, and
he was born safely. Had there been no fetal monitor, likely he would
have been stillborn–a little baby boy, perfectly developed and ready to
be born, dead of a stupid accident minutes before birth.

I’ll take modern technology, thank you. I’ll take Western Civilization,
with all of its Dead White Males, against whatever pap the multi-culti
crowd are pushing these days. It works, better than anything else we’ve
come up with. And I’ll tell you, sitting here in my warm study, in a
comfortable chair, with my little girl gurgling in her playpen, is much
more pleasant than living in the jungle, “in harmony with nature”,
worshipping the spirits in every plant and animal and worshipping giant
ground sloths as gods.

Sorry, Isabel. No, thank you.

In case you’ve been in a hole for the last fifty years, this is E.B.
White’s classic story of Charlotte the grey spider and how she saved a
pig named Wilbur from being turned into bacon. I read it several times when
I was a kid, and loved it. I read it to Dave over the last twenty or so
nights, and he loved it too. I’m going to have to look for
Stuart Little, which I somehow never got to, and
The Trumpet of the Swan, which I may have read more times as a
kid than Charlotte’s Web.

There are several editions of this book in print; the one I got has the
same illustrations I remember, except that these have been “colorized”.
The result is surprisingly attractive, and if I were going to give
somebody a copy of this book I’d definitely look for the “Full Color
Edition”.

I’ve read a number of P.J.’s books now, and generally enjoyed them. He
has an acerbic wit, and he’s a good observer; the combination makes him
interesting, and I often learn something. This, alas, is one of his
earlier books, back before he’d settled fully into his groove; there’s
too much sex, drugs, and inanities, and too little point for it to really
worth reading, especially given how dated most of the material is. Oh,
well.

Some years ago, Brust wrote a book called The Phoenix
Guards. It is set in the same world as his Vlad Taltos novels,
though nearly a thousand years earlier; it is also recognizably
inspired by Alexander
Dumas‘s book The Three Musketeers. Some time later he
wrote a sequel with the odd title Five Hundred Years After; the
sequel to The Three Musketeers is called Twenty Years
After. So it was no surprise to the Dumas fans in the audience
when he announced that the next book would be called The
Viscount of Adhrilankha (click on Dumas’ name, above, to see why).
Nor was it a surprise when it was revealed that The Viscount of
Adhrilankha would be published in three volumes. And, after far
too long a time, here is the first of them.

I’m almost at a loss to know how to describe this book. First of all,
it’s a rollicking adventure, like The Three Musketeers.
Historically, it takes place during the Interregnum that followed Adron’s
Disaster, and involves several efforts to reestablish the empire. The hero
is a young Tiassa named Piro, the son of our old friend Khaavren. And
finally, it’s written by Sir Paarfi of Roundwood.

The thing you need to know about Steven Brust is that he almost never
writes without a narrator (the Vlad Taltos books, for example, are
narrated by Vlad himself). And so, just as
The Three Musketeers is an historical novel written by
Alexander Dumas, The Paths of the Dead is not a
fantasy, but rather a Dragaeran historical novel written by an historian
named Sir Paarfi of Roundwood. And Sir Paarfi is a prolix soul (Jane
kept asking me if Paarfi was paid the word) who wants to be sure we
understand completely everything we need to about his tale–and a good
many things we don’t really need to know at all. A lot of the charm of
the book comes from Paarfi’s storytelling….and a lot of the humor is at
Paarfi’s expense.

An example: the Paths of the Dead are a very odd feature of the Dragaeran
landscape. Dead Dragaerans somehow end up there; and if they can
traverse the Paths of the Dead they end up in the Halls of Judgement,
where they stand some chance of reincarnation. The Paths of the Dead
clearly lie along the Blood River at the base of Deathgate Falls, and yet
they aren’t really on earth. Time behaves strangely in the Paths of the
Dead. And Sir Paarfi spends about half a page reminding us about this
peculiarity, in great detail, just so that he can then say that in fact
it has no effect on our tale.

Brust is one of our regular read-aloud authors, and so I read this aloud
to Jane; and I must say that while I enjoyed it, it was heavy going.
Paarfi’s prose is always perfectly clear, and grammatically correct, but
he likes convoluted sentences and long idiomatic constructions, and never
uses one word when five will do, so he’s a tiring author to read aloud.
It was worth it, though.

One caveat: although it ends with a reasonable climax, this book isn’t
really complete in itself; like The Fellowship of the Ring,
it’s simply the first third of a single novel. There are lots of threads
left dangling in odd places; if you’re easily troubled, you might want to
wait until the full work is available.

…as written by various different authors

This is really outstanding. The Dr. Suess version is particularly
good, but I also like the P.G. Wodehouse–not to mention Merry Poppins.

The young men of the title are all members of the aptly named Drones
Club, that refuge for the exquisitely well-dressed young man with nothing on
his mind but the perfect top hat (from Bodmin’s, of course). There’s
nothing serious here, but quite a bit to laugh at: this book is the
proper home of my favorite Wodehouse story, “Uncle Fred Flits By”, as
well as of the fiendishly plotted “Goodbye to All Cats”, along with nine
other gems. Buy it, read it, chortle.