books galore

Posted on by Dave O

“Spook Street” is the fourth novel in the ‘Slow Horses’ series of spy thrillers by Mick Herron. The story circles around David Cartwright, a top-tier spook of the Cold War era, as he slides into senility at about the same time that an unknown agency decides to take him out of the picture. I like these books for their fast, tight pacing. They’re so engaging I can easily read one from beginning to end in just two or three days. I honestly didn’t expect to become so engrossed in the series. The characters are all such colossal train wrecks, personally and professionally, that I thought they might put me off reading the whole series, but so far I’ve felt compelled to keep reading, in anticipation of a redemption arc for everyone except, I suspect, Jackson Lamb.

“Fledgling” by Octavia Butler is a vampire story? Okay, I didn’t expect to ever like a vampire story, but this one was pretty good. The ending seemed a little rushed, and the conclusion wasn’t especially satisfying, but I liked reading a vampire story in Butler’s voice. This novel was included in the Library of America volume I picked up a couple months back when I visited our local bookstore on a whim.

“Marginalia,” a short story by Mary Robinette Kowal, appeared in issue 56 of Uncanny Magazine. Until this, the only work of Kowal’s I had read was her “Lady Astronaut” series of novels (highly recommend!), an alternate history of the US space program and more in the camp of “hard SF” genre than fantasy, which is where “Marginalia” seems to fall (giant marauding snails? Yeah, seams fantastic to me). I usually lean more to SF than fantasy but this is a lovely short story which makes me feel I may have to check out her other works of fantasy.

“Standing By the Wall” is a collection of four novellas by Mick Herron in the ‘Slow Horses’ series. The first three novellas revolve around a third-rate spy called John Bachelor, and the fourth touches on the relationship between Molly Doran, the keeper of the Park’s records, and Jackson Lamb, sort of. That last novella is a chapter in one of the Slow Horses novels, I forget which one. 

“London Rules” is the fifth book in the series of “Slow Horses” novels by Mick Herron. This series of genre spy novels is pretty much my addiction right now. Not sure what I’m going to substitute for them when I finish. Not my favorite book of the series. The premise of the story felt weak; I never cared much who it affected or why. And most of the characters felt static, not growing much if at all, except for Whelan and Draper. Roddy Ho, who played arguably the most central part to the plot, barely made an appearance and when he did, developed not at all. Still, it’s a quick read and I’m very much looking forward to reading “Joe Country,” the next book in the series.

“Slouching Towards Bethlehem” by Joan Didion – I must have read Didion while I was studying for my English degree. She exactly the kind of author who would have been on a syllabus or two in my school, but that was before I paid much attention to authors who weren’t cranking out science fiction and fantasy, sadly for me. (Imagine paying for classes toward a bachelor’s degree but not paying attention. And that was back when four years of college loans totaled $5,000.00! I was such a putz.) I was triggered to go look for Didion again by the mention of her name in a new song by Natalie Merchant. I’m glad I went looking. This was a very enjoyable read.

books books books

Posted on by Dave O

It took me a while, but I finally finished reading “Lord Jim” by Joseph Conrad. And when I say “it took me a while,” I mean it took me years. As in, decades. I’m pretty sure I tried to read it for the first time forty years ago after I read “Heart of Darkness.” Probably gave up one or maybe even two chapters in. It’s four hundred plus pages of densely-packed multisyllabic prose, and a lot of those words I had to look up. Inferring the meaning doesn’t work when whole pages are filled with dozens of words I’m not familiar with.

On top of that, Conrad wrote it as if a guy named Marlowe was telling you the whole story, so every paragraph starts off with a quotation mark. Then, if someone is talking, there’s another quotation mark. And, if two people or more are talking, Conrad just jams the whole conversation into a single paragraph instead of starting a new line when each person says something. It doesn’t take long to lose track of who’s saying what. I had to read whole paragraphs three or four times just to make sure I knew who said what to whom.

After giving up the first time, I left the novel for years before picking it up again. Pretty sure I abandoned it after a couple chapters again. This happened over and over. The last time I failed to get through it was in the first or second year of the pandemic, but that time I got almost two hundred pages into it, which is pretty good momentum, but I just couldn’t keep it up. I don’t know what finally changed, but I started it about two weeks ago and kept on powering through it. Finished it last night.

Was it worth the effort? I have mixed feelings. The story is interesting. Jim, who doesn’t have a last name, is a man haunted by his past. He was the first mate on a ship when it hit something and started taking on water. He abandoned ship with the rest of the ship’s crew when they believed it was going to sink, only to find out later that it didn’t. There were 800 people aboard. So for the rest of his life he turns himself inside out for leaving those 800 people to die.

And Jim really should have had a hard look at himself for doing that, but he doesn’t. He runs away from his past. Literally runs away from everyone who brings it up, again and again, until he has finally retreated to the farthest reaches of human habitation where he makes himself over as a lord among the natives.

(There’s a lot of very casual, very brutal racism in this book, which is not surprising, given the time period Conrad’s writing about. There’s also a lot of misogyny for a book in which just one woman, Jim’s romantic interest, gets more than a mention. Jim calls her by a pet name, “Jewel,” and Marlow refers to her as “the girl” but Conrad never uses her real name, so she literally has no name at all.)

While I was looking for reading material day before yesterday I ran across a copy of God Bless You, Mister Rosewater, by Kurt Vonnegut, that I had squirreled away in an unseen corner of a bookshelf, flipped it open and started reading to see if the first few pages would hook me. Damned if they didn’t. I finished it early this morning after waking at three-thirty and finding I was unable to go back to sleep. Vonnegut’s writing has almost always held my interest even when I couldn’t say why, or that I understood what was going on. Mister Rosewater was an entertaining read but I couldn’t say why beyond “it was quirky and fun.”

I’ve been reading the Slow Horses books by Mick Herron, after watching the series on Apple TV. Good series, good books. So far I’ve read the first three books (Slow Horses, Real Tigers, Dead Lions) and I picked up the fourth book, Spook Street, from the library yesterday. Good spy thrillers, the whole lot of them. Would definitely recommend unreservedly. 

Before all that, I picked up a collection of Octavia Butler’s works published by the Library of America. Their collections are always good value for money, and I already knew I liked Butler after reading Wild Seed a year or two ago. This edition included the novel Kindred, which I read immediately, about a black woman from modern-day California who somehow travels back in time to antebellum Maryland. The novel’s not about time travel; there’s no explanation at all for how she gets there or gets back, it’s all about how she deals with being there, which Butler explores in detail. Can’t wait to read the rest of her work in this edition.

And before I picked up the collection of Butler, I found a collection of Joanna Russ, again published by Library of America, which included her novels The Female Man, We Who Are About To…, and One Strike Against God, as well as a half-dozen of her short stories. I read The Female Man way back in the day but wasn’t mature enough to appreciate its significance. And I remember reading We Who Are About To… when I was in high school or maybe college, but the kind of science fiction I was into back then focused on robots and battles against giant planet-killing bugs, and didn’t get into the depths of self-inspection that Russ’s novel went to. Again, I was not quite ready for that at the time. I’m pretty sure I had not read One Strike Against God before this; after mistakenly pigeonholing Russ as a sci-fi writer I wasn’t drawn to, I stopped looking into her books, and neither feminist lit nor lesbian lit were even on my radar until maybe sometime in the last 10-15 years. Too bad, because I would have benefited from reading One Strike long before this.

road rage

Posted on by Dave O

Just got home from a road trip to Denver and back. Never thought I’d say anything like this, but after driving in the traffic around the Denver metro area I hope I’ll never complain about Madison traffic ever again.

Not that I think Madison drivers are great. They’re not. They’re pretty piss-poor drivers by any objective test. But compared to Denver drivers, Madison drivers are relatively kind, almost considerate, conscientious to a point — again, COMPARED TO DENVER DRIVERS, who are not only contemptuous of traffic rules but are also casually inconsiderate in the most extreme way, like a person waving a loaded gun around as if it could not possibly discharge accidentally.

Like for instance, Madison drivers don’t know how to merge with highway traffic. They come up the on-ramp, sometimes with their blinker going, sometimes not, and gradually slow down until there’s a gap in traffic just big enough to jerk their car into, but not quite big enough that the next three cars in line behind won’t have to slam on their brakes.

But in Denver the roles are reversed: The cars on the highway are going about 50 MPH even though the posted limit is 65 MPH, while cars come blasting out of the on-ramps into traffic at 75 MPH. Somehow this does not result in massive pile-ups of tangled wreckage everywhere, but I don’t know how.

There is one way that Denver drivers are like Madison drivers: There are lots of people driving pickup trucks so comically large they can’t turn the corners of most city streets without stopping, backing up, going forward, stopping, backing up, and finally finishing the turn. There are also plenty of people driving tiny Hondas or Fiats or whatever those little Beetle-looking cars are, whining down the road as if they’re powered by motorcycle engines.

first lines

Posted on by Dave O

It’s a thing on social media right now for creators to quote the first lines from their favorite books. Trouble with this trend, it seems to me, is they’re all reading the first lines from the books that will obviously get them clicks, so almost every listcicle includes the first line from a Harry Potter book, a Jane Austen book, a Stephen King book.

For my money, it’s hard to top the opening lines of The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells:

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.

Honestly, the only way for that opening to be any better would be to have Morgan Freeman read it aloud.

refinish

Posted on by Dave O

Our Little Red House was built in the 1950s. The kitchen cabinets are original. I want to replace the cabinets under the counter, but I want to keep the cabinets above the counter and over the range. I’ll have to refinish them if I keep them but I have no experience whatsoever refinishing woodwork like this, so I’m trying to figure it out by refinishing the cabinets under the counter. If I can make them look good, then I’ll try refinishing the overhead cabinets.

I began this experiment by pulling the doors off the cabinets under the sink, sanding them clean, then applying three coats of a combination stain and sealer. I chose to sand them rather than strip them because although most of the wood still looked remarkably good after fifty-some years, the areas around the handles were badly dinged up and grungy-looking. By carefully sanding down to clear grain, then layering stain/sealer over the surface, I brought each door back to a satisfyingly good look.

Wrapped up tight against the dust.

The next most logical step was to stain and sand the face of the cabinets. Sanding would produce a lot of dust even with a vacuum attached to the sander and a fan in the window to keep the air moving. I didn’t want to clear the kitchen of every last appliance, pan, spatula & etc. so I hung a plastic sheet from the ceiling (first photo), cut away an opening to get at the cabinets, then taped the plastic to the counter top to keep the dust in. When everything was sealed up, I dragged the vacuum and the sander into the kitchen, plugged them in, and sanded the wood smooth.

After one coat of stain/sealer … and a grainy shot before staining.

This wooden face has taken quite a beating over the years and is very badly worn in spots. I didn’t get a great before photo but the wear and tear is evident on the drawers I haven’t refinished yet.

test drive

Posted on by Dave O

I wanted to try out an e-bike last week. Luckily, there are racks full of rental e-bikes all over town. Unluckily, the only way to rent them is to download an app to your smart phone. To download it, you have to complete a shit-ton of paperwork (notionally – it’s all electronic, but I had to enter my name almost as many times on that as I did when I signed a home mortgage). Then, you have to sign in about a dozen times. Then, you have to pay them. No matter how many times I tried that last part, the app kept crashing. Eventually, I gave up and went home.

The bike rack I went to was in the parking lot of a local hotel where there were a lot of tents set up to advertise stuff. One of the tents was for Tesla. I wasn’t anywhere near it, but because I was standing there so long futzing with the app on my phone, I guess the guy saw me as a target of opportunity, wandered over, and asked me if I’d like to take a look at the Teslas.

I was actually offended. The idea that anyone would believe I was interested in a Tesla was revolting. This was a prejudice I didn’t know I had. I might as well admit that this is a prejudice I’m not going to try to remediate.

“No,” I told him flatly, without the “thank you.”

“You sure?” he asked. “We can take it for a test drive if you like it.”

I was thinking of saying something like, “I would never consciously put money in the pocket of your megalomaniacal CEO for any reason ever.” But instead I just flatly repeated, “No.” He got the hint and went to find another mark.

Oshkosh Fly-In 2023

Posted on by Dave O

For the first time since about, I think, 1979 or 1980, I went to the Oshkosh fly-in. I don’t fly but I used to back then, so going to the Oshkosh fly-in every year was a ritual akin to going to church, and just as deeply fulfilling an experience. And although it was a fly-in held at one of the biggest airfields in Wisconsin, it had the feel of a fly-in at a grass strip in a central Wisconsin county. I am almost certainly romanticizing it at this 44-year remove, but only just enough to make me feel better. We camped in alfalfa fields, strolled between the rows of old planes parked in hay fields just off the runway, shuffled through canvas tents to peer at the books and hardware and second-hand clothes on sale, and sat cross-legged in the grass under the wings of DC-3 Gooney Birds to watch the air show.

There’s still a lot to see and do, but I didn’t get a grass-strip fly-in feeling from going to it this time around. Entry to the field was once a gap in a snow fence; now it’s a broad gateway flanked by permanent ticketing pavilions where long back-and-forth lines of incoming tourists are processed before they’re admitted through the main gates to walk up the wide central boulevard to Boeing Plaza. It felt less like a visit to a clapboard church in the countryside and more like slogging across a wide, hot parking lot to sit through a service in a megachurch.

It’s not even called the Oshkosh Fly-In anymore. It’s the Experimental Aircraft Association’s “Air Venture.” Yikes. I wonder how much money they paid a consultant to come up with that clunker?

Whatever. I went to see the airplanes, not to go on an “air venture.” Lucky for me they still have lots and lots of planes parked in row after long row across vast fields of freshly-mown grass, and I had a pretty good time for as long as I wandered among them, which was a long time. Hopscotching from one field to the next, I strolled up and down the rows of old planes, sticking my head into the cockpits if the doors were open, reading the displays that explained how they were lovingly restored by their owners.

I had to pop out of the fields every so often to find a spigot to refill my water bottle because it turned out to be a punishingly hot all day with relentless sunshine, smothering humidity, and a dim haze that clung to the sky. Each time I emerged from the rows and rows of planes, I was met with concession stands selling ten-dollar pretzels and four-dollar cans of soda pop. I stuck to eating the snacks I brought with me and drinking the tepid water I got from spigots outside the rest rooms.

After slowly wandering from one end of the flight line to the other I doubled back to see if the exhibition halls were worth a look-see. They might have been, but they were packed tight with too many people. I had a final look around the outdoor exhibits, gradually making my way closer to the main gate, and finally left at about mid-afternoon.

bleep

Posted on by Dave O

This is so stupid.

“Bleep” is so stupid. Even though I played it, I still think it’s stupid. I honestly didn’t expect it to work. I played it only because I was trying to get my brain going. I needed to a word, any word, to get some momentum going and I only had one vowel and I couldn’t think of anything but “bleep” so I played it. I was shocked that it accepted “bleep.” Then I was sooo disappointment when the whole word turned green. Seriously? “Bleep?” Ugh.

knee bends

Posted on by Dave O

I went for a walk along the causeway to the arboretum last Sunday. It was a lovely warm sunny day for a walk. What I love most about walking in the arboretum is there are places where you can just about convince yourself that you’re not in the middle of a city. It’s not that the arboretum is like being in the unspoiled countryside. Every bit of it is very much a park and looks like it. But, every so often, when the wind is blowing in the right direction to silence the noise of traffic on the beltline, you look out across a lake to watch turtles splash from a log into the water, or glance up into into a thick stand of trees to catch the rays of the morning sun through the leaves and, for a few moments, you’re not in Madison anymore.

The moment doesn’t always last. You are, in fact, in the middle of a busy city. But those moments can be a tonic for the soul.