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originaldetectivesheep · 7 years

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Year in Review - Books I Read In 2016

In between writing three books this year, I read a hundred or so book-equivalents of other people's work. About half of these were read while traveling; I read fast and spent a lot of this year on or waiting for airplanes. Most of these are extremely old and not many of them were great, but casting a wide net can produce unexpected results; 2017 just from what I already have available is going to likely be dominated by more Gutenberg-grinding, but I'm also going to try to get farther outside the box and continue to work on picking up more diverse and widespread influences.

John Buchan - Witch Wood Buchan took a long leap away from his typical hard-bitten inter-war suspense plots for this historical romance set in 17th century Scotland, a time of witch hunts, plague, and disputes between hardcore Calvinists and even-crazier hardcore Calvinists that occasionally flared up into actual civil war. The language is a little clunky, and there is a lot of impenetrable Scots dialect that isn't translated, but in terms of total quality it's not greatly different from his Hannay stuff. If you like Buchan's pacing, but tend to lose patience with the public-school-Toryism of a lot of his lead characters, you might want to take a look at this one, which is far enough removed from modern politics that he's out of that mode. He only did something like this the once, so it maybe wasn't a commercially-successful experiment, but it's an interesting one all the same.

Abraham Merritt - various short stories While cleaning up my pile of Gutenberg Australia texts, I read through a bunch of Merritt's stuff. The quality was kind of intermittent, but what really struck me was how relatively non-racist it was, for a guy in this time period writing through a bunch of east-Asian subjects. Edgar Wallace or Edgar Rice Burroughs would have been terrible on this stuff. The best one of these stories is probably "The Fox Woman", with "The Women of the Wood" being pretty solid as well. "The Drone" is a little disposable, "The People of the Pit" is a worse version of Lovecraft's "At The Mountains of Madness", and "Through the Dragon Glass" is trying too hard, dumping in a bucket of Orientalist cliches where a teaspoon would have been enough.

Ellis Parker Butler - Philo Gubb, collected More people should be more aware of the adventures of Philo Gubb, the determined-but-derpy detective and wallpaper-hanger from Riverside, Iowa. A lot of people parody Sherlock Holmes, but what Parker Butler's parodying here is Holmes mania. Step by step, Gubb actually does solve his mysteries like a less hilarious detective; he's just living in the universe of absurdity that comes with being a wallpaper installer with a correspondence-school detective certificate as a main character. The twist endings are all pretty clever, and the dialect in dialogue doesn't obstruct the humor; of these, the "Greatest Case" is probably the best, for both its extremely well-crafted setup, and then the hilarious end where Gubb literally falls ass backward into the resolution of the case.

Joseph Conrad - A Set of Six This was the first larger thing that I completely finished reading in 2016; if I recall correctly, I started Witch Wood at the very end of '15. There are some parts that felt like a re-read, but you read a lot of Conrad getting a reasonable education in the English-speaking world, so that might have been it; some of these are probably in Tales of Unrest, another collection I read back in '13. This is one of his classic collections, and it definitely earns it: "Gaspar Ruiz" is not the strongest, and is overwrought in the way that people who don't like Conrad frequently criticize him for being, but "The Informer" and "An Anarchist" should be mandatory, and "The Duel" is good not just for the psychological characterizations, but in the way that he weaves in and presents the whole Napoleonic era.

L. Roy Terwilliger - Cuban Folk-Lore My dad sent me this ethnographic thing at the end of January for little immediately-discernable reason, and since it was short and I had some time burning backups, I read it down. I got a couple ideas out of it, but it's wicked old (late 19th century, probably before the American conquest), as racist as anything from that time period and with the usual intermittent methodology and absent sourcing, and the actual content describing local practices is not enormously novel to someone who's even a little familiar with Afro-Catholic syncretic practices from the Caribbean. It's short, though, so that's maybe something.

Joseph Conrad - Twixt Land and Sea I finished this faster than I thought I would, again at the laundromat, and can heartily recommend it. "The Secret Sharer" is in here, for one, and that should be enough, but the final story, "The Lady of the Isles", is a damn masterpiece. It's still, as noted above, a little wrought in places, but Conrad's language, man, his knack of locating exactly the perfect word in his fourth goddamn language to build exactly the right impression -- even if his psychology can get a little wrought, it's worth reading Conrad just to read him. And -- and this sticks out especially in this last tale -- in Conrad as in very, very few of his contemporaries, stylistic or chronological, everybody in the story is always a fully-paid-up human being. The men, of whatever nation, the women, the "natives" -- they all have their foibles and their failings, but they're all fully human and always worthy of the reader or the narrator's respect. If Conrad in himself isn't enough to get you to read him, that bit ought to be: and the rewards will pay off, intensely.

Shelagh Delaney - A Taste of Honey I read this as a consequence of doing research for a Linksshifter story, and enjoyed it well enough, even though it really needs a director's hand to transform the lines and inconsistent, weirdly placed directions into an actual dramatic performance. While the hellish conditions of pre-slum-clearance Salford are no longer current, I've seen enough historical stuff from the bad parts of Glasgow at the time the play was written to fill them in, and I seriously know like all of the main characters in this story. Jimmie and Geoff are fairly stock and generic, but Helen, Jo, and Peter are real people I could easily cast just from the circles of people I know from the north of England and the Irish diaspora. Maybe that gives it more kick than it might have for other people, but at least from my perspective this is more than just a kitchen-sink drama.

Piotyr Kropotkin - Mutual Aid This took up most of February and nearly all of March at the laundromat, but is well worth the long, long read. Some of Kropotkin's zoology is a little shaky, and his ethnography and sociology are probably out of date, but this isn't a textbook, and wasn't even when it was written. If you don't take it too literally, though, this is a treasure trove of practical, well-referenced information supporting the now well-populated fields of inquiry into cooperation and altruism in biological evolution and human society. Not all of it is correct or complete, but the sheer volume of evidence crushes the life out of Spencerian/social-Darwinist arguments as not remotely correct or complete either. That this is normal and familiar instead of revolutionary is just an indication of how much better we've gotten, in the last hundred or so years, at not being dicks to each other out of misunderstood interpretations of science.

Piotyr Kropotkin - The Conquest of Bread The style of this tract has oddly aged better than the content. Kropotkin's rigorous anti-racism and anti-sexism put him streets ahead of nearly all his contemporaries, but his ideas about how agriculture works were at the trailing edge even at the time. The heart of the agro-mech revolution then in process -- admittedly not in Russia, where he did most of his field observation -- was that people who were specialists in their fields could increase production by knowing the fields and machinery inside and out, and Kropotkin wants to change that out for mechanics and professors and ditch-diggers working rotating part-time shifts. This is dumb, but the basic idea -- that work and production and opportunity should be spread as evenly as possible -- is still relevant. The moment of anarchism has probably passed, but the post-scarcity, post-employment society is still coming, and if we don't put in some kind of implementation of Kropotkin's ideas, we're going to be looking up at this book instead of down.

Piotyr Kropotkin - The Place of Anarchism In Socialistic Evolution A speech or tract rather than a full book, this still was on my Kindle this year and still got read. As always, Kropotkin glosses over how independent organization is supposed to guarantee fair distribution of stuff without turning into government or corporations, but the principles are sound and vital: that what we want to do is get away from a society where people devour each other and toward one based on being nice to other people via education and more cultural interconnections, to make sure that where there is no scarcity, no one is deprived, and to reduce crime and social problems by reducing inequality. There is still no implementation in any of this, but when capitalists and governments alike are seriously mooting the idea of basic income as a real, humane replacement for employment in automated-out jobs and the current paternalistic, judgy, inadequate safety net, it's definitely time for another look at Kropotkin.

Laurence Donovan - Moon Riders Stepping around actually naming the Klan, this novella is the FBI versus the Klan in a little town in the mountain West circa 1920; taut and relentlessly violent, it was a nice palate cleanser after nearly two solid months of academic anarchism. The characters are mostly cardboard, and the love interest is transparent, circumstantial, and virtually unnecessary, but this is pulp, and pulp gon pulp. It's pretty good pulp for all that, though, and a quick read regardless.

Laurence Donovan - Pin Up Girl Murders This story is too busy for its wordcount: ramming a spy heist, a murder, another incidental killing, and two love-affair betrayals into barely enough pages for a novella makes everything far too complicated, and there is too much twee drawing-room-detective bullshit in it to fit either the space constraints on the narrative or Donovan's two-fisted, red-blooded style. You can barely do a mystery where forensics are relevant in this little space, and dumping a bunch of wordcount on setting up the love triangles does not help. This is disordered crap that keeps tripping over its own feet.

Minna Sundberg - Stand Still, Stay Silent Book 1 As awesome as SSSS is on the internet, it is even more beautiful on the printed page -- and in this form, the prologue especially hits like a ton of bricks. This is barely the start of a story that continues to build and grow, but this tome doesn't need to wait for the rest of it to be complete. Sundberg's infinite passion for scene painting rules all and pops from cover to cover; the story, good as it is, is almost incidental to the art. SSSS isn't ideally perfect (that Washington Post award was a make-up call for passing on A Redtail's Dream, not for this still-unfinished work), and people coming into the story cold will probably notice a lot of stuff in the prologue that can be read much more darkly about author intent than is likely to be the case, but if you can get past that, there's a lot of reward waiting here.

Laurence Donovan - Whispering Death I have some longer-form Donovan that is not loaded up yet, and after this one, I really want to get to it and see what he can do when he doesn't have to go backwards. The constraint of pulp writing means that you have to start with a hook or sting -- like here, a shot-up patrol face-down in no-man's-land with German bullets whistling over their heads -- but in the middle of that action Donovan has to back up via flashback to do his love interest, and this really breaks up the flow of the narration. This one's good enough, but if there was more forward or just less backward, it would turn out better.

Marie Corelli - A Romance of Two Worlds I'd loaded Corelli's works onto my device for the Russia trip three years ago, but only gotten to the first of them, this one, just now. It's very easy to write off her style and subjects as overblown and tired theosophic crap -- the mystic, gnostic "Electric Christianity" in this one could have been written as a satire of the new religious movements between 1848 and 1914 -- but there's good stuff in here as well. Corelli wasn't writing a lesbian relationship between Zara and the narrator, but I defy modern audiences to read it as anything but; as a male writer, reading women writing women in love with women gives me a perspective that's distinctly outside my experience -- one reason among many that I need to read more women more often. I read enough crap male writers: not reading women writers because they happen to be mawkish theosophical women writers isn't going to wash. That said, this book is about three books glued together badly, and full of poorly-reasoned gnostic garbage and bad science. If you have better woman writers at your disposal, read their stuff first.

Perley Poore Sheehan - Captain Trouble A marginally bearable hodgepodge of orientalist crap written at about a fourth-grade level that will frequently sound hilarious to the modern ear (if you know, like, anything about China and/or central Asia at all), the Captain Trouble stories are not quite at the Dan-Brown "The famous man looked at the red cup" level of shittiness, but an author who can put up "The Chuds ate human flesh. The Chuds lived in caves. The Chuds were a cross of bears and bats." as consecutive sentences is getting pretty damn close. You will get a brain cramp if you read too much of this; as far as I can tell, the correct order (I got these from Gutenberg and had to re-collect them) should be something like: The Fighting Fool Where Terror Lurked The Red Road to Shamballah The Green Shiver Spider Tong The Black Abbot The Chinese in use throughout these stories is somewhere between "archaic", "geographically inappropriate", "mistranslated", and "plain wrong", but occasionally you can see what Sheehan was going for and how he got it right, or almost did in his poorly-preserved pinyin. The racism is mostly of the "funny foreigners" type rather than the kick-em-while-they're-down shit; these features combine for a story cycle that is today still antiquated and problematic, but was a goddamned model of progress and equality in its time and pulp context.

Perley Poore Sheehan - Monsieur de Guise A bare sketch of fantasy, this space-filling creeper is probably not worth your attention. Sheehan is not great at description generally, and his American swamp feels less real than his Chinese deserts. This does not have a lot going for it other than being short and probably can be safely skipped.

Perley Poore Sheehan - Kwa and the Ape People On the surface, this is yet another wannabe Tarzan, thoroughly possessed of the racist conceit that white people are so super-awesome that, if brought up in "savage" circumstances, they will necessarily become super god-heroes in that world. And yet, this is infinitely better than Tarzan on the axes of taking Africans seriously as human beings, and of not treating African animals as monsters or an inexhaustible font of murder victims. The fight with Sobek that opens the book is a great piece of naturalistic writing, from observation and from the literature on crocodilians, and later parts that are more spoilery to discuss here show that Sheehan was willing to put in the work on at least some bits of African folklore and language rather than just making shit up. Burroughs got in first and poisoned the well, but of the lesser Tarzans, Kwa is the best I've encountered so far.

Perley Poore Sheehan - Kwa and the Beast Men Well, that didn't last too long. This shorter Kwa adventure is purer Tarzan-ripoff shit, probably from commercial considerations; pulp audiences didn't want to read about real animals or real anthropology, they wanted to see White Dudes kicking the shit out of Darkest Africa. Sheehan's patent inability to describe things leaves you with zero picture of the Beast Men from the title, despite the huge role they play in the narrative; the lack of any kind of structure in the animal-telepathy bits is similarly unhelpful. Ignore this garbage, re-read ...Ape People.

Stanley G. Weinbaum - Parasite Planet I was initially pretty hot about some bad mistakes in the science up front (Venus is not tidally locked to the Sun), but got over it (this wasn't discovered until radar astronomy came in in the '60s) and eventually warmed up to this formulaic but well-done adventure of life on the rocket frontier. The world-building is good and seldom overruns the narrative, and while the gender roles are pretty '40s, at least it's not '20s. If I can keep getting relatively solid science and relatively good writing, it's going to be a good thing I've got more Weinbaum on the stack.

Stanley G. Weinbaum - Proteus Island Back on earth, Weinbaum can't avoid the taint of the racism of his day, which may make the start and the abuse of the Maori guides a little hard to take. However, if you fight through it, you get a really neat story about biological variation with some, as usual, nearly correct science at the foot of the science fiction. I'm not a fan of the "explain everything in the epilogue" school, but it does tie up a lot of the mystery here; if more of this could have been done in-narration and a harder climax hit, this story would probably work better. Maybe back in the day people put up with more falling action generally, dunno.

Stanley G. Weinbaum - Pygmalion's Spectacles A really neat story, this one takes advantage of multiple psychological elements -- set up, significantly, by reading a lot of contemporary SF and fantasy (in particular H.G. Wells) -- to become significantly better than it appears to be by a very cool twist ending. If you need an in to Weinbaum, this isn't a bad place at all to start.

Stanley G. Weinbaum - Redemption Cairn If you know LITERALLY ANYTHING AT ALL about how narrative works, you will figure out the important part of this rocket noir's ending pretty much as soon as it's introduced. That said, it's a fun read after you accept the relentless sexism as just going with the territory, and Weinbaum's trademark Almost Correct Science is well-built-out here to furnish an alien world and a moderately hard vision of rocket mechanics. It could be more progressive, sure, but this is of an age with Radar Men From The Moon, where women went to space literally because the men needed someone to cook for them.

Stanley G. Weinbaum - Shifting Seas If a lot of Weinbaum has aged poorly -- overtaken by more modern science and more modern ideas about people who aren't white males being fully qualified humans -- this has if anything improved. The ending gets a little into Wellsian utopianism, but the immediacy of the climate-change and geoengineering plot could have been ripped from tomorrow's headlines. More of the science is right here than in many other parts, and the telling of the tale doesn't lack either.

Stanley G. Weinbaum - The Adaptive Ultimate I am the wrong person to unpack Weinbaum's rather deep weirdness about women; if this sort of thinking was general back in the day, it is no wonder that a herd of neuroses flourished and psychotherapy became popular. This tale is less sexist than most of his other ones, the science approximately correct, and in its own way it's probably the most self-sufficient of these... ...but, owing to that weirdness, should not be the only Weinbaum story you read.

Stanley G. Weinbaum - The Brink of Infinity Send this one to your high school math students. This is less a story than a logical exercise, a parable like Einstein's teachers used to explain algebra. I've written stories like this one to test job applicants on their background in algorithms; this one provides the answers to that test, and is a pretty neat study in mathematical thinking by exclusions. The terminology may be a little out of date, but the fundamentals are all right, and they make the story pop the way it's supposed to.

Stanley G. Weinbaum - The Circle of Zero In the modern day, this story would be spun up from many-worlds quantum and make dumb references to Roko's Basilisk. This is marginally more right than the interpretation of the laws of probability used to set the stage here, but that's not the point. The trick works as well in either context, and Weinbaum's hand for the eerie in the narrator's visions doesn't fail. Another good one.

Stanley G. Weinbaum - The Ideal Weinbaum has some good characters in this one, but the early-20th-century sexual weirdness has the narrative tripping all over itself from a modern perspective, twisting and mutilating into desperately strange corners. There's some good stuff in here, but a lot of Weinbaum's work is a lot better than this.

Stanley G. Weinbaum - The Lotus Eaters If you can make it through the negging field in here (seriously, did people use to act like this on purpose?), you will find probably Weinbaum's best work. The exobiology is, in light of modern cladistic ideas, pretty dumb and wrong-headed, but the plot and the particulars are rock-solid and relentlessly imaginative. Read this after Parasite Planet for narrative reasons; it's a rare example where the sequel's better than the original.

Stanley G. Weinbaum - The Mad Moon Weinbaum's world-building, good elsewhere, is absolutely excellent here, a jewel of alien environments and future society that would be worth reading even if he hadn't managed to dial the usual sexism down to levels approaching those of modern content. The story in amid the setting is good too, and if you're paying careful attention, you can see the elements and corners of other parts of Weinbaum's ouevre; he'd obviously plotted out his solar system of tomorrow outside the printed pages, keeping everything consistent to make sure things linked up right, and that all of these stories had a common base to build from. The craft is awe-inspiring; the art built on it covers joy.

Stanley G. Weinbaum - The Point of View Another van Manderpootz comic adventure, this one works better than "The Ideal", and clarified the points in that one that seemed missing; there's a predecessor to both of these stories, hopefully in the queue somewhere, and both Dixon and the Professor gain by being repeating characters reacting to different situations. This one is good enough to justify reading the rest of them in order -- and in that progression, perhaps, we may find Weinbaum working his way out to less mental attitudes about women in full.

Stanley G. Weinbaum - The Worlds of If That first van Manderpootz adventure? Well, here it is, and a much better start it makes than "The Ideal". Maybe some of this is coming back with the formula in mind, and it's not as good as this series got as late as "The Point of View", but the quantum is nearly correct, the sexual politics not unduly problematic, and the writing just as comic as Weinbaum can be at his best.

Stanley G. Weinbaum - Tidal Moon Not quite as good as "Redemption Cairn" if its sexual politics are slightly less bad and its main trick slightly less stonneringly obvious, this one is good mostly for the world-building. Even Weinbaum can't be super-good all the time, and this one is a slack one; there's probably a better story about his Ganymede out there, to be written if nothing else, but this story doesn't really get close to that ideal.

Stanley G. Weinbaum - A Martian Odyssey The French and German/Yiddish dialect is a little unnecessary here, and the plot could use some more development. Weinbaum's powers of description hold up this point-to-point adventure across Mars, with some nifty thoughts about cognition and intelligence along the way, but there's better stuff of his out there.

Stanley G. Weinbaum - Valley of Dreams This is really the second half of "A Martian Odyssey", and there's so much left unfinished and unanswered that I desperately wish there was more of this out there. There's more plot to this one, and a lot more meaningful exobiology and exosociology than in the first part, but also with shadows of "At The Mountains of Madness" that are begging for a third part and further exploration. Alas, it's not on the pile, if it even exists.

Stanley G. Weinbaum - Dawn of Flame Longer than most of the novelettes I ground through prior to finishing up my Weinbaum course, this one is a post-apocalyptic fiction probably inspired by the 1919 flu pandemic. It's better than Burroughs' America-re-emerged-from-the-primitive stuff, and much better on gender politics than nearly anything else that came out of his pen, which helps make up for the clunky flow, footnotes, and occasional leaps in logic. Weinbaum's usually better in more hopeful futures, but this one is a good read all the same.

Marie Corelli - Ardath If you wanted a sword-and-sandal novel glued into the middle of another theosophic Christian treatise, this is the book to pick up. Corelli's range is tweezers-wide, but bearing that in mind, she manages to pass out thoroughgoing kicks, by turns, to atheism, democracy, literary criticism, science, and people who don't like improvisational music; this gets a bit on-orbit at times, and a lot of it is not real good, but the feeling and tone can't help but get through. Corelli's arguments are not good -- you don't need religion or gods in order to derive the axiom "be nice to people, because you wouldn't want someone being a jerk to you", and on this principle rests, um, all of civilization -- and she is rather too fond of exclamation points, but you need to read some of this style for exposure, if only to see the arguments in advance.

Marie Corelli - The Secret Power Corelli proves as vulnerable to the effects of the Great War as anyone. In its day, this was nearly up to the standard of a 'liberated' novel, and her religious collapse back into 'gut' Catholicism is a sure reaction against the mad spiral of spiritualism and theosophy into madness and black magic during and after the war had proved them utterly bankrupt. This is the first Corelli book I can actually recommend to other people without reservation.

Marie Corelli - The Soul of Lilith There are some good parts in this three-master, but a lot of bad ones, including a TRANSPARENT author self-insert crushing the plot so badly in the last two parts that a "Mary Sue" might and should well have been called a "Irene Vassilius". If you've gotten stuck reading a bunch of Corelli for some dreadfully-stupid reason, this will provide a good release laughing at her self-insert, but otherwise, let this one drop.

Marie Corelli - Zizka This is self-contained, not focused on screaming at literary critics, subdued in its Christianity -- is this actually a Corelli? Well, it's got a wack sword-and-sandal drop-in, barely-veiled closeted-lesbian disparaging of marriage (admittedly, in this time period you didn't have to be queer to get totally messed up by marriage practices as a woman) and persistent if not overdone theosophical Christianity, so yup, yes. This is about as good as Corelli gets, so totally check this one out ahead of most of the others.

Marjorie Bowen - Black Magic This opens up as a fairly conventional yaoi-esque tale of gay monks worshipping the devil, but then snowballs through the maze of high Middle Ages imperial politics and drops an atom bomb of a twist in the third act that is probably harder to guess coming in the modern day. In preference to Corelli among Gutenberg women writers, definitely read Bowen, and definitely read this one.

Marjorie Bowen - The Crown Derby Plate A short piece, this is a nice, original ghost story that does a good job tipping its hand and putting up reasons for the protagonist not catching on. A quick story, but definitely good.

Marjorie Bowen - The Folding Doors I kind of overdosed on Revolutionary France last year reading all of Orczy's Pimpernell between various travels and laundromat visits, so this suspense tale of an attempted royal rescue and how it didn't happen kind of left me cold. The structure is good and the twist hits nice and hard, but you read too many of these and they start to blur together.

Mary Shelley - Falkner Continuing with the "read good women Gutenbergers rather than bad ones", I picked up this classical three-volume romance and ground on through the telegraphed plot, predictable twists, and needlessly florid language to pick up the good points; this is through and through Romanticism in its style and sentiments, and you could almost use it as a template for writing a three-master romance. It's not awesome, but it's still pretty decent and your eyes don't glaze over too often in the reading process.

Mary Shelley - Lonore This three-volume potboiler can't make up its mind as to how it's going to shake itself out, and basically just keeps rattling and creaking on until it stops. There are good ideas, but too few of them connect to each other to be really worth reading. Shelley did better than this, and you should put your emphasis on those.

Mary Shelley - On Ghosts Two ghost stories worked into an essay, this is essential Shelley, and also bails out before her language overruns the narrative. The "king of the cats" bit is particularly critical, and is probably the seed of hundreds of stories before and since -- I'm probably going to end up taking a stab at it sooner or later as well.

Mary Shelley - The Dream This is a poorly executed bit on a good seed -- the legend of the Bed of St. Catherine -- that shows that even the best writers sometimes screw up a sure thing. It's pretty short, but this doesn't make it any clearer or better.

Mary Shelley - The Evil Eye Kind of a cash-in on the Greek conflict of the time, this is a decent story of banditry, but for the modern reader, it's probably encumbered with too many names and relationships of sub-Albanian and sub-Macedonian ethnic groups that for better or worse have been extirpated or absorbed by other identities in the present. Again, it's short, but that in itself isn't a virtue.

Mary Shelley - The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck This three-master is Romanticism down to its bones, but this rather more obstructs than enlightens the tale of the last of the Yorkist Pretenders; in a modern context, this story is called Game of Thrones. The language, artifice, and emotions are class; the storytelling muddled, the sense of where this whole novel is going beyond Shakespeare and the chroniclers he borrowed from lacking. Shelley has better stuff out and this can probably be avoided.

Mary Shelley - The Heir of Mondolfo In this one, Shelley keeps herself at novella length, and her beautiful pastorals, strange lands, and wild passions are the better for the relative restraint of language. The story flows and moves with ease, and doesn't trip over itself or tie itself up in knots; one could only wish that more of her novels were this good.

Mary Shelley - The Invisible Girl This one doubles back on itself, a frequent problem in Shelley's work, but due to the fairly short length, this is more easily managed. The heart of the story is really good, the scene dressing around it a little less so, but the ultimate effect is still enjoyable.

Mary Shelley - The Last Man This is an interesting book if not a great one. Broken into two halves, it's a well-done if not super-imaginative vision of England at the end of the 21st century as barely different from the start of the 19th. Shelley was not really a science-fiction writer, let alone one for far-future stuff like Wells or Weinbaum, but her talent in siting what appears to be her circle of Romantic writers as the lead cast in the first part (look carefully, it's hard to see otherwise), and then working through the macabre Grand Tour of the second half is impeccable. As someone who likes untying these kinds of referential puzzles, I liked it, but other people may well want more science fact in their science fiction.

Mary Shelley - The Mortal Immortal This one is a little closer to Frankenstein (which for some reason isn't in the pile, what the hell) as a mystic science fantasy; the novella length keeps Shelley dialed back to brass tacks, and the result is a good explication of the usual look at the downsides of eternal youth. It's not a barn-burner in its own right, but it's Gutenfreed now, so who cares? Definitely worth the time.

Mary Shelley - Valperga Once you get past the hilariously-named Euthanasia (there was a Perdita in The Last Man, so this sort of on-the-nose naming is nothing new), this is a much better novel of intrigue and medieval conflict than, say, ...Perkin Warbeck, and Euthanasia herself is an impressively strong and complex character who should be much better known to literature fans. The conclusion of the book is unsatisfying and poorly done, though, ditching in the name of historical accuracy all the good work that Shelley'd put in on the plot, the actions and personalities of the two women orbiting Castruccio, and how this stuff should impact the conclusion to work as literature. It's flawed at the most important part, sure, but most of the time you're reading this, it's excellent.

Max Brand - The Ghost As a short foretaste of Brand's stuff, this is more humorous than his regular run, but it's still a solid, realistic, and decently gritty Western alienated from any real setting and plopped into Brand's slice of backcountry where it's always about 1880 and the law is always on the take or far, far away. You should be able to spot the turn in advance, but it's still a good read.

Max Brand - The Night Horseman These are in sequence as I read them, and they preserve the fact that I read this one before The Untamed when it's technically a sequel. In the modern age, this is probably wrong. Reading that one first makes it read like a tall tale that gets an unnecessary second act here; this first throws the reader into a properly-alienating (the lead-in character's an Eastern tenderfoot) atmosphere of fear and mystery that really helps sell Whistlin' Dan as a character, and then you read The Untamed as a prequel and get his backstory as layers peeled off the onion. As written, these are pretty much just oat operas; 'backwards', they turn into a powerful meditation on the nature of humanity and wildness set against the harsh and inhuman landscape of the high desert. Definitely read both, but read this first.

Max Brand - The Untamed As above; this was a good book, but it benefits by getting read out of order after its sequel, or it's barely more than a tall tale about a fey ninja-cowboy. Brand is good here, but he gets better.

R A J Walling - The Corpse in the Crimson Slippers I was kind of on the edge of passing out from exhaustion when I started this country-house murder case, so I'm not sure how well it was read out in advance, but Walling is no Christie. This is decent enough as a point-to-point detective story, but if you're looking for a case where the clues are in place and you have the chance to solve it before the detective does, that's not what you're going to get here.

Arthur Conan Doyle - The Bully of Brocas Court Cleaning up some of the authors who I'd mostly read out, I came across this little horror piece from the author of Sherlock Holmes. It's not quite the best -- the setup is pretty obvious, and some of the turn could be better handled -- but it's good enough for a short read, and gives a good proper chill.

Arthur Conan Doyle - The Great Brown-Pericord Motor Doyle puts his hand to science fiction in this one, and while it's still more in the line with his true-crime writing, which he was also majorly into at the time, it's still pretty decent. As you might expect from a man who later came to believe in fairies as an absolute fact, the machine is barely described, but it's barely more than a Macguffin anyways, so this doesn't hurt the tale as much as it might for like HG Wells or someone.

Arthur Conan Doyle - Playing With Fire Doyle is on surer ground with this one; his narration of a spiritualist seance is obviously drawn from life, down to the medium tricks -- well, until the monster that was signaled from the start pops out. This is better horror than "The Bully of Brocas Court", drawn so faithfully from life, and with the conviction of a true believer.

Arthur Conan Doyle - The Brown Hand There's room in this neat but pedestrian ghost story for readings as both brain-bendingly racist and a subtle but sharp critique of racism and colonialism. It's probably both, but the story itself is decent enough -- if kind of predictable -- that people should read it themselves to come to a decision rather than looking for one here.

R A J Walling - The Man With The Squeaky Voice With a second one down, I can be unequivocal: Walling is rubbish, and you should not read his stuff. There are parts like this with decent description to them, but as in ...Crimson Slippers, too much of the plot action happens off-screen and gets reported by side characters in a way that's out of left field based on what's happened so far. Walling would have had a good career doing adaptations of movie scripts for print, as he's a good technician, but asking him to come up with his own interesting and logically coherent plots is a bridge too far.

Arthur Conan Doyle - True Crime From The Strand This covers the following three stories: The Debatable Case of Mrs. Emsley The Holocaust of Manor Place The Love Affair of George Vincent Parker Given that these are all mostly-true stories, the main interest is not in the details of the cases, but how Conan Doyle writes about them, and what that says about him and his readers. Most of this can be covered with "embarrassing attitudes about women, who are not expected to know anything", but there are some other bits of Victorian social mores that come through as well. These aren't really any more potboilery than the Holmes stories, but they're not as good either, and can probably be ignored.

Rafael Sabatini - Bardelys the Magnificent I haven't gotten to Sabatini's Captain Blood stuff yet, but this one is a pure and vital swashbuckler, the kind of book you'd hand someone to demonstrate what this genre is. But it's more than that, too: as Edgars Wallace and Rice Burroughs have demonstrated in the past, Sabatini doesn't need to treat women like human beings, but he does, and he doesn't need to have his hero also go through a crisis of personal development to sell a novel about romance and swordfighting, but he does that too. This is a good book, and I'm hoping for more good stuff in my large pile of Sabatini in the reader for laundromat and travel purposes.

Heinrich Boell - Billiard um halb elf I read this in German -- hence the non-translated title -- over a period of about eight months. This is a physical book, and thus more difficult to read during my typical slots, but it was awesome and worthwhile; Boell's characters and style are strong enough that I was always able to keep it in memory, even when I was picking it up weeks or months after the last stretch I had to really sit down and just read. I don't generally read a lot of literary fiction, so this is probably going to stay the best book I read in 2016 -- and may even stay in that slot if I get to Maurice Stendahl hanging around airport waiting rooms in the Pacific at the end of the year.

Rafael Sabatini - Captain Blood I haven't read enough Sabatini yet (this will change by the end of the year) to be categorical about this being a best entry point, but it's definitely the first appearance of his most famous character, and a rollicking swashbuckler from first to last. Sabatini of course romanticizes the Golden Age of piracy a little, but keeps strong to the real as well, and it's that reality, the brutality of the slave system, the reality of blood and wounds and broken ships, casual inhumanity and subpar prizes, that gives this one its kick. We'll see if the rest of the Captain Blood series is equally good, but the first one is definite quality.

Rafael Sabatini - The Chronicles of Captain Blood The first appearance of the character was a full-length, fully-realized novel that went beyond just the swashbuckling, but when Sabatini and his editors realized that they had a franchise on their hands, a collection of episodic short stories like this one was a natural move. With looser connections to each other, the chapters in this one are hung off the cornices of the original book, some characters and subplots returning, with others still unresolved. This is less of a literary achievement than the first book, but still a fun read.

C.L.R. James - Beyond A Boundary I read a lot, as the list above indicates. But for all the stuff I read, I don't read enough right, partly because there isn't a whole lot of right out there. But C.L.R. James, that is right enough, all the way around. This is the first thing I really read from James, and his masterwork by all accounts, but it will almost certainly not be the last. At times I had trouble following the cricket vocabulary, but the narrative flow always carried me on and wound me up at the end; this is not a book about cricket, but a book about how cricket reflects the dispersion and history of Englandism, a unifying idea for the shards of Empire almost in spite of themselves. Even if it was only a cricket book, though, it would still be probably the best book I've read yet all year; there is James writing on W.G. Grace, and then there is pretty much everyone else writing about pretty much anything. Deep springs don't come much deeper.

Jean Jaurès - Studies in Socialism I had to read this as part of the setting production on Three Pretenders In Ruritania, and I picked a good fin de siecle socialist for the character in question to take as her leading light. Jaures is smarter than a lot of his contemporaries about what's practical and useful, clear-eyed about history, and always puts reason over dogma and experience over theory. The result is a socialist tract that's committed to the real world, and how that program can be actually achieved; unlike Kropotkin way up top there, it's clear that Jaures actually knows and has interacted with real working people and has an understanding of how a modern industrial economy works, and the struggles that will need to be done to transition it out of a capitalist model to something else. I hew more closely to the non-idealist/technocratic line of his engineer friend in the closing essay, but I can appreciate Jaures' ideals as well, along with a first-class intellect that doesn't ever seem to get stuck in translation.

Lesley M. M. Blume - Let's Bring Back I read this as more research for Three Pretenders In Ruritania, and while it's useful in that role, that's about as far as I can recommend it. A condensation of Blume's blog column of the same name, there's a lot of useful stuff in here, mainly focusing on polite society in the English-speaking world between the US Civil War and the start of the Second World War, but the alphabetical organization, rather than by time period or subject matter domain, makes it difficult to use as anything except a blaze-through trawling for things that you wouldn't spot otherwise. It's also significantly weighted towards Blume's own style icons, making it less of a comprehensive survey than it might be, but on the positive side it's a quick read, it covers a hell of a lot of stuff across multiple areas of everyday life, and she's got a good knack for getting straight to the point and getting good observations out of her guest contributors.

Carl E. Schorske - Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture I blasted through this somewhat disconnected set of long essays -- that's what it is, much more than a book -- again doing research for Three Pretenders In Ruritania, but unlike most of the stuff I used for research, I did actually read it all the way through (I need to go back and give the same treatment to Robert Beachy's Gay Berlin and Greg King/Sue Woolmans' Assassination of the Archduke once the dust settles a little). Schorske is perceptive and informative, and at least tries to tie everything together, but you're looking at a book that covers both the redevelopment of the Ring and the emergence of Freudianism in addition to a shit-ton of other stuff, and there's only so much cohesion that you're going to get out of this. It's a little dry in places (so much passive voice in transcription) and a knowledge of both German and French will make the reading faster, but this is still a pretty cool look at a culture that most English-speaking people have about zero contact with.

Eduardo Galeano - Soccer in Sun and Shadow (translated from Futbol en Sol y Sombre) I'd read this before in a smaller edition, but did not have a copy of my own until I decided to throw it in the basket with James' Beyond A Boundary above; it makes a nice companion piece, with Galeano demonstrating fitba's mirroring of the rest of the world through poetry while James works through cricket as an analogy of Britishness by oratory. The end trails off a little -- the edition I have is an extended one that runs on from 1995 with a lot less focus than Galeano puts onto the game's first hundredish years -- but there is so much in this that is good and cool that you can forgive it. It's undoubtedly better in the original, but my Spanish isn't good enough for that yet; one for the future I guess.

Anthony Hope - The Prisoner of Zenda I had not actually read this -- or seen any of the film adaptations -- before I had to do so in order to avoid copying it in Three Pretenders In Ruritania -- I'd been introduced to the genre by a second-rate ripoff of it called By Right Of Sword and had my defaults formed mostly by Burroughs' The Mad King and some stuff of E. Phillips Oppenheim -- and was glad to note that I wouldn't have to fix the outline or characters to dodge around it. This is an ok swashbuckler, but its Victorian narrative sense ties itself in knots at seriously, the most critical junctures possible, and as usual, the villain and the hero's retainers are the most interesting characters. What was even more weird to me was how small it was -- I read it through in about half an hour, and there's roughly half as much action in this in terms of story beats as there is in something that I'm planning to write in under a month. With another 120 years of development in literature, I ought to be able to do better than this -- whether I actually can or not is going to be down to my abilities or lack thereof.

Rafael Sabatini - The Fortunes of Captain Blood Unsurprisingly, the Captain Blood franchise got a third season with this volume, continuing much in the same vein as the second volume in the series; briefer, barely-connected episodes hung off the corners of the original novel. Despite the way that the production on this must have been formalized by this time, Sabatini still mostly keeps it fresh, and doesn't repeat himself or get too crank-turny. It's still not as good as the original, but also still a fun read all the same.

Rafael Sabatini - Casanova's Alibi and Others A collection of Sabatini's Casanova stories, this one swaggers through the legendary adventurer's career with a bunch of generally cool stories of varying quality. Some, like the last, are stellar examples of Sabatini's hand with a tail-twist; others are too reliant on too-stretchy MacGuffins to really hang with his best work. In total, this is good stuff, but it is less good than Captain Blood and should not take precedence over it.

Rafael Sabatini - Collected Stories This is a pretty uneven volume that trails off at the end; it's cool to see Sabatini exploring different genres as he gradually finds his ouevre, but there are two versions of the same story -- "The Sword of Islam" and "In Destiny's Grip" -- one after the other, and the collection concludes with a Captain Blood episode that of course got into the second volume of that character's adventures. If you read a lot of Sabatini, like I've been doing for the last few months, it's ok to stop this one early.

Rafael Sabatini - Columbus Sabatini's research skills are good enough that he has to keep this to the immediate vicinity of Cristobal Colon's voyage rather than making it a 'life'; there are hints of the congenital pride, vanity, and dickholishness that would characterize Columbus' brutal career as the actual viceroy of New Spain, but for the most part, the events of him selling his dream, and the web spun around it by love, enemy agents, and court intrigue allows the title character to be mostly a hero -- a flawed and kind of grasping one to be sure, but he did take an enormous risk on incorrect information and nearly lost everything several times over. This is a good story even where it's incomplete history, and there's enough *good* history in the scene dressing -- Sabatini is as usual awesome in the interplay of political strands in the blending of religious cultures in Spanish/Mediterranean society -- to overwhelm any objections. As an exposition of the context of Columbus' pitch-making, this is better than a lot of history, and it's still a really good novel besides.

Rafael Sabatini - Dagger and Sword A quick short story among a range of three-masters, this one gets in, gets its work done -- and well -- and gets out. There's not a whole lot of inside fencing baseball in it, but enough to satisfy heads while still keeping clicking for normal audiences. Try to get this in a collection though.

Rafael Sabatini - Fortune's Fool This romance of the London Plague takes a good while to get moving, and some of the foreshadowing is plain clumsy, but it is still good, well-executed, and effective in the swashbuckly scenes where Sabatini always shines, and with his resolute and disciplined eye for historical detail. In comparison to some of his other works this one is almost straightforward, so try not to get too fed up with the occasional running in place.

Rafael Sabatini - In the Shadow of the Guillotine A sharply acted and smartly restricted novella, this is Sabatini at his best, taut with inter-character tension and shifting loyalties and motivations -- and with a notable sting in the tail. It's not long, but this is one of his better set pieces.

Rafael Sabatini - Love-at-Arms Some idiot publisher titled this, no doubt; this is a neat look into Italy's sengokujidai that creaks only a little in setting up its main conflict, where the best of the condetorri defends an impregnable castle against a besieging army with twenty men and empty cannons. The romance is well-developed and believably sprouted, and if the build to the climax is a little over-rotated, the actual climax is excellent and Peppe is one of the best of Sabatini's side characters outside the Captain Blood series. This novel may not quite stand with those paragons, but it's close.

Rafael Sabatini - Mistress Wilding This over-plotted chronicle of the Monmouth Rising distinguishes itself by the increasingly contrived and unproductive circles it runs around in from first to last. This is historically accurate, but its main character takes a while becoming sympathetic enough to justify the investment in his adventures, and there are almost too many things going on for the reader to really keep track of. This needed a second editorial pass and never got it, but fortunately Sabatini also produced a large volume of really good work to balance out relative duds like this.

Rafael Sabatini - Scaramouche In this wide-ranging three-master Sabatini takes on revolutionary France with his usual eye for historical detail and social conditions, and does kind of go on for three books in one, but he succeeds in keeping all the various elements current and connected, and ties things up nicely if a little tritely at the end. The general forms have been done before, but Sabatini as usual focuses on different themes, elements, and perspectives than the typical courtly romances around the revolution, and also has an excellent cast of characters here, especially in the middle third with the troupe of actors. This is probably the other Sabatini work people have heard of after Captain Blood, and it's with good reason.

Rafael Sabatini - Scaramouche the Kingmaker If there was a thought to make of Scaramouche another enduring character as Captain Blood, it foundered on this over-complex and over-researched volume. Sabatini does an excellent deep dive on the corruption and infighting of the Jacobin Assembly, but in the process bogs down his plot and characters in a stew of intrigue that it takes an intensive grounding in history and almost a degree in finance to keep straight. There is too much there here, required to fill the historical span of time that he has to cover, and while several of the set pieces are really good, there are too damn many of them, and this gets exhausting after a while. There is good craft here -- the thematic quotations from commedia del'arte in the furnishing of stock character types are well-integrated and always useful -- but the overarching art is too ponderous and the frame of the story is crushed by the weight of ornament piled onto it.

Rafael Sabatini - St. Martin's' Summer The cramdown of the romance in this one is deeply unsatisfying, but Sabatini repays that in spades with the larger-than-life character of Granache and the strong rogues' gallery he has to fight his way through in this one. And fight is the operative word: the fight in the tower that sets up the break to the critical point is one of the best fights I can recall in swashbuckling literature, and then there's the duel where the Condillacs put on a jolly-gaff worthy of a Musashi and the other duel inside an inn bedroom. Granache is a fighter, not a lover, from the first, and if his love scenes are inconsistent and forced, the fight scenes are anything but.

Rafael Sabatini - The Carolinian It's tempting to accuse Sabatini of falling off the pace here via an American setting for this one rather than his normal European metiers, but the truth is that South Carolina works fine as a backdrop, and his research on the social-political scene of the place and time is as usual impeccable. No, the real complaint against this one is that the back half/third of the book -- everything after the pistol duel in the middle -- is somewhat unnecessary, deforms the characters, and in large measure feels like a political thriller plotted by R. A. J. Walling or someone else who sucks. It is well executed craft, but it strains disbelief too hard and introduces unnecessary conflicts poorly in setting itself up.

Rafael Sabatini - The Historical Nights' Entertainment (three volumes) Published in three collections initially, it's not necessary in the age of the ebook to draw distinctions between these. The stories are mostly unconnected, and the theme -- a historical novella barely connected to the 'night' aspect referenced in the story's title -- is similarly flexible. It's neat to see Sabatini moving through subject areas outside France, Restoration England, and Renaissance Italy, but it is also a little trying to take these on all at once. They are probably best consumed in small chunks, as originally magazine-published, and with intervening spacing, rather than en bloc for like thirty stories at once.

Rafael Sabatini - The Life of Cesare Borgia Sabatini sets himself a tall order here -- "rehabilitate the goddamn Borgias" -- but works yeomanlike against it, and may actually get to a result. This result is likely to be "the Borgias were not worse than other Renaissance tyrants and Alexander VI was not worse than the other bad popes of his era", but there's only so far this is going to stretch. He does a good job of separating fact from fiction in the case of a few of the more egregious crimes posted up by Cesare and his family, but there are others that are less easily discarded, and too often Sabatini hides critical evidence or first-hand impressions in untranslated Latin or Italian; if you wondered how homosexuality got to be the love that dared not speak its name, just look here, where sodomy is the crime that is ceaselessly danced about but never directly mentioned in English. In the main, I prefer Sabatini's fiction to this nonfiction, but this is a good biography of one of the leading families of the Renaissance, and as such preferable to Sabatini's less-good fiction that has been clogging the queue recently.

Rafael Sabatini - The Lion's Skin When you read as much of a single author as I've been reading over the last few, things start to run together. In this Jacobite romance, though, there's some of Sabatini's best spycraft, one of his best villains in Rotherby, and a whole family of excellent characters in the Ostermeres. The twists are well-executed if not wholly surprising after reading so much of this, and the final effect is a good one.

Rafael Sabatini - The Marquis of Carabas Superficially resembling The Lion's Skin, this one sets up a bit differently through its twists, and what look like pagecount-padding subplots in the beginning turn out to be vital exposition by the end. In its detailed exposition of the Breton Chouannerie and the fatal stupidity that destroyed counterrevolution in the west of France, this one is another case of Sabatini doing history better and closer than the professors, but the ALL TEH FEELS ending is so because this one really succeeds as a novel beyond and above its historical merits.

Rafael Sabatini - The Plague of Ghosts and Others A Gutenberg Australia collection of stuff mostly not collected elsewhere, this one packs together a couple of structurally similar highwayman stories with some French secret agents before and after the revolution and, predictably, "The Sword of Islam" yet again. This is a good story, so no wonder it keeps getting packed in, but most of the rest of these are nice quick puff reads whose absence from collections is kind of understandable. The best of the lot is "Kynaston's Reckoning", where the twist is telegraphed from miles and miles away, but executed with the hand of a master; this alone makes the collection worthy, but if you can get it on its own somewhere else, that will probably suffice.

Rafael Sabatini - The Pretender What sells this novella, more than anything, is Sabatini's own history: when you read Sabatini, you expect Jacobites and swashbuckling and knaves turned by gold, so when this one starts going there, and then doesn't, the twist hits all the harder for it. This is one of his best twists outside the Casanova stories, and it's too quick a read to go further into spoiling it here.

Rafael Sabatini - The Sea Hawk Another of Sabatini's better ones after a couple of recent relative clunkers, this one takes on more of his favorite subjects, being in this case bare outer corners of canonical history and unexpected springs of heroism. The idea that Christian renegades might have fought, and well, and even converted, for the corsairs of Barbary might almost be too hot a take for modern minds, but in that age both sides had no lack of converts, fellow-travelers, or plainfaced adventurers for whom race or religion was just an accident of birth, and Sabatini as always follows these threads faithfully. Some of the tricks and plot dressing are a little too convenient to really be believable, but this is an XL-sized story that can barely be held in its traces even as it is.

Rafael Sabatini - The Shame of Motley As expected with the hero playing the fool, this one doesn't stint on the jokes, even as the adventure winds its way around the edges of the ascent of Cesare Borgia. That Life from a few notes back is a good companion to this to set the context, but it's not really necessary, filled as this is with plots nefarious and quick-witted, brazen impostures, bloody battle and some truly horrific set pieces of murder and torture, and of course the excellent passage in the cathedral that sets up the point of no return. If you wanted a fictional story around that Life of Borgia, take this one: it's just as well executed, and as prime an example of the author's craft as that one is of the historian's.

Rafael Sabatini - The Snare For people already familiar with the Peninsular War, this is a mediocre intrigue of an overwrought giri-ninjou clash strapped to a third-rate detective story. For those like me who weren't, this is a passable if replacement-level romance that gives the opportunity to see Sabatini discourse on Wellington and the complicated travails of being the smartest person in the room while occupying someone else's country. This would probably have been a better essay than a novel, but the characters -- especially Sylvia, one of his best heroines -- save it from failure even for the jaded.

Rafael Sabatini - The Strolling Saint Sabatini continues his Borgia-stanning here fifty years after their era, in a strong Bildungsroman with a hell of a well-hidden twist that may be even better than The Shame of Motley. Some of the push-pull around the Inquisition is a little weak, but Sabatini's Cinquecendista game is still strong, and Agostino, in his thorough development, is one of his better heroes. A definite rec.

Rafael Sabatini - The Suitors of Yvonne This loses a little steam as the love story picks up, which is not really groundworked or developed in terms of signs of increasing affection, but this is a swashbuckler through and through, and there are so many jokes, sick burns, and good fights especially at the start and continuing on through that it is really hard to put this one down. Sabatini's style and how he approaches history can make him a little grave and pedantic at times, so when he's having fun, as here, you revel in it.

Rafael Sabatini - The Sword of Islam Misleadingly titled to say the least, this one deals with not Dragut Reis, mostly, but Prospero Adorno, the Genoese captain who is put into the role of the suggester of the canal from the other two times this tale, under this title and others, has showed up in print. Prospero's story is bits and pieces of other Sabatini novels glued together to give a frame to the sea-fighting; on the waves, Sabatini still does the clash of galleys and the interplay of cultures and loyalties on the Mediterranean littoral like nobody else, but on land or out of battle, this tale has a tendency to drive this one into the ground. There is probably a good novel on the life and career of one of the Barbary captains of this period that would be worthy of the title, but this one isn't even sure what it's trying to be.

Rafael Sabatini - The Tavern Knight Sabatini digs himself into a mighty hole on this one, which he extricates himself from by an offensively dumb and blatant deus ex machina. There was a better resolution to this somewhere, and in his other works there's every indication that he might have found a way to thread the needle, but for whatever reason, we don't get it. The good, well-drawn characters deserve better than this hamhanded plot.

Rafael Sabatini - The Trampling of the Lilies With all the stops pulled on the brutality of rural France before the revolution, it should come as no surprise that Sabatini can have a soft spot for Robespierre here. (Or really, dude stans for the Borgias hello) He did a lot of stuff about the French Revolution, but each tale is different, each tale is new, and this one is no exception: there's a lot in the superstructure of Scaramouche or "In the Shadow of the Guillotine", but the plot still develops after its own way, and the characters are sharp and fresh throughout.

Rafael Sabatini - The Word of Borgia The episode from this novella probably showed up in the Life of Borgia, unless including it would have kept Sabatini from stanning as hard for Cesare as he does there. Here, crime is returned with crime: first some swashbuckling and then an intricate work of evil that is done with such careful glee as to undermine any thesis that called it jigo jitoku. Very good and definitely worth a pack-in if/when that Life is republished.

Ralph Adams Cram - Excalibur: An Arthurian Drama Before considering to write an equivalent of the Ring, you should first check and make sure that you are the equal of Wagner. Cram is not. This stupid and overly pietist melodrama -- when you make Merlin, the very icon of prechristian druidism, into a man of God, you are already well off on the wrong foot -- derps itself around in circles as though it is conscious that there is not enough material in Arthurian legend to carry a focused trilogy, and if you make it through the broadsides of non-cared-about origin story and hopelessly archaic language, all you get is the source of a couple of the references in Monty Python and the Holy Grail -- which is fast becoming the one authoritative treatment of the Arthurian legends. This one can be pretty safely ignored.

Ralph Adams Cram - In Kropsberg Keep Cram pulls this off better than the mess that was Excalibur, and these few ghost stories make light reading and an interesting diversion. At the least, they're different and free from the blockhead milk-and-water Christianity of Cram's drama -- in some cases, severely so.

Randall Craig - Satan's Incubator If you want to be a double Batman, both a philanthropist and a vigilante in secret, you really ought to not link the two so easily as by being "Dr. Skull" -- a hell of a name for a medical man -- and the "Skull Killer". As red-blooded and as bloodthirsty as the Secret Agent X stories that inaugurated my discovery of bad imitation Batmans from the pulp years, Craig's Dr. Skull is fortunately a little less stupid, significantly less racist, and possessed of some legitimately smart and cool tricks, especially around his adversaries. Nevertheless, this is still a long episode of When Keeping It Real Goes Wrong, as hardcoreness for the sake of hardcore bottoms out in hilarious stupidity. It's a fast read and a page turner, but wicked ephimeral even for pulp.

Randall Craig - The City Condemned to Hell The first adventure of Dr. Skull, this is confusingly plotted and hangs together poorly. It's possessed with the same needless brutality as its sequel, but can't reliably keep track of who's alive or dead at any one point in time and its science is mind-bogglingly dumb even for pulp horror. The same mechanics (and large chunks of the intro) are reproduced later in Satan's Incubator; if you must read one Craig novel, make it that one and consider this an abortive first draft.

Robert Barr - A Rock In The Baltic Barr was a favorite of mine when I was just starting to get into Gutenberg tests, and I'm glad to finally wend my way back to him all these years later. This one opens up as an nice and sharp novel of manners, with two excellent female characters in Kate and Dorothy, and over the epistolary bridge takes a very well-executed turn into intrigue. The science in some parts is a little iffy, and the climax could come off a bit differently -- Sabatini would *definitely* had them shell the island and then have Jack and Drummond fight their way out by disabling the soldiers, then put the Russian supply ship, which would have turned out to have been a Q-ship full of secret police, out of action by one of the girls dropping a round onto its rudder -- but even taken for what it is, this is a really good and smart novel of love and spies and jailbreak, turned by the hand of a master.

Robert Barr - From Whose Bourne Barr is playing several games in this tight but winding spiritual detective story, and manages to keep all the balls in the air until the surprising twist ending. It's almost a meta-commentary on detective stories and the conventions of romances like he usually writes; for that, make it past the occasional maudlin tones of Victorian spiritualism at the start and check this one out.

Fred M. White - Real Dramas This had to be recollected from the following (in order): His Second Self An Extra Turn Not In The Bill The Plagiarist The Man In Possession A Pair of Handcuffs Being a bunch of set-piece short stories set around the theatrical scene on various continents, this collection has its high and low points, but is not really outstanding anywhere and frequently slides back into Edwardian melodrama. The general style of this recalls Barr significantly, but the execution is low-energy and the results indifferent. I have a lot of Fred White in the queue ahead, and if this is an accurate indication of his abilities as a writer 2017 is going to be pretty boring.

Fred M. White - The Doom of London The order of these is dubious, but this collection of London-centric apocalypses composes: A Bubble Burst The Dust of Death The Four Days' Night The Four White Days The Invisible Force The River of Death White is on a little sounder ground here, when grappling with issues of engineering or public health -- all of these are realistic catastrophes born out of the hypertrophism of turn-of-the-century urbanism and the lagging ability of government to deal with emergent problems -- though his ideas on biological science float somewhere between 'hopeless' and 'godawful'. The pressure of getting to a happy ending inside the span of a short story hampers most of these, but in most of them, there's also the germ of a really good story -- and most of these problems are still not completely resolved in our modern age of climate change, deregulation, and service-underfunding. The time's ripe for new dooms -- and ones that don't blink at the actual enormity of the underlying issues, and the real difficulties that need to be faced in resolving them.

Fred M. White - Drenton Denn Another after-the-fact collection, containing: The Yellow Moth The Red Speck With a good deal more questions than answers and an unwillingness to actually press on questions of life, death, and eros as they come up in the narrative, this is high-school-jazz-band level pulp imitation, on the level of a properly-spelled Eye of Argon. There are good elements in here, but White or his editors consistently end up in a position where they're suppressed by too-timid plotting or comics-code sanitization. White is not a bad writer overall, but this sort of weird fiction is not what he's good at at all.

Robert Barr - Revenge More of this collection of short stories on the themes of vengeance and comeuppance some to good ends rather than bad -- this is Barr after all, and like E.P. Oppenheim and a lot of Victorians/Edwardians he has a hard time resisting Love Conquers All -- but those that do are seldom less sharp and smart than the ones where things do go over the edge. Not all of these are great, but there are a lot of good ones in here, and if you get stuck with something middling, the next one is going to come at you fresh and vital.

Phillip Francis Nowlan - The Prince of Mars Returns I've written stuff like this, so I shouldn't be over-critical. However, I was in middle school when I did, so fuck that. This is horrid garbage with no consistent tone that wastes itself burping in circles about bad world-building and exobiology nearly as bad as its real Earth biology. The actual writing is not as bad as, say, Sheehan above, but it is boring and telegraphed and clunky and unable to hold the interest of the audience. Post Burroughs, there is no need for sword-and-sandal on Mars to be this goddamned bad, and the wretched science looks even worse in a year with this much Weinbaum.

Phillip Francis Nowlan - Armageddon 2419 AD This turns out to be the first appearance of Tony aka "Buck" Rogers, and the overly-explicated story of how he awakened in 25th century America to fight the world-dominating Chinese. There are good bits, but the world-building is illogical and clunky, the science might as well be magic, and the military tactics are complete ass. When Rogers and his friends are raiding the Han archives to find the traitors, battling hand to hand and zipping between buildings on rocket ships and flying belts, the story pops, but there is too little of that here and too much explicatory garbage. It's somewhat interesting how merely peripherally racist this story is; the Han are evil oppressors, but not incompetent or senselessly cruel or caricatured, and while physically different from the American resisters are not monstrous or decrepitly corrupt. There was no lack of anti-Chinese racism in the US at the time, and those fears definitely did play into the success of this franchise and how it developed, but the genesis here looks to be mostly Nowlan reacting to the emergence of the Republic of China and the end of the dysfunctional empire and going "wow, there are a shitload of Chinese people, if they actually get their shit together they could be a world power". The book still kind of sucks, but not as bad as it would if written with, like, Burroughs-level racism settings.

Phillip Francis Nowlan - The Airlords of Han And theeeeere's the racism. Seriously, the ramp-up on the implausibly disordered morals of Han society, the intimation that they are partially non-human, and the maniac blind spots of a fully automated civilization shifting gears are not even the worst parts of this story; the science is not discontinuous with what was known of atomic physics prior to the discovery of the neutron, but even if the paint-huffery about breaking stuff into sub-quarks and reconstituting it was remotely correct, you don't take a break in the middle of an action sequence to spend two separate and distinct chapters doing scientific worldbuilding. Nowlan's ability to set scenes is good, but like a movie director who shoots a billion feet and then tells his editor to make sense of it, his ability to put them into an order that makes sense and keeps the attention of the reader is sharply limited. Even with the racism turned down, this would be an incoherent mess of unnecessary sequel; as it is, drop this entirely and stick to the better appearances of Buck Rogers in other media.

#meta #criticism #how i wasted 2016

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