rose

Books 53-59

All of these are by the Brothers Grimm.

53. The Nail. A short and sweet parable that will likely be familiar to many, and a good lesson in the importance of paying attention to the small things. A merchant is eager to get home and ignores the warnings that a nail is missing from his horse's shoe and, later, the shoe is lost. Needless to say, the merchant regrets his haste.

54. The Mouse, The Bird and the Sausage. A good parable about being content with what you have if things are going well. A mouse, a bird and a sausage befriend each other and decide to live together. They split up their duties and prosper together. However, one day the bird runs into a fellow avian, who chastises the bird as a sucker who must work harder than the other two. As a result, the bird asks his roommates to swap around duties. The results do not make for a happy ending. I've read variations on this story before.

55. The Moon. This serves as an origin story for how the moon came to be. I don't think I've ever read a tale about the moon quite like this one! I can see it adapted as a children's picture book. Here, four men steal the moon hanging from another kingdom and hang it from their town's oak tree. Things go well for the town, whose people enjoy the night illumination, but things change after the four men die.

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Fireworks

Book #7: Pines by Blake Crouch

I couldn't review this one without giving spoilers, so...

[Spoiler (click to open)]Pines (Wayward Pines, #1)Pines by Blake Crouch

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


At the start of the book, Ethan Burke arrives in the mysterious, and seemingly perfect town of Wayward Pines on the trail of two missing F.B.I. Agents. Anyone who has seen the TV series will know about the twist that comes at the end of this opening novel, that the action is set in the future, with Ethan and other characters having been kept in cryonic suspension (similar to TV's Futurama) for over a thousand years.

So, the start of this book feels almost like a variation "Life on Mars" as Ethan is involved in a car accident, just before waking up in the future. Wayward Pines is apparently the only civilisation left on the planet, with the ferocious "abbies" that live in the surrounding wilderness seeming almost like H.G. Wells' Morlocks.

The plot to this book was quite simple, as it didn't go into as much depth about the several characters in the town as I had expected, instead introducing Ethan and the family who he left behind (who also end up living in Wayward Pines) and also introducing the reader to the principal location.

This was a relatively quick, and easy read, although at times there were some annoying changes in the narrative style. Most of this was because of Ethan's regular flashbacks to an incident in a war he was fighting in where he was tortured. The narrative felt almost like stream-of-consciousness dialogue as it switched to the present tense; one scene flashed between the present and past as Ethan started hallucinating during an intense moment.

That didn't really distract much from an otherwise decent novel, and I am keen to read the other two books in this trilogy.



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Carol Daryl

Book #6: Butter by Azako Yuzuki

ButterButter by Asako Yuzuki

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This was a Japanese book that got mentioned as I recall it on BBC's "Between the Covers"; I was intrigued enough to read it.

The central character Rika is a journalist. The other main character is Kajii, who is a cook and also a serial killer, believed to have murdered three men. Rika starts visiting Kajii in prison, hoping to get an interview with her for the magazine she works for.

Kajii is clearly passionate about cooking; in the opening chapter, she chastises Rika for cooking using margerine and insists that she start using butter, or she'll not say anything more (she make a few other food-related requests later on in the book). It has the apparent effect of making Rika start gaining weight.

This is a book that is hard to define into any genre really; although the narrative suggests that Kajii might be innocent, it becomes apparent that the purpose is not about proving it. To me, it felt more like a commentary about the relationship between the main characters and the concept of whether you can idolise someone too much.

This was a book that constantly did not go in the direction I thought it would, and seemed very unconventional in its content, but I enjoyed it a lot. The narrative style was a straight forward third-person almost throughout, with the exception of one chapter that was told from the point of view of Rika's best friend Reiko. I loved reading about Rika's fixation of understanding Kajii better, and would definitely read another book by Asako Yuzuki.



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rose

Books 37-52, short stories by the Grimm Brothers

All are by the Brothers Grimm.

37. The Iron Stove. A fairly traditional Grimm Brothers tale. I've never read this particular story but there are elements from other stories included in here (indeed, I feel as if a lot of stories are combinations of three or more stories mixed together, tweaked and published under a new name). A princess gets lost in the forest and runs across an iron stove, who helps her find her way home but makes her promise to come back and start carving away at the iron. The young maid, understandably, is a bit creeped out but ultimately is made to keep up her end of their agreement. But when she makes a hole in the iron stove, she discovers a handsome prince is inside, who immediately declares his love for her. She gets over being creeped out quickly and agrees, but then breaks another (rather arbitrary) agreement and sets off on another journey to find her prince. This one is a bit goofy but the elements are typical of older fairy tales.

38. The Hut in the Forest. This one will make animal rights lovers cheer. Three sisters, over a period of several days, are sent into the forest with a meal for their woodcutter father, but all three get lost and run across the titular hut in the woods. The first two sisters meet a less than ideal fate but the youngest, due to her kind heart, uncovers the secret of the hut and its occupants.

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lighthouse

Book #5: Danny's People by Virginia Bovell

Danny's People: A Memoir and Manifesto About AutismDanny's People: A Memoir and Manifesto About Autism by Virginia Bovell

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


The eponymous Danny is the now adult son of the book's writer Virginia Bovell and well-known author Nick Hornby. Danny is severely autistic to the point that he is non-verbal, and needs constant care.

His mother's memoir about bringing him up tells all about how he received his autism diagnosis, and about the levels of support that he received as he grew up. Reading this, I found it at times very touching, and at other times very upsetting.

Quite late on in the book is an account of a time that Danny spent in hospital because of problems with his digestive system, and charts all of his mother's feelings throughout the process. It was this incident that made her realise that her son could not cope with solid food, meaning that he is now supported by a liquid diet.

As someone who has been diagnosed with asperger's myself, I found it quite compelling to read a book about how autism manifests it in people. The book also goes into depths about the number of ways in which the healthcare system lets down people with autism.

I noticed that Bovell is particularly angry at the idea that some people think people can be "cured" of autism, and I agree with her argument that it isn't a bad thing that should be cured in any way. As she notes, some autistic people have said that taking away their autism effectively takes away who they are as a person.

At times, the sections about how autistic people are constantly being let down felt almost like soapboxing, but at the same time this felt like a really important book that needed to be written. More disturbing are the implications that parents might choose to terminate a pregnancy in the future if they found out their child had a disability. I'm all in favour of women being able to choose to have an abortion, but I'd definitely join Virginia Bovell in questioning a choice to do this if it was to avoid having to raise a child with a learning disability.

As I read this book, I could tell how much the author loves her son, and would recommend it to anyone to read.



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pacificparlour

Suburban Sprawl Was a Long Time in the Making.

I'll start 2025's attempt to post fifty book reviews with John Stilgoe's Metropolitan Corridor: Railroads and the American Scene.  Although the book features a train on the dust jacket, and railroads in the subtitle, it's not ferroequinology.  Nor is it urban planning, although I intend to argue that amateur or professional urbanists will gain a great deal from a close reading.

Professor Stilgoe served the faculty of landscape architecture at Harvard at the time Metropolitan Corridor was published.  He also has experience in military intelligence and an affinity for vintage O Scale modelling.  The preface to Metropolitan Corridor engages in a great deal of product differentiation, concluding with "This book offers only an introduction, an addition to the vocabulary of visual analysis of the built environment."  That follows a disclaimer, "The following pages look as closely as possible at the physical presence of the railroad industry and its infrastructure and seek to interpret the public attitude toward them.  Dividing object from creating system may be unwise, but to research the origin, growth, and place of corporate finance in this period is to produce another book."  Presumably inter alia Alfred Chandler and Ken Galbraith had that covered.

I intend to focus Book Review No. 1 on supporting the outrageous claim of the post's title.  First, though, let me note that there's a lot in Metropolitan Corridor for culture-studies and assorted humanities types to learn from.  My elaborations will come after the jump.

First, where do you find the metropolitan corridor?  Do you look in Lionel catalogs?  Do you read pulp magazines?  Perhaps today's "theorists" might rediscover inductive pattern-recognition rather than arguing, on the basis of tight and empirically empty priors, that Sir Topham Hatt is a tyrant, or that there's too much sex-stereotyping in the toy department at Christmas.

Second, how do you describe the metropolitan corridor?  Do you paint it "with mixed emotions"?  Depict it as a smoky despoiler of all that is beautiful?  Sneak a pickpocket into the Gare St-Lazare?  Or show the giant conquerors of space, time, and drudgery?  Most of the artistic establishment might accentuate the despoilation, although there is enough celebration of the accomplishments to fill Milwaukee's Grohmann Museum with such paintings.  Do you write of it as soul-crushing, or do you affirm it?  Yes, the high school American Literature curriculum is a heavy dose of Upton Sinclair and Sinclair Lewis and general "bourgeois bland sucks" and yet, concurrent with the publication of Babbitt, p. 77, came civic boosters establishing "Babbitt clubs."  Les deplorables, an echo in time.
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Regional economics is always about balancing centrifugal and centripetal forces, isn't it?  So it was with the river towns bypassed by the railroads, so it was with the frontier towns that the railroads didn't build to, so it was with much of the railroad-based metropolitan corridor by the early 1980s, so it might be with the shopping malls that were still all the rage in the early 1980s, and it remains to be seen what will come of the edge cities (does anybody even write about edge cities any more?) and in the ongoing tussles over gentrification and congestion pricing in densely populated cities we see precisely the tensions Romans dealt with two millennia ago.

(Cross-posted to Cold Spring Shops.)
Sunset

Book #4: Dead if You Don't by Peter James

Dead If You Don't (Roy Grace, #14)Dead If You Don't by Peter James

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This book opens with Roy Grace at a Brighton and Hove Albion football match, but things soon descend into chaos with a bomb threat. Grace identifies the suspect item and attempts to be a hero, only for the bomb to turn out to be a hoax. His actions get him into trouble with his obnoxious boss Cassian Pewe, who decides that this gives the police a bad name. It's not a particularly rational decision, but it does lead the novel to explore the relationship between the two men a little bit more.

Also at the football stadium, a boy is kidnapped: Mungo is the son of an obsessive gambler called Kipp, with the kidnappers demanding a huge ransom. The whole thing involves the growing trend of bitcoin, but this doesn't take up too much of what is definitely one of the better novels in this series.

So, for much of the storyline, Mungo is put in grave peril, with the threat of being drowned if he is not found in time. The book feels like a race against time very much like the first book in the series, "Dead Simple" with its burial alive plot. Each chapter heading gives not only the day, but also the time when the action is happening.

This book also involves immigrant characters (possibly refugees like in one of the earlier books) being forced to do the main villain's bidding as part of what appears to be some sort of act of blackmail. To me, it felt like another commentary on how easy it is for vulnerable people to be exploited to other peoples' ends. I noticed a lot of hanging plot threads that weren't tied up at the end of the book, including dead drug mules, more bomb incidents and an unclear fate for the main antagonist. I am hoping that this is the beginning of an on-going plot arc that will unravel in the later titles.



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rose

Books 22-28

All but the first are Brothers Grimm stories:


22. Great Lakes: Shipwrecks and Survivals, by William Ratigan. I don't recall the last time I so looked forward to reading a book and was so disappointed. I'd heard this book referenced a few times by a couple of YouTubers that do documentaries on ships and shipwrecks, so, Great Lakes shipwrecks being an interest of mine, I wanted to check it out.

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rose

Books 13-21

All but the first are Grimm Brothers tales.

13. Iona Iverson's Rules for Commuting, by Claire Pooley. I loved this book! It is so charming and warm. I laughed several times (one time I had to put down the book for a few minutes I was laughing so hard- without giving away any spoilers I will just say it involves the can-can). There were a couple times, including the last chapter, where I got a bit teary-eyed. Yes, the book is a bit predictable, there weren't a lot of major surprises, but this predictability is like having one's favorite sweater or warm blanket. It's escapism, and pure fun watching the lives of the characters unfold.

As the title hints, the story involves several commuters on a train as they go to and from their jobs. They first just have nicknames for each other but never really talk, until one day an errant grape goes down the wrong way and one of the commuters starts choking. Thankfully for him there's a medical professional on board. Slowly, the characters all get to know each other and form their own family which winds up coming together and supporting each other on several instances.

This book does deal with some serious issues (one teen character takes some very unwise photos and gets bullied as a result, for example.)

What's interesting and pertinent are the themes of community and the need to look past the initial impressions. Highly recommend to just about anyone needing an uplifting escape.

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Gerrard

Book #3: The Dead of Winter by Sarah Clegg

The Dead of Winter: Beware the Krampus and Other Wicked Christmas CreaturesThe Dead of Winter: Beware the Krampus and Other Wicked Christmas Creatures by Sarah Clegg

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


The Christmas period is associated with all sorts of mythical demons, witches and ghosts. Krampus, the anti-Santa from Germany is somewhat well known, for kidnapping children who have not behaved themselves. Perhaps less well-known are other similar characters such as Knecht Ruprecht, Belsnickel and Pére Fouittard. Krampus himself gives his name to the "Krampus Run" at Salzberg.

Other mythical characters who might invade your house and cause you harm include Saint Lucy the Witch, described as having a particularly large nose, who people in Finland put out food for in order to stop her taking out her revenge.

Sarah Clegg does a good job of setting out all the Christmas myths, and traditions associated with them, and in most cases these are excuses for people to dress up and go out into the streets. Examples include the Chepstow Wassail, which involves revelers dressed up as almost demonic horses. While at times, the book felt like a list of facts and quotes from Sarah Clegg's source material, there were some good accounts from her own first-hand experience.

To research her book, she attended all of the festivals that she mentions, so there are lots of sections where she recalls her experiences, and it gives a good idea for what the atmosphere is like. In the chapter on the Krampusrun, where it is considered normal for people dressed as Krampus to run up to kids, she describes one of the costumed performers causing her a slight injury by scratching the back of her leg.

It was also interesting to see how many of the traditions that are still allowed are ones that should be taboo in today's society, like events that women are not allowed to take part in, and even some where people wear blackface. I loved reading some of her own thoughts about the events she witnessed, concluding by asking: "Am I sure I'm entirely safe?"

This was a completely blind read, and I enjoyed it a lot.



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