“Books are standing counselors and preachers, always at hand, and always disinterested; having this advantage over oral instructors, that they are ready to repeat their lesson as often as we please.†~Oswald Chambers
Welcome to the Saturday Review of Books at Semicolon. Here’s how it usually works. Find a book review on your blog posted sometime during the previous week. The review doesn’t have to be a formal sort of thing. You can link to your thoughts on a particular book, a few ideas inspired by reading the book, your evaluation, quotations, whatever.
Then on Friday night/Saturday, you post a link here at Semicolon in Mr. Linky to the specific post where you’ve written your book review. Don’t link to your main blog page because this kind of link makes it hard to find the book review, especially when people drop in later after you’ve added new content to your blog. In parentheses after your name, add the title of the book you’re reviewing. This addition will help people to find the reviews they’re most interested in reading.
After linking to your own reviews, you can spend as long as you want reading the reviews of other bloggers for the week and adding to your wishlist of books to read. That’s how my own TBR list has become completely unmanageable and the reason I can’t join any reading challenges. I have my own personal challenge that never ends.
I’m definitely a fan of Golden Age detective fiction—Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Rex Stout, Josephine Tey—but I’ve read all the books I can find by those authors. And I’ve tried a few others that are supposed to belong to that particular club, Margery Allingham and John Dickson Carr in particular, and I just didn’t care for them. So, Georgette Heyer’s mysteries have that Christie/Golden Age flavor, and I’m pleased to find another writer from that era that I can recommend and enjoy myself.
No Wind of Blame has lovely, interesting characters, somewhat stereotypical but still memorable, and that’s what makes the book. There’s a fortune hunting Russian (or perhaps Georgian) prince with an impossibly long name, a histrionic and very wealthy Aunt Ermyntrude, a dogsbody poor relation with a pleasant personality and a pretty face, a very pretty daughter who tries on a new persona every time she descends the stairs, a smarmy neighbor who’s involved in some dubious business deals, and a police inspector with a refreshingly normal, down-to-earth take on the whole case. The case itself, a murder of course, is not the focus of the novel, and the solution is beyond my understanding and limited mechanical abilities. However, I didn’t care that I didn’t understand exactly how the murderer did it because I enjoyed the company, the dialogue, and the interactions between the characters so much.
I’ve read one or two of Ms. Heyer’s Regency romances, and although the wit and good characterization are still there, I don’t much like straight romance novels. An element of romance is good, but I prefer my love stories mixed up with something else, perhaps a good mystery. I plan to look for more of Ms Heyer’s mystery novels and see if they’re all as good as No Wind of Blame.
A list of Georgette Heyer’s “thrillers” or detective novels:
Footsteps in the Dark (1932) Why Shoot a Butler? (1933) The Unfinished Clue (1934) Death in the Stocks (1935) Behold, Here’s Poison (1936) They Found Him Dead (1937) A Blunt Instrument (1938) No Wind of Blame (1939) Envious Casca (1941) Penhallow (1942) Duplicate Death (1951) Detection Unlimited (1953)
For a while Ms. Heyer published one thriller and one romance every year. However, her British publisher and her American publisher both disliked the book Penhallow, published in 1942, and she mostly stuck to romances with some historical fiction after that.
I once wrote a post on Mudslinging Authors, authors dissing other authors. Today for your entertainment or for vindication of your opinion on one of the following authors, I present another edition of Mudslinging Authors and Literary Daggers:
Anatole France on Emile Zola: “His work is evil, and he is one of those unhappy beings of whom one can say that it would be better had he never been born.”
G.K. Chesterton on Emile Zola: “I am grown up, and do not worry myself much about Zola’s immorality. The thing I cannot stand is his morality…. Zola was worse than a pornographer, he was a pessimist.”
George Bernard Shaw on Shakespeare: “With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his… it would positively be a relief to me to dig him up and throw stones at him.”
Israel Zangwill on George Bernard Shaw: “The way Bernard Shaw believes in himself is very refreshing in these atheistic days when so many people believe in no God at all.”
Valdimir Nabakov on Ernest Hemingway: “As to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early ‘forties, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it.”
Gore Vidal on Hemingway: “What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke?â€
William Faulkner on Henry James: “One of the nicest old ladies I ever met.”
Henry James on Edgar Allan Poe: “An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection.”
Dame Edith Sitwell on Virginia Woolf: “Virginia Woolf’s writing is no more than glamorous knitting. I believe she must have a pattern somewhere.”
Virginia Woolf on James Joyce: “[Ulysses is] the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.â€
Willliam Thackeray on Jonathan Swift: “A monster, gibbering, shrieking and gnashing imprecations against mankind.”
Thomas Carlyle on Percy Byshe Shelley: “Poor Shelley always was, and is, a kind of ghastly object; colourless, pallid, tuneless, without health or warmth or vigour.”
John Keats on William Wordsworth: “Wordsworth has left a bad impression wherever he visited in town by his egotism, vanity and bigotry.”
H.G. Wells on Joseph Conrad: “One could always baffle Conrad by saying ‘humour’.”
Oliver Goldsmith on Samuel Johnson: “There is no arguing with Johnson; for when his pistol misses fire, he knocks you down with the butt end of it.”
Other than K-dramas, the other culture I’ve been exploring via television lately is that of redneck Louisiana and duck-hunting as portrayed in the A&E series Duck Dynasty. It’s just as fascinating, if not quite as foreign, as Korean drama culture.
Duck Dynasty is a “reality TV” series starring the Robertson clan, owners of a multi-million dollar business that creates products for duck hunters, including duck calls, hunting videos, and other hunting paraphernalia. The company is called Duck Commander, and there’s a companion company, Buck Commander, that sells stuff for deer hunters. The show, however, isn’t about hunting so much as it is about the Robertsons and their weird and wonderful family dynamic.
Meet the Robertsons:
Phil is the family patriarch, the man who founded Duck Commander, a fanatical and skilled duck hunter, designer of the double reed duck call that is Duck Commander’s featured product. Phil wants everyone to be “happy, happy, happy” without bothering him too much, and he doesn’t have much use for “yuppies” and modern technology. Ms. Kay is Phil’s wife and mother to the four Robertson boys. Ms. Kay can cook anything and make it taste great; her speciality is fried squirrel and squirrel brains. She says the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, and squirrel brains make you smart.
Three of the “boys” are featured in the TV show: Willie is the CEO of Duck COmmander. He spends most of his time on the TV show trying to get the rest of the family to work and build duck calls instead of taking naps, going hunting, and generally goofing off. Jase is Willie’s older brother, but he’s more interested in working in the duck call room, designing duck calls and testing them. Jase and Willie have different,complementary roles in the business, but outside of business hours they are highly competitive in everything from fishing to sports to cooking to outwitting one another. Jep is the baby of the family, kind of quiet, but according to the book he does a lot of the filming for the hunting videos.
The other main character in the TV shows is Uncle Si, a Vietnam veteran who has the best and funniest lines in the show. Uncle Si makes the reeds for the duck calls. He also drinks sweet tea by the gallon from a plastic Tupperware glass that he carries with him everywhere. Uncle Si reminds me of a combination of Engineer Husband’s two brothers: the storytelling, the exaggerations, the beard, the eccentricity.
After I watched most of seasons one and two of Duck Dynasty, I wanted to know how much of the show was true and how much was put-on. So I read The Duck Commander Family: How Faith, Family, and Ducks Built a Dynasty by Willie and Korie (Willie’s wife) Robertson (with Mark Schlabach). The book isn’t a classic, but it serves the purpose of giving more information about the Robertson family background. Each TV episode closes with the entire clan gathered around the table, and Phil prays a blessing over the food and the family. The book tells how the family came to have such a strong heritage of faith in God. It wasn’t easy. Phil and Kay married young, and Phil became an alcoholic and deserted the family for a time. After God brought him to a realization of his need for Christ and his love of his family, Phil returned to Ms. Kay and his sons and became a strong man of God, still a little quirky but grounded in the Bible and faith in God’s provision.
I highly recommend the TV series, and then the book if you want more information about this wacky, unconventional, and inspirational family. Warning: the Robertsons are NOT your typical rich, sophisticated family. They like to blow things up, shoot animals and eat them, and generally run wild. It’s a great TV show to watch with the young men in your family, older men, too.
War and peace is a recurring theme in literature, in movies and television, and in history. Seraphina, winner of the Cybil Award of 2012 in the Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy category, is about trust and mistrust between two different species, dragons and humans, in the kingdom of Goredd. My latest (second) K-drama, The King 2 Hearts, is about war and peace, trust and mistrust, between North and South Korea. Both the book and the TV series share some commonalities:
Tough-as-nails, but tender on the inside commoner girl meets insecure, but charming prince. Romance ensues.
Cultural differences create misunderstandings and lead two nations to the brink of war.
Evil villain tries to provoke war between the two groups.
Relationship between the girl and the prince mirrors the uneasy relationship between the two countries. Danger lurks everywhere, and almost all of the main characters come near to death multiple times in both Seraphina and King 2 Hearts.
There are also differences between the two stories. In the book, the dragons are emotionless, mathematical, and super-rational, unless they have taken on human form in which case they must be on guard against getting tripped up by human emotions. Yes, the dragons can transform into human bodies. (No, the humans can’t get dragon bodies–which doesn’t seem quite fair.) And Seraphina, our young protagonist, has a very special problem: she hides a secret that would, if revealed, turn everyone, both dragon and human against her and perhaps cost her life.
So, there’s a lot of interplay in Seraphina between the supposed opposite ways of viewing life: artistic and emotional or mathematical and rational. Unfortunately, Mr. Spock and Captain Kirk did it better. The idea of bridging cultural differences and making peace by bringing together two cultures is more interesting. Seraphina brings together the two cultures in the book because she has a unique identity, (POSSIBLE SPOILER) half dragon and half human. In King 2 Hearts the attempt to bridge two cultures is embodied in the proposed marriage of the South Korean prince to a North Korean bride. Of course, reconciling two disparate cultures is difficult, whether it’s an internal conflict or recurring discord and confrontation between two people who actually love each other.
It’s the conflict that keeps the story fresh and compelling. King 2 Hearts consists of 20 episodes, a length that I’m told is common for Korean dramas. It probably could have been improved by being shortened by about five episodes and tightened up. Some of the characters—the “psycho” super-villain, his stoned hired assassin, and the U.S. government official with the speech impediment, in particular–were rather unbelievable and cringe-worthy. But the series itself was addictive; I kept thinking I’d watch just one more episode, then one more, then one more . . .
If you want some (mostly clean) romance embedded in a story with Important Stuff to Say about war and peace I’d recommend Seraphina if you have a few hours to read a fantasy novel, and King 2 Hearts only if you have about twenty hours to invest in a roller-coaster of a TV show, with sub-titles and loads of Korean politics, mores and traditions. Consume both if you’re a glutton for political drama, fantasy, spy thrillers, romantic sparring, and a surprising but satisfactory resolution.
I hope to write more about King 2 Hearts and the other K-drama that I’ve watched, Queen In-hyun’s Man, soon. Suffice it to say I think I already have a K-drama problem, and I can’t, can’t, can’t start any more shows anytime soon or else I might be accused of family-neglect.
“If anyone finds that he never reads serious literature, if all his reading is frothy and trashy, he would do well to try to train himself to like books that the general agreement of cultivated and sound-thinking persons has placed among the classics. It is as discreditable to the mind to be unfit for sustained mental effort as it is to the body of a young man to be unfit for sustained physical effort.†~Theodore Roosevelt
Welcome to the Saturday Review of Books at Semicolon. Here’s how it usually works. Find a book review on your blog posted sometime during the previous week. The review doesn’t have to be a formal sort of thing. You can link to your thoughts on a particular book, a few ideas inspired by reading the book, your evaluation, quotations, whatever.
Then on Friday night/Saturday, you post a link here at Semicolon in Mr. Linky to the specific post where you’ve written your book review. Don’t link to your main blog page because this kind of link makes it hard to find the book review, especially when people drop in later after you’ve added new content to your blog. In parentheses after your name, add the title of the book you’re reviewing. This addition will help people to find the reviews they’re most interested in reading.
After linking to your own reviews, you can spend as long as you want reading the reviews of other bloggers for the week and adding to your wishlist of books to read. That’s how my own TBR list has become completely unmanageable and the reason I can’t join any reading challenges. I have my own personal challenge that never ends.
Bags We Love: A collection of bookstore and literary tote bags, curated by Julie Blattberg (HarperCollins). I actually own two of these bags.
Deb Nance at Reader Buzz on Little Libraries. When Engineer Husband retires, I’m going to beg him to build me one of these little wooden boxes for a Little Free Library of my own. I think the idea is beautiful, such a community-builder.
How To Grow a Man Without Even Trying (Poetry Memorization) Cindy always has such inspiring, yet practical, posts about homeschooling for excellence. Heaven knows, I could use some down-to-earth inspiration about now in my homeschooling journey. Sometimes I wonder if anything I try really gets through those thick skulls, including my own.
Finally, I don’t want to just link to this sermon by Tullian Tchividjian. I want to embed it here because it’s so true, and so encouraging, and so real. The title of the sermon is God’s Two Words for a Worn-Out World.
“That’s what I love about reading: one tiny thing will interest you in a book, and that tiny thing will lead you onto another book, and another bit there will lead you onto a third book. It’s geometrically progressive – all with no end in sight, and for no other reason than sheer enjoyment.†~Mary Ann Shaffer, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
Welcome to the Saturday Review of Books at Semicolon. Here’s how it usually works. Find a book review on your blog posted sometime during the previous week. The review doesn’t have to be a formal sort of thing. You can link to your thoughts on a particular book, a few ideas inspired by reading the book, your evaluation, quotations, whatever.
Then on Friday night/Saturday, you post a link here at Semicolon in Mr. Linky to the specific post where you’ve written your book review. Don’t link to your main blog page because this kind of link makes it hard to find the book review, especially when people drop in later after you’ve added new content to your blog. In parentheses after your name, add the title of the book you’re reviewing. This addition will help people to find the reviews they’re most interested in reading.
After linking to your own reviews, you can spend as long as you want reading the reviews of other bloggers for the week and adding to your wishlist of books to read. That’s how my own TBR list has become completely unmanageable and the reason I can’t join any reading challenges. I have my own personal challenge that never ends.
I like reading about quirky, little-known incidents and events and characters in history that influenced our world in ways we never knew about. Jean Denis’s transfusion experiments are just such an oddity of history. Like the space race, there was a 17th century transfusion race between the French and the British (with a few Italians thrown in for good measure) to see who would be the first to successfully transfuse blood into a human being. Unfortunately for the subjects of these experiments, the blood being shared came from animals, and the transfusions were performed under unsanitary and rather primitive conditions. The human recipients, who were being transfused to cure them of madness not a blood disease, probably didn’t actually get much in the way of blood actually transfused and generally died.
Ms. Tucker draws a comparison between these early experiments in medical transfusion and the twenty-first controversy over stem cells and genetic engineering and cloning. However, her final verdict about the lesson we are to draw from the failure of Denis’s transfusions is unclear. Is it that animals and humans shouldn’t mix? Or that the established medical authorities can be short-sighted and self-serving in their opposition to new methods of treatment? Ms. Tucker seems to say that the 17th century opposition to blood transfusion is akin to to 21st century opposition to stem cell research and that both are narrow-minded and obstructionist with no basis in fact or morality. However, the French man who was (maybe) transfused did die, and Denis, in hindsight, didn’t have a clue what he was doing. My “lesson” is that we had better be really, really careful when we start experimenting on human beings, notwithstanding all the wonders of blood transfusion and modern medicine.
There’s also a murder mystery thrown into the mix, and although the mystery added some suspense to the story, it was the least satisfying and interesting part of the book. If you’re interested in science and medicine and history mixed, you might want to try this one out. Just don’t accept all of Ms. Tucker’s conclusions and comparisons at face value.
