2003-08-27
Jill the Reckless (UK title: The Little Warrior) is another of those Wodehouses you can read for yourself with little or no trouble: click on the 'buy this book' link and the e-text whizzes its way onto your hard-disk, gratis, courteousy of the Russian Wodehouse Society
2003-08-26
Apparently, Allen Andrews is one of those one-or-two book authors that surface, get published and then disappear. That's a very great pity, because Castle Crespin has a lot of good in it.
2003-08-25
We found only one Magdalen Nabb novel to take on holiday; I'd willingly swapped four Freelings for one extra Nabb. That said, I didn't feel that Death of a Dutchman was all that good.
When I studied Chinese in Leyden, one of the first things they told us was to go and read all of van Gulik's Judge Dee novels. The very first thing they told us was that two out of three students wouldn't even make it through the first year. I always thought the first advice to be more valuable than the second advice, which I considered to be mere sententiousness. Reading a Judge Dee book is always a good idea.
The American Book Center in Amsterdam is a great shop. They have lots and lots and lots of books. There SF and Fantasy shelves are so packed that it becomes almost impossible to find anything amidst the trilogies and other polylologies. And they're not too expensive, if you buy one of then ten-percent-off cards. Without one of those cards they are more expensive than W.H. Smith, also in Amsterdam. But, and this is important, so follow me closely, they also have two big bookcases with second-hand and ramsj fantasy and sf books. Better and cheaper than the English Book Exchange, also in Amsterdam, which is in itself a pretty nifty place. So, in preparation for the before-mentioned holiday to Greece, I went to the American Discount, and bought books.
2003-08-24
A book with a perhaps more thoroughly Dutch athmosphere than the others, less cosmopolitan, this last of the Freelings we took on our holiday to Greece was also one of the best. A nice mystery, a very close look at our Inspector van der Valk and some excellent writing make for an engaging, fast read.
Diana Wynne Jones is without a doubt and by universal assent the very best author of fantastic fiction currently writing. She admits to preferring to write for children, because children can handle more complex plots and weirder distortions of the world than adults. At least, so I remember from reading an interview with her that I no longer can find. (Oh, and for the obligatory comparison with J.K. Rowling: there is no comparison. Rowling writes mundane boarding school schmaltz with a bit of mundane magic thrown in. If her characters weren't so engaging, nothing would be left. With Diana Wynne Jones you never know what's going to happen. If you like your books tame, stick to JKR, if you like real imagination, order DWJ's back catalogue when you buy this book.)
2003-08-14
The contents of this volume in Elsevier's attempt at the collected works of Godfried Bomans reflect most accurately the kind of work Bomans is second best remembered for, after Eric. Fairly long, whimsical pieces of prose.
2003-08-13
It used to be custom at the company where I worked to give departing collegues a book by way of souvenir. Because the company was called Tryllian, the souvenir was naturally Adams' Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. However, there were people who already had that book in profusion on their shelves, and Otto Moerbeek was one of those. And he already possessed The Art of Computer Programming, the default second choice. So we presented him with Things a computer scientist rarely thinks about. And now I have borrowed his copy and read it. In one sitting, between five o'clock in the afternoon and midnight.
We took four or five Nicolas Freelings with us and as many Patricia Wentworths. I read all the Freelings, and only one of the Wentworts. The other Wentworths I gave a trial, but dismissed them around page 20. This was the only one I finished...
In January this year we accidentally stumbled upon a chest filled with forgotten dubloons. (Virtually, that is -- a savings account we both had forgotten, even through some quite hard times. We tend to be organizationally challenged. Differently organized, that's the phrase). This windfall enabled is to go on holiday; a real, long holiday, really far away. After consultation with the children we decided to go to Kea, Greece. This resolution was taken in February or March, leaving me with a month or three to learn Greek in.
I know that Greek is quite a difficult language, especially for someone who isn't used to inflections and so on. But 25 years... For someone living in Greece all the time? No wonder the subtitle of this little booklet is for the linguistically challenged.
2003-08-09
One of the books Irina bought in Greece. Curiously enough, I didn't buy a single book during our stay in Greece. Not because all the books were in Greek — as you can see, this one is in English, and I would have liked to pit my meagre Greek skils against a whole book, but because the selection was very limited on the small island we visited. Anyway, this book is about olive oil. And olives. With traditional recipies, no less. And written by an archaeologist.
Anyway, on to Blandings Castle. As the title indicates so very clearly, this book would be about Blandings Castle, that most beloved of Englands Stately Homes. Nor does the title lie, very much. Because we also get a Bobbie Wickham story, always a treat, and five Mulliner's stories about life in Hollywood. I have never been very fond of these, and upon re-reading I found them quite weak. (Still, Wodehouse presumably gives us some inside information on early Hollywood. He was there, as a screen writer, and apparently kept payed a lot while nobody used his scripts. Only when he gave an interview in which he gently derided the situation he was fired.)
In the seventies, Elsevier embarked upon the publication of series of books that would represent the complete works the Dutch author Godfried Bomans, who had just died in 1971. I am fairly sure that they never reached their goal of completeness. Elsevier had a reputation for starting things, and never completing them. Nowadays, Elsevier doesn't publish any literature anymore, just incredibly expensive scientific journals and scientific databanks. Their task has been picked up a few years ago, and there now exists the Complete Works of Godfried Bomans in five impressive volumes. Too expensive for me, I'm afraid, and I haven't seen them in second-hand bookshops yet.
One of the nice things about Nicolas Freeling's books is the depiction of the home life of his protagonists — whether it is inspector van der Valk or Henri Castang. In Tsing-Boum (really a rotten title, and as you can see, a rotten cover), an added attraction is the appearance of Ruth, the daughter of Esther, who is the murderee in this book
Athelstane E-Texts, which is apparently Nicholas Hodson, is an excellent institution dedicated to the making available of C19 texts. They will also produce e-texts of paper texts you have for a modest sum. However, that's not the reason I mention them here. That's because they have made available the text of Hough's 'Dr. Joliffe's Boys' -- a, to stay in the jargon, ripping example of the early English boys' school book.
I discovered this rare text at the headquarters of the Russian Wodehouse Society, that admirable body. It is a short work, and a complete send-up of Oppenheim's series of books in which that worthy tried to stir England into vigilance and preparedness for the German/Russian/Chinese/French/Turk/Monegask menace. But especially the German menace. When reading early Oppenheim, and other turn-of-the-19th-century books like Soldiers of the Queen it becomes very clear how much people were expecting a war with Germany in the years leading up to the first world war
The Bugles Blowing is the first, and up to now, the only Henri Castang novel I have read. When Freeling got tired of his previous protagonist, van der Valk, he had him killed. One more book followed, with Arlette, van der Valk's French wife, in the role of sleuth. Then he switched to Henri Castang. I'm not so sure I like this particular detective.
Another late Wodehouse — 1968. Do Butlers Burgle Banks is sufficiently recent that it will never come out of copyright, thanks to the Mickey Mouse act. So you all will have to hope for a reprint, since it is only available second-hand nowadays.
My mother-in-law rather liked to cook. She liked buying cookery books even more. So when she died a few years ago, we inherited her collection of cookery books. It is entirely possible that she had bought this slim volume when it was new — her collection has books from 1950 to about 1990.
Harrië Freezer is best known as the woman who translated Roald Dahl's books into Dutch. An impressive achievement! She was also a well-known feminist, and worked for the Dutch feminish montly 'Opzij' until her death. Curiously enough, if you follow the link to the website with the most information on the author (click on her name), you'll find that the book I'm looking at here isn't in the list. Dutch authors are generally rather ill-endowed with useful websites, I'm afraid.
2003-08-06
We had four Nicolas Freelings books with us (or it might have been five) because we found this stack of them in a second-hand bookshop, and having read Gun before Butter and enjoyed it. It soon became apparent that, while well written, most often in an engaging style, Freeling had one big problem, a problem that was already apparent in Gun before Butter: he cannot do endings. Or maybe the unsatisfactory endings are structural and part of what he wanted to achieve, that's possible too, I suppose.
2003-08-05
P.G. Wodehouse's writing career spans the greater part of the twentieth century (and a few years of the nineteenth, but those are only of interest to the real afficionados, like me, who also like books about English boy's boarding schools). Like the twentieth century, his career can thus be divided in pre-WW-I, interbellum and post-WW-II. His first phase, acted out before he went to the United States to get rich with the serialisation of Piccadilly Jim (if I remember correctly) and with the production of books and lyrics for many well-received musicals, was one where he produced more serious stuff. Stories and novels that were sometimes not even very funny, just moving, like The man with two left feet, or Psmith Journalist, which is very funny, but which is also a strongly-worded j'accuse addressed at the corrupt elite of pre-WW-I New York. The interbellum is his golden period: wonderful books, wonderful language, wonderful humour — a beaker overflowing with happiness. After the second world war, his work began to show signs of becoming over-formulaic, and, despite his protestations that he would always write of Edwardian England, he allowed the deplorable spirit of the fifties to enter the world he depicted in his books. (Where he didn't his books became so detached from the world, that they might as well have been filled with helium instead of ink.) French Leave is a post-WW-II book. But a very refreshing one.
By all accounts, Dennis Wheatley was a very unpleasant man. Mysogynist, tippler, wastrel, spiritist, racist, national-socialist, jingoist. But a very famous writer, very popular in his native England until the seventies. Which telles us something about that country in its years of decline.
Everyman is rumoured -- I have never seen any physical evidence -- of being in the process of republishing the entire Wodehouse canon in hardcover editions (minus Performing Flea, the musicals and the articles, I fear), but before those excellent people started on their ambitious project, Penguin was the publisher to go to if you wanted to get a new Wodehouse to complete your collection of second-hand Herbert Jenkins First Editions. Penguin, in their wisdom, have published Wodehouse in three formats -- viz., and in chronological order from hoary to contemporary, orange-spined with Ionicus covers, orange-spined with Chris Riddell covers and, in a smaller format, variecoloured with David Hitch covers. Both Ionicus and Chris can be relied upon to produce a nice sketch if called upon. David cannot draw. Worse, far worse, was the decision to set the text with a ragged right edge. Unjustified and unjustifiable. You see, Wodehouse mixes a lot of dialogue with his exposition. And one of the visual clues a reader uses to recognize dialogue is that the right margin is rather more ragged than the right margin of the more narrative sections. Ragging every paragraph means that it is deuced hard to distinguish between dialogue and narrative. And that is what made me reluctant to read and finish my copy of Pigs Have Wings.
Still catching up on the reading from before the holidays... I had bought this book to take to Greece, but both Irina and I had finished it before we departed. Wee Free Men is the second (if you don't count _Eric_) children's novel Terry Pratchett has set in the Discworld. It tells the tale of how young Tiffany Aching becomes a witch, the successor of ther grandmother in the fight against the queen of elfland, with a little advice from a more experienced witch and the very useful help of a clan of small, blue persons.
In one of his forewords in the Penguin edition of his works (the editions with the Ionicus or Riddel covers have them &mdash makes those editions the most desirable ones), Wodehouse remarks on that saga habit of his. You write one book with an interesting set of characters, you find yourself writing another of them — saves yourself a bit of work &mdash and then the public wants a third. And suddenly you are an author who, when he writes a book outside any series, is introduced with 'author of the JEEVES series' on the cover. Company for Henry, a clear post-WW-II book, is not in any series. And I think that's something of a pity, because there are people in there that I've grown very fond of over the span of several re-readings. I am thinking especially of Aunt Kelly.
The web is full of reviews of this book; indeed the world seems to be filled to its edges with copies of this hefty tome. No doubt if you were to stack them, they would reach to the moon and back. Not that I suppose it can be done, but still. And the astonishing thing is that the book's popularity is not the result of careful marketing, product-placement, audience-targeting, hype-spinning or media-doctoring. The Harry Potter phenomenon is a grass-roots phenomenon, to use the old-fashioned term. People read part one, and told their friends to do likewise. And then they hungered for part two, thirsted for part three and were nearly famished and dehydrated waiting for part four. And now we're five.