Fading Memories

This is the book that comes before Magician's Ward. In some respects, notably typesetter's accuracy, Magician's Ward is a better book — this is the famous book where a C19 housemaid exclaims 'Cool!' when she hears about a burglary, instead of the 'Coo!' the author intended...

Read more ...

Yes, I can wallow in the reading and imagining about the life of the people who could afford building the stately homes of England, and who could afford to live there. So what? I can always say it's good research for the novel-in-planning.

Read more ...

A perfect gem of a Wodehouse, one of the Blandings stories I most often reread — I was surprised I hadn't already read A Pelican at Blandings this year. But my Fading Memories log says not, so there...

Read more ...

A Pelican at Blandings is the quintessential Blandings story; Right Ho, Jeeves is the quintessential Jeeves and Wooster story.

Read more ...

Lord Ickenham is a Wodehouse character who can be counted upon to spread a bit of lightness around whenever he can escape from the stranglehold of his wife to the vast wildernesses of London.

Read more ...

When I bought a Wacom tablet my intention was to use it to sketch maps for my novel-in-progress. Quite soon I discovered that it came with an application that purported to imitate, simulate or fake real artist's media, like charcoal, paint and ink.

Read more ...

Not really a book by Godfried Bomans, but rather a collection of memories jotted down by his family and friends after his death on December 22, 1971, about two years after I was born.

Read more ...

Magician's Ward is the sequel to Mairelon the Magician. I bought the latter first, as is fitting, and just before I started with Fading Memories. At the end of Mairelon the Magician I was quite sure that Kim, the ward, would end up marrying Mairelon in something very close to the classic King Cophetua stunt.

Read more ...

Otfried is one of Germany's best known children's books authors; others are of course Michael Ende and Erich Kastner. And there is little doubt that Otfried Preußler's master work is this book, Krabat, rather limply translated into Dutch as Meester van de zwarte molen.

Read more ...

I've noted before that I'm not really all that fond of the works of the very well known and very highly regarded Dutch author Tonke Dragt. Neither her style in illustration, nor her stories have ever held me spell-bound.

Read more ...

As I said before, I rather like good buildings. Irina knows this, and when she came across this book in our local bookshop, she knew it would be a perfect birthday present.

Read more ...

My father-in-law bought, or received, this copy of The Man Upstairs in 1939, and he has apparently read it to pieces. Early Wodehouse, and this is very early, ca. 1914, is far less exuberant than the product of his old age. This is apprentice-work, not quite mature, but full of promise.

Read more ...

An early Havank, and a fun one. But a quick notice, since I've been typing a lot of notices tonight, and I'm getting a bit tired.

Read more ...

I have two editions of Pepys famous diary; that is to say, I have got two volumes from the Everyman edition, and I've got the Concise Pepys Diary. The Everyman isn't complete, of course, and it wouldn't be complete even if I had all volumes. The Concise Pepys is a cheap Wordsworth reprint of the original 1825 abridged publication.

Read more ...

This book I borrowed from a collegue of mine at Tryllian, Peter Tax. It appears to be and have been the standard text for Computer Graphics 101 at Dutch universities and technical universities, because another collegue, Remco Schaar, offered to lend me his copy, which is a new edition. Since I've never done anything academic with computers except for a course in SGML, another in SNOBOl and a last in Pascal for Linguistcs, all this stuff was new to me.

Read more ...

Jonathan Knudsen is, acknowledges the back blurb, an O'Reilly staff writer. That means he's not a subject expert, but what is technically termed a 'hack' who writes about whatever subject O'Reilly needs a book. That's not to say that he doesn't know his subject, but his book on Java Cryptography wasn't all that good and at first I thought that the book on Java 2D graphics wasn't up to scratch either.

Read more ...

I've started studying theology, having enrolled in the correspondence course of the Saint-Serge Institute, as translated and provided by the Centrum voor Theologische Vorming Johannes de Doper in Brussels. One Saturday every month I travel to Brussels to receive a wad of papers and some face-to-face tuition. I've had only one lesson yet, because Irina was away the weekend of the second lesson, and the third Saturday, coming up now, we already have exams.

Read more ...

Baen's Free Library is a great institution. Lots of titles from Baen's back catalog are available in html, word or another format, freely downloadable, freely readable. No conditions, nothing. And since I don't usually read (the covers tend to be somewhat off-putting...) what Baen publishes, this is the perfect way of making the acquaintance of what their authors write.

Read more ...

Gosh! It's almost ten years old, this book! Ten years. It's a long time in programming. When this book was published I had just started using Linux full-time, having made its first acquintance in 1993 or 1992, I don't remember exactly. At that time, I only knew Basic, Pascal, Snobol and SGML; in 1994 I started learning SQL, PL/SQL and C. And since then I've picked up Java, Python, C++ and Visual Basic. And a smattering of Bash.

Read more ...

Almost completely forgotten (although the capital of Frisia, Leeuwarden has named the streets in a new development after characters in his books), the Dutch author Havank has been treated to only one biography; this book.

Read more ...

Foley et. al. is the current incumbent of Newman and Sproull: the absolute standard text for budding graphics programmers. The field has widened, deepened and generally ballooned; that's clear just from the difference in page numbers: Foley is twice Newman.

Read more ...

I'm trying to hack Krita into submission. I want a paint application that fakes natural media and the way they work, not just the way they look. So I've started studying C++ and computer graphics, a completely new field for me.

Read more ...

Between 1935 and about 1975, Havank was the most popular, most widely read Dutch author. Therefore it's no wonder that he has never received much critical acclaim. Still, i consider him not only an author of fine, formulaic mystery novels, but also as the Dutch Wodehouse. But where Wodehouse received acclaim for his similes and virtuoso use of language, Havank was derided for his Popish boarding-school type of humour.

Read more ...

When I first read the Amazon blurb of Monstrous Regiment, I thought that this might very well be one of the better Discworld novels to appear in recent years. Terry Pratchett seems to need a fresh setting to do his best, and this book was set in a new place, with new characters, too. All set to spark the author's imagination.

Read more ...

I was very fond of Fingersmith, so I eagerly snapped up Tipping the Velvet when I had to go on a long train journey to Brussels. Well, when I say eagerly, I must admit that I spent some time looking for a copy with a different cover. While I rather like the way the right-hand girl looks at the left-hand girl (Nancy at Kitty, not vice versa), there is a certain je-ne-sais-quoi that makes this copy a little less suitable for public perusal. I blame the television, and their idea of Victorian undies, myself.

Read more ...

I bought this book in Lisbon in 1996 or so, when I was still an Oracle Software Engineer (or, in other words, a PL-SQL hacker), and wanted to learn C++. This book didn't help me then, and now, when I want again to learn C++, but for a certain project, this time, it doesn't help me either.

Read more ...

I'm not a dab hand at French — when I was in Brussels last weekend, I had a hard time getting the taxi driver to understand me, and had to resort to English, because he refused to understand Dutch. And everytime I wanted to say something in French, I could only produce a broken Greek.

Read more ...

Dorothy L. Sayers co-authored this novel with Robert Eustace (who primarily presented her with the scientific foundation for the crime). It is an experimental work, presenting the evidence for the case in the form of letters, newspaper clippings and statements.

Read more ...

I usually love the language courses from the Teach Yourself series: I must have more than twenty of the little blue, black or yellow books. But Biblical Hebrew is a bad egg. Originally published in 1955, and written in a style that was dated in 1890, H&S had no business reprinting the text photographically in 1991.

Read more ...

Being an Orthodox Christian myself, it behooves me to know something about my religion, naturally. And this book, The Orthodox Church was both my first introduction and one of the books I now and then take up again, to refresh my memory.

Read more ...

A couple of quick notes, both because I've got a big stack of books I've read cluttering up my desk, table, floor and mind, and because I want to go on with learning C++.

Read more ...

The 1907 Nobel Prize laureate Rudyard Kipling is one of the lions of the English literary history. His work, particularly his poetry, has inspired countless authors, most of whom seem to end up writing mil-sf for Baen.

Read more ...

When I studied Chinese, Sanskrit, Pali and a few other East-Asian languages in Leyden, I was pretty interested in Buddhism. One of the books I bought at that time was this volume, a nice and durable reprinto of the out-of-copyright Oxford University Press series published near the close of the nineteenth century, when scholars where scholars and books were books.

Read more ...

Is this really the first time in a year that I read something by Werumeus Buning? Probably not, it's more likely that I just assumed I'd already written a notice on what I read, because I read and re-read Werumeus Buning a lot.

Read more ...

This is the fourth Marshall Guarnaccia book, an early Magdalen Nabb, therefore. Death in Autumn is a quite perfectly formed, nicely rounded, well told and concise in plan.

Read more ...

As Dorothy L. Sayers has a woman say in Gaudy Night, once I was a scholar. I went to the University of Leyden to study sinology, capping my studies with an attempt at comparative linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman area. During my five years in Leyden, I acquired, amongst others, this translation of the Analects. I never quite got round to reading it — I always preferred Mencius to Confucius.

Read more ...

It was reading the afterword in De Psalmen that made me order this book through inter-library loan. Of course, like a fool, I started with Volume I, which is not about the psalms; I should have ordered Volume III (which is what you get when you click the buy this link; books like this are hard to get through Amazon, and the scholarly booksellers that do have a web presense don't have a search function.). Still, I'm very glad I've dipped in this book.

Read more ...

Necklace and Calabash is the last Judge Dee novel but one Robert van Gulik wrote. One year after its completion, van Gulik died from cancer, after completing Poets and Murder, the very last Judge Dee mystery. Robert van Gulik is one of those authors who show a clear progression in their work, and Necklace and Calabash is one of his best works.

Read more ...

Poetry is notoriously difficult to write about — perhaps the only form of literature that is more difficult to write about than to write. Even more difficult is to write about this book, De Psalmen which is the collection of Lloyd Haft's reworkings of, well, the Psalms.

Read more ...

I am not an ethnobotanist. What I know about organic or anorganic chemistry would fit in the RAM of a first issue ZX-80. But With Bitter Herbs They Shall Eat It still held me spellbound. The author, Timothy Johns, manages to present his difficult and to me unfamiliar subject with admirable clarity. His prose is seldom dull, the book has been organized in the most transparent fashion and the ideas he presents are thought-provoking.

Read more ...

It is always dangerous to be even moderately well-informed about a subject. It can, for instance, seriously distract from ones enjoyment of a book if one is trained as a sinologist, and the author of a book set in China manages to get almost every Chinese word wrong. This remarkable feat, far beyond the usual mangling, is the achievement of Paul Doherty. Not that there isn't plenty else to dislike.

Read more ...

What's the difference between a children's book and a book for adults? That the protagonists are children and the plot can be a bit more complex and the story a bit swifter paced if it's a children's book? That the book is a bit shorter? Year of the Griffin is a book about students at a University, so the protagonists aren't really children, but there's a lot of story going on. Anyway, people with taste read Diana Wynne Jones, no matter under which category they are packaged and marketed.

Read more ...

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

Read more ...

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.

Read more ...

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.

Read more ...

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.

Read more ...

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.

Read more ...

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.

Read more ...

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.)

Read more ...

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.

Read more ...

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.

Read more ...

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...

Read more ...

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.

Read more ...

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.

Read more ...

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.

Read more ...

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.)

Read more ...

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.

Read more ...

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

Read more ...

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.

Read more ...

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

Read more ...

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.

Read more ...

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.

Read more ...

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.

Read more ...

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.

Read more ...

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.

Read more ...

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.

Read more ...

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.

Read more ...

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.

Read more ...

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.

Read more ...

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.

Read more ...

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.

Read more ...

• Death of a Dutchman, Magdalen Nabb
• Castle Crespin, Allen Andrews
• To Say Nothing of the Dog, Connie Willis (again)
• Because of the cats, Nicolas Freeling
• Tsing-Boum, Nicolas Freeling
• Fantoom in Foe-Lai, Robert van Gulik
• Learn Greek in 25 years, Brian Church
• Blandings Castle, P.G. Wodehouse
• The Bugles Blowing, Nicolas Freeling
• The King of the Rainy Country, Nicolas Freeling
• Prisma Nieuwgrieks - Nederlands / Nederlands-Nieuwgrieks
• Fingersmith, Sarah Watters
• The Chinese Shawl, Patrica Wentworth
• Harry Potter and the Oder of the Phoenix, J.K. Rowling
• The Fox Woman, Kij Johnson
• The Wee Free Men, Terry Pratchett
• Oude en Nieuwe Buitelingen, Godfried Bomans
• The Seven Seals, Dennis Wheatley
• Dr. Joliffe's Boys, Lewis Hough
• Destinies Shield, David Drake
• Olive Oil

And I think that I scratch all books from the to-read list and start afresh...

Fingersmith, by Sarah Watters is a very well-written, very well-constructed pastiche of a Victorian novel. The plot is partly based in Collins' _Woman in White_, partly on Dickens' Oliver Twist -- make of that what you want! An it's also more or less a lesbian bodice-ripper, if I understand that term correctly.

Read more ...

A house-guest of ours advised Irina to read Mary Wesley: she suspected that Irina would love her books. Little did they expect that _I_ would love her works, too. An Imaginative Experience is a love story, and a very fine one, written with mildness and love for the dramatis personae.

Read more ...

The Avenging Parrot was part of a large stack of pre-WW II mystery novels, thrillers and detective novels I bought at a sale at the local library. You can't go very far wrong for 50 eurocents, I thought, and bought the book.

Read more ...

Life has been a little stressful lately, what with my company going belly-up and then righting itself again and some other, more private matters, that I have had singularly little inclination to get started on the more solid volumes on my to-read pile, preferring instead to read a simple, silly detective story. So that's why you're reading about Inspector French and the Starvel Tragedy (or IFATST) instead of Lud in the Mist.

Read more ...

A stack of mystery novels, when bought for 50 cents at a library sale can give a lot of enjoyment. And anyone familiar with Trent's Last Case wouldn't pass up on Trent's own case, I felt.

Read more ...

I first came across Gibrat's wonderful painting when I visited Dupuis' website looking for newly appeared albums. There was also a new section with wallpapers, and the cover of Elke Raaf Pikt was amongst them.

Read more ...

It is seldom that I read a classic work from beginning to end, every page without skipping. The Anabasis is one such work. It's the story of how the author, Xenophon, managed to get command of ten thousand Greek soldiers (and their slaves, wives, boyfriends and cattle) and lead them around Anatolia back to Greece.

Read more ...

Our library sells used books (not just discarded library copies) for about fifty eurocents, and recently I came home with a stack of old mystery novels. Gun before butter was one of those, by a certain Nicolas Freeling. I'd never heard of the man, although he is apparently well-known, well-respected and still alive.

Read more ...

Python in a Nutshell is the latest addition to the small array of books that are always on my desk. The others are Present Day Political Organization in Chine, The Little Lisper, Practical C++ Programman, Van Dale Nederlands-=Engels, The Nine Songs, The Songs of the South, An Introduction to Buddhism, Learning the VI Editor, GUI Programming with Python uting the Qt Toolkit, Mastering Regular Expressions, The Concise Oxford, Python Cookbook and Het Romeinse Leger. One thing is clear: out of 14 books, 5 are O'Reilly titles. I must be a programmer.

Read more ...

I wish I could write as fast as Paul Doherty... This father of seven children, headmaster of a big comprehensive school writes mostly historical mystery novels, under a variety of pseudonyms. Lately, though, he seems to have started to use his real name for almost all his output. Paul Doherty, Paul Harding, Michael Clynes, Ann Dukthas, C.L. Grace, and Anna Apostolou — it's all the same author.

Read more ...

E. Phillips Oppenheim, or Oppy as Wodehouse called him, was a prolific writer of the best kind of adventurous spy trash. Most of his work seems to center around the First World War and the intrigues leading up to it. Russian princesses. Stolen plans. Impersonations. Champagne. Monte Carlo. Blue Train. Sinister spies. Damsels in distress.

Read more ...

This is one you can read yourself: If you click on the buy this book link (on the right, or right here), you won't be taken to Amazon, but to Project Gutenberg, where you can download the e-text of The Great Impersonation

Read more ...

I've been on an Oppenheim roll, ever since Irina bought me my third Oppy — The Great Impersonation.

Read more ...

Truth! Justice! Freedom! Reasonably Priced Love! A Hard-boiled Egg! What with one thing and another, I'm feeling a bit down, and possible out, too. So I went back to an old mainstay of mine. Something I can read when even Wodehouse is too demanding.

Read more ...

The final installment of the four volume series of The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers is a relatively slim, but very attractive book. It contains both My Edwardian Childhood and Cat O'Mary. The first was an abortive attempt at memoirs; the second an abortive attempt at a 'straight' literary novel. This book contains a very worthwile preface by Christopher Dean, the Chairman of the Dorothy L. Sayers Society, and an insightful introduction by Barbara Reynolds, who has worked with DLS on the translation of Dante and who has edited the other volumes of letters.

Read more ...

It's Lent, and I thought I'd give this book another try. And again I foundered.

Read more ...

Piccadilly Jim is one of the early Wodehouses; and also a very fine title. That the book failed to grab me this re-reading has everything to do with being tired out with flue, rather overwrought with family matters and shaken by being within two weeks of losing my job, and not with the excellent work of Plum.

Read more ...

Down with flu, I tend to grab something easy, something accessible. Nobody will argue that 1632 is a masterwork. Its prose is ordinary, but racy. The premises are questionable. The mathematics suck. But it's a rousing, fast-paced read for all that.

Read more ...

Joy in the Morning is one of the perfect pearls Wodehouse has given the world. I was given my copy by Adrian Morgan's mother, when they made a stop with us when they toured Europe.

Read more ...

The United States might — arrogantly — assume hegemony over the world, thinking it is the richest state, the last superpower, a nation with a manifest destiny, forget that the rest of the world pays it five hundred billion dollars a year, making them the best paid mercenaries in history, they still do not know what war is, what occupation is.

Read more ...

A fresh an fun read about a ferocious battle.

Read more ...

To Say Nothing of the Dog has been described to me as Connie Willis' homage to my favourite authors: P.G. Wodehouse, Dorothy L. Sayers, and also, of course, to Jerome K. Jerome, of whom I haven't read anything yet. See reading list, though..

Read more ...

Striding Folly is the last collection of Lord Peter Wimsey short stories. As a collection, it wasn't published during Dorothy L. Sayers lifetime; it is copyright by Anthony Fleming, her son, and its meager pagecount is eked out by a horrible introduction by Janet Hitchman whose main criticism of DLS is that neither she nor Harriet Vane conformed to her (Janet's) ideas on what is good clothes sense. I feel that Janet Hitchmen is more like the Helen, Duchess of Denver than she knows herself...

Read more ...

I there's one book I reread and reread, it's Busman's honeymoon. Ostensibly a murder mystery, but in fact a love story with detective interruptions, I first encountered it when I was courting Irina. This is significant, because I feel that I've learnt a lot about the metier d'époux from the Wimsey-Vane marriage tribulations. And whenever I feel a certain book is not soothing enough, I do not fall back to the Looking Glass, but to Busman's Honeymoon.

Read more ...

David Liss's second novel was so spanking new that the bookshop where I bought it (Atheneum in Amsterdam) couldn't find it in their computers. I bought it because I was intrigued by the first few pages I read, and by the what the blurb uncovered about the plot. Was it a good buy?

Read more ...

My favourite Astrid Lindgren books (and one of my all-round favourites, for that) were those about Superdetective Blomkwist: Mästerdetektiven Blomkvist, Mästerdetektiven Blomkvist lever farligt and Kalle Blomkvist och Rasmus. Of course, my Swedish being what it is, I've never read these book in the original language, but rather in the praiseworthy translation by Rita Törnqvist-Verschuur. And now my daughters have reached the ripe ages of seven, seven and nine, I'm reading the stories to them.

Read more ...

We visited Denmark two years ago, and Lars Mathiesen, a friend from the CONLANG mailing list welcomed us at his Kopenhagen home. There, he lent us his copy of Bellwether for the train journey home. And a very enjoyable journey was had by us all.

Read more ...

Achitecture is a hobby of mine. Or rather, I love good buildings, and I often need a handbook to help me design buildings for novels or roleplaying games. So when I happened upon this volume for the bargain price of f17,90 (original price 38s, online available for about $35,-), I snapped it up immediately.

Read more ...

One of my favourite Dupuis series is Cupido. And not only mine; also of my daughters. Malik is a consummate artist who sketches his scenes with a lovely delicacy. As with Sammy, Cauvin is responsible for the scenarios, but Cupido albums contains several shorter stories and gags, and there's a fair chance of hitting upon one or two wonderful ones.

Read more ...

A collection of Wodehouse juvenilia, this. Excellent juvenilia, written with love and fun. But also redolent of the trappings of a market that no longer exists: the humorous mainstream magazine story.

Read more ...

Right, so I've decided to add comics to Fading Memories, too. Or rather, bandes dessinees, to distinguish between the kind I like to read and superhero stuff, which I'm not interested in. I will write a notice only for albums I've just bought, since adding reviews on rereading would bandes dessinees would really cut into my reading time. If I've got five minutes, perhaps ten, I tend to grab a Sammy, a Melisande or a Cupido. I'll start with the latests Sammy. And no, I haven't got an advanced taste in bandes dessinees, either. Lotusbloem (or Poupee d'ivoire by Franz is about as sophisticated I can handle. I don't like the kind of bandes dessinees where the author uses the story as an excuse for graphically shoving unsuitable implements in cunts. And those are more common than someone who doesn't frequent comics shops would imagine.

Read more ...

Others, notably Dean Bagley, have said that Young Men in Spats is possible the best of the collections of Wodehouse shorts. I agree...

Read more ...

I've seen men, healthy, strong, hard-faced Irishmen, blown to shreds. I've helped to clear up the mess. I've trod on dead men's chests in the sand, and the ribs have bent in and the putrid gases of decay have burst through with a whhh-h-ff-f.

Read more ...

A novel in letters -- written, not by the protagonist, but by her family, friends and her readers. And a book with an all too familiar, but none the less true, message. Perhaps it would have been better to write this book in Arabic, to make it possible for it to reach its audience.

Read more ...

The most recent Magdalen Nabb I've read — though not the most recent, Magdalen Nabb is still writing, and Some Bitter Taste was published in january 2003. The Monster of Florence is the work of a matured author. It's no longer an easy murder mystery with a cute detective. It's terrifying.

Read more ...

Years and years ago Irina and I chanced upon a large collection of fifties and sixties sf magazines. Asimov's, Astounding, New Worlds Science Fiction -- the works. And sometimes I pick one of them from the shelves to re-calibrate, as it were.

Read more ...

I've always been a sucker for epistolary novels since I read Daddy Long Legs as a teenager. A Woman of Independent Means is a very good one, covering a woman's life from fourth grade at about ten until her death at seventy-nine.

Read more ...

Marshall Salvatore Guarnaccia is at his best with ordinary people and their ordinary problems. That's his job, after all. He likes it, and he likes doing his job in Florence. Which makes it a very frightening proposition to be investigating a murder (or a suicide) in the highest circles.

Read more ...

I've already done a review of the text of Vegetius Epitoma Rei Militaris, so this is merely a review of the Dutch translation by Fik Meijer, Professor Oude Geschiedenis at the University of Amsterdam.

Read more ...

I had the chance to read the manuscript of Caroline Stevermer's latest, Scholar of Magic, a more-or-less sequel to a College of Magics. I bought When the King Comes Home for Irina's birthday in 2002, not being aware at the time that this was the same Caroline who had written Sorcery and Cecilia, an old favourite of Irina's. When the King Comes Home is a perfectly balanced tale, and I'm going to re-read it again soon, but you can read a good review of it at Outside of a Dog. Soon we ordered everything that was still available from Amazon, and got a College of Magics, which tasted a lot like more. And A Scholar of Magics is more, but it's different, too. Better balanced, somehow, with perhaps better defined protagonists. Can't give it a full review until I've got the hardback, though, which I'm eagerly awaiting.

Read more ...

Tonke Dragt is one of more well-known Dutch authors of children's books. Her work often veers in the direction of the fantastic, although she sometimes shies away before committing herself. De Zevensprong is a case in point.

Read more ...

Vegetius' Epitoma Rei Militaris is, essentially, an agitprop pamflet written to inspire his nation to revert to the grand military tradition of their ancestors. The book seems to have been written during the reign emperor Valentinian II (375-392) or Theodosius I (379-395 ). At least, it's not clear to me which emperor Vegetius dedicated it to. Since the Sack of Rome occurred only a little later, in 410, we can conclude that he failed in his objective. But he did write a book that has been the constant companion of military leaders through the ages.

Read more ...

Apparently, in Book 1 (which our library doesn't have') Jane da Silva gets stuck with the detective agency of her rich, but dead uncle. Only if she fixes a really hopeless case, she'll inherit the money. This book is about her second attempt.

Read more ...

• Author: John Ronald Reuel Tolkien
• Publisher: George Allen & Unwin
• Published: 1986 (1954)
• Pages: 442

I have at least three English editions of Lord of the Rings on my shelves, but I didn't choose to give the particulars of this one without premeditation. It was my first copy. Previously, I had borrowed both Dutch and the English versions from the local library. I didn't like the book at the time. Possibly because The Two Towers, together with the (remaindered at the time) appendices, was the only volume available. Yes, that's right. Dutch public libraries have a penchant for buying Part Two of Three of anything -- or Part 3, 5, 6 and 7 of eight, for that matter. But, retournons a nos moutons, I entered the 1986 paperback edition of Two Towers in the little unsorted list above. That was my first copy, as I said. I bought all three volumes in one audacious move, even though I couldn't afford it, and had to borrow money from my mum. In 1986 I was about sixteen years old, I guess. For two weeks I was off the map. I severely harmed, if you can believe it, my English marks, because my teacher didn't want to believe that 'dale' was a word. Anyway, I've read Lord of the Rings about six times since then, which is not as often as some, but more than most people on this swiftly moving clod of earth, and every time I reread it, I discover new nuances, new joys, and gain a deeper appreciation of Tolkien's work. I don't consider myself a fan — after all, my Sindarin is a joke. But I know the book. I've got a handsome three-volumes-in-one bound copy printed in a nice, large letter on unfortunate paper, and my wife has the great three-volume hardback on cream paper.

Read more ...

• Author: J.K. Rowling
• Publisher: Bloomsbury
• Published: 1998
• Pages: 251

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (laughably inaccurately translated into Dutch as 'Harry Potter en de Geheime Kamer' — literally 'the Secret Chamber') is the weakest book of the series. The movie is the first movie I've seen in years (which doesn't say much, since I think I've seen maybe twelve movies in the past four years) that was really, atrociously, inexcusable bad.

Read more ...

• Compiler and editor: Stephan P. Clarke
• Publisher: The Dorothy L. Sayers Society
• Published: 2003
• Edition: Second, first printing
• Pages: 773
• ISBN:: 0-9518000 8 6

A noble book is a like a song to my soul — the original, in Lord Peter Views the Body, the story of Uncle Meleagers Will, has this about an old book. But a new book works just as well, if it's a book like the LPCW.

Read more ...

• Author: Dorothy L. Sayers
• Publisher: New English Library
• Published: 1974 (1933)
• Pages: 188

Dorothy L. Sayers is, of course, the second-most famous author of mystery novels and short stories: Agatha Christie is the most famous of the breed. But DLS' books are often deeper than Christie's, and very often more literate, too. This means that DLS' novels are not for everyone; she expects you to be able to read enough French to know the difference between a masculine and a femine article (in the story 'The Entertaining Episode of the Article in Question' in Lord Peter Views the Body). And, apparently, scatters words like bromide through her texts. I, for one, am glad of that: most of my English vocubulary seems to originate from her books.

Read more ...

• Author: Peta Tayler
• Publisher: Headline
• Published: 1996
• Pages: 282
• ISBN:: 0-7472-1705-X

Perhaps last week (the second week of January 2003, for the record) was a better week for writing than for reading. This isn't the only book I returned to store. I didn't finish The Code of the Woosters, either, but that one is still on the to-read, or more accurately, the to-read-again stack. I only discontinued reading the Master's immortal prose because I acquired Carry On, Jeeves, whereas I quit reading this book because I plain didn't like it.

Read more ...

• Author: P.G. Wodehouse
• Publisher: Penguin
• Published: 1980 (1925)
• Pages: 235
• ISBN:: 0 14 00.1174 9

Carry On, Jeeves is a collection of Jeeves and Wooster stories; what's more, it's the collection of the first Jeeves and Wooster stories. The first story is the one where Jeeves enters the employment of Bertram Wooster, and the other stories give us the details on the various episodes Bertie keeps referring to in the rest of his works.

Read more ...

• Author: P.G. Wodehouse
• Publisher: Herbert Jenkins
• Published: 1929
• Pages: 318
• Alternative title:: Fish Preferred

I know I'm a strange kind of fish — there's no use denying it. There are a few books I know I'm going to like that I only read small pieces from. A chapter here, a chapter there, saving the real treat for some other time. This is what I did with Summer Lightning. However, feeling rather miserable with one thing and another, I figured the time had come to allow myself a long draught of the Master's tonic.

Read more ...

• Author: Helen Waddell
• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Published: 1962 (1929)
• Pages: 352

And not for nothing. Finally I have a compilation of Latin verse where even I, with my meager knowledge, can correct the translator. When Ausonius writes olim regum et puerorum nomina, it is surely essential to get the contrast that is caused by the juxtaposition of kings and children in the translation, and not merely give up with "once bewailed names of kings." The Dutch translation that springs to mind is "eens de namen van koningen en kinderen", but I have to admit that I cannot so readily phrase that in alliterating English.

Read more ...

An Irish priest in London wrestles with himself - not his vocation, but with celibacy and the fact that he doesn't believe in God and never has. Now when have we heard that before? In the nineteen-sixties. But this book is from the twenty-first century, if only just. The premise isn't new; the resolution isn't, either. But the way Burke handles it is fresh enough to keep it interesting.

Read more ...

Yet another part of my Quest for the Ultimate English Mystery Novel. I actually realized when I was on page 15 or so that I'd read it some years ago, but could only remember one scene - not a good sign. Not that the book is at all bad, just not memorable.

Read more ...

• Author: Magdalen Nabb
• Publisher: Fontana
• Published: 1984(1983)
• ISBN: 0-00-617032-3
• Pages: 155

Now I've got about ten reviews — or rather book notices, since reviews ought to be a bit more full-bodied, and more critical — I begin to see where I should work on Squishdot to provide better support. Indexes by author, for instance, and better search functions. No doubt I'll get the itch one of these days, and hack it in.

Read more ...

• Author: Lawrence Watt-Evans
• Publisher: Del-Rey (Ballantine)
• Published: 1991
• Place: New York
• Pages: 231

I hereby vow to also enter the books I don't finish reading in Fading Memories. So, if I pick up the book from the stack, I can see whether my opinion has changed at all.

Read more ...