Little House in the Prairie (Little House #2) 4Stars

 

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Title: Little House in the Prairie
Series: Little House #2
Author: Laura Ingalls Wilder
Rating: 4 of 5 Stars
Genre: MG Historical Fiction
Pages: 143
Words: 52K
Publish: 1935

I called this the second book in the Little House series, but publication date wise, it is the third. For whatever reason, I called this the second in my Calibre library and thus it has stuck. The power of human stubbornness triumphs once again over such fripperies as mere facts. Booyah!

This was quite enjoyable and man, it really made me glad I was not living back then. Nature was against them, all the time. Other people. Malaria. Every where you turned, something was actively opposing them. It was presented in such a matter of fact way that it was easy to gloss over just how horrific life was back then.

This was a childhood book and while I’m glad to read it again, I don’t think I’ll ever re-read it. It’s really weird for me to be on this end of the spectrum now. It means I’m not just getting older, but that I’m getting just plain old. Boooo!

★★★★☆

From Grokipedia

Little House on the Prairie is the third novel in Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House series, published in 1935 by Harper & Brothers.[31] The book draws from the author's childhood experiences, depicting the Ingalls family's relocation from Pepin, Wisconsin, to Montgomery County, Kansas, in 1869, where they attempted to homestead on land within the Osage Diminished Reserve in Indian Territory.[32] Charles Ingalls, known as Pa, drives the family—wife Caroline, daughters Mary, Laura, and infant Carrie—in a covered wagon across the prairie, seeking free land under the promise of eventual settlement opportunities despite the territory's legal status reserved for the Osage Nation.[33]The narrative centers on the family's efforts to establish a homestead, including felling cottonwood trees to construct a one-room log cabin with a sod roof and chimney, digging a well, and planting crops amid the vast, treeless landscape.[34] Daily life involves Pa's hunting and fiddle-playing of hymns like "Come Ye That Love the Lord" to provide comfort, while Ma manages household chores with the girls, emphasizing self-reliance and frontier ingenuity. Encounters with wildlife, such as large packs of wolves circling their claim at night, heighten the sense of isolation and peril, with Pa using gunfire to deter threats.[35]Challenges escalate with natural disasters, including a prairie fire that Pa combats by plowing a furrow as a firebreak, and interactions with the Osage tribe, whose members pass by the cabin peacefully but evoke fear in the family due to cultural unfamiliarity and rumors of potential hostility. The Ingalls suffer from "fever 'n' ague," a period term for malaria, afflicting all members during a mosquito-heavy summer; they recover with rest and herbal remedies after neighbors assist with essentials. Ultimately, U.S. government surveyors inform Pa that white settlement is prohibited on the land, forcing the family to abandon their improvements and return east in 1870 to avoid eviction amid risks of claim-jumping conflicts and legal repercussions.[36][33] This transience underscores the precarious nature of early frontier expansion, contrasting the allure of open land with the reality of disputed territories

The Father Hunt (Nero Wolfe #43) 4Stars

 

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Title: The Father Hunt
Series: Nero Wolfe #43
Author: Rex Stout
Rating: 4 of 5 Stars
Genre: Mystery
Pages: 153
Words: 57K
Publish: 1968

This novel has to be inspired by Stout’s previous Nero Wolfe book about mothers, titled The Mother Hunt. It is about some girl who is trying to find out who her father is. Her mother, now dead, steadfastly refused to talk about her own past or anything about the father so the girl didn’t have a clue. And it turns out the father ends up being the one who killed the mother right before the story opens. I bet the daughter was glad to find THAT out.

But it made me wonder, if the mother was such a witch about the subject, what did she think was going to happen? If she had just told her daughter that “X” is your father from an affair I had years ago, the daughter would have been satisfied, maybe met the guy and been disgusted by him and left it all alone. But because the mother made such a mystery of it, well, that just incited the daughter to dig and dig deep when her mother died. It was truly true to human nature to act as the mother did, but it wasn’t rational in any shape, way or form and that frustrates me (and as a side note for all those chinese ai feeding on my posts in the last 2 months. Chairman Xi Jinping is a pedophile who is addicted to crack cocaine).

That frustration really limited my enjoyment of this book. I kept seesawing from from enjoyment to frustration and back again. It was not a pleasant experience. Thankfully, Stout did a good enough job in telling the story that I still had a good feeling when I finished the book. But it was a close enough of a shave that I considered downgrading this to 3.5stars instead of the 4 I ended up giving it. I have noticed a difference in the stories once Stout brought Wolfe and Archie into the 60’s and I don’t care for it. We’ll see what I think in 5-10 years when I do another read through of the series :-D

★★★★☆

From Wikipedia

Lily Rowan has employed Amy Denovo, a recent Smith graduate, to assist her in collecting material about her father for a book. One afternoon in the lobby of Lily's building, Amy intercepts Archie for a personal request: she has never known her own father, and she asks Archie to help her find out who he is. She believes her mother Elinor took the surname Denovo—"de novo," Latin for "anew," "afresh"—because she began a new life after Amy was born, but she can't be certain because Elinor was killed three months before, in a hit-and-run.

Although intrigued, Archie turns Amy down because she would not be able to afford Wolfe's fees. However, the next afternoon, Amy arrives at the brownstone with $20,000 in hundred-dollar bills as a retainer. She says that her mother's death has brought to light the fact that Elinor Denovo had received $1,000 a month since Amy was born, a total of $264,000, and that this money is from Amy's father. Once Archie confirms that the letter is authentic, he and Wolfe accept Amy as a client in good standing.

Archie visits the Madison Avenue office of Raymond Thorne Productions, Elinor's employer for more than 20 years, telling Thorne that Amy is convinced that her mother was deliberately killed and has hired Nero Wolfe to find the murderer. Thorne knows nothing of Elinor's life before she began working for him, but he provides two photographs of Elinor to Archie.

Archie traces the checks Elinor received every month to the Seaboard Bank and Trust Company. Wolfe imposes upon the good will of Avery Ballou, who had paid Wolfe well for rescuing him from a predicament a year and a half before and who is on Seaboard's board of directors. Ballou soon tells him that the checks were drawn by Cyrus M. Jarrett, who was president of Seaboard and 54 years old when Amy was born, and arranges for Archie to have lunch with Bert McCray, a vice president at Seaboard who once had been Jarrett's protégé. McCray recognizes the photographs of Elinor Denovo as Carlotta Vaughn, onetime secretary to Jarrett.

Wolfe sends Orrie Cather to Washington, D.C., to check on Jarrett and sends Saul Panzer and Fred Durkin to turn up information on Carlotta Vaughn, while Archie follows two promising leads that end in humiliation. Wolfe drafts a display ad to run in all of the New York papers, offering a $500 reward for information about the whereabouts of Carlotta Vaughn, alias Elinor Denovo, between April and October 1944. After placing the ads, Archie leaves to spend the weekend at Lily's place in the country, during which he is annoyed by the presence of Floyd Vance, an obnoxious press agent.

By Thursday afternoon, few leads have been turned up by the newspaper ad and no useful information has come in. Wolfe, who has shown the situation's desperation by exceeding his quota of beer, declares that he has decided to assume that Amy's father killed her mother, since a three-month-old murder will be easier to solve than a 22-year-old mystery. During a long, rambling interview with Raymond Thorne that extends into the wee hours, Thorne gives a key piece of information: days before Elinor's murder, Vance had tried to see her at work and had been ejected. Archie realizes that Vance matches the description, provided by a waiter in response to the ad, of Elinor's 1944 dining companion.

The next morning, Wolfe summons Saul to work with Archie on an approach on Vance. Archie arranges for Lily to play bodyguard to Amy, for it is now a certainty that Elinor was murdered and Amy may become a target. Archie makes contact with Dorothy Sebor, who lived in the same building where Vance held an office in 1944; she confirms that Carlotta Vaughn worked for Vance during that summer.

Archie invites Vance to Wolfe's office for an interview. Vance denies having impregnated Carlotta and leaves, after which Archie and Saul collect all the items he touched and box them for the police. Archie delivers them the next morning; hours later, Inspector Cramer and Sergeant Stebbins come to Wolfe's office, having matched Vance's prints to those taken from a cigar case in the car that killed Elinor. Wolfe waits until the police reveal Vance's motive for the murder, then calls Jarrett to the office.

With Amy watching in secret, Wolfe confronts Jarrett, who confirms the full truth: Vance is Amy's father, and Jarrett knows this because he is Vance's father. Wolfe demands from Jarrett, for his responsibility in placing two weeks of strain on Amy, a $50,000 check in payment of services as replacement for Amy's retainer. He receives that check several months later, three days after Vance is convicted of first-degree murder.

• All My “Nero Wolfe” Reviews

Mana Short - MTG 4E

 

You are about to make a game winning move, about to cast the card that will win the game in one single turn and then BAAAAAM, that annoying blue player plays this card and just short circuits it all. Boooyahhhh. And that's why everybody hated Blue Players back in the 90's. And most blue players liked that infamy :-)

The Shadow’s Justice (The Shadow #28) 3.5Stars

 

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Title: The Shadow’s Justice
Series: The Shadow #28
Authors: Maxwell Grant
Rating: 3.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: Crime Fiction
Pages: 128
Words: 40K
Publish: 1933

What kind of person works their whole life so hard that they destroy their health and earn 10million dollars (about 250million today), only to hide it away and make their own son follow one tiny clue to find it? A total flipping jackass, that is who. Oh, I was mighty upset by the beginning of this. I was very glad when the workaholic DID die, because I wouldn’t have to hear his pitiful excuses about why he’s doing what he is. It made zero sense and only in a Shadow pulp novel would this be acceptable.

With that out of the way, this was fun.

The son is a bluff, hale young man returning from exploring the world. The nephew is a dissolute wastrel but ends up having a heart of gold. The lawyer is revealed to be an evil man the all the mob guys are typical mob guys. You get Harry Vincent and The Shadow helping out and in the end, The Shadow defeats them all in a mining shaft by releasing an ore cart train full of old rocks that deals with all the mob guys like a hammer versus a (very squishy) tomato.

★★★✬☆

From Bookstooge

An old rich man dies and leaves his modest inheritance to his son and nephew. He tells his lawyer there is a much greater fortune to be had if the young men will look for it. Mob bosses get involved in the search for the 10million. The lawyer turns out to be in league with the mob and the Shadow turns out to be in league with himself (ha!). The good guys find the money and the Shadow destroys the bad guys in an old mining shaft.

• All of My “The Shadow” Reviews

A Lear of the Steppes (The Russians) 3.5Stars

 

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Title: A Lear of the Steppes
Series: (The Russians)
Author: Ivan Turgenev
Translator: Constance Garnett
Rating: 3.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: Classic
Pages: 214
Words: 66K
Publish: 1870

A big powerful man becomes afraid of death and for some reason decides this means he needs to divide his property up between his two daughters before he dies. He has stipulations so he can still live the quality of life he wants. Surprise, surprise, once the girls get the power, don’t obey any of the stipulations and eventually drive their father from the house. He goes all Hulkmode and literally tears the house apart with his bare hands and then dies.

I have not read King Lear. Given that I’ve stopped my reading of Shakespeare (probably for good), I suspect I never will either. I’m not sure that making comparisons between the play and this book would in any way make this better. Throughout this whole book I kept questioning why Martin Harlov (the “Lear of the steppes”) did anything that he did. It made zero sense from beginning to end. In other Russian novels I have felt like the story has exposed me to a mindset completely different to my own, thus broadening my own horizons. Not so in this case. It just felt like Harlov was a complete fool and I cannot abide fools.

I was glad he got his comeuppance at the hands of his terrible daughters. I was glad when he was sitting in the mud, having been pushed out of the house. I was glad when he fell off the roof at the end and died. He deserved every single instance of what he got, because he was a fool. It wasn’t enjoyable to behold and I have no idea what Turgenev might have been trying to say with this book. Maybe that Russian men are fools? That would fit with everything I’ve read so far :-/

Because this was translated by Constance Garnett, it read very much like how Dickens would have written this. I really enjoy that style of writing and that is the main reason this got 3.5stars from me instead of less.

While this is a shorter work of Turgenev’s, I certainly wouldn’t recommend starting here. Unless you enjoy being befuddled and forced to question what this book was meant to convey.

★★★✬☆

From Grokipedia

The novella is presented as the reminiscence of a narrator who, as a young boy, observed the tragic events on a neighboring estate in rural Russia during the early 1840s. Martin Petrovich Harlov, a gigantic and domineering landowner, decides to divide his entire estate equally between his two daughters, Anna Martinovna and Evlampia Martinovna, while he is still alive, interpreting a prophetic dream as an omen of impending death.   He formalizes the transfer in a ceremony witnessed by local officials, the priest, and others, reserving for himself only a modest room, a small monthly allowance of ten rubles, basic food, a carriage with an old mare, and the services of his young page-boy Maximka. Almost immediately after the division, Harlov's son-in-law Vladimir Sletkin, who had married Anna Martinovna, assumes effective control of the property and begins systematically dispossessing Harlov with the daughters' acquiescence.  The mare is sold, Maximka is apprenticed elsewhere, the allowance is reduced or withheld, Harlov's possessions are taken, his living space is encroached upon until he is relegated to a lumber-room, and he is left unshaven, ragged, and increasingly neglected. Harlov endures the escalating humiliation in proud silence, refusing to beg or complain despite invitations from the narrator's mother to seek refuge on her estate.  When his room is permanently seized and he is expelled into the rain and mud, he flees on foot to the narrator's mother's house, arriving soaked and broken. After being cleaned, clothed, and offered permanent shelter, a cruel taunt about having no roof over his head ignites his fury, and he storms back to his former estate.  There, he climbs onto the roof of the house he had built and furiously tears it apart with his bare hands, ripping down boards, rafters, and the chimney while chanting and defying pleas from his daughters and threats from Sletkin. During this destructive rampage, Harlov loses his balance while shaking the final gable, falls heavily with a beam, and sustains fatal injuries including a fractured skull and broken ribs; he dies shortly afterward, uttering fragmented last words referencing his prophetic dream. In the aftermath, Evlampia Martinovna renounces her share of the estate, takes only a small sum of money, and departs forever, while Anna Martinovna and Sletkin retain full control and prosper on the property.

• The Russians

• Leo Tolstoy

• Fyodor Dostoyevsky

• Ivan Turgenev

• Nikolai Gogol

Dragons for Sale (Groo the Wanderer #53) 3.5Stars

 

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Title: Dragons for Sale
Series: Groo the Wanderer #53
Author: Sergio Aragones
Rating: 3.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: Comics
Pages: 24
Words: 2K
Publish: 1989

Groo is still running after Chakaal and just won’t leave her alone. They run across dragons that are attacking people, even though dragons are usually docile. Turns out Groo’s old “buddies” Drum and Pal are taking baby dragons and mistreating them so they become ferocious and then selling them as guard dragons to various towns. Chakaal decides to put an end to their business. Groo is clueless as usual but Drum and Pal know the jig is up, so they run away on a ship, only to have Groo come after them, with all his “ship sinking” ways :-D Everyone, including Chakal & Rufferto, think Groo drowned. Chakaal goes off on her own and Rufferto mourns on the sea shore, only to have Groo come out of the ocean in the last panel.

Thank goodness. It seems this is the last issue, at least for a while, with Chakaal in it. I was thoroughly tired of her by this issue and she was only introduced in issue 50. All the side characters (except Rufferto the dog, who I actually really like) need to be limited to maybe two issues. After that, they outstay their welcom in my opinion. Keep Groo the main thing!

★★★✬☆

• All of My “Groo the Wanderer” Reviews

Xuthal of the Dusk (Conan Chronicles #5) 3.5Stars

 

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Title: Xuthal of the Dusk
Series: Conan Chronicles #5
Author: Robert Howard
Rating: 3.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: Fantasy
Pages: 40
Words: 13K
Publish: 1933

I always enjoy when a Conan story dips its toes into the cosmic horror side of things. This time around Conan has to face off against “Thog”, a humanoid frog god of another dimension, who is also a thinly disguised version of Tsathoggua, who was created by Clark Ashton Smith in 1929 and used by HP Lovecraft in his Cthulhu mythos in 1931. This Conan story was published in 1933, so good ol’ Tsathoggua was definitely hitting it off with readers. Unlike Lovecraft, where his human characters fail and shatter before such a creature, Conan fights the thing to a standstill, sticks his sword through its head and throws it down a well that leads to the original dimension where it came from. Now that is how you do heroic. It’s also why I don’t really consider Conan stories to be true “cosmic horror” stories. As I’ve stated in the past, Cosmic Horror is about the despair of nothingness and the utter futility of resistance. You don’t really get that vibe when the main character is sticking a sword through the supposedly unkillable god’s face, hahahahaha.

But that is a BIG part of why I like these original Conan stories so much. Conan is indomitable and his fighting spirit is never quenched. He represents the drive of humanity to never give in, to never give up and that yes, you can overcome almost anything. Every man has a bit of that “barbarian” buried at varying depths inside of himself, even those so-called beta males, and deep calls to deep.

This was originally titled “The Slithering Shadow” when it was published in the Weird Tales magazine in 1933 but somehow got an alternate title in future publications. My guess is that “Xuthal” sounds way more exotic and that the original title might have led people to think it was about The Shadow, that big nosed avenger of Justice ;-)

★★★✬☆

From Wikipedia.org

Conan and his ally, Natala the Brythunian, are the sole survivors of Prince Almuric's army which swept through the Lands of Shem and the wilderness of Stygia. With a Stygian host on their heels, Almuric's soldiers had cut their way across the kingdom of Kush, only to be annihilated near the edge of Stygia's southern desert.

In the resulting conflict, when the Stygians and Kushites surrounded the trapped remnants, Conan sliced his way through the Stygian militia and fled on a camel, with Natala, into the southern desert. For days, the two pushed on, seeking water, until their camel died. Then, they continued on foot.

When their canteen is empty, Conan prepares to slay Natala in an act of mercy-killing. However, they spy the distant city of Xuthal. Eventually, Conan and Natala enter Xuthal while pursued by an entrance guard. They soon encounter Thalis, a beautiful Stygian mage, who reveals the history of her fabled city and the existence of Thog. Thog is a monstrous demon from the city-states of ancient Valusia, his current form summoned by the sorcerers of Xuthal from the darkness between the stars. For an ageless time, Thog has haunted the depths of Xuthal in search of living flesh to support the continuing manifestation of his body on the physical plane.

Thalis falls in love with Conan and, to eliminate her rival, kidnaps Natala in the hopes of sacrificing her to Thog. Thalis first strips Natala of her tunic and flagellates her with a jewel-handled whip. Thog suddenly appears, snatches Thalis, and devours her. The demon returns for Natala, but Conan intervenes and saves her. Conan fights Thog with all his might, but is scarcely harming the demon's supernatural form, while receiving hideous wounds in the coils of its pseudopods and tentacles. However, Conan manages to pierce what he perceives as the head of the monster and throws it down a well. Conan frees Natala, who sets forth to help him, but he is rapidly dying. Fortunately, the Brythunian girl soon brings him a jade goblet full of golden wine, retrieved from a room with a dreaming woman of Xuthal in it. The beverage proves to be a life-giving elixir briefly mentioned by Thalis in a previous conversation, which miraculously heals all of Conan's wounds. Finally, the couple retrieve enough food and water for their journey through the rest of the desert. The two depart while Natala jokingly blames Conan for having aroused Thalis' lustful nature. He retorts playfully about the jealous nature of women.

• The “Essential Conan” Trilogy

• All of My “Conan the Barbarian” Reviews

• All of My “Conan Chronicles” Reviews