Tales of the Black Widowers (The Black Widowers #1) 3Stars

 

This review is written with a GPL 4.0 license and the rights contained therein shall supersede all TOS by any and all websites in regards to copying and sharing without proper authorization and permissions. Crossposted at WordPress & Blogspot by Bookstooge’s Exalted Permission

Title: Tales of the Black Widowers
Series: The Black Widowers #1
Authors: Isaac Asimov
Rating: 3 of 5 Stars
Genre: Mystery
Pages: 179
Words: 69K

This was a collection of short stories (as are all the books in this series) and so I knew that I would enjoy them. Asimov was an absolute master of the short story, and whether it was in SF or Mystery (as in here), he knew how to convey the most info in the shortest amount of words and STILL knock your lights out with a hidden right hook to the jaw.

So you would think this would have had a higher rating. I did too. And it would have, except for one thing, that was consistent across all the stories. The members of the club are petty and argue about the stupidest little thing, and generally made me wonder WHY they were all in the same club. They did not seem to hate each other, but they also didn’t seem to click with each other like friends do. If this was my introduction to friendship, I would want no part of it.

Without that aspect, the stories and mini-mysteries would have gotten an easy 4stars from me. Quick and punchy and never overstaying it’s welcome. Asimov also talks about each story, where it was published and something interesting about it. But! And this is most important, he does it AFTER the story is done. I get to read the story, make up my own mind about it and then he throws his own light on it. I’ve read too many anthologies where the editor thought their words and ideas were the most important and put them before the story, thus ruining the whole thing for me. Asimov was smart enough to know that The Stories the Thing. Because of that, I was able to enjoy what he wrote about them. Most of the stuff he talked about was title changes. The mystery magazine would change the title and he’d talk about why he agreed or didn’t with that decision. It also led to talking about whether he kept the title change for the story in his own book or used the original. It was all done with a very light hand and there wasn’t a note of bitterness or acrimony in it all.

I am looking forward to the rest of the series but am hoping the members become less pigheaded to each other.

★★★☆☆

From Wikipedia.org

This book is the first of six that describe mysteries solved by the Black Widowers, based on a literary dining club Asimov belonged to known as the Trap Door Spiders. It collects twelve stories by Asimov, nine reprinted from mystery magazines and three previously unpublished, together with a general introduction, and an afterword following each story by the author. Each story involves the club members' knowledge of trivia.

• "The Acquisitive Chuckle"

• "Ph as in Phony"

• "Truth to Tell"

• "Go, Little Book!"

• "Early Sunday Morning"

• "The Obvious Factor"

• "The Pointing Finger"

• "Miss What?"

• "The Lullaby of Broadway"

• "Yankee Doodle Went to Town"

• "The Curious Omission"

• "Out of Sight"

• All of My Asimov Reviews

Lesley Castle 3Stars

 

This review is written with a GPL 4.0 license and the rights contained therein shall supersede all TOS by any and all websites in regards to copying and sharing without proper authorization and permissions. Crossposted at WordPress & Blogspot by Bookstooge’s Exalted Permission

Title: Lesley Castle
Series: ----------
Author: Jane Austen
Rating: 3 of 5 Stars
Genre: Juvenilia unfinished story
Pages: 35
Words: 10K

I am glad to be reading these juvenilia stories by Austen, but between them being unfinished and them being written in her teens, it leaves a lot to be desired.

That being said, she shows more talent as a raw teenager than about 9/10ths of the adult hacks today who think that writing a book is just putting words down on paper. If you want to write a book, then I highly encourage you to read this. If what you are writing isn’t even this good, you should give up. Because nobody wants to read your crap and you should stop clogging up the book pipeline. Let the good books get written. And if that hurts your feelings or makes you feel “bad”, then you should also give up, because nobody has time for pansy writers with paper thin skin.

This post has been brought to you by the Bookstooge Wants To Hurt Your Feelings Co., LLC, Inc.

★★★☆☆

From Bookstooge

A series of letters between multiple overlapping female acquaintances. No overarching plot and simply ends randomly after the tenth letter.

• Jane Austen’s Minor Works (2013 Review)

• All My “Jane Austen” Reviews

• Reading Austen 2025 Master Post

Glasses of Urza - MTG 4E

 

I was never the type of player who could strategize well enough to take advantage of a card like this. Knowing what my opponent had never gave me enough to turn the game to my favor. Black had a lot of cards that would allow you to force your opponent to discard, which this card would synergize with quite well, but I never played black back in the day either, so I was STILL out of luck :-D

Starfishers (Starfishers #2) 3Stars

 

This review is written with a GPL 4.0 license and the rights contained therein shall supersede all TOS by any and all websites in regards to copying and sharing without proper authorization and permissions. Crossposted at WordPress & Blogspot by Bookstooge’s Exalted Permission

Title: Starfishers
Series: Starfishers #2
Author: Glen Cook
Rating: 3 of 5 Stars
Genre: SF
Pages: 211
Words: 72K

The boy narrator from the previous book is now just one of two undercover agents for Luna Command, the military machine of humanity. They have infiltrated a Starfisher world ship to discover its secrets for all of humanity. The Sangaree, the humanoid aliens also from the previous book, have also sent their own undercover agent. She ends up outing BenRabi and Mouse but they for some inexplicable reason don’t out her. This allows her to get a Sangaree Clan fleet to attack the world ship and then there’s some space sharks (I’m not kidding) and there’s big battles, blah, blah, blah.

The whole time BenRabi has been having an existential crisis and he’s as whiny as a 15 year old. It gets real old real fast. I wanted to slap him across the face so many times and tell him to grow up and stop being such a baby. Why Cook chose to write him this way is beyond me.

In the end BenRabi chooses to abandon Luna Command and join in with the Starfishers. Which is what they also wanted. However, Mouse is Luna Commands long term bullyboy BenRabi going over was all part of his plan. Aye yi yi.

This wasn’t a waste of my time and I actually enjoyed this a tiny bit more than the first book, but my goodness, BenRabi made it very hard to enjoy the story. It almost seems like Cook is deliberately writing his SF to be as unpalatable as possible. Why, I have zero idea. Maybe Cook has a split personality and the side that wrote SF hated everybody, but especially the people who read his SF? OR! Cook didn’t actually write his SF. He subcontracted it out to guy named Vladimir Gonzalez from China who only wrote in Bavarian and then used a corgi to re-translate it into english. Hey, that works for me! It neatly explains everything.

The REAL Glen Cook

★★★☆☆

From the Publisher

Starfish: Treasure troves of power. They were creatures of fusion energy, ancient, huge, intelligent, drifting in herds on the edge of the galaxy, producing their ambergris, the substance precious to man and the man-like Sangaree alike. In deep, starless space the herds were protected by the great harvestships of the Seiners, or Starfishers - the independent, non-Confederation people who dared to skirt the deadly boundaries of Stars' End and battle the Sangaree. It is with them on the harvestship Danion that Confederation agents Mouse Storm and Moyshe BenRabi have to fly and fight, probing mystery and myth. And where BenRabi, man of many names, must surrender his dreams and his mind itself to the golden dragons of space and their shepherds, the gathering... Starfishers.

A New ERA Begins

I have been using ereaders since ‘08. However, in 2017 I bought a Kindle Oasis. It was everything I wanted in an ereader. It was small and light enough to hold comfortably in one hand. It had a warm front light so I didn’t need to sit directly under a lamp to see what I was reading. It worked with Calibre without a hitch. Most importantly, it had BUTTONS. I hate touching a screen when I am reading. Mainly because I half the time I am eating and my fingers might be greasy, etc. Thus, for the last 7 ½ years I have enjoyed ereading bliss. Sadly, the battery is beginning to wear out on the Oasis (it has the bulk of the battery in the cover) and I have to charge it twice a week now (when I first bought it, it would last from 7-10 days on a charge). It has also begun to show signs of software degradation as well as hardware degradation (screen might take a double tap to select something, or a button will have to be pressed several times to get it to respond). I realized it was time to get a new ereader.

The landscape has changed dramatically since ‘17 though. Amazon no longer makes an ereader with buttons. They have also begun seriously locking down their kindle devices in much the same way that Apple has screwed their Iwhatever users over. So a new kindle wasn’t an option this time around. In fact, most ereader makers had stopped making devices with buttons. I ended up going with the Pocketbook Era, a device from ‘22 that still had buttons.

I knew there would be a learning curve and I had hoped that any issues would all fall into that category. One positive thing from the get-go was that I didn’t need to register the device or create an account at Pocketbook to use the Era, unlike any kindle device. I created my various collections (series or authors) and then began moving books onto the device from Calibre. I only moved a couple at first, as I didn’t know how things would go and I am glad I started small.

My first, and probably biggest, issue with the Era was that I couldn’t go into a collection and then add multiple books to it. Everything on the Era is built around books as individual files and how everything is handled is based on that. That meant that I had to select each individual book and move it into the collection I wanted. That is totally bassackwards! It was also incredibly frustating as I had to do this for all 80’ish books. There is a plugin for Calibre called Pocketbook Collections that was created to take care of this problem, but most plugins are created by people who live this kind of stuff and so what seems easy, commonsense and “duh” to the creators are like calculus problems for the rest of us, while blindfolded. I gave it 10min of my time and then gave up. I was already frustrated and trying to do something “more” while frustrated would just lead to more frustrations. So I moved each individual book into its proper collection, one by *&^% one. I will not do that again. Which means I will have to conquer the plugin. I’ve conquered other Calibre plugins, so I know I can conquer this one too. The slight hitch is that I have recently quit Mobileread.com (where the Calibre and plugin help forums are) because I told someone from Massachusetts to step in front of a bus. That’s not acceptable behavior and so I closed down my account so there wouldn’t be any repeats of it. I can’t act like that and I won’t accept it in myself. But that means its up to me and my pal Google (the lying piece of trash) to figure this thing out. I will, albeit very slowly. But I work best in first gear anyway. It’s just annoying when you know you could be going 60mph.

So everything was loaded up and I got the light settings how I wanted, the text size and spacing just how I wanted and the margins how I wanted. I was good to go! Then I experienced the second issue.
The bleeping buttons, of all things. They were not the softpress buttons like all of the kindles I have used to date, but were much more “haptic” (a hard press until it literally “clicks”) like the Barnes and Noble Simple Touch of years gone by. The reason that is a problem is that kind of hard pressing does a number on your thumb after a while. Considering that I will read for hours at a time, necessitating a LOT of button pushing, I could tell my thumb would end up hurting after an hour or so. Now, the Era also has a touch enabled screen so I could touch the screen, but I don’t like being forced that way.
That’s it, my only problems. Both are surmountable and something I’ll get use to. But for anyone thinking about the Era, they need to be aware of those issues.

The biggest thing I like about this Era is that it is bigger than my Oasis. That means I can use the same font size and have more words on the page to read. And the Era actually weighs a little less. More words on the page means more reading between page turns, which adds up to more time reading overall. While it might only mean an extra minute or two per book, given the number of books I read per year means an extra book or two per year. That’s not a lot and for some people it would mean nothing but that they are worrying about numbers. But I LIKE to read and getting the opportunity to read even one extra book a year is a wonderful thing.

As I begin to use the Era on a full time basis, I’m sure I’ll stumble over other negatives and positives. But this is my reader now and I’ll simply have to accept those for the quirks they are. 

My Week XX

 

I hope Netnanny doesn't block this post from me!

The time change here in the US happened this past weekend. "Springing" forward always does a number on me, but man, this time around, it hit me harder than it ever has before. It also messed Mrs B up too. I ended up waking up Sunday morning at 9:45am (I'm usually up at 5am) and that was when Mrs B finally got to sleep. Needless to say, we didn't go to church that morning. Of course, church was having issues with their equipment so there was no livestream.

The discombobulation continued throughout the week. Several days I fell asleep before 8pm and then woke up at 2am. THAT made for some miserable work days. But to balance things out, it was mostly sunny and warm! No snow shoes, hurrrahhh! That made my mood much better. I am hoping to reset my internal clock this weekend.

I also bought a box of Twinkies. That really helped my mood :-D Sugar and fat sure do taste yummy.

My reading has been really off. Sleeping such odd hours has made it almost impossible to focus on reading for hours on end like I'm used to. The flip side of that is that I've been able to do a bit of blogging. I'm fully 3 weeks ahead with some extra random days in April already done. That makes me feel good.

Speaking of feeling good. I am in a much better place than last month but I'm still pretty fragile. Kind of like I'd gotten a wound over winter and it has finally scabbed over and begun healing under the surface. Unfortunately, I've still got a couple of situations ahead of me that might just rip the scab off and force me to start healing all over again. But I hope it goes better than my pessimistic self believes :-)

I just want to have enough energy to read again. I think that will be my goal for the next two weeks. 

The Courageous Exploits of Doctor Syn (Doctor Syn #6) 3Stars

 

This review is written with a GPL 4.0 license and the rights contained therein shall supersede all TOS by any and all websites in regards to copying and sharing without proper authorization and permissions. Crossposted at WordPress & Blogspot by Bookstooge’s Exalted Permission

Title: The Courageous Exploits of Doctor Syn
Series: Doctor Syn #6
Author: Arthur Russell Thorndike
Rating: 3 of 5 Stars
Genre: Historical Fiction
Pages: 199
Words: 75K

Somehow I misnumbered the series and got ahead of myself with this book. I didn’t notice a thing though, so I suspect the episodic nature of this series insulates it from problems like that.

I have NO idea why this is called “The Courageous Exploits…”. There’s nothing courageous about a smuggler of liquor out to avoid taxes. We also find out that when one of the Dymchurch gang disagrees with the Scarecrow, if they aren’t killed, they and their family are exiled to an island off the coast of France where one of the Scarecrow’s suppliers lives in luxury. They have a decent life too, but that is where their life is going to stay. It’s always good to be reminded that Doctor Syn was the pirate captain Clegg and he’s as hard and unrelenting now as the Scarecrow as he ever was as Clegg.

Syn has his usual adventures with traitors and new authority figures. Thankfully, there seems to be no new romance on the horizon. That is good because we all know it wouldn’t turn out well and the poor woman would just die or be killed or kidnapped and killed or something that would end with “She’s daid Jim”.

★★★☆☆

From Wikipedia

In 1781, Doctor Syn continues his adventures as the Scarecrow of Romney Marsh, foiling all attempts to catch him and to break up the Dymchurch smugglers.

The Wild Adventures of Cthulhu Vol 1 (Cthulhu Anthology #21) 3Stars

 

This review is written with a GPL 4.0 license and the rights contained therein shall supersede all TOS by any and all websites in regards to copying and sharing without proper authorization and permissions. Crossposted at WordPress, Blogspot, & Librarything by Bookstooge’s Exalted Permission

Title: The Wild Adventures of Cthulhu Vol 1
Series: Cthulhu Anthology #21
Editor: Will Murray
Rating: 3 of 5 Stars
Genre: Cosmic Horror
Pages: 199
Words: 66K

Will Murray wrote Cthulhu short stories for various magazines and collections and they all had the overarching element of being connected by an organization that was trying to prevent the intrusion of the elder gods into our dimension. Each story was standalone, not necessarily dependent on previous stories OR future stories and if one story contradicted how our world ended, it didn’t matter, because what did matter was that the elder gods WOULD break through, period.

I had only read one of these stories before, so the novelty of them all was pretty good. My usual complaint occurred, which didn’t surprise me. One of the top men of the top secret organization (CEES? I can’t remember what ridiculous thing it was called. It made sense when reading but as soon as I stopped I simply forgot because it had no real world application) was a devout Christian and when the elder gods broke into our world and were eradicating humanity, said leader went insane, spouted some specific blasphemies about God and Jesus and then blew his head off with his service pistol. What concerned me about it was that it didn’t concern me.

I am thinking that I have gotten too used to such things, and that isn’t good. So I’ve got one more Cthulhu anthology on my ereader and once I’ve read that, I’m going to take a break from the cosmic horror for the rest of the year. Let my standards reset to what they should be. Repeated exposure to blasphemy is doing what it always does, it dulls and I refuse to accept that in my life.

★★★☆☆

Table of Contents

Introduction

To Clear the Earth

The Eldridge Collection

Rude Awakening

A Trillion Young

Static

The Sothis Radiant

Dark Redeemer

What Brings the Void

The Hour of Our Triumph

Black Fire

• All of My “Cthulhu Anthology” Reviews

The Lost and the Lurking (Silver John #3) 3Stars

 

This review is written with a GPL 4.0 license and the rights contained therein shall supersede all TOS by any and all websites in regards to copying and sharing without proper authorization and permissions. Crossposted at WordPress & Blogspot by Bookstooge’s Exalted Permission

Title: The Lost and the Lurking
Series: Silver John #3
Author: Manly Wade Wellman
Rating: 3 of 5 Stars
Genre: Folk Fantasy
Pages: 178
Words: 56K

Silver John is tasked by the gubbamint to investigate a town. Turns out the entire town is in thrall to a witch woman and she has BIG plans.

John does his usual self-effacing thing, calls on demonic powers (but supposedly benign) and ends up letting a black preacher save the souls of Wolver when the witch woman accidentally kills herself.

Yeah, this story was about evil devouring itself. John does very little, just a nudge here and there. Exactly as in the previous two novels.

The only difference here is that Wellman lets his politics peek through for just a couple of sentences. I was disappointed in him for doing so because he hadn’t done so before. It felt very whiny.

I gave this the same rating as the previous Silver John stories because it was a template and just like the previous ones. As long as you can deal with that aspect of these stories, then you’ve nothing to fear from diving into this series.

I usually like to include the covers for these, but I simply couldn’t find one that was even halfway decent. The big ones were just smaller versions stretched out and pixelated OR they were pictures of an old paperback with all the attendant damage an old book cover has. That’s actually what I’m using here but with it being smaller it isn’t so noticeable.

★★★☆☆

From the Publisher and Bookstooge

Country folk, especially backcountry folk, are like to be a mite suspicious of strangers. But a plain man with a civil manner and no highfalutin airs can count on a neighborly reception from simple, decent people, so when the natives of Wolver looked to be fixing to whale on Silver John, he reckoned maybe it wasn't the sleepy little hamlet it seemed. But then, if it was, he had no business there anyhow.

The man who picked the guitar with the silver strings had seen some doings in this mountain country, and had a reputation with some almighty powerful souls, not all of them flesh and blood. So when the government got curious about the goings-on in Wolver, it wasn't so strange that they should have asked Silver John to see what he could see, nor at all peculiar that the wanderer had shouldered his pack and his guitar and hiked up the trace of a road to take a gander.

Wolver had a desolated look, from the smoking trash piles outside the town to the tumbledown ruined church. The children in the grimy yards stared at him dully, while their elders ignored him or watched him with undisguised hostility. John had no quarrel with them, but it sure looked like they were set on picking one with him.

With Tiphaine the witchwoman in talks with foreign agents to bring down the United States, John must call on all his arcane knowledge to not only save the deceived people of Wolver and his own life, but the American Way of Life itself.

Giant Tortoise - MTG 4E

 

Hey look at that, the Foglio's can draw something that isn't all cartoony and jiggly! Color me surprised. I wouldn't have guessed that in a million years. Of course, back in the day I never paid attention to who the artists are anyway. That's changing as I'm doing these posts though.