I didn't realize that The Birds, Rebecca and Don't Look Now were all written by the same person. I first sought out the movie Don't Look Now after Alan Moore referenced it in a Swamp Thing story. I may buy this new collection. Thanks for bringing it to my attention!
I ordered After Midnight within hours of reading about it. For whatever reason, it wasn't to be delivered until November 26, but I received it today. So far I have read only the introduction, then skipped directly to "The Birds" which is the fifth story in the collection. Stephen King's introduction was everything I hoped and expected. I will undoubtedly be paraphrasing much of what he said for years to come (especially the bits about "spoiler" warnings and why short story collections are less popular than novels. I knew as soon as I started to read that "The Birds" would be quite different from the movie, which, as King puts it, is "overloaded with a love-match between Hollywood pretty people." Here's how it opens...
On December the third the wind changed overnight and it was winter. Until then the autumn had been mellow, soft. The leaves had lingered on the trees, golden red, and the hedgerows were still green. The earth was rich where the plough had turned it.
John Woman by Walter Mosley. Cornelius is a teenager who's mother leaves home and his father is bed ridden. He takes over his dad's job to bring some income in. When his father dies he takes on a new identity to helphide a crime he was involved in. he ends up a history professor at a college in the Southwest. Most of the other professors in his department hate him and are trying to get him expelled. That being said this novel is actually about history and its kind of hard to explain it, but I've really been enjoying it.
HAWKES HARBOR by S.E. Hinton: I just finished reading this. I burned through it once it came to my attention and I realized what it was. It was originally intended, in 1999, to be a part of HarperCollins' line of Dark Shadows novels, but was rejected by the publisher. Instead of letting it go, Hinton reworked all of the character and place names and released it as a novel in its own right. I'll have more to say about it on the "Dark Shadows" thread, but here's a LINK to what Danny Horn had to say about it on his "Dark Shadows Every Day" blog. In what will probably turn out to be a "tl;dnr" situation for most of you, he sets about answering the question, "Does the story of Dark Shadows actually make any goddamn sense?" In addition to transcribing two large chunks of text, Horn also quotes from several online reviews from Goodreads and Amazon as well as professional reviews, all written be people who obviously have no clue this is, for all intents and purposes, a TV soap opera tie-in. I don't know how non-fans would feel about it, but I, for one, loved it.
I've just finished reading Six Four, by Hideo Yokoyama (translated by Jonathan Lloyd-Davies). It's a crime novel set in a small city/large town in Japan. The protagonist is Mikami, a cop who was in the C.I.D. for years, but has recently been transferred to become the head of media relations. His home life is complicated as his teenage daughter ran away from home three months before, and he and his wife have heard nothing from her since. His work life becomes complicated when there is a sudden resurgence of interest in a case that he helped work on fourteen years before in which a little girl was kidnapped and done away with, and the kidnapper got away with the money. Mikami is caught between the press who accuse him of withholding information, and his former C.I.D. colleagues, who seem to be concealing something about the case. It's an interesting story and a good read.
SANTA LIVES! - Five Conclusive Arguments for the Existence of Santa Claus by Ellis Weiner: From the dustjacket: "Using many of the same arguments -- and even some of the same words -- employed by people much smarter than he to answer other, even harder querstions, Weiner offers a brilliant step-by-step analysis that is as full of insight as it is insightful. His investigation tounches upon a myriad of topics, including the existence of napkins, the differences between Birthday cake and fruitcake, and whether Santa is American." His argumenys are ontological, causal, teleological, experimental and moral, as well as several lesser arguments. Worth reading.
Other than A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens wrote four other Christmas books: The Chimes, The Cricket on the Hearth, The Battle of Life and The Haunted Man. In addition to those, he wrote another 14 Christmas-themed short stories or essays. Every year I try to read at least one of them on Christmas day, and this year it is "A Christmas Tree."
I just finished reading The Mighty Avengers vs. the 1970s, by Paul Cornell, a book that I received as a Christmas present. Interesting stuff. I didn't start reading DC or Marvel comics regularly until about 1975 or so, apart from some reprints that I've read over the years, so parts of this covers comics that I am unfamiliar with. the rest of it brings back memories of comics that I read when I was a kid and gives some background information that I never knew. A fun read.
I've just finished reading Phasers on Stun!, by Ryan Britt, a 2022 book that I received as a Christmas gift. It's a history of the various incarnations of Star Trek from The Original Series through the date of publication. It's very interesting, I learned a lot, even about things that I thought I already knew all about. It also covered a lot of things that I knew nothing about.
To clarify, I've seen all of The Original Series, The Animated Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager, as well as all of The Original Series, Next Generation and "Kelvin" movies. I started getting burned out on Trek towards the end of Voyager. I watched the first season of Enterprise, but the show failed to connect with me, and I haven't seen much of the rest of that show, except for the Borg and Mirror Universe episodes, as well as the series finale. (And let me say that if I was a huge Enterprise fan, that finale would have p*ssed me off.) I've not seen anything of Discovery, Short Treks, Picard, Lower Decks, Prodigy, Strange New Worlds or any other Trek that may have come out since 2022. I mention this only because that while I'm not one to worry about spoilers, if you're the kind of person that does, this book - while it's not jam-packed full of spoilers - may discuss aspects of series that you haven't seen yet.
All that said, I enjoyed this book immensely and recommend it to anyone who's interested in Trek.
I just read Strange Pictures by Uketsu -- a Christmas gift from Kathy. It's a mystery (or series of mysteries, connected) where the keys are all in pictures drawn, sometimes at the scene of the crime, sometimes in anticipation of it. It's a wierd little book, and goes by quickly. The translation itself reminds me a bit of subtitles of Japanese anime -- there's a bluntness to the emotional content that I'm not sure is in the original text (and is a cultural difference) or if it's an inadequacy of English to capture subtleties of Japanese words for emotion. (One character is described as "literally jumping for joy," and in a native-English book, I'd write it off as bad writing, but this is so of a piece with other stiffly translated Japanese works that I wonder if it's not simply a cultural difference.)
Anyway, awkwardness aside, it's breezy as hell. I read this in two days, turning page after page as the mysteries in the pictures revealed themselves.
Replies
I didn't realize that The Birds, Rebecca and Don't Look Now were all written by the same person. I first sought out the movie Don't Look Now after Alan Moore referenced it in a Swamp Thing story. I may buy this new collection. Thanks for bringing it to my attention!
Daphne du Maurier Wrote Butt-Kicking Horror
I may buy this new collection.
I ordered After Midnight within hours of reading about it. For whatever reason, it wasn't to be delivered until November 26, but I received it today. So far I have read only the introduction, then skipped directly to "The Birds" which is the fifth story in the collection. Stephen King's introduction was everything I hoped and expected. I will undoubtedly be paraphrasing much of what he said for years to come (especially the bits about "spoiler" warnings and why short story collections are less popular than novels. I knew as soon as I started to read that "The Birds" would be quite different from the movie, which, as King puts it, is "overloaded with a love-match between Hollywood pretty people." Here's how it opens...
On December the third the wind changed overnight and it was winter. Until then the autumn had been mellow, soft. The leaves had lingered on the trees, golden red, and the hedgerows were still green. The earth was rich where the plough had turned it.
John Woman by Walter Mosley. Cornelius is a teenager who's mother leaves home and his father is bed ridden. He takes over his dad's job to bring some income in. When his father dies he takes on a new identity to helphide a crime he was involved in. he ends up a history professor at a college in the Southwest. Most of the other professors in his department hate him and are trying to get him expelled. That being said this novel is actually about history and its kind of hard to explain it, but I've really been enjoying it.
HAWKES HARBOR by S.E. Hinton: I just finished reading this. I burned through it once it came to my attention and I realized what it was. It was originally intended, in 1999, to be a part of HarperCollins' line of Dark Shadows novels, but was rejected by the publisher. Instead of letting it go, Hinton reworked all of the character and place names and released it as a novel in its own right. I'll have more to say about it on the "Dark Shadows" thread, but here's a LINK to what Danny Horn had to say about it on his "Dark Shadows Every Day" blog. In what will probably turn out to be a "tl;dnr" situation for most of you, he sets about answering the question, "Does the story of Dark Shadows actually make any goddamn sense?" In addition to transcribing two large chunks of text, Horn also quotes from several online reviews from Goodreads and Amazon as well as professional reviews, all written be people who obviously have no clue this is, for all intents and purposes, a TV soap opera tie-in. I don't know how non-fans would feel about it, but I, for one, loved it.
I've just finished reading Six Four, by Hideo Yokoyama (translated by Jonathan Lloyd-Davies). It's a crime novel set in a small city/large town in Japan. The protagonist is Mikami, a cop who was in the C.I.D. for years, but has recently been transferred to become the head of media relations. His home life is complicated as his teenage daughter ran away from home three months before, and he and his wife have heard nothing from her since. His work life becomes complicated when there is a sudden resurgence of interest in a case that he helped work on fourteen years before in which a little girl was kidnapped and done away with, and the kidnapper got away with the money. Mikami is caught between the press who accuse him of withholding information, and his former C.I.D. colleagues, who seem to be concealing something about the case. It's an interesting story and a good read.
SANTA LIVES! - Five Conclusive Arguments for the Existence of Santa Claus by Ellis Weiner: From the dustjacket: "Using many of the same arguments -- and even some of the same words -- employed by people much smarter than he to answer other, even harder querstions, Weiner offers a brilliant step-by-step analysis that is as full of insight as it is insightful. His investigation tounches upon a myriad of topics, including the existence of napkins, the differences between Birthday cake and fruitcake, and whether Santa is American." His argumenys are ontological, causal, teleological, experimental and moral, as well as several lesser arguments. Worth reading.
Other than A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens wrote four other Christmas books: The Chimes, The Cricket on the Hearth, The Battle of Life and The Haunted Man. In addition to those, he wrote another 14 Christmas-themed short stories or essays. Every year I try to read at least one of them on Christmas day, and this year it is "A Christmas Tree."
I just finished reading The Mighty Avengers vs. the 1970s, by Paul Cornell, a book that I received as a Christmas present. Interesting stuff. I didn't start reading DC or Marvel comics regularly until about 1975 or so, apart from some reprints that I've read over the years, so parts of this covers comics that I am unfamiliar with. the rest of it brings back memories of comics that I read when I was a kid and gives some background information that I never knew. A fun read.
I just read Strange Pictures by Uketsu -- a Christmas gift from Kathy. It's a mystery (or series of mysteries, connected) where the keys are all in pictures drawn, sometimes at the scene of the crime, sometimes in anticipation of it. It's a wierd little book, and goes by quickly. The translation itself reminds me a bit of subtitles of Japanese anime -- there's a bluntness to the emotional content that I'm not sure is in the original text (and is a cultural difference) or if it's an inadequacy of English to capture subtleties of Japanese words for emotion. (One character is described as "literally jumping for joy," and in a native-English book, I'd write it off as bad writing, but this is so of a piece with other stiffly translated Japanese works that I wonder if it's not simply a cultural difference.)
Anyway, awkwardness aside, it's breezy as hell. I read this in two days, turning page after page as the mysteries in the pictures revealed themselves.
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