Today’s Book Club is a little different. Instead of book reviews it features some ruminations about books and the enjoyment of reading them. To be sure, you will find recommendations about specific books or book series that you might want to read—or maybe not! Today’s post kicks off with my answer to a reader’s question amount new books from your truly…
Today’s Post by Joe Farace
“Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very’; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.”–Mark Twain
I love reading but just as much as reading books is fun, writing books is even more fun because I get to share some of the knowledge that I’ve acquired over the years with others. That includes some of the “Stupid Photographer’s Tricks” that I’ve learned from the school of hard knocks as well as being able to share my thoughts and experiences in more depth and more detail than I can express in the posts I’ve been writing here for all-these-many years. So when I’m asked a question like:
When are you going to write a new book? from Harry from Vancouver, BC. To answer this question, I’d like to quote former Maryland Senator Barbara Mikulski, now a Johns Hopkins University professor of public policy, who, when asked why she never married, replied: “Nobody ever asked me.” I say this sadly because I dearly love the process of writing books. It’s true that I haven’t recently pitched any book ideas mainly because post-COVID the photo book marketplace changed considerably and based on my experience pitching book ideas during this time it seems like a waste of my time. Believe me I have been down the “Lucy and the football” path with way too many photo book publishers and I just can’t get motivated to try again. In the not-so-distant past, a few publishers approached me about writing books but the deals never closed for reasons I really don’t know. I wasn’t being a prima donna and I’m not picky about money—just pay me something. Part of the reason may be (but I don’t know for sure) is that these days it seems that some/most/all photo book publishers don’t really want to sell the books; they want the authors to do all the work. So if you have 100,000 or more Instagram followers, you can get a book published to sell to your fans. I only have 2500 Instagram followers and 168 YouTube subscribers and neither is enough to interest any book publisher. So to answer Harry’s question, I don’t know.
Hows my TBR List Coming?
Several books that Mary ordered for me are starting to arrive. That includes a new paperback copy of Rex Stout’s Three Doors to Death that showed up on my front porch and I just finished reading it. Its a typical wonderful Nero Wolfe mystery and I eagerly gobbled it up. Other books on her list that haven’t arrived yet include Michael Connelly’s The Waiting, as well as Preston & Child’s sequel to their time travel novel of Angel of Vengeance. I’m also looking forward to Jonathan and Jesse Kellerman’s The Lost Coast. But next up is a book by two authors I was not familiar with—John Shen Yen Nee and SJ Rozon. The Murder of Mr. Ma is a mystery set in 1920’s London and in the first few pages that I’ve read seems, the book seems pretty interesting.
Right after jumping into the Nero Wolfe novel. I finally got around to David Housewright’s Man in the Water that’s been on my TBR list for a while. I consider this to be the best book he’s written in the “McKenzie” series, and feel it’s almost as good a read and maybe as good, as the five books from his Holland Taylor series, which for some reason, Housewright stopped writing. Poor sales? I don;t know but I highly recommend Man in the Water and if you can find, buy or borrow any one of the Holland Taylor series books, I strongly recommend you read them. You’ll thank me later. In case you were wondering what the book’s titles are, here’s a list i(and links) in order of publication, although you can read them in any order; I did:
The Holland Taylor series
And for those still keeping score my count of “Books Read in 2024” stands at 30 as I wrote this.
Time and the Rani
Time and the Rani is name of the first series in the 24th season of the British science fiction television series Doctor Who, which was first broadcast in four weekly parts from September 7 to 28, 1987. What’s that got to do with books? Not much but I’m a big fan of Doctor Who.
I think that when a book is written can have a big effect on your perception of that book. Take 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, for example, which was one of the selections of the science fiction book club I belonged to. The first edition of the book was published in 1871 when few people had any idea of what the South Pole was like. In the book when the Nautilus reaches the South Pole, Jules Verne describes it as “brimming with life” and describes all of the flora and fauna found there in great detail. Yet, when I asked two people who actually lived and worked at the South Pole, what it was like they described it as “white nothingness.”
Another book on my TBR list was The Return of Tarzan, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ sequel to Tarzan of The Apes that I was able to pick up on eBay. Like the first book, it’s a rip-roaring yarn and if the dialog seems more than a little stilted keep in mind that the book was published in 1915 and maybe that’s the way people talked back then. Maybe not because Burroughs wasn’t all that great at writing dialog in the first place. Similarly near the end of the book when Tarzan gets to “the city of gold” he encounters what at first seems like the title character from SHE from H. Rider Haggard’s novel—it got me excited but the woman in question and her tribe turned out to be a race of people who were human/ape hybrids. While that might seem weird but you might remember that H,G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau, which feature human/animal hybrids, was published in 1896. As I said at the beginning of this section, it’s all about time. All of which does not make The Return of Tarzan any less of a fun read and unlike the first book, it does not end in a cliffhanger,
At The Movies
She (1935) was one of the late Ray Harryhausen’s favorite movies and some time ago he was involved in curating a colorized DVD version of the film along with another favorite of his, Things to Come (1936,) which was included on the same disc. If you can find the set of discs they also have the films available to view in Black and white. The transfer of She was pretty good; Things to Come, not so much. The Criterion Collection’s version of Things to Come is superb and it’s one of my favorite movies too.
She was remade in 1965 with Ursula Andress in the title role and while this version adheres more closely to the book than the 1935 version and Ms. Andress may be more appealing to modern audiences than Helen Gahagan was in the original, there is an undeniable charm in the original. (See an upcoming Joe’s Movie Club post about remakes.) Neither one of these versions of the film seem to be currently available, although used copies may be available on eBay. I saw DVDs of the 1965 version available for around $15 if you want to chase’em down.