The Silver Witch by Paula Brackston

Rating: WARTY!

I love the Welsh accent and I enjoyed listening to the reader, Marisa Calin's understated voice in this audiobook, but no matter how sweet her voice was, and it was honeyed, it couldn't make up for a ponderous plot that seemed to be going nowhere even during those rare times when it was actually moving. I was quite engrossed in the story to begin with, but by the time I got halfway through and still nothing really interesting was happening, I couldn't stand the lethargy and inertia anymore, and I ditched the book in favor of something that actually interested me.

So, the story! Tilda Fordwells is an albino woman (why, we never get to learn - maybe just to make her stand out?) who is somehow tied to another albino witch and seer who lived in this same area of Wales in the tenth(?) century. The story is told in two pieces - third person present: Tilda Fordwells, and first person present, but in the past: Seren Arianaidd. To me this is annoying, although for the sake of enjoying this story I let it slide, but to me it seems wrong. I am not a fan of first person at all, but the Tilda story, if the author had to do this, should have been the first person present, and the Seren part should have been in third person past. It made no sense, ass-backwards as it was.

Tilda moves into a home she was going to share with her husband, but he died in a vehicle accident a year prior to the story beginning. Tilda starts having visions of an ancient people and a ghoulish presence. Meanwhile, there's an archaeological dig going on over on this island in the middle of the lake nearby where she lives, and a grave is uncovered with two bodies. It seems obvious who the bodies are: Seren's rival for the Prince's love, named Wenna (spelling uncertain - audiobook!) and her scheming brother, and Princess Wenna who is now out for revenge on Seren's modern ancestor, which was a bit unoriginal and pathetic, and the haunting part of the story made little sense.

The real problem though, was the Quaalude pacing of the story and the endless repetitive detail. We were treated to Tilda and Seren's every random thought and mundane action like it was some miraculous event worth witnessing and deliberating over repeatedly. No, it wasn't, and what was a minor irritation to begin with became a serious impediment to focusing on the story.

After listening to half of this novel, carried largely by Calin's voice and barely at all by the story, I reached a point where I simply didn't care what became of any of these people and ditched it. I could listen to Calin forever, but not if she's reading this stuff! I started re-watching Torchwood for my Welsh accent fix and the truth is I like Gwen Cooper far more than ever I could like Seren or Tilda!

North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell

Rating: WARTY!

This is an 1855 novel about teenager Margaret Hale, who is forced to leave her beloved parsonage when her father rebels against his church. He moves his family north to the fictional county of Darkshire (seriously? LOL!) in the industrial town of Milton, where she is miserable. My next novel will be set in Lightshire in the village of Tilmon and the teenager will be ecstatic! There is actually no reason given (or if there was, I missed it) as to why they move so far. He plans on taking up work as a tutor, but it seems there would be a much better opportunity in the south than in the north for such work.

Anyway, there she meets John Thornton, who owns Marlborough Mills. This is one of those uninventive novels where the main female character takes an immediate dislike to the main male one, and in the end of course, marries him. It's essentially a Pride and Prejudice for the Industrial age with an ending cribbed from Jane Eyre. I came to this through the television mini-series that I saw a while back. There have been several, but the one I watched and considered pretty decent was the 2004 the BBC aired North and South, and so I figured I'd try the novel, but no joy was to be had. There were parts where the quaint way of expressing themselves back then was highly amusing, but that did not make up for the humdrum story - or rather, lack of one.

Set against a background of dire factory conditions and union organizers, the novel could have been a good one, but it was so tedious to listen to. This was an audiobook read decently by Harriet Seed, who was let down by the material and on occasion by her peculiar pronunciation proclivities with some words, such as 'trousseau'. The story was so rambling and pedantic that it took forever to get moving and never really did - not in the quarter of it that I could bear to listen to, anyhow.

I grew rapidly tired of the endlessly meandering perambulations and trivial topics, and just gave up on it. I was going to at least ride out the week listening to this, but by Thursday morning I'd had enough. Perhaps there's a story in there somewhere, but I saw none of it in the first 25% of this novel, and grew bored with waiting for it to show. Can't commend.

Elisabeth Samson Forbidden Bride by Carolyn Proctor

Rating: WARTY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This is a book that sounded interesting from the description - although there were some issues I had with it, such as this woman proudly proclaiming her wealth (which was measured in slaves), like it was some sort of an achievement rather than a shame. Given that she was the daughter of a woman who had been a slave you might have expected some empathy there, but I read none in this novel based on the life of this woman who lived in the latter half of the eighteenth century.

The book is first person which is almost never a good voice, and in this case it makes the main character seem even more self-centered and self-absorbed than she would have in third person. Additionally, the novel is too Americanized, has too modern of a sensibility, and a total lack of empathy for the slaves this 'wealthy' woman owned.

As you might guess from the title and the description, the book was far more about her romance than ever it was about the ethics of what she was doing with that life. I had hoped for better. I'd decided to give it a try and see what the author had done with it, but quite quickly discovered that I was not pleased. The story is truly humdrum and offers little in the way of interest - at least not for me.

It’s of a woman who might have been a fine business woman, but who apparently has the ethics and integrity of a Donald Trump - someone who I hope to never read about again after January 20th. For example, I had multiple problems with this part: "At nineteen, I myself already owned the coffee plantation Welgemoed, which is doing quite well, along with two hundred slaves which are my own personal property, not the plantation’s. A sense of well-being touched me when I thought of Welgemoed."

I confess I'm not sure how that distinction works: the slaves are hers, not the plantation's, when she owns the plantation, but that's not the point. This woman, Samson, has a sense of well-being knowing that she has personal ownership of 200 slaves? Frankly that made me sick, and turned me right off her. It should have made her sick, coming as she did from a family that were slaves in past generations, but evidently that impinged on her considerations not one whit. The fact that she apparently sees nothing wrong at all in this contradiction in her life is mystifying to me and apparently the author was uninterested in exploring it.

Now it may well be that this is exactly how the real Samson felt, but the fact of it - or at least the fiction of it in this book made me dislike her intensely, and it strongly dissuaded me from wanting to continue reading. At one point, for example, I read, "We employed a slave to walk a few meters before us and beat the ground with a palm frond to frighten away snakes." That's so cold and callous. If this is even remotely the truth of how she was, why should I give a damn about what happens to her or what her personal troubles are? I have to wonder why the author would include something like that. Is she deliberately trying to make her character unlikable?

The fact that the author uses meters is particularly problematic because Elisabeth Samson died in 1771 and the meter wasn't 'invented' until the early 1790s! Samson would have used an archaic Dutch measure, such as an el or a rod or most probably a voet, which is pretty much the same as a foot (the Dutch word voet means foot). The book description claims that the book is "Rich with emotion and historical detail," but quite obviously, it isn’t. I detected little of either.

It also has the occasional oddity. For example, there was a sentence which made no sense to me: "Isaac is not happy with Liesbeth’s a particularly evil neighbor who is known to have slain one of Quackoe’s slaves." I have no idea what that's supposed to mean. Liesbeth and Quakoe are characters in the novel, but the sentence makes no sense. Maybe that indefinite article needs to be removed?

As that quote a few paragraphs back revealed, one of the early properties owned by Samson was Welgemoed. That's the name used in the book, but in Dutch, the word means 'good cheer' - that's what the property was called. That's how Dutch speakers would hear it. I don't imagine the slaves would think of it that way, but the owner undoubtedly did, so given that it's a much more evocative (and hypocritical!) name in English, why use the Dutch term, like it has no real meaning? At another point I read that slaves were "strolling towards the back of the plantation house to the keuken house." Keuken is the Dutch word for kitchen (think 'cookin'!), so why not use 'kitchen'?

This capriciousness in employing Dutch words in some places and not in others was seemingly quite random. It made for an oddly unsettling reading experience and overall it didn't work. The book felt far too American and not Dutch at all. Note that Suriname is on the northeast coast of South America and was a Dutch colony. The Dutch got it in exchange for the English getting New York City after a war. The official language in Suriname today is still Dutch, although many natives speak a lingo called Sranantongo. Why there was not more of a Dutch flavor to this novel, I do not know.

I have a problem with authors who do not seem to realize that words - even people's names and place names - have actual and real meaning and they therefore carry power. So in the same way the Dutch term for kitchen was used in place of the English, the English term 'manumission' or derivatives of it were used frequently in the novel.

The term which was popularly used in the middle of the nineteenth century, but not so much before or after, comes from Latin via French, and it relates to freeing slaves, but it’s far more of an American term than it is a Dutch word. The Dutch equivalent is 'vrijlating', a word which also saw a spike in usage in the mid-nineteenth century, but nowhere is that term used in this novel. It’s like this American author, rather than tying Samson to her Suriname and Dutch roots was deliberately trying to divorce her from them, and Americanize her. For me this spoiled the reading experience and rendered it very inauthentic.

How Samson was in real life, I don't know. I honestly doubt I would have liked her had I met her, but the cold attitude she evidently had toward her slaves in this work of fiction was quite off-putting. I read at various points very early in the novel things like: "La Vallaire sent for something more potent than mope, and also some slaves to fan us as the breeze had died down."

Carl Otto is the man Elisabeth supposedly loves, but at one point he outright states, "He may kill as many Negroes as he pleases...as long as he pays the five hundred florins a head." The text adds, "Carl Otto is always quick to present the logic of a situation." But that's not logic, that's mercenary callousness, and the fact that this is the cold jackass that she loves made me see there was a lot wrong with Elisabeth if she evidently sees nothing wrong with what he has said there. And the Dutch used guilders, not florins as such.

Maybe that's really how Elisabeth Samson was, in which case she deserves no respect whatsoever, no matter what she did for marriage. I can't credit a woman for liberating herself when she owns 200 slaves and is proud of it. I don't want to hear how she was a product of her time. She was a woman who had slavery in her recent past, and yet she felt nothing for the slaves she personally owned? I mean if she felt bad for her slaves she could have freed them all and hired them as workers, but she apparently did not. She was apparently not a good person regardless of her marriage endeavors, and this author neither feigns painting her in any endearing strokes nor does she offer any kind of commentary on her appalling attitude toward slaves. If, frankly my dear, she doesn't give a damn about her slaves, then why should I care a jot about her?

I DNF'd this book because it was not for me, and I honestly can’t see any thinking and feeling person finding anything romantic about it, the way it’s written.

Fallen Women by Sandra Dallas

Rating: WARTY!

This was another old pritn book from my shelves that I'm slowly going through and reading whatever catches my eye that I haven't read already. Set in 1885, the year that Grover Cleveland was sworn in as the 22nd President of the USA, the Cree massacre of settlers at Frog Lake too place, Gottlieb Daimler was granted a patent for the first motorcycle, 'Jumbo' the elephant died in the PT Barnum Circus train wreck, and Dr Pepper was served for the first time!

Louis Pasteur also successfully tested his rabies vaccine and it's a pity it could not have been used on this novel in which protagonist Beret Osmundsen travels to Denver, Colorado, where her younger sister has been murdered. Lillie worked in a house of ill-repute, and Beret is determined to see justice done, despite her disapproval of her sister's life. The book description has it that Beret's "investigation takes her from the dangerous, seedy underworld of Denver’s tenderloin to the highest levels of Denver society. Along the way Beret learns the depths of Lillie’s depravity and must reconcile these with her memories of the innocent young girl of their youth."

I don't knwo where my thought processes were at when I picked this up. I should have set it right back down having read that much, but it seemed at the time - I'm guessing! - to be a potentially interesting period novel. It was not. I made it through six tedious chapters and grew rapidly tired of the constant flashbacks. I want to follow events now! I don't honestly give a damn about the main characters' pasts. Now is what I'm interested in, even if 'now' is over a century ago. It's why I bought the book. If I'd wante done set in 1875 or whenever, I'd have bought that one instead!

The problem is that even had there been no flashbacks, I would still have ditched this, because neither of the two main characters was remotely appealing to me. Worse, I quickly grew to dislike them both: Beret and the lout of a police detective who she was working with. Given the way that character was drawn, I saw no reason why he would agree to let her be involved in the investigation, and she had nothing that appealed to me in terms of being an interesting person or a memorable character. Like I said, I DNF'd it and did not regret it because I was able to move on to a much more interesting book! I can't commend this. Instead, I condemn it.

The PG Wodehouse Collection by PG Wodehouse

Rating: WARTY!

This was an audiobook collection of short stories and a novel. I'd already heard the novel, Right Ho, Jeeves, in a separate audiobook and liked it, so while I resented having to buy it again as a part of this collection (come on Chirp, think about what you're doing!), I was interested in the short stories. I now wish I had not been tempted because this was an unpleasant mess. The weird thing is that if I'd bought this first, I might never have made it to the novel because I was so put off by the stories preceding it.

Originally, I had listened to the novel with mixed feelings because on the one hand it featured the most appalling snobbery and privilege, but this was offset on the other by the absurdity and humor which softened those harsh edges. In this collection, there was no absurdity and little humor, so all that was left were the distasteful parts, and that didn't sit well with me.

Neither did it help that while Simon Jones, who read the novel I originally had heard, did a great job, BJ Harrison, who reads this collection, is nowhere near as good. Consequently, I was neither amused nor entertained. The stories included are as follows:

• Leave It To Jeeves (1916)
• Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest (1919)
• The Aunt and the Sluggard (1919)
• Death at the Excelsior (1976)
• Jeeves and the Hard-Boiled Egg (1919)
• Jeeves in the Springtime (1923)
• The Man Upstairs (1914)
• Jeeves and the Chump Cyril (1923)
• Jeeves Takes Charge (1925)
• Deep Waters (1914)
• The Man Who Disliked Cats (1914)
• Extricating Young Gussie (1917)
• Right Ho, Jeeves (1934)

Why they're in that particular order, I do not know. Clearly it's not chronological. The stories seem to have been randomly tossed in there, so there's no flow of anything. Several were not about Jeeves or Wooster. These included Death at the Excelsior which was a boring detective story, The Man Upstairs another boring story about a man and a woman living in apartments one above the other, Deep Waters about a man who fakes being unable to swim to make time with an attractive woman he sees swimming, and The Man Who Disliked Cats about some dude who seeks to have his girlfriend's cat kill her parrot so she'll get rid of the cat, which he dislikes. Those latter two had the potential to be truly funny, but they were not, neither of them.

I was seriosuly disappointed in this collection and do not commend it at all, unless you're getting it solely for the novel at the end, but I can't speak for that having not listened to it in this version.

The Graduate by Charles Webb

Rating: WARTY!

This was an audiobook of the novella that gave rise to the 1967 movie of the same name starring Anne Bancroft and Dustin Hoffman. The novella was published in 1963, and it's very much of its time. The USA was still pretty much stuck in the fifties in the early sixties, but even so, there were problems with the writing, for me, and I would have ditched this with a hour still left to listen to if it had not been for the fact that, having seen the movie, I was curious as to how the book ended and what differences there were, so despite knowing I was going to rate this as warty, I listened to the whole thing. The movie followed the book pretty darned closely from start to finish.

The thing is that this could have been a romance or a romantic comedy, but there's too much evil behavior in it to be either. I have a feeling it might well have been rejected by publishers if it had been submitted today. It didn't even do well back when it was originally published, and it only took off at all after the movie came out.

This is the only book I've read by author Charles Webb, and I'm far from convinced he can write female characters. Elaine is so passive and compliant, and doesn't behave like she has any self-respect, so for me she was written poorly and her whole interaction with Ben was so unrealistic. But I'm getting ahead. The story is of Ben who is a college grad fresh home from school, and he's one of the most morose, petulant, moody and angry characters I've read about.

He was really annoying in his childishness and his control-freak behavior. He was letting opportunities to get on with his life slip by - for example in not taking-up this grant he was awarded for grad school. Neither is he looking for a job. At the same time he seeks to control everything around him despite what others, particularly Elaine, might want. he proves time and time again that he really doesn't care what Elaine wants as long as he gets what he wants.

Ben's parents alternately hound him cruelly and spoil him rotten, so I guess it's hardly surprising that he's turned out the way he has. At one point early in the story, Mrs Robinson, the wife of his dad's law partner, corners Ben in an upstairs bedroom and makes it plain that she's available to him sexually if and whenever he wants her. Ben rejects this at first, but soon starts an affair with her. They meet at night in the swanky Taft Hotel and spend the night together, and they do this often. Mrs R leaves early in the morning to go home to make her husband breakfast! How she gets away with this is a mystery until she explains this to Ben when he prods her about having a conversation instead of just sex.

She tells Ben that she and her husband not only do not share the same bed, they don't even share the same bedroom, and he only pays her any physical attention when he gets drunk. So the affair continues until Mrs R's daughter Elaine comes home for Thanksgiving, and Mr R and Ben's parents insist he take her out to dinner. He doesn't want to and Mrs Robinson forbids it on pain of revealing their affair to everyone, so Ben doesn't want to take her on a date, but does so under this pressure, ignoring Mrs R's ultimatum. He doesn't believe she'll carry out her threat, but clearly he doesn't know Mrs Robinson at all.

I'm actually with Mrs Robinson on this because Ben has hardly shown his character to be stellar. He's having some sort of existential crisis and he's moody and isn't remotely interested in going back to school or finding a job. He always seems to have money though, but where he gets that, I don't know. The issue isn't addressed in the story or the movie for that matter, so I can only assume his parents give it to him, but why they would do that is a mystery given how he treats them.

They whine about his going out so much, and so late at night with no explanation, but if it bothers them that much, then why facilitate it by paying for it? They gave him an Italian sports car as a graduation present, so he's spoiled rotten. Maybe they just can't say 'no'. I can't blame Elaine's mom for not wanting someone like Ben associating with her daughter, though. And why would Ben? He had no interest in Elaine before, so why now? It made zero sense that he'd suddenly obsess on her except that maybe he just wants the thing that people are trying hardest to deny him?

There is a mildly interesting idea I read online that Mrs R didn't want Ben and Elaine to get involved because they both have the same father, which indicates that Elaine's father seduced Ben's mother, but there's nothing in the book to suggest that and it would mean - in an indirect way of course - that she's having sex with her own son. She doesn't seem like the kind of person who would do something like that. She's not shown as being particularly motherly either, so maybe she was just a predator, jealously guarding her prey, Ben, from becoming someone else's catch, but since we never see Ben aiming to date a different girl and get Mrs R's reaction to that, it's hard to be sure what her motivation was. Maybe she was just horny and Ben seemed like an easy mark to her.

She apparently cares little for him; it's just about sex for her, so I don't imagine she much cares about someone stealing her prey, just about him not being fit to marry Elaine. I think if that were the case, she would have simply said that's why she objected to it, but she really doesn't want her daughter traveling the same crappy road though life that she had to follow and she can see that coming a mile away with Ben at the wheel. She sees too much of herself in Ben: someone who is going nowhere, who has a drinking problem, and who could well end-up being at best a neglectful and at worse an abusive husband later in life.

Interestingly, she's never given a first name in the movie: she's always referred to - and addressed even by Ben - as Mrs Robinson, like she's someone else's property rather than her own person. We learn that her initials are G. L. but we never find out what those letters stand for. This may be a conscious choice by the author, but even when Ben wants to have that conversation with her in the Taft, rather than just get down to the sex like they typically do, he never asks her what her first name is.

From this, it would seem that he has no real interest in her either, despite his claimed desire for a conversation. For me Mrs Robinson is without question the most interesting and strongest person in the movie. Ben is a spineless ne'er-do-well and it's hard to imagine that someone like Elaine would be attracted to him, especially after the shabby way he treats her, followed by her learning of his affair with her mom. Their relationship makes no sense except in that they're both as bad as one another in their own bumbling and insecure way.

On the date with Elaine, he tries to ruin things by treating her badly and taking her to seedy clubs, one of which features an exotic dancer. She eventually demands he take her home, but he refuses, and instead pressures her into changing her mind, offering a meek apology, and she goes right along with it. He mentions having an affair and is worried she'd think badly of him for that, but he barely addresses the elephant in the room: of how he treated her thus far that evening!

Despite all of this she lets him dominate her and she agrees to go out for a drive with him the next day. When he comes to pick her up, Mrs R confronts him and Elaine figures out that the affair he had was with her mother. She orders Ben to leave, and refuses to speak to him. So now we're expected to believe that he's in love with Elaine and in the big finale, she's somehow persuaded to return his feelings despite neither of them really knowing each other; despite their having had no contact since high school; despite his controlling behavior, and despite his neurotic demeanor and his poor treatment of her. It doesn't work.

Initially, I found this audio-book amusing, if a bit irritating here and there, but I became rather less enamored of it as I listened to more of it, and especially after that 'date'. Webb also has a truly annoying writing habit, at least in this novella. Apparently all of the main characters are hard of hearing because the sheer number of times the word 'what' is used interrogatively in conversations is phenomenally annoying. It's like every other thing any character says, the person they're talking to says, "What?" like they haven't heard, or they can't believe it, or they don't understand what was said even though it's perfectly plain, and the other character constantly has to repeat what they just said. It's really pervasive and really distracting. And thoroughly irritating.

I found myself coming into agreement with an email friend of mine whose early assessment, based on what I'd told her about Ben and Elaine, was that they deserved each other - and not in a good way. After being in another funk for several weeks post-rejection, Ben abruptly declares to his parents that he's going to marry Elaine, despite him never addressing this topic with her and despite his having been angrily barred from her life a few weeks before - and despite the fact that he barely knows her these days!

So he drives up to Berkley where she's doing her senior year and starts stalking her. He sells his car so he'll have some money to live on and starts hanging around the campus looking for her. He planned on going to her dorm, meeting her and inviting her out to dinner, but he chickened out of that. He tried composing a couple of letters, but got drunk, the letters becoming more and more incoherent as he did, and he fell asleep. Eventually he runs into her in the street and she rejects him again, but he won't take no for an answer.

Later she shows up at his rooming house and he tries talking to her, but she won't talk to him because Mrs R has told Elaine that Benjamin got her drunk and raped her. Elaine won't listen to his denials, and he's such a poor communicator that he fails dismally in explaining his side of the story - and this is the guy who was, we're told, head of the debating club in college! It just doesn't work! Elaine tells him to leave Berkley and leave her alone, but later, she shows up in his room late at night. How she even got in there without a key is a mystery. I guess no one locks any doors in Berkley. Suddenly, she's interested in listening to him. He asks her to marry him and she says she might. She is so easily influenced that she really has no personality of her own, simply going with the flow of whoever is dominating her at the time - her boyfriend Carl, her father, or Ben. Always men, and they dictate her life right to the end of the story.

None of this story makes sense, and it doesn't really offer a fulfilling tale, So, overall, I can't commend it. It has its moments, but in general it's poorly and inauthentically written and it really doesn't give us a realistic story. On reflection, I think the story would have been considerably better had it been about Mrs Robinson instead of Ben, but not if Webb wrote it! I can see no future for Ben and Elaine except one of misery as he controls her life, abuses her, maybe even beats her when he's drunk, and she eventually commits suicide. There's no romance here at all.

The Vampyre by John William Polidori

Rating: WARTY!

Here's another classic, and I have to say right up front that the story of how this novella came to be written is far more interesting than the story itself actually is! I'm not a fan of vampire stories. They're tedious for the most part and with few exceptions, but this is a classic and in my ongoing quest, I decided I should read it. In its favor, it's very short!

The legend is well-known to anyone who has any interest in Mary Shelly, Percy Shelly, or George Byron: it was the wintry cold summer of 1816 which was literally overshadowed by the eruption of Mount Tambora the year before. That volcano spewed out so much ash that, though it reduced the temperature of the planet by only a fraction of a degree, it ruined the crops the next year and caused widespread famine. This is what people don't get about climate change - oh it will only heat up by a degree or two, they think, dismissively. They think it isn't worth worrying about, but it's actually highly significant and dangerously destructive.

So that summer, the two Shellys, plus Byron and his doctor, John Polidori, were staying at a villa close by Lake Geneva in Switzerland. Mary was only eighteen. After entertaining themselves one night by reading ghost stories to each other, Byron came up with a challenge that they each write their own. None did! Mary began work on a short story that over the next couple of years expanded into a novel, which was published in 1818 as Frankenstein. Percy didn't write a damned thing. Neither did Polidori at first. Byron began a tale about a vampire, which he abandoned, leaving Polidori to complete it. This is that story - a mere thirty pages or so which didn't materialize as a published work until the year after Shelley's novel.

It's tedious to read. The doctor goes on for screens at a time in a single paragraph making it a chore to read, and the story has no drama, no excitement, and no real ending. There's barely even any vampirism in it! I cannot commend it as a decent read.

Whisper Falls by Elizabeth Langston

Rating: WARTY!

This novel is the first in the inevitable trilogy and that was the first strike against it. The second strike was the almost inevitable worst person voice - times two. Barf. I should have quit right then, but even so I tried to read it (this was before I developed my allergy to first person novels), but it was written rather amateurishly and entirely unrealistically, and worst of all, it dragged.

The plot is that Mark, while out riding his mountain bike, encounters a girl who appears to be out of time - because she is. Susanna is an indentured servant from 1796, yet never once does she think mark is a demon or a witch or something along those lines. It makes no sense that a person from that era would not at least have thoughts like that cross her mind.

So eventually it becomes the masculine rescue of the helpless maiden, and I wasn't about to read this kind of a story that far. I sure as hell wasn't going to read a frigging trilogy of this stuff. I'd had enough and I gave up on it about a fifth of the way in. I can't commend this based on the sorry portion that I endured.

Odyssey by Homer

Rating: WARTY!

Another classic bites the dist. This is one of the most stupid, tedious, repetitive, and pointless stories I've ever listened to. I listened to the audiobook version since originally, this was meant to be listened to, not read, but the version I had is not in poetic meter. It's told as a prose story by a narrator who was tedious to listen to, which made things worse. Despite this prose approach, the story still retains the repetitiveness of the poetry, which does not a thing to improve the situation. I grew to honestly and truly detest the phrase 'child of morn, rosy-fingered Dawn' with a passion.

Odysseus is one of the most puffed-up, self-aggrandizing, boorish braggarts I've ever encountered in literature. His son is useless and his wife Penelope is a complete jackass. Odysseus is always the best, the most virile, the strongest, the most upright, the toughest, the most skilled, etc., etc. He never loses, except in his ridiculously haphazard return from Troy after the ten year war.

It takes him another ten years to get home and all this time we're supposed to believe his wife is faithful. Odysseus is nearly always plied with riches by his hosts no matter whose island he fetches up on after another disastrous voyage in which he loses the previous treasure he was given. His various crews are always weeping, or lily-livered, or dishonest, or incompetent, or untrustworthy, while he himself is a paragon.

The thing is that it's really not that far from Troy to Ithaca! This admittedly assumes that the present day Ithaca is remotely close to where the ancient one was, but even if it wasn't, we know it was in Greece, where nowhere is very far from anywhere else. The point is that it's possible to travel the entire distance by land pretty much. He could have almost literally walked the entire distance in a couple of years, so why he repeatedly embarks on voyages given that he knows Poseidon, the fricking god of the ocean, is out to get him, is as much of a mystery as it is a testimony to one thing and one thing only: how profoundly dumb Odysseus truly is. He's a callous jerk, too! Despite his losing crew after crew, Odysseus never mourns a single one of those he traveled with or left behind.

Meanwhile back at home, we have the comedy duo of Telemachus, Odysseus's 20-year-old son, and Odysseus's wife, Penelope. His son is purportedly the head of the household, yet he has not an iota of wherewithal to throw out these suitors to his mom who number about a hundred or so. I know there was a tradition of hospitality in that era, but they're the worst guests imaginable, eating him out of house and home and he can't dispatch even one of them? How Odysseus was even supposed to have anything left of his holdings after ten years of this is a joke. Penelope, were she not such a limp rag and a waste of skin, could simply have told any number of these suitors she wasn't interested, but she keeps them hanging on: all five score of them, while making cheap excuses as to why she can't make up her mind. She's an asshole, period.

The suitors are utter morons. They're dumb-asses for hanging around for ten years when they're clearly getting clearly nowhere with Penelope. They're imbeciles in that they cannot see through her ridiculous ruse of un-weaving Laertes's burial shroud each night so she can re-weave it the next day. Despite all this, Telemachus can't seem to handle them and it takes Odysseus's heroic return of course, before they're summarily dispatched. Here's the last ridiculous thing: he arrives in disguise instead of striding proudly up to his home. Why? No good reason at all. Yet we're supposed to believe he has littered his way home with rejected lovers because he loved his wife so much? Bullshit.

This story is awful and not worth the time to read or listen to it.

Our Lizzie by Anna Jacobs

Rating: WARTY!

I gave up on this in short order after I read how yet another female writer refers to her female characters. "...Lizzie was a child still, but when she grew up - ah, then he'd be waiting for her...He'd enjoy taming her, wooing her first and then mastering her, as all women loved to be mastered. Marrying her, perhaps." That was page six of this novel and it was where I and it parted. I don't care if this is supposed to be the male character's thoughts. That picture just turned my stomach and I had no desire to read any further.

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I did skim through the book a little and at one point I read the unintentional humor in "I'm a rotten sewer" - where what the girl meant to convey was that she was poor at sewing. Later a character who wants to be her lover is named Peter. he;s described int eh book description as her new love - like the old one was actually a "love" as opposed to an abuser. It confirmed that I'd made the right decision to quit reading this when I did.

I can't commend this precisely because of that.

Utopia by Thomas More

Rating: WARTY!

Originally published (in Latin in 1516!) as A truly golden little book, no less beneficial than entertaining, of a republic's best state and of the new island Utopia this book proved to be as boring as the title. It began well enough, but though it's fiction, it is by no means a story as we would imagine one in modern times. It's much more like a lecture that will put you to sleep, so don't listen, as I did, while driving! Although I survived it, the lethargic and droning delivery could prove fatal in some circumstances!

I made it about 60% of the way through, and I was planning on finishing out the week with it, but after listening to it while driving home on the Thursday I grew so deadened by it that I couldn't stand to listen to it on the Friday, so I ditched it for something else. The reader, James Adams has a voice that doesn't help. My Latin is barely existent, and although this is fortunately in modern English, it's possible to imagine that More himself is reading it. It started out well enough, but over time, it became repetitive, plodding, and tedious to listen to.

Utopia is supposedly an island, although it actually was a peninsular though which a canal was cut to separate it from the mainland. The problem is that there's nothing Utopian about it. Life is highly regimented and there is slavery and a death penalty, so how this remotely resembles any idea of a utopia we may hold today was a mystery to me.

The "islanders" have rejected money as any sort of local currency, although they do use it in foreign trade if necessary (trade, after all, literally meant a trade - one item of goods offered for a different item in return), but the society itself is pretty much a communist one along the lines of everything being held in common, with each giving according to ability and receiving according to need, although there is more to it than that in this case. The thing is that while all this may have been original five hundred years ago and may even have impressed some people, clearly it impressed precious few since it never took hold. Today, it's nothing more than quaintly antique, and it offers nothing special, or new or interesting.

In some parts it was unintentionally amusing, being rather reminiscent of the board game The Settlers of Catan where sheep and bricks are traded, and little else. I've never played that game but I am familiar with it, and it was amusing how limited this 'vision' was - about as limited in scope as the game. Though I can't commend this at all as a worthy read, my recent migration through reading/listening to antique works continues to at least to one more volume - but by a different author. I'll post that review anon.

The Machine Stops by EM Forster

Rating: WORTHY!

Edward Morgan Forster published this very short story (only some 25 pages) in 1909, and I came to it by way of an article online that claimed (as does Wikipedia) that the novel is eerily prescient of life today under Coronavirus, but that's bullshit!

There's one thing and one thing only that's similar which is that the story depicts a society where everyone typically lives in isolation from others, communicating using a video system. But that's it. In this story people are not forcibly confined to their homes under threat of a virus! They choose to live that way from habituation, and they're not struggling with it any more than they are struggling to provide food for themselves! Every single thing is laid on for them; they're spoiled rotten. There is no comparison whatsoever to the world today and it's insulting to claim there is.

A much better comparison is to the short story is Pixar's movie Wall-E, where humans are carried around on chairs and everything is done for them. True, there's no isolation, but in every other regard it's pretty much the same story. They're confined to a spacecraft whereas in Forster's story they're confined underground, they live in fear of the surface of planet Earth, and are totally under the thrall of technology. Forster's story is a tale of caution against too much reliance on machines and therein lies the comparison to modern day living.

Predictably the story doesn't end well with the machine breaking down. It's right there in the title. What I find mysterious is how, in 1909, the author managed to tell the story at precisely the time that this event came to pass. Was he psychic? Was he simply a great predictor of events? Or was he just very lucky? I'm kidding! Of course he'd tell it then because otherwise where's the interest?

All kidding aside, I commend this story as a decent read. It's of its time and unrealistic in the sense that far too many dystopian novels are: they show everyone conforming whereas in real life such a thing would never happen because there are far too many rebellious and non-conformist souls who would never submit, but it does carry a valid warning about too much dependence on machines and that resonates now more than ever with technology occupying such a huge proportion of our lives today.

Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft

Rating: WARTY!

This was written in the eighteenth century and published in 1798 the year after the author died. Mary Wollstonecraft was one of the earliest feminists in the UK, and was the mother of Mary Shelly. In a way this is a sort of fictional sequel to an earlier book, Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published six years earlier.

While writing that earlier treatise very quickly, it seems Wollstonecraft struggled with the fictional form, and had not finished it when she died from septicemia after giving birth to Mary in late 1797. Her husband, the philosopher William Godwin cobbled together what she had written and added a commentary here and there explaining that parts were missing and some parts were confused in that Wollstonecraft had perhaps wanted to tell it one way at the beginning, but changed her mind later and told it a different way, but never had the opportunity to go back and correct the earlier part.

The story tells of Maria, and begins an asylum for the insane, where Maria's husband, George Venables has had her placed so he can avail himself of her money. He also took away her child and the child died in his 'care'. The story begins with Maria managing to contact a fellow inmate, Henry Darnford, via an intermediary named Jemima, a helper at the asylum. The two begin by exchanging messages, and then Maria gets access to the man's books and eventually, the man bribes the guards to allow him to meet Maria face to face. This part is fine, but after a short while, the story devolved into a diatribe about the way society demeans and devalues women, and I'm sorry to report that it starts falling apart then.

For me it felt far too preachy - even while it is accurate. It just rambles though, and provides precious little in the way of engagement for the reader. The main character is shown to be weak and easily dominated even as the author tells us she is strong, and in the end, she clings to a man. For me this was the wrong way to write this book, and I felt it cheapened Maria's story and devalued it, which is precisely what society did back then to women - and still does today in far too many ways. This is why I cannot commend this as a worthy read despite my admiration of, and support for, the author.

Scullion by Jarad Greene

Rating: WARTY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

I guess me and writers named Greene with first initial J, are not destined to get along. I quit reading this about four fifths the way through because it wasn't entertaining me at all. I kept hoping something would happen or that it would get better, but it never did, and I felt resentful of the time I'd spent reading it when I could have been doing something more fulfilling. When I picked the thing to review I'd thought the two characters on the cover were women who worked in the scullery of a castle, but only one of them is.

He gets kidnapped by trolls who mistake him for the other person on the cover who is actually a female warrior. Apparently trolls are really stupid mistaking an accidental headscarf for real purple hair, but the trolls are not consistent in their stupidity which made the device rather flimsy.

There were half-hearted attempts at humor. Despite this being set in medieval times, they have modern amenities and outlooks - but these fell flat on me. The story felt confused, with far too many characters coming in like Keystone Cops and filling up the panels without much of an introduction to set the stage. I lost track repeatedly as to what was supposed to be happening or why people were doing certain things (and not doing other things that seemed far more logical in the circumstances), and I decided this was not for me. I can't commend it at all.

A Trace of Copper by Anne Renwick

Rating: WARTY!

I like the idea of steampunk as a genre, but I seem to have had little success with that genre from what I've so far subjected myself to, and this audio book was no exception to that pattern. I could not get into it and DNF'd it before long. It did not help that this was the first in a series (An Elemental Web Tale), and I'm not much into series. The first volume is always a prologue and prologues and me definitely do not get along.

In this story, Doctor Piyali Mukherji, a recruit to an organization called "The Queen's Agents." I like a good Indian woman in a story and have enjoyed such stories in other genres. I'm in a sort of delayed process of gearing up to write one of my own, but in the case of this particular novel, I could not get up any head of steam, and I found myself caring less and less what she was up to, because it just seemed so rambling and uninviting. It went on and on and I couldn't focus on it at all. It was a bit weird frankly.

Her investigation was in Wales, which is also something I'm interested in normally. I love the Welsh accent and have visited wales myself more than once, but again, in this case, it failed to stir me. This 'reuniting' of Doctor Mukherji with an old flame, Evan Tredegar, and the kindling of past and alienated desires I could have done without. It's a tired trope and it offered nothing new.

The real question though is how was this steampunk? It was really an epidemiological study with nothing steampunk about it. It could have been any genre, so there was that strike against it, too. Maybe steampunk played a larger part in the story later, but I couldn't stand to read that far, having had my interest badly squandered by the uninspired writing.

So there's the real problem in a nut's hell: it (at least theoretically) has steampunk; it has a potentially strong Indian woman as a main character, and it was set in Wales, and yet this could not hold my interest! I can only conclude that the problem was not me, but poor writing which failed to engage me, and misrepresentation by the author and or the publisher as to what this book was really about, and what it had to offer the reader. I can't commend this based on what I read.

The Dragon Choker by Stephanie Alexander

Rating: WARTY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

Errata:
"...the more likely her husband would give up and returned to his own chamber." Returned need the -ed suffix removed.
"He must think thusly at times" - 'thusly' isn't really a word. The 'ly' needs to be omitted.
"...and since they both knew the way they let themselves in." - this needed a comma after 'way'.
"She lit on the muddy ground..." - unless she shone a flashlight on it or set fire to it, lit is the wrong word. It needed to be alit or alighted. Either is acceptable.

This is volume two of a series based on the Cinderella fairy-tale. There are several quite varying "Cinderella" stories though history, originating from as far and wide as Greece and China, but most people tend to think of Cinderella as the version written by Charles Perrault in 1697, titled Cendrillon ou la petite pantoufle de verre ("Cinderella or the little glass slipper"), which is where the Disney Fairytale Mining Corporation™ lifted the premise for the animated version it put out in 1950. That's the version that introduced the two evil stepsisters, the glass slipper, the pumpkin and all that, and upon which this novel is loosely-based.

I haven't read volume one of this series, and I'm far from convinced I'd like it if I did, so I wasn't about to try reading that before I started on this one. Since I'm not very much into series, whether I'd end up liking this one was the question. I started out quite happy that it wasn't written in first-person voice - which I despise, and which would have decidedly turned me off it, so I commend the author for that wise choice.

It was decently-written for the most part (subject to occasional grammatical and word-choice errors, some examples of which I'll list below. It did keep me engaged for a while, but as time passed I started losing faith in the author and consequently my interest in the story waned considerably. I also had problems with some of the plot choices and with the portrayal of Eleanor, which I think belied the book description - or more accurately the book description misrepresented the novel.

It was from that description though, that I had become intrigued by this story, being led to believe that the novel was something bit different from the usual premise. The not-so-happily-ever-after induced me to request it for review. The description began, "Eleanor Brice Desmarais, she of the cracked glass slipper and unladylike intellectual propensities" and that caught my attention. 'Desmarais' is French for 'of the swamp' so maybe there's some history related to that in volume one. Or maybe not! I can't speak to that. Character names are important to me so I tend to have them mean something which may not always be apparent to the reader, but maybe I read more into other authors' choices than I ought.

This promise of 'unladylike intellectual propensities' however, failed to materialize unless all that the person writing that description meant was that Eleanor had a sexual appetite. Oh how scandalous - a woman enjoys sex! Who knew?! Seriously? But if that's the case, then the writer of the description needs to get an education regarding the difference between intellectual and sexual.

The really sad thing about Eleanor though, and the tragic paradox of this story is that she's purported to be the people's princess, and yet she was risking bringing down shame on herself and the royal family by her uncontrolled behavior. This is hardly how a great princess behaves. She seems to have been modeled on Princess Diana, but unlike in that real life case, Eleanor starts her affair long before she's ever built-up any credibility by demonstrating a generosity of spirit, a warmth, and a caring attitude that the real life Diana did before she embarked on her affair. There's a huge difference between the two.

I think intellectual is sexy, but if it was merely used as a euphemism for sexual propensities, then it was a cheap shot. If it actually meant intellectual, then it missed the mark because Eleanor did not come across as any such thing. Quite the opposite. She spent all her time pining for Dorian, the best friend of her husband, Prince Gregory. At one point Eleanor mentions Dorian's "girth" and from that I could conclude only that her 'intellect' seemed decidedly low and her interest in him had nothing to do with love since they never seemed to have any conversation that didn't revolve around their physical trysting.

The story was boring because this was all she ever did. There was one brief interlude where she was visiting the poor and talking about opening school for girls, but that was a bump in an otherwise featureless romp, or unending talk of romping, or unending wishful thinking of romping, with Dorian. She didn't even spend any significant time with her child - not according to how this was written up to the point where I quit reading it, about a quarter the way through. Maybe things changed later, but I had zero faith, given what I'd read thus far, that it would improve. Eleanor was a one-trick pony (interpret 'trick' however you like), and she wasn't remotely interesting to read about.

I can understand that a woman who is unhappy in her marriage may seek solace elsewhere. I don't have a problem with that, and missing the first volume may well skew my perception, but did Eleanor even try to resolve things with Gregory or did she just leap right onto Dorian's girth? I know Gregory could be a bit of a jerk at times, but overall he did not seem to be a bad person, yet Eleanor was willing to spend all kinds of time on sexual technique with Dorian. Could she not spend any time at all working on her marriage with Gregory?

This perception diminished her in my eyes, and led me to the conviction that she's not much deserving of sympathy or support. Like I said, without having the first volume under my belt, maybe I'm misjudging her, but frankly she seems like a bit of a sleaze here. It's not a good look on her! If once in a while she'd expressed some regret or harked back to earlier times when she'd tried to work with her husband to make their marriage a good one and been rejected by him, that would have changed my perception of her, but in this story she's all Dorian all the time and it's tedious.

This book seriously failed to pass the Bechdel-Wallace test (after a fashion) because all Eleanor could think of was how to get with her lover. She had a one-track mind. Talking of Disney, it's like she had no life that wasn't animated by Dorian. After I'd read that book description, what I'd been hoping for was someone like the princess in my own novel, Femarine which really did have a different mindset from your usual princess story.

The very reason I wrote that was to offer readers some sort of an antidote to the disturbing plethora of stories about simpering, compliant princesses and their wilting addiction to princes charming, and it seemed I was not wrong because there is a readership for the road less taken. I just wish publishers and other authors would embrace that more, but it seems all they want to do it retread this old story, and even when a slightly different direction is taken - like this one attempted, the original prince is merely replaced by a new 'prince' and off we go, stuck on the same old rutted road - or rutting road in this case!

This is why I tend not to believe book descriptions much, because I've seen so many misleading ones, and it bothers me that they often seem to have been written by people who haven't read the novel, or in the case of YA stories, by people who seem to have completely missed the point of the #MeToo movement. But moving on: Eleanor is the Cinders of this story, having the slipper and the requisite two stepsisters, although as in the Drew Barrymore Ever After movie which I enjoyed, one of the sisters is friendly toward Eleanor. The other, Sylvia, is very much antagonistic and deceitful. Fortunately, she does not know that Eleanor has the hots for her husband's best friend Dorian, for that would be a disaster she'd dearly love to exploit.

I have to say a word about poor Sylvia. I was not a fan of hers, but she's after Prince Gregory. In her pursuit, she's doing nothing worse than Eleanor is doing, and arguably better since, unlike Eleanor, Sylvia isn't married! The problem is that she's portrayed as some sort of marriage wrecker or trouble-maker! When Dorian sees what she's up to he makes a mental note to tell Eleanor. The thing is that Gregory is known for quite literally whoring around, and Eleanor is already getting down to it with Dorian, so why slut-shame Sylvia? It was inappropriate at best, and it wasn't the only case where a woman is demeaned in this book.

On another occasion I read, "Pandra was twelve years his senior, but she was amazingly well preserved for all her years of use." What? That means she was only 38, not old by any means. Saying she was amazingly well preserved is ageism without a doubt. It's one thing to have a character say something like that about another person; it's an entirely different thing to have the author say it - and that comment wasn't in a character's speech - it was in the narrative! Now you can argue that it was intended as the thought of either Prince Gregory or Dorian, but that wasn't indicated as such, and if it was indeed Dorian's thinking, what does that say about his attitude toward women?

At a ball, Eleanor is recommending Dorian ask this one girl who'd shown an interest in him, to dance with him. This was not because she wanted Dorian to, but because it would be a diversion from their mutual horniness. After that I read, again not as speech, but as narration, "In truth, Patience had been an obvious dingbat." It's like if you're not part of the small specific set of people of whom Eleanor approves, then all you merit is insult. It really turned me off her. This was not the 'intellectual propensity' girl I'd been promised - someone deep and interesting, strong and motivated, fun to read about. She was just the opposite and I didn't like her.

And 'dingbat'? The term has been around for a century, but it's hardly terminology from the Cinderella era! I know you can't write a novel in ancient English - it would be tedious to read, if not impossible! - but you can write it with a bit of an atmosphere, ans a nod and a wink to the period in which it's supposedly set. This one was written with such a modern outlook that for me, it kept tripping up the narrative, making it seem like it couldn't decide if it wanted to be ancient or modern.

In this world, it is, of course, a capital offense for the princess bride to have an affair, even with the prince's best friend, so one has to wonder about Dorian's love for Eleanor when he willingly puts her life at risk by continuing to see her for sex. She's obviously so weak-willed that she can't help herself, but you'd think he'd be strong for her, if he cared. On the other hand, he's reported as someone who's been lucky to avoid sexually-transmitted diseases since he cannot for the life of him keep his junk in his pantaloons. He's had sex with so many women, he's lost count, so maybe his integrity is as poor as hers and his backbone just as flimsy. At any rate Eleanor has no reason to believe she's not just another conquest. Not from what I read anyway.

I began reading this with interest and quickly encountered an unintentionally amusing scene which brought the novel some credit by putting me in a good mood. That was sadly dissipated with disturbing velocity by further reading, and in truth it was another writing issue. An exasperated Eleanor is mucking-out the stable where her unicorn is housed. She's not doing this because she has to, but because she needs something to take her mind off her frustrations. While she's thus engaged, her husband and Dorian come down to take out the prince's horse, Vigor, for a ride.

In what I consider to be an amusingly unfortunate juxtaposition of ideas, I read, "Gregory kissed her again. This time she felt the flick of his tongue. He mounted and she held Vigor's bridle." Now, who or what exactly is he mounting - his horse or his bride? LOL! I assume it's his horse, but it just goes to show that one needs to be careful when writing narrative! There really needed to be something between "his tongue" and "He mounted" to distance the two actions. On a more adolescent note, it also struck me that the very title of this novel is rather unfortunate. To be clear: the Dragon Choker isn't a teenage boy's slang term for masturbation. It refers to a beautiful necklace that Prince Gregory buys for Eleanor and for which she shows little gratitude. Again, unlike the necklace, she came off in a bad light.

So, in short, I did not finish this novel. I gave up on it because the more I read the more I disliked Eleanor and the more I disliked the story. It felt like there were problems with the plot that could have been avoided with more sensitive writing, and with a better portrayal of Eleanor (and maybe a somewhat worse portrayal of Gregory). Eleanor comes across not only as having no character, she doesn't even have any depth - and certainly no intellect, let alone any sort of propensity at all to growing one. She wasn't interesting and I did not want to read any more about her. I wish the author all the best in her writing career, but I can't commend this one as a worthy read.

The Importance of Being Ernest by Oscar Wilde

Rating: WORTHY!

This is perhaps my favorite play. The definitive movie version is that starring Rupert Everett, Colin Firth, Frances O'Connor, Judi Dench, Tom Wilkinson, Anna Massey, and unfortunately, Reese Witherspoon, who I used to like until she played the "Do you know who I am?" card in 2013, when she was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct.

This audiobook version is a fine work, and made me laugh out loud frequently. Unlike the movie, it's very true to the play, which is generally considered to be one of the best English comedies. Unfortunately the audiobook version I had did not list a single cast member so I can't list them here. I even went to the publisher's website (Highbridge Audio - this is part of the Highbridge Classics series) in search of a cast, and they offered nothing, which I feel was rather mean of them.

Wilde is unleashed full force through his various characters here, cutting a swathe through social convention and societal habit with great relish. Two friends, Jack and Algernon, have invented fictitious family or friends to give them each an excuse to get away from their regular life and duties, and escape into a fantasy world of complete irresponsibility. Jack's bother is called Earnest, and Earnest is actually jack, but in his Earnest guise, he pays no bills, misbehaves in general and has a great time. Algernon's invention is a sick friend named Bunbury, and Algernon often goes 'Bunburying' when he wants to get away, under the guise of visiting and taking care of his ailing friend.

Jack has an eighteen-year-old ward named Cecily Cardew, as well he should be having inherited her father's fortune. Jack is an adoptee with no family history, having been discovered by accident in a bag left at the baggage claim at Victoria Station in London. Jack is so in love with Algernon's cousin Gwendolen Fairfax that he actually proposes to her despite the disapproval of the formidable Lady Bracknell, who insists upon interviewing Jack regarding his suitability to press his suit. When Algernon learns of Jack's ward, he decides to press a suit of his own and goes down to Jack's country home, posing as Jack's fictional brother Earnest. The confusion and self-induced foot-shooting only increase from there.

The joy of this is listening to Wilde's take on life, and hearing it expressed as a holistic philosophy from these two reprobates. I highly commend this, or the movie, or going to see the play performed if you can, or simply reading the play for yourself. It's available free from Project Gutenberg in ebook form.

Au Bonheur des Dames by Émile Zola

Rating: WARTY!

This novel was mentioned in a biography I am reading, and which will be reviewed in the near future. I found it interesting, because it's an historical novel that was written at the time, so to speak, and therefore had a lot of authenticity even though it's fiction.

The only problem is that it was written in French and I had a modern English translation, so it lost something in that, and there was some confusion about what to translate. Naturally, the names of people and places remain in French, but while on the one hand they maintained the French currency: sous, centimes, and francs, they translated measurements into imperial. I didn't get that! Did the translator think American audiences are so dumb they can't figure out what a metre is?

The story started out interestingly enough, with 20-year-old Denise Baudu arriving in Paris from the country, and finding herself with impoverished relatives. She is quickly forced to find work, and ends up as a sales assistant at a huge department store named Au Bonheur des Dames (The Ladies' Paradise). Here she is subject to such persistent cruelty from the existing assistants who seem to universally torture her, and deride her that the reading became tedious. It felt like reading a modern YA novel!

My ebook reader told me there were over a thousand screens, and I had made it barely to the halfway point when she got rather unjustly fired from her job. Maybe the story picked up after that, but by that point I was so uninterested in pursuing it that I had not the heart to keep reading. I really didn't care what became of Denise.

On the one hand she was cruelly abused, but on the other she was a profoundly stupid woman who let her profligate brother walk all over her, and she simply isn't the kind of character I'm interested in reading about. Seeing no sign of any real change in circumstances by the half-way point, I quit and decided to try something else that might entertain me better. Life is too short to put up with dissatisfying literature!

So I'm done with Émile Zola, and I cannot commend this novel based on what I read of it.

Puck of Pook's Hill by Rudyard Kipling

Rating: WARTY!

I've enjoyed more than one book by Kipling, but not this one I'm sorry to report. The first problem is with the title, because the book barely features Puck. It uses him instead as an introduction to history, and each chapter gives a concocted history lesson about a period in British history. The first two or three chapters cover the aftermath of the Norman invasion when William the Conqueror beat King Harald at Hastings, and the Normans took over Britain. Yes, everyone was called Norman. No, I'm kidding, of course.

The story covers one fictional character named Sir Richard, who takes over a manor as his spoils and fortunately happens to be a moderate and just lord. But that's all the story is. There isn't anything special about it, and while it may well have entertained children - or more accurately, the boys at which it's aimed - in Kipling's time, it really doesn't have anything to say to modern children because it's not even a good history lesson. I suspect the book tells us more about the history of Kipling's boyhood passions than ever it would about British history in general.

The next section goes even further and is about gorilla warfare - literally. It takes us back into Viking times and relates something about the endless Viking incursions into British coastal villages, raping and pillaging as they were wont to do. They somehow get blown off course and end up skirting the coast of Africa and encountering gorillas, who they view as hairy people.

Kipling appallingly and shamefully misrepresents gorillas. This was no more or less than people thought at a time when gorillas were kept in brutally disgraceful conditions in Edwardian zoos, but I expected something better and different from him. It wasn't forthcoming. The story dragged on and was boring, and it was at this point that I gave up on this book. I can't commend it as a worthy read.

The Door in the Wall by Marguerite de Angeli

Rating: WORTHY!

Despite my abhorrence of Newbery medal winners, I have read one or two by accident. This is another one, and while most have been awful, I'm forced to conclude that older Newbery winners are infinitely better than the more recent ones in that they're far less pompous and pretentious and therefore make for a better read.

This one, which won in 1950, was short - which helps when it's a Newbery - and educational. Set in the middle ages with a very small cast, it features young Robin, who is expected to become a knight like his dad, but who suffers some sort of debilitating disease which robs him of the use of his legs, and of which he only regains limited re-use over time.

Derailed from his life plan, and ending up at a monastery after scaring away his helper with his unappreciative behavior, Robin eventually finds strength in other pursuits such as reading, swimming, and wood carving, eventually moving on to build a harp.

The language in the book is period, but the wrong period. Most kids won't know the difference, however, and it has to be rendered intelligibly, let's face it! It's read amiably by Roger Rees, and the book is educational, so I consider it a worthy read despite being handicapped with the taint of a Newbery.