What about also defining salads and soups? The “is a hotdog a sandwich” debate has been going around for a while, but then there’s also the “what is a salad/soup” question that someone wrote a whole (short) paper on.
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Currently reading Salt Houses by Hala Alyan, and then next on my TBR list is Sunrise on the Reaping bc I’ve been excited about that one for a WHILE. 
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It’s early May, so this year’s daily reading of Dracula has begun.
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Barchester Towers, Victorian era novel by Anthony Trollope. It’s a little bit of a chuckle that Trollope is actually mentioned in a TADS3 documentation example as being a “second-rate Victorian hack” (or similar), but I have found his writing especially droll and satisfying. As to the book itself, it started off seeming to be the driest of settings, which made it all the more delightful to keep on and discover what a charming, humorous tangle of circumstances ensued from what I thought was just going to be a dutiful “culturing” read.
I’m over 3/4 through, and I’m always eager for the next time I can pick it up.
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One book that sat in my guilt pile for decades was A Marriage is Arranged by Iris Weigh. Known to me as Granny Weigh, Iris Weigh was an author of romantic fiction novels, and my next-door neighbour.
Granny Weigh and her husband Grandad Weigh lived in the other half of the small semi-detached house I lived in with my parents until I was three years old. They were a kindly couple, probably then in their sixties, and they would often babysit for me.
I only have a few memories of Grandad Weigh. I remember his wheezy breath, a pipe, an astrakhan hat, and that he used to like to show me the sculptures he’d made out of slate. These were mountainsides with little hand-painted mountaineers climbing up them, cotton thread serving as rope. Granny Weigh would chide him, saying “he’s far too young to make one of those.” He disappears from my memories after that, and I presume that he passed away when I was still too young to understand.
Granny Weigh continued to be part of our lives until her passing in the mid 1980s. She would look after me in her own home, and we would make scrapbooks together. I would choose the images and Granny Weigh would carefully cut them out and paste them in. Sometimes she would choose pictures of her own. I still have these scrapbooks; they’re a window into the early 1970s, perfectly preserved. All my life I have loved any sort of collaborative creative endeavour. I drew a comic strip with my brother for ten years, took up improv, collaborated with Duncan Bowsman and G. C. Baccaris on Excalibur, and have been writing Escape from the Crazy Place with my oldest friend Loz Etheridge for more than forty years. I believe that love of collaborative art began with those scrapbooks.
Iris Weigh’s first published novel was Look Not Behind in 1951. Twenty years appear to have passed before her second novel Somewhere Love Waits was published, and most likely this was when she was raising her daughter, who I never met. Her third was A Marriage is Arranged, published the same year, and my parents had a signed copy which now belongs to me.
Granny Weigh wrote romance novels. They protagonists are mainly middle-aged women, “spinsters”, who find love late in life. They seem very old-fashioned now. She was always very self deprecating about her talents, but there are flashes of Du Maurier and D. H. Lawrence in her work. I read A Marriage is Arranged a few years back and a friend recently gifted me several others.
In a way it was strange to have this insight into the heart and soul of a beloved family friend who departed so long ago. I was reminded of something I had forgotten, that Granny Weigh had lived in Barbados for a time. The book Winter Meeting is partly set there. People of colour fill only very minor roles in that book, but I was cheered to read one passage in particular. When a white character describes the Afro-Barbadians as lazy, the central character calls her our on her racism, and sets her straight in no uncertain terms. My heart swelled when I read it. All these years after her death, here was another little reason to love her.
There’s an odd little coda to this story. When I wrote Excalibur I gave the head writer on the TV show the name Robert Hale. It was a name I just plucked out of the air, one that sounded suitably seventies. At that point A Marriage is Arranged had sat on my shelf, unread, for decades. When I finally took it down to read it, I noticed the name of the publisher on the spine: “Robert Hale”.
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The Bordeaux wine region in France, 1939. The insufferably egocentric and exceedingly beautiful 17 year old Léa Delmas, focus of all the region’s young men’s attentions, gets in a hissy fit when one of her admirers marries another woman.
And then the Germans invade Poland.
The original trilogy of La Bicyclette Bleue by Régine Deforges follows Léa’s experiences during the six following years of war and occupation. Her amourous adventures, her work as delivery-girl for the resistance, her close encounters with Gestapo and French collaborating police, her attempts to save what she can of her father’s vineyard.
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Everybody seems to be talking about Dungeon Crawler Carl so I finally gave in and started it
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Do you like it? It’s on my maybe list.
I’ve been re-reading Graham Nelson’s Players’ Bill of Rights.
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I’m about halfway through now. It is interesting and keeps me turning pages.
Several people have told me that the audiobook is excellent but I can’t do audiobooks, I tune out.
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I am currently reading Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut. I have read Cat’s Cradle twice and I really like the way the writer conveys themes, such as religion, global destruction and the impact of the atom bomb with dark humour and simple wording.
Part of Mother Night is about Kurt Vonnegut’s experience as a WWII soldier in Dresden, Germany. The metropolitan city was supposedly an open city not to be attacked, however the British together with the American troops bombarded it, which led to the deaths of thousands of civilians. As for the fictional part, the main character is Howard Campbell W. Jr., an American anti-Semitic propagandist who lives in Germany during Hitler’s rise. Towards the ending of the war another character, Frank Wirtaten approaches him and coerces him into becoming an American spy. After the war ends, he flees to New York and paradoxically he doesn’t change his name as he believes that nobody will remember the notorious propagandist, Howard W. Campbell Jr. Unfortunately, one of his neighbours is a Russian spy and he informs the publisher of a white supremacist newspaper about his existence. After a series of events Campbell finds himself waiting for his trial in an Israeli prison for WWII criminals.
It’s an interesting book for those who are into war narratives and want to educate themselves on WWII and the Holocaust.
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Be careful what you pretend to be…
There’s a good podcast that goes through each of his works individually called Kurt Vonneguys.
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Thank you! I’ll check it out. He is the first writer that makes me want to read most of his bibliography.
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I was assigned Slaughterhouse-Five in high school then read Cat’s Cradle when we got to pick our own book. Then I read everything else roughly in publication order.
A couple years ago Ryan North (Dinosaur Comics, Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Fantastic Four, etc) put out a graphic novel version of Slaughterhouse-Five that’s very good.
Ryan also has several “legally we can’t say Choose Your Own Adventure” books that are excellent.
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Just finished part two of Robin Hobb’s Liveship Traders-trilogy: The Mad Ship.
Lots of character development, important revelations about the backstory of the sea serpents, and the beginnings of the Bingtown rebellion against the Jamaillian Satrapy. Truly engrossing.
I can’t believe I never read Hobb during my Fantasy-devouring twenties. This is the best in the genre I’ve read in a long time, and among the best in general.
The Mad Ship - Wikipedia
Now I’m getting started on Jeanne Bourin’s La Chambre des Dames. The life of two women, a goldsmith and her trouvère daughter, in the thirteenth century.
Jeanne Bourin - Wikipedia
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Just started reading Gene Wolfe’s “Book Of The Short Sun”.
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Finished The Last Full Measure (last years of the American Civil War). I read Gods and Generals (first years of the American Civil War) about a year ago. Now I just have to track down the author’s father Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels (Battle of Gettysburg) to read about those crucial days that form the hinge or tipping point between Jeff Shaara’s two books.
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Compliments.
As next reading, I warmly suggest to read Luraghi’s History of the American Civil War, by far the best non-US book on that war.
he was an Italian army officier and fought as a partisan commander during our civil war (1943-5), so he know close & personal the “brother against brother” environment.
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
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That sounds really interesting! Thank you for the recommendation.
Unfortunately, I can find nothing about a translation to English (or French or Dutch). Would you happen to know if one exists?
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I know that was xlated in English, but from a quick look @ amazon seems that is badly out of print…
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
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