January has welcomed us with our first snowstorm of 2022. That didn't take long! Much colder air is arriving as well. At least we are quite used to staying indoors by now. That is one of the reasons why I read so many books in December. I was finished my required reading last month by the 15th, so on the 16th I began the first of 6 books not related to the Avon/Equinox SF authors. Three of the six books were real, live books, and three were Kindle reads. Three were SF, one was an art book, one was classic fiction, and one was a mystery story.
First up was Station Eleven, a tale of post-apocalyptic Ontario and western Michigan after a virus has ravaged the world, killing over 99 % of the people very quickly. Imagine my surprise as I neared the end of Emily St. John Mandel's absorbing novel to read in the Globe and Mail newspaper about a new HBO series just coming out called Station Eleven. I will have to subscribe to another paid channel if I wish to see it, and I probably will. The first episode should tell me if I will continue to watch. I have read so many books in the past 5 1/2 years that I now much prefer them not to be made into anything to do with TV or movies. But I will give this one a try soon. There are ten episodes, and so far 5 have been released for viewing. I liked the book a lot, though Emily owes much to writers like John Christopher and Edgar Pangborn, both who have written exceptional novels of post-apocalyptic life. Highly recommended, the book was written in 2014, not long after the SARS scare.
Next up was Olaf Stapledon's first novel, called First And Last Men. There are very few writers with superb imaginations that are able to put down on paper exactly what they are thinking, in terms that we mere mortals might comprehend. This is a novel (from 1930) that greatly influenced generations of SF writers, and is still regarded as one of the best SF tales ever told. It relates two billion years of human history, from today through then, in a most astonishing tale of success and failure. What Stapledon has managed to do is provide enough material for future SF authors to write literally thousands of additional novels, filling in the details he has forced to skim over. If ever there was a SF novel to end all SF novels, here it is. It is a fairly long book, but broken up into manageable units, and not difficult to read if taken a bit at a time. There is a lot of food to chew on, so chew slowly and enjoy.
Next up was another SF classic, this time a reread for me. The House On The Borderland is from 1908, written by William Hope Hodgson, the man who brought us The Night Land. I haven't read it in many years, and though it is much easier to see the flaws today, it is just as easy to become engrossed in one of the best horror novels ever composed, one that Lovecraft would try and copy many times. The setting is a large, lonely house on the Moors, and it happens to sit atop a gaping hole that goes deep into the earth. Very strange and threatening things happen at the house, and we are there for all of them. This is a must read for fans of the genre. Don't expect great writing, but expect some wonderful chills and mysterious doings.
Rock With Wings, by Anne Hillerman, is a continuation of her father's famous mystery stories set in Navajo land in new Mexico and Arizona. She uses the same characters as Tony, but we now see things from a female officer's perspective. Bernie Manuelito and Jim Chee are a couple, and they both are sworn officers of the Navajo police. Their beat covers a vast area, thinly populated, where cell phone service is often absent, and even police car two way radios don't work. This is her second book (she has six so far, and another on the way), and it is quite good. We get a mix of police work and life on the reservation. This plot involves a zombie movie production on location at Monument Valley. Well done.
The Cincinnati Museum of Art has long attracted our attention, and when Deb had films accepted in the Cincinnati Film festival two years in a row, we visited the city again both times. I was able to spend a luxurious day at the main art museum, one of two in the city. I recently reread Dutch, Flemish, and German Art In The Cincinnati Museum of Art, a catalogue of paintings. I was reading this while reading the above novels, focussing on a painting or two each day. While the collection is much smaller than the one at the DIA (for example, Detroit has more 17th Century Flemish paintings than all of Cincinnati's Dutch, Flemish, and German art from all ages combined), there are choice paintings here that too many people will never see. Like many museums, their choice Rembrandt selection was downgraded a few years ago to Studio Of..., but there are still plenty of autogrpah masterpieces to see. I also have their Italian paintings catalogue, but now I am embarked on a DIA catalogue of American Art, Volume Three of their American painting collection (which is vast beyond words). Cincinnati is a beautiful Midwest city of the shores of the Ohio River, and their main art museum is a world class institute that will never disappoint visitors, even ones like me who have been there many times.
Last, but not least, was Joseph Conrad's Outcast Of The Islands. This was his second novel, though the events in it are related to Almayer's Folly, his first novel. The events in Outcast take place prior to those in Almayer, with several of the same characters present. No one writes like Conrad, or as well. That man could handle a sentence, a paragraph, and a chapter in such masterful ways as to leave readers gaping open-mouthed at his prowess. His use of nature as a foil to human emotions and deep, inner thoughts is brilliant and unique. He tackles racism and White feelings of superiority head on, portraying characters not so much as mean or evil towards their "inferiors", but merely clueless as to what they are really like, their thinking and their potential. Why are dark people inferior? Because white people say so! The story revolves around Wilhelms, a Dutchman with a respectable job with a major trading company. He loses at poker and borrows from the company to pay his debts. He is caught, disgraced, and forced to leave the area forever. Captain Lingard (who is in all three related novels) takes him to Almayer, where he proves to be not only his own worst enemy, but Almayer's and Lingard's as well. In my early 30s I first got seriously interested in reading Conrad. Now that I have the Delphi collection of complete works, I can finally read his entire canon. With greatest of pleasure.
There is some fresh snow on the ground, and the temp will remain below freezing all day today and tomorrow. It feels like January. On the bright side, the days are growing longer, and we are already 12 days into winter, being that much closer to Spring. I would linger here, but there are books to read, movies to watch, piano pieces to practice, and laundry to do. Until next time.
Mapman Mike
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