KindleUnlimited

Takeaway: A story of regret and complaint, joy and pain. Much like the story of many of us.

As regular readers of this blog well know, I have been intentionally reading a lot of CS Lewis for about 18 months. Lewis is an icon of Christian literature. And there are few that can compete with the breadth of his work, from apologetics, to memoir, to children’s literature, to serious adult fiction, to serious academic work, to contemporary essays.

I first read Till We Have Faces nearly three years ago before this most recent reading. I liked it much more this time. I think I both understand Lewis and have more context than the previous reading and I think I probably read the book better.

Till We Have Faces is a retelling of the story of Cupid and Psyche from the perspective of one of Psyche’s sisters. I didn’t really know the story of Cupid and Psyche before, and so I intentionally read several things about it before I re-read this to make sure I have the basics of the story in my head.

Books and Cuture had a good review by John McWhorter of a book on the history of jazz. The thing that has really stuck with me is McWhorter’s comments about a 1957 Looney Tune cartoon that riffed off of the three little pigs story with jazz musicians.

What McWhorter notes is that in order to understand the “˜Three Little Bops’ cartoon, the audience had to understand the original story of the three little pigs. And similarly, when jazz was popular music, the jazz solo was riffing off of a known melody and song. But as jazz has become a more “˜classical form’ it has taken more work to understand the original musical stories that are currently being riffed off of.

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Takeaway: Evidently I am old enough to understand and appreciate mid-life crisis books.

Recently I have decided that I need to read more 20th-century literary fiction. My education missed out on that entire century. And I also have been interested in the Catholic writers that were so popular in the mid to late 20th century.

Walker Percy has been republished by Open Road and has books easily available on Kindle (and from Lendle.me).

I didn’t realize when I started (and I don’t think it makes much of a difference) but The Second Coming is follow-up to The Last Gentleman. (I will get back and read that at some point.)

Will Barrett is middle aged, retired early, wealthy, and recently, a widower. This is a classic mid-life crisis book, one that I don’t think I would have appreciated as much as I do now even five years ago.

Allison is a young woman that has recently escaped from a mental hospital. She is schizophrenic, daughter of an old flame of Will’s, fabulously talented, but unable to cope with much of normal life.

Most of the book centers around Will Barrett’s internal drama. He is focused on the meaning of life, whether there is a God (and how God can be proved) and Barrett’s own history. Barrett’s (like Percy) father committed suicide when Will was a teen. Coupled with Barrett’s health problems, which are slowly revealed throughout the book, his thoughts take over his life.

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Summary: Two long lived people interact, love and fight over generations.

Wild Seed is now the fourth book and the start of the second series I have read by Octavia Butler. She is a good writer and creates interesting (and wildly different) settings and characters.

But Butler is also hard to read at times. Not particularly unusually among fantasy and science fiction authors, she uses her settings to create alternative social structures and explore issues of ethics and morality.

Butler is known for her feminist writing. While not all men are evil, all of the books I have read from her so far have explored the ideas of male oppression of women.

Wild Seed is about two long lived people. Doro has the power to move from one body to another, living forever, but needing to “˜feed’ on those around him both to stay alive and because of an innate need. Because of his long life (he has been alive for over 4000 years), he has created breeding programs to breed special powers into his “˜children’. These settlements, first in Africa and then later in the Americas, are scattered, but allow him to live as a God. Worshiped by his children, who will willingly give up their bodies for their God.

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Reposting my 2013 review because the Kindle Edition is free today only. The audiobook is $2.99 with the purchase of the free kindle book.
Summary: An amateur detective (and younger brother to a Duke) helps a Scotland Yard officer solve a murder.

In my ongoing quest to read more old literature, I picked up the first book in Dorothy Sayer’s Lord Peter Wimsey series.  Generally the reviews were mediocre.  Most people agreed that this isn’t her best book and not the best of the series.  The Audiobook review (which is how I read this) were even less kind.  There are two copies of this at Audible, both are narrated by middle aged British women.  (I listened to the sample for the one I didn’t get and both sound very similar.)

Maybe it was the very low expectations that I had coming in, but this was an enjoyable mystery.  I am not a huge mystery fan, I don’t really like the traditional Sherlock Holmes style detective who is just so much smarter than everyone and figures things out.  But Sayers is intentionally writing Lord Wimsey to be an anti-Holmes.  There are several passages about how Holmes is not real and how real police work different than Holmes or most other books.

Although it is a bit of a stretch, this feels more like the TV show Castle than anything else (without the sexual chemistry between the police detective and the amateur sleuth).  Peter Wimsey is a relatively young, single, carefree man that is part of the Nobility, but does not have a particular role to fill.  He is a younger brother, so he is not the Duke, he has not gone into politics or law.  He is well educated, but not a professional.  So he has made a hobby of being a detective.

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Reposting this 2014 review because What if is today’s Audible Deal of the day (March 30) and on sale for $2.95 for the Audible.com Audiobook. This is one that might be better in print, but the narrator is Wil Wheaton and the audiobook is well reviewed.
Summary: Serious science, with humor and line drawings, what more could you want.

The best thing I randomly stumbled across in my searching through the Kindle Unlimited books is the recently released book What If? by the author of the xkcd comic.

This is formatted as a book to browse through (or a bathroom book if that is your thing.) Each question is 4 to 5 pages and Munroe takes the subtitle’s Absurd idea seriously.

Some of the questions are absurd, but most of the answers are taken to an absurd level that puts the original questions to shame.

One of the questions asks if you could turn the recoil of a machine gun into a jetpack. Then Munroe calculates the recoil of various machine guns and figures out how many of them together would need to lift you into the air.

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