Pilgrimage: The Book of the People (1961) by Zenna Henderson: 3/5

This is a "fix-up" novel of six novelettes published in F&SF during the 1950s, telling about The People who came from another planet, crash landed on Earth (Arizona) and then "trying to find the best way to fit in unnoticed among the people of Earth and yet not lose our identity as the People."

As far as I can see no revisions were made and the linking passages don't really add much. So I regret not just reading the short stories when they appeared on my reading list, but instead saving all but the first one for this book.
The first three stories are quite good, but the fourth and fifth ones are just too much repetition and dragged on too long. The protagonists are yet again female schoolteachers in rural schools, who use lots of Kleenex, and with classes of children all ages, some of which are "special". And we get sentences like this:

Feminine writing can be a breath of fresh air when reading older SF, especially "engineering" SF, but that's enough of it right there to last me for several months.

As Science Fiction it's very weak, but should instead, like Ray Bradbury, be read as Fantasy (in the broader sense). There's no attempt whatsoever to explain the Psi abilities of The People, nor why they are just like Homo sapiens in all other respects (except being nicer, of course). Nor is much made to explore the sociological implications of being able to fly and read minds and such.
It's all about a group of people who are "different" and the problems they face. There's many similarities with the Jews, but I don't think it's meant to be an allegory about Jews.

Zenna Henderson was an interesting character.
Apparently she was a racist, since none of her characters are described as black.
And she was also an anti-semite since in one story (which I haven't read) there's a Jewish couple who is quarrelsome.
And as if that's not enough, she was even not a real feminist, but a pre-feminist, since her characters were men and women in the gender roles that were normal at the time she wrote her stories. The sheer audacity of the woman; living in the 1950s and not conforming to the stereotype of how a female writer should be according to the mental midgets that dominate and pollute the SF community of the 2020s! Hopefully they are just a very vocal minority.

Henderson was not part of the SF community AFAIK, but her favourite writers were Bradbury, Hal Clement (she even named a character after him, I think), Asimov and Heinlein. In writing style she's obviously closest to Bradbury and the very opposite of Clement. But like Clement she was a schoolteacher whose stories often revolved around kids and nice aliens, so I guess that resonated with Henderson. Heinlein is more surprising, but he did write about The Families (a group of immortals who must hide their immortality from society) in Methuselah's Children, and he did write lots of juveniles.

Jeff Wheeler's Kingfountain Trilogy -- The Queen's Poisoner, The Thief's Daughter, & The King's Traitor.

10/10, 9.5/10, 10/10

Yeah, I know it became 9 books over 3 story arcs: Books 1, 2, &3 about MC "Owen", Arc 2: Books 4, 5, & 6 about Owen's child, and Arc 3: books 0.5, 0.6, & 0.9 about Owen's teacher in book 1.

But I read the Trilogy as it was originally intended and scored it as 10/10, 9.5/10 & 10/10. There were times I hated what the author did to some of my favorite characters, but I understood by the end of the book. Book 2 is set a number of years after the events of the first book, and there is also a gap between books 2 & 3.

It is fantasy that is ever so slightly based on events from history. I highly recommend it to anyone who has the slightest interest in fantasy, or who prefers their books clean.

When deciding if he would be forever loyal and hold the motto of "Loyalty Binds Me", Owen Kiskaddon came upon this quote: and this one .

This trilogy has become one of my tip-top favorite series of all time. I cannot wait to read more from this author.

★☆☆ Jacques the Fatalist / Denis Diderot
★★★ Crime and Punishment / Fyodor Dostoevsky
★★☆ The Labors of Hercules / Agatha Christie
★★☆ The Art of War /Sun Tzu
★☆☆ Zarządzanie w chaosie / Ewa Błaszczak
★★★ The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master / Andy Hunt, Dave Thomas
★★★ The One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey / Kenneth H. Blanchard, William Oncken Jr.
★★☆ Deathless / Catherynne M. Valente
★★☆ We Are Legion (We Are Bob) / Dennis E. Taylor
★★☆ God Never Blinks: 50 Lessons for Life's Little Detours / Regina Brett

List of all books read in 2021.

I have read very few fiction books this year :( I finished reading Behind the Beautiful Forevers, The Red Pony, and All Over But the Shoutin'. Now I am reading The Ox-Bow Incident.

Finally, I can now start reading David Baldacci novels in the order he wrote them ... skipping the ones I've already read of course. He's written a lot, and I started with a series in the latter half of what he has written, and then read a few others, some of which were related ... or the premise really attracted me.

Anyway, I've now completed a few of his later series, such that I can do as I usually do and read an author's books in the order they wrote them. I'd gotten a freebie and a very cheap one, and been inspired to read due to a friend recommending him ... though I purchased and started reading another of his ebooks, that I really liked the sound of, first.

David Baldacci wrote a lot of standalone novels when he first started, and then he began to do series, and every couple of years started a new series, while finishing off an earlier one usually, and sometimes linking a character between series.

His first novel, which I have just started, is a well known box office success, starring Clint Eastwood and Gene Hackman - Absolute Power. Luckily, I've not yet gotten around to watching the DVD, which I've had a while, as I prefer to read first. That was not deliberate in this case, as I wasn't even aware of the author when I bought the DVD. Like with books and games I have a backlog of movies too.

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

For what this book aims to do, extrapolating from a handful of representative examples to demonstrate that we're in the midst of the sixth known mass extinction in the history of life on this planet and that humans are responsible for it, I can find no reasons to complain. It's written well, easy to read, and the examples and arguments are properly selected and presented. In particular, I'll point out the appalling but all too common human behavior against other creatures depicted in chapter three, the fact that chapter four doesn't depict an extinction caused by humans but shows both that extinction isn't the "fault" of the species going extinct and how tightly even scientists tend to hold on to existing convictions despite the evidence, and chapter eleven, which shows that humans have been a disaster for other species pretty much since we started spreading all over this planet, so that idyllic image of a time when humans lived in harmony with Nature was probably never true.
Past that, however, it stops at pointing out a few extraordinary conservation and possibly restoration efforts, presenting them as proof of the good humans can do, even though all other evidence shows that in that case you can't extrapolate in the same manner. Choosing to end in that manner instead of stressing that typical human behavior, at the individual level but far more importantly in terms of how society, past and present, is set up and functions, is responsible for all this destruction and needs to change, quickly and radically, is disappointing to say the least.
As for the translated edition I read, I spotted a handful of typos and translation errors, so I wonder how many I didn't spot, especially since the translator didn't seem sufficiently comfortable with the field. And I still don't like the notes being at the end, and in this case the number would have allowed them to be footnotes... Which would have also likely avoided the couple of situations where the numbers in a chapter ended up off by one after a point.

Rating: 4/5

Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning is a book by Jonah Goldberg, in which Goldberg argues that fascist movements were and are left-wing.

Ten years on, the book still holds up. Goldberg argues, provocatively, that fascism shared roots in common with what we call modern liberalism or progressivism.
[/https://jonahgoldberg.com/liberal-fascism/]

Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) by Robert A. Heinlein:3.5

Heinlein's first non-juvenile book that was never serialized in a magazine, probably due mainly to length (400+ pages) but also due to the sexual content, this is the story of Valentine Michael Smith, a human born on Mars and raised by Martians, and his experiences on Earth as a Martian mind in a human body.

It took Heinlein 13 days to write The Door Into Summer, but 13 years to finish this one, which I've seen referred to as his masterpiece. Sadly, I was rather disappointed. Writing in one burst ensures an internal consistency, but SSL is just too much rambling.

The premise is very interesting; a new take on the Tarzan and "wolf child" stories. The physically very different Martians have amazing psi powers, which Smith also learns. But how feasible is that? A monkey raised by humans will never learn to speak, but a squirrel raised by cats will learn to purr. In the story other humans can learn some psi powers, though, so in that context it makes sense.

Heinlein's novels are often told in first person, by a Competent Man, which he did very well. In this story it's told in 3rd person, and the main POV character is Jubal E. Harshaw.



Incidentally the last two sentences quoted are only in the revised edition from 1991, which is the full unedited version. I read the 1961 version (1987 edition) myself, as I have a very strong suspicion that Heinlein needed an editor.

Heinlein's Competent Men were often slightly annoying, often having a trace of the Insufferable Knowitall. But in this story the POV character is no longer a practical man, but a fully formed Insufferable Knowitall, which I gather Heinlein himself turned into. Harshaw is not arrogant or haughty, though, so he's a nice enough character, but every time he speaks it's like a Heinlein essay on religion, nudity and free love.
Harshaw is too old to be a complete insertion of Heinlein himself who was about 40-55 when he wrote the book, but perhaps he represents how Heinlein saw himself as he would be when he was 70; a successful writer, with three beautiful secretaries being part of his household, and with a group of "kids" to whom he could be Big Daddy and lecture to.
But at least Harshaw seems to be self aware:


So this feels to me like a turning point in Heinlein's career; and not a good one. Little variety in characters was always his main weakness, IMO. This time the characters are more diverse (and I'm not talking about the kind of superficial diversity in appearance that a "modern audience" is obsessed with), but the writing is more rambling with far too many "essays" by Harshaw, there's lots of dialogue which I usually like in books, but I found the dialogue mostly rather weak.
Heinlein had already handled most of the themes earlier. "What is a man?" in Jerry is a Man, and religion in If This Goes On...and Sixth Column. There's some cloak-and-dagger stuff early in the book, but that was done much better in Gulf.
So the parts I liked best was the "alien" with different mentality interacting with humans (which is far more interesting than Hal Clement's and Zenna Henderson's aliens) and some short passages when Harshaw throws the law book around, including at some SWAT teams breaking into his property.
The first half of the book is quite good, but then it turned into endless essays about religion and Free Love. So Heinlein kind of predicted the sexual revolution, but not the form it would take. There were rumours that the Heinleins were swingers. No idea if they were, but I wouldn't be surprised if this book started the rumours.

The Man from Mars was apparently based partially on Theodore Sturgeon, but at some point he turns into more of a L. Ron Hubbard type, creating a new "religion". IIRC Heinlein's reaction when meeting Sturgeon for the first time was "no man has any business being that pretty" or words to that effect.
But it's dedicated to Philip Jose Farmer (expert in interspecies sex) and Fredric Brown.

I was initially planning on reading the 1961 version first and in ten years time or so read the 1991 version, but I have a feeling that the 1991 version is just more of the stuff I didn't like in this book...

I read the book a few decades ago and quite enjoyed it.
Whether I would enjoy it as much now who knows.
SciFi novels especially are hard to judge properly long after they were written. So many little things have changed, most you would not consciously be aware of, and they all add up to how you feel about the story.

Having read all seven Foundation novels by Isaac Asimov in the last year or so, for the first time, I can honestly say it is hard to be objective about the older material. The newer stories were better written, which you would expect as a writer's skills develop. Too hard to say which were the best novels, though I found the newer ones easier to read, and so read them quicker. Of course each novel fleshed things out more.

On the one hand I am easy to please as a reader, while on the other I'm not. If anything jars or feels foolish, even just spelling errors, it can break the flow for me and take me out of the zone ... mar the illusion and make it harder to suspend any disbelief.

While humans haven't essentially changed much, they do depending on their education think differently about things, especially over time. This can cause some effect in stories written long ago, and you don't always pick up its effect consciously, but it can contribute to the whole of the experience when reading.

When reading older books it helps having an understanding of the time and culture it was written. I recently read Don Quijote, and thought it was OK, but I would probably have enjoyed it much more if I could read Spanish and had read all the books Cervantes satirized.

What really irks me is when "a modern audience" reads older books and are deeply troubled ("this book is problematic")
that modern sensibilities are absent.

It's also a question of when you read a book. For example much of Fantasy is more enjoyable when you are young and inexperienced.

As for Foundation I first read it 15 years ago, right after having read the first 3.5 brilliant books of A Song of Ice and Fire, and I was not very impressed, and the difference in style between the older and newer books were jarring.
But when I started to read speculative fiction chronologically about eight years ago I was in a retro mode when rereading the original magazine versions of Foundation, and found them much more enjoyable.

Stranger in a Strange Land was written to provoke the virtue signalers of that time, but nowadays the things that were "problematic" then is just a few click away on the Interporn, while the portrayals of women and homosexuality being "wrongness" will provoke the virtue signalers of today.

So Heinlein managed to provoke even better than he probably planned.

Yes mode you are in makes a big difference for sure.
Some writers make that easier to get into than others.
I've always read a lot of older books ... Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, Rafael Sabatini, Leslie Charteris, Jules Verne, H.G. Wells and countless others.
I find mode is often related to mood too, and for sure the style and substance etc of what you may have just read.
Variety as they say, is the spice of life, and I find it improves my reading ... even if I don't vary it a lot ... like for instance I have been stuck in mysteries and thrillers modes for a few years now, and don't tire of it, because I am always interspersing something from another genre ... and sometimes its just something light, because some books can be quite heavy going or dark.
I can remember getting burnt out with Fantasy when I was younger ... just read too much of it continuously.

Fantasy is like you say, easier to cope with when younger, where you are more forgiving, but it often depends on the quality of the writing and how the author portrays things or thinks. Tolkien and Martin and Jordan and Hobb are great examples to my mind, and not them only, of brilliance in the Fantasy genre. They go that extra mile, and have depth and complexity. My favorite series of Fantasy books would be the Empire trilogy by Raymond E. Fiest and Janny Wurts, but others by the authors I mentioned are right up there, including The Song Of Ice And Fire, as you mentioned.

In some ways, as an older reader who has seen and experienced many changes in the world, I perhaps find it easier to step back in time and read books from an earlier period in history ... but I have to be in the right mood to do so, and I learnt long ago now, never to force things, having previously religiously stuck to my 'To Read List'. Now I go more with the flow of what grabs me, and I have so much I never want for anything reading wise, other than more time. Trouble is though, I can't seem to stop acquiring more books, even though my backlog is huge, and I sometimes get caught up with new authors, like David Baldacci and J. Robert Kennedy in the last couple of years ... so I am in a kind of binge mode with them, though I break them up regularly with something else here and there.

Robert Heinlein is certainly a controversial writer or person. A man of his times in many ways, even though he wrote Science Fiction, often with a fantastical element. I liked some of his books, though never enough to read a lot, and he could waffle on a bit. I much prefer Frank Herbert ... Dune series at least. Isaac Asimov's robot stories and novels I also enjoyed a lot. Odd perhaps that I read them long before reading the Foundation series ... but I guess you can put that down to the appeal of robots. In fact I read other robot novels before getting to Asimov's and his three laws.

When it comes to culture, I rarely read something from another culture or set in another culture on Earth. I certainly can't read any other language than English. Though I guess I have read a good number of translations, for authors like Alexandre Dumas and Jules Verne and more recently a Witcher novel. That said, I guess I grew up with European folk tales, and been immersed at various times in things like Vampires etc. I quite like a bit of Gothic.

Speaks the Nightbird, by Robert McCammon. McCammon came out of an early retirement (I gather it was an unwilling retirement) in the early 2000s to publish this big fat historical mystery. It's a bit of a departure from his horror roots, but it's also relatively hard-edged and "R-rated" for the genre, with lurid violence, language, and sex. It's set in 1699 and the hero, Matthew Corbett, is the clerk to a magistrate that's been called to a small settlement in the Carolina colonies to preside over a witch trial. Of course not all is at it seems.

The book really nails the sense of place and the people in it. The colonies were in a precarious state once you got beyond the major ports, and this was still an era in which a person stood a reasonable chance of getting eaten by a bear if they drifted even a short ways out. Plus hostile Indians, pirates and highwaymen, serial killers, Spaniards... Corbett is a somewhat forward-thinking and idealistic hero, but he's not a vehicle for smug finger-pointing often found in stories like this, and it's also well-established that the other characters in the story aren't just a bunch of superstitious maniacs despite their witch-burning fervor. They're people that act according to the information they have, which was the most current information available in the era (hey, they had a whole variety of witchcraft textbooks back then), plus there's at least one villain manipulating things to push them more firmly toward certain conclusions. McCammon's a smart writer and you tend to find that his characters get more nuanced as you get to know them instead of remaining shallow and inert. I feel dumb having to say that but there are many writers, including some extremely popular ones, who are perfectly happy to stick to one-dimensional stereotyping.

The plot is a tad slow and talky but I didn't mind since I found the historical atmosphere so satisfying, and McCammon thankfully sticks the ending. He's since written a whole series of Corbett novels, although sadly they don't seem to have done huge business and have remained a cult series. I've got the second one, but getting the rest of them in print might take some doing (I guess if I get desperate I could just go with e-books, but I hate e-books...).

Darkmage by Barbara Hambly

The book is set in a medieval industrializing empire where magic is plentiful but lawfully restricted. After a mage is mysteriously murdered by someone that somehow knows to open gates to other worlds. a warrior vow-bound to mages set out on a journey with his Archmage grandfather to see the imprisoned insane mage.
I enjoyed the book, especially the insane mage.

★★☆ Wir pamięci / Edmund Wnuk-Lipiński
★★☆ Rozpad połowiczny / Edmund Wnuk-Lipiński
★☆☆ Pełna MOC życia / Jacek Walkiewicz
★☆☆ A Martian Odyssey / Stanley G. Weinbaum
★★☆ Ksiega emocji / Judi Abbot Maraa Menendez-Ponte
★☆☆ Meadowland: The Private Life of an English Field / John Lewis-Stempel
★★☆ 20th Century Ghosts / Joe Hill
★☆☆ The 5 AM Club: Own Your Morning. Elevate Your Life / Robin S. Sharma
★★☆ Cuphead, Volume 1: Comic Capers & Curios / Zack Keller, Shawn Dickinson
★★★ Winnie-the-Pooh / A.A. Milne
★★☆ The Global Economy as You've Never Seen It / Thomas Ramge, Jan Schwochow
★★★ I Heard You Paint Houses / Charles Brandt
★★☆ Statystycznie rzecz biorąc, czyli ile trzeba zjeść czekolady, żeby dostać Nobla? / Janina Bąk

List of all books read in 2021.

The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future

More than simply not struggling and not being annoyed by this book, I surprisingly enjoyed most of it, especially the early chapters. Such excellent and thorough criticism of the economic system, also detailing how it corrupts politics, justice and various other aspects of society and behavior, making most even act against their own interests. There are too many good points to make a selection, but it was great to see it spelled out that the current system rewards those who are most predatory, best at exploiting the market, people and the environment, while progress is mainly owed to state involvement and those choosing to not profit from their breakthroughs, and also how the fact that businesses don’t pay in full for the environmental damage caused and the natural resources used constitutes subsidies, on top of the direct ones that even some of the worst polluters receive. Otherwise, notes are often lengthy comments that are well worth reading, though I spotted one with no correspondence in the text, and not fitting anywhere, making me wonder whether a bit of text was skipped in this edition.
Later chapters, especially the ninth, did become less enjoyable, however. Focusing in ever greater detail on the 2008 crisis in the United States and maybe the next few years makes it less interesting for me here and now, but worse is the firm stance against prioritizing low inflation, though inflation hurts those who aren’t wealthy more, and repeatedly stressing that full employment must be the target and unemployment is the biggest failure puts me completely at odds with the author, the biggest failure being that people still need jobs and to “earn a living” when they should be freed from this. And overall, despite going surprisingly far for someone who held such important positions within the system, aiming for continued growth and mere reforms, albeit major ones, instead of completely changing the system, makes the proposed solutions too little, too late, doing more harm than good by supporting the belief that such a fundamental and rapid shift and the end of growth aren’t desperately necessary.

Rating: 4/5