A Table Near the Band

A Table Near the Band
by A.A. Milne
Rating: ★★★★½
Publication Date: January 1, 1950
Pages: 223
Genre: Fiction, Literature
Publisher: Methuen

It’s not often that a collection of stories comes along that doesn’t have a mix of average, above-average and maybe a couple of bombs. When I wrote my reading status update for A Table Near the Band I didn’t really have a lot of confidence that the stories would continue to be the same high-quality delight that the first two proved to be – what would be the chances? Imagine my surprise to find that, with the exception of 1 story, the entire collection never failed to surprise, entertain and charm.

I have to start first with the dedication, because it made me laugh:

To
THE READER
Whose weekly parcel from the Library has included
this or that book, either because it has been re-
commended by a friend or because the author’s
previous work has recommended itself:
Who has flipped through the pages in happy anticipa-
tion and found that it is a book of short stories :
Who has said disappointedly
“Oh! short stories, and
has put it aside and settled down to one of the
other books

I DEDICATE THIS ONE
At the same time pointing out to her that completely
revealing titles which are both attractive and as
yet unused are hard to come by, and that after all
one should expect

A TABLE NEAR THE BAND
to offer a view of other tables, at each one of which
some story may well be in the making.

How often have I done this to myself – buying a book thinking it a story only to find it’s a collection of them. Thankfully, this was not one of those books, but one I did buy on the strength of A.A. Milne’s The Red House Mystery, which I thoroughly enjoyed.

A list of the stories, with individual ratings and a sentence worth of blurb follows:

A Table Near the Band: 5 stars. The titular story and a short comedy of … not errors, but a neat encapsulation of the foibles of both genders. Neither side comes out looking good, but it’s light and amusing.

The Prettiest Girl in the Room: 5 stars. This one starts out sad and depressing, but midway through turns into a sweet, generous tale that manages to warm the heart without the saccharine side-effects.

A Man Greatly Beloved: 5 stars. I was completely knocked back by this story; it starts off quietly and as though it could be predictable, although the narrator’s voice has an unintended cheekiness to it that is amusing. The story than abruptly turns into an altogether different animal that leaves the reader foundering a bit, but Milne closes the story as gracefully as can be imagined.

The Rise and Fall of Mortimer Scrivens: 5 stars. An epistolary short story that had me laughing at the ‘villain’s’ comeuppance, done in a way that really only British humour can pull off.

Christmas Party: 4.5 stars. Family holidays from an untapped perspective, but which one anyone part of a married couple has experienced, and Milne delivers on the ultimate irony of the perpetual perception of the importance of family togetherness.

The Three Dreams of Mr. Findlater: 4 stars. Disturbing. Well-written but with an ending that leaves the reader both crying deus ex machina! and floundering with judgement of the character.

The River: 4 stars. This one was well-written but an odd duck. The premise – the power of a powerful coincidence – works well enough, but given the reader knows the ultimate end of the story from almost the beginning, it fails to have the power it might have had under different circumstances.

Murder at Eleven: 3 stars. The weakest, by far, of all the stories and a murder mystery, but a transparent one. Luckily, it’s short.

A Rattling Good Yarn: 5 stars. A humorous tale about how revenge can be subtle and still be sweet.

Portrait of Lydia: 4 stars. Another mystery, but better written; the reader knows there’s something hinky but doesn’t get all the details until the end, when the protagonist finds out years later.

The Wibberly Touch: 4.5 stars. I want to call this another ironic story, but I’m not sure it is; it’s obvious that Milne writes with a satiric pen about a character that’s not nearly as suave or as good as he thinks he is, but the reader is left thinking he’s an ass, but is a really a dishonest one?

Before the Flood: 4.5 stars. Not a morality tale, but a different perspective on the events proceeding the great biblical flood. Told with humor, but not with disrespect.

The Balcony: 5 stars. This one is the most theological and not necessarily one that a lot of people would consider good, but it resonated with me a great deal because Milne plays with the average person’s overly simplified idea of judgement and heaven. It’s a short piece but it balances angst and hope reasonably well, leaving an ending that is up to the reader to decide.

From a strictly mathematical point of view, the collection is not quite 4.5 stars, but I rounded up in acknowledgement of a collection that I never shied away from picking back up. Milne wasn’t just a gifted children’s author, but a gifted author, capable of charming both young and old.

Einstein’s War: How Relativity Triumphed Amid the Vicious Nationalism of WWI

Einstein's War: How Relativity Triumphed Amid the Vicious Nationalism of World War I
by Matthew Stanley
Rating: ★★★★½
isbn: 9781524745417
Publication Date: May 21, 2019
Pages: 391
Genre: History, Science
Publisher: Dutton

Few recognize how the Great War, the industrialized slaughter that bled Europe from 1914 to 1918, shaped Einstein&;s life and work. While Einstein never held a rifle, he formulated general relativity blockaded in Berlin, literally starving. He lost fifty pounds in three months, unable to communicate with his most important colleagues. Some of those colleagues fought against rabid nationalism; others were busy inventing chemical warfare&;being a scientist trapped you in the power plays of empire. Meanwhile, Einstein struggled to craft relativity and persuade the world that it was correct. This was, after all, the first complete revision of our conception of the universe since Isaac Newton, and its victory was far from sure.

Scientists seeking to confirm Einstein&;s ideas were arrested as spies. Technical journals were banned as enemy propaganda. Colleagues died in the trenches. Einstein was separated from his most crucial ally by barbed wire and U-boats. This ally was the Quaker astronomer and Cambridge don A. S. Eddington, who would go on to convince the world of the truth of relativity and the greatness of Einstein.

In May of 1919, when Europe was still in chaos from the war, Eddington led a globe-spanning expedition to catch a fleeting solar eclipse for a rare opportunity to confirm Einstein&;s bold prediction that light has weight. It was the result of this expedition&;the proof of relativity, as many saw it&;that put Einstein on front pages around the world. Matthew Stanley&;s epic tale is a celebration of how bigotry and nationalism can be defeated and of what science can offer when they are.

As I mentioned in an earlier reading status post, I was both drawn to this book and apprehensive about reading it. I wanted it for the bits about Einstein and relativity, but I’ve had it up to my eyeballs in the hypocrisy and vicious hate that’s the order of our days (unless I’m at the hydrotherapy pool, and then I’m all about the hate, because seriously, parents need to learn, and then teach their unruly monsters, some damn common courtesy – especially when they share the pool with frail, injured and/or elderly tax-payers. But I digress.)

I decided to read the prologue and was immediately sucked in, and I figured I could skim the war bits if they started dragging me down. The war bits did drag me down, but I didn’t skim, because this book was so much more than I expected it to be in a lot of unexpected ways.

This book is not only the story of how Einstein became Einstein, it’s the story about how his theory came into this world, bit by bit, painful mistake after painful fruitless searching, with duct-tape slapped on and removed, rationalisations made, and the whole thing scrapped and started over again. I found this part enlightening because modern tellings tend to make people think the general theory of relativity just sprouted fully formed one day from Einstein’s pencil. I also enjoyed his small attempts, with illustrations, to describe aspects of relativity, and that he included details about some of the thought experiments that Einstein used.

This book is also about A.S. Eddington, a brilliant British mathematician turned astronomer, a Quaker, and a conscientious objector during WWI. It’s about how his faith informed every part of his life, and his refusal to divorce his religious beliefs from his work when the British government tried to demand it of him. It’s about how his religion guided his efforts to repair the integrity of international science when it was thought to be irreconcilably broken, and how his choice for this international bridge building – proving a calculation that verified Einstein’s theory of relativity, via the 1919 solar eclipse – and how he went about doing it, was largely responsible for turning Einstein into science’s first and only genuine superstar. It’s about one man’s efforts to quietly and modestly fight the vicious hate and anger that permeated every part of the UK at the time.

I loved this book. I took half a star off because the author’s fast and loose, zig-zagging time lines during the war years drove me crazy. I know it’s difficult to be linear about complex historical events that happened in tandem, but I’d be reading about events in 1918, thinking we were getting to the end of the war, and suddenly the author had me back in 1917 without the appropriate signage. This happened a few times and left me lost on every occasion.

But putting that aside, I loved this book. I wasn’t expecting the respect the author showed towards Eddington’s religious integrity. I wasn’t expecting the author’s objectivity when acknowledging Einstein’s controversies, small though they might seem in the grand scheme of things. (I’m completely icked out by the fact that he told Elsa and her daughter that it made no difference to him which one of them he married.)

I liked that Stanley addressed and discussed the question of how much Einstein’s ex-wife Mileva may have contributed to his work, and I really liked how the author included the female scientists throughout the years that touched on Einstein’s work or life. I loved that when he did so, it was casually, in the same narrative tone and voice he used for everything else in the book, like women working in science wasn’t special, or unique. He was honest about their chances of advancement, or of even getting paid, but he didn’t treat them like they were some rare exotic or token.

Where the author really earned my respect though, was at the end. Up until that last chapter, I thought the book insightful, thoughtful, well-written and engaging, but the last chapter really brought home the author’s sense of balance. I can do no better than to quote him. Warning, this quote is long.

Everyone wants a simple explanation for why things turn out as
they do. Popper thought the expeditions were extraordinary and made
them exemplars of good science. Everitt thought the expeditions were
biased and made them exemplars of bad science. Collins and Pinch
thought the expeditions were shaped by politics and authority, and
made them exemplars of socially constructed science

Einstein’s War has been a story about how none of those are enough.
Einstein and relativity’s victory involved good science, bad science,
politics, and personal authority. Any episode in science does. None of
those mean relativity is wrong (it has been confirmed many, many
times since then) or that Eddington fudged the numbers (there were
good reasons to trust the 1919 results). Science is done by people. That
means it will be inherently complicated and often confusing. People
will make mistakes, equipment will break, poor decisions will be made
because of political or personal bias.

Note that you could replace “science” and “scientist” in this last paragraph with any profession in the world today and it would be just as apt, and just as relevant.

We do not have to be forced into extremes. The presence of human
scientists does not make science unreliable. We need to understand,
though, what science-done-by-people actually looks like and how it
works. That means leaving behind some comforting myths about the
dispassionate, purely rational, always-objective nature of science. The
deeply human, sometimes chaotic story of relativity is not an excep-
tion. It is an exemplar. Science is messy, it is also a powerful way to
learn about the real world around us.

By the end of this book I was wanting to yell “Preach it!” Given that I’ve never uttered those two words, never-mind thought them, in the whole of my modestly repressed life, they’re probably the best summation for just how much this book resonated with me. Overall, it as just a really excellent read.

Reading Status: A Table Near the Band

A Table Near the Band
by A.A. Milne
Publication Date: January 1, 1950
Pages: 223
Genre: Fiction, Literature
Publisher: Methuen

I grabbed this book as a counter-balance to Einstein’s War, and while I’m only 30 pages and 2 stories in, it’s charming so far! A.A. Milne has given me a wry and humorous story and a sweet one that manages to be sweet without being saccharine or overly sentimental. If the rest of the stories are this good this collection will be a treasure.

Reading Status: Einstein’s War: How Relativity Triumphed Amid the Vicious Nationalism of World War I

Einstein's War: How Relativity Triumphed Amid the Vicious Nationalism of World War I
by Matthew Stanley
isbn: 9781524745417
Publication Date: May 21, 2019
Pages: 391
Genre: History, Science
Publisher: Dutton

Few recognize how the Great War, the industrialized slaughter that bled Europe from 1914 to 1918, shaped Einstein&;s life and work. While Einstein never held a rifle, he formulated general relativity blockaded in Berlin, literally starving. He lost fifty pounds in three months, unable to communicate with his most important colleagues. Some of those colleagues fought against rabid nationalism; others were busy inventing chemical warfare&;being a scientist trapped you in the power plays of empire. Meanwhile, Einstein struggled to craft relativity and persuade the world that it was correct. This was, after all, the first complete revision of our conception of the universe since Isaac Newton, and its victory was far from sure.

Scientists seeking to confirm Einstein&;s ideas were arrested as spies. Technical journals were banned as enemy propaganda. Colleagues died in the trenches. Einstein was separated from his most crucial ally by barbed wire and U-boats. This ally was the Quaker astronomer and Cambridge don A. S. Eddington, who would go on to convince the world of the truth of relativity and the greatness of Einstein.

In May of 1919, when Europe was still in chaos from the war, Eddington led a globe-spanning expedition to catch a fleeting solar eclipse for a rare opportunity to confirm Einstein&;s bold prediction that light has weight. It was the result of this expedition&;the proof of relativity, as many saw it&;that put Einstein on front pages around the world. Matthew Stanley&;s epic tale is a celebration of how bigotry and nationalism can be defeated and of what science can offer when they are.

I picked this off the TBR shelves yesterday because Einstein! I almost put it back because Nationalism! War! and I’m in the mood for neither. I decided to read the prologue, and got completely sucked in.

I’m only 60 pages in, so Einstein and Eddington are still relative newbies to the science scene and WWI is only a gleam in Kaiser Wilhelm II’s eye, but I’m thoroughly sucked it. I’m really enjoying the author’s way of leading the reader through all of Einstein’s papers, so it’s apparent that the general theory of relativity was a process that was built upon, layer by layer, instead of something that sprouted fully formed one day. I’m also appreciating the graphs and illustrations, even if the mathematical formulas are way over my pay-grade.

I’m really hoping my zeal for the book will withstand WWI.

The Book of Forgotten Authors

The Book of Forgotten Authors
by Christopher Fowler
Rating: ★★★★
isbn: 9781786484895
Publication Date: October 5, 2017
Pages: 374
Genre: Books and Reading, Non-fiction
Publisher: River Run Books

"Absence doesn't make the heart grow fonder. It makes people think you're dead."

So begins Christopher Fowler's foray into the back catalogues and backstories of 99 authors who, once hugely popular, have all but disappeared from our shelves.

Whether male or female, domestic or international, flash-in-the-pan or prolific, mega-seller or prize-winner - no author, it seems, can ever be fully immune from the fate of being forgotten. And Fowler, as well as remembering their careers, lifts the lid on their lives, and why they often stopped writing or disappeared from the public eye.

These 99 journeys are punctuated by 12 short essays about faded once-favourites: including the now-vanished novels Walt Disney brought to the screen, the contemporary rivals of Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie who did not stand the test of time, and the women who introduced us to psychological suspense many decades before it conquered the world.

This is a book about books and their authors. It is for book lovers, and is written by one who could not be a more enthusiastic, enlightening and entertaining guide.

The 4th star I’m giving this book, a collection of 99 authors who have been ‘forgotten’, is a tip of the hat bump-up for witty dialog that made me chuckle throughout the book, and for giving me a handful of author names worth researching for future used bookstore treasures.

Otherwise, this is a collection of 99 authors who have been ‘forgotten’, along with a half-dozen or so essays that discuss additional forgotten authors, that is made a bit average through sheer volume. It’s both a book that doesn’t lend itself to reading through, nor dipping into here and there. It’s best read in chunks, I guess, but then one is apt to get to authors who write – or wrote – in areas of no interest to the reader, and suddenly there’s skimming and skipping.

There are a number of authors Fowler includes that I’ve not only heard of and/or read, but whose titles are actively sitting on my shelves: Allington, Wheatley, Orczy, Mitchell and Crispin, among others. This made me feel oddly better about myself in a way I probably shouldn’t admit to, but there it is; suddenly my wall of cozies seem a tiny bit elevated by sharing company with these names who have been deemed worth remembering.

The Sherlock Holmes Companion

The Sherlock Holmes Companion
by Michael Hardwick, Mollie Hardwick
Rating: ★★★★
isbn: 0517219166
Publication Date: January 1, 1962
Pages: 262
Genre: Books and Reading, Reference
Publisher: Bramhall House

One of my acquisitions from my visit to the Berkelouw Book Barn, this isn’t really a sit-down-and-read book, so much as it’s a handy reference of characters, story plots and a selection of quotes (which I found to be a mediocre selection, at best). But there are two ‘chapters’ at the back that offer small biographies of Sherlock and Holmes, and one of Conan Doyle himself.

The Sherlock/Watson biographies about what you’d expect, although I’m constantly amazed, whenever I read these types of things, how much presumption is done on the part of the fans who write them, no matter how learned those fans are. I can never get through one without periodic outbursts along the lines of give me a break!. While this one was no different, I was, at least relieved to see that the authors dismissed the nonsense that Holmes, pre-Watson, had had a great love that died, leaving him unable to ever love again.

The chapter of Conan Doyle’s mini-biography was concise but packed with his life, including quite a few facts I’d yet to read about (I have Hesketh’s biography waiting for me on my TBR, and one of these days I’m going to get ahold of Dickson Carr’s ACD bio too). ACD was not only an author of mythical skill, he was a truely good man who fought for pretty much any cause that needed fighting for, and a prescient man, correctly forseeing what a war with submarines and advanced weaponry would mean for the crumbling empire soon the enter WWI. That question that makes the rounds every once in awhile: who would you go back in time to speak with, if you could? Without question, it would be Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, every time.

Venom

Venom
by Eivind Undheim, Ronald Jenner
Rating: ★★★★½
isbn: 9781486308378
Publication Date: October 1, 2017
Pages: 208
Genre: Natural Science, Science
Publisher: CSIRO Publishing

A fully illustrated guide to venom, its evolution in different animal groups, its effects and its treatments.
When we enter the world of venom, we enter the realm of one of the most diverse, versatile, sophisticated and deadly biological adaptations ever to have evolved on Earth.

Since it first appeared in ancient jellyfish and sea anemones, venom has proved so effective that it has since evolved independently in dozens of different animal groups. The authors reveal the many unique methods by which venomous animals deliver their cocktail of toxins and how these disrupt the physiology of the victims.

Jenner and Undheim also consider how humans have learnt to neutralise venom’s devastating effects, as well as exploit the power of venom in innovative ways to create new drugs to treat a variety of serious conditions. Fully illustrated throughout, this illuminating guide will appeal to all those with an interest in the wondrous world of venom.

This was not quite the book I was expecting, proving you can’t always judge a book by its cover and full colour photos. I originally thought it would be a fast-ish read. I should have known better though because it’s published by CSIRO, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, an Australian Government agency responsible for scientific research.

33 days and two nightmares later, (seriously – first time EVER a book has given me nightmares) and I can say I’d happily recommend that @elentarri check this book out if she can find it. For anyone else out there that finds science, and especially natural sciences, fun and fascinating, and is happy to tackle a densely written narrative that falls closer to academic research paper than it does to popular science in writing style, you too should see if you can find this book.

Only 7 chapters and less than 200 pages long and filled with full colour illustrations, photos (warning: some of them are graphic) and charts, but don’t let this fool you: there’s a lot of hard science here. As I was reading it, I got the impression that it’s mean to be a primer or introduction for science students and hard-core amateurs. Chapter 1 discusses the definitive differences between a poison and a venom, luring the reader into a sense that this is definitely aimed at armchair scientists. By the time Chapter 5 rolls around, though, the writers are saying things like:

Not all enzymes conserve their ancestral activity while evolving into molecular killers, however. Some snake venom PLA₂enzymes, for example, have lot their enzymatic activity but they can still exert their toxic roles.

(Quote take at random from chapter 5 “Evolving Venoms”). By chapter 3 I had learned a lot but the authors were making me work for it. While I can say, how that I’m done, that I now have a good overall understanding of the concepts presented, it’s only a very thin veneer of all that this book offers. This is a book I’d have to re-read several times, slowly, before I could say I had an immersive understanding of the text.

While chapter 5 is, I’d say, the densest chapter, the authors do wrap the book up with two lighter chapters that were akin to a nice after-dinner sorbet. Chapter 6 discusses how venoms are used for traditional healing, cosmetics, recreational drug use (I can’t imagine ever thinking that smoking dried scorpions sounded like a viable option), rites of passage, spiritual vision quests, and modern medicines. I found this chapter fascinating from an anthropological perspective. Chapter 7 is a summary chapter that uses the honeybee as a microcosm example of all the concepts of venom relevant across the microcosm.

I have never been afraid of snakes and have always been one of the first to volunteer to interact with one, and while I’ve never been stupid about venomous ones, giving them a wide berth at all times, I’ve got to say reading this, especially Chapter 4 “Dissecting the power of venom”, planted a tiny seed of fear in me about ever running across them in any context. What few anecdotes the authors offer are chilling and I’ve been wondering if, when I can walk again, I could feasibly bush walk in thigh-high thick rubber waders. Maybe with some good insoles…

There are, of course, a lot of other animals covered in this book – as the authors point out, 25% of all phyla are venomous (mosquitoes are considered venomous). I have a whole new respect for the male platypus during breeding season (must look up when that is), and the slow loris?, well all I can say is if it puts its arms up to hug you, run away – fast. But the snakes are what leave the most indelible impression, making even the spiders look like the lesser evil.

All in all, a good book for those genuinely interested.

Reading Status Update: I’ve read 68 out of 208 of Venom

Venom
by Eivind Undheim, Ronald Jenner
isbn: 9781486308378
Publication Date: October 1, 2017
Pages: 208
Genre: Natural Science, Science
Publisher: CSIRO Publishing

A fully illustrated guide to venom, its evolution in different animal groups, its effects and its treatments.
When we enter the world of venom, we enter the realm of one of the most diverse, versatile, sophisticated and deadly biological adaptations ever to have evolved on Earth.

Since it first appeared in ancient jellyfish and sea anemones, venom has proved so effective that it has since evolved independently in dozens of different animal groups. The authors reveal the many unique methods by which venomous animals deliver their cocktail of toxins and how these disrupt the physiology of the victims.

Jenner and Undheim also consider how humans have learnt to neutralise venom’s devastating effects, as well as exploit the power of venom in innovative ways to create new drugs to treat a variety of serious conditions. Fully illustrated throughout, this illuminating guide will appeal to all those with an interest in the wondrous world of venom.

When I started this book, I thought it was going to be introductory, aimed at a mainstream audience. It’s introductory, in its way, but I can’t imagine it’s really meant for a mainstream audience; lots of latin names and terminology that’s not advanced (no molecular structures, so far) but not really reader friendly either.

I’m really enjoying it; I like the informative charts I’ve come across so far, and there is a generous number of full colour photographs that are beautiful. Some of the information is old-hat for me, but quite a bit of it is new, and I’m only done with 2 chapters.

This is a slow read that will ruin my average reading time stats, but will be well worth it, I think.

One Day: The Extraordinary Story of an Ordinary 24 Hours in America

One Day: The Extraordinary Story Of An Ordinary 24 Hours In America
by Gene Weingarten
Rating: ★★★★★
isbn: 9780399166662
Publication Date: October 22, 2019
Pages: 375
Genre: History
Publisher: Blue Rider Press

Two-time Pulitzer Prize–winner Gene Weingarten explores the events of a random day in U.S. history, offering a diorama of American life that illuminates all that has changed—and all that hasn’t—in the past three decades.

On New Year’s Day 2013, two-time Pulitzer Prize–winner Gene Weingarten asked three strangers to, literally, pluck a day, month, and year from a hat. That day—chosen completely at random—turned out to be Sunday, December 28, 1986, by any conventional measure a most ordinary day. Weingarten spent the next six years proving that there is no such thing.

That Sunday between Christmas and New Year’s turned out to be filled with comedy, tragedy, implausible irony, cosmic comeuppances, kindness, cruelty, heroism, cowardice, genius, idiocy, prejudice, selflessness, coincidence, and startling moments of human connection, along with evocative foreshadowing of momentous events yet to come. Lives were lost. Lives were saved. Lives were altered in overwhelming ways. Many of these events never made it into the news; they were private dramas in the lives of private people. They were utterly compelling.

One Day asks and answers the question of whether there is even such a thing as “ordinary” when we are talking about how we all lurch and stumble our way through the daily, daunting challenge of being human.

The subtitle of this book should have been The Extraordinary Stories of an Ordinary 24 Hours in America; it would have better encapsulated what this book is about, in a way.

A day was chosen at random – December 28, 1986 – and Weingarten digs into the stories and events that happened in that 24 hours, fleshing out their backstories and, in some cases, providing epilogues (I appreciated this; it always annoys me that news outlets rarely follow up on stories). Some of them are beyond tragic; events that were catalysts for change both at home and around the world. Some of the stories are terrible and shocking on a more personal level, and many are hopeful, a few inspiring, and a couple are downright cheerful.

I remember being drawn to this book by the striking cover, and thinking that I’d enjoyed Bill Bryson’s One Summer, so I grabbed it on impulse when it first came out. It languished on my TBR for the last 3 years, give or take, until I finally grabbed it last weekend, and it grabbed me right back. Weingarten is a journalist, so the narrative voice is unapologetically journalistic, but he’s a 2 time Pulitzer winning journalist, so the writing is excellent. I found myself deeply involved in each and every story – even the ones I’d really rather have been more detached from. I was both reading parts out to MT, and telling him you really need to read this yourself. The stories are American, but very few of them are uniquely American; they’re stories of the human experience and for the most part could be the experiences of anyone, anyplace.

Weingarten didn’t quite stick the landing; the wrap up was a tiny bit messy and might have been tighter, neater, had he ended it a page sooner, but it’s a negligible niggle and really didn’t detract from a fascinating read.

Under the Covers and Between the Sheets

Under the Covers and Between the Sheets
by C. Alan Joyce, Sarah Janssen
Rating: ★★★★
isbn: 9781606520345
Publication Date: October 15, 2009
Pages: 175
Genre: Books and Reading, History, Reference
Publisher: Reader's Digest

Bibliophiles, grab your glasses! Here is a compendium of interesting--and often scandalous--facts and quips about the literary world. Featuring authors and tomes of yesteryear and yesterday, from Tolkien's Middle- earth to Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex, you'll sections such as:

Parental Guidance Suggested: Banned works of fiction and the controversy surrounding them.

Lions and Tigers and Bears (Oh My!): The real-life stories and inspirations behind beloved "leading creatures."

Time to Make the Doughnuts: Odd jobs of famous authors.

Tell Me a Story: Dahl's short stories, Seuss's political cartoons; the lesser-known, and sometimes shocking, adult writings of beloved children's authors.

The Long Con: Shocking (and sometimes shockingly long-lived) literary hoaxes: Frey, JT Leroy, The Education of Little Tree, The Day After Roswell, etc.

Science Fiction, Science Fact: If alien monoliths are ever found on the moon, the safer bet is that they would be translucent crystal; Sir Arthur C. Clarke is celebrated for making accurate predictions of various technologies, years ahead of their time. A look at which of his predictions held true and the same feats of other authors.

Yes, But is it Art?: The weirdest books ever written: books without verbs, without punctuation...or without the letter "e".

I had no idea that Reader’s Digest was still publishing books, nor that they were publishing things I’d find interesting. (Are they still doing condensed books?) But this little reference tome of odd and interesting facts was interesting; trivia is cat nip for me, and while some of what was in here were things I already knew, quite a bit wasn’t. I found myself reading some sections out loud to MT, and more than a couple sparked interesting conversations, and at least 1 debate. (MT got a bit sloppy and made a throw-away comment about Australia not banning books like America did – to be fair, a national sports icon died young yesterday, and he wasn’t in top form. Still, Wikipedia was called up, and there was a reckoning.)

I always pick these type of books up at used book sales, or remainder shops, so I always feel like the knowledge gained was good value.