Topic: Reader's Nook

[Beatrix]

Thanks Six. 
Glad to be here, have a telephone number again, and everything I need so far. 
I hope you have the same.  I'm sure your canning expertise serves you well.

[6pairsofshoes]

It's funny you mention that.  I'm making apple/mint jelly and also a small batch of applesauce tonight.   Someone gave me mint and I had some nice older organic apples that had gotten a little less than crisp so it was into the pot with them.

The applesauce turned out well.  It's so easy to make and you can put up a large batch with very little trouble.

[goldshirt*9]

sounds nice apple and mint

[6pairsofshoes]

Here.  For your reading pleasure is the wonderful, and short, Japanese tale, "The Boy who drew cats."
http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/books/japan/hearn/boydrewcats.html

The Boy Who Drew Cats

A LONG, long time ago, in a small country-village in Japan, there lived a poor farmer and his wife, who were very good people. They had a number of children, and found it very hard to feed them all. The elder son was strong enough when only fourteen years old to help his father; and the little girls learned to help their; mother almost as soon as they could walk.

But the youngest child, a little boy, did not seem to be fit for hard work. He was very clever,-cleverer than all his brothers and sisters; but he was quite weak and small, and people said he could never grow very big. So his parents thought it would be better for him to become a priest than to become a farmer. They took him with them to the village-temple one day, and asked the good old priest who lived there, if he would have their little boy for his acolyte, and teach him all that a priest ought to know.

The old man spoke kindly to the lad, and asked him some hard questions. So clever were the answers that the priest agreed to take the little fellow into the temple as an acolyte, and to educate him for the priest hood.

The boy learned quickly what the old priest taught him, and was very obedient in most things. But he had one fault. He liked to draw cats during study-hours, and to draw cats even where cats ought not to have been drawn at all.

Whenever he found himself alone, he drew cats. He drew them on the margins of the priest's books, and on all the screens of the temple, and on the walls, and on the pillars. Several times the priest told him this was not right; but he did not stop drawing cats. He drew them because he could not really help it. He had what is called "the genius of an artist," and just for that reason he was not quite fit to be an acolyte;-a good acolyte should study books.

One day after he had drawn some very clever pictures of cats upon a paper screen, the old priest said to him severely: "My boy, you must go away from this temple at once. You will never make a good priest, but per haps you will become a great artist. Now let me give you a last piece of advice, and be sure you never forget it. Avoid large places at night;-keep to small!"

The boy did not know what the priest meant by saying, "Avoid large places;-keep to small." He thought and thought, while he was tying up his little bundle of clothes to go away; but he could not understand those words, and he was afraid to speak to the priest any more, except to say good-by.

He left the temple very sorrowfully, and began to wonder what he should do. If he went straight home he felt sure his father would punish him for having been disobedient to the priest: so he was afraid to go home. All at once he remembered that at the next village, twelve miles away, there was a very big temple. He had heard there were several priests at that temple; and he made up his mind to go to them and ask them to take him for their acolyte.
Now that big temple was closed up but the boy did not know this fact. The reason it had been closed up was that a goblin had frightened the priests away, and had taken possession of the place. Some brave warriors had afterward gone to the temple at night to kill the goblin; but they had never been seen alive again. Nobody had ever told these things to the boy;-so he walked all the way to the village hoping to be kindly treated by the priests!

When he got to the village it was already dark, and all the people were in bed, but he saw the big temple on a hill at the other end of the principal street, and he saw there was a light in the temple. People who tell the story say the goblin used to make that light, in order to tempt lonely travelers to ask for shelter. The boy went at once to the temple, and knocked. There was no sound inside. He knocked and knocked again; but still nobody came. At last he pushed gently at the door, and was quite glad to find that it had not been fastened. So he went in, and saw a lamp burning,-but no priest.

He thought some priest would be sure to come very soon, and he sat down and waited. Then he noticed that everything in the temple was gray with dust, and thickly spun over with cobwebs. So he thought to him self that the priests would certainly like to have an acolyte, to keep the place clean. He wondered why they had allowed everything to get so dusty. What most pleased him, however, were some big white screens, good to paint cats upon. Though he was tired, he looked at once for a writing-box, and found one, and ground some ink, and began to paint cats.

He painted a great many cats upon the screens; and then he began to feel very, very sleepy. He was just on the point of lying down to sleep beside one of the screens, when he suddenly remembered the words, "Avoid large places;-keep to small!"

The temple was very large; he was all alone; and as he thought of these words,-though he could not quite understand them-he began to feel for the first time a little afraid; and he resolved to look for a small place in which to sleep. He found a little cabinet, with a sliding door, and went into it, and shut himself up. Then he lay down and fell fast asleep.

Very late in the night he was awakened by a most terrible noise,-a noise of fighting and screaming. It was so dreadful that he was afraid even to look through a chink of the little cabinet: he lay very still, holding his breath for fright.

The light that had been in the temple went out; but the awful sounds continued, and became more awful, and all the temple shook. After a long time silence came; but the boy was still afraid to move. He did not move until the light of the morning sun shone into the cabinet through the chinks of the little door.

Then he got out of his hiding-place very cautiously, and looked about. The first thing he saw was that all the floor of the temple was covered with blood. And then he saw, lying dead in the middle of it, an enormous, monstrous rat,-a goblin-rat,-bigger than a cow!

But who or what could have killed it? There was no man or other creature to be seen. Suddenly the boy observed that the mouths of all the cats he had drawn the night before, were red and wet with blood. Then he knew that the goblin had been killed by the cats which he had drawn. And then also, for the first time, he understood why the wise old priest had said to him, "Avoid large places at night;-keep to small."

Afterward that boy became a very famous artist. Some of the cats which he drew are still shown to travelers in Japan.

[6pairsofshoes]

The San Francisco Public Library is pretty amazing, given its perch on the edge of the Western world.  Today they emailed me a list of the 2020 Hugo Award nominees.  I'll paste the link to the list below.  Has anyone read any of them, or are you familiar with the listed authors?  Other than The Expanse, these are all unfamiliar to me.  I'm always looking for more recommendations.  Currently, I'm reading Boccacio's 14th c. Decameron, a collection of bawdy, moralistic stories recounted by a group holing up in a villa during a plague.
https://sfpl.bibliocommons.com/list/share/433865467_sfpl_readersadvisory/1618256485_2020_hugo_award_nominees

[goldshirt*9]

In Leicester our library is a joke

[6pairsofshoes]

At least you have a cheese you can be proud of...

The libraries here are pretty remarkable, really.  It's better when you can actually visit them, but they are doing a great deal to be accessible while the Shelter in place orders are in effect.  The access to magazines, newspapers, ebooks, audio books and streaming tv and movies is pretty astonishing. 

I have just started looking into my recent cache of classic SciFi books and have a copy of Wm. Gibson's Virtual Light that looks promising.  I read Neuromancer a long time ago and it was ok.  Crazy how groggy one feels from taking a midday nap.  I may resort to coffee so I can get motivated to go run errands.  Maybe it's the heat.  We have one of those short hot spells on at the moment.  The tomatoes will be happy at least.

[goldshirt*9]

At least you have a cheese you can be proud of...

Only the farm raised one  (vintage Ivanhoe is WoW) , rest are just commercial rubber

[Beatrix]

The five rings

[6pairsofshoes]

Leo Perutz, Master of the Day of Judgment.

Curious story, translated from German, about a regimental officer accused of causing an actor's suicide.  The book veers into fantasy and suggests that hallucinatory drugs were at work.  The ending belies this.  We are left not knowing what actually happened.

Perutz was a mathematician turned novelist.  His short novels are intriguing and delve into non-supernatural fantasy realms.  The pace was slow but eventually, I stayed up to finish it.  It was something someone gave away, I can't even remember how it came into my possession.  It has a Rockwell Kent woodcut on the cover, which is really a gorgeous design for a paperback.  Edition published in 1930.  It's sewn, so that probably explains why it hasn't just fallen apart.

[goldshirt*9]

Ben Kane - The forgotten Legion 

[6pairsofshoes]

Wm. Gibson, Virtual Light.  I'm about 9/10 of the way through this novel written in the 1980's, but I'm continually impressed at how prescient it is:  people wearing masks to avoid the various "viroids" in the wake of variants of HIV that plague the population; a breakdown of the integrity of the US into smaller states after a major conflict/upheaval.  Also, there is the common theme of the usual post apocalyptic disorder, including multiple layers of private security and police companies, most of which are corrupt, computer hackers, Japanese real estate investors altering the physical landscape, a rotting Bay Bridge with multiple levels of ad hoc squatter dwellings on it, heroic computer hackers and others living off the grid.  Also, multiple weird religious sects, many fundamentalist, run by the usual charlatans.

Much of the general structure of the plot is predictable and not especially different from normal policiers/hard bitten rogue cop on quest for justice type books, but it's still been an entertaining read.

[6pairsofshoes]

Just finished City in the Middle of the Night, by Charlie Jane Anders.  It was pretty engaging.  Life on a planet in the future with human colonies landing there after Earth became uninhabitable.  Interesting take on structures of governance, different species, environmental issues and technology.  Also, pretty much told from the perspective of lesbian protagonists.  That was not especially foregrounded, just the fact that the main actors were women and the romantic interests were generally between them.

I'm inhaling science fiction novels now.  Will read The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley next.

I think these were on some list somewhere of recommended new science fiction.  I found them online.  I am open to more suggestions.

[6pairsofshoes]

Thanks for the suggestion.  I'll check that out.  I am reading the remaining actual book I brought, Asimov's Eight Stories from the Rest of the Robots, mostly chosen because I liked Foundation and it was thin, so relatively portable.  I won't be taking these home with me, but leaving them for someone else to read.

The first of the stories was amusing, but very much dated, and squarely in the sort of writing you'd expect from the 1960's.  Given the 1964 publication date, I'm not surprised.  This won't last long, as the individual stories are 10 pages at most, on average.

[goldshirt*9]

I am atm reading Spartacus  by the Scottish writer Lewis Grassic Gibbon,
But Spartacus is not the main character in the book.
Not what i expected at all. Grittier with plenty of rape and pillage with a few torture scenes to boot.
At the front of the book you get a description of the the writer, a bit of a tortured soul.
Written in 1933 the descriptive language and style makes a interesting read.