Currently reading forum game

The Penguin Book of Curious and Interesting Puzzles
David Wells 1992 (Penguin 1992)



"This collection of logical and mathematical puzzles, none requiring specialist knowledge or more than pencil, paper and a few counters, brings together examples from earliest times upto the inexhaustable riches of the present day. Some are truly demanding, others require a single "easy" but easily missed lateral leap - so turn to the solutions or endure days of delicious frustration! Yet whether they concern prisoner's dilemmas, Delightful discounts, Pandigital products, fast breeding rabbits, liars and truthtellers or Prince Rupert's cube, one thing is sure: endless entertainment is guaranteed." (blurb)

568 puzzles in all of which I attempted to solve less than one in ten (and succeeded in even fewer) but even the ones I didn't attempt were usually interesting enough to want to look up the solution and see how it was done. I'd seen a fair few of these in the Martin Gardner books but I found I still couldn't solve most of them even having seen the solutions fairly recently.
I used this for the last read before lights out when mental acuity is at its dullest - that's my excuse anyway.

A Zoo in My Luggage
Gerald Durrell 1960 (Penguin 1974)



"Here Gerald Durrell chronicles the birth of a private zoo. Journeying to the Cameroons he and his wife, helped by the renowned Fon of Bafut, managed to collect "plenty beef". Their difficulties began when they found themselves back at home, with Cholmondley the chimpanzee, Bug-eye the bush-baby, and other founder members...and nowhere to put them." (publisher's blurb)

This was Durrell's third collecting trip to British Cameroon in 1957 with the animals eventually ending up in the zoo he founded in Jersey.
A quick pleasant read.

The Purple Valley
Malcolm Saville 1964 (Girls Gone By 2017)



"The second of a series of suspense novels which feature the enigmatic secret agent, Marston Baines, and his undergraduate nephew Simon and his friend Charles - and two delightful and spirited girls.
Marston and his young friends find themselves in a plot to introduce an addictive drug into the universities of Europe to undermine morals and make fantastic profits. The source of the drug baffles the authorities and the action soon moves from Oxford to Provence which the three men intend to explore in Marston's Mini-Cooper.
By chance they arouse the suspicions of a smart restaurateur who discovers that the british agent knew this country during the war when he was dropped by parachute to help the French resistance.
Their search takes them into the wild, sun-baked mountains, forests and ravines which were the territory of the Maquis when France was fighting for her freedom; when, by chanc, they discover the secret purple valley, they find themselves threatened with death." (publisher's blurb)

The Baines novels were aimed at an older readership than the Lone Pine books but are still written in Saville's slightly naive style which seems to jar with the more adult themes and real violence. Saville often bemoaned his struggles with plotting and this is a good example as the the story is propelled by a series of absurd coincidences that has the reader gasping in admiration/disbelief.
I didn't enjoy this one as much as the LP books, probably because I hadn't read any of this series as a boy, but I'll probably read the others as I seem to have evolved into a Saville collector.

The Beginning and the End
Isaac Asimov 1977 (Doubleday 1977)



"How can a moon colony manage without water? (By catching comets and melting them down.) What discovery by Thomas Edison, which he thought useless, made all our modern electronic devices, including television, possible? (The "Edison effect" which led to the development of the radio tube.) How many drops of water does the Earth contain? (28,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000')
These and other intriguing facts await the Asimov reader as this amazing man's mind leads you through twenty-three wide-ranging discussions of where we are today, where we were yesterday and where we might be tomorrow.
Here is Asimov hypothesizing on where mermaids came from, what supermarkets will be like a century from now; and how the first spaceships can be hung in space on either side of the Earth while colonies get used to living in them.
And in his most captivating essay, "The Beginning and the End" Asimov takes up the endlessly puzzling question of how the universe came into being(if it did), and how it will end (if it will). (publisher's blurb)

This is a collection of Asimov's non-F&SF essays published 1973-76 in a variety of periodicals including "poolife" which was a magazine published by a company which produced chemicals for disinfecting swimming pools and in which he states that the Earth posesses 28 trillion drops of water. Not a lot of people know that.
Asimov is still banging on about overpopulation and the need for world government. In amongst the prophecies of doom there are a few interesting articles such as the one on Cyrano de Bergerac's career as a science fiction writer. The megaloconked swordsman was the first person to envisage space travel by rocket in his 1657 "A Voyage to the Moon"

George VI
Philip Ziegler 2014 (Penguin 2018)



"If Ethelred was notoriously 'Unready' and Alfred 'Great', King George VI should bear the designation of 'George the Dutiful'. Throughout his life he dedicated himself to the pursuit of what he thought he ought to be doing rather than what he wanted to do. Inarticulate and loathing any sort of public appearances, he accepted that it was his destiny to figure regularly and conspicuously in the public eye, gritted his teeth, largely conquered his crippling stammer and got on with it. He was not born to be king, but he made an admirable one, and was the figurehead of the nation at the time of its greatest trial, during the Second World War. This is a sparklingly brilliant and enjoyable book about him." (from Blackwell's)

Like the Liz 2 entry in the Penguin Monarchs series this was readable but not riveting. Partly because most of the info is familiar but mainly because modern constitutional monarchs are figureheads and therefore not very interesting. Having said that George was probably duller than most so I'm hoping his big brother "Eddie 8 - The Abdicator" will pick up the pace.

Lady
Thomas Tryon 1974 (Coronet 1976)



"In Pequot Landing, there are two sights to see: the largest elm in America, which dominates the stately old village green, and the house of Lady Harleigh. When the Great War ended, she was the most beautiful bride in the village, and though she was widowed soon after, mourning dampened neither her beauty nor her spirits. By the time the Great Depression rolls around, she is the unchallenged center of Pequot society—lovely and energetic, but subject to bouts of grim melancholy that hint at something dark beneath her surface.
Woody is eight years old when he first notices the Lady, and her glittering elegance captures his heart. He spends his boyhood deeply in love with the mysterious widow, obsessed with the sadness that lies at her core. As he gets closer to her, he finds that Lady Harleigh is haunted—not just by grief, but by a scandalous secret that, if revealed, could change Pequot Landing forever." (from Open Road)

I read the author's novel Harvest Home a long time ago and liked it a lot so I was happy to pick this one up in a charity shop. The mystery element was mysterious enough to keep me interested but mostly it is an account of a boy growing up in small town America in the 1930s. It's well written, poignant and I enjoyed reading it.

Advanced Geordie Palaver
Scott Dobson 1970 (Frank Graham 1970)



Number three in the publisher's "Geordie Beuk" series. They were successful enough to spawn about a dozen titles, most authored or co-authored by Scott Dobson. I read several as a lad so they are another set of nostalgic reads for me.

The Wizard of Oz
L. Frank Baum 1900 (Puffin 1982)



"We all know the movie and storyline well. But have you ever read the original novel? Influenced by the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, L. Frank Baum created this classic story and fantasy using the dream of young Dorothy on her journey home to demonstrate the theme of good vs. evil. Throughout her adventure, she encounters several newfound friends: a scarecrow, a tin woodman, and a cowardly lion. They traverse the land of Oz together by following the famous yellow brick road to the stunning Emerald City. Though they encounter surprises along the way, what they find in the Emerald City shocks them." (from Simon & Schuster)

I picked this up because I'm a big fan of Martin Gardner and Gardner was a big fan of the Oz books and references them in his own works.
It does read like a traditional European fairy tale with the casual savagery that you associate with the form. The film left out the bits where the lion bites the head off a shelob like giant spider and a pack of wolves are beheaded by proto-terminator and mad axeman the Tin Woodman.
Baum wrote thirteen Oz books so this might become another series to be collected.

Hear the Boat Sing
Nigel McCrery 2017 (The History Press 2017)



"During the First World War many sportsmen exchanged their sports field for the battlefield, switched their equipment for firearms. Here acclaimed author and screenwriter Nigel McCrery investigates over forty Oxbridge rowers all of whom put down their oars and gave their lives for their country.

Complete with individual portraits, these brave men are remembered vividly in this poignant work and, together with a new memorial to be unveiled at the 2017 Boat Race, there is no more fitting tribute to these men who made the ultimate sacrifice." (from Amazon)

I saw a link to this book when I was reading the Vivian Woodward biography. It was frustrating that there was so liitle information about his WWI service and the possible long term effects on his health and when I was looking into it I saw a link to this book. It contains a lot of boat race minutiae which I found boring but the biographies of the men and accounts of the action they saw and how they were killed was worth reading. The accounts for each man are short because there are forty two to fit in but i saw that there is a published diary for Frederick Kelly, who is one of the subjects, which I'm planning to read.
The author has published similar compendia of footballers, cricketers and rugby players killed in the Great War so I may get hold of those as well.

The Best Science Fiction of the Year #10
Terry Carr (editor) 1981 (Pocket Books 1981)



Carr admits in his introduction that the splitting of these collections into novellas and shorter works the previous two years was not a commercial success and so it reverts to a single volume.
I thought this was a pretty decent selection. Maybe three of the twelve fell into the daft/pointless category but not egregiously so. Five were Ok/not bad and four classified as pretty good. Three of the latter I had read before decades ago, two of which I had no recollection of even when reading them.
The four best:

Grotto of the Dancing Deer - Clifford D. Simak
Ginungagap - Michael Swanwick
The Ugly Chickens - Howard Waldrop
Slow Music - James Tiptree Jr

Simak won the Nebula and Hugo for best short story and Waldrop won the Nebula for best novelette.