I am on Goodreads (as "Tomj"), I have decided to start blogging about what I've been reading, here is what I read in October. I'll have another batch for November.
Playground, Richard Powers. As others have remarked, this novel kind of does for the sea what The Overstory did for trees. Powers is one of my favorite novelists, and this one is one of his best, up there with The Gold Bug Variations and The Echo Maker.
A Few Days in Athens; being the Translation of a Greek Manuscript Discovered in Herculaneum, Frances Wright. A 19th century novel that discusses Epicureanism, a pretty good. Available from Project Gutenberg. I've really gotten into Epicureanism.
The Demon Breed, James Schmitz. A science fiction adventure novel, featuring a strong female protagonist, set in a planet with an interesting ecology. I am reading books nominated for the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award (I am a judge). Pretty good book.
Polostan, Neal Stephenson. Historical fiction, featuring a Russian-American woman brought up as a Communist. First book of a trilogy. Stephenson and Powers are two of my favorite living writers, so October was a good month for me.
Chapel Perilous: The Life & Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson, Gabriel Kennedy. This is the book that most of you will be interested in, so it deserves a few more words.
Exhaustively researched (there's even a list in the back of many of the places RAW lived), accurate in the most important particulars, the section about Robert Shea is well-researched, too. I agreed with most of the opinions in the book. The research generates quite a few things that surprised me. I didn't know that Paideia University, where RAW got his advanced degree, actually was a creation of RAW and his wife. You'll learn other things about RAW you didn't know before, even if you are well read in his work.
The book is formatted accurately for Kindle (not a given for self-published books) and has a good cover, by Laura Kang. The book's main flaw is that it is poorly copyedited, or rather, it reads as if there was little copyediting. Lots of spelling and grammar mistakes.
Chapel Perilous is available as a Kindle, hardcover and paperback via Amazon and on Lulu.
7 comments:
I am very surprised to read of lots of spelling and grammar mistakes in Chapel Perilous. Tom, does a section or set of pages come to mind showing lots of mistakes? I was sent a final draft of it about 3 weeks before the e-book publication and I didn't see lots of spelling and/or grammar mistakes. I did see a few and passed on what I found to Prop who said he implemented my suggestions. Yes, mistakes can slip through but it shouldn't look like no proofing was done. I also copy edited it a couple of years ago and there were lots of mistakes as you'd expect at the beginning of the process. I found the recent final draft I read to be remarkably clean and free of mistakes though some were noted. This makes me wonder if the wrong draft got used for the version reviewed here? I verge on being obsessive and annoying pointing out mistakes when proof reading. I also google things I'm not sure about. I know that considerable time and effort was spent trying to make it read perfectly because I put in the time and effort and know that others did too.
Oz, mistakes are always going to slip in even a carefully edited book. But in this book, women in a Playboy magazine book are "bearing" their breasts, Madalyn Murray O'Hair (misspelled as "Murray-O'Hair" in the book) suffers a "grizzly" death, Emmett Till's name is misspelled, the name of the film director Costa-Gavras is misspelled as "Costa Graves," punctuation for sentences is wrong, words like "Communist" are capitalized in one sentence and then lower case in another, the book switches back and forth between "US" and "U.S." and so on. I just felt like the book would have benefitted from more careful attention.
I kinda wish it did not look as if Bob is doing a fascist salute on the cover art, though.
To be honest, the idea of RAW doing a fascist salute seems so unlikely to me, I didn't think of it that way; I just assumed he's waving or something. I liked the cover.
Tom, yes I know from experience that typos can slip into, or rather remain in carefully edited books. They are the exception rather than the rule in those books. There' s a huge difference between that and a book that hasn't been proofed at all. Of the errors flagged in your comment, the only misspelled words are proper names. Misspelled names can get by a proofreader more easily than misspelled words when the proofer is less familiar with those people. Hundreds of correctly spelled names appear in Chapel Perilous. "Bearing" and "grizzly" appear as incorrect homonyms spelled correctly. Neither misrepresent or mislead the sense of the propositions they appear in. As a proofreader, the variable use of capitalization for a given word is something I see all the time, both RAW and Crowley do it, and I deliberately do it in my writing, as well, so it's not something I would flag. I see rules of punctuation broken time and time again in the books I read, therefore unless it looks egregiously wrong and/or distorts the meaning of the proposition, I won't flag it preferring to give artistic license to the author.
The impression I had from the opening post was that the proofing of Chapel Perilous looks sloppy, careless or even non-existent. I expected to see multiple problems on nearly every page. This seems completely inaccurate. The specific errors mentioned, 2 wrong words, 3 slightly wrong names, seem ones that slipped by carefully placed attention (mine) or due to ignorance – I didn't know that "grizzly" should be "grisly," for instance, or that Emmett has two "t"s. I haven't been convinced that Chapel Perilous is flawed by a lack of copy editing. The value of it far outweighs these slight blemishes.
I agree with you, Tom Jackson. ButI feel like someone not already familiar with RAW could easily get the wrong idea, espcially since the picture is surrounded by words such as "perilous" or "thought crimes".
I do like the spooky font and the spiral ring inside the eye in the pyramid.
Oz, I gave the book five stars on Goodreads, so I agree it's valuable, but it's still my opinion there are too many mistakes -- obviously, the examples I gave are just examples. I am curious that other people's impressions are.
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