I’ve been rereading Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. Finally got around to “A Study In Scarlet,” which paints a rather unpleasant picture of the Mormons in the years after their arrival in Utah, with characters including Brigham Young. My wife reminded me that we first read the book we borrowed from the library at the University of Utah, where we were for grad school years ago.
!!
I’ve always found Conan Doyle’s depictions of American events and personalities in his time fascinating.
Indeed! In A Study in Scarlet, the Avenging Angels or Danites was based on a real vigilante group that likely never existed after the Mormons left Missouri in 1838. Rumors and legends continued, however, and other bits and pieces real and suspected were folded into the mythology. From the Wikipedia article:
"Doyle is reported to have said “…he had been misled by writings of the time about the church.” In 1991, Doyle’s daughter stated that “Father would be the first to admit that his first Sherlock Holmes novel was full of errors about the Mormons.”
I should say Salt Lake City was a great place to live, and everyone was really pleasant. The area was beautiful. Of course the LDS church and its members were a huge presence in the state, but we were never made to feel unwelcome. The only times we have been approached by young people on their missions were when we returned to the east coast.
Quite a learning experience.
Is it true that in SLC the streets are wide enough to U-turn a team of oxen?
'Course, things could’ve changed since people were driving oxen.
The main downtown streets are much wider than in most cities. I haven’t seen a team of oxen in a while, so I don’t know if it’s still true. One nice feature is the streets are numbered in both directions, such that you can specify an address by coordinates.
BTW, does reading street signs fall under this topic? 
It’s reading, so yeah!
I’m currently on the second book of this…
Here is a recent interview with her about The Broken Earth Trilogy, which I read a while ago…
I’ve listened to about half of Project Hail Mary so far during a pair of really long drives, but haven’t finished yet because I was listening with someone else, and neither has wanted to move ahead of the other…
Nice, chunky, hard sci-fi (aside from some obvious bits of handwavium). They clearly took a lot of time trying to think about consequences of the handwaving, to the point that it can feel like Sufficiently Advanced Science rather than just pure magic. Only real complaint I have so far is that it occasionally felt like it had a slightly overzealous editor pushing to explain things out the long way just in case the reader missed something a few pages earlier.
Sometimes I like a bit of repetition of new concepts, just so I can remember them – but maybe that’s because my memory is lousy. I read Altered Carbon (I think that was it) several years ago, and it seemed like a memory test. The author (whose name I don’t recall 
) seemed determined to explain a concept ONCE, as if declaring that if you aren’t as smart as he was, tough. I couldn’t make heads or tails of the book.
In my opinion, John Scalzi’s only fault along those lines is that he describes his characters’ appearance minimally or not at all. The personalities are different but I need at least a little bit of an image in my mind to keep things straight.
BTW, “handwavium” is a great word! First I’ve heard of it. Balonium I’m familiar with.
It’s a tough line to straddle sometimes, and I hate complaining about it because it’s obviously something that readers will experience differently. I just had a periods where the main character is going over the basic facts of their situation yet again, while I’m anxiously waiting for them to finally reach the conclusion that seemed obvious the first time around so the story can move forward. Didn’t happen enough to ruin things for me, but my fellow listener got to hear me heckle the main character a bit. 
Speaking of Scalzi, last week I started listening to his most recent on some drives for work:
I haven’t gotten very far into it, but it’s been fun so far. Definitely NOT hard sci-fi (at least, so far)… science facts are in it, and science things happen, but also things that are very much not science.
Now that I think of it, this one hasn’t really described people much at all either. I don’t think I’ve ever noticed that, possibly because I’ve never really been able to picture people I know in my head, so I’ve never really gotten very attached to a book description of someone unless it really stands out.
I know a drummer named Rich Scalzi. That seems to be a fairly common Italianate surname.
I love griping about things!
You’re right, it’s a tough line to straddle. I guess I fall on the “make sure I understand” side. But it certainly can be overdone.
I finished Preservation Society a few months ago and had a great time. Scalzi is really good at humor, subtle or not. I really liked Red Shirts and Agent to the Stars." We saw him give a hilarious talk at a con, which he called his “performing monkey mode.” We got a book autographed, The Last Colony, and I said, trying to be funny, “I really liked The Last Colon!” So he blackened the y on the title page and signed it.
Have you read Greg Egan’s work? I’ve only read Distress, and I must admit it was too dense for my taste.
Finished The Word Is Murder, by Anthony Horowitz, a mystery in which Horowitz himself is the main character (a writer) and narrator. He works with an ex-cop. The mystery is great and well plotted. But what a wild concept! He refers to his previous books (some of which we’ve read) and TV shows he’s created, such as Foyle’s War, which we’ve seen. Not to mention other stuff that is likely real.
The only other book like this I’ve ever read is Asimov’s Murder At The ABA, in which Asimov put himself in a few short places, as a very minor character as comic relief. The main character here is based on Harlan Ellison. (!)
Nothing really matters.
Now I’ve started reading Void: The Strange Physics Of Nothing, by James Owen Weatherall. I’ve read that a perfect vacuum is still full of weirdness, and I hope to understand it better by the end!
Today, I finished up the Dreamblood duology (which seems to have been left open for another installment, but wrapped up the story well). I started Maeve Higgin’s Tell Everyone On This Train I Love Them… which is a wonderful book full of thoughtful and often funny but serious essays:
In one she compares the discourse and history of American Confederate monuments with the history of British statues in her native Ireland.
Likely where they learned it.
You mean the US/southerners? Could be. The discourse around the antebellum enslaver culture, both before and after the war, hinged a lot on an appearance of gentility that viewed Anglo-Saxon culture as the pinnacle of cultural development.
That was the English line of bullshit that the slavers continued unironically, and the flunky class accepted because for once it wasn’t aimed at them.
Oh yeah… Sometimes modern racists let the Anglo-Saxon purity bullshit slip through… it’s happening more and more in the current atmosphere…
“Western Civilization”