Paul Theroux is a jerk — but I’d rank him one of the top wordsmiths working today.
This man can write.
Now age-82, Theroux’s 2024 book is as sharp and insightful as ever.
Burma Sahib is the story of George Orwell’s Burmese days. Back when he was in his snivelling early 20s.
A fictional rewriting of young Eric Blair’s years with the police in Burma. Eric Blair is Orwell’s real name.
He arrived Mandalay 1922, age-19, fresh out of Eton.
As unimpressive and pitiable as any Brit in the Raj.
His story is depressing. Mostly colonial bigotry and hateful racism.
Sunburned officer smoking and drinking their lives away.
… the young probationary policeman, bookish and too tall, is plagued not only by the vicious mosquitoes of the river delta but by a pathological awkwardness. …
Theroux, like Orwell, is the sharpest observer of the nonsenses of the class system …
Inspired by the book series The Enola Holmes Mysteries by Nancy Springer — this film instead takes real-life inspiration from the 1888 matchgirls’ strike. Following the strike’s success, the Union of Women Matchmakers (later the Matchmakers’ Union) was formed later in 1888. On its creation, it was the largest union of women and girls in the country, and inspired a wave of collective organizing among industrial workers.
Enola opens her own detective agency, but struggles to get clients unlike her famous detective brother Sherlock Holmes.
A factory girl named Bessie asks Enola to help find her missing sister Sarah Chapman. Bessie takes Enola to the match factory, which is experiencing a deadly typhus epidemic …
Though it got mixed reviews, this book kept me going.
16-year-old Shay Renby arrives in Hollywood with $58 and a handmade knife. She’s got to find her brother before Singular does….
Odin’s a brilliant hacker but a bit of a loose cannon. He and a group of radical animal rights activists hit a Singular Corporation research lab. The raid was a disaster, but Odin escaped with a set of highly encrypted flash drives and a post-surgical dog.
When Shay gets a frantic 3 a.m. phone call from Odin — talking about evidence of unspeakable experiments, and a ruthless corporation, and how he must hide — she’s concerned.
When she gets a menacing visit from Singular’s security team, she knows: her brother’s a dead man walking.
What Singular doesn’t know — yet — is that 16-year-old Shay is every bit as ruthless as their security force, and she will burn Singular to the ground, if that’s what it takes to save her brother…
Even better is Andy Serkis as David Robey, a wealthy and psychopathic millionaire turned high body count serial killer, who uses surveillance technology to manipulate and kill civilians.
Valentine Michael Smith, a human who comes to Earth in early adulthood after being born on the planet Mars and raised by Martians, brings light to all the silly, stupid conventions of Earth.
Heinlein named his main character “Smith” because he was disappointed in the unpronounceable names assigned to extraterrestrials in most science fiction.
The given names of the chief characters have great importance to the plot. They were carefully selected: Jubal means ‘the father of all, ‘ Michael stands for ‘Who is like God?’
It’s a philosophical and thought providing read.
Plenty of sex to keep the teenage male audience absorbed.
Stranger is one of many books which pose provocative situations, challenging conventional social mores.
The importance of individual liberty and self-reliance, the nature of sexual relationships, the obligation individuals owe to their societies, the influence of organized religion on culture and government.
The free love and commune living aspects led to the book’s exclusion from school reading lists in the USA.
I still like the book — though this review is not wrong:
The New York Times, Orville Prescott received the novel caustically, describing it as a “disastrous mishmash of science fiction, laborious humor, dreary social satire, and cheap eroticism”; he characterized Stranger in a Strange Land as “puerile and ludicrous”, saying “when a non-stop orgy is combined with a lot of preposterous chatter, it becomes unendurable, an affront to the patience and intelligence of readers”.
It’s the eve of 1953, and Aloysius Archer is in Los Angeles to ring in the New Year with an old friend, aspiring actress Liberty Callahan, when their evening is interrupted by an acquaintance of Callahan’s: Eleanor Lamb, a screenwriter in dire straits.
After a series of increasingly chilling events—mysterious phone calls, the same blue car loitering outside her house, and a bloody knife left in her sink—Eleanor fears that her life is in danger, and she wants to hire Archer to look into the matter. …
Rick McCharles 