Clovis Sangrail

Bitter and exasperatingly full of red herrings

Revisado: 02-26-25

This is a typical Brand mystery novel in that it is full of upper class characters who are incredibly nasty and yet are supposed to be charming, and there are a couple of ugly and unpleasant lower class people who aren't respectful enough of their betters. And that's it.
When someone is accused of the murder (and they all are, repeatedly), you can tell if they are really the one by checking to see how many pages are left. When the true murderer is finally revealed, there's absolutely no dramatic punch left, and there is no better reason for the murderer to have been the murderer than anyone else. There's no "aha" moment where everything makes sense.
I'm okay with reading subpar mystery plots if the characters are interesting, but that didn't happen here either. Everyone and everything feels half baked and incomplete.

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A collection for pre-existing Benson fans.

Revisado: 08-29-24

The author of the stories in this collection was born in 1867 so it seems somewhat unfair of the previous reviewer to give the book one star for 19th century-style writing. E.F. Benson wrote like a late Victorian because... he was a late Victorian.

Benson was a son of an Archbishop of Canterbury and educated at Marlborough and then Cambridge, where his writing was influenced by M.R. James (b. 1862), perhaps the worst offender amongst these stuffy ghost story types. So naturally Benson was never going to develop the literary je ne sais quoi of a Stephen King or an R.L. Stine.

Despite these regrettable deficiencies, I am terribly fond of Benson, and for that reason I am baffled and dismayed by the editor's choice of stories, or at least, the order in which to present them. "Dummy on a Dahabeah" is a good ghost story but Benson's least approachable. He was a bridge and whist superfan, and half of the considerably long story consists of interminable technical descriptions of whist games which mean absolutely nothing to most of us now.

First time Benson readers/listeners should absolutely skip to the third story, "Between the Lights," which is much more typical of him, and is in the same vein as certain stories written by Arthur Machen, John Buchan, and Arthur Conan Doyle. Better yet, first timers should pick a more traditional Benson collection that features all his greatest hits.

-Five stars for the stories because it's E. F. Benson, who is the Kannon to M.R. James' Amida.
-Three to four stars for the narration (one narrator was great, one was good, and one was a little too enthusiastic).

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An unexpectedly outstanding performance of a lesser known classic series

Revisado: 06-09-24

I bought this collection with some misgivings because I've had bad luck with recent audiobook releases of old mystery novels. Some companies seem to think that as long as they have a guy with a British accent reading it, it's good enough. But Graham Scott does more than just read - - he does great voice acting, with appropriate and interesting accents, and it's easy to tell the characters apart by the way they sound (Reggie sounds exactly right - a bit cherubic, a bit puckish).

You can tell that Scott has read each story before and planned how to approach it. I automatically listen for misplaced stress in sentences (I wish I didn't), and even the best narrators do it sometimes, but he has a lower rate than just about anyone.

The stories are, ofc, great, I've read them a million times, Reggie is essentially one of the milder Saki characters turned detective. I'm delighted that they were treated so well in their translation to audiobook.

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Ian Carmichael, master raconteur

Revisado: 05-27-24

I read this book years ago and loved it. It's very funny and charming and I often was howling with laughter and had to stop and read sections aloud to my long suffering friends.

Jerome K. Jerome is an adorable, good-natured writer, with an unexpected strain of refreshing, ascerbic wit that surfaces from time to time. His dog anecdotes alone are worth the price of the book.

But when I listened to the narration by Carmichael, it felt like a new book. He laid bare new layers of meaning that had previously been hidden to me. His impeccable comic timing and mastery of character voices made everything so much funnier than it was in my head, and I found myself understanding jokes that I had glossed over in my first reading.

This is one case in which listening to the audiobook is greatly superior than reading the book, on your first go, anyway.

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Funny at times but painfully outdated

Revisado: 10-25-23

No credible modern humanities scholar would say that European progress was put on hold for 2000 years during the "dark ages," as Strathern calls the medieval period (although to be fair, at the time he wrote this book that was an entirely unexceptional thing to say).
The singular importance he places on the role of empirical science and rationalism in the development of philosophy is baffling. Not only that, but he's frequently just wrong about history. He says that Europeans relied on religious methods to save themselves during the Black Death, but in reality they also tried an array of practical methods (bloodletting, aromatics, isolation). Most of them didn't work, but people tried things that made sense based on their miasma-based conception of disease. (The Greeks didn't do any better during the plague of Athens btw.)
Strathern also baldly states that we wouldn't have science today if it wasn't for the Greeks. I'm a historian of early modern Japan and the neoconfucians were certainly doing observation-based research that likely would have developed into something very like European empirical science had they been left to themselves. For info on this, see Federico Marcon's The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan (2017).

I enjoyed the light tone of the book, but the author's rationalist chauvinism made it unlikely that I'll try another in this series. I wish more of Paul Feyerabend's books were on Audible.

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A scholarly look at an oft sensationalized topic

Revisado: 02-15-22

I feel I need to defend this book for being dry. This is a scholarly monograph, and most such books don't get made into audiobooks. The reason is that they're usually intensely boring to anyone who isn't researching that specific area. (To be honest, they're still boring then, but they're at least useful).
However, scholarly monographs about WWII and especially about the Nazis _do_ often get made into audiobooks because there's an unusual level of popular interest. But it's important to know what you're getting with this book--it's not a popular history, like, say, Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. I think Shirer is a magnificent writer, but he doesn't write like an academic (pretty sure the two facts are directly related, tbh!). Kurlander's book is a scholarly work with extensive notes and a long bibliography full of solid sources, and as such it can certainly be dry at times.
That said, I enjoyed it very much--it was one of the most accessible and engaging scholarly monographs I've ever read/listened to (and that's in the high hundreds). But it was also useful for my own dissertation research (about Japanese mysticism, folk movements and nationalism), so I went into it with a specific goal in mind. I can understand being disappointed and bored if you aren't looking to get something specific and useful out of the book.

I do have a few criticisms. The book can be repetitive at times, and I'm pretty sure I heard a sentence or two from an early chapter repeated in a later chapter (and it wasn't a quote). It could have used some aggressive editing.
I also think that it would have benefitted enormously from a deeper look at theosophy and similar movements prior to WWI throughout Europe and America, perhaps starting with folk/rural romanticism and disillusionment with industrialization. It's a big subject, but it's important to emphasize that these ideas didn't suddenly appear in Weimar Germany out of nowhere (and Kurlander definitely knows this and does devote space to it--just not enough, in my opinion).
Finally, I do think that some of the Weimar and Nazi criticisms of the 19th and 20th-century dominance of scientific materialism and rationalism are interesting and legitimate, even though they were being made by some terrible, terrible people and used to justify unspeakable actions. It is a fact that at the time many people (including scientists) thought science would eventually solve every problem of humanity, even those of human nature. That belief in a regimented scientific utopia was responsible for much suffering and death. Nazi ideology occupied a weird space between absolute faith in science, and resentment that science had destroyed the mysterious and spiritual aspects of life (which Kurlander does discuss). That's not a specifically Nazi issue; in fact, it's a jarring incongruity that western society is still attempting to mediate, without much success. In the book, Kurlander comes down pretty hard on the side of scientific materialism, sometimes to the point of sarcasm. I wish he had been more even-handed. (Or maybe I'm doing Kurlander a disservice and he's just personally an ultra-materialist?)
As for the narration, I often buy books simply because they're narrated by Grover Gardner, so I was pleased as punch when I saw his name on this one.

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