Bill The Galactic Hero, Volume 1 - Harry Harrison

    1989; 236 pages.  Full Title : Bill the Galactic Hero, Volume 1, The Planet of the Robot Slaves.  New Author? : No, but a new series.  Genre : Science Fiction; Humor & Satire.  Book #1 (or #2) in the 6-or-7 book “Bill the Galactic Hero” series.  Overall Rating : 5½*/10.

    Meet Corporal Bill.  Aka, Drill Instructor Bill.  Quite the unforgettable character, isn’t he?

    Maybe it’s because he has two right arms.  No, he doesn’t have three arms.  But after his left arm was blown off in battle, the doctors sewed a carbonized black right arm back onto him in its place.  Now he can shake hands with himself, which he finds to be lots of fun.

    Or perhaps it’s his feet.  His right foot is twice the size of his left one.  It has a long toe sticking out the back of it, it's yellow in color, and tipped with an impressive, shining claw.  A giant chicken’s foot, perhaps. Another replacement body part attached to Bill by the army surgical staff.  They were short on human feet that day.

    Actually, I think his most unforgettable quality is that tusk.  Sticking out from among his teeth, it is the salient object that draws the eyes of everyone who looks at Bill.  Courtesy once again of the military medical team, and frankly,  a most pathetic sight.  There’s only one thing to do about it.

    Yep, save up enough money for a second tusk.  Because while one tusk is a monstrosity, a pair of them on a Drill Instructor instills fear and dread into any raw recruit who has the misfortune to go through Boot Camp under him.

What’s To Like...

    Oxymoronically, Bill the Galactic Hero 1 is actually the 1989 sequel to the original (and eponymous) Bill the Galactic Hero  novel, written 24 years earlier by Harry Harrison.  I suppose you could call it Book 2 in the series, but as can be seen on the cover, the author calls it Volume 1, so I’m sticking with his counting system.  This one is a solo effort by Harrison; the rest of the books in the series are all co-authored, or more precisely, “share cropped” (see the Wiki article here).   Based on that article, Harrison was none too pleased about that development.

    The book is replete with wit and zaniness.  It also features a recurring and more serious theme in Harry Harrison’s writings – the insanity of war.  Bill is a lovable but dim-witted hero, somewhat of a contrast to the protagonist in another Harry Harrison series – The Stainless Steel Rat.

    I liked the invention of the word “bowb”, a multipurpose euphemism for just about any cuss word in the English language, which is also applied to a familiar acronym to give us “SNABU”.  Nevertheless, there is a fair amount of actual cussing as well, which made me wonder who the target audience was.  There’s also a bunch of booze, drugs, and meds, mostly ingested by the good guys.  I found it funny; other readers might disagree.

    There are 16 pages of illustrations, smack dab in the middle of the book and smack dab in the middle of a chapter.  Most of these were of the various robot beings we meet in the story, plus one of Princess Dejah Vue, a woman of pin-up sexiness.  I suppose these were meant to be a perk, but frankly, I found them of limited interest.

    There is a little bit of French inserted, and that’s always a plus for me.  I also liked some of the scientific terms that the author sneaks in – including one I happen to work with - “Mercaptan”.  Beyond the mechanical monstrosities, there are a fair amount of critters to fight with or against, including Wankers, Chingers, and flying metallic dragons.  We only get to visit two planets – Grundgy and Usa.  But we travel to all sorts of places on Usa.

    There are 25 chapters – plus a prologue – covering the 236 pages of text.  Bill The Galactic Hero Volume 1 is a standalone novel, and a fast and easy read.  If you have a book report due tomorrow, and you haven't even started reading something yet, this is your salvation.

Kewlest New Word. . .

Shufty (n.) : a look, a peek.  A Britishism.

Others : Satyrisais (n.); Zaftig (adj.);Cozened (v.); Autochthons (n., plural)

Excerpts...

    The war was on.  Mankind was advancing to the stars.  For out there among the stardust, suns and planets, comets and space crap, there existed a race of intelligent aliens.  The Chingers.  They were peaceful little green lizards with four arms, scales, a tail like most lizards.  So of course they had to be destroyed.  They might become a menace sometime, maybe.  In any case – what is an army and a navy for if not to fight war?   (pg. 2)

    “I saw you land through my telescope – magic mirror, that is.  You were brought in by flying dragon and, being Welsh, I greatly appreciated that.  I said, King, I said, those are the toughies we need.  Strangers, not afraid of the gods.”  He stopped and looked at them piercingly.  “You are not superstitious – are you?”

    “I’m a Fundamentalist Zoroastrian,” Bill said humbly.  (pg. 206)

 Is this how life ends?  Not with a bang but with a green Barthroomian massacre and barbecue.”  (pg. 143)

       Despite the humor and craziness, Bill the Galactic Hero 1 has some issues, the most serious of which is the complete lack of an overall plot.  Bill and his makeshift squad gad around like a bunch of stooges, getting captured, hired, and threatened.  But these scenes play out like just a bunch of comic sketches in a vaudeville show.  They’re funny, but not cohesive.  Indeed, late in the story we stumble onto a “King Arthur versus the Roman Legions” scenario, which made no sense whatsoever.

    Not surprisingly, this makes for an extremely weak ending, with an annoying and awkward deus ex machina inserted as an excuse to close out the tale.  It almost felt like Harry Harrison was tired of writing the book and said, “Hey, what’s the quickest way to finish this mess off?”

    Finally, it should be noted that there are an unusually large number of typos in the book.  I’ll forgive these things in self-published e-books, but it’s unacceptable for a published paperback.  Avon Books needs to get better editors editors.  Jeez, I thought I was reading something by Tor Books, who are infamous for their sloppy editing.

    5½ Stars.  Add 2 stars if you can be entertained by a storyline that’s long on chuckles and short on substance.  This book’s for you.  The next book in the series, Bill the Galactic Hero on the Planet of Bottled Brains, reposes on my TBR shelf.  It is co-authored (“share cropped”?) by Robert Sheckley, a sci-fi writer I’ve been meaning to get acquainted with for quite some time now.  I wonder if it will be a step up, or a step down, from this book.

The Martian Chronicles - Ray Bradbury

   1950; 181 pages.  New Author? : No, but the last time I read a Ray Bradbury book was before this blog existed.  Genre : Classic Science-Fiction; Anthology; “Fix-up”; First Contact.  Overall Rating : 7½*/10.

    In another dimension, Mars is a planet capable of sustaining humanoid life.  Martians, although somewhat shorter than we Earthlings, marry, live in houses, on both farms and in cities, and are telepathic.

    Alas, the coming of space rockets from planet Earth spells the doom of Martian civilization, for the germs and diseases we bring with us wipe out the Martians, almost (but not quite) to the last being.  But hey, that’s progress for you.  Now we humans have a whole second planet to colonize and exploit.  Say hello to galactic hot dog stands and pianos.

    Sounds pretty far out, eh?  Such a scenario is quite the otherworldly universe.  Well actually, it lies in the brilliant and fertile mind of renowned sci-fi author Ray Bradbury, here on Earth, in the late 1940’s and early 50’s.

What’s To Like...

    The Martian Chronicles was Ray Bradbury’s breakthrough novel, paving the way for his incredibly popular follow-up novel, Fahrenheit 451, which was published three years later.  Wikipedia calls it a “fix-up” novel, meaning Bradbury took a bunch of his short stories (mostly, but not entirely, previously published), and kinda stitched them together via minor rewriting and some extremely short interludes (sometimes only a paragraph in length) to give the collected stories a certain amount of continuity.  You can read the Wiki article about fix-ups here.

    The book is short, a mere 181 pages, which was the norm for science fiction novels back then, and is divided into 26 stories, the longest of which is only 24 pages.  At first, I tried to read it like a regular novel, but gave up after about the third story.  The characters almost never carry over from one tale to the next, and there are time gaps between each episode.  OTOH, Bradbury does list the month and year for each tale in the Table of Contents and Chapter headings, and they are given in chronological order.

    I don’t think Bradbury intended The Martian Chronicles to be a realistic portrayal of what we’d find on Mars if and when we landed there.  The stories were penned years before we launched the first rockets into space, but IIRC, we already knew the “canals” of Mars were naturally-occurring features and the odds of finding life of any kind there would be slim.

     Instead, I think he used the tales to give his views on hot-button topics whose time had frankly not yet come: the genocide the Native Americans perpetrated by the European colonists and conquistadors; the people who wanted to ban any books that didn’t support the (imagined) Leave It To Beaver society of the time; and the ever-present 1950’s fear of a nuclear holocaust. 

    Perhaps the most powerful and foresighted story in the book is Way in the Middle of the Air, which is a scathing examination of racial bigotry years before the Civil Rights movement even began.  Indeed, this tale makes abundant use of the N-word, and was purged from later editions for that offensive reason.  I was fortunate to be reading the 13^th printing, from 1967, pictured above, before the censorship took place.

    It was fun to see how different life and literature were in the 1950’s.  Cigarette and cigars are smoked without controversy, the only way to listen to music was via LP’s, and the atom bomb weighed heavily on everybody’s mind.  There’s a nod to Johnny Appleseed in one of the stories, a tip-of-the-hat to Edgar Allan Poe in another, and a way-kewl excerpt from a Sara Teasdale poem, which will probably cause me to go looking for a book of her poetry at my local used-book store soon.

    There are a few cusswords sprinkled throughout, which surprised me.  I didn’t think science fiction published in 1950 had such language.  But it fits in well.  Despite being an anthology, this is a standalone novel, with an ending that is suitable for the subject matter.

Kewlest New Word. . .

Spicules (n.; plural) : tiny, sharp-pointed objects that are typically present in large numbers, such as fine dust or ice particles.

Others : Plangent (adj.).

Excerpts...

    Chicken pox, God, chicken pox, think of it!  A race builds itself for a million years, refines itself, erects cities like those out there, does everything it can to give itself respect and beauty, and then it dies.  Part of it dies slowly, in its own time, before our age, with dignity.  But the rest!  Does the rest of Mars die of a disease with a fine name or a terrifying name or a majestic name?  No, in the name of all that’s holy, it has to be chicken pox, a child’s disease, a disease that doesn’t even kill children on Earth!  It’s not right and it’s not fair.  It’s like saying the Greeks died of mumps, or the proud Romans died on their beautiful hills of athlete’s foot!”  (pg. 51)

    So they lined them up against a library wall one Sunday morning thirty years ago, in 1975; they lined them up, St. Nicholas and the Headless Horseman and Snow White and Rumpelstiltskin and Mother Goose  oh, what a wailing – and shot them down, and burned the paper castles and the fairy frogs and old kings and the people who lives happily ever after (for of course it was a fact that nobody lived happily ever after!), and Once Upon A Time became No More!  And they spread the ashes of the Phantom Rickshaw with the rubble of the Land of Oz; the filleted the bones of Glinda the Good and Ozma and shattered Polychrome in a spectroscope and served Jack Pumpkinhead with meringue at the Biologists’ Ball!”  (pg. 106)

 “I’m being ironic.  Don’t interrupt a man in the midst of being ironic, it’s not polite.”  (pg. 116)

    There are some drawbacks to The Martian Chronicles.  The patchwork interludes that try to tie the various short stories together into something coherent are generally meh.  Frankly, any chapter under 4 pages is skippable.

    Even the first couple “long” short stories (is that an oxymoron?), primarily dealing with the 1^st, 2^nd, and 3^rd contacts, didn’t do much for me.  And some of the major events in the timeline, such as the great Martian plague, don't exist in the book, they get skipped over between chapters.

    But if you’re patient enough to wait until around the 11^th story, Night Meeting, you’ll find the rest of the chapters in the book have powerful messages to impart and entertaining stories to relate.  It’s easy to see why this became an instant success for Bradbury.

    7½ Stars.  It’s hard to rate a book that’s so ho-hum to begin with and so fantastic starting about halfway through.  Subtract 2 stars if you yearn for life to return to a Beaver Cleaver world.   It never actually existed, but it’s fun to pretend, I suppose.

The Lives Of Tao - Wesley Chu

   2013; 464 pages.  Book #1 (out of 3, plus a couple of spinoffs) in the Tao series.  New Author? : Yes.  Genre : Fantasy; Humorous; Action-Intrigue.  Overall Rating : 9*/10.

    Ah yes, those pesky voices in your head.  Roen’s got them.  Well, technically, there’s only a single voice in him, at least that’s what the voice tells him.

    He’s got a name, too – "Tao".  And he says he’s an extraterrestrial, and he’s sorry he jumped into Roen’s head, but now he’s stuck there, so there you go.  And Tao says he and Roen are a team now, and they’ve got to save the world from other people with aliens in their heads, or something like that.

    Roen’s pretty sure he’s just going crazy.  But don’t crazy people just blindly do whatever those voices in their heads tell them to?  Roen isn’t having any of that, so he must not be crazy, right?  On the other hand, if he’s not crazy, then that means there really is an alien camped out in his cranium.  It’s all so confusing.

    But when other people start calling him Tao, while in the process of trying to kill him, Roen has to admit – Tao’s story is beginning to sound a lot more plausible.

What’s To Like...

    The Lives of Tao is the start of a fresh new (for me at least)  Action series, with a touch of Fantasy thrown in for fun.  The story is equal parts character-driven and plotline-driven, and I liked this balance.  Our protagonist, Roen, starts out as overweight, out-of-shape nerd, and it’s fun to watch Tao, and some of the other spirit-ET’s, mold him into a secret agent that just might eventually survive encounters with the bad guys.  Heck, he might even get a date with an earth girl, something that never happens in real life to nerds.

    The best part of The Lives of Tao, as other reviewers have noted, is the witty dialogue  and alien/human interaction that goes on between Tao and Roen.  This could get awkward to read, especially when there’s a third entity taking part in the conversation, but Wesley Chu handles it quite deftly.  Tao’s thoughts are in italics, and the humans’ words are in quotation marks.

    For the most part, the book is set in Chicago; presumably the author hails from there.  There are 39 chapters covering the 464 pages, which makes them of moderate length.  Starting with Chapter 9, each chapter opens with a sort of ‘prologue’, giving details of Tao’s various previous lives.  He’s been inhabiting humans for several millennia, and has an impressive résumé.  There is some cussing in the dialogue, but it's few and far between and fits in nicely.

    It is obvious that Wesley Chu is a history buff, and I very much enjoyed that.  One of my history heroes, Vercingetorix, gets some ink here, as does playing chess with a chess clock. Both of those were nerdy treats for me.  One gets the feeling that perhaps the author is a bit of a nerd himself, and I mean that as a compliment.

    The overarching plotline concerns the ongoing war between the two extraterrestrial forces – the Prophus (the good guys, including Tao), and the Genjix (the baddies).  At the moment, the baddies are kicking butt, and presumably the trilogy is all about the Prophus making a comeback, with Tao/Roen leading the charge.  It’s fun to watch Roen get used to being a Prophus agent, especially trying to come to grips with the fact that his new line of work be necessity involves killing people.

    Everything builds to an action-packed, tension-filled ending.  There are, of course, a number of threads still to be resolved.  But hey, that’s why Books 2 and 3 exist.  The Lives of Tao is a standalone novel, and its sequel, The Deaths of Tao, resides on my TBR shelf.

Excerpts...

    “Oh, this makes perfect sense now.  Million year-old geriatric aliens.  How do you stay alive for so long?  What’s your secret?”

    “Technically we self-reproduce, similar to how amoebas on your planet reproduce.  Over the course of time, we continually regenerate, sustaining ourselves from the nutrients of our hosts.”

    “So you’re a parasite?”

    “We like to think of it as symbiotic, but we can discuss biology another time.”  (loc. 815)

    Roen leaned back onto the couch and picked up his cat.  The poor creature had been feeling neglected for months now and hissed, trying to escape.  Roen held on to the tabby as he squirmed and dug his claws into his arm.  “Now, now, pussycat,” he murmured.

    “Have you decided on giving him a real name yet?”

    “Nah … Meow Meow’s a fine name.”

    “No, it is not.  That is like calling a dog Bark Bark.”

    “Actually, it would be more like Woof Woof, but I think Meow Meow sounds cuter.”

    “Your naming habits will get your kids beat up in the schoolyard.”  (loc. 3000)

Kindle Details...

    The Lives of Tao sells for $6.99 at Amazon.  The other two e-books in the series, The Deaths of Tao and The Rebirths of Tao, sell for the same price, as does the spinoff, The Rise of Io.  A related novella, The Days of Tao, goes for $2.99.

 What are you going to do next time a Genjix wants to kill you, beg him to death?”  (loc. 1356)

    It’s really tough to come up with any quibbles about The Lives of Tao.  The only thing I can think of is that you aren’t alerted about any scene shifts as you’re reading, and that got confusing at times.  But that’s really a very small nit to pick.

    I suppose one could carp about the storyline being somewhat less than “epic”.  We spend most of the book watching Roen go through spy training boot camp and then accompany him out on some rookie-easy surveillance jobs.  Yet somehow, Wesley Chu makes it all very interesting, and the reader is rewarded with more exciting capers as Roen gains experience.

    9 Stars.  It’s always a literary thrill to “discover” a great new author who thoroughly entertains you and who you’d never heard of before.  That was the case here.  I remember my local Half Price Books store promoting the heck out of this series a couple years ago.  Now I understand why.

The Lost Symbol - Dan Brown

   2009; 639 pages.  New Author? : No, but it’s been a while.  Since before the start of this blog, actually.  Book #3 (out of 5) in the Robert Langdon series.  Genre: Action-Thriller; Mystery; Puzzle-Solving.  Overall Rating : 7*/10.

    For Robert Langdon, it was great to be back in Washington DC.  Especially since it was an all-expenses-paid trip, courtesy of his lifelong mentor and friend, Peter Solomon, who's invited him to be a guest speaker for the night.  In the US Capitol building, no less.

    Of course, it was all on very short notice.  Something about the originally scheduled speaker suddenly being unable to make it.  So Langdon was kind of a back-up option.  Still, having a private jet pick him up and fly him  to DC was quite the experience.  As was a sleek Lincoln Town Car limousine waiting to whisk him from Dulles Airport to the Capitol.

    That was when things got just a little bit wonky.  Because when the limousine dropped him off, and Robert Langdon made his way to Statuary Hall, where the lecture was to be held, it was dark.  And empty.  And in checking with the Capitol officials, there was no lecture of any kind scheduled for tonight in the building.  Maybe this was somebody’s idea of a joke.

    But if so, the jokester had sunk a lot of money into pulling it off.

What’s To Like...

    The Lost Symbol is equal parts action, intrigue, and puzzle-solving, and delivers plenty of each from the get-go.  Dan Brown switches up the POV’s to keep things hopping at a crisp pace.  There aren’t a lot of characters to follow in this 600+ page book, so the ones that are here get developed nicely.  I was particularly intrigued by Inoue Sato; you could never be 100% sure exactly whose side she was on.

    There’s only one setting for the book : Washington DC.  Indeed, towards the end of the book (page 622), Robert Langdon remarks that it’s only been ten hours since he landed in DC.  So the book's entire time frame is amazingly short.

    If you’re fascinated by the Masonic Order, with their 33 hierarchy levels and their rumored metaphysical secrets, this is the book for you.  Ditto if you’re curious as to how Particle Physics might dovetail with ancient Mysticism.  And of course, there are a slew of puzzles that need solving to save the world.

    With 134 chapters to span the 639 pages, there’s always a convenient place to stop reading for the night.  I was happy to see my Gnostics get worked into the story, as well as a brief plug for blogging.  Even Aleister Crowley gets a brief mention (who?), and it was kewl to see Melancolia 1 here too.  The acronym “TLV” was new to me (it means something quite different if you work in Regulatory Affairs), and it was fun to learn the origin of the word “sincerely”.

    There’s a little bit of cussing, and of course a requisite amount of violence and killing.  This is a standalone novel, as well as part of the Robert Langdon series.

Kewlest New Word...

Suffumigation (n.) : the burning of substances (such as incense) to produce fumes as part of some magical rituals.

Others: Putti (n., plural).

Excerpts...

    One mortal man had seen Mal’akh naked, eighteen house earlier.  The man had shouted in fear.  “Good God, you’re a demon!”

    “If you perceive me as such,” Mal’akh had replied, understanding as had the ancients that angels and demons were identical – interchangeable archetypes – all a matter of polarity: the guardian angel who conquered your enemy in battle was perceived by your enemy as a demon destroyer.  (pg. 14)

    As a young girl, Katherine Solomon had often wondered if there was life after death.  Does heaven exist?  What happens when we die?  As she grew older, her studies in science quickly erased any fanciful notions of heaven, hell, or the afterlife.  The concept of “life after death,” she came to accept, was a human construct … a fairy tale designed to soften the horrifying truth that was our mortality.

    Or so I believed …  (pg. 487)

 “Death is usually an all-or-nothing thing!”  (pg. 47)

    For all the thrills and spills in The Lost Symbol, there were some weaknesses.  First of all, there are a slew of info dumps: about the Masons, New Age metaphysics, the layout of Washington DC, the mystical “eye” on the back of the $1 bill, etc., and for the most part, they’re awkwardly dropped into the storyline.

    No one seems to perceive that Dr. Abaddon’s  name is obviously phony – it’s an old synonym for Hell or the Devil.  And you just know that when one of the characters is introduced as being “plump”, she’s going to get killed off somewhere along the line.  Why not just dress her in a Star Trek red shirt?

    Also, there is a kewl bit of situational ethics introduced at the end, when the showdown between Peter Solomon and Mal’akh takes place.  Alas, the author chickens out in resolving it, allowing an act of God to make the decision instead of the humans.

    But the main problem with The Lost Symbol is the big secret itself.  The bad guy wants it.  The Masons are willing to die to keep it a secret.  And the mighty CIA lives in mortal fear that us commoners will learn about it.  Yet when it finally is disclosed to the reader, it’s really no big deal and it’s really not that big of a secret.  Anyone who’s ever dabbled in Metaphysics 101 will already be familiar with it.

    What a royal letdown.

    7 Stars.  I remember The Lost Symbol being panned as a literary flop when it came out.  True, it had to follow Dan Brown’s mega-hit, The Da Vinci Code, an almost impossible task.  The haters are justified; it is a poorly-written book with an ending that is mediocre at best.  But the Dan Brown loyalists are justified as well.  The writing may be mediocre, but the nonstop-action storytelling itself is top-notch.

Bonk - Mary Roach

   2008; 320 pages.  Full Title : Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex.  New Author? : Yes.    Genre : Non-Fiction; Science; Human Sexuality; Research.  Overall Rating : 9*/10.

    Hey, I’ve got a great idea!  Let’s do a sex research project.

    Um, okay.  Have you thought of anything specific?

    Yeah.  Does eating kiwi fruit enhance your desire to, you know, “do it”?

    Well, that’ll certainly be an original study.  Where will you get the money to pay for the test subjects?

    Pay them?!  I’ll just get volunteers.  Anybody who likes to eat kiwi fruit will jump at the chance for free food.

    How do you know they’ll give you honest answers?

    Hmm. I don’t know, man.  I guess we’ll have to hook them up to some sort of lie-detector machine.

    That costs money.  And you’ll have to pay someone to figure out exactly how to test your human guinea pigs to get verifiable, reproducible results.

    You're right.  I suppose we’ll have to apply for some government grant money.

    They don’t like giving out money unless your project will make tangible improvements for some sort of illness or problem.  ED, frigidity, impotence; things like that.  I don’t think eating kiwis be better the lot of people with sexual issues.

    Jeez.  This is going to be more difficult than I thought.  Maybe I better read a book on Scientific Research and Sex.  Do you know of any?

    How about Mary Roach’s “Bonk”?  And hey, don’t give up.  You know what they say.  “If you never eat a kiwi, you never want a kiwi.”  (an actual quote from Bonk)

     

What’s To Like...

    Let’s get the important question out of the way first.  If you’re wondering if Bonk might be the non-fiction equivalent to 50 Shades of Grey, the answer is ‘no’.  This book is more about scientific research into sex, a less about sex itself.  As such, it focuses on the challenges of recruiting the best test subjects, and getting objective and meaningful results.  For instance, simply asking the participants what “felt best” is not reliable, your test subjects may be wanting to please and therefore give you overly optimistic feedback.

    The key to any research project is gaining grant money to fund it via grants.  To aid in that, sex researchers come up with a lot of “clinical terms” for their endeavors.  The main one is substituting “psychophysiology” for “sex”, but there are lots of others.  For instance: eroscillation, somatosensory stimulus, flowback losses, mounting readiness, visual erotic stimulation, intravaginal stimulation, anterior-lateral attitude, flaturia, 50% orgasmic return, normal voluptuous reaction, and bulbocavernosis reflex, the latter being my favorite piece of “newspeak”.

    The book is divided into 15 chapters, plus a prologue, each with a title and a subtitle, all of which are catchy phrases.  Some of the "tamer" examples are:

Ch. 1.  The Sausage, The Porcupine, and the Agreeable Mrs. G.

Ch. 3.  The Princess and Her Pea.

Ch. 7.  If Two Are Good, Would Three Be Better? (subtitle, and not about what you think)

Ch.  8. Re-Member Me.

Ch. 11.  The Immaculate Orgasm. (subtitle, and about what you think it is)

Ch. 14. Monkey Do. (The Secret Sway of Hormones).

    There are a multitude of footnotes, and they are on a par with Terry Pratchett footnotes in wittiness and interest.  If you skip them, you will be missing some great humor and obscure trivia.  I found it easiest to bookmark the page I was on, then go read the footnote, then access the bookmark.  In short, do not skip the footnotes!

    Although the book is about researching human sexuality, there is much to be learned from the animal kingdom.  Mary Roach observes and reports about monkeys and their courtship rituals, pigs in foreplay, and – perhaps the most educational of all – how porcupines manage to do it without getting pricked to death by the quills of their mate.

    Mary Roach is a diligent researcher, willing to travel anywhere, even to Egypt to learn firsthand about sex research there and how it can be done while living in a conservative Muslim nation.  She also personally takes part in a couple of the research projects, and in one case, talks her husband into participating as a team.  That particular study involved being in an MRI tube, which made for crowded quarters.

    The author makes extensive use of the Internet, including Google and Wikipedia, to find research papers on obscure topics.  Several of the chapters grew out of this technique, where Internet search “hits” were followed up by direct communication.  There is such a thing as TMI, however, such as when she interviewed ER personnel and asked for a list of items that they'd had to remove from rectums.  We’ll leave that list in the comments of this review.  You’ve been warned.

Excerpts...

    If you try this yourself, I recommend doing so when no one is home.  Otherwise, you will run the risk of someone walking in on you and having to witness a scene that includes a mirror, the husband’s Stanley Powerlock tape measure, and the half-undressed self, squatting.  No one should have to see that.  It’s bad enough you just had to read it.  (loc. 684)

    Dr. Ahmed Shafik wears three-piece suits with gold watch fobs and a diamond stick pin in the lapel.  His glasses are the thick, black rectangular style of the Nasser era.  He owns a Cairo hospital and lives in a mansion with marble walls.  He was nominated for a Nobel Prize.  I don’t care about any of this.  Shafik won my heart by publishing a paper in European Urology in which he investigated the effects of polyester on sexual activity.  Ahmed Shafik dressed lab rats in polyester pants.  (loc. 2628)

Kindle Details...

    Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex sells for $9.99, which is a pretty good price for a top-flight science book.  Mary Roach offers another half dozen e-books, ranging in price from $8.61 to $11.99.  I borrowed my copy via my local library’s digital library, and it seems like not many people have discovered this source of Mary Roach books.

 The Lord  … hath made me a polished shaft (Isaiah 49:2)  (loc. 2191)

    I really don’t have any quibbles with Bonk.   If you’re not of a scientific mindset, I suppose the abundance of details concerning the research can get tedious.  And it has to be admitted, after a while, one research project starts sounding pretty much like another.  But I am a chemist by profession, so reading about the “hows and whys” of these studies was fascinating for me.

    Bonk is part of what is at present a 4-volume single-word-titled series by Mary Roach.  The other three books in the series are Grunt (science meets humans at war), Gulp (the science of the alimentary canal), and Spook (science tackles the afterlife).  My local digital library carries all of these.  I suspect I'll be reading more books by this author in the near future.

    9 Stars.  Subtract 1 star  if scientific research bores you.  And that would be a shame, since you’d miss curious bits of study such as this: Placing cheese crumbs close to a pair of laboratory rats while they’re copulating will distract the female, but not the male.  And maybe that’s all you need to know about how the two genders regard the act of sex.