The Ministry of Time

Bradley, Kaliane. The Ministry of Time. New York: Avid Reader 2024. Print.

First Sentences:

 

Perhaps he'll die this time. He finds this doesn't worry him. Maybe because he's so cold he has a drunkard's grip on his mind. When thoughts come, they're translucent, free-swimming medusae. As the Arctic wind bites at his hands and feet, his thoughts slop against his skull. They'll be the last thing to freeze over.

Description:

Being a fan of time-travel books, Kaliane Bradley's The Ministry of Time, was a definite must-read for me. Of course, it involves different eras, people trying to understand earlier and later worlds, and possible altering history.

But Ministry of Time is quite different on many levels. First, it is primarily a character study between several protagonists, not just people wandering around a different world with their mouths open, making awkward mistakes. Second, it does not sem to dwell on the time-travel element. The time machine is rarely presented and remains cloaked in origin, powers, and dangers right up to the end. And the people simply go about their business in the new era, knowing they cannot return to their origins, so that issue rarely is discussed.

Here's the premise, without spoilers since this all happens in the first few pages. Somehow England in today's world and its government agency called "The Ministry" has a time machine that can bring a handful of people from their eras into the present. The selected people historically were destined to die soon, so removing them from the past probably wouldn't affect the future. One was from the plague era in the 1600s; one was a member of John Franklin's ill-fated Arctic exploration in the 1850s; one a soldier in the trenches of Somme in World War I, etc. 

Commander Graham Gore, the arctic explorer, is one of the five transported "expats" who is assigned to a previously lowly female Ministry civil servant in languages to be his Bridge. As his Bridge, she is to monitor and report on the expat's mental and physical developments, platonically living with Gore and being there to help him aclimate to the 21t century during his first year. After that, he had to get a job. 

 

But to what purpose has the Ministry of Time brought these five individuals into the present day? How will the expats cope with their new world and their Bridges? What is the future of the time machine and the administers who make decisions regarding its use? And finally, what will become of Gore and his relationship with other expats and his nameless Bridge?

That's all I'm revealling. It is a slower plot without ray guns or rockets, realistically paced to guage the activities and thoughts of the characters to reveal their deliberations and actions as they work on how best to address the people and the world of this century. 

But the writing, especially the imagry, are first rate:

• Being around her made me want to run across the crosswalks without looking;

• The days moldered and dampened, like something lost at the back of the fridge;

• She looked at me as you ight a cat that, with unusual perspicacity, has brought home a ten-pound not instead of a dead mouse;
• He was looking worse than when I last saw him -- he had that inefable air of someone who has to boil hot water on his stove for bathing, which was surely incompatible with his rank.

It's a compelling read with a layered plot that is not fully uncovered until the final pages. Until then, buckle up and follow these interesting characters try to uncover the mysteries and purposes of their very much-altered existance.

 

[If this book interests you, be sure to check out:] 

  

Crouch, Blake. Recursion.   

People have begun realizing they have False Memory Syndrome, where they recall bits and pieces of an alternate life they've lived (or are living now). If so, which life can they choose to continue living? Fascinating.

Happy reading.

Fred

 

Click here to browse over 435 more book recommendations by subject or title

(and read the introduction to The First Sentence Reader).

 

Safe Enough

Child, Lee. Safe Enough. New York: Mysterious Press. 2024. Print.

First Sentences:

 

Like everything else, the world of bodyguarding is split between the real and the phony. Phony bodyguards are just glorified drivers, big men in suits chosen for their size and shape and appearance, not paid very much, not very useful when push comes to shove, Real bodyguards are technicians, thinkers, trained men with experience....I am a real bodyguard. Or at least, I was. 

Description:

If ever an author epitomized my First Sentence Reader philosophy, it is Lee Child, creater of the twenty-nine books in the Jack Reacher series. His writings, from the first sentence on, pull readers inexorably onward from sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph, page to page right up to the end. His ear for dialogue and inner thoughts are smooth and realistic, lending a believable persona to each of the people who populate his books. While some readers may not be fans of violence, Child handles these tricky encounters with straightforward descriptions that, while they never dwell on the overly-graphic, are descriptive enough to paint a picture that plants readers right smack dab in the middle of the mind and emotions of the protagonista.

His newest book, Safe Enough, is a collection of his published short stories, and not a one is about Jack Reacher. But no matter. Each story is riveting right from the start and up to the end. You simply cannot put them down until they are finished. Child finishes each tale with an unexpected (for me) twist, giving these tales the air of a Saki-Hitchcock-Spillane collaboration.

His stories were told by characters such as:

• A bodyguard who himself needs a protector;
• An assassin who likes to double-dip his protection fees by offering his target the opportunity to knock off the person who wants them killed;
• An investigator working on a crime on Baker Street near Sherlock Holmes fictional lodgings;
• A courier carrying a briefcase possibly full of money, but unable to be arrested in case he is innovent;
• A Black jazz piano player with a mysterious past;

I simply ate them up, every one of them, in two short sittings. Great characters, enticing stories, smooth writing, and unexpected twists and turns. Who could want more in a book perfect for passing short periods of time in the world of crime and mystery? Highly recommended.

 

 [If this book interests you, be sure to check out:] 

  

Child, Lee. The Killing Floor.   

Introduction to the Jack Reacher character: loner, ex-Military Police, 6' 6' of muscle, wandering the country with just a toothbrush and a desire to find the truth. Each one in the series is tremendous although contains some violence: brilliant read s for character, dialogue, and story.

Happy reading.

Fred

 

Click here to browse over 435 more book recommendations by subject or title

(and read the introduction to The First Sentence Reader).

 

Here Is New York

White, E. B. Here Is New York. New York: Little Bookroom. 1949. Print.

First Sentences:

 

On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy....for the residents of Manhattan are to a large extent strangers who have pulled up stakes somewhere and come to town, seeking sanctuary or fulfillment or some greater or lesser grail. The capacity to make such dubious gifts is a mysterious quality of New York.


Description:

Unless you live in New York City or very much enjoy visiting this delightful, challenging city, you might think you would have little interest in reading E.B. White's Here Is New York from his 1949 summer living in the city.  But you would be so quite wrong. 

White is a magnificent writer, a quiet observer relating to us lucky readers his thoughts about the sights, sounds, people, and even the air of New York. And rather than me try to convince you of value of this short book/essay (only 56 pages), I'll just present some quotes from White and let you judge for yourself.

• New York blends the gift of privacy with the excitement of participation; and better than most dense communities it succeeds in insulating the individual (if he wants it, and almost everybody wants or needs it) against all enormous and violent and wonderful events that are taking place every minute.

•  I heard the Queen Mary blow one midnight, though, and the sound carried the whole history of departure and longing and loss.

•  Many people who have no real independence of spirit depend on the city's tremendous variety and sources of excitement for spiritual sustenance and maintenance of morale.

•  Not many [commuters] have ever spent a drowsy afternoon in the great rustling oaken silence of the reading room of the Public Library, with the book elevator (like an old water wheel) spewing out books onto trays.

• The city makes up for its hazards and its deficiencies by supplying its citizens with massive doses of a supplementary vitamin -- the sense of belonging to something unique, cosmopolitan, mighty and unparalleled.

•  On a summer night [the Bowery] drunks sleep in the open. The sidewalk is a free bed, and there are no lice. Pedestrians step along and over and around the still forms as though walking on a battlefield among the dead.

• New York is not a capital city -- it is not a national capital or a state capital. But it is by way of becoming the capital of the world. 

Well, there it is for you. By now, you'll either love these wonderful descriptions of a uniquely complicated city (as I do) and want to visit it or at least read more about it. Or you will have had enough and are ready to move on to some other diversion. Your choice. But with E.B. White as your guide, how can you go wrong at least reading his brief essay, This Is New York? 

The city is uncomfortable and inconvenient, but New Yorkers temperamentally do not crave comfort and convenience -- if they did they would live elsewhere

[If this book interests you, be sure to check out:] 

  

Hayes, Bill. Insomniac City.   

The thoughts of the author as he wanders the streets of New York City in the late night hours, including the people he meets, the restaurants he visits, and the quiet, dark sights he enjoys.

  

Happy reading.

Fred

 

Click here to browse over 435 more book recommendations by subject or title

(and read the introduction to The First Sentence Reader).

 

The Dictionary People

Ogilvie, Sarah. The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary.. New York: Knopf 2023. Print.

First Sentences:

 
It was in a hidden corner of the Oxford University Press basement, where the Dictionary's archive is stored, that I opened a dusty box and came across a small black book tied with a cream ribbon....Perhaps those ghosts were guiding me because the discovery I made that day would lead me on an extraordinary journey.


Description:

Sarah Ogilvie, author of the fascinating new non-fiction book, The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary, was an editor for the OED and thus had access to the bowels of the dictionary's vast archives. It was there she made an incredible discovery: the address book of James Murray, editor of the OED from 1879-1915. In it, Murray had listed the names, addresses, books read, and special notations (e.g., "Hopeless") from the thousands of people who contributed unusual words towards the creation of this all-encompassing dictionary.

Author Ogilvie, upon this discovery as well as a photo collection of contributors collected by the OED's creator and first editor Frederick Furnivall, decided to research these OED contributors, some of whom had sent in over 100,000 word entries to be considered for inclusion in the dictionary. Who were these people? Why did they work so hard reading obscure books to discover uncommon words? And what was the process these words had to go through until they could be part of the OED? 

Those questions were enough to hook Ogilvie to spend eight years wading through this trove of names and perusing letters, articles, photographs, and scribbled notes, along with "censuses, marriage registers birth certificates, and official records" to unravel the backgrounds of these people and their relationship to the OED and its editor Murray.

The OED was conceived to be "the first dictionary that described language....[and] would trace the meaning of words across time and describe how people were actually using them." To gather these words and the sentences that contained them, the original editors "crowdsourced" the project between 1858-1928, placing advertisements for volunteer readers in newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, and through popular literary clubs and societies like the Philological Society, which became the underwriter of the OED's expenses. Most readers worked for free, simply desiring to just be a part of this important, historic project.

The Dictionary People could also be cranky, difficult, and eccentric...but that, paradoxically, also makes them lovable , or at least fascinating.

Slips of 4 x 6 paper were sent to contributors for them to record interesting words on the slip, along with the book where each was found, and a sentence that contained the word that would illustrate its usage. These slips were then gathered by sub-editors (often Murray's own family members - he had 11 children), alphabetized and placed in chronological order in the workspace named the "Scriptorium." Editors then created definitions, checked for earlier references of each word, and gathered the finished words into the specific dictionary section/letter currently under development. These sections were published as they were developed, until the final letters were completed and all could be compiled into one vast book. 

In the mid-nineteenth century, the launch of a "uniform penny post" and the birth of steam power (driving printing presses, and leading to railway transport and faster ocean crossings) enabled this system of reading for the dictionary to be so successful...[creating] the conditions for a global, shared, intellectual project.

Here are a few examples of the OED contributors whom Ogilvie discovered, and then placed in chapters arranged alphabetically by the person's distinguishing profession (or quirk) for The Dictionary People:

• Archaeologist - Margaret Alice Murray, a nurse living in India, focused on books of that culture until she became an Egyptologist at age 31, and wrote her own autobiography at age 100 titled, My First Hundred Years;

• Best Contributor - Thomas Austin Jnr, who sent in 165,061 words. Second place went to William Douglas (151,982 words);

• Explorer - Sir John Richardson, surgeon for John Franklin's ill-fated three-year voyage to discover the Northwest Passage, an undertaking where most of the men starved to death or resorted to cannibalism;

• "Hopeless" Contributors (so noted in the address book) - Those people who requested books to read and slips to fill out, then never sent in any contributions, often keeping the valuable, old books;

• Lunatics - John Dormer, "one of Murray's most faithful Subeditors and Readers," was an inmate at the Croydon Mental Hospital psychiatric institution. (Note: Three of the top four OED contributors were in mental asylums. "Lunatic" was, in 1871, a defining term the US Census, along with "Dear and Dumb or Blind, Imbecile or Idiot.");

• New Zealander - W. Herbert-Jones, a wildly popular speaker about New Zealand, (complete with the new invention of projected slides), contributed many words from that country, although he had never visited New Zealand and the information he presented to audiences was completely made up;

• Zealots - James Murray, overall editor of the OED, who had left school at 14, but nonetheless learned twenty-five languages

Contributors could select the books of their own interest to scour for interesting words. Author Ogilive sneaks in some examples of these words submitted which are fascinating in their own right. Here are some words submitted by William Douglas (another member of the asylum "lunatics") from Robert Knox's System of Human Anatomy, taken from the staggering 1,600 words he turned in from that book alone.

• aphasic - "having lost the power of speech"
• buccinator- "a muscle of the wall of the cheek"
• occipitofronalis - "a muscle of the scalp
• ozyat - "an obsolete drink of almond and orange-flower water"

One interesting finding out of the myriad of discoveries Ogilive unlocked was the three words with the most "senses" (definitions). These are  "Run" (654 senses), Go (603 senses) and Take (586 senses). Incredible.

When finally completed and published in 1928, the Oxford English Dictionary, contained "400,000 words, 15,000 pages of literature, 2,000,000 quotations, and 178 miles of type." Peoople still contribute slips of words to update the OED, including Chris Collier who sent in over 100,000 words between 1975 to 2010, taken solely from the local newspaper, the Brisbane Courier-Mail. Ogilive tracked him down in Australia and talked with him about his contribution. He was a reclusive sort, hording a vast collection of movie posters and taken to mowing his lawn and walking the streets at midnight ...naked,

I found myself totally absorbed into this mid-nineteenth century world of dedicated, tireless, scholarly (and sometimes quirky) people who built the OED. I simply could not get enough details about who these people were and how many had voluntary devoted their lives to this project. I highly recommend The Dictionary People for anyone interested in language, people, and the world of the 1800s.

But what united [readers] was their startling enthusiasm for the emerging Dictionary, their ardent desire to document their language, and, especially for the hundreds of autodidacts, the chance to be associated with a prestigious project attached to a famous university which symbolized the world of learning from which they were otherwise excluded.

 

 [If this book interests you, be sure to check out:]

Winchester, Simon. The Professor and the Madman.   

Author Winchester unravels the bizarre, true history of James Murray, the director  of The Oxford English Dictionary, when he discovered that one of his most prolific contributors of new words for the OED was currently committed to an asylum for the criminally insane.. 

 

Happy reading. 

 

Fred

 

Click here to browse over 435 more book recommendations by subject or title

(and read the introduction to The First Sentence Reader).

 

Special Post - Holiday Gift Books

Description:

I know it is a bit early for the holidays, but since I am taking a break from writing new book recommendations until after the New Year, I thought people might be looking for interesting titles to read themselves or give to others over the gift-giving season.

Below are some of my favorites with links to my reviews. Every one of these I highly recommend. I hope a few will catch your interest and work their way onto your shelves for reading or for sharing with friends and family.

 

Happy reading. 

 

Fred

     See More Recommendations 

          (and an Intro to The First Sentence Reader) 

________________________

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Animals

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Remarkable Bright Creatures - Shelby Van Pelt

West With Giraffes (historical fiction) - Lynda Rutledge

  

Humor

Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

Food: A Love Story - Jim Gaffigan

The Golf Omnibus  - P.G. Wodehouse

Round Ireland with a Fridge - Tony Hawks

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen  - Paul Torday

 

Mystery

Booked to Die - John Dunning

Remarkable Bright Creatures - Shelby Van Pelt

The Twyford Code - Janice Hawlett

 

Romantic Relationships

The Japanese Lover - Isabelle Allende

Meet Me at the Museum - Anne Youngson

The Odds - Nan Stewart

The Rosie Project - Graeme Simsion

Two Across - Jefff Bartsch

 

Science Fiction

An Absolutely Remarkable Thing - Hank Green

Cold People - Tom Rob Smith

Golden State - Ben H. Winters

Machine Man  Max Barry

Seveneves  - Neal Stephenson

Sleeping Giants - Sylvain Neuval

 

Short Stories

The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke - Arthur C. Clarke

 In Sunlight or in Shadow - Lawrence Block, editor

 

Small Towns / Western Setting

Juliet in August - Dianne Warren

Outlawed  - Anna North

Plainsong - Kent Haruf

The Whistling Season - Ivan Doig

 

Thrillers

Before I Go to Sleep - S.J. Watson

I Am Pilgrim - Terry Hayes

Memory Man - David Baldacci

Shibumi  - Travanian

The Silent Patient - Alex Michaelides

Sometimes I Lie - Alice Feeney

 

Young Adult

Brewster  - Mark Slouka

Ender's Game - Orsen Scott Card

Five Children and It  - E. Nesbit

Hatchet - Gary Paulsen

The Hobbit  - J.R.R. Tolkein

Ready Player One - Ernest Cline

 

Leftovers - Just Plain Great Reads

An American Marriage - Tayari Jones

Housekeeping - Marilynne Robinson

The Immortalists  - Chloe Benjamin

The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien

Manners from Heaven - Quentin Crisp

The Speed of Dark - Elizabeth Moon

The Scapegoat - Daphne Du Maurier

To Serve Them All My Days - R.F. Delderfield

World of Wonders - Robertson Davies

 

Non-Fiction 

Animals

The Soul of an Octopus - Sy Montgomery

 

Books Themed

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One for the Books - Joe Queenan

Outwitting History - Aaron Lansky

The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distractions - Alan Jacobs

 

People

84 Charing Cross Road - Helene Hanff

At Ease: Stories I Tell To Friends - Dwight D. Eisenhower

Educating Esme  - Esme Raji Codell

The Feather Thief - Kirk Wallace Johnson

The Hammersteins - Oscar Hammersteins

Insomniac City - Bill Hayes

The Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940 - Victoria Wilson

Never Cry Wolf  - Farley Mowat

Nothing To Do But Stay - Carrie Young

The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio - Terry Ryan

Shakespeare Saved My Life  - Laura Bates

We Took to the Woods - Louise Dickinson Rich

Sports

The Glory of Their Times - Lawrence Ritter

Handful of Summers - Gordon Forbes

Three-Year Swim Club - Julie Checkoway

Wait Till Next Year - Doris Kearns Goodwin

Why We Swim - Bonnie Tsui

 

War

To End All Wars - Adam Hochschild

The Volunteer - Jack Fairweather

We Die Alone - David Howarth

Winter Fortress - Neal Bascomb