Sometimes I write Friday’s post on Thursday morning because I’m often a bit tired on Friday morning, after playing with my grandchildren in 95 degree heat, but I had too many ideas this time and couldn’t settle on just one.

Meanwhile, I’ve been reading four different book series on Amazon Kindle and finished several new entries in the past month or two. Some things really stand out. The first three series are written by older people, two men and a woman. The last one, with no name was written by a ~ 23 year old guy.

Lady Hardcastle is the detective for T. E. Kinsey’s series, set around 1910. Kinsey works hard on his setting and his murders are quite varied. However, he makes a point of dissing Sunday, as a day of rest or anything else. His narrator comments repeatedly on her dislike of sitting around doing nothing on Sunday. Heaven forbid she should do something Else. Kinsey does have a vicar for the small village where Lady Hardcastle is living, but that would be a necessity for the kind of setting he’s working in, so it doesn’t really make up for the explicit and unnecessary commentary on Sunday as an annoying interruption to life. I’m still reading these.

Next up is a science fiction series that started with an interesting premise. The protagonist spent a lot of time looking into the past by examining derelict spaceships that she found here and there. As that series progressed however, two things became clear. One was that human relationships were never going to pass a certain point. There weren’t going to be any children written about. The protagonist was deliberately stepping back and explaining how she always would. This is not how the series started. Unfortunately, the way it’s written it’s not like she’s going to have an epiphany.

As the series progressed, the various empires represented by the derelict ships began to come into conflict (along with a bit of time travel), and the last two books featured thousands of people dying, with absolutely no thought for their lives. From my perspective, the author was stuck on a certain kind of cleverness, but I started not caring any longer. Why root for one or another side, or even a third, if they are all so callous about life. I find this kind of sad because there were some interesting puzzles in the first books, and I really wonder what happened to the author.

Here’s the last example from that series, that turned me off totally. In one of the earlier books a character takes unilateral action and causes a major problem. In one of the last books, the ship’s crew that was affected by that unilateral action is convicted of mutiny. Wait, what?! That’s not what happened. It’s totally unfair. But it is presented as a great legal victory. I think. I guess I don’t care if something is going to change in another later book. I feel super short-changed. I feel like a sucker. So I’m not sharing the name.

The third series is one recommended by Lucy. P. J. Fitzsimmons describes himself as wishing that he were P. G. Wodehouse, if Wodehouse solved locked room mysteries. His stories feature Anthony Boisjoly, Anty for short, and are set in the late 1920’s. I don’t know if he’s American or English but the mysteries are set in England. They are mostly very funny (avoid Number 4) and very clever. They avoid the Sunday trap and, so far, haven’t shown a brutal level of disinterest in other people. My lesson from them, is to avoid whatever happened to this guy in episode number 4. I think he was trying too hard to be clever and forgot to have fun.

I’m not going to name the last series because it has a lot of stuff in it that is questionable. You know… bad language and etcetera. But… The hero tries incredibly hard to be kind and good in the face of two huge drawbacks. The world this story is set in, is a sort of Chinese role-playing game turned real, with incredibly powerful “cultivators”, and mortals, who they destroy without a thought as the “cultivators” ascend to ever higher and higher realms. At the outset, the hero is a very weak cultivator, so he can’t do much in the “higher” realms, and though all stories are about how “cultivators” ascend and have epic battles, he just gets to do everyone else’s laundry and gardening. But when he leaves the Cult, he is an incredibly strong mortal, so he can do way too much in the regular world. His choices in this situation are fascinating and a lot of fun to read.

For starters, he becomes a farmer, which is an ironic joke on being a “cultivator”. As a super farmer, he grows crops so amazing that the poor place where he is living can’t afford to buy from him, because he is selling luxury goods. The author has a fascinating and fun take on the economics of this situation, including giving some away, and finding merchants who can buy the rest, and sell it to rich people far away. In the process a whole bunch of mid-level people become a bit richer from the trickle-down.

I’m up to about page 300,000 so I can’t come close to a lot of the plot, but the last thing that happened is that the more-or-less commune, that has developed around him, finds two new quests, and a bunch of people go off in different directions. He feels left behind for a page or two. Is he supposed to be going out with those others, to be heroic and settle the hash of evil people? Or is he supposed to stay at home with his wife and new baby? We, who are, so to speak, in the know, know that trouble is on its way to him. But he doesn’t sit around waiting for it (especially since he doesn’t know it is on the way). He decides that heroism, for him, means making sure that home is still there when his friends come back — and that it should be better than when they left. So he gets back to work. That is a charming choice.

My take from this one is… this is an incredibly popular story. I read the comments and people really like the homey aspects, along with the fighting and what-not. They want the hero to show up the super-powerful beings who don’t care. They want the romances to work out properly, and they want more babies. They want everyone to rise as high as they are able and to have different things that they like doing. Who knew?