Some Books

I enjoyed Cecile Richards's autobiography, reading the young adult's version. Making Trouble was recently reviewed. A useful device would be to compare the original and young adult versions and determine how much is lost in the translation. I see it as a sort of abridged version.

The Night of Baba Yaga (a European fable character) by Akiri Otani is an LGBTQ novel of sorts. A young woman becomes a driver/bodyguard to the daughter of a mobster. Meanwhile, we are given what seems like some details of the daughter's fugitive mother and her lover. Nonetheless, I think if you read closely, you might suspect something is fishy.

The driver/bodyguard is chosen for her fighting skills (and gender). The book has some violent scenes. The book then takes a gender-bending turn, especially as the last part of this small novel skips along from c. 1980 to the current day (around 2020). I found the ending dubious. Overall, however, it was a worthwhile read with some alt-gender content.

The Death of Socrates by Ellen R. Wilson discusses the title subject as well as how it was understood from the time of Ancient Greece until the present (around 2010). It's part of a collection of shortish (not too much over 200 pages with pictures) historical books covering various topics.

I found it an approachable read for someone not too philosophically or historically inclined. She does not address only graduate school people here. The book started to get tedious around the Middle Ages though some of the more modern stuff was okay. The strongest part was the time of the ancients, including the Greeks and Romans. 

The chapter concerning Jesus and Christianity (Socrates and Jesus overlap in various ways though many thought Socrates didn't suffer enough) started to fall into a more academic groove and the book was more of a trudge. The earlier chapters was much easier to read. Still, overall, worthwhile.

I watched some of the film Cluny Brown, one of three adult films (two children's Rescuers films were also made) from books by Margery Sharp. The book version has the same basic characters and storyline but it changes some things around. For instance, Cluny is not so into plumbing and does not meet the professor in the opening scene. 

The professor is also not quite as approachably quirky early on. The two wind up together in the book too (if not quite in the same way) but it seems much more out of the blue this way. In the film, the two had more of a connection early on. The film in some ways is an improvement. The other characters are basically the same in the book and film versions. 

I found the book somewhat hardgoing at times. I read the whole thing and it had its charms. Still, at some point, it felt that nothing much was going on, and the book would have been better if it was around 30-50 pages shorter. The film seems crisper in that sense. 

I will check out her book The Nutmeg Tree next.