The copyright dates from 1963 and 1964. This collection features the usual gang and their lives in the beginning of time with modern times popping in unexpectedly through golf and baseball and hotels and a snakeskin marked as made in Japan. We also find out that the turtle's name is John. Named after the author? Time marches on but the comic strips remains just as funny as when it first started out.
A play in five acts. This edition comes with a Preface, by the author, and two Prologues and an Epilogue. It was Sheridan's first play, staged in 1775.
The main characters are Lydia Languish and Captain Absolute, aka Ensign Beverly. Second in importance are Julia, Lydia's cousin, and Faulkland, Captain Absolute's friend.
Captain Absolute is in love with Lydia. But apparently Lydia has a romantic fantasy of an illict lover and subsequent elopement. Catering to her fantasy, Captain Absolute becomes Ensign Beverly, a young man of little means and wholely unacceptable to her family and with the promise of defiance to Julia's family and an exciting elopement.
Meanwhile, there is Lydia's cousin, Julia, who is engaged to be married to Faulkland. However, Faulkland seems to be unable to accept that Julia truly loves him and is constantly testing her love to see if it is genuine. Which ultimately leads to romantic disaster.
Back to the Captain, disguised as Beverly, who finds his romantic pursuit blows up in his face when Lydia learns he is not a penniless nobody, but a man of wealth and of good family. All her silly dreams of a runaway marriage dissolve and she is left feeling duped and resentful.
Throw in a couple duels, a cowardly country rube and an unreasonably angry Irishman, and a couple of confounded parental types, and you have a screwball comedy that was probably considered hilarious in its day. I watched a stage performance of the play on YouTube and the laughs were few and far between. Mildly amusing at the most.
A. Deborah Baker was probably the world's most skilled modern alchemist. So skilled she manufactured a human being of her own, James Reed. Reed was also a greatly skilled alchemist which is something his peers should have kept in mind. But just like they did with Baker, treating her as inferior simply because she was a woman, they also acknowledged Reed's skills but did not give him the respect he craved. For this error, they would pay for their lives in one fell swoop.
Reed was an ambitious creature and he wanted to rule the Universe by bringing about the Impossible City. Once this was accomplished, he would have the powers of an actual god. But since Reed was a cruel monster, this would be horrendous for everyone and everything else.
Reed had a plan. If he could embody the Doctrine of Ethos in human form, this would trigger the Impossible City. [I wish I could explain this idea better, but frankly it is way beyond my ability to even understand what the author was on about.] Reed did this by making lab grown twin babies who, as they matured, would come together and [ I didn't comprehend that part either] become the Doctrine of Ethos. [I never figured out what the Doctrine of Ethos was.]
There were lots of failures. But finally Reed has two sets of twins who seemed to be shaping up to attain success manifesting the Doctrine. The oldest set was headed down the right track, but there were also problems. The younger set of twins was Reed's backup plan if the first set crashed and burned.
So the plan required that the twins be kept separate until maturity. So one twin was fostered on the East Coast of the US and the other twin on the West Coast. But distance was not enough to keep the kids apart and they found each other, psychically. The male twin, Roger, was a whiz at words. The female twin, Dodger, was a whiz at math.
Meanwhile, Reed and his chief minion, Leigh, the bloodthirsty witch, were busy making life hard for the younger set of twins and for anyone else who happened to be in their orbit. These two villains are just about as nasty as is possible to be.
By the time Roger and Dodger are college age, Reed has decided they will not do and he sends his minions to murder them. But one of the minions is not loyal and she helps Roger and Dodger escape. Leigh, the witch, hunts them down and the battle ensues.
This book was way too long. And it required a suspension of belief of which I was not capable. I never got the Doctine of Ethos thing figured out or why it's achievement would create godlike beings of the twins or why once they reached their godhood they would pay any attention to the crazed desires of those two lunatic monsters, Reed and Leigh.
Most of the book is about Roger and Dodger growing up and finding each other and discovering their special connection. On and on it went, it got really boring. And the evil machinations of Reed and Leigh in the background also went on and on.
But towards the end, it was like reading a video game, where the two hero twins have to face the final bosses. Meh. I don't like those kind of video games. The closer I got to the end, the more I just skipped so much wordage, just wanting it over. Frankly, if I hadn't spent almost $30 for the book, I probably would have just quit halfway, 250 pages in.
However, it seems lots of readers really like the book. So I will call it a good read. I just think I was not brainy enough to enjoy it. Maybe it should have a warning, like You Must Have a High IQ to Understand this Novel.
Here is a review by Kirkus.
An novel, even though the main character is also named Jeanette and her and the author were both adopted by religious fanatics. So that's something.
Anyway, fictional Jeanette is adopted by Christian fundamentalists. Well, actually the mother is the religious nutter. The father is a nonentity in the story. The mother, Louie, is quite devoted to her religion and her adopted daughter is being raised in the faith too. No problem, the daughter is nearly as gung-ho as the mother. That is until love enters the picture, in the form of another girl.
So Jeanette's first love is a girl and so is her second love and her third love and so on. Which is ok until Louie finds out and blabs everything to the church she is devoted to. And the churchy people decide Jeanette is possessed by the devil and needs an exorcism. Jeanette doesn't respond well to the exorcism and becomes quite ill.
When she recovers, it soon become apparent that the exorcism was a failure because Jeanette is still falling in loves with girls. Eventually her sexual preference results in not only being kicked out of their little church but out of the only home she has ever known. Now nearly grown, she has to find work and make her own way in the world without the love and support of her adoptive parents.
This supposedly comic novel, per the blurbs on the cover ("[Waterson] has mastered both comedy and tragedy in this rich little novel." "A daring, unconventional comic novel . . . told with romping humor" "quirky and subtle hilarity of Winterson's autobiographical first novel") was boring and not what I would call comical or subtly hilarious. And it is interspersed with some weird fantasy stuff that was puzzling and I supposed was an allegory for the character's feelings or life or whatever, but I didn't care for those intrusions into the story.
But apparently the literary world loves this novel, so what do I know? Nothing, most likely.
This is not a review but is a distillation by John Crace (Digested Classics it's called) from The Guardian. It pretty much covers the main points and I get the feeling he didn't really care much for the fantasy bits either.
