I read The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World by Bettany Hughes in 2025 and gave it 3 stars
A good read that I picked up at one of my favorite local shops. This book, while packed with information, would probably have been better as a long-form journal/magazine piece rather than a book. It felt like reading a Wikipedia article, where you keep clicking to go deeper and deeper down different rabbit holes. There was a lack of cohesion in each section, more of a well-researched data dump rather than a contained piece.
Having said that, my favorite chapter was on the Mausoleum of Halikarnossos. I think it was partly due to her citing various sources that I have always enjoyed and have copies of, such as Homer’s Iliad, Aulus Gellius’s Attic Nights and Herodotus’ Histories.
I read Listen Listen by Kate Wilhelm earlier this year and gave it 3 stars.
After having finished “The Clone” which Theodore L. Thomas co-wrote with Kate Wilhelm, I was getting worried. Wilhelm is a fantastic writer, who brings depth & psychological to her work. “The Clone” from 1965 was simply awful. I think Wilhelm hit her stride in the late 1960s/early 1970s and that’s where some of her favorite works of mine can be found, like The Abyss, The Downstairs Room, The Killer Thing, The Infinity Box, Margaret & I, Somerset Dreams and Other Fictions, The Clewiston Test, and, of course, Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang.
This new book, “Listen, Listen” was better than The Clone, but not her best work. Still, a good book by Wilhelm is worth more than a great book by a lesser craftswoman. It contains three novellas, one novellete, and a speech she gave on writing science fiction.
The first novella, “The Winter Beach” (1981), is the Kate Wilhelm I know and love. A hint of science fiction but an abundance of psychology, philosophy and simply beautiful writing. “Julian” (1978) is a shorter novellete that’s a great story for the most part, even with its weird ending. Still, wonderful craft at work.
The novella from 1981, “With Thimbles, with Forks, and Hope”, didn’t do anything for me. I didn’t enjoy it and ended up skimming it. I think the next novella, “Moongate” from 1978, was even worse.
The concluding essay “The Uncertain Edge of Reality” from a talk she gave at a convention in 1980, was good. Nothing spectacular like Joanna Russ’s essay collection “To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction” from 1995, but still an interesting read.
Finished reading: Murder by Memory by Olivia Waite 📚
Beautifully written, very fast read, love generation ship stories. Plot a little thin but a joy to read.
A new dawn … that simple little phrase can mean so much. New joys or new tears. New fears or new hopes. But, if you do it right, always exploring. I have so many new things to explore and hope that each dawn brings a little joy to me and others.