Book Club 2025: Line Up For Murder by Marian Babson

Oops! I was hung over today, so I decided to read a mystery.

This is a quite original concept — it’s about a bunch of people in line for days for a huge sale, and the “mystery” bit is about whether the people in the queue have other motives for sleeping on the sidewalk than just getting a good deal.

As usual with Babson, it’s pretty well written on a page by page basis, but she needed, like, more more. You can tell that it was a struggle even to fill the 170 pages of this book, and she starts repeating herself around the two thirds mark.

Still, it’s a perfectly pleasant way to spend a day when your brain’s not working well.

I was actually trying to find a different Babson book — the first of the Trixie Dolan & Evangeline Sinclair series, which I know I have here somewhere. But I just couldn’t find it. So I thought I’d just re-buy it as an ebook, but nope! Not available. I guess neither her publisher(s) not her heirs (I think she’s dead?) are confident that anybody would want to read these old and not exactly celebrated books these days, so even if scanning, OCR-ing and proffreading a book wouldn’t be very expensive, it’s not worth it?

Anyway, The Internet Archive has that book, but as a scanned PDF. You can only “borrow” it, but there’s a plugin to allow you to download things anyway, and:

But… eh. Epaper contrast is already pretty sucky, but here we get almost-black on quite grey. I mean, I could fix that up (threshold everything over #aaa to #fff), but the resolution on this thing still wouldn’t make that particularly pleasant.

And I just couldn’t be bothered, especially since I was just trying to find something to read while feeling sorry for myself today.

Line Up For Murder (1980) by Marian Babson (buy used, 3.55 on Goodreads)

WoRdPrEsS ReWrItEs My PoStS

So the other day, for the first time ever, I actually read one of my blog posts (excerpt seen above). (This also explains all the typoes.) But I saw that “WordPress” up there and I knew that I’d never write something that cringe-worthy. And indeed:

See? In that test, there’s only one capitalised character in the word, and I’m not sure that I’m able to actually write that word here, so let me paste it in like an image: . See? Only the first character in the word is capitalised and not several, like some illiterate pendant would do.

So there’s some code in somewhere that rewrites that into . I.e, if I write (let’s see whether this goes through) “W o r d p r e s s”, there’s some code in WordPress to reformat that into “W o r d P r e s s” which apparently can’t be disabled (or at least it seems that way after going through a few menu items in the admin interface).

I object to this censorship! SO MUCH. THIS IS AN OUTRAGE

I quote Cory Doctorow’s revolutionary essay:

This year, I resolve to minimize my use of incaps when writing about commercial products and companies. An incap changes a word into a logo, and has no place in journalism or commentary — it’s branding activity that colonizes everyday communications. It’s free advertising.

So: “Iphone,” not “iPhone” and “Paypal,” not “PayPal.”

I don’t know whether the Automattic Censorship Committee will allow any of those brands to be displayed how they should be, i.e., without InCaps, but I guess we’ll see.

I Pity The Plants

I’ve got a couple of big sansevierias of different types, but they all have the same problem: About once a year, they send up these huge flower stems of, admittedly, not very impressive off-white flowers.

So what’s the problem? It’s that every night when it gets dark, they send out the richest, sweetest, most perfumed scent imaginable. It’s really like WHOA, to put it 90sishly. It’s worse than stepping into an elevator where a combined Perfume & Aftershave Abomination has taken place.

I find myself reluctant to cut them down, though, because the poor plants have spent so much energy on these things… not only the stem, flowers and the scent, but they literally drip with nectar. Very sticky nectar, too.

But tonight I came into the living room, I was literally stunned into submission, swooned, fell over, and literally choked and died, and I’m now dead.

So… begone, sweet-smelling flowers. I’m not gonna miss you.

Book Club 2025: Ned til hundene by Helle Helle

Helle Helle is a Danish author, and I’ve seen her books around for years, but never actually read any of her books. I guess the main intriguing thing for me has been her cool name — yes, I’m that shallow.

I guess I bought this book at an airport in December 2014, but then never read it.

And… it’s amazing! It’s the most tense, nerve-wracking book ever, despite “nothing happens”. Helle Helle has mostly written short stories, and that’s really apparently in this novel — there’s not a sentence wasted.

I’m definitely going to get more of her books, but perhaps in Danish — I’ve got a Norwegian translation here. The translation (by Trude Marstein) is fine, but there’s some oddball word choices here and there that seem to land halfway between both intelligible Danish and intelligible Norwegian.

I don’t think Helle Helle has been translated to English much? Let’s see… Apparently just one novel. I’m also going to go ahead and guess that many readers dislike this novel because the protagonist isn’t exactly… “inspiring”? Right:

Det er svaert at blive foelelsesmaessigt involveret og investere i en hovedperson der virker saa uendeligt kedelig, passiv, usikker og ulykkelig.

Heh heh:

So to sum up: this is an incrediably boring book.

Ned til hundene (2008) by Helle Helle (3.66 on Goodreads)