Mike's Guest Reviews, 2017

 An asterisk (*) indicates that the book was one of my dad’s.

 

Servants -- Lucy Lethbridge

 

A well-written history of domestic service in England over the mid-1800s to the 1970s. Modernization came late to England because house-owners didn't want to go to the expense and inconvenience of getting things like washing machines or electric irons just to make things easier for the servants. Many great English houses didn't even have electricity until they were occupied by the Army during World War II. Of course the upper class painted this as a moral issue: if the servants' work got easier they'd just use their spare time to laze around. They used the same argument against the National Health -- the employers protested volubly that the relation between master and servant was an age-old noble tradition and the Government interfering in it would destroy the fabric of society (this despite the fact that it was very rare for employers to make any kind of retirement provisions even for servants who'd worked for them for decades.) As usual, social change had to wait for people to die: as both the employers who demanded Victorian service and the number of people willing to provide it died off, domestic service heavily declined in England. It wasn't until the 1970s (!) that the majority of households had no servants. Really interesting.

 

 

Take This Bread -- Sara Miles

 

A memoir; the first few chapters are the author's conversion story, pretty banal and self-congratulatory, with a good deal of sneering over how shallow and robotic other Christians are compared to her own hippy-dippy nonsectarian congregation. Had that been all the book wouldn't be worth reading, but the majority of it is taken up with an account of the food pantry she started in San Francisco, operating weekly out of her church to provide groceries to people who needed them. It's a good picture of the logistics of a volunteer charity, and also a depressing reminder of how enormous the problem is, and how any charitable volunteer eventually has to confront the fact that they will never be able to feed everyone. That part of the book was really interesting.

 

 

Marathon -- Richard A. Billows

 

A gripping re-creation of the great battle of Marathon, with some good material on its background and consequences but mainly concentrating on the course of the battle itself. Billows makes a convincing case that the Athenians, whose fighting style relied on hitting the enemy as a more or less concentrated mass, probably didn't charge at full speed all the way from their encampment to the Persian lines. Granted it was downhill all the way, but it's unlikely they could have kept a unified front while running more than a mile over uneven ground. Billows argues that they probably marched downhill at a walking pace in order to stay together, only breaking into a run when they came into range of the Persian arrows (two hundred yards or so.) It always surprises me that pretty much all historians agree that Herodotos's account of only a few dozen Athenian casualties versus thousands of Persian dead is probably accurate.

Alone among the Greeks, the Plataeans stood with Athens at Marathon, sending their whole army, and the Athenians never forgot it. When Plataea was later invaded by the Persians, Athens took in the entire population and voted to make them Athenian citizens, the only outsiders ever given that status.

Even more interesting is the way the legend of Marathon has survived. Everyone remembers that the herald Pheidippides ran the 26 miles from the beach at Marathon to the Acropolis with news of the victory before dropping dead, but in fact this didn't happen -- it's a conflation of two other things that did happen, both of which are way more impressive! On the one hand, Pheidippides did make an epic run, but it wasn't after the battle, it was before it. Pheidippides was sent to Sparta to warn them of the Persian approach and ask for help; he ran the hundred and forty miles from Athens to Sparta, crossing two very difficult mountain passes, in only forty-eight hours -- and when the Spartans said they wouldn't come until after the change of the moon, he slept the night there and then ran all the way back with the bad news! On the other hand, even more amazingly, although the Persians were badly beaten at Marathon, they weren't destroyed, and their ships withdrew and set off southward, intending to round the Euboean peninsula and attack Athens from the west. Since the entire Athenian adult population was at Marathon, that meant the city was defenseless -- so the whole Athenian army, after winning the battle, immediately had to turn around and run the twenty-six miles back to Athens, in their armor and carrying their weapons, cutting across the peninsula to beat the Persians there. They made it with a couple hours to spare, and when the Persian ships came in view of Athens and saw the army waiting for them, they gave it up and went home. An excellent book.

 

 

So You've Been Publicly Shamed -- Jon Ronson

 

A book mostly about how the pile-on culture of the Internet has effectively brought back the pillory. He opens with a vignette about a problem he had with a trio of annoying college students who put his name on a Twitter account and used it to publish inane garbage, and he found how easy it was to harness the Internet's outrage machine to force them to stop -- literally thousands of people, who didn't know any of the parties involved, gleefully piled on the trio with harassing calls, emails, DDoS attacks, and the like until they had to take the account down. Ronson thinks people join in this sort of thing so eagerly for the same reasons they join lynch mobs: it provides an easy, consequence-free rush of self-righteousness. He goes on to deal with the stories of several other people who had the weight of the Internet fall on them for various reasons major and minor -- a guy the author caught in plagiarism, that dentist who shot the endangered lion, a couple people who made tasteless jokes on Twitter -- and what happened to them afterwards. Most of them still seemed genuinely shocked even months later, not only having lost their jobs and careers but having to cope with ongoing harassment from thousands of strangers with no reason to think it would ever stop. The case that struck me the most was that of a British politician who was attacked in the newspapers, with pictures, for his non-standard sexual practices. He seemed to suffer no consequences whatever, not even losing his next election, which Ronson attributes to the fact that he refused to defend himself or make any apology. You can't be shamed if you won't be embarrassed. I thought that was interesting. It was a good book.

 

 

Dear American Airlines -- Jonathan Miles

 

A polemic novel that takes the form of an angry letter written by the protagonist, who is stuck at O'Hare because of an airline delay and in danger of missing the wedding of his daughter, whom he hasn't seen since she was a baby. He keeps adding to the letter as the delay gets longer and longer and he has to keep going through security over and over when he goes outside to smoke, and the letter eventually spreads out to cover his upbringing and tell the story of his unsuccessful marriage and alienation from his ex-wife, the strain of taking care of his mentally ill and now physically disabled mother, and his urges toward suicide. This is all gotten across between some very funny asides, which was necessary because the story itself is pretty heavy. I liked it.

 

 

The White Feather -- P.G. Wodehouse

 

A very early novel, set at the public school of Wrykyn (Wodehouse's disguised version of his own school) telling the story of a bookish student who, ashamed of not having jumped in when a fight broke out between the school boys and the townies, spends the semester secretly training with a retired boxer in order to enter the end-of-term contests and redeem himself. Even Wodehouse couldn't make that plot seem fresh and the story is a little tedious. Well-written, though.

 

 

*Deathblow Hill -- Phoebe Atwood Taylor

 

An Asey Mayo mystery, not very good as a mystery (her books generally aren't) but a great picture of Cape Cod in the mid-30s. Dad was very pleased with the accuracy of the rural scenes -- such as a woman, upon hearing thunder, rushing out to bring in the milk (after milking her cow she'd left the milk outside to separate, and she had to go get it so the pail wouldn't get rained in.) He also notes the way Asey's Cape relatives quote Scripture quite un-self-consciously ("Well, if thine enemy hunger, feed 'im, Asey") and someone remarking "Here we be" (which he remembered Uncle George often saying.) My favorite line was when Asey says of a long-standing enmity between two families that it's "Not a good Southern feud -- more a passionately restrained Eugene O'Neill sort." The mystery is resolved rather stupidly when it turns out one of the characters has been insane all along, but you don't read these books for the plot.

 

 

Radio On -- Sarah Vowell

 

Her first book, a diary of what was on the radio throughout 1995, alternating mostly between the stations in Chicago and Bozeman, Montana. She was in her early twenties and it shows. The prose is over-written and dull, and the book has only commonplace things to say: Rush Limbaugh and Gordon Liddy are mean-spirited and dishonest, NPR is self-admiring and unadventurous, top forty pop music is shallow and usually boring. It wasn't very interesting.

 

 

Haruki Murakami Goes to Meet Hayao Kawai -- Haruki Murakami

 

A record of some conversations Murakami had with Kawai, a psychologist better known in Japan than the US. I found it uninteresting. Murakami tried to start general topics and Kawai always led them back to his ideas about therapy. A lot of it has slipped my mind already and what I do remember was dull.

 

 

Heartbreak House -- George Bernard Shaw

 

A farcical comedy set in the teens, reading rather like a parody of Chekhov. The action takes place at the Shotover house, an English country house built in the shape of a sailing ship for some reason. Shotover is a mad inventor whose function is to go in and out making crazy speeches and fail to recognize his children; in between those scenes, the house guests take turns seeing who can be more totally unmoved by other guests declaring their secret love. There's a funny scene when the family catches a burglar, but are too softhearted to turn him in, and they tell him he can go, but he refuses to leave unless they pay him to -- he's not really a burglar at all, but an aggressive panhandler who preys on English people's reluctance to make a scene. Shotover's laboratory is blown up by an air raid, but no one seems to care very much and they all return to being bored by life.  I didn't find it very interesting.

 

 

*Coleridge's Writings on Shakespeare -- Terence Hawkes, ed.

 

My main takeaway from this was that Coleridge was really, really insistent that he started paying serious attention to Shakespeare all on his own and absolutely not because he went to lectures on Shakespeare by Friedrich Schiller in Germany, that had nothing to do with it. In my memory he spends more time insisting that his interpretation of Shakespeare is utterly uninfluenced by Schiller than he does actually interpreting Shakespeare. This may be because the book is a collection of public lectures he gave, reconstructed from shorthand notes taken by newspaper stenographers in the audience. Coleridge is supposed to have been a pretty good lecturer, but that doesn't come across in these transcripts and I found them kind of dry.

 

 

One of Ours -- Willa Cather

 

A war novel, sort of, although most of it takes place in Nebraska around the turn of the last century. The hero, Claude, is a farmer's son who feels hopelessly locked in to a life of unfulfilling drudgery on the prairie; his father could afford to send him to college, but won't do it because he considers it unnecessary. Looking for some independence, Claude marries and sets up on his own farmstead; but his wife is only interested in promoting missionary work -- it's strongly implied that the marriage is never consummated -- and Claude feels more isolated and hopeless than ever, so much so that when the US enters the war in Europe in 1917, Claude can't volunteer fast enough. He mentally infuses the war with his romantic ideas about purpose, and for the first time in his life he feels like what he's doing matters. He ends up getting killed in a German offensive, which, I'm pretty sure, is what he was hoping for. It was a good book.

 

 

Black Folk Tales -- Julius Lester

 

A collection of retold slave stories from the 19th century. Most of them tell the adventures of High John the Conqueror, a trickster figure probably derived from Anansi, and probably also the inspiration for Br'er Rabbit. High John is an African prince sold into American slavery, and he outwits the whites by exploiting their laziness, greed, and arrogance. Good reading.

 

 

*Portrait of Dr. Gachet -- Cynthia Saltzman

 

A good book about one specific painting, Van Gogh's brilliant portrait of the doctor who was treating him during the last months of his life. Van Gogh seems to have taken a dislike to the doctor at first but soon warmed up to him; his private letters describe the doctor as "sensitive and intelligent". The first part of the book deals with the background and composition of the portrait: Dr. Gachet is shown in the classic pose of melancholy, his elbow on a table and his chin resting heavily on his right hand. Van Gogh said he meant the doctor's face to represent "the heartbroken expression of our time". Van Gogh killed himself less than a month after finishing it, and along with the rest of his property it went to his brother and sister. The rest of the book follows the painting as it was sold and re-sold until it went for $82 million at an auction in 1990, making it the most expensive painting in history at the time the book was written. For the early part of the 20th century it was in a museum in Frankfurt; the curator took it down in the thirties and hid it in a storeroom in hopes of protecting it from the Nazis' campaign to clean Germany of "degenerate" art. It didn't work, though, and the portrait was confiscated in 1937. It might have been burned, as many other paintings were, but Goering requisitioned it and sold it; a Jewish banker named Karmarsky got hold of it through a middleman and sent it out of Europe to the United States, where it hung in the Met in New York for a long time until Kramarsky's descendants had Christie's auction it off. A crazy Japanese gazillionaire bought it and promptly shut it away in his house, and it's never been seen in public since, although the buyer died over twenty years ago. Good reading.

 

 

Devil in a Blue Dress -- Walter Mosley

 

His first novel, a noir story introducing Ezekiel ("Easy") Rawlins, a black Army veteran living in LA just after the war. As the novel begins he's just been let go from his factory job for being "uppity", and at loose ends (and with a mortgage to meet) he takes a kind of shady friend-of-a-friend job looking for a black woman who's lying low while several white men are on her trail, for reasons no one wants to tell Rawlins. He figures it out as the plot unfolds, dealing with 1940s race politics, theft, murder, and obsession. I liked the internal struggle he goes through when debating whether to call for help from a childhood friend of his, a stone-cold killer incongruously named Mouse. Rawlins knows that Mouse's solution to every problem is just to kill everyone involved, and he has to decide between the weight that involving Mouse will put on his own conscience against the bad consequences of failing to resolve the case. I liked it a lot.

 

 

The Coming of Bill -- P.G. Wodehouse

 

I didn't like this. I thought both the hero and the love interest were awful, and it was all the worse because Wodehouse obviously expects you to admire their awful behavior. The hero is a semi-talented painter with a trust fund living a Bohemian life in New York. When he falls for a woman and gets married she drives off all his former friends; it's explicitly stated that she does this because she's jealous of them and can't stand for there to be anyone who shares a part of his life that she wasn't there for. This is held up as something to be praised. They live a life of near-total isolation, seeing and speaking to no one but each other and their infant son Bill, for a year or two until the hero's trust fund collapses. He joins a mining expedition to Central America to make a fortune, and comes back to New York two years later having failed at it. When he returns he finds that his wife has inherited money and they're now rich. He's furious that his wife has made friends and now has a life outside of the house instead of sitting quietly at home (again Wodehouse presents this as an attitude we're supposed to sympathize with) and eventually leaves her because of it. In the end she comes crawling to him and renounces her independence, and they settle down to live in monastic solitude. Wodehouse clearly thinks this is a happy ending, but I think the whole book is really a horror story.

 

 

Pedagogy of the Oppressed -- Paulo Freire

 

An interesting book about educating the proletariat while maintaining solidarity -- that is, not being condescending or trying to dictate the people's direction for them. The book is concerned with educating illiterate adults rather than with child-based teaching. It does rather stumble on the blind spot of Marxist theorists, the assumption that whatever the mass of the people decide on is by definition morally right. If you held a plebiscite in America to determine whether or not to outlaw every non-Christian religion, I'm sure the result would be yes.

 

 

*The Tinkling Symbol -- Phoebe Atwood Taylor

 

The first of the Asey Mayo books Dad read; apparently Mom saw Taylor's obituary in the Globe and showed it to Dad, who went to the library to see what they had. That was in 1976 so it would have still been the old library in the Memorial building. It's a murder mystery, narrated by yet another middle-aged New England spinster, who can place people within ten miles or so from their accents; Dad notes this was quite possible back before television. I was interested in how the subtext changes what people meant -- for example, when Asey says a man wasn't good enough at football to get a job after college, he's not talking about playing in pro football, he means that if the man had been a bigger star at his Ivy League school, some alumnus would have given him a minor Wall Street sinecure because of it. (Dad notes this was still true well into the fifties.) Also when someone says of a woman that she's well-known for her personal generosity, I might not have realized that that was a roundabout way of calling her promiscuous. The mystery itself is silly, as usual, with Taylor obviously not deciding who the killer is until the last minute and then pulling a motive out of thin air.

 

 

The Hidden Life of Trees -- Peter Wohlleben

 

I learned a lot of cool stuff about trees from this -- I hadn't known, for example, that fallen trees soak up the spring rains and act as reservoirs for the forest life throughout the summer; or that a forest's root structure is immensely more interconnected than I'd thought, so much so that a tree in a forest and the same tree standing in the open by itself would practically be different organisms; or that on average trees live at replacement level -- that is, out of all the seeds a tree produces over its lifetime, typically one will become a full-grown tree. On the other hand the writer seems to be asserting (although not a hundred percent seriously, since he must know it's ridiculous) that trees are intelligent and capable of emotions. He absurdly romanticizes wholly mechanical actions. For example, when a tree falls, the stump often stays alive for several years, because its roots are still connected to the surrounding trees, and the interchange of nutrients goes on for quite a while until the stump degenerates enough that its tissues are no longer capable of supporting moisture. Because trees that fall are generally older trees, the surrounding trees will usually have sprung from seeds dropped by the fallen tree. The author, with a straight face, says that this shows that the trees keep the stump alive on purpose out of filial affection. That detracted from the book for me, but it was still interesting.

 

 

Justinian's Flea -- William Rosen

 

Outstanding book about the terrible pandemic that struck the Roman Empire in AD 540-542, the first known outbreak of the Black Death. It was caused by a now-extinct strain of the plague virus, apparently a mutation generated in rat-borne fleas carried on grain ships across the Mediterranean. Anywhere from thirty to fifty million people died, about twenty-five percent of the empire, including nearly half the population of Constantinople itself. This outbreak carried not only the fearsome buboes but a fast-spreading necrosis: people's hands rotted right off their arms before they died. The fact that the empire, in however changed form, was able to survive such an enormous blow is a testament to the staggering power, wealth, and organization of the Roman state. Rome was always more a product of mass power than individual will, and there were many emperors who had almost no effect on the operation or legacy of the empire, but you couldn't say that about Justinian. A man of tremendous energy and intelligence, he governed the world with the help of immensely competent assistants; the honest ones he sent to solve distant problems, the treacherous ones he kept helplessly under his thumb. Unlike many monarchs, who schemed or fought for the purple with no real motive beyond wanting to be top dog, Justinian had a very clear and wide-horizoned vision of what he wanted the empire to do and become. Along with securing the borders, crushing dissent, and reforming the laws, he set out to reconquer Italy and its possessions, lost to the Empire a hundred years previously, at least as much out of vainglory as policy. He was the last emperor to rule both the western and eastern halves of the empire and is sometimes called "the last Roman". The codex of laws he produced was probably his most lasting influence. It was said of Augustus that he found Rome in brick and left it in marble; it might be said of Justinian that he found Rome a tribal monarchy and left it a theocratic nation-state. The plague hit at the very height of his success; Justinian himself sickened from it, but recovered. He seems to have recognized almost right away that the appalling loss of manpower and resources meant that he would have to abandon some of his ambitions and Rome would have to contract its sphere of influence, and to his credit he got right to it without much delay. The book raises a lot of what-ifs. Muhammad was born only twenty years after the plague; what if emerging Islam had faced a Rome that hadn't had to withdraw from the Middle East? What if a heavily weakened Rome hadn't had to grant local autonomy to powerful Slavic and Germanic tribes? All of Eurasia might have ended up divided between a unified Rome in the west and a unified China in the east, with Zoroastrian Persia as a buffer state in the middle and Islam a forgotten footnote. Very good reading. 

 

 

Dynasty -- Tom Holland

 

I liked this, but I did get the feeling that the original manuscript must have been a bit sticky when Holland handed it in. It's a blood-and-sex history of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, from Caesar to Nero, and Holland clearly decided that the best way to get an exciting punch-'em-in-the-face story was not only to accept every single thing people's enemies wrote about them at face value, but to add lurid descriptions that he probably thinks "give an educated idea of what might have happened" (read: he made them up.) I particularly thought he was overly interested in what specifically Tiberius was doing during his retirement on Capri. The Forum gossip held that Tiberius was secretly a predator of demonic sexual energy and that Capri was filled with nonstop orgies of indescribable depravity; Holland cheerfully assumes this is perfectly true and outdoes the sources in speculating exactly what the orgies might have been like. (I myself think that Tiberius probably spent his time on Capri quietly reading, and I have better reason, since that's what he's known to have done with his free time elsewhere.)

This makes me not take the book seriously, since once you've accepted an assumption as true it affects all your subsequent reasoning. For example, take these three known facts about Caligula: for the first year of his reign he was widely praised as a temperate, reasonable person who took his duties seriously and made a large number of excellent policy decisions that everyone approved of. Then he got so sick he almost died. After that he was universally reviled as a monster of cruelty and treated the Senate and Rome generally like dirt.

The most reasonable explanation, most modern historians think (I agree, for what that's worth) is that Caligula suffered some sort of brain damage from his illness and became progressively more insane as time went on. Holland, though, to fit his narrative, constructs a psychodrama where the young Caligula was so scarred by witnessing the incredible sexual excesses at orgies in his youth (here Holland digresses again to give a picture of what those orgies must have been like, drawn unapologetically from his imagination) that his mind was permanently twisted, and his good behavior in his first year on the throne is explained away as Caligula slowly gathering the courage to behave as he wanted to. It's a good story but it's bad history.

 

 

*Out of My Later Years -- Albert Einstein

 

A collection of magazine articles, mostly about peace and disarmament. I was struck by one article that consisted of notes for a speech he'd prepared for a gathering of German university professors (which never took place because the Nazis ordered them all fired) in which he called for all the intellectual leaders of the nation to stand up for science and freedom of thought, because if they wouldn't defend them they didn't deserve to have them.

 

 

A Pelican at Blandings -- P.G. Wodehouse

 

One of his last books, a terrific farce wherein the peacefully solitary life at Blandings is knocked askew by the arrival of a crowd of unwanted house guests, all of whom consider themselves free to criticize and harass poor Lord Emsworth: his snobbish sister Connie, an equally snobbish woman named Vanessa (the first chance acquaintance made on a boat in all of Wodehouse who doesn't turn out to be a con artist), and the awful bullyragging Duke of Dunstable, the Donald Trump of his time, an obnoxious ass who considers the whole world his doormat. Lord Emsworth calls for help from his loyal brother Gally, who arrives to suavely insult and infuriate the houseguests, coolly reminding Dunstable that he was rejected from Gally's Pelican Club as an undesirable. Dunstable clings like a limpet, though: he's bought a valuable painting because he knows the wealthy Wilbur Trout badly wants it, and he intends to squeeze a high price out of Trout for it when he visits in his turn. (Wodehouse disliked greed, and he once said of some rich man that although he was worth a million pounds he would still walk eight miles in pinching shoes in order to cheat someone out of sixpence.) However, Gally learns from his godson Johnny -- who is secretly engaged to Dunstable's ward Linda, though they're on the outs just now because Linda was a witness in a court case, and Johnny, who happened to be acting for the defense, grilled her harshly on the stand -- that the painting is a fake, and in order to save Johnny's friend the art dealer from exposure Gally steals the fake, intending to replace it with the real one. Before he can, though, Lord Emsworth, who has been down by the sty condoling with his prize pig, who is ill and off her feed, finds himself locked out and has to get in the house through Dunstable's window, causing a mass confusion that ends with Johnny falling down the main staircase and taking Dunstable with him. Worth the price, I'd say, and on top of that his accident brings Linda running to make things up. To soothe Dunstable's temper, Connie gets him to write a letter proposing marriage to the wealthy Vanessa, but when Wilbur Trout arrives to look at the painting, we find that he and Vanessa are old flames; meanwhile, Gally, having intercepted the letter of proposal, tells Dunstable that Vanessa is actually a pauper, and uses the letter to blackmail him into allowing Linda to marry Johnny, before he can find out that Gally made it up and in fact Trout and Vanessa have run off together. All the infuriated guests blow out of Blandings in a rage and Lord Emsworth is left alone to eat his meals peacefully in the library. It says a lot about how neatly Wodehouse's crazy plots resolve themselves that I read this book months ago and the plot is still clear in my mind. I loved it.

 

 

The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. -- Washington Irving

 

His most famous book, a collection of stories and essays including "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and "Rip Van Winkle". It was the first really popular American book, widely read both in the US and in Europe. Most of the essays actually deal with England, where he was living when he wrote it, and English writers he admired, such as William Roscoe and Izaak Walton. There's a good essay condemning the American government for its brutal treatment of the American Indians. The prose is very good, very "easy" as Samuel Johnson would say, and I enjoyed reading it.

 

 

Acres of Skin -- Allen M. Hornblum

 

An appalling book about medical experiments on black prisoners in Pennsylvania in the fifties, sixties, and seventies. The man who ran the program was a dermatologist named Kligman; he was originally called in to Holmesburg prison to treat the chronic athlete's foot the prisoners were getting from poorly cleaned shower floors. He later said of the prisoners that "all I saw was acres of skin"; he realized right away that the prisoners would make ideal test subjects because every aspect of their lives was tightly controlled. He quickly got funding from Johnson & Johnson and recruited prisoners for skin-cream experiments; the prisoners, desperate for money to pay their lawyers, were told they were simply testing acne treatments, which in fact some of them were. The author, entering Holmesburg for the first time around 1970, was surprised to see shirtless prisoners with tic-tac-toe patterns taped on their backs and others walking around with terrible scarring; what really got to him was that none of the guards or prison administrators seemed to care at all. The author eventually found out that Kligman was also funded by Dow Chemical and he'd been experimenting on the prisoners using Agent Orange, psychoactive drugs, and even radioactive material. Not only had Kligman not told the prisoners what he was doing, he was just a dermatologist and not in any way qualified to administer drugs or work with radiation, and he was also sloppy and dishonest, discarding results he didn't like and falsely claiming certifications he didn't possess. The FDA revoked his approval for a while when this came to light but Johnson & Johnson leaned on Congress to force them to restore it. Everything about this was awful, but I couldn't decide which was the absolute worst. Was it that Kligman got very rich off the program? That so many of the prisoners were left with permanently crippling conditions for which they were never compensated?  That Kligman never showed any remorse at all (either about this or about his separate experiments on retarded children) and went to his grave without apologizing? That when it all came to light the op-eds in the newspapers regarded the whole thing as part of the prisoners' debt to society, arguing that prisoners don't have human rights? It was a very good book but very heavy going.

 

 

Sex, Bombs, and Burgers -- Peter Nowak

 

A book on the history of technology, basically about how pretty much every technical gadget you use was originally designed for pornography or the military or the fast food industry, and later repurposed for general consumption. The microwave oven was invented by a defense contractor based on radar technology he developed during the war; the early ovens were huge and expensive, and it was only when McDonald's adopted them that they became financially tenable. The Roomba self-propelled vacuum cleaner was originally a mine-sweeper developed for searching caves in Afghanistan. And so on. It was pretty good.

 

 

The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons -- Sam Kean

 

The title led me to expect a conflict of personality between two specific people, but that's not what the book is about. It's mostly a collection of case histories of people with brain injuries and their odd results (the author admits, with a weary sigh, that he just couldn't avoid including Phineas Gage, even though his story has been told ad nauseam.) The connecting thread is the pretty much wholly empirical development of neuroscience, for which the only approach until very recently was just to find people with head injuries and follow them around. The field eventually developed into two camps: those who thought communication among the nerves in the brain used chemical secretions, and those who thought it used electrical impulses. The two camps were generally known as the "Soups" and the "Sparks", though surprisingly without much of the vicious acrimony that usually accompanies academic disagreements. I liked it.

 

 

*The Crimson Patch -- Phoebe Atwood Taylor

 

An Asey Mayo mystery set on the Cape in 1936. The effects of the Depression are everywhere visible, though no one uses the word -- characters talk about losing their pensions and everyone just knows what they mean. Also when someone causes a disturbance to distract the heroes' attention, Asey grumbles "They probably got some hobos to leave off pretending to dig alphabetical ditches for the Government and come up here." Taylor believed you should never let the plot get in the way of the setting; very visible here, as the plot involves a naive Bostonian who gets on a budget bus to the Cape, not realizing the driver is an escaping criminal who has murdered the real driver, and strains credibility by accidentally switching bags with the driver and so walking off with the loot. Taylor gives everyone an alibi so when she finally decides, a few pages before the end, who the killer is, she has to undo his alibi, pretty unconvincingly. Dad liked the scene where a character tries to get to sleep and instead of counting sheep recites the Iliad and "Thanatopsis" to himself. (Dad notes that Mom memorized part of "Thanatopsis" in school, but when I asked her about it she said she didn't and had probably just said that to show off.)

 

 

The Undoing Project -- Michael Lewis

 

Michael Lewis is a bit of a hero-worshipper, and I get the feeling that when he's not writing about finance (a topic where his feet are firmly on his own ground) he relies too much on what the subjects of his books tell him. This book is about the economist Daniel Kahneman and his contentious intellectual partnership with the cognitive scientist Amos Tversky; since Tversky died twenty years ago it's necessarily told from Kahneman's point of view, and I think Lewis was overly uncritical. He quotes Kahneman saying, about his own work (I'm paraphrasing) "This is established fact, there's no possible disagreement" when actually there's a lot of contemporary criticism of Kahneman's work, particularly his over-reliance on insufficient sample sizes, none of which Lewis mentions. There's a classic example of authorial blindness: Lewis describes a lecture Kahneman and Tversky gave to an audience of historians, in which they described points of important decisions in history, and argued that modern historians don't have any information that the people involved didn't have before the decision, so their only advantage is that they know how things turned out, which doesn't actually tell you anything about the decision-making process. Then Lewis quotes Kahneman beaming about how all the historians staggered out of the room ashen-faced, having had their entire discipline turned upside down, with no acknowledgement whatever that the whole story relies on Kahneman's unsupported memory of something that happened forty years ago, which is exactly the same error that Kahneman is warning about on the same page! Lewis also did not find and speak to any historians who were at that lecture, so he's really just taking Kahneman's word that he won a fight and the other guy ran off crying. Kahneman and Tversky are best known for their argument that long-term decisions shouldn't be made on the basis of short-term peak or trough performances, since those performances are sure to regress to the mean over time. As far as I can see the only people who have really internalized that lesson are the people who run professional sports teams. (It's why the Patriots didn't break the bank to re-sign LeGarrette Blount; Bill Belichick knows that a guy who averages 4.5 rushing touchdowns a season over his career, and then has 18 at age thirty, isn't going to do it again the next season.) For all that, it was an interesting read.

 

 

*Happy to Be Here -- Garrison Keillor

 

His first book, a collection of several short stories and a few dozen vignettes. I liked the ones about a detective who realizes his private-eye skills are ideally suited to the field of arts administration; the rest I thought were kind of hit or miss. Not bad though.

 

 

Nervous Conditions -- Tsitsi Dangarembga

 

An autobiographical novel, telling the story of a young girl named Tambu growing up in Rhodesia during the UDI period. (The UDI, Unilateral Declaration of Independence, was the fifteen-year period between Rhodesia separating from Britain and Britain accepting it, ending with the creation of fully independent Zimbabwe in 1980.) Tambu's family lives in rural semi-poverty, relieved by aid from the head of their family; we never learn his name because Tambu thinks of him only as Babamukuru, literally "father's older brother". Babamukuru is a teacher and school administrator, and the novel dwells on his (and Tambu's) obsession with European values: the whole family has converted to Anglican Christianity, and Babamukuru has studied in England and is grooming Tambu's older brother to follow in his footsteps, which makes him feel superior to the others and refuse to do his share of the family chores. After the brother dies at age twelve, Tambu is sent to the school to take his place; she finds that her once easy relationship with her cousin Nyasha has become less warm now that Nyasha has been to school in England and speaks English almost exclusively, snobbishly affecting to have trouble understanding their native Shona. Nyasha's time abroad has also made her less willing to conform to the traditional life of a Shona woman as her father expects her to, and this leads to angry arguments within the family. Tambu devotes her time to the fiercely competitive schoolwork, with the aim of qualifying for higher education, and to dealing with Nyasha's unhealthy eating disorder, which her father refuses to acknowledge. It was a troubling book but I liked it.

 

 

The Pot-Hunters -- P.G. Wodehouse

 

His first novel, written when he was a teenager. It's a school-story, revolving around a pair of silver sports trophies stolen from the school grounds, and the difficulty of catching the thief (a local poacher) given the complexities of who saw what when they were out after curfew, or off school grounds when they weren't supposed to be, and that sort of thing. It isn't that great, but come on, he wrote it when he was nineteen. The only part I really liked was the scene where a teacher visits a local house where a student (for plot reasons) is laid up with a sprained ankle; he intends to give the student a talking-to, but the woman whose house it is guesses what he's there for and, knowing that the teacher can't decently yell at a student with a local matron in the room, sits cheerfully by the bedside, deaf to all hints about giving them some privacy, until the teacher has to give in and leave. Other than that it was pretty dull.

 

 

Tales of St. Austin's -- P.G. Wodehouse

 

A collection of mildly interesting short stories all set at an English boys' school in the 1890s, generally about clever but lazy schoolboys who slack off their work and play tricks on the school masters. Mostly written when Wodehouse was in his teens, when he had some skill with prose but had not yet developed his strengths of plot and character. I read it because I'm a completist, but it didn't exactly enrich my life.

 

 

Mildred Pierce -- James M. Cain

 

A nasty novel from the thirties, very well written and tightly paced, but I didn't like it because all the characters are so awful. The main character, Mildred Pierce, is a housewife in the early days of the Great Depression; as the story begins she kicks her worthless philandering husband out of the house and sets out to find a job. After some trouble swallowing her pride, she ends up as a waitress at a diner, which she at first tries to keep secret for fear of offending her older daughter, a spoiled ten-year-old who has been raised to despise the working-class and admire the idle rich. Mildred starts a side business baking pies and eventually opens her own restaurant, but all her work is always undermined by her desperate need to buy the love of her monstrous daughter, who detests her. Eventually she loses everything and the story ends with her clearly on the road to drinking herself to death. A miserably depressing book.

 

 

Never Look an American in the Eye -- Okey Ndibe

 

Ndibe is a Nigerian writer who came to America in the late eighties to attend grad school at UMass -- I must have met him in the English department there but I don't remember it. There's a funny scene when he arrives in New York in December, having flown from near-equatorial Nigeria without even a jacket; he walks out of the airport terminal into his first winter wind, and immediately turns around and walks right back in. His name is pronounced "okay", which led to a lot of confusion in his early days at grad school. He also got to work with the great writer Chinua Achebe; he tells the story of how when he was young all the neighborhood boys would come running out to wave at Achebe's car when it went by. With Achebe's encouragement, he founded a well-respected magazine called African Commentary, which had a good reputation for a while before folding for lack of money. (Ndibe expected Achebe to be more involved with the magazine than he turned out to be, and this soured their relationship a bit.) The title comes from the way his Nigerian relatives loaded him with advice about going to America, although none of them had ever been there; his uncle solemnly assured him that Americans would shoot you if you looked them in the eye, so he spent his first few weeks in the US always looking at the ground. I liked it.

 

 

The Little Nugget -- P.G. Wodehouse

 

Not one of his better books. The hero is Peter, a wealthy idler, who, after his fiancée jilted him, became engaged to an impoverished woman named Cynthia, mostly out of pity. Cynthia works for a very rich American, whose rotten teenage son, Ogden, is the "nugget" of the title: so called because of his value as a target for kidnappers. He has in fact been kidnapped several times: sometimes by agents of his divorced parents stealing him back and forth from each other, sometimes by professionals working on spec, as it were. The father has sent Ogden to an English school, and against his better judgement Peter lets Cynthia talk him into helping her kidnap Ogden on behalf of the mother; he gets a job at the school as a classics teacher, but soon finds that several other would-be kidnappers have also taken jobs there and they all settle into a war of attrition. As it happens Peter's ex-fiancée also works there, having been deserted by the guy she ran off with, and the two of them end up barricaded in a stable and holding off a gang, until Ogden escapes through the roof, having decided he'd rather be kidnapped than stay at the school. Luckily Peter hears that Cynthia has dumped him so he can reunite with his ex. The only part I thought was really funny was the math teacher who sells insurance on the side, and whose gloomy conversation always dwells on sickness, old age, and death.

 

 

The American Senator -- Anthony Trollope

 

This wasn't bad but I felt like Trollope couldn't decide which of the three story lines was the main plot and which were the subplots. There are two romances, intended to be foils to each other: one the story of Mary, the daughter of a country lawyer who falls in love with a gentleman but says nothing because he's of too high a social class for her; the other the story of Arabella, a well-born but insolvent society woman who sets out in the most cynical way to entrap a lord into marriage. Arabella's story is much more vivid and well-told, but Arabella herself is repellent, a woman totally devoid of any feeling other than hatred of herself and the wealthy men she unsuccessfully pursues; everything she says or does is part of a calculated act and she lies constantly. Mary is a much nicer but also less interesting character; her whole story is loving the squire's brother in silence and refusing a marriage offer from a farmer without telling anyone why, and suffering persecution from her stepmother for it. Eventually she does marry the squire's brother, but only because circumstances arrange it -- she never really does anything other than sit in her room and cry. I thought she was tedious -- I can't imagine having a conversation with her, for example. What could you talk about? To both of these stories is added a third, the visit to England of the honest but tactless Senator Gotobed, who is shown to be constitutionally incapable of understanding English customs. Trollope probably meant to use the Senator to deliver some mild social criticism, but he detested America and progressiveness in general so the Senator comes across as an arrogant buffoon. The Senator becomes interested in a local case where a landowner sues a local nobleman for damages after the nobleman's fox-hunt wrecks his crops; this could have been a good plot-thread, showing how the courts behave when a poor man sues a rich man, but in Trollope anyone who opposes any aristocrat or any old custom is by definition a villain, so of course the plaintiff is shown to be a worthless thief who's only suing the lord because he's too lazy to work his land properly. It could have been handled better.

 

 

Time and Tide -- John Ruskin

 

A series of public letters addressed to a friend in Manchester, on the subject of the public unrest there at the time (in the mid-1800s, Manchester was the second-largest city in England but it had no representatives in Parliament.) It's a well-argued tract in favor of Ruskin's awful political views -- he was very much against equality and individual liberty, and he describes his ideal government as a sort of Confucian England, an unchanging hierarchy where every man's life is under constant supervision by a political/religious official, who is supervised in turn by an official still higher, and so on up to the House of Lords. Everyone would spend all his life in the station to which he was born, and all aspects of his work and domestic life would be laid out in rules, which his supervisor would make sure he followed. Also every detail of his professional and private lives would have to be written down in a state-ordered journal that would be periodically published. Since Ruskin's picture of the good life sounds to me like an appalling nightmare, it won't surprise you that I thought all his other ideas were equally useless and repellent.

 

 

The Real Inspector Hound -- Tom Stoppard

 

A play from the sixties, a really, really funny dark comedy. I last read it in college and it's even funnier the second time around. The main characters are two theater critics watching a whodunit, a parody of Christie's The Mouse-Trap. The whodunit is a disaster, with the actors missing cues, coming on and off at the wrong times, and clearly ad-libbing to cover their mistakes. The critics are only half interested in the play; the older critic is more concerned with the affair he hopes to have with the lead actress, while the younger is gloomily resentful of his career as a stand-in for his paper's more successful theater critic. The play they're watching gets ever more lost in its own complications, made worse by the actors' obvious panic backstage, and the critics end up getting involved in the play against their wills. It all ends up with my favorite closing line ever: "Puckeridge! You cunning bastard." I hope to see it live someday.

 

 

*Out of Order -- Phoebe Atwood Taylor

 

Another Asey Mayo mystery, bringing Asey's old boss Bill Porter back on the scene for the first time since the first book. Bill and an annoying former classmate get in a fistfight at the Harvard Club -- apparently a common thing for the two of them -- on the day of the Harvard-Yale game. An ill-advised drunken bet results, the details of which nobody seems to understand for sure, except that the classmate seems to have goaded Bill into the fight on purpose for just that reason. Bill's wife rounds up Asey to sort out what's going on, which leads to some social criticism unusual for Taylor, who was a die-hard Landon Republican: Asey is unsettled at the lavish meals at the rich people's houses when so many people are out of work. An old saying about oysters is mentioned several times: that they are ungodly, unkind, and uncharitable (Dad remembered the saying appearing in Swift -- they're ungodly because you eat them without saying grace, unkind because you eat them alive, uncharitable because only the shells are left for the poor.) Dad was surprised at the scene where Asey sends the kid who's tagging along after him to get him a couple hot dogs, "and get some for yourself", and the kid winds up eating eight of them. Was he that hungry just because he was a teenager, or because it was the Depression and he didn't get to eat regularly? The bet turns out to be a dim-witted cover-up for some rich people having stupidly lost their fortune, which seems like an insufficient reason to kill three people, but I guess Taylor didn't think it was really a mystery without a murder.

 

 

The Political Economy of Art -- John Ruskin

 

I thought I'd seen Ruskin at his worst, but I was wrong. This is his manifesto of total cultural supremacism, not making an argument but simply stating as an unquestionable truth that all art in history was produced by Christian Western Europe. He says, as if there could be no possible disagreement, "There is no art in America, none in Africa, none in Asia." I actually can't get past that -- if he's capable of believing that the entire non-white world is incapable of making art, then he can't possibly understand art or have anything useful to say about it.

 

 

Persuasion -- Jane Austen

 

Her last novel and probably the best written. The heroine is Anne, a woman in her late twenties, who was once engaged to a naval officer named Wentworth but broke it off under pressure from her family, who considered Wentworth's social standing too low. The story begins seven years later, at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, with most of the Navy being mustered out and sent home. Anne's family, hurting for money, lets their property to a retired admiral who turns out to be an in-law of the still unmarried Wentworth. Anne and her younger sisters become the center of a crowd of returning sailors and also their cousin, long estranged from the family but now trying to patch things up (it turns out he's a creep, and since he's the heir to the estate he's really just trying to prevent Anne's father from remarrying and possibly having a son, which would disinherit him.) A lot of the novel deals with the heavy power of persuasion older relatives have on younger, and the inability of younger relatives to stand up to it. Anne realizes that Wentworth is both still attached to her and still hurt, and she finally asks him to forgive her for caving to family pressure and they get engaged again. I liked it.

 

 

A History of the World in 100 Objects -- Neil MacGregor

 

I'm surprised there could be a successful radio program all about art objects the listeners would just have to picture in their minds, but the BBC did it and apparently it was well received. This book is a collection of the transcripts of that program, but illustrated with photos of the objects, so the reader is one up on the radio listener. It's well explained and the illustrations are great; also I went to the British Museum a few weeks after reading it and had fun finding the objects from the book. It starts with the oldest artifacts from the museum -- cutting-stones from about a million and a half years ago -- and ends with the most recent display item, a credit card. It was pretty interesting.

 

 

The Man Who Planted Trees -- Jean Giono

 

An illustrated short story about a hiker in the Alps who wanders into a desolate valley in Provence, where he meets a shepherd named Bouffier who is slowly and methodically planting the valley with acorns he has brought from more fertile regions. Over the next thirty or forty years, the hiker occasionally returns to the valley to watch Bouffier's progress, seeing the valley gradually become a mighty forest. It was really well-told and touching. It was made into a very good animated film Lucy showed me some years ago.

 

 

Hair -- Kurt Stenn

 

Just what it says on the cover. It wandered a bit. Rather more of a collection of thematically-related essays than a book, since there's no overall structure, but a lot of it was interesting. There's a lot about the wig industry, of course, and unusual demands on it -- Hasidic women, for example, are big customers of wigs, since they're ritually proscribed from letting their hair show, but their wigs need to be good enough to wear but bad enough to be visibly fake, since if they were too convincing the women might be suspected of not wearing a wig at all. There's also a section about how  drug traces stay in the hair a lot longer than in the body, which made me wonder if it's a coincidence that the fad for pro athletes shaving their heads started just about the same time more rigorous drug testing was being introduced. It wasn't bad.   

 

 

Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts --- Donald Barthelme

 

A collection of post-modern short stories that I didn't really understand. The only one I felt like I sort of got was "The Balloon", a story about a miles-wide balloon that appears mysteriously over New York; some people run around on top of it, some try to find paths that lead inside, some try to pop it (probably a picture of people's reactions to art -- some appreciate the surface, some look for deeper meaning, some feel threatened) but at the end the narrator explains that he inflated the balloon for purely personal and inexplicable reasons (i.e. the critics are all wrong.) I didn't connect with it, really.

 

 

*Victoria -- Knut Hamsun

 

A love story, about Victoria and Johannes, two Norwegians who have loved each other since childhood but are separated by an uncrossable social divide. Johannes is from a working-class family, and though he educates himself, becomes a famous writer, and travels the world, he will still never be welcomed into Victoria's family's country house through the front door. Victoria is eventually forced by her family to become engaged to an upper-class suitor, a military officer, who is jealous and suspicious of Johannes even though Johannes has moved to the city in order to avoid encountering them. Johannes and Victoria occasionally meet at social events in the city, and once or twice they have short conversations in the street, but these meetings are painful for both of them. The officer is killed in an accident, but it's socially impossible for Johannes to visit the family to condole with them. Not long afterward Victoria falls ill and dies, and Johannes visits her grave before leaving the area for good. It was a sad book but I liked it.

 

 

The World As Will and Idea -- Arthur Schopenhauer

 

I had a terrific professor in college, David Knauf, who retired my junior year and gave me most of his office library: hundreds of plays and books of theater criticism, along with several works of German philosophy, including this one. David actually died of complications from AIDS before the semester ended. (I remember his partner at the funeral talking about David’s father and uncle, Ernst and Werner, who emigrated from Germany; because they lived in Brooklyn they were universally known as Oinie and Woinie.) I put the book on my shelf in 1991 and it sat there unread until now; it wasn’t worth the wait. How did I hate it? Let me count the ways. In the very first place, there's a long, long preface, written about twenty years after the book was published, in which Schopenhauer angrily whines that the book hasn't made him rich, and snarls that the reason other people have university positions and he doesn't is that they're all talentless toadies who will say anything to get ahead, while his own shining intellect and respect for the truth have made everyone work against him out of puerile jealousy. The whole book is very much in keeping with the preface, and serves as an excellent illustration of what I think of as the Ayn Rand mindset, which can be summed up as: "My worldview is based SOLELY on pure objective reason -- DON'T QUESTION ME -- but no one agrees with me, so that must mean everyone else is really stupid and only I understand the truth." His philosophy is one of those life-is-nothing-but-misery affairs, arguing "the best thing is never to be born, and next-best is to die as early as possible," and he simultaneously tries to incorporate the idea that all people are really, in some sense, the same person. There are dull digressions on art that read rather like Stalinist criticism -- that is, art is to be judged on how well it illustrates the principles of Schopenhauer's philosophy, and in so far as it doesn't do that, it's bad art and only stupid people like it. Also only Schopenhauer has ever understood Christianity properly -- ditto for Hinduism -- and he wastes more pages explaining to people why they have mistaken their own religions, although he makes sure to leave himself time to spend hating Jews and women. I could go on but I'm tired of it. The thing that surprised me was that very early on Schopenhauer discusses, quite correctly, how philosophical exploration is really just people finding ways to justify what they already believe by instinct, but then forgets all about that as soon as he's discussed it. What a revolting person.

 

 

This Is Your Brain On Music -- Daniel Levitin

 

A good book on the physics of music, with a good explanation of the difference between a harmonic and an overtone, which has always confused me. When you pluck a string it vibrates at several frequencies at the same time. The main frequency -- the "note" -- is called the fundamental. Technically an overtone is any frequency higher than the fundamental, while a harmonic is a frequency that's an integer multiple of the fundamental. (Including the integer 1, of course, which is why the first harmonic is lower than the first overtone, which is the sort of thing that's always driven me batty.) It's generally the overtones that make one instrument sound distinctly different to another instrument even when they're playing the same note. There's a great deal of information on the physiology of the ear and the parts of the brain responsible for interpreting sound. Did you know that listening to music is one of the only activities known to use every region of the brain and every neural subsystem? I also really liked the section on consonant resolution, the phenomenon that makes music sound "incomplete" unless it concludes on the expected note. An example the book uses is the motif of the last movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, which is made up of two cadences that are identical except for the final note: the first time through the cadence ends with re-re, which makes you aware that it's not finished, while the second time the cadence ends with re-do, which gives you a sense of resolution. I found it fascinating that the Beatles' song "For No One" -- which deliberately ends in the middle of a phrase (because it's a song about a messy breakup) -- is actually completed by the next song on that album, "Doctor Robert", since the opening note of "Doctor Robert" is the note that would have resolved the phrase at the end of "For No One".  I liked it a lot.

 

 

The Haunted Tea-Cosy -- Edward Gorey

 

An absurd retelling of A Christmas Carol, wherein the hero is visited by the Bahhum Bug, a giant supernatural insectoid creature, who takes him through the stages of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet To Come, illustrated with Gorey's strange and intricate artwork. It was great.

 

 

The Headless Bust -- Edward Gorey

 

The story of the monumental hangover everyone had the day after the visit of the Christmas spirits. The hero and the Bahhum Bug clean up in a desultory way and the whole thing is pretty strange. Good artwork.

 

 

*Figure Away -- Phoebe Atwood Taylor

 

An Asey Mayo book set around the anniversary celebration of a Cape Cod town (very similar to the Ashland anniversary, Dad says.) Someone seems to be trying to sabotage the whole thing, and Asey -- as a local and a relative of lots of the people running the show -- is called in to figure things out on the quiet. One of the purposes of the festival is to draw in tourist money, although putting up with the tourists requires a lot of gritting of teeth. Asey recalls a tourist who took an heirloom quilt right off his clothes line and left fifty cents for it. Taylor eventually decides that the bad guy is one of the town selectmen, and evidence that he's been embezzling for years pops up out of nowhere, even though the selectman is old and wheezy and she's previously established that the bad guy outran a local in a chase that lasted twenty minutes. (She even made a point of saying the local ran a 4:17 mile in college!) I read once that it took Taylor about three weeks to write a novel; clearly none of that time was spent editing.

 

 

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead -- Tom Stoppard

 

A tragicomedy, by turns funny and bleak. The action of the play covers the events happening offstage in Hamlet -- "Every exit is an entrance somewhere else", as Stoppard says, and the play follows Rosencrantz and Guildenstern while they're not actually talking to Hamlet. The two of them are exceptionally uncertain people, not quite sure of what's really going on, or what the people they talk to really want, or at times even which of them is which. This is probably because, despite their high-minded conversation, they don't really have any moral character; for instance, when they find out that they are escorting Hamlet to England only for him to be murdered there, they not only don't warn him but try to argue that they are only innocent bystanders and have no responsibility to act. A big chunk of the play is taken up with the two of them talking at cross-purposes with the Player King and his band, which is good because those scenes are very funny and without them the play would be miserable. I saw it live in London recently and I thought the Player King was the best part of the show. I also thought Guildenstern delivered his final speech very well -- a weary, puzzled monologue where he tries to figure out where he went wrong: "There must have been some point where I could have said 'No', and I missed it" -- the only time he comes close to recognizing that he had a moral responsibility and didn't live up to it. An unpleasant play but I liked the performance I saw.

 

 

A Rage In Harlem -- Chester Himes

 

The first of his 1950s novels following the careers of two black police detectives called Grave Digger and Coffin Ed, ferociously angry men who are treated with terrified respect by everyone in Harlem. They do the sort of policing where the fist follows immediately on the question, and sometimes precedes it. The story follows what happens when a Harlem handyman falls for the old "money box" routine. (This is a scam where a con man claims he has a machine that can turn ten-dollar bills into twenties, uses some planted twenties to fool the mark into believing it, and gets him to pony up all his money to be doubled; a phony cop busts in during the process and "arrests" the con man for "counterfeiting" and confiscates the money. As a double dip the phony cop shakes down the mark for a bribe to refrain from "arresting" him too.) The con man puts his device in the handyman's cheap gas oven to "heat up the ink", but just as the phony cop appears to make his phony arrest, the faulty oven explodes, and everything goes wrong from there. The woman who roped the handyman into the scheme grabs the money and makes a run for it, pursued by the handyman (who thinks he's rescuing her), by the con man and his partner (who want the money), by the handyman's much smarter brother (who's after the money himself), by the handyman's employer (whose money the handyman stole to give to the con man), and by the detectives (once the bodies start falling.) It was a very good story.

 

 

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle -- Haruki Murakami

 

A strange book. I had previously read the first chapter, which was published separately as a short story, but without the context of the novel the story didn't really make sense. The first chapter finds our hero, Toru, at home during the day, having recently quit his job because he saw no prospects for advancement. His wife has asked him to go out and search for their cat, who has been missing for some days; in between searches he starts getting obscene phone calls from a woman he doesn't know. He doesn't find the cat but does make friends with a teenager named May, who seems to live by herself and doesn't attend school for reasons she won't go into. In the novel a complex plot develops, revolving around Toru's brother-in-law Noburu, whom he detests: a right-wing academic making the transition to political demagogue. There's something off-putting about Noburu (we later learn he's a serial rapist) and he's taking steps to make his personal life newspaper-proof. One day Toru's wife Kumiko doesn't come home, and Noburu tells Toru that Kumiko has left him and doesn't want to see or speak to him. Toru speaks to mutual acquaintances, a pair of fortune-telling sisters that Noburu's superstitious family sometimes consults, and at the same time starts learning about the life story of a former neighbor and the strange things that happened to him when he was trapped for several days in a dry well in the desert in Mongolia during the Japanese invasion of China. What he hears from the fortune-tellers seems to echo the neighbor's story, and moved by an obscure impulse he climbs down to the bottom of a deep dry well in the yard of a local abandoned house; while there he has a mystical experience and seems to walk through the side of the well into an otherworldly hotel, where he goes into a dark room and meets the woman who has been calling him on the phone, although she won't let him see her face and warns him away from the hotel, which she says is dangerous. Back in the real world he wakes up with a strange bluish mark on his face and a conviction that somehow that hotel is the key to finding out what happened to Kumiko, whom he thinks Noburu has forced to leave him. The mark on his face seems to be recognized in some way by a few people, including a faith healer who hires him to help revitalize her clients, in return for buying the abandoned property so Toru can continue to sit at the bottom of the well, hoping to return to the other world; in the mean time he corresponds with May, who has moved away to work in a distant wig factory and writes him strangely chatty letters about death and spiritual disintegration. Eventually Toru returns to the other place through the well and finds the woman again; it turns out the woman is in fact Kumiko, who is trapped by an unexplained power Noburu has over her, and the phone calls Toru has been getting were from her, a part of her psyche reaching out to him for rescue. In the darkness of the hotel Toru is attacked by a guard, but hits him on the head with a baseball bat he acquired under mysterious circumstances; when he returns to the real world, the mark on his face now gone, he learns that Noburu has had a cerebral hemorrhage, and he's convinced that this is a result of the fight in the other world. Toru gets a message from Kumiko telling him that, now freed of Noburu's power, she intends to unplug him from his life-support and so kill him. In a last conversation with May we learn that Kumiko has killed Noburu and gone to prison, and Toru is waiting for her sentence to run out.

One thing that bothered me about the story was that looked at from a different angle, Toru could easily be seen as a controlling stalker who refuses to believe that his wife doesn't want to live with him any more, and who invents a conspiracy among her relatives to keep her away from him, thus justifying his obsessive refusal to let her go as a heroic rescue; but Toru is consistently presented as sympathetic, so that set up a bit of an emotional dissonance for me. Also, there are some frustrating gaps in the story, such as the disappearance without explanation of the fortune-telling sisters; I found out that this is because the translator cut out about sixty pages of the book and also rearranged the order of some of the chapters, I don't know why. Maybe I'd grasp the story better if I could read the whole thing. Overall, though, I still liked it.

 

 

The Murder of Charles the Good -- Galbert of Bruges (James Bruce Ross, trans.)

 

A first-hand history of the murder of the Count of Flanders in Bruges in 1127 and its aftermath. Galbert was a court notary, and he was actually present in the Bruges church when the assassins surprised the Count at prayer and cut him down. He gives a very clear day-by-day account of the next few months, as the populace seized and killed the assassins, while the men who hired them -- the Erembald family, who had badly misjudged the attitude of the people -- barricaded themselves in the church tower and withstood a siege for several months. Unable to fight their way in to the well-defended tower, the townspeople eventually started pulling the foundation apart, and the Erembalds had to flee the tower just before it fell; they were all taken and tortured to death. Galbert recorded all this as it happened, with digressions added later to explain what was happening elsewhere at the same time, as the King of France and the Burgundians both put forward their own candidates to replace the fallen Charles. It was pretty interesting.

 

 

Much More of This, Old Boy...? -- Peter Paterson

 

A memoir of newspaper and magazine work in England over the second half of the 20th century. The author was raised in an orphanage and started working and living on his own at age fourteen, starting as a copy boy and working his way from small provincial papers to Bristol and then London, eventually spending decades covering labor relations for the Spectator and the Times before strangely shifting gears to television criticism, which seems like kind of a waste of talent. The title comes from a traditional newspaper joke: when reporters phoned in their stories to the copy desk, the copy editor would take it all down and occasionally give a weary sigh and ask: "Much more of this, old boy...?" It was pretty good reading. Paterson doesn't mind telling stories against himself: he was a little embarrassed about never having gone to school, and he used to say defensively that he'd been at "the university of life", until a co-worker responded "Failed your degree, did you?"

 

 

The Broken Road -- Patrick Leigh Fermor

 

The third of three books covering Fermor's walk across Europe in 1933-4. It's good but not as well written as the previous two books, since he wrote it in the 2010s, nearly eighty years after the fact, relying on old journals unexpectedly recovered from where they were lost in Romania in the thirties and filling in the details from memory, and he died before he was finished. It's still enjoyable, covering the last leg of the trip, from the lower Danube into Serb territory in Yugoslavia and thence through Bulgaria, with a northerly detour to Bucharest in Romania, before finally arriving in Istanbul just before New Year's Eve 1934. In Bucharest he stayed in a brothel, which had nicer rooms than the hotels he could afford, and he gives an interesting picture of it -- as a roomer he was treated very differently from the customers, eating in the kitchen with the women who worked there, whom he describes as very friendly in a wholly Platonic way. In fact just about everyone treated him very well -- there's a funny episode, though it probably didn't seem funny at the time, when he got lost along the coast of the Black Sea at night in November, and, having both fallen in the water and cut up his boots on the rocks, had to keep walking to keep from freezing; he was composing his obituary in his head ("Irish student found dead of exposure; foul play not suspected") when he ran across a cave shared by Greek fishermen and Bulgarian goat-herders, who took him in as though they'd been expecting him, the fishermen helping him to their dinner and warming him up with raki while the goat-herders calmly stitched up a new pair of goatskin boots. I liked it a lot.

 

 

*Octagon House -- Phoebe Atwood Taylor

 

An Asey Mayo mystery, largely about a chunk of ambergris that washes up on the Cape and the people who kill each other over it. There's some good Depression-era detail -- Taylor gets a lot of laughs out of the New Deal-type WPA artist who paints a civic-pride mural in the post office; when a vandal paints over it everyone agrees that the  vandal should be given a vote of thanks from the town. The local sawbones, Doc Cummings, gets a lot of page time. Dad's favorite part was how Doc spends ten minutes declaiming about how speechless he is. He also liked Taylor's description of Doc's car as a "coffee grinder", noting that she was talking about the big Rube-Goldbergian manual grinders people used in general stores before the war, before vacuum-sealed pre-ground coffee became common. Dad says people still used the old store grinders in Germany in the fifties.

 

 

*Franz Kafka: A Biography -- Max Brod

 

More of a memoir than a biography. Brod and Kafka met as teenagers and remained close friends until Kafka died of tuberculosis when he was forty; this is a pretty good look at Kafka's development as an artist (Brod generally critiqued Kafka's early drafts) and his difficult relationship with his cold and disapproving father. One thing Brod emphasized is that if you only knew Kafka from speaking to him you would never guess what his writing was like, since in person Kafka was friendly and full of lively and interesting conversation. Brod argued, I thought insightfully, that this was not a mask -- neither the Kafka of the writing nor the Kafka of the conversation was the "real" man; the "real" man was a complex mixture of the two and he just chose to emphasize one aspect of himself in his writing and another in his personal relationships. Brod also says that when Kafka, toward the end of his life, asked Brod to burn his unpublished manuscripts when he died, Brod flatly refused and told Kafka to his face that if he wanted the manuscripts burned he would have to entrust them to someone else, since Brod intended to publish them. Kafka had plenty of time to appoint someone else but never did, so he probably wasn't really as averse to having them published as all that. Not all of it is wholly reliable: Brod incorrectly believed that Kafka had an illegitimate son, for example, and his picture of Kafka's relationship with Milena Jesenská is not consistent with the letters Kafka wrote her (which Brod hadn't read.) An interesting book.

 

 

Summer Moonshine -- P.G. Wodehouse

 

A farce set in an English country house, owned by a baron who is too broke to pay the house's upkeep and so has turned it into a summer hotel. The baron is a good guy whose friends call him Buck, and the actual running of the hotel is mostly managed by his daughter Jane, one of whose duties is tactfully shooing away foreign visitors who expect Buck to be visibly aristocratic. Sharing the work is Buck's secretary, Miss Whittaker, who was engaged to a guest at the hotel, a friendly fellow called Tubby, but they've had a falling out and now Miss Whittaker treats him with icily insulting politeness. Things get moving when Tubby's brother Joe arrives to enlist Tubby's support against their stepmother, whom they both despise; Joe has written a hit play, in which the villain is recognizably the stepmother, and she's going to sue. Also arriving is Jane's uncle, whom she's never met, and Jane's secret fiancé Adrian, a weedy loser. Jane needs to shuffle everyone around to keep things running smoothly, since they're expecting the arrival of a rich princess who may want to buy the house. However, when the princess arrives, she turns out to be Joe and Tubby's stepmother, plus it turns out she's previously had an affair with Adrian; not to be out-complicated, Joe falls in love with Jane at first sight. Of course it has to happen that Joe and Jane, Tubby and Miss Whittaker, and Adrian and the princess will all pair off and get married, but the fun is seeing how Wodehouse manages to throw all sixteen eggs into the air and have them end up all in their proper rows unbroken. I thought it was great.

 

 

The Iron Tonic -- Edward Gorey

 

A strange story in dark rhyme about a bleak winter, illustrated with his eerie macabre drawings of things such as children skating on a frozen pond known to contain a colony of eels. I've always loved the way Gorey can hint at a whole world of implications: a small foot sticking out of a snow drift with the couplet "The infant dead beside the path/Escaped the orphanage's wrath." I loved it.

 

 

Can't Stop Won't Stop -- Jeff Chang

 

A very readable history of hip-hop music. A lot of the early part tells the story of DJ Kool Herc, a dance-music expert who in the sixties noticed that when he played records in a club, the dancers would hang back waiting for the instrumental breakdown, that being the best part of a song to dance to. So he developed a routine of having multiple records spinning on multiple turntables, and playing only the break from any song, switching out records to build extended dance mixes; that's why it's called "break dancing". Competition was hot among DJs to see who could build the best and most exciting break mixes on the fly; Herc says DJs would scrape the labels off their records to keep rivals from seeing what they were playing. The early rappers like Afrikaa Bambaataa and Grand Master Flash would rap while a DJ played breaks underneath, the rapper and the DJ cooperating to accentuate each other's beats, a skill they called "flow" that became the mark of a great rapper. The book also covers the graffiti-art movement in New York in the seventies, but those parts were less interesting. There's also a stretch near the end that goes into way too much detail about the office politics at Source magazine. Overall, though, it was really interesting. I felt like a learned a lot.

 

 

The Carnival of Thieves -- Jean Anouilh

 

A farcical play from the thirties, about a group of thieves who take advantage of Carnival-time to assume grotesque disguises; one of the younger thieves rebels against the hidebound rules of the leader, while another sets up to con a rich family but ends up abandoning the game and eloping with the family's daughter. Not bad, although it's probably funnier in French.

 

 

Real Food, Fake Food -- Larry Olmsted

 

A terrific and infuriating book about food packaging in America. It's a long-festering grievance that the United States refuses to recognize other countries' food trademarks -- that's why American manufacturers make "parmesan" that doesn't come from Parma and "champagne" that doesn't come from Champagne, and why even chain restaurants sell "Kobe beef sliders" (Kobe beef is not commercially available in the US; it's so expensive that no one would waste it in a hamburger; and its marbly texture would make terrible hamburgers anyway.) European vintners are so mad about it that a lot of them bottle their cheapest, crappiest wines with "Napa Valley" on the label as payback. The US has tried to prevent this with trade agreements, but won't agree to reciprocal trademark respect, so in Europe "Napa Valley" means "cheap garbage". Serves us right. (Also, it turns out that "Aspirin" became a non-protected generic term not because of "common use" but because Bayer let the trademark expire.) Within the US, there's almost no limit to what food manufacturers can get away with, because the FDA is hobbled by hostile lobbying and doesn't have any weapons for enforcement, even if it had the resources to inspect everything properly, which it doesn't. Several independent investigations have found that there is no American sushi restaurant that really serves everything it claims to serve on the menu. One kind of whitefish looks just like every other, so it's easy to substitute. Red snapper seems to be the most common -- every team found that over ninety percent of the sushi they were sold as "red snapper" was really some far less expensive whitefish. Big companies are even more brazen -- Kraft sells a product called "100% Grated Parmesan Cheese" that not only isn't Parmesan, it isn't even cheese, consisting mostly of wood pulp. When they were sued Kraft calmly maintained that the contents of the can were in fact 100% grated, so the label was strictly correct, and they got away with it. In fact in most cases it doesn't matter what they put on the label, because Congress won't let the FDA assign specific legal meanings to certain phrases. Does your food have a label that says "Cruelty-free"? "Grass-fed"? "Organic"? "Free-range"? None of those phrases have any legal meaning, so anyone who wants to can put any or all of them on anything and face no penalty. About fifteen percent of olive oil made is "extra virgin", but in the US over 95% of olive oil sold says "extra virgin" on the label. And so on. I thought the book was great, though I could have lived with a little less of the author rhapsodizing about the awesomeness of really authentic and expensive food that I'll never eat.

 

 

*The Good Soldier Schweik -- Jaroslav Hasek

 

A very funny anti-war story from the twenties, following the misadventures of the titular Josef Schweik (Svejk in Czech) who, hearing of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, rushes off to public patriotic displays, bursting with zealous enthusiasm -- but we soon see that his apparent zeal is really a front, a parody of bone-headed militarism aimed at people too blind to see it. Schweik's army career is a non-stop parade of cheerful noncompliance and open insolence to his superiors, which he gets away with because they all think he's mentally incompetent. He's constantly being yelled at by senior officers, who, the more they berate him, the more they unintentionally reveal their own stupidity and show how unsuited they are to hold any kind of authority. Dad loved it, of course. It was publically burned by the Nazis -- a good recommendation for anything in my book -- and Schweik has become something of a hero of passive resistance in eastern Europe. It isn't complete, the author having died before he was finished, but it was intended as a series of self-contained volumes, so it's only the last volume that ends in mid-story. I liked it a lot.

 

 

Snow White -- Donald Barthelme

 

A post-modern novel that finds Snow White and the dwarves inexplicably living in a condo in New York in a contentious eight-way relationship that pleases no one, Snow White least of all. Prince Charming hangs around but he's too aimless and nihilistic to do any rescuing. The point of the book is more the prose than the story. In most books where the main attraction is meant to be the aesthetic pleasure of the arrangement of the words on the page, the whole thing is usually an exercise in word play, which doesn't generally hold my interest -- that's why most of Nabokov doesn't appeal to me -- but here Barthelme seems to just have been concentrating on writing weird, funny prose that's also, considered as just an arrangement of words, aesthetically pleasing. I liked the scene where the irritated dwarves decide to throw six-packs of Miller High Life through the windshield of a man named Fondue. I really prefer plot-driven books to word-art, but this was fun to read anyway.

 

 

*Pigeon Feathers -- John Updike

 

The first Updike I've ever read that I liked. It's an early collection of short stories, mostly slice-of-life vignettes. The best was "A&P", a good story about a teenage supermarket cashier whose slow day at work is interrupted when a trio of teenage girls in bikinis come in to the store on their way to the beach. The cashier watches them covertly, seesawing between being embarrassed and admiring their un-self-conscious confidence. When the three check out, the store's manager comes out of his office to berate them, and the cashier, angry at the manager for embarrassing the girls for no reason, quits on the spot in a tiny moment of heroism. I liked the ludicrousness of the more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger rebuke the manager gives him -- imagine the mind-set of someone who really believes that walking away from a high-school summer job at the supermarket is something you'll regret all your life!

 

 

*The Annulet of Gilt -- Phoebe Atwood Taylor

 

An Asey Mayo novel, in which an old Army buddy of Asey's makes an appearance and we learn that Asey was a secret agent during World War I, going on murky missions to eastern Europe, which apparently everybody in Cape Cod knows, although Asey firmly insists he spent the war peeling potatoes on a destroyer. It turns out "annulet" is an old heraldic term for a ring, and although a ring is the McGuffin in the story, calling it an "annulet" seems to have no importance -- I'd be willing to bet Taylor just saw the word somewhere and liked it. Not a lot of local color in this one -- there's a kids' camera club going around using various locations for shooting "war footage", but Taylor either got bored with them or forgot what she introduced them for, because they drop out of the story halfway through and have no effect on the mystery. Interestingly, there's a millionaire named Colvin who's been living in Europe but has come back to the US (the book was written in 1938) and Taylor, though a staunch opponent of Roosevelt herself, clearly means Colvin as a portrait of a bad American -- someone who, though he has lived in Europe and seen Fascism first-hand, still thinks that the New Deal is the real threat to America. I feel it would be remiss of me not to mention that there's an escaped elephant roaming around the Cape, which everyone accepts with almost exaggerated aplomb -- Asey's cousin seems strangely untroubled to come home and find an elephant eating her hedge. I can hardly think of any book that wouldn't be improved by an elephant.

 

 

The Sixth Extinction -- Elizabeth Kolbert

 

A terrifying book about our ongoing destruction of our environment. It won the Pulitzer a couple years ago for its vivid and clearly laid out picture of how environmental catastrophe rushes toward us at every turn, like incoming water on a small boat, with no one point where bailing will stop the inflow. Human transport of invasive species all over the world; human over-predation of animals; human over-exploitation of natural resources that other animals rely on; human over-production of pollutants; human destruction of animal habitats. Every major river in the world and most of the minor ones have been dammed in several places, using up more than half of the planet's freshwater runoff. We've introduced far more nitrogen than there are nitrogen fixers to receive it. We've filled the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, a lot of which is absorbed by the ocean to make carbonic acid, which is killing the ocean life. Not to mention it's warming the whole planet, leading to the melting of the ice caps and possibly an apocalyptic release of poisonous methane gases that are currently trapped in the ice. We constantly carry species from one continent to another, both intentionally and unintentionally, which not only leads to things like Australia being covered with rabbits and the US drowning in kudzu vines, it also leads to the spreading and mutation of drug-resistant microorganisms. It's amazing we're still here at all, honestly. I remember that I was told in middle school that the mastodons and the Neanderthals couldn't adapt after the Ice Age ended and that's why they died out, but it turns out it's far more likely that they died out because we killed them all. See, this is why I think Elon Musk is wrong -- if we want anything of humanity to survive, we should put all-out effort into building intelligent machines. We won't survive a mass extinction, but robots will, and intellectually at least they'll be our children. Go robots!

 

 

The Road to Little Dribbling -- Bill Bryson

 

This book pulls off the rare combination of being both terrible and boring. What is it about getting older that makes people start being proud of how rude and abrasive they are? This is a rehash of Bryson's earlier book Notes From a Small Island, but without the same spirit of fun. Bryson says at the outset that he intends to write about different parts of Britain than he did last time, but he doesn't hold to it. He grumpily travels around England and Scotland and bitches about how everything is worse than it used to be, and goes out of his way to show himself being an asshole to everyone. Can he possibly think his kids-these-days groaning could be interesting to anyone at all?

 

 

Sunset at Blandings -- P.G. Wodehouse

 

Wodehouse's last novel, left unfinished at his death at age 93. His longtime editor Richard Usborne put the manuscript in order and published it along with Wodehouse's notes for the unfinished part of the book, as well as notes on planned revisions for the completed part. Usborne also gave the book its title, a gloomier one than Wodehouse himself would have chosen, certainly. Appropriately, it has all the classic elements of a Blandings story: yet another family niece (apparently every woman in England between seventeen and twenty-six was a niece or godchild or ward or step-daughter of the Emsworth clan) has fallen in love, as all the Emsworth nieces do, with a man who is in every way a good egg but has no money. More of the poor Earl's endless supply of harpy-like sisters come out of the woodwork to prevent the marriage, and the Earl and the niece both turn for sympathy and help to the resourceful Uncle Galahad, who brings the young man to Blandings (as an impostor, of course) in the guise of an animal-art guru hired to paint a portrait of the Earl's prize pig. Yet another of the family sisters turns up, this one, astonishingly, quite decent and friendly (she was probably switched by elves or something.) Also on the scene is the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who's in love with the friendly sister but can't propose because he's hampered by the inescapable presence of his stodgily proper bodyguard, who sticks to him like a limpet. Galahad takes on his sister's case too, leaving him two sets of lovers to unite and a mean sister to frustrate. The notes give an idea of how the story would have gone, but Wodehouse revised everything he wrote several times, often rewriting whole sections of a book if a funnier idea occurred to him, so it's really only a suggestion. I'm glad to have read it, though. It's nice to know that the Earl and Galahad had at least one sister who didn't make their lives a torment.

 

 

Buddha -- Karen Armstrong

 

A biography of the Buddha can't be really definitive, since we don't even know whether he lived in the sixth or fifth century BCE, and on top of that a lot of the stories about Gautama's life are actually allegories intended to demonstrate a moral lesson, but given the unavoidable limitations this was a really good job. There are two versions of the Buddhist scriptures, one in Pali, the language Gautama spoke, and one in Sanskrit, which was the lingua franca of the subcontinent at the time. English uses the Sanskrit for most Buddhist terminology -- so dharma instead of dhamma, Nirvana instead of Nibbana, and so on. It's known that Gautama spent some time as an ascetic before deciding that the path to enlightenment must be a middle way between self-indulgence on one hand and self-denial on the other. I was really interested in the way the stories about the Buddha were understood even at the time to be illustrative rather than strictly literal. For example, the story of how Gautama finally became enlightened tells how he was sitting under a tree while the gods rooted for him, and during the night he was confronted by a demon called Mara. "Mara" is actually the part of the Buddha's own soul that doesn't want to become enlightened because it clings to selfishness, to the freedom to indulge his own desires without caring what consequences they will have on other people; he's the embodiment of what the Buddha called the three fires in the soul that enlightenment extinguishes: greed, hatred, and ignorance. Anyway, Mara approaches the Buddha at the head of an army, riding a huge war-elephant and in the guise of a cakavatti, a conquering warrior-king, sprouting a hundred arms, each holding a different weapon. (Mara thinks he can solve all problems with violence.) Pointing at the Buddha's seat under the great tree, Mara demands that he give it up -- a man detached from life does not deserve such a place. "I belong there, not you!" The Buddha calmly answers that Mara has done nothing to deserve a seat of honor, since all his accomplishments are destructive, while he, the Buddha, has spent his life giving alms and devoting himself to compassion: "Who can say that he has seen Mara help anyone?" Mara bellows that he has his army to witness his deeds, while the Buddha is alone. "Who will bear witness for you?" he demands. In response, the Buddha does something that no cakavatti would ever do: he asks for help. He places his right hand on the ground and begs the Earth to be his witness. Upon this, the ground shakes and the Earth speaks: "I WILL BEAR HIM WITNESS!" Mara's army flees in terror and his elephant falls to its knees, and Mara has to admit defeat. (This is why you often see statues of the Buddha sitting with his right hand touching the ground, in the gesture now called "dispelling of demons".) The story illustrates the Buddha's extinguishing his own selfishness and so becoming enlightened, and also shows that the Buddha's Middle Way is not against nature, but in harmony with it, and therefore achievable by anyone. The Buddha lived for over forty years after he became enlightened, showing that spiritual awakening is not incompatible with living in the world.  There's a story that one day the Buddha was sitting and thinking by the side of a road when a traveler passed by and saw that he was not an ordinary man. The traveler asked him if he was a god, and the Buddha answered that he wasn't. When the traveler, still puzzled, asked how he should describe the Buddha to his friends, the Buddha answered "Tell them you have seen a man who has woken up."

 

 

The Marble Faun -- Nathaniel Hawthorne

 

This is sort of a love story and sort of a Gothic beautiful-woman-with-a-dark-past story, but what it really is, is an awful fetishization of "purity". There are four main characters, but the heroine of the story is Hilda, a New England woman in her twenties living in Rome and studying art. All the other characters, plus the omniscient narrator, go on and on and on about how innocent and tender and virginal and stainless and childlike and pure and angelic she is, and how this specifically is what makes her so attractive, which really got to be nauseating -- I started to feel as though the narrator were secretly Humbert Humbert. What really stood out for me, aside from the child-molester creepiness, was the almost frantic anti-Catholicism. Hilda visits St. Peter's, and her artistic sensibility is so overwhelmed by its grandeur that she actually touches the holy water in the basin, and is on the very verge of making the sign of the cross, until a sudden vision of her mother weeping at her apostasy breaks the evil spell and she flicks the water off her hand as if it were acid. A little later on, a sculptor she knows -- an older man who's supposed to be the moral center of the story -- sees her having a conversation with a priest and immediately accosts her and sternly interrogates her about her orthodoxy, just as if he were Cotton Mather trying a witch.  The plot isn't much; Emerson called the novel "mush" and I agree. I wouldn't recommend it.

 

 

Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned -- Walter Mosley

 

An excellent collection of short stories about a black man in his fifties named Socrates Fortlow, who lives in an abandoned building in Los Angeles, after serving twenty-seven years in prison for killing his two best friends in a drunken fight. Because of his criminal record he can't get a job so he collects cans and brings them to the supermarket, where the white teenagers make him wait in smoldering resentment, sometimes for hours, before they sneeringly take the cans. Prison has taught him to keep his rage on the inside but it seeps through sometimes. There's a good scene where he meets a robber who brags about his technique of wearing crummy clothes over a good suit so he can rob someone and then ditch the outer layer and walk away as an upright citizen who doesn't fit the description. Socrates lays into him for causing trouble for other black people: "You say you wear garbage clothes, you mean me, you dress like me. That's why people look at me they see a robber." It was a good read.

 

 

Under Heaven -- Guy Gavriel Kay

 

A good adventure-intrigue novel, set in an imaginary version of China during the Tang Dynasty and revolving around the An Lushan rebellion of the mid-8th century CE. Our hero, Shen Tai, in his late twenties, is a former soldier who left the army after a traumatic campaign in Mongolia in order to become a Taoist scholar, but following the death of his father he left the capital and now lives in a valley in the no-man's-land between China and the Tibetan empire. The valley has been a battlefield many times over the centuries, and Shen Tai spends his time digging graves for the bones of the thousands of soldiers who lie dead there, as an act of piety on behalf of his family (his father was a general in a battle that was fought there), which doesn't seem a half-bad way to spend your life, actually. He lives alone, since people avoid the valley for fear of the ghosts of the dead armies, but after two years of grave-digging he receives two visits. The first is an emissary from the queen of the Tibetans, who as an acknowledgement of his pious work has made him a present of purebred Tibetan horses; one such horse would be a fortune no ordinary man could ever afford, and she has given him two hundred and fifty, putting him in an impossible position. Immediately after this he is visited by a Chinese messenger, who turns out to be an assassin, there to kill him on behalf of a former romantic rival who is now the prime minister. He survives, but now has to leave the valley and return to the dangerous intrigue of the capital, both to sort out the assassins and to find a way of delivering the horses to the stables of the Army without being murdered by rival generals who want all the horses for their own corps. Luckily he has the help of a second assassin who was dispatched by a friend to stop the first one, and of the real-life great poet Li Bai, who was so honored for his poetry that he was called "the banished Immortal" (meaning he was so talented he must have been a god who was banished from Heaven, probably for writing a disrespectful poem about the chief of the gods.) There's also a good secondary plot involving Shen Tai's sister escaping hunters and wolves across the steppes of Mongolia. It was a good story, a real page-turner.

 

 

*Spring Harrowing -- Phoebe Atwood Taylor

 

An Asey Mayo mystery, set during the run-up to the war -- one character has recently resigned from the Navy, which everyone thinks very strange, but it turns out he was medically discharged for sleepwalking. There's a lot of discussion of the changes in the coastline caused by the great hurricane of 1938 (the year before the book came out) which interested Dad a great deal. Dad also liked the murder victim because he was a man who collected all kinds of things. One of his curios was an Indian weapon called a wagh nakh, a sort of brass knuckles with raking blades attached; this was the murder weapon, and the murderer intended to make it look as though the victim had been killed by a wild cat (serendipitously there's a neighbor who keeps lynxes.) Asey recognizes the weapon, though, because he knows everything the plot requires him to know. My favorite bit was when the doctor, who often assumes an air of martyrdom, remarks sourly that "My wealthy patients disappear as fast as they can, but the poor are always with me."

 

 

The Real Cool Killers -- Chester Himes

 

A good murder mystery set in 1950s Harlem. It's really well done, fast-paced and exciting. A slumming white guy hanging around a Harlem bar gets attacked by a black man with a knife, which starts a brawl; fleeing outside, the white man -- very much out of place and even more conspicuous in his bloody suit -- catches the eye of a local drunk, who pulls a gun and chases the white guy down the street, shooting. The hard-case detectives Grave Digger and Coffin Ed arrive to find the white man shot to death in the street. They arrest the drunk, but a street gang calling themselves the Real Cool Moslems (really local teenagers in fake beards) cause a distraction and spirit the drunk away. After settling everything down, the detectives find that the gun they confiscated from the drunk is a stage prop that only shoots blanks. So the rest of the story follows two paths: on the one hand figuring out who really shot the white guy, and on the other hunting down the gang and finding out why they got involved. The two paths cross, of course. A really good read.

 

 

Browsings -- Michael Dirda

 

A collection of columns by the book critic for the Washington Post. They're not reviews of new books; they're mostly appreciations of books he likes. Since his favorite genre is "adventure stories from about 1880 to about 1950", a genre I feel is criminally overlooked, I was very much on his side right from the beginning: when someone ends his introduction with "Oh, one more thing, as Lieutenant Columbo used to say", I know he's the right sort.  How could I not love a guy who taught a college literature class with a reading list of Kidnapped, The Lost World, Kim, The Man Who Was Thursday, Captain Blood, Double Indemnity, Red Harvest, and At The Mountains of Madness? I got a long list of books I want to read from these columns.

 

 

Mozart -- Peter Gay

 

A well-written biography of Mozart's too-short life. The biggest figure in his life was his grasping and manipulative father, himself a musician, who seems to have resented his son all his life for being a better pianist and composer than he was. Before Mozart was four years old his father was dragging him all over Europe to perform; like many child stars he suffered some long-term consequences. As an adult he was full of nervous energy, apparently having trouble sitting still, and he had fits of temper over trivial things -- although it's hard to know how much of this was just the unsurprising behavior of an artist who was always insecure financially, and exaggerated because he was famous. He also had what the author calls a "startling fondness" for scatological humor, and his letters to his sisters do make surprising reading. It certainly didn't help that his awful father called him a traitor for getting married (as long as he remained a bachelor all the money he made came to his father, with none going for trivial things like supporting a wife and children.) After Mozart escaped to Vienna his father took to writing vicious letters blaming Mozart for his mother's death, never letting up until he himself died some years later, and good riddance. I had thought Mozart lived in dire poverty, but actually he made quite a lot of money; it's true he could never make ends meet and was constantly borrowing from people, but that was because he had no idea how to budget -- his father was a miser and he never had any money of his own until he was almost thirty. He was buried in a "common grave", but that doesn't mean a pauper's grave, it just means a grave for someone who wasn't noble. Under Austrian law at the time all funerals had to be modest, but his was as formal as the law allowed, and his friends from court attended, including Salieri, whose rivalry with him was more friendly than not. Legend has him dying of sheer want, but in fact it was some sort of rheumatic fever. He really did keep composing the Requiem Mass on his deathbed, though.

 

 

Laughing Gas -- P.G. Wodehouse

 

A body-switching story, and also a send-up of Hollywood, particularly the treatment of child stars. Our hero is Reggie, whose stuck-up relatives have dispatched him from England to California with orders to find his runaway cousin Eggy and keep him out of trouble (by which they mean not letting him marry someone unsuitable.) On the cross-country train Reggie meets the actress April June, who (after finding out he's an earl) lays on the all-American sweetheart routine with a trowel. The smitten Reggie forgets all about his cousin until they meet by accident at a party, where Reggie learns that Eggy is engaged to Reggie's ex-fiancée Ann (which is good because Ann is great, but bad because Ann hasn't been able to stop Eggy's problem drinking.) Ann tries to warn Reggie about April, but he ignores her and is on the point of proposing when a toothache sends him on an emergency visit to the dentist, where he meets a famous twelve-year-old movie star named Joey who is also there for a tooth-pulling. They both go under anaesthetic at the same time, and somehow this causes them to switch bodies. Reggie, in Joey's body, is appalled to find he has to live at the house of the head of his studio, with no contact with his parents, and under the thumb of a mean-spirited housekeeper who feeds him on dried prunes. Meanwhile Joey, in Reggie's body, is delighted to find that Reggie is built like a gorilla and he sets out to find people who have been mean to Joey and sock them one. Joey is currently co-starring in a movie with April, and Reggie gets to see what she's really like (awful) while also getting reacquainted with Ann, who coincidentally has just been hired as Joey's publicist, a tough job since the real Joey has been misbehaving in hopes of breaking his contract, while Reggie in Joey's body absent-mindedly smokes in front of tabloid reporters. Joey and Reggie keep crossing paths at Eggy's place, and their behavior convinces Eggy he's gone mad and should quit drinking. With the help of the house servants (who it turns out are all would-be actors hoping to catch the studio head's eye) Reggie-as-Joey gets out a window to run away, and accidentally runs into Joey-as-Reggie, who has just belted a few studio executives and is escaping on a stolen police motorcycle. The collision makes them switch back, and the real Joey happily gets sent home to Ohio in disgrace while the real Reggie skips town to avoid getting arrested for assault, and, once again engaged to Ann, can report at home that Eggy has gotten sober and safely married a respectable leader of the temperance movement. It was pretty good.

 

 

*Dr. Johnson's Women -- Norma Clarke

 

Biographies and critical studies of the leading female authors of Johnson's lifetime, most of whom he knew and was on friendly terms with. A little dry, but not bad.

 

 

The Eastern Stars -- Mark Kurlansky

 

This was marketed as a baseball book, but it isn't really. It's more a look at Caribbean poverty, with the small town of San Pedro de Macoris -- which has produced a surprising number of major-league players considering its population is under twenty thousand -- serving as the tie-in to baseball, with its local team, the sad-sack Estrellas Orientales, providing the book's title. Using baseball as the hook might not have been the best idea, since Kurlansky is clearly not a baseball fan and he makes a lot of really basic mistakes when talking about the game. The non-baseball parts are much better, describing the long arm of colonialism: after the Spanish slaughtered the Taino Indians, they brought in huge numbers of African slaves to work and die in the sugar cane fields, turning Santo Domingo into a single-crop economy, which collapsed when sugar stopped being a cash crop, leaving the Dominicans in a state of crushing poverty they haven't recovered from yet. A depressing book.

 

 

Cutting Along the Color Line -- Quincy T. Mills

 

A book about the history of black barbers in America. The subject was really interesting but the writing was extremely dry and academic, so it took some getting through. Also, the author said right up front that he tried to interview barbers for the book but was met with uncooperative hostility, mostly because he had dreadlocks, so everything in the book comes from written sources. Barber shops were battlegrounds for civil rights in the twenties and again in the sixties. Throughout the nineteenth century nearly all barbers were black, both because it was considered a menial occupation and because white customers considered it appropriate for blacks to be their body-servants. White barbers became more numerous in the twentieth century and they tried to drive the black barbers away from white customers, both by direct violence and by trying to establish state barbering boards, which would administer examinations and issue licenses, both of which of course would be closed to blacks, either openly or through silent agreement. Many black barber shop owners were prominent in state politics, though, since they had their finger on the pulse of the black community, and they used their influence to protect their shops. In fact many of them owned separate barber shops for white and black customers; Zora Neale Hurston worked as a manicurist in a black-owned whites-only shop and said that the employees would get angry if a black customer tried to get served, because that would drive away the white customers the shop relied on. Throughout the sixties white barber shop owners tried to keep blacks out on the grounds that black and white hair are so different that white people literally couldn't cut black hair, which led to bizarre scenes in court where jurors had to take close-up looks at witnesses' scalps. The barber shop business seems to have settled into a kind of voluntary segregation for now, as black customers generally prefer a place where they can speak freely away from hostile listeners. This could have been a really great book if the writing weren't so wooden.

 

 

Treason By the Book -- Jonathan D. Spence

 

A very interesting book about propaganda and the best way of dealing with dissidents. In China in the early 18th century, during the reign of the Yongzheng Emperor (fifth ruler of the Qing Dynasty), an obscure provincial named Zeng wrote a few books criticizing the Emperor in abusive terms -- blaming his bad governance for causing natural disasters and accusing him of having his relatives murdered, that sort of thing. The advisers in the capital all wanted Zeng executed, but the Emperor thought it might be better P.R. to have Zeng admit he was wrong, so he had Zeng brought to Beijing and essentially told him "You don't know squat about this country and I'll prove it to you." So Zeng got locked in a house where he had to sit and read through all the government paperwork for the last ten years -- and write book reports and essays on it! While he was doing that, the Emperor took the unusual step of publishing a rebuttal to Zeng's book, which he wrote himself; I was impressed by his calm remark that natural disasters happen all the time, century after century, whether people are good or bad, and the test of a ruler is not whether disasters happen but how well he relieves his people from them, which is more sense than a lot of people have right now. Also applicable today: a lot of the opposition to the Qing was based on ethnic hatred, because the Qing were Manchurian, unlike the Ming they replaced, who were Han. Zeng's book said that everything outside China was barbaric and only Chinese were truly human. The exasperated Emperor answered, "This cannot be true. Did not Master Kung" [Confucius] "write that 'Harmony will prevail throughout Heaven and Earth, all things will be nourished and will flourish'? The world is vast, and however large our land appears to us living in it, it is only a hundredth part of the whole. The Tao is the same everywhere; how then can there be one Heaven and Earth for China and another for the outer tribes?" Zeng eventually came to agree that he was wrong, and the arguments in his book were based on rumors, which were probably part of a whispering campaign started by the Emperor's brothers. The Emperor let Zeng go home, where he wrote a book called Awakening From Delusion, though he did have the rumormongers Zeng had talked to rounded up and killed. A really good read.

 

 

*Banbury Bog -- Phoebe Atwood Taylor

 

An Asey Mayo mystery, not one of the better ones. The motive for the murder is introduced four pages before the end, obviously made up on the spur of the moment when Taylor finally decided who the murderer was. Also there's an unusual amount of "scene-setting" with copious descriptions of a heavy fog that sets in, but the fog doesn't affect the plot in any way -- no one hides in it, it doesn't prevent Asey from driving at high speeds on back roads -- so it seems strange that Taylor should make such a big deal out of it. Dad liked the scenes where Asey and his companions search the basement of an old house, and Asey points out that the basement is a circle, which allowed the builders to use the smallest possible number of bricks. (Dad notes that there were no brick yards on the Cape when the house was built so the bricks would have to be brought in from near Boston, which is why they were so expensive.) Inevitably there's some vaudeville business with people mishearing "Banbury" as "cranberry". Kind of forgettable.

 

 

Brass Knuckles -- Frank Gruber

 

A collection of Gruber's 1920s short stories about Oliver Quade, the Human Encyclopedia, from the old pulp magazines. They're puzzle-mysteries; in each story Quade, an encyclopedia salesman, cons or gate-crashes his way into some event where he's not supposed to be -- state fairs, horse races, cock-fighting meetings -- in order to give his spiel and sell his encyclopedias. Some crime or other always occurs, and the itinerant outsider Quade is always the main suspect, until he uses some obscure fact from the encyclopedia (which he's memorized) to show up the dim-witted local cops and expose the real bad guy. Kind of formulaic, and the writing is only competent, but they were still enjoyable.

 

 

Colonel Jack -- Daniel Defoe

 

A picaresque novel about a London boy called Jack, raised in a tenement in the late 1600s by a "nurse". Since both the other boys the nurse has in her charge are also called Jack (that being the most common name given to illegitimate boys) she distinguishes them by the nicknames Captain, Major, and Colonel. The nurse dies when Jack is ten and all three Jacks are left homeless. The other two soon leave the city, while Colonel Jack supports himself by petty theft and sleeps in the warm ashes underneath a glass-house. He's eventually recruited as an assistant by an older thief and taught how to pick pockets, and goes on to a long career as a thief and occasional highwayman until being crimped and sold into involuntary servitude in Virginia. He escapes and joins the Army, and fights in Europe in the War of the Spanish Succession. He marries several times but each wife turns out to be an adulterer or a drunk or both. It was pretty good, although I wasn't as happy with the ending as Defoe probably intended because when Jack eventually becomes a prosperous planter in Virginia, of course he's making his money off the backs of slaves, which doesn't bother him at all.

 

 

Spook -- Mary Roach

 

A book about looking into the various claims of evidence of a life after death, and the unsurprising conclusion that none of them meet any kind of standards for proof. I didn't think it was that great.

 

 

The Second Life of Nick Mason -- Steve Hamilton

 

I really liked this. I bought it in the airport in San Jose and finished it before the plane crossed the Mississippi. The anti-hero, Nick, is a career burglar doing twenty years in prison after he took the fall for another guy shooting a cop. In prison he meets a crime lord named Cole, who's in for life. It turns out that Cole still pulls strings from prison, and he offers to get Nick released, on the condition that on the outside Nick will do whatever Cole tells him to. Cole lays it out: "This isn't freedom, this is mobility." Even though he knows this means becoming a killer -- Cole plans to have Nick murder the witnesses for Cole's upcoming retrial -- Nick agrees, both to get out of prison and so he can see his daughter. (It's an iron rule of an anti-hero story that there must be a pluckily adorable preteen daughter who serves as an excuse for whatever the anti-hero does.) Cole forces the cop who arrested Nick to recant his testimony and resign in disgrace, so Nick's conviction is vacated. The cop's former partner, Sandoval, knowing that the recantation was fake and that Cole must have sprung Nick for his own reasons, becomes obsessed with Nick and determined to put him back in prison. The novel follows Nick through his education in the assassination business, his first hit, his reconnection with friends and enemies from before he went away, and his open contest with Sandoval. It was gripping.

 

 

The Uncollected Wodehouse -- David A. Jesen, ed.

 

Somewhat misnamed, as many of the stories were collected during Wodehouse's lifetime in The Man Upstairs. The rest are minor early comedies, the best being several stories about a hard-luck boxing promoter and the bizarre lengths he goes to in order to try to motivate his world-beating but easily distracted fighter. They were pretty funny.

 

 

Men Without Women -- Haruki Murakami

 

A collection of short stories, mostly about alienation, I think. In some the narrator is the protagonist, in others the narrator is an outside observer. In every case the main character is a man who has tried to fill an existential void in his life by loving a woman and failed, with consequences ranging from mid-life career change to suicide by fasting. (The one exception is a weird surrealist piece that's a reversal of The Metamorphosis -- that is, one day a verminous insect wakes up to find that it has inexplicably turned into a human named Gregor. I thought that one was better in conceit than in execution.) The one I liked best was "Drive My Car", about a widowed famous actor who hires a driver because he's lost his license due to glaucoma and a DUI. Over the course of months he tells the driver about his late wife and how, though as far as he could tell she was always happy with him, she conducted serial affairs all through their marriage; although he knew about them he never spoke to her about it, which he now regrets. After her death from cancer he sought out one of her lovers (who didn't know him) and spent six months as his drinking buddy, to try to understand his wife, but it didn't tell him anything, really. He finally concludes that the affairs didn't have anything to do with him or the love between him and his wife, but were just an aspect of his wife he'd never seen and didn't understand, a kind of blind spot.

 

 

City Life -- Donald Barthelme

 

A collection of post-modern short stories that didn't really engage me. I did like "Kierkegaard Unfair to Schlegel", an imagined transcript of a therapy session, about the narrator's inability to turn off his perception of literary irony when he's not reading, so he sees subtext in everything. He draws an arresting word-picture of the military-surplus stores, and how the people who buy the obsolescent uniform gear and wear it for ironic purposes form a kind of clown army as a subversive counterpoint to the real one. Most of the others don't really stand out in my memory.

 

 

Invisible Man -- Ralph Ellison

 

A disturbing novel about personal identity and racial identity, and how life in America forces them to be the same thing. It's told by a nameless narrator living in an illegal underground apartment he's made by walling off sections of sub-basements of New York tenements; the narrator is a black man, and he explains that his color makes him socially invisible. The action of the novel is told in flashbacks, the narrator recounting his life of disillusion: how he grew up in the South in the thirties and really internalized Booker T. Washington's racial-improvement program, eventually going to a black college whose president is a nationally-admired black leader. While a student he accidentally lets a rich white visitor see some of the truth of rural black poverty, and he gets called on the carpet for it. He has a terrible shock when the president's angry diatribe shows him that the apparent mutual respect of the black leaders and white donors is a false front on both sides. Expelled from the school, he goes to New York and joins the Communist Party, where he becomes a popular speaker and agitator, wholly embracing the party line and believing it will lead to racial equality, until he comes to realize that the white higher-ups are only using the black agitators to cause unrest, and letting the blacks take the punishment while escaping consequences themselves. Mirroring his spiritual injuries, he's also physically damaged -- he breathes toxic fumes at a paint factory, and instead of medical treatment the white doctors give him electroshock therapy. Betrayed in turn by integrationism, Communism, and black nationalism, he retreats to his underground headquarters to gather himself and recover his bearings mentally while preparing to return to the surface and force the world to see him. A powerful story.

 

 

Serve the People -- Jen Lin-Liu

 

A very good book about an American-born Chinese woman who lived in Beijing and Shanghai in the 2000s, first as a freelance journalist and later as the food editor for a Chinese magazine. She went to a cooking school where she learned the basics from a grumpy survivor of the Cultural Revolution (typical for cooks of his age, he had simply been taken out of his previous job and told he was a cook now.) She did both better and worse than the other students: better because she hung around the cook and copied everything he did, worse because cheating among the students was simply a matter of course, but as a foreigner no one would help her. Similarly, as a foreigner with no experience outside her government cooking class, no one would hire her; she got jobs by working for places that couldn't be picky, barely-hanging-on noodle stands and snack stands that survived on the street lunch trade. She also learned to make dumplings from her upstairs neighbor, a woman who told her a great deal about living under the Maoist regime. It was a fun read.

 

 

Boxing Stories -- Robert E. Howard

 

I was surprised to find I didn't like these at all. Howard was a brilliant storyteller, and judging from his outstanding pulp fiction I would have thought boxing would be right in his wheelhouse, but the stories are poorly written and boring. Every fight proceeds exactly the same way: our hero fights a much stronger opponent and gets his head handed to him, but through sheer force of will stays on his feet and eventually wins because he just has to. The fights are mind-numbingly repetitive, every move the same and described in exactly the same words: the hero invariably sinks his left mitt to the wrist in the other guy's midriff -- seriously, that phrase appears at the midpoint of every single fight. What a disappointment.

 

 

*The Criminal C.O.D. -- Phoebe Atwood Taylor

 

An Asey Mayo mystery, this one a real farce where Asey finds a dead body, which goes missing, turns up somewhere else, then goes missing again, and so on until it turns up inside a package mailed to the doctor's house. Most of the book is an extended game of who's-got-the-button, including more than one drive to Boston (Dad notes that this was a very long trip in the days before expressways so Asey must have really been tearing up the roads.) The old vaudeville joke about the white and black horses is mentioned but not told, and I was surprised to see in Dad's notes that he didn't recognize the joke; it seems just the sort of thing he would know. (A farmer is puzzled why his black horses eat twice as much hay as his white horses, until his friend points out that he owns twice as many black horses as white horses.) The solution is even sillier than usual, with Asey suddenly remembering a few pages from the end that oh yeah, this guy's family owns an old ice house, where he must have stowed the body, and there's totally a good reason for him to be the murderer based on all the stuff I found out in Boston that I didn't mention to anyone until now. I did like it, though, for the fun picture of running a local election on the Cape in the thirties, including a funny scene where one side sets a booby trap for the other candidate to make him trip in mud and then have to walk unsteadily in the wrong size boots, so he stumbles into the town meeting looking as if he'd gotten drunk and fallen in a ditch. It was pretty good.

 

 

Clockers -- Richard Price

 

A crime novel set in the early 90s in a fictional version of Jersey City. There are two main characters, both of whom I kind of hated, whose stories are told in alternating chapters: Strike, a drug dealer, and Rocco, a homicide detective. Strike is about nineteen and has risen in the local dealing hierarchy because he's careful and intelligent and doesn't use drugs himself. However, he realizes he isn't going to rise any higher when his boss tells him to kill another dealer who's been skimming, and he realizes he doesn't have it in him to just murder someone in cold blood. He tells his problems to his older brother Victor, who -- drunk and furious at his dead-end life -- goes and kills the guy himself. Rocco and his openly racist partner arrive to examine the crime scene. Rocco, in his forties, is the kind of guy who works late and stays out drinking rather than deal with problems at home, as all the cops in the book seem to be, and also like them his main motive is proving himself right. He won't believe that the usually clean-living Victor is a killer, despite his confession, so he decides Strike must have done it and sets out to bully and harass Strike into confessing, eventually going so far as to set up and arrest Strike's boss in a drug bust and tell the boss that Strike sold him out, leading to the boss putting out a hit on Strike, who actually almost dies from a perforated ulcer before the killer even finds him. The book actually makes me feel a little bad for Strike, despite the fact that he's a low-life who uses ten-year-old kids to run his drugs for him. Eventually Rocco, who's realized that Victor did it after all, saves Strike from his boss by driving him in to Grand Central and putting him on a bus out of town. It's not a happy ending, because it's pretty obvious both of them will come to bad ends after the book is over; Strike, who didn't finish high school and has no skills, will certainly become a drug dealer again wherever he ends up, and eventually get killed; Rocco is sure to be divorced soon and will probably drink himself to death before he's fifty. The writing is very good, but the book is six hundred pages long and depressing, so it took me a long time to finish it.

 

 

The Life of Samuel Johnson -- James Boswell

 

I last read this about twenty years ago, so when I ran across a really nice three-volume edition at Recycle Books I decided to read it again. It amazes me that so high-minded a man as Johnson could put up with a low vulgarian like Boswell, a shameless boot-licker and parasite, who happily admitted that he only went to church on Easter to see how Johnson behaved there. It's even more amazing that someone like Boswell could have written such an incredibly good book. It's fascinating from start to finish, a thoroughly engrossing picture of the most learned man of a learned age. The picture isn't fully rounded; Boswell only knew Johnson for the last twenty years of his life, and though he makes an effort at covering Johnson's younger days it's pretty thin. It's all the more so because Boswell petulantly rejected all accounts of Johnson given by Mrs. Thrale (Johnson's closest friend) and others who had known him longer, obviously out of pure jealousy; Boswell was determined that only he should be the official torch-bearer of Johnsoniana, and he was tireless in insisting that Mrs. Thrale was mistaken or lying about everything she ever said. (For every hour Johnson spent in Boswell's company, he must have spent a hundred with the Thrales, so I consider her accounts more reliable.) Most of the book is taken up with accounts of Johnson's conversations, things Boswell heard him say or other people repeated to him. Johnson was a great talker, and since he was in very bad health his entire life he had great trouble sleeping and so he would happily stay up talking as late as anyone wanted to. Although testy and easily put in a temper, he was a kind man and went to enormous trouble and expense to help all kinds of people, most of whom had no claim on him. It was funny, in a pathetic kind of way, to watch Boswell try to win arguments with Johnson in absentia: Johnson was an abolitionist, while Boswell was enthusiastically pro-slavery, and after being demolished by Johnson on the subject he wrote about it and then added "nevertheless.." and brought out arguments he hadn't dared voice when Johnson was present. I couldn't help laughing when Boswell, who was an attorney by profession, and a thoroughly incompetent one -- he lost every case he ever argued -- printed in the book a court brief that Johnson had helped him write, and then said he had showed it to a friend and called it an example of that friend's "great perspicacity" that he could point out exactly which parts were Johnson's. (As if it took any skill to tell Boswell's writing apart from Johnson's!) I liked the edition -- not only was it well-bound and easy to read, it included a lot of very interesting marginalia. Mrs. Thrale didn't like Boswell, and the feeling was mutual, so when Mrs. Thrale read the book she made a lot of acid comments in the margins, all of which are reprinted in this edition. It's very handy for identifying people: whenever Boswell tells a story and tactfully doesn't mention someone's name, Mrs. Thrale notes "This was so-and-so." This is most entertaining on the several occasions when Boswell recounts "a gentleman" saying something really stupid and getting dressed down for it, and Mrs. Thrale notes "This was Boswell himself." I can't tell you how much I love this book. Probably the best biography ever written, and easily one of the most entertaining books of any kind.

 

 

Catching Fire -- Richard Wrangham

 

A fascinating book about cooking and its effect on human evolution. The author argues that the essential distinction between proto-humans and humans was not so much mastering fire as using it to cook food. One stat that astonished me: if you added up all the time in one day you spend chewing, it would probably come to less than forty-five minutes. For a gorilla it would come to more than six hours! Gorillas even have a ridge on the top of their skulls where their colossal jaw muscles are anchored, whereas our jaw muscles only go as high as our ears. Raw food needs so much more chewing that it puts limits on ape behavior. Chimpanzees, for example, kill monkeys for meat, but they don't go on hunts, and when chasing prey they give up after only a few minutes. That's because, thermodynamically, chimps just can't afford to invest too much time in pursuit because they need that time to chew and digest their meals. Digesting raw food also takes much more energy -- the human digestive system, especially the stomach and the large intestine, is proportionally much smaller than that of other apes, because humans use fire to do a lot of the work that other apes have to do in the stomach. Humans' mouths are also proportionally smaller -- chimpanzees are about half the size of humans but we have the same sized mouth cavity, and they can open their mouths far wider than we can. There's so much more! Some anthropologists think the hair-standing-on-end phenomenon is less aimed at making you seem bigger than at exposing as much skin as possible to the air for cooling purposes, since fighting builds up immense body heat, which most mammals are much less able to shed than we are. Cooking also seems to have pushed humans to develop tribal behavior: no other apes are observed to share food, ever, not even between mates. A terrific read. It's one of those books where you keep thinking about it for months afterwards.

 

 

The Nigger of the Narcissus -- Joseph Conrad

 

His third or fourth novel. His original publishers changed the title but Conrad later insisted on changing it back. Despite the awful title, it's generally considered the best of his early works. It tells the story of the voyage of the Narcissus from Bombay to London, and the bad effect on the ship of two sailors who join at the last minute: Wait, a black West Indian who is dying of tuberculosis, and a Cockney named Donkin, a sea-lawyer and a lazy coward. Wait attempts to work, though it's too much for him; Donkin shams sick and avoids work as much as possible. The crew sympathizes with Wait and they try to make his voyage as easy as they can, although he's petulant and ungrateful. The middle part of the book is taken up with the gripping story of a terrible storm off the Cape of Good Hope, where the ship is laid on her beam-ends -- that is, she's half-capsized, lying on her side with the tops of the masts almost in the water. (This is drawn from a real incident in Conrad's sailing career.) The crew want to cut the masts off at the deck, in hopes that when the masts fall away the ship will right herself, but the Captain rules against it and the crew has to ride out the storm clinging wherever they can. In the course of the storm someone remembers that Wait must still be in the sick-bay, and at great danger to themselves the crew forms a human chain to rescue him. Donkin, despite his low standing among the crew, manages to fan their resentment against the Captain's apparent heartlessness into a near-mutiny. The Captain aborts the mutiny by issuing the orders that will right the ship and simply acting as if there is no possibility he will be disobeyed. Conrad seems to be contrasting the crew's humane feelings toward Wait with the Captain's professional detachment, since the reader is left to consider that in the face of the uncaring sea it was the Captain's cold calculation, not the crew's humanity, that saved the ship and the crew. The Narcissus survives the storm and sails home; Wait dies within sight of land. There's a very good preface on the subject of writing and how this book was where Conrad started to think of himself as an artist.

 

 

Ring For Jeeves -- P.G. Wodehouse

 

The only book where Jeeves appears without Bertie, I think because it was originally written as a stage musical; in a musical comedy the hero must get married at the end, and Wodehouse wanted Bertie to remain a bachelor. In this book Jeeves is moonlighting as a valet to an earl named Bill while Bertie, apparently worried about losing all his money to postwar taxes and Socialism, is away at a school that teaches idle aristocrats how to work for a living. Bill, like other earls after the war, is broke and weighed down by the expensive upkeep of a huge unsellable white elephant of a family house. He also wants to get married, but despite being a cheerful good-hearted friendly sort of fellow, he can't get a job due to being a useless pea-brain. On Jeeves's suggestion he becomes an unlicensed bookie, and does very well for a while until he stupidly accepts a bet he doesn't have the resources to pay off, and when the bet wins he and Jeeves have to flee the race course with the cheated bettor in hot pursuit. They shake him off and hide their disguises in the house, and then receive several house guests: Bill's fiancée; Bill's sister and brother-in-law; a wealthy divorcée who is thinking about buying the house; and the divorcée's suitor, who coincidentally is the same man Bill welshed on. Bill has to be extra charming to the heiress while keeping the fiancée in good humor and keeping the suitor from recognizing him, while the brother-in-law cheerfully goes around pointing out every flaw in the house to all the guests. It's a great piece of juggling. Jeeves sorts everything out and arranges a number of happy endings before leaving to rejoin Bertie, who has been expelled from his independence school for cheating. It was very funny.

 

 

The Black Echo -- Michael Connelly

 

Kind of a formulaic crime thriller: a homicide cop with a shadowy past and a drinking problem digs deep into a murder case everyone else wants him to drop. The story unfolds predictably. Reading it was like listening to a top-forty pop song. You think to yourself, "Now we get the scene where the boss tells the cop he's too much of a lone wolf... here comes the showdown with the partner over how far to pursue the case... now it's time for the romantic interlude with the all-business federal agent... oh, we're at the chase scene... here's where the hero sets off after the bad guys by himself without waiting for backup... aaaand now we hit the final checkbox where the federal agent was behind it all."  It wouldn't stand out in my mind as much as it does if it weren't for the annoying foreword by another mystery writer named Burke, whose books I haven't read, who first whines about the lack of respect crime fiction gets generally and says, incorrectly, that college English departments don't teach the works of James M. Cain; then he fatuously says that Connelly's writing stands up to Cain's. I have to think Connelly didn't see the foreword before the book went to press, or he would have vetoed it, since having your pedestrian first novel compared to a once-in-a-generation master of tight prose must be embarrassing. It stayed in my mind the whole way through the book: I was constantly thinking things like, "You know, Cain would know that having the narrator complain about how clichéd his situation is does not excuse the writer for using a clichéd situation." Honestly I think Burke only knows that Cain was a great writer because someone told him so.

 

 

*The Deadly Sunshade -- Phoebe Atwood Taylor

 

The title was the best thing about this one. (The victim is found poisoned sitting under a beach umbrella.) The victim's name is Newell and Dad was amazed no one found the opportunity to say she was "deaf as a post". There's a well-known war correspondent roaming around providing one-liners, but the main background of the book is the (very dated) comic setup of the Cape women rounding up rifles and learning to shoot in case of invasion (the book came out in 1940.) Taylor plays this as straight comedy, taking it as absurd on the face of it that women should try to learn to shoot or take part in war preparations. There's a ridiculous scene when Asey is held at gunpoint by one of these humorless women in a ransacked house, a scene that goes on and on -- Dad called it "beyond farce" and wondered if it was padded to fill up a contractual page count. Although Taylor obviously originally intended the mystery to be a romantic-rivalry-gone-bad story, it soon goes off the rails and turns into a plot about former rum-runners and crooked cops trying to retake their former territory, with the murder's solution shoehorned in as a sort of afterthought. I would have liked it more, but the whole "ha ha, look at those silly women" thing put me off.

 

 

Step Aside, Pops -- Kate Beaton

 

Her second collection of webcomics, generally historical/literary/weird. A lot of them were very funny. I really liked the series of comics where she created back stories for Edward Gorey's oddball cover illustrations of Doubleday paperbacks.

 

 

The Sopping Thursday -- Edward Gorey

 

Grey-scale illustrations of mundanity. It's a series of drawings of inconsequential events on a very rainy day: a woman loses her umbrella, a man in a shop can't find an umbrella he likes, a dog wanders in and out, a toddler briefly gets lost and is found again. It's not really about anything but I liked the expressive quality of the heavy rain.

 

 

*Wanderers -- Knut Hamsun

 

In the original Norwegian this was two novels, but the translation puts them together in one binding. They could have been subtitled "Memoirs of an Annoying Busybody". The narrator is a man named Pedersen who seems to be a retired townsman; I'm not sure how old he is -- he's always complaining about being too old but he's vigorous enough to do heavy manual labor. On what seems like a whim he leaves his retirement cottage to go tramping around the country looking for work at farmsteads; in his narration he makes a big point of how it's important to keep his educated past a secret, but in fact he can't go an hour without hinting about it to someone. He's a skilled worker, and by far the best parts of the story are the passages describing the jobs he gets -- digging wells, laying water pipes, felling timber. He gets taken on for several months at a prosperous farmstead and becomes obsessed with the farmer's wife; he creepily stalks her while giving himself airs on his high-mindedness. In the second part (that is, in the sequel) he returns to the same farm after six years away, and while doing useful labor around the property also makes a dreadful pest of himself interfering in the family's affairs, which are none of his business. I thought the narrator was a sketchy asshole and at least partly to blame for the farm wife's suicide. I hated it.

 

 

The New American Splendor Anthology -- Harvey Pekar

 

This is a collection of self-published autobiographical comic books that Pekar wrote and various people illustrated. I was impressed with the way Pekar was willing to show himself at his worst -- short-tempered, irritable, needlessly combative. He also managed to convey how his testiness was an outgrowth of his chronic anxiety, without making it seem as though he was making excuses for himself. He did descend into self-delusion a little bit: Pekar occasionally appeared on David Letterman's TV show, and according to his own version he talked rings around Letterman and got the audience cheering for him, so much so that Letterman had to cut to commercial. I watched the old interviews online, though, and it was clear that Letterman was a professional and Pekar an amateur who thought he was cannier than he was, and Pekar really just came off looking angry and egotistical. I don't know that I'd go out of my way to read any more of his stuff, but I liked it.

 

 

The American Spirit -- David McCullough

 

A collection of speeches, mostly from commencement exercises. A common theme was that it's essential to being a good citizen to be thoroughly educated in world history and American history, and to this end you need to read as much as possible. Naturally I couldn't agree more.

 

 

Smart Baseball -- Keith Law

 

A stat primer, mostly, concentrating on explaining the new metrics teams have started using the last twenty years or so to measure baseball players' value. He touches on the absurd head-in-the-sand attitude older sports writers have taken towards the idea that the stats they grew up with aren't perfect, but that's mined-out territory and in any case most of those writers have either retired or been relegated to very minor jobs where no one pays attention to them. The book is in three sections: the first is about relics that are still used only because of inertia, from wholly useless stats like the save or the pitcher win to useful-but-incomplete things like batting average and ERA. The second section goes over the better modern replacements, such as OBP and the various attempts at measuring fielding ability. (Law doesn't mention it but my favorite among these is Bill James' replacement for the "error" stat, what he calls the CIDM, for "clearly identifiable defensive mistake".) The third section looks at where performance measurement is going, based on the overwhelming amount of data teams can now capture with Statcast, a system of networked cameras installed in every ball park a few years ago that can measure every imaginable event that occurs on a ball field -- the launch angle of the bat on every contact with the ball, the ball's velocity off the bat correlated with the arc of the hitter's wrists, the exact number of spins the ball makes after leaving the pitcher's hand, anything you can think of. Of course the teams don't share any of that information so the writers are all back on the outside again. A good book.

 

 

A Red Death -- Walter Mosley

 

The second Easy Rawlins novel, set in 1953. In the five years since the action of the last novel, Easy has bought several apartment buildings, although he passes himself off as the janitor and lets everyone believe the buildings are owned by some anonymous realtor downtown. But as the novel begins he is threatened by the IRS, the problem being that he can't account for how he came to own the buildings in the first place because the money he bought the first one with was stolen. An FBI agent intervenes and offers to get Easy out of tax trouble in return for digging up dirt on a Jewish Communist organizer working in Los Angeles. Easy reluctantly takes the deal and feels worse and worse about it when he finds that the Communist organizer is a European refugee and a thoroughly good man, friendly, tireless, and committed to the relief of the poor. In fact the Communist is the only character in the book who isn't hiding anything, and most of the action involves Easy turning up secrets -- who ratted him out to the IRS, why the IRS agent is pushing back against the FBI, what the FBI agent is really looking for. The ending was sad but I liked the way the book was put together.

 

 

The Riddle of the Compass -- Amir D. Aczel

 

Disappointing. The book barely makes it to 160 pages even with the help of large print and extra-wide margins, and even then half of the text is just filler. It read like a term paper where the student knows they didn't do enough research. There's not really much information about compasses, either.

 

 

Mad Enchantment -- Ross King

 

A story about the last fifteen years or so of Monet's life and his artistic renaissance. I don't know of any other great painter who had a similar career path: as a young man Monet's work was derided by the establishment, but he lived to see it gain acceptance and then admiration from both the critics and the public, and became rich, famous, and hailed as a genius... and then he reinvented himself at age seventy, moving in an entirely different direction and producing wholly new works of great depth, power, and originality. In the early years of the 20th century Monet went through a period of deep depression: his wife and oldest son died and he developed cataracts that led to years of near-blindness. He recovered his sight thanks to several operations and big contemporary advances in eyeglass technology, and when he could paint again he produced some of his best work, grand-scale paintings of the water lilies in his pond and studies of the willows around his Japanese-style footbridge, wonderfully exuberant riots of color. Monet thought the quality of light was so important and evanescent that he would set up outside with as many as six canvases, working on one as long as the light was right, then switching to another and not going back to the first until the same time the next day. Monet's house was full of paintings by his favorite artists like Matisse and Gauguin. When he thought his own work wasn't going well, Monet would go around his house and cover up their paintings because looking at them made him feel incompetent; that story really endeared him to me. The book is also a good picture of his long friendship with Clemenceau and his own ideas about his place in history. I did think the writer gave too much space to the endless arguments about the cost and design of the state-funded Monet museum, which took away from the second half of the book a little bit, but overall it was very good.

 

 

Emergence -- Steven Johnson

 

A very good book about emergent behavior, that is, properties of a system that only become apparent when the system becomes large enough. For example, if you only observed one ant, or a hundred ants, you would never predict the colossal feats of organization that appear in very large colonies of ants. One such feat: an ant colony generally has a garbage pile, which is unerringly located as far away as possible from the food storage, and also a place where they dump the bodies of dead ants, which is as far away as possible from both the food storage and the garbage pile. But there's no boss ant! Ants don't have a directing intelligence -- the queen's only function is to reproduce. The complexity of the ants' arrangements is an emergent property of the simple rules each ant follows independently of all the others. Human cities display the same phenomenon, even independent of imposed zoning regulations. For example, certain parts of the city spontaneously organize themselves into districts: the way all the theaters cluster in the same two blocks in Boston, or the way all the diamond merchants use the same few blocks of Amsterdam. Consciousness appears to be an emergent property of the human brain, which is why people think it's possible that consciousness might also emerge in other entities, such as a sufficiently complex machine. I enjoyed it.

 

 

The King -- Donald Barthelme

 

The only one of his novels I've really liked. It's an absurd story about what World War II might have been like if Arthur and all his knights had lived into the twentieth century and were still in charge. There are really funny scenes with Guinevere and her ladies listening to Lord Haw-Haw attacking them on the radio, and Arthur and Gawain talking to each other about what Winston's going to say in Parliament about their latest offensive. At the same time, several knights have the traditional strange visions and receive eerie visitors bearing arcane messages, which when they're all assembled at the Round Table turn out to come together to form plans on building an atomic bomb. Arthur decides that such a weapon can't coexist with knightly honor and destroys the plans. It was a good story.

 

 

The Old Reliable -- P.G. Wodehouse

 

A Hollywood novel, and a story where ill-treated poor relations give their snooty rich relatives their comeuppance, two of Wodehouse's favorite themes. The hero is a woman called Bill ("Bill" being Wodehouse's favorite name for a down-to-earth person; nearly all of his heroes are named Bill or Sally.) Bill is a writer recently fired in a pointless studio shakeup, and she has to go to work for her sister Adela, a former silent film star and domestic tyrant, ghost-writing Adela's memoirs in return for room and board. There are great scenes where the seething Bill has to do rewrites when Adela can't decide whether to say she personally stole the important plans during World War I or she was the romantic inspiration for a hero who did the actual stealing. Luckily Bill has distractions: helping her also-fired studio buddy court her niece; commiserating with her fellow poor relation Smedley, Adela's brother-in-law; and hob-nobbing with the butler, an Englishman whom she happens to know is a retired safe-cracker (she was on the jury that convicted him.) The McGuffin is the scorching-hot diary of a late Hollywood bombshell, full of the sort of names and details that make a best-selling tell-all memoir; everyone is convinced it's hidden in the house Adela has recently bought, and the tangle of alliances and betrayals as everyone connives to get hold of the diary form the bulk of the story. I liked it a lot.

 

 

The Gods Drink Whiskey -- Stephen Asma

 

A pretty good book about Buddhism in Cambodia and Thailand; the author manages to avoid poverty tourism, for which I was thankful. Most Buddhists in Indochina practice Theravada Buddhism, as distinct from the Mahayana Buddhism practiced in central Asia or the Zen Buddhism practiced in Japan. The American idea of Buddhism is generally tied up with Zen because of the strong influence here of Japanese pop culture, but traditions of Buddhism vary widely. Both the Thai and Cambodian governments have made periodic attempts to suppress Buddhism, because the monks carry a great deal of moral weight with the people; Cambodia actually passed laws against giving charity, because Buddhist monks own nothing and get their food by begging. In Okinawa I met an ancient Buddhist priest who had spent some time teaching in America in the sixties, but who eventually decided that the spirit of America isn't compatible with Buddhism. American spirituality is grounded on the Judeo-Christian idea of eternity, and can't find common ground with the essential Buddhist idea of impermanence. The Buddha himself said that his disciples should treat his teachings like a raft: you use a raft to get across a river that's in your way, but once you're across the river, you don't lash the raft to your back and carry it with you -- you leave it behind and continue your journey. I liked it.

 

 

The Crazy Kill -- Chester Himes

 

Another of Himes's novels set in 1950s Harlem. The ferociously angry detectives, Grave Digger and Coffin Ed -- the only black detectives in their openly racist precinct -- investigate a very strange crime scene: a tenement "rent party" where a street preacher falls out of a fourth-floor window, lands in a pile of bread boxes on the street, and returns to the party unhurt; the host gets a phone call telling her there's a dead body under her window and everyone laughs it off, until someone looks and there actually is a dead body there, a man who's been stabbed, and who is lying in the same place the preacher fell. It doesn't help that the preacher, who is prone to trances, starts accusing people of both pushing him out the window and killing the man in the street, saying he knows because it was revealed to him in a vision. Digger and Ed follow the trails of jealousy and gambling debts to the killer; their technique is basically to spread the police brutality around with a big shovel, sometimes to make people talk, sometimes just because they don't like someone's attitude. It was a good read.

 

 

*Henry Esmond -- William Makepeace Thackeray

 

I read this because Raymond Chandler wrote in an essay that "No one will ever write a better historical novel than Henry Esmond." I could go into a lot of detail but suffice it to say that Chandler was wrong. It's a tedious book about an unlikeable boy in Queen Anne's England who grows up to be a soldier and would-be writer, and spends a lot of asides attacking the character of the Duke of Marlborough (because Thackeray thought that Marlborough had been mean to Thackeray's great-great-great-great-uncle) in between taking shots at Catholicism. It's as exciting as it sounds. There are ludicrous Mary-Sue scenes where the hero wittily crushes Jonathan Swift, who sputters in helpless confusion, and I practically sprained my eyes from rolling them so much. It was also off-putting that the hero, as a teenager, falls in love with his eight-years-younger step-sister (who is also his cousin) and spends the whole novel pining after her, until suddenly abandoning her and marrying his step-mother four pages before the end. It clearly didn't hold Dad's interest, as his notes get sparser as the book goes on, ending with the remark "Obviously I stopped taking notes halfway through." I wouldn't recommend it.

 

 

The Actor's Nightmare -- Christopher Durang

 

A dream-landscape play, where the main character is a man having the "actor's nightmare", a dream where you're an actor about to go on stage, but you haven't rehearsed and don't know your lines. Everyone involved with the theater has had this dream; I've had it myself. The hero finds himself backstage and is told that the actor for whom he is the understudy has broken his legs and he must go on in his place; not only has he not rehearsed, he doesn't remember being cast in a play at all and is pretty sure he's an accountant. It's only after being pushed on stage and trying his best to get on with the play -- which morphs from Noel Coward to Samuel Beckett to Shakespeare -- that he realizes he's dreaming; as the play becomes A Man For All Seasons and he comes to the beheading scene, he decides that "dying" on stage in the dream will lead to waking up, so he goes to the headsman's block and the lights go out just as the axe comes down. The stage directions indicate that the hero should continue to lie motionless on the stage during the curtain calls. I liked it but I bet I'd find it pretty disturbing on stage.

 

 

*The Perennial Boarder -- Phoebe Atwood Taylor

 

An Asey Mayo story, written during the run-up to the war -- the plot involves Asey getting delayed by having to stop for columns of troop trucks, and the draft is mentioned several times. Asey, delivering some buckets of fresh clams, finds a dead body sitting in a telephone booth in the lobby of a boarding house, and is nonplussed when the body soon disappears -- it turns out that (for no reason ever explained) the phone booth has a sliding panel. Asey's investigation is slowed by the boarding house owner trying to cover everything up for fear of bad publicity. At one point Asey says he wouldn't trust someone on a "six-lane highway" -- Dad notes this was hyperbole since there weren't any six-lane highways in America in 1941. There's an extended digression with a chauffeur (Dad called it a "set-piece"); the chauffeur is a stage-Irishman ("The cops are all corrupt -- see?  Me brother's a cop -- see?") and since he drops out of the book after his comic monologue I got the feeling Taylor had written that scene for something else but hadn't used it and didn't want it to go to waste so she stuck it in here. I was interested to see the great lengths Doc Cummings goes to in order to imply a man is gay without actually saying so; I wouldn't have thought even that would be acceptable to publish in the forties.

 

 

Enter the Saint -- Leslie Charteris

 

A collection of three early novellas about Charteris's recurring character, "the Saint", a British gentleman-adventurer who's decided -- apparently just for the fun of it -- to devote his intelligence and money to fighting crime. His usual plan is to steal all of a bad guy's money and give it to charity, after deducting a percentage for expenses. These three are fairly predictable boiler-plate pulp thrillers; Charteris even apologizes for them in the foreword, saying that he wouldn't have reprinted them if it weren't for the demands from completists. (At that, there were even earlier Saint stories he said he was too embarrassed to reprint.) I'm told the series got much better later on, so I'll probably find some later books and see how I like those.

 

 

Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You -- Christopher Durang

 

I was a kid when this came out but I remember the big noise it made. It's an absurdist comedy about a confrontation between an elderly nun and some of her former students, who have returned to accuse her of terrifying and abusing them as children. Durang, a former Catholic, is clearly writing from angry memories. The nun I thnk would be diffcult to act on stage; the unruffled way she explains some of the more bizarre Church dogmas as if they made perfect sense echoes the way she faces her angry former students and calmly explains that they're mistaken, all her students loved her. That all builds up to the climax where, having made sure one of the students has been to confession that day, she shoots him, serenely explaining that she has sent him to Heaven. My parents both hated this play, though they didn't join the effort to have it banned in Boston. I remember Dad -- who always said the Globe was anti-Catholic -- complained to the paper about the way the reviews were written.

 

 

Hero of the Empire -- Candice Millard

 

A very good, very entertaining book about Winston Churchill's experience in the Boer War, the first low point in a century full of them. Churchill was in his mid-twenties and had already left the Army because he couldn't bear being under orders; when war broke out in South Africa, he got himself sent there as a war correspondent. The Boer War was England's most nakedly imperialistic land grab, which is really saying something, and I would have felt more sympathy for the Boers resisting England's totally unjust invasion, except that the Boers themselves were living on land they had brutally stolen from the Sang and Khoi Khoi people, who had lived there for tens of thousands of years, and about whom they cared precisely nothing. Churchill wasn't the sort to sit and wait for a story to come to him, and he traveled around with Army detachments as much as he could, finally getting caught in a Boer ambush on a troop train. Churchill was in a bad spot after getting captured, since he had committed very visible war crimes: he was carrying a gun and wearing a British Army jacket -- both forbidden to noncombatants -- and he took an active part in the fire-fight, including giving orders to British soldiers. The Boers would have been justified in just shooting him out of hand, and Churchill himself admitted that had a Boer correspondent done the same things the British would have killed him. Things are generally more civilized in the early days of a war, though, and Churchill was sent to a prison camp, where, with his usual colossal self-importance, he invited himself into a group planning an escape; he insisted on pushing up the escape's timetable, and fouled the operation up due to his own arrogant pig-headedness, ending up with the guards clamping down with Churchill on the outside of the wall and everyone else inside. That left everyone in a bad way: the other prisoners were now under much heavier guard, and Churchill was alone, far from friendly ground, with a price on his head and no resources -- he didn't even speak the language. With a stunning combination of chutzpah and luck he managed to cover a lot of ground by clinging to the sides of trains in the dark and dropping off before daylight, and with help from British laborers, who hid him in mine shafts during the day, he crossed hundreds of miles to reach British-held territory unharmed. The story of his escape was a nine-day wonder and launched his career in politics, even while the war grew more and more brutal, ending with the British committing wide-scale reprisals among the Boer civilians and establishing the first concentration camps; British propaganda has spent a hundred years avoiding the word genocide, but that's what it was. A terrific read, a real page-turner.

 

 

Come as You Are -- Emily Nagoski

 

A book about female sexuality that a feminist friend of mine recommended I read. It was well-organized and well-written; I thought it got a little repetitive in its constant reminding the reader that "everything about you is normal", but I guess that's a point that needs a lot of driving home. The author is a therapist, and she generally finds that her clients have had almost no sexual education whatever -- most of them seem to have gotten the same three-minute "This part goes there, and that's where babies come from, let's move on" school lecture as I did, and never did any research beyond that. Generally they accepted some half-understood paradigm tacitly expressed by the media or their partners, and in any place where their own real-life makeup didn't match the paradigm they thought there must be something wrong with them, which was simultaneously a failure and a cause for shame. That's not a formula for a fulfilling life, never mind a sex life, and I'm glad people like the author exist.

 

 

Tangled Vines -- Frances Dinkelspiel

 

A true-crime story about a con man named Anderson who ran the equivalent of a Ponzi scheme with wine. Apparently if you know even a little about wine it's easy to pose as an expert, and Anderson sold his customers on storing their valuable wine collections in his specialized facility, which was supposedly temperature-controlled and humidity-controlled and all kinds of things, but which was actually way more basic than that, and even then Anderson was secretly selling the wine to pay the rent. When customers wanted access to any of they wine they'd stored with him, Anderson would give them someone else's wine, or stall them off, or (if he was feeling really brazen that day) just give them bottles of much cheaper wine and insist that's what they stored with him in the first place. Juggling the costs didn't ket him keep up the rent, so without telling any of his customers he moved everything to a rented locker in a massive commercial wine warehouse in Vallejo, a former Naval base. Unable to cope with the mounting threats and lawsuits, Anderson decided to burn his inventory so no one could prove what he'd stolen. Either through malice or incompetence, no one's sure, the fire he set spread beyond his storage locker and eventually engulfed the entire warehouse, destroying about four and a half million bottles of wine (even the bottles that didn't shatter or explode had their contents cooked by the intense heat.) Something like ninety Napa Valley vintners stored their wines there; not only were whole years' vintages lost entirely, many vintners also stored cases of older vintages going back decades -- the whole history of a vineyard gone overnight. As if that weren't bad enough, the insurance companies argued that wine in a storehouse is technically "in transit", so they wouldn't pay out any insurance. Anderson went to prison, but that didn't help the dozens of smaller vintners who couldn't withstand the loss and had to close, ending generations of family businesses. A sad story but really well-written. I liked it.

 

 

The Other Statue -- Edward Gorey

 

Sort of what you might get if an alien tried to assemble a murder mystery out of pieces of other murder mysteries, without knowing what makes a murder mystery work. It's a funny story about a cocktail party at Backwater Hall, where a windstorm blows a statue off the roof, killing Lord Wherewithal; in the confusion the priceless statue of the Lisping Elbow goes missing. Who did it? The characters cluster confusedly and blink at one another in gentle bewilderment, rather like a crowd of flamingoes in Edwardian overcoats. It's the lovely line art that makes it all work, of course.

 

 

Sadness -- Donald Barthelme

 

A collection of surrealist short stories. I liked some better than others. The one that stays with me is a weird piece about Paul Klee, who was (in real life) assigned the odd job of painting camouflage on war planes during World War I. In the story he misplaces a plane and can't find it again because he's camouflaged it so well, and the story follows him trying to track down the plane while being trailed by a pair of strangely triumphant secret police agents. Most of the others left no impression on me, to be honest.

 

 

The Shores of Tripoli -- James L. Haley

 

A naval-adventure story, probably dealing with the campaign against the Barbary States, but so clumsily written I stopped reading after thirty pages so who knows.

 

 

The Genesee Diary -- Henri J.M. Nouwen

 

In 1974 Nouwen spent seven or eight months living in a Trappist monastery in upstate New York. This was a special privilege just for him -- ordinarily no one who wasn't considering becoming a monk would be allowed to live among them. Nouwen was not called to a contemplative life but he found the experience good for him, especially the weekly spiritual-direction sessions he had with with the abbott, a man he found profoundly impressive, where they discussed matters of faith and how to live a Christian life. The Trappists observe very strict rules, including maintaining long periods of silence, even while working. They get up for prayer at two AM and then spend most of the morning baking; initially Nouwen's job was to sift through the raisins for the raisin bread, looking for grit and pebbles, because at first he couldn't follow the monks' gestures well enough to bake. He mentions how one day, when everyone was at lunch, a monk came in to the hall and, having knocked on the table for attention, made a few signs; five or six monks got up and went out with him, and Nouwen was later taken aback to find out that there had been a fire and the monk was calling the fire brigade to help him put it out. In the afternoons he waded into the local stream to pull out rocks for the stone chapel the monks were building that year. The diary does such a good job of discussing dedicated contemplation and the spiritual life in general that the Trappists now give it to prospective monks to read before they come to the monastery. I liked it.

 

 

The 48 Laws of Power -- Robert Greene

 

I read this because the suave and scheming villain in "Luke Cage" mentions it as a book he relies on. It's appropriate because that villain turns out to be a dope who wrecks all his own schemes through stupid over-confidence. It's basically an MRA manual, a guide to winning meaningless victories in a social game no one but you is playing. Not worth reading.

 

 

A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys -- Nathaniel Hawthorne

 

A collection of classical myths re-told to make them acceptable for 19th-century New England; the gods are portrayed simply as mysterious strangers and there's no reference to Greek beliefs at all. Plus of course all hints of sex are banished, although there's plenty of killing. At that they're not bad, although since I'm so familiar with the sources my impression of these retellings may be colored by them. The stories are supposed to be told by a New England college student to a group of unbearably cutesy children, with names such as Cowslip and Squash-Blossom, whom I believe would have sickened me even when I was seven, but you can hold your nose through those parts.

 

 

Tanglewood Tales -- Nathaniel Hawthorne

 

This is a continuation of the Wonder-Book, with more bowdlerized stories from the Greek myths, but without the framing-stories of the disgustingly twee children, thank God. The stories aren't bad.

 

 

God and Golem, Inc. -- Norbert Wiener

 

A short book from fifty years ago about science and religion. It has the feel of having been a lecture originally. One of his central ideas is that since machines can learn and reproduce, and humanity unquestionably created machines, we may stand in the same relation to machines as God does to us (Wiener was an atheist but interested in the existence of creator-worship as an observed fact.) Wiener correctly predicted that machines would learn to defeat humans at even very complex games like chess and go, and although he was hesitant to describe machines as "alive" ("after all a living being is living in all its parts") he thought they might be usefully compared to the legendary Golem, created by the rabbi of Prague, which could move and act independently. How far does mimicry of life extend before it becomes indistinguishable from actual life? Boston Dynamics has built a robot dog whose behavior doesn't differ from that of a real dog in any important way. I'd love to know what Wiener would have had to say about that.

 

 

Doctor Sally -- P.G. Wodehouse

 

This was appalling. Wodehouse never left behind a lot of nineteenth-century attitudes, and many of his characters pursue their love interests in ways that I can only describe as stalking, which Wodehouse obviously thought was endearing; but this is the first one I've read where the hero is an actual rapist. The hero, Bill, is a wealthy layabout who falls in love at first sight with Sally Smith, an M.D. He comes up with various schemes to win her attention, from asking for golf lessons to pretending to be sick, but none of them work because Sally doesn't like do-nothing idlers. Frustrated, Bill finally corners Sally alone and grabs her. She fights him off and he briefly feels ashamed of himself, but he gets over it immediately and manages to convince Sally that he intends to get a job, whereupon she swoons at his feet. I was disgusted. If this had been the first Wodehouse I'd read, I would never have read another.

 

 

Hermit in Paris -- Italo Calvino

 

A posthumous collection of letters and autobiographical essays; the majority of the book is a long series of letters he wrote to his publisher in France during the six months he spent in America on a grant. (By his own account he seems to have spent most of his time in the US chasing women.) I hadn't known he was born in Cuba; his parents were botanists and taught in universities there and in South America. His mother, expecting him to grow up in the New World, gave him his unusual first name to remind him of his heritage; but since he wound up growing up in Italy after all, he was always uncomfortable about his name, saying it sounded "belligerently nationalistic". An anti-fascist, Calvino went to the University of Turin to avoid the Italian Army, and eventually joined the Garibaldi Brigades, fighting as a guerrilla against the Nazis until the war ended. He left the Communist Party after the Soviet invasion of Hungary, though he kept that odd Communist habit of talking about world leaders as though he knew them all personally and perfectly understood all their strategies. It was pretty interesting.

 

 

Falstaff -- Robert Nye

 

This wasn't very good. It purports to be the memoirs of Falstaff's servant, and a "secret history" of the Battle of Agincourt, and it presents a picture of Falstaff and the narrator raunching it up Elizabethan style and cheating and tricking their friends and each other. It goes on well into the reign of Henry the Sixth, with Falstaff living on to age eighty, twenty or thirty years later than he's shown dying in Shakespeare. That may have been explained away as a trick Falstaff was playing on Nell Quickly, but if it was I missed it, since I could never get into the story and skimmed for a bit before abandoning it altogether a hundred pages in.

 

 

The Author's Farce -- Henry Fielding

 

His first successful play. He had written earlier ones that were all flops; I don't know if any of them survive. It's a three-act comedy, featuring an unsuccessful playwright named Harry Luckless, who is constantly rejected by greedy and stupid theater-managers -- all based on real managers of the day such as Colley Cibber and his son. At the same time Luckless is trying to marry for money and making a fool of himself. He manages to get his play put on at an independent theater (based on the Little Haymarket, where this play was staged) and the third act is mostly a play-within-a-play as we see Luckless's comedy performed: the Goddess of Nonsense chooses a husband from among six dunces (also based on real people Fielding felt like sticking it to.) A Constable appears to arrest Luckless for "abusing Nonsense" but a character in the play talks him into letting it continue, and the play and the real world get confused, with Luckless suddenly inheriting the throne of a far Eastern sultanate and marrying his landlady. There's a metafictional epilogue where a crowd of poets sit around arguing about how they would have ended the play. It's very funny, although it helps a lot to be up on your Augustan literary history, so you know who Fielding was crapping on and why. I liked it.

 

 

Grandfather's Chair -- Nathaniel Hawthorne

 

A children's history of New England, actually quite readable if you glide lightly over the saccharine framing-scenes of the children pleading with Grandfather for a story. It gives a lot more attention to pre-Revolutionary Massachusetts than most histories do, which is unsurprising in Hawthorne but a welcome change. There's a lively account of William Phips and his sunken treasure, ending with a picture of the ennobled Sir William sitting in the State House giving a dinner for all his old seafaring friends. I suppose Hawthorne got his details out of Cotton Mather's suck-up biography, since there's no mention of the escapades that made Samuel Eliot Morison refer to Phips and his men as a "crew of cut-throats who practiced every known form of vice." 

 

 

White Butterfly -- Walter Mosley

 

The third Easy Rawlins novel. We've jumped ahead now to 1956 and Easy is married with a baby daughter, living in a house with them and his older adopted son. He's approached by the LAPD, who strong-arm him into investigating the murders of four LA women. Easy is pissed about it because the first three victims were black, and the cops are only investigating now because the fourth victim is a white woman killed in a black neighborhood. At the same time he's having trouble with his wife, who wants to be let in on what Easy does for a living. Easy solves the murders despite pressure from the fourth victim's parents, who don't want it known that their daughter had a child with a black man. Easy's domestic problems grated on me, kind of. It bugged me that his wife openly tells him that she married him only because she wanted a baby, and it bugged me that they've been married for two years and she's only now decided she wants to know where his money comes from. What really got to me, though, was an exchange during an argument, when Easy says he's always been good to her and she snaps back that he'd better be, because "you ever raise your hand to me or my child I'll walk out that door after I shoot you dead" -- and I thought, "But there are two children in that family." I disliked the wife not because she left Easy for another man and took the baby, but because she didn't take the older boy; it made me think about what life must have been like for the boy with her in the house. It put a sour cast on the book for me.

 

 

A Slip of the Keyboard -- Terry Pratchett

 

A collection of non-fiction articles from his later years, many of them dealing with his early-onset Alzheimer's and his decision to end his life. There are several right-to-die advocacy articles and a long piece about the assisted-suicide facility in Switzerland, which was made into a BBC documentary called "Choosing to Die". As it turned out Pratchett died naturally in his sleep, or at least that's what his family says, so he didn't go to Switzerland after all. I found the book pretty depressing.

 

 

Exit Strategy -- Steve Hamilton

 

This is a sequel to his earlier book about hitman-in-training Nick Mason, and although it was exciting and suspenseful, with great fight scenes, it disappointed me. In this one Nick decides to get himself free of Darius Cole, forging a temporary alliance with the cop Sandoval and a federal agent. Cole, who's been presented all along as an all-powerful puppet master, is suddenly and jarringly revealed in the last four pages to be only a tool in the hands of the EVEN MORE all-powerful puppet masters who have been BEHIND EVERYTHING ALL ALONG!, a trope that was dumb the first time it was used back in caveman story-telling times and hasn't improved since. The stupid ending ruined the whole book for me. The last page clearly sets up a series of sequels which I will not be reading.

 

 

Foreign Gods, Inc. -- Okey Ndibe

 

An awful, nasty novel. The anti-hero is Ike (pronounced ee-kay), who has a dead-end job and life in New York. Ike came from Nigeria to study finance at Amherst College, where he got top grades but after graduation took the first of many wrong steps by abandoning an intelligent, interesting woman (right in the middle of a conversation about Nigerian literature!) to pursue a vain American in hopes of marrying her for a green card. His wife never appears in the novel -- they divorced before the story begins -- but to hear him tell it the marriage failed because she was selfish and demanding. I don't think we can rely much on his version of events, though, so who knows. I kept expecting the story to turn so I would start liking Ike, but I just disliked him more and more as it went on. He did get a green card but was turned down at a job interview at a finance company because his accent was too strong; he found this crushing and never applied anywhere else, instead working as a taxi driver and gambling away all his money. As the novel opens he's dead broke, months behind on his rent and all his bills. He decides to act on a plan he's been contemplating for some time: to return to his home village and steal the war-god Ngene, a wooden idol, and bring it back to New York, where he will sell it to a gallery that specializes in selling foreign gods to rich Americans. He borrows money from friends and maxes out a credit card to pay for the trip. He arrives to find a family feud in progress, his mother and sister -- who have become followers of a recently-arrived Christian preacher -- having turned against Ike's uncle and grandmother, who have remained faithful to Ngene. Ike visits the preacher and finds him an ignorant fool who is only interested in money; Ike insults him and leaves, going to see his uncle despite his mother's forbidding it. His uncle is the priest of Ngene, and he and his fellow traditionalists welcome Ike and treat him kindly; his uncle has always believed that Ngene will choose Ike to be the next priest, and he warns Ike that there's no choice about it: Ngene chooses you and that's that. Despite this, Ike goes ahead with his plan to steal Ngene, even though he realizes all the consequences: not only is taking the village's god away inherently immoral and wrong, Ike knows the preacher will certainly be blamed when the idol vanishes, and if his uncle doesn't die of the shock he will probably kill the preacher and get executed for it. Ignoring all of this, Ike steals the god and takes it to New York, where the owner of the gallery ridicules it and won't pay the huge sums Ike had fantasized about. So Ike ends up where he began, only worse -- he owes still more money that he can't pay; he's caused panic and violence in his home village, which he hears about from his sister, who blames him for it; and the looming presence of Ngene -- whom he sees in every corner even with the lights off -- tells him that he has unwillingly become Ngene's chief priest. The novel ends with him sitting in his dark apartment rocking back and forth in horror. I hated it. If I could give back having read it, I would.

 

 

The Zen of Fish -- Trevor Corson

 

A very good book despite the dumb title. (It's been reissued as The Story of Sushi, probably a sign of personnel turnover at the publisher.) It follows the story of a bunch of Californians learning to make sushi in a months-long class at a restaurant in Hermosa Beach. That's a very non-traditional way to learn, but nothing about sushi in America is "traditional" anyway; sushi chefs here are largely self-taught Japanese men who didn't have the time, money, or inclination to go through the expensive and years-long process of becoming a sushi chef in Japan. Sushi is made a little differently here because of our different eating habits (the author does descend occasionally into self-righteous purist nonsense -- it's not some huge insult to the chef if you eat the ginger slices as an appetizer rather than as a palate-cleanser between courses!) For one thing, American diners want to eat what they feel like instead of just taking what the chef decides to give you. For another, the rice in the nigiri has to be packed a little tighter in the US, because Americans tend to dip the rice in soy sauce, which would make a more traditional loosely-packed nigiri fall apart. The book does a good job of laying out the whole history of sushi, including the accidental discovery of soy sauce when someone decided to taste the brown ooze that seeped out of fermenting tofu, and the gradual refinements of technique. There are lots of different kinds of sushi but the mental picture everyone has of it -- the rice-and-fish nigiri and the rice, fish, vegetable, and seaweed rolls -- is actually Tokyo-style sushi, which became the style of sushi after the widespread destruction in Japan in World War II, because it can be made without a kitchen. There's also a great deal of fascinating information about the structure of fish muscles and what part of the fish makes the best sashimi. I already knew that the "wasabi" served in American restaurants is actually a mixture of hot mustard and horseradish with food coloring in it, but I was interested to learn that throughout most of sushi's history mustard was the preferred condiment: not only is wasabi hard to grow and expensive, but the leaves of the wasabi plant look a lot like the design on the crest of the Imperial family, so it would be disrespectful for common people to eat it. Good book.

 

 

*The Willowdale Handcar -- Edward Gorey

 

An illustrated story about three friends who find a handcar on a railroad siding, and for no particular reason decide to ride away on it. They're constantly on the periphery of an unexplained second story -- as they roll along the tracks they encounter fleeing wives, skulking figures who appear to be burying bodies, wrecked and abandoned cars, all the detritus of an Edwardian murder mystery; but they regard it all with detached indifference. I thought it was great.

 

 

*The Six Iron Spiders -- Phoebe Atwood Taylor

 

An Asey Mayo mystery, written during the war. Asey, who is too old to go back into the Navy, is now manufacturing tanks with his old boss and returns to Wellfleet for a long weekend. He misses a connection and has to hitchhike sixty miles from the airport (Dad spent some time trying to figure out what airport that could have been, and decided it was probably Fall River.) Naturally he trips over a murder first thing. (A state cop even says to him "This sort of thing doesn't happen when you're away.") The victim was bashed in the head with a "spider", that being an old-fashioned cast-iron skillet with legs to prop it above a fire, hence the name. Everyone and his brother seems to have acquired an iron spider lately, so there's the usual business of giving everyone a motive until Taylor decides which are the red herrings and which is the killer. A lot of the local color involves what Dad called the "maddening officiousness" of the civilian officials (such as the air-raid warden) which Dad says is very true to life. At one point the killer tricks Asey into pursuing him down a road where he's sure to be stopped by a "spotter" (a 4F civilian on the lookout for enemy landings) and detained. Asey winds up using the doctor's car because it's the only one on the Cape that has four good tires (due to wartime rationing.)

 

 

Negroes and the Gun -- Nicholas Johnson

 

A history of black people's use of guns in resistance to white violence through American history. It's written by an NRA supporter so there's some fetishization of gun violence -- passages about "so-and-so many grains of lead moving at such-and-such feet per second", that sort of thing. Of course its ultimate argument is against gun control, resting on a set of assumptions that form the core of justification for anti-gun-control philosophy: that murderers are inherently different from other people (the "born bad" theory); that state power is never sufficient to prevent illegal traffic of guns; that the American state is not inherently hostile to non-whites; that state power can never sufficiently protect ordinary people from born-bad people. As with all advocacy literature, the author is concerned to present his own side as the calm, rational antidote to the emotional hysteria of the other side, using such phrasing as "a surface interpretation might suggest...but a closer investigation reveals..." where "surface" and "closer" are just semantic wallpaper to cover up that all he's really saying is "their side says...but my side says..." The book has nothing new to say about the gun debate, but it does a better job as a work of history, going over a couple hundred years of blacks standing up to whites, and the distinction between self-defense and political violence. I might support legislation saying that only non-white people could own guns. Worth trying!

 

 

Born to Kvetch -- Michael Wex

 

An unexpectedly terrific book all about Yiddish and its cultural context. I knew that kvetch means to moan or complain; I didn't know that it literally means "to exert effort" or "to strain", specifically the kind of straining you do when you need more fiber in your diet. The point is that listening to someone kvetch is as much fun as listening to someone having a difficult time on the toilet. The author's mother wouldn't let him watch the Three Stooges -- not because of the violence but because a lot of their dialogue is in Yiddish and it's extremely vulgar. (Actors often used Yiddish to get around the Censorship Board.) A lot of Yiddish expressions are circumlocutions or in-jokes appropriate to an oppressed minority. A common Yiddish way of saying "bullshit" is nisht geshtoygen und nisht gefloygen, literally "didn't climb and didn't fly" (referring to Jesus: he didn't climb off the Cross into Heaven and he sure didn't fly there.) Some are transliterated even now: a stock phrase of Jewish comedians -- "What am I, chopped liver?" meaning, How come you're treating me like this? -- in the original is actually "What, am I a Christian now?" My favorite part dealt with the famously long and involved Yiddish curses, which have an underlying spirit of fun -- you might curse out someone who cut you off in traffic, or even a friend who was getting on your nerves. For someone who'd done something genuinely bad you wouldn't construct an elaborate curse, you'd just say yemakh sh'moy, may his name be erased. I remember some of the old ladies on my paper route saying that when they watched the news. An ideal Yiddish curse is khazer-fisl, "like a pig's foot": it sounds like a blessing until you get to the stinger at the end. (To be kosher an animal must have cloven feet and chew its cud; a pig is unclean because it doesn't chew its cud, but it does have cloven feet, so if you showed someone only the pig's foot, they might think it was good to eat, until you showed them the rest, and they realized they'd been had.) The book gives a terrific example: "You should own a thousand houses, with a thousand rooms in each house, and a thousand beds in each room, and every night you should sleep in a different bed, in a different room, in a different house, and get up every morning, and go down a different staircase, and get into a different car, driven by a different chauffeur, who should drive you to a different doctor -- and he shouldn't know what's wrong with you either!" I loved it.

 

 

All Shot Up -- Chester Himes

 

Another of his 1950s novels about Harlem. He wrote them in France, having permanently moved there to escape American racism; in fact they were initially published in French, although I believe he wrote in English. This one finds the detectives Grave Digger and Coffin Ed investigating an armed robbery that left several bystanders dead; the object of the robbery was a payroll carried by a ward boss, and the detectives are pretty sure the ward boss arranged the robbery himself in order to steal the money. But they don't want to bring it against him directly, both because they're reluctant to undermine a black politician who supports Harlemites against the white establishment and because they themselves often need the help of a powerful politician against their own white superiors. So they have to work out a way of clearing everything up without either bringing down the ward boss or letting him think he can stage fake crimes with impunity. Good story.

 

 

Shadows on the Koyukuk -- Sidney Huntington and Jim Rearden

 

A really interesting book about growing up in beyond-rural Alaska back in the teens and twenties. The author was the son of half-Athabascan parents, and the family made its living by fishing for salmon in the summer and trapping furs in the winter. I doubt Huntington could really have such vivid memories of things that happened when he was three years old, especially considering that he wrote the book in his seventies, but even if he remembered them more from being told about them they're probably accurate. I'm sure he did have vivid memories of his mother dying when he was five, and being left to take care of his younger brother and sister by himself because his father was away up the river for weeks and there were no neighbors. It's a good story, all about surviving in the wilderness beyond the Koyukuk River, hunting for food and building their own boats and dog sleds. There are harrowing episodes, such as the time he almost died after falling through the ice while his sled went on without him -- luckily his sled dogs eventually noticed that the sled was too light and came back to find him where he'd crawled out of the river. Or the year the ice jam built up so high the spring flood washed their house and boat away (they found the boat some miles downstream but they never did find any of the house.) There's also interesting passages about Athabascan customs, such as the way they speak in the third person when describing something they've accomplished, so as not to seem like they're bragging -- so a man telling the story of how he'd killed a bear with a spear, for example, would say "There was a young man who went hunting bear..." Huntington occasionally participated in old-fashioned bear hunts that I don't think would be legal now: hunters would locate a bear's den and one would wait out front with a spear while others would dig in through the roof of the den and make noise, so the bear would come out; the angry bear would charge the first thing it saw, so the hunter out front would brace the spear and let the bear charge on to it and impale itself, a staggeringly dangerous way to hunt. Good reading.

 

 

The House Spirit -- Kanoko Okamoto

 

An excellent collection of short stories from the thirties; Okamoto was a famous Buddhist scholar and poet who only turned to writing fiction in the last two or three years of her life, so this collection represents a great deal of her total output. They're very engaging, well-told stories about small facets of ordinary life, many of them having to do with food. My favorite was "Sushi", about a teenager working at her family's restaurant and gradually hearing the life story of a regular customer, who as a child was constantly sick and unable to eat anything except the sushi his mother carefully made for him, so that for him sushi has become emblematic of love and tenderness. They were very well written.

 

 

The Gold Bat -- P.G. Wodehouse

 

Another very early school story, with a main plot about the rugby team and a B-plot about some jerks who smash up people's stuff when they're not around. Nothing really memorable.

 

 

*Swann's Way -- Marcel Proust

 

The first volume of Remembrance of Things Past. Dad gave me this a long time ago, when he bought a newer edition from that academic-overstock catalog he subscribed to. This is the original C.K. Scott Moncrieff translation, not the more recent updated one. I prefer it for a few reasons: first, Moncrieff knew Proust and consulted with him both by letter and in person, a resource no other translator can have. Second, Moncrieff was Proust's contemporary and must have had a feel for the times that's impossible for a translator to have now. I remember a review called the new translation "A Proust for the twenty-first century!" I found that nonsensical since Proust didn't live in the twenty-first century, and what we actually want is a Proust for the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The novel doesn't really have a plot, being more a tone poem or a huge mosaic of imagery than a story, so the author's choice of words is even more important than usual. People can go overboard about that, though; take the opening sentence: Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure. Moncrieff translates it, I think unimprovably, as "For a long time I used to go to bed early." I've read critics say that since the temps element in the first word echoes the overall title -- A la Recherche du Temps Perdu -- then "Time" must be the first word in the English version, thus insisting on such awkward phrasings as "Time was I went to bed early", which seem to me to sacrifice elegance in English in a futile attempt to preserve elegance in French.

As for the novel itself, I liked it, though I think if I'd read it twenty-five years ago it would have bored me to death. I'm more willing now to follow along a character with whom I don't sympathize. The unnamed narrator, who is obviously meant to be Proust himself, though spiritually rather than literally (it's not an autobiography), is a boy growing up in the countryside in France just after the fall of Napoleon III, an only child and the youngest of a numerous and well-off family, and suffering from some sort of emotional problem that the nineteenth century could only diagnose as "nerves". He and his parents often go for long walks in the evenings, choosing one path or the other depending on the weather: either the "Guermantes Way" (a very long woodsy path that passes the estate of the Guermantes family) or "Swann's Way" (a shorter path along a stream that passes the house of their friend Charles Swann.) Interestingly the one thing that absolutely everyone knows about this book -- that the narrator's memory is sparked by the scent of a madeleine -- is wrong: it's actually the taste of a cup of tea that a slightly burnt madeleine has been dipped in. The sense of smell isn't even mentioned. Anyway the taste of the tea causes what Proust called "involuntary memory", a rush of memories, images, associations, all arising in your mind all at once in no sort of order, and the whole novel -- all seven volumes of it -- is meant to evoke that chaotic rush of images. I don't like the narrator much, as he seems kind of cynical, assuming the worst about everyone, and he's also a dreadful voyeur; he invents elaborate reasons why it's a wholly innocent accident that he happens to be hidden in the bushes outside someone's window where he can see and hear everything inside without being seen himself, which I don't think are even meant to be believed. He also gives involved descriptions of the inner feelings of the people he talks about, down to the tiniest shade of nuance, things he couldn't possibly know, so he must be inventing them to amuse himself. A very long section of the book is given to an episode before the narrator was born (although he describes it all with as much detail as though everyone involved had spoken to him about it with less reserve than in the Confessional) about a love-affair between Charles Swann and a woman named Odette. A lot of that part might as well have been set on an alien planet for all I could relate to it; it was all about society gatherings and what makes a person a desirable guest, and to what extent wit makes up for lack of aristocratic birth and vice versa. The hostesses, who are shown as petty tyrants, are constantly decreeing people "very witty" or "too dull for words" with so little reason that I have to conclude that none of them have any idea of what wit or good taste actually are, and they're only playing a sort of charade. That may be the point of that section, I don't know. I didn't like Swann much, but I liked Odette and her unjustifiably snooty friends even less, so I was glad for Swann when the affair ended badly. There are six volumes still to go to make up the whole novel, so I will probably have to come back to this several times -- I don't suppose I'll be able to hold the whole thing in my mind at once.

 

 

The American -- Henry James

 

Way back in one of my college classes -- Major British Writers, I think -- I had a terrific professor, a Socialist firebrand who really knew and loved the material (his lectures on the cultural background were things like "Europe then was dominated by Kaiser Wilhelm, an inbred moron ... novels in England were partly formed by the tastes of King George the Fifth -- another idiot, by the way --" I never skipped that class.) One day he mentioned The American because of a scene in it that he described vividly and said was a real picture of the change in European-American relations in the nineteenth century. The American hero, Christopher Newman (ha ha) wants to marry a woman from a noble French family; he speaks to her mother, an old dragon who coldly tells him he's not good enough and turns away to indicate the conversation is over. But Newman, instead of slinking away, simply says "I'm rich." After a pause, the woman turns back and says "How rich?" My professor described this so well that soon afterwards I bought the book; but right about then, for another class, I read What Maisie Knew and Daisy Miller, both of which I hated, so The American sat on my shelf unread for 27 years, until now. I liked it a lot. Newman is a very likable hero, a man who's worked for a living since age ten and retired rich in his thirties, and has come to Europe to see some culture. He's a picture of what James considered the best sort of American, a direct, honest, thoroughly good-natured man who's inclined to take people as they are. The scene with the old noblewoman is just as my professor descibed it. The main conflict is internal: after Newman becomes engaged to his fiancée Claire, her mother and brother forbid the marriage and force her out of Paris, and since she cannot bring herself to marry against the will of her family Claire joins a Carmelite convent. At the same time Newman learns that Claire's family has a terrible secret and gets hold of evidence that if published will ruin them. He debates making it public; on the one hand he frankly admits that he has been hurt and wants to hurt them back, while on the other hand ferreting out other people's secrets seems like a low and nasty thing to do. Eventually he burns the evidence, deciding that using it would be beneath him. One of James's points, I think, is that a smaller man would have published the evidence, in the same way that Claire's brother fought a duel rather than let an unimportant insult pass; but America has the potential to produce bigger men. Newman never does see Claire again, either, which I liked because that would have cheapened the ending.

 

 

The Eternal Husband -- Fyodor Dostoyevsky

 

A late novella, generally praised by people who can read Russian as his most successful piece of pure craftsmanship; I'll have to take their word for that, although I did like it. It tells the story of Velchaninov, a middle-aged, moderately well-off landowner, who is living in St. Petersburg because he's involved in a contentious trial about a disputed tract of land. He doesn't really like city life and he finds the trial exasperating, plus he's a bit of a hypochondriac, so he's testy and unsocial. One day he unexpectedly meets Trusotsky, a man from a country town where Velchaninov once held a government post; they were friendly then but they have not seen each other in years. Velchaninov is stunned to learn that Trusotsky's wife Natalia has recently died. It turns out that Velchaninov had an affair with Natalia and her breaking it off was why he left that town. Velchaninov isn't inclined to renew the friendship, especially because Trusotsky has deteriorated and become an alcoholic; but for old times' sake he sees him once or twice, and meets his daughter Liza, who is neglected and ill. Doing the math Velchaninov becomes convinced that Liza is actually his own daughter, and he arranges for her to go live with a country couple in hopes of recuperating, but her illness worsens and she dies. Trusotsky, wishing to marry a much younger woman, takes Velchaninov -- who doesn't feel he can refuse -- along to a party at her house, but is enraged when the woman and her friends make fun of him while showing marked respect to Velchaninov, and later he gets drunk and tries to murder Velchaninov with a razor -- because of the party? Because of Liza? Because of the affair with Natalia? It's hard to say. Anyway Velchaninov runs him off but doesn't report him to the police, and soon after the trial ends in his favor and he can return home, so he's much happier and more relaxed. Not long after that he meets Trusotsky again in a train station, accompanied by his new wife, a younger woman; Trusotsky pointedly does not ask Velchaninov to come visit them, but watching the behavior of a young and handsome soldier traveling with them, Velchaninov is convinced that Trusotsky's second marriage will turn out the same as the first. It really held my attention.

 

 

*The Decipherment of Linear B -- John Chadwick

 

A good book on the Minoan stone tablets dating from about 1400 BCE or so. There are two distinct alphabets, known as Linear A and B. Linear A has never been deciphered, because there just aren't enough existing samples of it for study. There have been several discoveries of Linear B tablets at several sites, though; the tablets were made of clay, and in places where there was a major fire the tablets baked to stone. People attempted to decipher them for a hundred years or so, but no real progress got made until an Englishman named Michael Ventris -- an architect who taught himself ancient languages as a hobby -- worked on it in the 1940s and realized that the tablets were written in a form of ancient Greek. Chadwick worked with Ventris to help him publish his book, so he had first-hand knowledge of how Ventris approached the problem. For such an esoteric subject it's very readable, laid out almost like a mystery novel. Really interesting.

 

 

Walkin' the Dog -- Walter Mosley

 

A second collection of stories about the ex-con Socrates Fortlow, who lives in LA in a sort-of apartment that's really the space between two industrial buildings. Most of the book deals with his efforts just to keep his head above water; the hours-long bus rides to his job at the supermarket, keeping his temper when dealing with the hostile middle manager, looking after a homeless boy he feels responsible for. There's a striking scene in the middle of the book where he gets mugged; Mosley has done such a good job of building up our idea of Socrates as a hugely strong man that it's genuinely shocking when the much younger mugger just shrugs off his punches. (Socrates eventually wins the fight by hitting the guy in the head with a rock.) It's notable that pretty much as soon as he has a steady income he becomes more active in resisting social injustice. The climax of the book involves him making a public demonstration against racist police brutality and losing his little gains because of it. Very well written.

 

 

North of Nowhere -- Steve Hamilton

 

Usually I'm put off by books that say "A Name-of-Protagonist Novel!" on the cover, but I've liked other books by this author so I picked this up and immediately regretted it. It's a story about an asshole who lives by himself somewhere in a very cold place -- far northern Minnesota, I think? -- and who for some reason, even though he's an open and unapologetic jerk, still has devoted friends who insist on hanging out with him despite the way he treats them. I got as far as a scene where the inexplicably devoted friend is insisting on the hero joining him in some hunting expedition or something, but I got fed up and threw the book away so I may not be describing that accurately. I didn't like it, is what I'm saying.

 

 

Saint Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox -- G.K. Chesterton

 

This book was really just one long sneer. Chesterton was very much a laudator temporis acti, and he seems only to have written the book in order to have a platform to compare the brilliance of the thirteenth century with the dull stupidity of twentieth-century writers other than himself. You know those modern pagans who are always saying things like "Ooh, science is only now discovering things that shamans understood perfectly thousands of years ago"? Chesterton is like that. There's very little actual information about the saint himself; most of those passages are descriptions of what Chesterton imagined Aquinas's state of mind to be, which tells you rather more about Chesterton than it does about Aquinas.

 

 

The Night in Question -- Tobias Wolff

 

A well-written short-story collection, with some war stories and some slice-of-life stories. There was a good one about an overworked newspaper editor who gets fired after he runs the obituary of a guy who's still alive (the guy, it turns out, sent in his own obituary just so he could see something nice about himself in print); another about a young teenager whose divorced father takes him out one night and insists on driving through heavy snow on unsafe roads, with a very good sense of the boy's ill-hidden fear of his father and the unstated reasons for it. I really liked the Vietnam story where the narrator's buddy keeps getting singled out by their unit's commander, who doesn't like him, to go on dangerous night recon missions; the narrator, reflecting that the experience of war has taken away everything he liked about himself except one thing -- the conviction that he's the kind of man who'd do anything to help a buddy -- nerves himself up to volunteer in his buddy's place, but the buddy gets killed before he can and he's left to deal with the guilt he feels over being relieved that he won't have to volunteer now. Good book.

 

 

The Specialist -- Chic Sale

 

A short book from the twenties, a prose adaptation of Sale's vaudeville routine: a comic monologue where Sale played a hayseed carpenter giving the audience a lecture on the tricks of the trade involved in building an outhouse. It was probably funnier on stage, but I liked it.

 

 

Integration is a BITCH! -- Tom Floyd

 

A very funny collection of cartoons from the sixties about being the only black guy at an office job. A lot of them are pretty savage -- the hero working late, clearly within view of the receptionist saying on the phone "No, all the men have gone home"; a white co-worker about to tell a joke but changing his mind when he sees the hero. My favorite was a cartoon of the office going out to a movie: the scene on the movie screen shows a pair of Great White Hunter types tied up and menaced by black tribesmen, and our hero is loudly cheering while all his co-workers glare at him. It was good reading, and a reminder that not a lot has changed since then.

 

 

The Grid -- Gretchen Bakke

 

A really good book about America's power grid, which is actually three grids: one for east of the Mississippi, one for west of the Mississippi (which also includes parts of western Canada and northern Mexico) and a separate one for Texas. An important thing about the grid is that it wasn't designed, it just sort of happened -- and it's been in more or less its current state since before World War II. The Carter administration established the Department of Energy partly to prepare for an overhaul of the power grid, although naturally nothing ever got done. One problem is that our electrical systems work so well that no one ever thinks about them, even though the grid started to fail about fifteen years ago and we're only now starting to do something about it. Another is that, as presently constituted, the grid only really works well when it has constant, consistent, predictable input -- exactly what solar and wind power don't provide. Yet another, and really the most important one, is that electricity, practically speaking, can't be stored. Every watt of power you use was created the instant before you used it. This is a problem because for a balanced system variable output is just as bad as variable input. There's a huge spike in demand around five PM, when people get home from work and turn on the TV and the microwave and do their laundry and crank the AC or the heat, and then a big valley when people turn everything off and go to bed. (This is why devices that consume a lot of power, such as dishwashers and especially dryers, now usually come with a timer option so you can set them to run in the middle of the night to even out the demands on the grid.) With hydroelectric power you can just turn a faucet to make the power output go up or down with demand; but you can't turn the wind off, and if you call up the wind farm and ask them to stop some of their windmills, powering them down takes time, even if they're willing to do it -- which they may not be, if they're paid by the kilowatt-hour. Windmills that aren't turning don't generate revenue. The grid needs to be made more robust, which probably means overhauling the monolithic grid into a much larger number of smaller semi-independent grids, so a series of outages in Ohio (often caused by power companies failing to trim the trees near their high-power lines) won't cause a blackout over the whole East Coast. There will also have to be some spillover mechanism, so that one grid getting too much input can reroute some of the output to another grid in order to stay balanced. Large-scale battery farms would be good too, but we appear to have reached the limit of battery technology, and until someone works out a way to synthesize lithium we're stuck. Very, very good book.

 

 

Black Betty -- Walter Mosley

 

The fourth Easy Rawlins book. We've jumped ahead five years to 1961, and Easy is living in a rented house with his two adopted children because most of his money is tied up in a real estate project, which he's running through a front because he doesn't want any stakeholders to know that the primary investor is black. A white private eye asks him to take on a job looking for a black woman who's gone missing; Easy doesn't want to get involved but he needs the money so he agrees. The missing woman is an older woman Easy knew in Texas when he was a boy, and he tracks her into a morass of wills and inheritance and questions of who is and isn't related. At the same time he's trying, in a keep-at-a-safe-distance kind of way, to stop his conscienceless friend Mouse from going on a murder spree; Mouse has just gotten out of prison after doing five years for manslaughter, and not knowing who called the cops on him he's decided just to kill everyone who might have done it. Easy manages to sort out the missing-person case and stop Mouse from killing half the neighborhood, but he loses his real-estate investment when his agent sells him out to a group of rich white men. It really held my interest, I stayed up late to finish it.

 

 

The Great God Pan -- Arthur Machen

 

A nineteenth-century horror story, built around implying that a young woman was impregnated by the devil, later having a daughter who embodies evil. The prose is a little purple. I don't know if the author intended this, but for me the real horror of the story is the way the gentleman-scientist calmly asserts that since he took the young woman off the streets in the first place, he's within his rights to perform any experiments he feels like on her. It wasn't bad.

 

 

*The Asey Mayo Trio -- Phoebe Atwood Taylor

 

Three wartime Asey Mayo novellas. The mysteries are silly but they're an interesting picture of wartime life on the Cape: very few cars because of the lack of gas and tires and parts; women running local businesses like the auto mechanic's and the towing company, and doing a good job, much to everyone's surprise; blackouts and rationed food and hoarding. Asey grumbles that such a heavy blackout isn't really necessary three miles from the ocean, but Dad notes that the blackout was just as heavy in Ashland, thirty miles further inland. People get around on bicycles and horses and old horse-drawn carts -- Cousin Jennie blisters Asey for leaving harnessed horses standing in the rain ("If your grandfather knew you let horses stand!") One of the plots involves a "fallen" branch that was actually planted in the road in order to stop a moving truck to make enough time for the murder -- a ten-year-old boy notices that the branch is out of place because it's maple and there are no maple trees near that road. (Dad notes that it wouldn't be at all surprising for even young children to know one tree from another back then, when people were more "woodsy".)

 

 

Blues For Mister Charlie -- James Baldwin

 

A horrifying play based on the murder of Emmett Till. A white man murders a black teenager and is acquitted by the all-white jury; the appalling open racism of the prosecutor, the jury, and the townspeople generally is thoroughly laid out, but the real stinger is the behavior of the "progressive" white character, who vocally favors civil rights but ends up committing perjury at the trial to save the murderer's life. This sums up Baldwin's opinion of the civil rights movement: liberal whites can talk big all they want, but when push comes to shove, black people can't rely on them. Nothing about that has changed in the last fifty years, I think.

 

 

The Man of Numbers -- Keith Devlin

 

A biography of Leonardo of Pisa, the thirteenth-century Italian mathematician who was most responsible for introducing Hindu-Arabic numerals to Europe. Leonardo is widely known as "Fibonacci", a nickname made up by a 19th-century historian based on the fact that in his most important book, Liber Abaci, he referred to himself as filius Bonacci, "son of Bonacci" -- puzzling because his father's name was actually Guglielmo, but possibly he meant "a relative of the Bonacci clan". Leonardo's father was a prosperous merchant and from a young age Leonardo traveled with him all around the Mediterranean and to several cities in Africa, where he first learned the Hindu-Arabic numerals. He was something of a wunderkind: he published his Liber Abaci, explaining the whole system of Hindu-Arabic mathematics, when he was twenty-seven. The book clearly explains the vast superiority of the Hindu-Arabic system to the Roman numerals then in use, with chapters on subjects ranging from housekeeping to reckoning compound interest. There are also chapters on abstract issues of number theory, such as primes and irrational numbers and how much better the Hindu-Arabic numerals are at representing fractional quantities. In one of these chapters he poses and solves a word-problem dealing with the breeding of rabbits; his answer involves an exponential series where each number is the sum of the two numbers preceding it, which has become known as the "Fibonacci sequence". We know a great deal about Leonardo's work but not a whole lot about his personal life, so this book spends most of its time on his place in history. It was pretty good.

 

 

The Letters of James Branch Cabell -- Edward Wagenknecht, ed.

 

I first saw Cabell's name mentioned in an aside in Neil Gaiman's Sandman, a background detail I now realize was meant to establish that a character's taste in books ran to the obscure. Cabell was a very popular writer in the twenties, but his star dimmed after that, probably because of his artistic vision: at some point he decided that all of his novels taken together should comprise the spiritual biography of a medieval Spanish nobleman named Dom Manuel, with the various novels' protagonists as Manuel's reincarnations. (It would probably make more sense if I'd read more of his books.) The problem was that he heavily re-wrote all his earlier novels to make them fall in line with his new idea and then refused to let anyone publish the originals. (Imagine if Isaac Asimov, after his ill-advised attempt in the late eighties to make all his novels tie together, had gone back and re-written The Caves of Steel to include time-traveling characters from The End of Eternity, and then made that the only edition anyone could get.) I thought this collection wasn't edited well, since the letters are arranged by recipient rather than chronologically, which is needlessly confusing. I also got a picture of Cabell as someone I would have disliked a great deal, mostly for his annoying artsily superior attitude; the bulk of his letters seem to be all about how everyone is too stupid to understand his work, and how all modern writers are garbage. It's not enlivened by his O tempora, O mores laments about the incredible sub-human imbecility of people who voted for Roosevelt. I felt like his character was pretty well illustrated by a passage about how he didn't like staying near the ocean, since its ceaseless motion was dull and insipid and seeing the distant boats was a disagreeable reminder of the folly of human striving, and like that. He says in several letters that he doesn't want to be remembered solely as "the author of Jurgen", which is too bad because that's the only one of his books anyone still reads. It's the only one I've read, and after going through these letters I'm not going to bother with any of the others, even if I could find them.

 

 

Iron Dawn -- Richard Snow

 

An extraordinarily well-written and gripping book about the building of the USS Monitor and its battle with the ironclad Merrimack at Hampton Roads in 1862. Technically only the Merrimack was an "ironclad" -- that is, it was a wooden ship retrofitted with an iron framework; the Monitor was made wholly of iron from the start. Speaking of technicalities, the author mentioned that an academic once wrote a 200-page book on whether the ship's name was properly the Merrimack or the Merrimac (concluding that the k is proper because the ship was named after the river, not the town.) That's wholly apart from the question of whether she should be called the Merrimack at all, since the Confederacy renamed her the Virginia; the maritime authorities say that since the Confederacy was never recognized by the US as a legal government, it didn't have the authority to rename the ship, so the Merrimack she remains. The book does a great job of illustrating the many characters involved with both ships without ever getting bogged down, maintaining a breathless pace right up to the Monitor's eleventh-hour arrival at the Hampton Roads, literally in the nick of time to save the Union fleet and the harbor behind it, and possibly the Union itself. Public opinion may never have turned faster: when the Monitor steamed into Hampton Roads the onlookers could not have been less impressed, since she was barely 150 feet long with a deck only a few inches above the water, looking like nothing so much as a cheese box floating on a plank. But after she single-handedly fought off the Merrimack, against which the whole fleet had been helpless the day before, she was cheered to the skies -- and more tellingly, when the news of the battle crossed the Atlantic, the shipyards of Europe not only scrapped plans for building any more wooden ships, but even abandoned work on the ones already in progress. A fantastic book.

 

 

The Pulp Jungle -- Frank Gruber

 

Gruber was a prolific writer for the old pulp magazines, successful in his day but forgotten now. This is a retrospective of his early days, written in the sixties, long after the pulps had gone under. There's a lot of interesting detail about living on a shoestring, like eating for free at automats (you took a soup bowl and filled it up with hot water from the tea urn, crumbled some free crackers into it, and sat at a table where you poured in half a bottle of ketchup: voilà, tomato soup. Since automats didn't have waiters there was no one to catch you.) There's also good stories about the oddball editors of the thirties, like the one who got sick in the middle of a story meeting and threw up his last night's drinking into the wastebasket while gesturing Gruber to go on with his pitch. I would have liked it more except that I'm sure I wouldn't have liked Gruber had I known him; he has only negative things to say about anyone, and he goes off on stupid digressions about how college is bad for people and how no editor has ever helped any writer in the slightest, and how he, Gruber, earned absolutely everything in his life through his own hard work and owed nothing at all to anyone. He has a telling habit: several times he tells the same story, with only the names and locales changed, of how he got into an argument with someone and there was just about to be a fight, but the other guy saw the look in his eyes and backed down. Never having met anyone involved I can still guarantee you that none of those almost-fights ever happened anywhere outside Gruber's imagination. The book is as well-written as Gruber's fiction, which is to say it's only competent; his books have been out of print for fifty years and more.

 

 

Witches, Midwives, and Nurses -- Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English

 

A very interesting book, originally published as a pamphlet in the early seventies and spread through samizdat. Its overall concern is to describe how women were deliberately and systematically pushed out of roles in health care, a process accelerated by the anti-empiricism of the nineteenth century, a period when essentially all doctors were quacks. Men running hospitals in the 1800s and 1900s established a canonical procedure, and they stuck to that procedure even if it killed the patient. To justify themselves they had to insist that women healers were ignorant butchers (in the same way that medieval women who challenged the male hierarchy were labeled witches and silenced) even though 19th- century female midwives had a far better record of patient survival than male obstetricians, and the experience of labor and birth was far less traumatic for patients of midwives, which meant a faster and healthier recovery, which continues to be true today. Some of the research the book originally quoted has since been shown to be incorrect, mostly because of new research that only happened because this book was written; this edition incorporates the newer research, which doesn't change the basic conclusions. It would probably be hard to overestimate the effect this book had on labor-and-delivery treatment and nursing generally over the last forty years. My mom went to nursing school in the early fifties and the emphasis then was on robotically following the doctors' orders; the school was more tightly regimented than the Army and nurses were taught never to use their own judgement. Today one of the main functions of a nurse is to keep an eye on the doctors and make sure they don't screw up. 

 

 

Red Harvest -- Dashiell Hammett

 

An excellent noir story from the twenties. It's the book that inspired Kurosawa to make Yojimbo, which means it's also ultimately the source for A Fistful of Dollars and Last Man Standing and every other movie that copied Kurosawa: the story of a crooked town run by gangs and the nameless stranger who rides in and cleans it up by setting all the criminal gangs against each other, while leaving you in doubt about his personal morality until the end. The stranger in this case is the Continental Op, a recurring short-story character of Hammett's, here appearing in his first novel. He's an operative for the Continental Detective Agency, a fictional version of the Pinkertons (Hammett was a Pinkerton agent in real life.) He's sent by the agency to the fictional California town of Personville, where's he's supposed to take on a job for the publisher of the local newspaper, but the publisher is murdered before they can meet; the Op learns that the publisher was leading a campaign to clean up the town, and his murder has sparked the local crime bosses -- one of whom is the chief of police -- to start blaming each other. The Op finds out that the publisher was actually killed by a jealous rival over a woman, which would be enough to calm things down, except that by that time the police chief has already tried twice to have the Op killed, and to get even the Op decides to bring down all the gangs and sets out to sow dissension among them. The book is elevated by a strong scene in the middle -- a scene that didn't make it into any of the movie adaptations -- where the Op has to get drunk so he can ignore his conscience, because he knows that his plan will directly cause the death of dozens of people, and he has to think about what kind of man his job has turned him into. It's a terrific read, fast-moving and exciting, full of shootouts, narrow escapes, car chases, even a femme fatale -- everything you'd want from a pulp story.

 

 

The Big Gold Dream -- Chester Himes

 

A Harlem novel from the early sixties. This one involves another religious scam -- every preacher who appears in any Himes story is a cynical, philandering con man. When a woman apparently drops dead of poisoning during a street salvation show, a lot of plot lines get set in motion -- the hair-trigger detectives Grave Digger and Coffin Ed come to investigate the poisoning; the woman's husband rushes to find the money he's convinced she's stashed away; the local vultures hurry to her apartment to sell her furniture to a pawn shop. A couple more murders happen there after the pawnbroker finds a pile of cash hidden inside the sofa, but that turns out to be a red herring since the money is Confederate scrip that's been in the sofa for a hundred years. Eventually the detectives threaten and pistol-whip their way to the answer, which I found kind of unsatisfying. I didn't think it was one of his best.

 

 

The Head of Kay's -- P.G. Wodehouse

 

A school story, about an older boy who gets stuck being the student-in-charge of a school house run by a fussy, petty, ineffective schoolmaster named Kay. As far as I can tell Wodehouse legitimately believed that the real business of a school is turning out boys who are good at playing rugby and cricket. I didn't think much of it.

 

 

Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee -- Robert H. Gulik, trans.

 

A very interesting book -- a Chinese detective novel from the 18th century, featuring a real-life judge named Di Ren-jieh who lived during the Tang dynasty. The novel was written a thousand years after Di's lifetime, so it doesn't pretend to be literally factual. Gulik was a diplomat who worked for the Dutch embassy to the Kuomintang during World War II; he spent his free time translating Chinese literature, including this book. The novel tells the story of a busy two or three weeks in Judge Dee's life, when he has to solve three complicated cases more or less simultaneously -- a Tang-era judge was a combination judge, detective, and policeman. Chinese detective stories usually have supernatural elements and long digressions about philosophy; Gulik says in his preface that he chose to translate this book particularly because it has little philosophy and only one ghost, so it's closer to Western detective fiction. I had mixed feelings about the story. On the one hand I liked how Dee never accepts the easy answer and always pushes on to find the truth, even at risk to his career and life; on the other hand, he's amazingly callous and has nearly everyone who appears in his court tortured, just to see if their story changes under torment. It was a pretty lively story, full of interesting characters; I thought it was well done.

 

 

Karma Cola -- Gita Mehta

 

A book about the modern "selling" of India, a process that began in the 1960s, when large numbers of hippies from Europe and America came to India on self-described spiritual pilgrimages; according to Mehta, when the Indians realized that the Westerners were coming to India looking to fill up the emptiness in their lives, they cynically packaged up various Indian mystical traditions and made them into a commodity to sell to gullible enlightenment-tourists. Throughout the book I kept thinking of the A3 song "Ain't Goin' to Goa", especially the bit where D.Wayne says "The righteous truth is, there ain't nothin' worse than some fool lyin' on some third-world beach in spandex psychedelic trousers, smokin' damn dope and pretendin' he gettin' consciousness expansion!" The same sort of thing happened in Okinawa in the fifties and sixties, with the swarm of fake martial-arts teachers preying on the ignorance of the Americans and drowning out the small number of genuine karate masters, and Mehta thinks it had something of the same effect in India: with armies of con artists pushing made-up temples and cults and retreats to take advantage of the tourists, people lost respect for the actual yogis and lamas and parama-hamsas who have been a prominent thread in Indian culture for thousands of years, which she thinks contributes heavily to a spiritual flattening in modern-day India. A really good book.

 

 

The Revenge of Analog -- David Sax

 

This is a book about the persistence and even resurgence of analog technology in the last ten or fifteen years. I didn't like the writing style; it was already a bad sign in the introduction when the author managed to repeat the title of the book fourteen times in four pages. It's divided into chapters on various currently-thriving analog products, such as vinyl LPs or Moleskin notebooks. The author doesn't really have an argument to make, simply relying on a barrage of words like "magical", "somehow", "indefinably", and "authentic", while working hard not to notice that all these products are expensive luxury goods for niche markets. I thought it was pretty pointless and I didn't finish it.

 

 

Why the Wheel is Round -- Steven Vogel

 

I thought this was great. It's written by an engineer and it shows -- the writing is so dry I could only read a chapter at a time, but the information was fascinating. It's all about the engineering challenges of wheels and wheeled vehicles and how they probably came to be invented, with long sections on axles, undercarriages, friction problems (wooden axles are almost always made from the lignum vitae plant, because it's extraordinarily dense and it exudes oil under pressure), spinning jennies, flywheels (made with the majority of the mass on the rim because of angular momentum), treadmills, gears, millstones, and more. I had always thought pocket-watches were bejewelled simply out of vainglory, but it turns out that the watch escapement is a rotating rod; for the watch to be accurate the rod can't be deformed by the pressure of the watch plate, which means it needs to be harder than steel, so that's why they used diamonds. I really liked it.

 

 

The Right Mistake -- Walter Mosley

 

The third collection of short stories about the aging ex-con Socrates Fortlow. I didn't think it was as good as the first two. The arc that connects the stories is Socrates's founding of a community center where people from various backgrounds can meet and talk out their problems. Throughout the book we're told how important the work they do there is, and how important and influential everyone says it is, but we don't actually see very much of it so we really just have to take the omniscient narrator's word for it. The book gives a lot of time to the first real romantic relationship Socrates has had since getting out of prison, which was believable but didn't make me care about it, and then ends with a fantasy piece of wish-fulfillment where Socrates kills a policeman in self-defense and then gets acquitted at the trial even though he's a poor black man who's previously served thirty years for rape and murder. I wasn't engaged.

 

 

Amédée -- Eugene Ionesco

 

An absurdist play about Amédée, a playwright, and his wife Madeleine, a switchboard operator, who live in an apartment somewhere in France. Both are unable to concentrate on their work because they're distracted by the presence of a man's dead body in their guest room. It's never explained who the man is or how he died; they tell several conflicting stories about it, but the only sure thing is that the body has been there for years and they're terrified of the neighbors finding out. As if angry at being ignored, the corpse has somehow been causing mushrooms to grow all over the apartment, and as the play opens it's begun growing -- Amédée and Madeleine are constantly going over and looking in on it in horrified fascination. Eventually the body's legs burst through into the main room -- which must be fun to stage -- and Amédée decides to drag the body out the window and throw it in the river, but he gets tangled in the legs and when the body inexplicably flies away into the air he's carried away with it. If the play has a point beyond weirdness for weirdness's sake, I didn't see it.

 

 

*Going, Going, GONE -- Phoebe Atwood Taylor

 

An Asey Mayo story, where Asey comes home from the tank-manufacturing plant for a long weekend and gets roped into taking Cousin Jennie to an auction, which he hates. (Cousin Syl isn't there to take her because he's fighting in the Pacific, of course.) Taylor seems to know a lot about auctioneers and she spends a lot of time on the auction, getting some laughs out of Asey's sour opinion of the Currier and Ives prints that all auctions were loaded with back then -- he grumbles that Jennie is a sucker for "paintings of little boys who look like they're dying of malnutrition." As predicted, Jennie buys a Currier and Ives print along with a broken whatnot that she expects Asey to fix up, which is kind of more interesting than the actual plot, which involves a dead body turning up inside a locked chest at the auction, and Asey solving the murder by figuring out what happened to the big pile of heavy books that was in the chest originally. The victim was on the rationing board; war rationing, especially of food and gas, was always a big presence in everyone's mind -- Dad, sixty years later, could still rattle off the details of the A, B, and C stickers for gas priority from memory. There are a lot of other war details -- car headlights are all painted black on the upper half, old Doc Cummings is the only MD for three towns around because all the others are in the Army, and Asey has trouble chasing a bad guy because all the open spaces he's used to running through have been filled up with Victory Gardens. I liked it.

 

 

Crazy Rich Asians -- Kevin Kwan

 

This was funny but I didn't totally get into it because I didn't really like anyone. The heroine is Rachel, a professor at NYU, who's dating a fellow-professor, Nick, who invites her to come to Singapore as his guest for the wedding of his best friend, for whom he is the best man. Nick fails to warn Rachel that the bride and groom are among the richest people in the world, and that he himself comes from a family of immeasurable wealth. The book didn't manage to persuade me that it was believable that Nick could have thought that the culture and class shock between Rachel and his family wouldn't be important and that he didn't even think he needed to prepare Rachel at all. Most of the book is given to satirical descriptions of the ridiculous excess that Nick's family wallows in, contrasted with their pathetic narrow-mindedness, since his relatives care about nothing whatever outside of their net worth and spend whatever time they're not managing their portfolios in bitter gossip and back-stabbing. It was all very soap-opera-ish, and I kind of wanted everyone in the book to drop dead. I did get a lot of laughs out of it, but not enough to make me want to read the sequels.

 

 

*Within a Budding Grove -- Marcel Proust

 

The second part of Remembrance of Things Past. I'm not clear just how old the narrator is in this novel, but it's somewhere in the middle teens. The first part returns to his life at Combray (based on Illiers, in north-Central France -- the village actually changed its name to Combray because of Proust!) and his parents' social life, particularly the dinner guests, with whom the narrator can converse now that he's old enough to sit at the table with the adults. The conversations are wide-ranging, but the narrator concentrates on the ones about art -- he's an aesthetically inclined person, very interested in painting, music, theater, architecture, and especially the design of clothes; he sometimes spends pages at a time discussing women's dresses (really to the point of weariness -- I started skimming those passages.) He also becomes more acquainted with the Swann family, and develops a crush on the Swanns' daughter, Gilberte, who's about his age. Even though we were warned in the first novel that Swann had made an imprudent marriage and was no longer as well received in society because of his wife's low character, I was surprised to find out that Madame Swann is in fact the same Odette with whom he carried on the long and unhappy affair described in the "Swann In Love" section of the first book, which ended with the two of them realizing they didn't like each other and breaking it off. I wonder what changed? Anyway the whole middle of the book covers the narrator's crush on Gilberte and his later puppy-like infatuation with her mother. There's another memory-scene, set in a park in summer, where Gilberte is teasing the narrator by playing keep-away with a letter of his; he wrestles with her for it and unexpectedly has his first orgasm (described very allusively by the Victorian Moncrieff -- I had to read that passage several times before I understood what had happened.) As he leaves in confusion, the odor of sex, which he's now consciously smelling for the first time, suddenly brings back the memory of his childhood visits to the apartment of his uncle Adolphe, described in Swann's Way, and he understands for the first time what the women who visited his uncle were there for.

The last section, about half the book, covers a months-long visit to the fictional coastal town of Balbec, where his parents send him for his health, accompanied by his grandmother. He wavers between adolescence and adulthood, making friends with well-known artists and society people but generally preferring the company of the crowd of teenage girls visiting the resort for the summer. Among these is Albertine Simonet, apparently destined to become the love of his life later on, but at this time he's more or less in love with all of them, intoxicated by their youthful beauty and the general undercurrent of sexual awakening. (This is the significance of the title in French, À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, literally "In the shadow of young girls in flower".) As the summer fades the girls go home one by one, until only the narrator and his grandmother are left in the cold, half-manned hotel, finally leaving in the autumn with the narrator realizing that the picture of those girls on the sunny beach will stay in his mind forever. My attention wandered sometimes and it took me a while to get through it, but I did enjoy it.

 

 

The Impossible Fortress -- Jason Rekulak

 

This was basically an After-School Special, if you remember those: a silly morality-play for teenagers. It's even set in the mid-80s, the After-School Special's heyday. It's the story of a nerdy kid in his early teens and his loser friends, whose dumb plan to obtain a Playboy magazine gets them all in trouble. I had the same problem with it that I had with the TV equivalents, in that the hero is absurdly powerless against peer pressure, letting other kids push him into an idiotic scheme for breaking into a convenience store that involves luring away dogs, crossing rooftops on planks, and deactivating alarm codes. I just couldn't accept that the hero would never have said "Okay, that's enough" at any of the several points where he has the opportunity to walk away. I'm sure the author didn't intend it, but I ended up regarding the hero as a genuinely bad person who deserved a lot more punishment than he got, and I thought everyone forgave him way too readily. I didn't like it.

 

 

The Death of Napoleon --- Simon Leys

 

A short novel that imagines Napoleon escaped from St. Helena in 1821 by switching places with a lookalike. He plans to announce his return and raise his loyalists when he reaches Paris, but his ship gets diverted and he lands in Belgium, from where he has to make his way to Paris on foot, crossing the battlefield of Waterloo on the way; he's bemused at how it's become a crass tourist trap. Before he can raise his loyalists in Paris his lookalike on St. Helena suddenly dies, and Napoleon, now officially dead, has lost his chance. At loose ends he rents a room above a failing grocery, and for want of anything else to do he devotes his genius and energy to saving the grocery, inspiring the fruit-sellers with passionate discipline and organizing them to ruthlessly crush their competition. There's a terrific scene where he's recognized by an anti-Bonapartist, who lures him into the grounds of an insane asylum for people who imagine themselves to be Napoleon, and he needs to escape all over again. I thought it was really good.

 

 

One L -- Scott Turow

 

A memoir of the famously difficult first year at Harvard Law School, which Turow went through in 1975. Like all students, Turow thought the classes were too hard and the professors were too strict and the work load was too heavy. He did a decent job of showing his enthusiasm for the law deteriorating under the weight of first-year burnout. He spent a lot of time on the students' resentment of the law professors and the intimidating practice of interrogating individual students on the reading, but I really sided with the professors, which I'm sure Turow didn't intend. I didn't have a lot of sympathy for the students, who seemed kind of whiny, and though Turow seemed to think it was some kind of epoch-making heroism when a student refused to answer a professor's question, it just looked like stupid petulance to me. I also thought Turow spent too much time patting himself on the back for his idealism in dreaming of pursuing law in the courts, as opposed to classmates who intended to go straight into corporate law. I did think he did a good job of describing the fierce competition over grades, which only grew stronger over the course of the year, with students building up bitter hatred for other students who did better on exams. Overall I found the book kind of unpleasant.

 

 

The Glass Key -- Dashiell Hammett

 

A terrific noir thriller set in an unnamed American city in the twenties. The hero is a gambler named Ned, the right-hand man of the city's top crime boss, Paul Madvig. As the book opens he finds a dead body in the street, the son of the senior Senator from his state. There are all kinds of cross-purposes: Madvig's machine has been backing the Senator in the upcoming election; Madvig's daughter has secretly been dating the Senator's son; Madvig is trying to marry the Senator's daughter. Madvig's enemies, who are backing the opposition candidate, soon use the newspapers to blame Madvig for the murder, and tar the Senator by association. Unlike most noir heroes, who are generally pretty cynical and detached, Ned is wholly driven by loyalty to Madvig, his best friend. He also realizes right away what happened with the murder -- when he explains his reasoning at the end, I felt pretty dumb for not seeing it that way before. It's really well written, exciting and suspenseful, and a very good character portrait at the same time. I really liked it.

 

 

*Proof of the Pudding -- Phoebe Atwood Taylor

 

Asey Mayo arrives home on the Cape after V-J Day, as the tank plant is converting back to an auto plant and Asey can return to retirement. He gets to his house to find a big party and assumes it's a welcome-home, but in fact it's his cousin Jennie having a charity sale to raise money for victims of the hurricane of 1945, which hit the Cape only a couple weeks before. Shooed out from underfoot, Asey wnaders over the storm-wrack and (naturally) almost immediately trips over a dead body. The victim is the daughter of a man Asey had a fight with forty years ago, so the whole town decides Asey killed her, which I had a hard time swallowing. The real solution is silly, as usual, with the killer being revealed out of the blue two pages from the end and no motive ever mentioned. There's some meta-humor as Asey visits a book store and rambles on about clues in mystery novels for two full pages, even remarking that the best thing about them is often the local color! Dad notes that the killer is the most blasé murderer of all time -- when nabbed he just says "Okay, I'll go quietly" and conversationally tells Asey he would have gotten away with it if Asey hadn't come home. It was all right but not that memorable.

 

 

A Little Yellow Dog -- Walter Mosley

 

The fifth Easy Rawlins novel. We've moved ahead a couple years to 1963 and Easy has used his favor-for-favor connections to get himself a city job as a head janitor in the school system, for the pension and for security for his two adopted children. He's arranged a job for his friend Mouse, who's going through an existential crisis after killing a friend (who may actually have been his father) in a fit of drunken anger. I didn't like this setup as much as some of the other books; Easy has arranged his life to stay out of trouble, and so the author has to use coincidence to make trouble find him, which is something the reader has to consciously forgive for the sake of the story, which I find less satisfying than having the trouble arise naturally out of the hero's life. Anyway, it turns out one of the teachers is involved with a theft-slash-drug-smuggling ring that's being run out of the school, which leads to several murders and Easy putting his job at risk by investigating, for no better reason than that he doesn't like the cop in charge. It wasn't my favorite.

 

 

1066 and All That -- W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman

 

A terrific satirical history of England, as though written by an indifferent student trying to put down what he vaguely remembers from school: such events as the Disillusion of the Monasteries (when all the monks got tired of the religious life, apparently) and the Industrial Revelation. It's very funny, and I imagine it's even funnier for people who went through the sort of schooling the book is parodying. The book insists that the only two important dates in history are 55 BC (the landing of the Romans) and 1066 (the Norman Conquest) and you can just fudge the rest. There's a half-accurate litany of the monarchs, judged Good or Bad on half-remembered criteria. It was immensely popular, so much so that Robert Graves titled his autobiography Good-Bye to All That, confident that his readers would know what he meant. I thought it was great.

 

 

*Letters to Milena -- Franz Kafka

 

In 1920 the writer Milena Jesenská translated Kafka's early stories into Czech; she wrote to him about it, and the business correspondence gradually developed into a passionate love affair, conducted almost entirely by letter -- the two of them met only twice, and then briefly. Milena was 23, about twelve years younger than Kafka; she was from Prague, but lived in Vienna in a very unhappy marriage with Ernst Pollak, whom Kafka knew slightly. (Pollak was a believer in the free-love philosphies of Otto Gross; in modern parlance they had an open marriage, but open only on his side.) She was also in poor health, due to poverty, malnutrition, and overwork -- her husband was chronically ill. The letters, written in both German and Czech, go back and forth between literary affairs and personal ones; Milena was the only person who called Kafka "Frank", a pet name arising from a misreading of the way he signed his name -- "FranzK". Their situation seems tailor-made for Kafka's tragic view of life: she was unable to leave Vienna (partly because of her husband's illness, partly because she couldn't support herself in Prague due to the hostility of her family -- her father, a domestic tyrant, had actually had her confined in an asylum rather than let her marry a Jew, and she only got out when she came of age at 21) while Kafka couldn't move there, because of his work and family responsibilities in Prague and because of his own illness -- he was slowly dying of tuberculosis. Kafka felt able to talk to Milena about things he normally kept to himself, and the letters describe the constant, inescapable anxiety that ruled his life, and which he called the fear. He was tormented by self-loathing -- he had the idea that sexual desire was "filthy", and his own libido filled him with disgust. He was also very sensitive, and felt insults keenly, another source of trouble considering he said that living in Prague was like "wallowing" in anti-Semitic hatred. They wrote each other three or four times a day for seven or eight months, until Kafka ended the correspondence because it was too painful, since Milena thought that Pollak was too dependent on her for her to leave him, and they had very little contact from then on; Kafka died three and a half years later, leaving Milena his diaries and papers (which she later gave to Max Brod, although she arranged to have her own letters to Kafka burned.) She wrote an insightful and moving obituary for him and lived on until she died in the Ravensbruck concentration camp during the war. I wouldn't say I enjoyed the book, exactly, but I'm glad to have read it. One odd thing: there are a few places where the end-notes say that a few lines were "removed to comply with privacy laws"; I wonder what could still be covered by even European privacy laws ninety years after Kafka's death and seventy years after Milena's?

 

 

Ice in the Bedroom -- P.G. Wodehouse

 

This was really a retelling of his earlier novel Sam the Sudden: once again the never-quite-successful criminals "Chimp" Twist and the Molloys know about a treasure hidden in a house in the pleasant London suburb of Valley Fields, and are frustrated in their attempts to go after it by the unrelated love-affairs of a young man (the Drone Freddie Widgeon this time). This one was funnier, though, largely due to the presence of Leila Yorke, a famous novelist: she's a boisterous, hard-drinking life-of-the-party type who makes a fortune writing sob-story romances, but to the chagrin of her publisher she's decided to write a searing-exposé-of-life's-dark-underbelly, George Gissing sort of novel. Freddie, who works (incompetently) at the publisher and coincidentally is in love with Leila's secretary (unsurprisingly named Sally, as nearly all of Wodehouse's heroines are) suggests to Leila that she rent the house next door to him in order to experience the bleak despair of suburban life. Mrs. Molloy hid a stolen diamond necklace in that house before being sent to prison on another charge, and now she and her husband start a campaign to force Leila to move out of it, culminating in putting an ad in every London newspaper offering to buy snakes if people will bring them to the house. As it happens the only person who answers the ad turns out to be Leila's estranged husband, a vaudeville snake-charmer, and the two reunite happily while Freddie and Sally find the necklace and return it to its owner. I liked it.

 

 

The Road to Daybreak -- Henri J.M. Nouwen

 

This is the journal Nouwen kept during most of 1985, a year he spent making up his mind whether to accept the offer to become the pastor of Daybreak, a residence for mentally disabled people in Toronto. He admitted frankly that it was not at all what he had thought of doing with his life; working with the poor in Latin America was what really appealed to him. He spent a lot of time praying for the strength to do what he was called to do, rather than follow his own inclination; he opens the journal by dwelling on Luke 1:38, where Mary epitomizes obedient faith: "Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word." He writes too about how although he set aside an hour of every day for prayer, he generally didn't feel truly prayerful; his mind wandered and he also spent a lot of time feeling tired and resentful. He goes into some digressions on the bad effects of self-righteousness: he tells a story about visiting a cathedral, and being taken for a tour by a friendly and knowledgeable sexton, but when another tourist walked into the cathedral, the sexton angrily berated him for wearing a hat in a church; Nouwen wondered if the tourist would ever enter a church again. He was also distressed by the question of what kind of relationship he should have with people who did not consider Christ the center of their lives, which described most of the younger generation of his own family. In the end he decided to go to Daybreak, where he spent the rest of his life, concluding that sometimes Jesus calls you where you don't want to go. A thoughtful book.

 

 

Cotton Comes to Harlem -- Chester Himes

 

A good thriller set in Harlem in the early sixties. The book opens at a big rally for a back-to-Africa movement, with Harlem families lining up to buy tickets on a planned liner to Africa, plus a house and land when they get there. Back-to-Africa was a real movement but this rally is run by a swindler, who's arranged for some fake detectives to "arrest" him at the end of the rally and run off with the money, about $87,000, leaving the police to take the blame. But the scheme goes off the rails when some white thieves crash the rally in a van and steal the money, leaving several people shot and run over behind them. The skull-cracking detectives Grave Digger and Coffin Ed find the van, which crashed into a phone pole during its escape, and also learn that a homeless junk man called Uncle Bud found the book's McGuffin, a bale of cotton that bounced out of the van. (The thieves were using the thick bale as a shield against gunfire, which would work against small-caliber pistols.) The book turns into a running fight among all the parties looking for the cotton bale, which probably has the loot from the robbery hidden inside it. Digger and Ed are angry that no one cares about the Harlemites who lost all their life savings; the two of them go off the books and break a witness out of jail to help them, and they set all parties against each other and finally corner the rich Southerner behind the robbery. They demand the money, but he doesn't have it -- when the bale was finally found, it was empty. So the detectives tell him they've got him cold on a murder rap, but they'll give him two days' head start if he coughs up the $87,000 out of his own pocket, and he agrees, knowing Alabama won't extradite him to New York for killing a black man. The detectives return the money to the scam victims and use their arrest of the badly-wanted swindler to get themselves out of trouble. They later hear that the junk man Uncle Bud is now living rich in Dakar, and they realize he must have taken the money from the cotton bale -- so at least one Harlemite did get to go back to Africa. I thought it was really good.

 

 

The Continental Op -- Dashiell Hammett

 

A collection of Hammett's pulp stories from Black Mask magazine in the twenties, all narrated by a private eye whose name we're never told, an operative for the Continental Agency (Hammett's stand-in for the Pinkertons, where he worked himself before World War I.) In these stories the Op pursues the Continental's business with unemotional efficiency, though he does try to make sure that the Continental's ends line up with his own ideas of justice, even if that means stretching the limits of a job a bit. His cold single-mindedness lets him close several cases; I liked the one where he brings in a near-irresistible femme fatale because he's the one man who cares more about doing his job than getting something for himself. The stories are well-written, full of action, and they draw a good picture of a smart and determined man facing problems that call out his best qualities. I liked them a lot.

 

 

Medium Hero -- Korby Lenker

 

A collection of contemporary short stories. About half of them (the better half) are autobiographical sketches about the author's life as a struggling musician. My favorite was a vignette about putting up flyers for a show and the late-night conversation he had with a homeless guy who decided to help him poster an intersection; although I also liked the one where he talked to a stranger at a bar and admitted his secret jealousy of his more-successful musician girlfriend. The rest includes several stories about a self-absorbed hipster douchebag named Simon; if they're based on a real guy to make him look like an asshole they succeed brilliantly, but I didn't like them.

 

 

*The Cows Are Out!  -- Trudy Chambers Price

 

Dad bought this in Maine in 2004 (I know because he wrote the date on a bookmark.) It's a memoir of running a dairy farm in Maine in the sixties, seventies, and eighties. Most of it is pretty light-hearted, telling stories about the time the cows opened the main gate, or the time the writer (who was afraid of heights) climbed all the way up to the top of their silo to set up a Christmas tree. There's funny stories about their kids and dogs and horses; I would have liked more about the cows, though. It's pretty good, but the ending is a bit of a downer: after twenty-three years of endless back-breaking labor, the author finally concluded that the farm would never get out of debt and she was just killing herself for the benefit of the bank, and she quit farming and went to work in a book store. It was a good thing for uncle George that he got a salary from taking care of the cows at the state sanitarium and so his farm didn't fall into inescapable debt.

 

 

*The Souls of Black Folk -- W.E.B. DuBois

 

DuBois's best-known book, a collection of powerful essays on race in America. He spends a lot of it vigorously disagreeing with the keep-our-heads-down approach of Booker T. Washington, whose plan was for blacks to concentrate on learning trades and forgo higher education and civil rights until some indeterminate future time; while acknowledging Washington's important work, DuBois came out strongly in favor of as much education as everyone could get, combined with a strong civil-rights platform. Of course DuBois would go on to help found the NAACP. It's been over a hundred years since the book was written and American race relations are just about as bad as ever, which I think shows that DuBois was right. The prose is excellent, too.

 

 

Bill the Conqueror -- P.G. Wodehouse

 

A who's-going-to-marry-whom story, with several iterations of Person A being ordered by their family to marry Person B, although they're secretly in love with Person C, and in any case Person B is secretly in love with Person D. The As, Bs, Cs, and Ds all cross paths in a comic mishmash that Wodehouse expertly untangles to have everyone end up in the right place. It was pretty funny.

 

 

*The Middle-Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze -- James Thurber

 

A collection of Thurber's very funny short pieces from the New Yorker in the thirties, enlivened by his loose, flowing cartoons. They're mostly comic anecdotes about Thurber (in his helplessly put-upon everyman persona) trying to cope with the bizarre behavior of the eccentrics who always seemed to haunt his footsteps. I liked it a lot.

 

 

Nathaniel's Nutmeg -- Giles Milton

 

I often say of a book that the idea was better than the execution; this might be the first time I've thought it was the other way about. It's a good execution of a poorly-thought-out idea. The author wanted to tell the story of the seventeenth-century Englishman Nathaniel Courthope and the time he held the tiny island of Run against a greatly superior Dutch force for almost three years, but there's not enough material there to fill a book, so the author pretended the fight was more consequential than it really was. In order to give a sense of what the fighting was about he decided he needed to explain the whole history of the spice trade, including the founding and early exploits of the Dutch and English East India companies, and Courthope's story doesn't get started until page 273 and it barely takes up twenty pages. Although the stand of the English on Run genuinely was an example of courage and resource in the face of adversity, on the scale of empires it was a minor incident that ultimately affected nothing, and in no way merits the book's subtitle "how one man's courage changed the course of history." Milton tries to milk significance out of the formality that England renounced its claim to Run in the same treaty where the Netherlands abandoned their claim to Manhattan, but those were merely de jure recognitions of a state of affairs that had already existed de facto for fifty years. So overall the book tries to make a mountain out of a molehill and fails, but along the way there's a lot of good stuff about nutmeg (its great trade value was not as a seasoning but because quacks claimed it could prevent the plague) and about the horrible treatment of the natives of the Spice Islands. Milton (an Englishman) unashamedly paints the Dutch as demoniacal savages and the English as open-handed saints, portrayals that can be dismissed without further comment. More accurately, you could say the main difference was in the commanders the Dutch and English companies chose for their fleets; the Dutch sent brutal idiots while the English sent incompetent idiots. It was well-written but it has an ill-chosen structure and doesn't achieve its end.

 

 

Letters To His Neighbor -- Marcel Proust (Lydia Davis, trans.)

 

I found this in the City Lights book store in San Francisco; it's the book I would have given Dad for Christmas. After Proust's mother died, he moved into an apartment in a building his family owned in Paris. He was chronically ill, with bad asthma and probably other undiagnosed problems, on top of being a nervous, high-strung person who had trouble sleeping. Unfortunately for him, after he'd lived there a year or two, the next two floors up were taken by an American who ran a thriving dentistry practice directly over his head. This caused Proust endless annoyance -- the loud machinery, the tramp of feet, the constant stream of patients who rang Proust's doorbell looking for the dentist's office. To make things worse the dentist had a mania for renovation and there were always carpenters, painters, plumbers, electricians, pounding away while poor Proust was sitting below trying to write The Guermantes Way. This book contains a series of letters, only recently discovered, that Proust wrote to his upstairs neighbors between 1908 and 1918, complaining about the noise in the most polite and agreeable way possible. Only Proust would apologize for asking his neighbors to keep the noise down by sending them flowers and presents of game birds. Most of the letters are addressed to the dentist's wife, a cultured and intelligent person who read Proust's novels and occasionally sent him books to read. They seem never to have met, which for anyone else would be surprising, but Proust was something of a recluse and the dentist's wife appears to have been a shut-in -- her letters to Proust have not survived so I don't know what her problem was. Serendipitously, right before I found this book I had just gotten to the part in Within a Budding Grove where Albertine points out to the narrator the resort town's various characters of interest, one of whom she calls "the dentist"; this is certainly a portrait of Proust's upstairs neighbor. The letters are good reading, interestingly written in the same style as his fiction: long sentences containing many nested clauses with no punctuation whatever, but perfectly clear -- you never have to go back and reread a sentence in order to understand it. That's impressive because the book has photos of several of the letters, and they're obviously written off the top of his head, not the product of several careful drafts: the handwriting is loose and fast, with extra clauses stuck in the margins. I liked it.

 

 

Believe Me -- Eddie Izzard

 

Izzard's autobiography. On a bookseller's recommendation I listened to the audiobook, which Izzard himself narrates; because he can never resist ad-libbing the audiobook is probably half again as long as the printed one. It was funny and interesting, going over Izzard's childhood, his years at boarding school (with great passages about the appalling school food), and his coming out in his twenties. He says "alternative sexuality" instead of "LGBTQ" -- I always thought that was just a British thing, but it turns out he's dyslexic and it's very difficult for him to recite a string of letters. He spends a lot of time on his early career as a street performer -- having a volunteer truss him up with chains and padlocks and then getting out of them while riding a unicycle, that sort of thing -- and how the patter he used developed into his voice as a performer. He talks a lot about what he calls the Great Wall of No -- everything he's ever wanted to do, he did in the face of people telling him no, no, no, no, no. Luckily his father was always very supportive, although he seems to have had a difficult time with his stepmother, a socially conservative woman with a do-what-you're-told philosophy of life. There was a touching scene when he came out to his father and his father said he was okay with it, and then said "You know your mother would have been okay with it too" and he was just flattened. Like most people Izzard seems to believe that the path he followed to success is the only good one, which leads him to some silly doctrinaire conclusions, such as that learning to read sheet music prevents you from being creative musically. Overall, though, it's a very good book, and the bookseller was right: if you want to read this, listen to the audiobook.

 

 

At The Mountains of Madness -- H.P. Lovecraft

 

A collection of three of his famous horror stories: the title novella plus the shorter "The Whisperer in Darkness" and "The Shadow Out of Time". The stories have dated quite a bit, I think, mostly because Lovecraft was born in 1890 and educated with the nineteenth-century great-chain-of-being idea of a hierarchy of life with humanity at the top. The horror of his stories lies in the narrators slowly discovering the existence of unthinkably older races than humanity, incomprehensible beings that came from other planets or other planes of reality and lived on Earth a billion years ago; what makes them terrible is their total indifference -- humanity means nothing at all to them. The realization causes the narrators indescribable fear and pushes them near insanity, due to the sense of loss of their central identity. I remember that in The War of the Worlds the narrator says that the worst thing about the arrival of the Martians was the sense of being dethroned as the rulers of the world. As a product of a post-world-war, post-space-age education myself, ideas that fill Lovecraft's narrators with terror are just things I take for granted: I have understood since I was small that the Earth is unfathomably old, and I have never thought of humanity as anything other than a very successful animal among other animals. That's why I found "The Whisperer in Darkness" the most effective of the stories: the narrator is in actual physical danger, not just threatened existentially. The writing is a little stiff but it's still a good read.