I was getting embarrassed about not sending these out until
March or April so I started writing them at Thanksgiving this year.
Stiff -- Mary Roach
A book about human corpses and what becomes of them,
competently written and full of interesting detail. Turns out it's not as easy
to donate your body to science as I would have thought; anatomists don't pay
transport costs, and whatever institution you willed your body to only gets it
if you happen to die reasonably close by. If you keel over while on vacation in
the next state, the institution is out of luck. I was surprised and kind of
repelled by the fact that Disney World actually has to have several employees
whose full-time job is preventing people from dumping out their dead relatives'
ashes on the rides.
Portrait of a Man Known As Il Condottiere -- Georges
Perec (trans. David Bellos)
Perec's first book, a really good novel about forgery. It
tells the story of a skilled artist named Gaspard working to create a fake
painting on behalf of his employer, a petty criminal. As the novel begins,
Gaspard has just murdered his employer, and he is dragging the body into the
basement while wondering how he got himself into this. The rest of the story is
told in flashback. Gaspard is trying to create a painting in the style of
Antonello da Messina, a medieval Italian, whose famous portrait "Man Known
as Il Condottiere" (it's in the Louvre) is a masterpiece, showing a
man who exudes strength without cruelty. Perec undoubtedly picked this painting
because of the ambiguity of the title -- why "known as"? Was he not
actually a condottiere (a mercenary soldier) but just called that, or
was he a real condottiere whose profession was so tied up with his
identity that it usurped his name? The real-life painting also has a trompe
l'oeil pun: the lower part of the painting shows a frame with a parchment note
stuck on it, painted in such a way that you have to look twice to realize it's
part of the painting and not an actual note. The note reads Antonellus me
pinxit, "Antonello painted me", a double meaning. Gaspard, a man
of real talent, sets out to create a new painting in da Messina's style -- he
wants to create a perfect forgery that is, at the same time, an original work
of art that's all his own. But he's undone by the paradox -- in order to make a
great forgery he has to put himself into da Messina's shoes, and the more he
does that the more he moves away from being really himself, which makes it
impossible to put himself into his art. His failure preys on him and eventually
unsettles his mind. It was well told.
How To Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia -- Mohsin Hamid
A very good novel following the career of a boy from a poor
rural family in an unnamed Asian country, sort of a more realistic Horatio
Alger story. The family moves to the city and the boy, quickly abandoning his
studies under a drunken, illiterate schoolmaster, gets his start as a runner
delivering pirated DVDs to people's homes. As he gets older he becomes a
salesman for a shady businessman who buys up expired canned goods, fakes new
dates on them, and resells them to grocers who don't ask too many questions. He
learns from all this and sets up on his own, bottling boiled tap water and
selling it as "spring water", boiling the water in his own lean-to
with stolen propane and making the labels by hand. Over time this grows into a
large concern, making him wealthy in the process. There's never a resting-point,
though, since he constantly has to juggle back-scratching and bribes for
politicians, rival businessmen, and gangs. I liked it a lot.
The Inimitable Jeeves -- P.G. Wodehouse
A sort-of novel made up of a collection of short episodes,
all of which follow the same general pattern: Bertie's idiot friend Bingo meets
a woman, falls madly in love at first sight, and implores Bertie for help
winning her heart; Bertie, who can't say no, gets involved and somehow winds up
in an embarrassing jam; he gets half-way out of it only to find that Bingo has
fallen for someone else and utterly forgotten the first woman; Jeeves smoothly
gets Bertie out of trouble; Bertie goes home vowing never to help Bingo again.
Repeat. At the end of it Bingo meets a woman who's faster on the draw than the
others and she marries him, not without leaving Bertie in the soup one last
time. They were good but I did rather wish Bertie would punch Bingo in the nose
every so often.
Dance Dance Dance -- Haruki Murakami
The aftermath of his earlier novel A Wild Sheep Chase,
with the still-unnamed narrator returning to the north of Japan four years
later to try to find the woman who'd accompanied him on his search the first
time, and who apparently vanished without a trace after the narrator's encounter
with the mysterious Sheep Man. The narrator is nonplussed to find that the
crummy run-down Dolphin Hotel he and the woman stayed at has been replaced by a
pretentious Western-style place called "l'Hotel Dauphin". This is a
running theme in the novel -- a lot of the time only the names of the
characters remind you the story is set in Japan, as the narrator eats at
McDonald's, listens to the Talking Heads, and discusses Clint Eastwood movies.
Asking about when the hotel changed hands, he gets stonewalled; a concierge
later tells him, off the record, that there's something eerie about the place
-- late at night, sometimes the elevator opens on a floor that isn't part of
the hotel, a pitch-dark corridor that echoes with distant footsteps. He starts
a relationship with the concierge and also befriends a precocious teenage girl
named Yuki, whose globe-trotting parents sometimes absently leave her behind.
Back in Tokyo he renews contact with a high-school friend, now a famous movie
star who feels trapped by the teen-idol good looks that keep him in stereotyped
roles, and through him befriends a good-natured prostitute named Mei. When Mei
is murdered, the narrator sets out to look into her death, which leads him back
to the Hotel Dauphin, where one night the elevator takes him to the strange
floor, where he sets off to follow the sound of the footsteps. There's a lot
more to it than that, but the novel doesn't feel crowded. I really liked it.
A Prefect's Uncle -- P.G. Wodehouse
His second or third book. He was only a year or so out of
public school when he wrote it, and it shows. It's a pretty typical
school-story, heavy on cricket, with the decent chaps showing the rotters
what's what and the sixth-former bearing up manfully under public scorn rather
than reveal someone else's shameful secret. The only thing that makes it feel
like Wodehouse is the side-plot where one of the older students goes to meet an
uncle at the train station, expecting a flying visit and maybe a handout from
some unfamiliar relative, only to find that the uncle is younger than he is and
is starting at the same school that term. He is of course appalled at the
absurd position that puts him in, and it isn't made any better by the fact that
this younger uncle is a bit of a supercilious snob. Overall it was kind of
unmemorable.
The Black Jacobins -- C.L.R. James
An outstandingly good book about Toussaint l'Ouverture and
the slave revolt in Haiti -- the only successful slave uprising in history, as
the author points out. Toussaint and his party always wanted to remain
associated with France, but in the end there simply couldn't be any coexistence
with the white plantation owners and their investors in France, who couldn't
get rich off their plantations without slave labor. (Not to mention all their
slaves becoming free meant their net worth dropped.) The Revolutionary
government abolished slavery in all French possessions, which was one reason
the French merchants supported Napoleon, who reestablished it. Napoleon invited
Toussaint to France and then had him seized and thrown into prison, where he
died; but by that time the revolution had grown so strong that neither France
nor Britain could force their way in, although both of them spent the next
hundred years in undeclared economic warfare with Haiti, crushing it from among
the richest to among the poorest nations in the world, all the while singing
hymns to the awesome beneficence of their colonial policies. The bastards.
The Information -- James Gleick
A history of information theory, very thorough but kind of
dry. Could have been better written.
My Korean Deli -- Ben Ryder Howe
An all-right autobiographical story about a period in the
author's life when, under pressure from his wife, he agreed to help fund the
purchase of a Brooklyn deli to be run by his mother-in-law. He also worked at
the deli once it opened, to the detriment of his other job, as an editor at the
Paris Review under George Plimpton. (I almost said "regular
job", but there was nothing regular about anything Plimpton was involved
with.) I didn't really like the author, since he was relentlessly critical of
everyone -- his mother-in-law, whom he disliked; his wife, whom he portrays as
demanding and unreasonable; even George Plimpton, one of the nicest people
ever. The author thought Plimpton was too easy-going and didn't take work at
the magazine seriously enough -- not that he has any room to kvetch, since he
seems to have done very little work at the magazine even before spending half
his time at the deli. (Probably the author didn't know that Plimpton didn't
have to worry about the business end because the Paris Review was funded
by the CIA, some of whose agents used jobs at the magazine as a cover; that
didn't come out until after Plimpton died.) By far the best part of the book is
the portrait of the employee they inherited with the store, a local reformed
alcoholic named Dwayne, whom the author obviously genuinely liked despite his
odd habits, such as loudly giving life advice to people while expertly making
sandwiches, or letting his friends use the storeroom for card games, or
carrying a gun while solemnly swearing to the author that he wasn't. I actually
would have liked the book more if the author had left out all the parts about
his family, which I didn't care about, and used the space for more about
Dwayne.
I Am An Executioner -- Rajesh Parameshwaran
A very good collection of short stories about love gone
terribly wrong. There's story told from the point of view of a tiger who's fallen
in love with his handler and, in showing his affection, accidentally claws the
handler to death; another about a laid-off worker who steals medical textbooks
from a library and sets himself up as a doctor without a license, eventually
horribly botching a surgery on his own wife in a desperate attempt to operate
on her inoperable cervical cancer. They were well written and somehow less
depressing than you'd think.
Inventing Niagara -- Ginger Strand
An entertaining book all about Niagara Falls and the culture
of natural wonder that surrounds it, even though the entire thing is totally
fake. The original Falls have been gone for a hundred fifty years; what's there
now is a man-made sculpture created by dynamiting half the cliffs to make the
flow better suited to powering electric turbines, so completely divorced from
Nature that there's a bureaucrat's office that controls the water flow with a
faucet (they turn the flow up for tourist season and down in the off months.)
Nothing about the Falls is real -- it even has a fake history that promotes a
fake myth of conservationism, when the truth is that the minute Europeans
became aware of the Falls they fell all over themselves in the rush to exploit
them for money. Even the islands above the Falls are man-made, imported dirt
and stone covering up decades' worth of industrial slag and radioactive uranium
waste. Good read.
Thank You, Jeeves -- P.G. Wodehouse
The first full-length Bertie Wooster novel. Bertie takes to
playing the banjolele (I had to look it up -- it's a small instrument with a
banjo body and a ukulele neck, designed for vaudeville performers who needed
something that played as easily as a ukulele, but louder. Just the sort of
thing Bertie would like.) When his near-deafened landlord boots him out of his
apartment, Bertie resolves to settle in a cottage where he can practice in
peace, which leads to Jeeves giving his notice. Bertie resolutely sticks to his
plan and takes a cottage in a rural neighborhood, almost instantly followed by
the serendipitous arrival of 1) a yacht carrying a vengeful American
millionaire who suspects Bertie of trying to win his daughter away from her
fiancé, who is also Jeeves' new employer; 2) a troupe of New Orleans jazz
musicians who specialize in the banjolele; and 3) Bertie's old nemesis Sir
Roderick Glossop, who is courting the neighborhood doyenne, who coincidentally
is Jeeves' new employer's aunt. The tremendous complications that ensue wind up
with Bertie and Sir Roderick, both in blackface for different reasons, fleeing
the neighborhood under cover of darkness, pursued by Bertie's new valet, a
Bolshevik who, having chosen that night to get good and drunk, has decided that
the best way to bring about the millennium would be to set fire to Bertie's
cottage and murder him with a carving knife. Jeeves settles everything in the
end, of course. I laughed the whole way through it.
The Pattern On The Stone -- W. Daniel Hillis
A pretty good description of Boolean logic and how its
implementation isn't necessarily tied to electromagnetic relays -- the same
effect, though not as efficiently, can be produced with any mechanism that
allows measuring of two distinct states with an excluded middle, such as rods
and springs or hydraulic valves. Pretty readable.
The Unnamed -- Joshua Ferris
A bleak novel about a successful attorney who develops some
kind of idiopathic disorder that causes him to walk compulsively until he collapses
from exhaustion. It's a really good picture of the maddening frustration of
dealing with a chronic illness no one can explain or treat, and the
victim-blaming that inevitably ensues. The attorney loses his job, loses
extremities to frostbite, and eventually loses his marriage, despite the
enormous effort he and his wife expend to save it. He never recovers and never
finds out what causes his condition, and the novel ends on a total downer with
no hope or relief. I got pretty invested in the lead characters, which is what
kept me reading, but the novel isn't at all enjoyable and I can't think it was
even meant to be.
Mardi -- Herman Melville
An odd, wandering hodgepodge of a novel; Melville is
obviously making it up as he goes along, and it mutates from a travelogue to a
romance to a satire to a work of philosophy. It begins as a sea-story, with the
hero deserting from a whaling-ship in the Pacific (as Melville himself had
done) and setting out on a voyage of exploration in a small boat. Among other adventures
he meets a group of Polynesian outriggers carrying a woman named Yillah;
imagining the others are taking her to be sacrificed, he takes her away with
him, killing a tribal elder in the process. Unusually, the hero recognizes that
he has committed murder, and the guilt of his crime haunts him throughout the
novel. Later, while he and his crew are visiting a Polynesian island, Yillah
mysteriously vanishes; it's implied that the queen of a different island has
stolen her away with magic. The king of the island rigs out a search party of
several canoes, and the hero goes in search of Yillah, leaving his crew behind.
They never find her, but in the course of the search they stop to visit and
search many islands, which are thinly-veiled versions of the nations of Europe
and the United States; Melville uses these visits to satirize European and
American customs. After that the hero more or less fades out of the story and
the main interest of the rest of the book is the philosophical conversations
among the king and his wise men as they voyage across the sea. I couldn't
decide if the novel's structure was a deliberate decision or if Melville just
lost interest in the story and had to move it into a new course to keep himself
going, and then that happened four more times. I wasn't really satisfied with
it.
Right Ho, Jeeves -- P.G. Wodehouse
A hilarious novel, really well-paced, featuring some of
Wodehouse's best episodes. Bertie tries to help his jellyfish-like friend
Gussie talk to the girl he likes ("I can think of no better illustration
of Gussie's character than that his nickname at school was 'Fat-Head', and this
was in a class that included me") but through a misunderstanding becomes
engaged to the girl himself; an appalling fate, since the girl, Madeline, is
unbearably cutesy and believes in fairies. (I can sympathize here, as I once
instantly lost interest in a girl when she told me that wearing glasses lets
you see stars on a rainy night.) To try to put some backbone into Gussie he
gets him loaded, which leads to Gussie taking the occasion at a town meeting to
tell off half the town, to the delight of the other half. Jeeves saves the day,
of course, at the expense of making Bertie take the fall for everything, a
price he's glad to pay if it means getting shot of Madeline. What a great book.
Chilled -- Tom Jackson
A history of refrigeration, with a good picture of the old
ice-harvesting days, when people had literal ice boxes -- a wooden cabinet with
a metal container in the top for holding a block of ice. Mom remembers that one
of her neighbors had an ice box when she was little and he would give the
neighborhood kids chips of ice as a summer treat. The ice-shipping business was
a lot like the bottled-water business now: the shippers mostly lied about where
the ice came from. They made grand claims about treks to far Northern lakes and
that sort of thing, but in fact the ice generally came from local ponds and was
renewed by "flooding" -- after chopping out a layer of ice, the
workmen would pour water from a hose over the surface of the pond to make more
(so the ice would be full of their dirty footprints afterwards.) It's kind of
sad that the person who invented Freon thought it would save the environment
from overharvesting of ice. And in fact it was the same person who invented
leaded gasoline, which he (and everyone else) also thought was good for the
environment! I guess it's lucky for him he died before people found out those
were both bad ideas.
The Code of the Woosters -- P.G. Wodehouse
A Bertie Wooster novel, featuring his hilarious send-up of
British Fascism in the character of the would-be Dictator Roderick Spode and
his followers the Black Shorts (a caricature of Oswald Mosley and his Black
Shirts.) Mosley was later sent to prison for plotting against the Government,
but I suspect that if he could have had the choice between getting out of
prison and having "The Code of the Woosters" suppressed, he would
have chosen the latter. It's a great attack on self-importance generally, and
it's all the more satisfying that it's the mild and agreeable Bertie who gets
to puncture the seven-foot Spode's image of himself: "The trouble with
you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of
half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you
think you're someone.... What the Voice of the People is saying is: 'Look at
that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags!'" I loved it.
Assassination Vacation -- Sarah Vowell
This is just what it sounds like: Vowell did a lot of
traveling around to visit historical sites connected to three of the American
Presidents who were assassinated. (She doesn't include Kennedy, probably
because that's over-trodden ground.) It seems a big part of the impetus behind
the trip was her own hatred of George W. Bush; she reminds herself that there
were plenty of people who hated Lincoln, too. The tone of the book kind of
seesaws a bit; the Garfield chapters are more light-hearted, and she clearly
likes him -- hardly surprising since he took any excuse he could to slope off
from being President to read books -- while the McKinley chapters concentrate
on American imperialism, as a deliberate echo of our current geopolitics. I
liked the story-telling; Vowell doesn't drive, so she had to sweet-talk her
friends and relatives into taking vacation days with her ("Hey, who wants
to spend the weekend finding the graveyard where Leon Czolgosz is
buried?")
The Lady and the Panda -- Vicki Constantine Croke
A book about Ruth Harkness, an American eccentric who in the
1930s spent her inheritance to trek across China and Tibet to find a giant
panda to bring back to the United States. Pandas live only in remote mountain
forests where hardly anyone ever goes, plus China was in the middle of a civil
war and a Japanese invasion, so it wasn't easy going, not to mention she was
harassed and libeled by rival adventuring parties who couldn't stand competing
with a woman. She did find one, an infant male that she mistook for a somewhat
older female (no one knew very much about pandas then) and managed to keep it
alive all the way to the Chicago Zoo, where it became the biggest gate
attraction any zoo has ever had. She became very attached to the panda; when,
on a later expedition to capture more, she heard that it had died in captivity,
she had a change of heart about zoos and released the newer panda she'd caught
back into the wild. It was pretty good.
The Powerhouse -- Steve LeVine
An excellent book on the structure of batteries and the industrial
race that's been going on the last twenty years to find a new breakthrough. The
car population in China is growing fast and there's heavy competition among
Korean, Japanese, Chinese, and American companies to produce a battery that can
last long enough, put out enough power, and cost little enough that it can
become a genuine alternative to gasoline. A lot of battery engineers now have
backgrounds in materials science, because one thing that's needed is to build
an anode that can withstand thousands of charge-ups and charge-downs without
degrading. You could do it with solid lithium, but lithium is too scarce to
make that a useful approach, so everyone's trying to make a functional
equivalent. The author spent a few years doing fly-on-the-wall coverage of a
big battery breakthrough, but it turned out the results were faked and the
company he was following went bust. Still a good story, though.
Townie -- Andre Dubus III
A pretty good memoir about violence and fear. The author
grew up in the seventies in the old mill towns of Massachusetts, Lowell and
Lawrence and Dunstable, raised in poverty by his mother, with a tenuous
relationship with his distant father, the famous writer Andre Dubus, who walked
out on them when the author was a boy. He goes into a lot of detail about the
violence of his neighborhoods and the fights he was in; what struck me was how
avoidable most of them were. He says his fear of being bullied drove him to
bodybuilding and boxing, but when he grew into his strength it didn't make him
calm. The fear remained, and it led him into looking for trouble, going out of
his way to get into fights, something he wasn't able to grow out of until he
was in his thirties. I liked the scene where he and his brother, both
professional carpenters, roast their father for writing a story where the lead
character builds a coffin, digs a grave, and fills it in, all within three
hours (it would actually take days to do all that.) There was a striking
callback to that later on, when he and his brother are building their father's
coffin, and occasionally one of them pauses and says "Three hours, my
ass." I liked it.
Young Men in Spats -- P.G. Wodehouse
An excellent collection of short stories about adventures of
the members of the aptly-named Drones Club, generally told by one Drone to
another about a third, although some are narrated by the garrulous Mr.
Mulliner, whose astounding array of relations includes a few Drones. They're
all funny, but by far the best is "Uncle Fred Flits By", for my money
the funniest thing Wodehouse ever wrote, which features the first appearance of
England's champion liar, Uncle Fred, and the tangled mess he causes and solves
when he enters a stranger's house to get out of the rain and proceeds to
impersonate a half-dozen different people, presenting a new identity in turn to
every person who enters the house, blithely juggling all his stories at once
and keeping everyone off balance with a stream of stupendous lies. I laughed
till I cried.
Shallow Soil -- Knut Hamsun
One of his early novels, about petty one-upmanship among the
artistic community in Christiana (now Oslo.) It's probably a roman a clef,
but since the topical disagreements among Norwegian writers in the 1870s made
no lasting impression on our cultural memory I can just read it as a straight
novel. The story largely ignores the artists' work and instead criticizes their
lax and dishonest lifestyle: they sponge off their working friends and sneer at
them behind their backs. They maintain a pose of disdaining worldly things
while sucking up to the newspapermen for favorable reviews and ruthlessly
maneuvering to get themselves awarded government grants. The sour-grapes
attitude they take when looking down on the artist who wins the grant they were
all fighting for is pretty funny. They're also shown as fairly small-minded and
insecure; they consider themselves the gatekeepers of an exclusive society, and
they angrily unite to silence a visitor to the city who dares to offer opinions
about art and politics that they haven't approved first. They're not at all
attractive people, and it's hardly surprising that Hamsun decided he needed to
leave Christiana for his art to grow. I liked it.
Quick Service -- P.G. Wodehouse
A comedy featuring the sort of dazzling web of
cross-purposes that only Wodehouse could pull off. Sally, the heroine, lives
with her snobby aunt Mabel, who has married an American prize fighter named
Steptoe and is trying to bully him into becoming an English gentleman. To this
end she has hired the young and suave Lord Hobelton to teach her husband
manners; Sally has become engaged to Lord H but it has to be kept secret since
they're both broke. Rounding out the ménage is Mabel's sister-in-law
from her first marriage, Mrs. Chavender. Mrs. C was once engaged to James Duff,
who by coincidence is the trustee of Lord H's estate, and by another
coincidence also the employer of Joss, an artist who painted a portrait of Mrs.
C, commissioned by Mabel in hopes of being named Mrs. C's heir. For various
reasons several people want that portrait, and Joss, having fallen in love with
Sally at first sight, volunteers to take a job as Steptoe's valet, in order to
help Sally steal it. Joss's cheerful can-do attitude impresses Sally in
contrast to Lord H's glum defeatism and want of enterprise, and after Lord H
departs to find a household where there isn't quite so much art theft, Joss and
Sally get engaged and everything ends happily. It was great.
The Black Count -- Tom Reiss
A fantastic biography of Alexandre Dumas grand-père,
the father of the novelist. Really gripping. Dumas-the-eldest was the son of a
Haitian slave woman and a no-good younger son of an aristocratic French family
named Antoine. Antoine left France in the mid-1700s to escape debts and lived
in Haiti for thirty years until his relatives died, whereupon he sold his wife
back into slavery, and their children along with her, except the oldest --
Alex, as he always called himself -- whom he brought along to Port-au-Prince,
only to sell him as a slave there in order to pay his passage to France.
Antoine did redeem Alex from the ship's captain once he scrounged some money in
France, but Alex always used his mother's name, Dumas, after that. Slavery was
illegal in France, and by law any slave setting foot on French soil became
free, but the merchants got around that by building slave pens near the ports
and having them declared extra-territorial. Alex joined the Army, and with his
native talent and the open atmosphere of the Revolution eventually rose to become
general-in-chief of an army, the first black man to do so and the last until
the 1970s. He fought for the Revolutionary government and for the Consulate
that succeeded it with amazing heroism -- he was the model for the military
heroes in his son's novels -- but as both a die-hard republican and an opponent
of slavery, he clashed with Napoleon throughout his career. When he was
captured by the Neapolitan regime, he wasn't ransomed; and when he did get free
and return to France, in poor health after eighteen months in a dungeon, he was
not paid a pension and died in illness and poverty. There used to be a statue
to him in Paris, but it was destroyed by the Nazis as part of their racial
purification program and it was never replaced.
The Seville Communion -- Arturo Perez-Reverte
An anti-Catholic novel, whose plot is a vehicle for
attacking the Church, which can make a good story when done well, which this
wasn't. There are six Catholic priests in the story (one of whom is the
protagonist) plus a nun; the priests are all revolting cynics and the nun is a
murderer. The protagonist, who works as a sort of investigator and hatchet man
for the Vatican, is an open atheist who believes his lack of faith makes him
good at his job; his boss openly mocks Church ritual as pointless nonsense,
sneeringly dismisses John Paul II as "the Pole", and regards the
protagonist's violation of his vow of celibacy as unimportant and probably good
for him; and the Cardinal they both report to has ordered the murders of
liberation-theology priests in South America. It's no better in Seville, where
the protagonist is sent to sort out what's going on with a medieval church
where two men have died mysteriously; the local Cardinal is a caricature of
bureaucratic malice, and the church's pastor is a barefoot fanatic straight out
of the Dark Ages who will only celebrate the Mass in Latin (though it turns out
that he too is an atheist and just considers the Mass more suited to comforting
and soothing stupid people when it's in an incomprehensible language), while
his assistant priest is a man whose first reaction to finding the protagonist
snooping around is to punch him in the face. And then there's the nun, who it
turns out has murdered three people in an attempt to keep the old church from
being torn down (it doesn't make a lot of sense.) The protagonist figures it
out but doesn't turn her in, mainly to spite the local Cardinal, who's
pro-demolition. I didn't like it.
The Return of George Washington -- Edward J. Larson
An excellent book on Washington and the period between his
retirement from the Army in 1783 and his return to public life in 1787. He
spent a lot of it getting his estate back in order after eight years away (he
was only home for three or four nights in the whole war.) He repaired his
farms, unsuccessfully tried to sell his Western property to the squatters on
it, and made plans for a navigation canal that was never built. During this
time he maintained close contact with like-minded supporters of a strong
federal government, but he deliberately kept quiet in public on political
questions; he knew the value of his political capital and he wanted to get the
most out of it by spending it all at once, on the Constitution, rather than
weakening it by taking public stands on less important matters. A great deal of
public acceptance of the Constitution came just from the fact that it was
generally seen as Washington's program. In Philadelphia he made a point of
attending Mass at a Catholic church, as a public signal that the new government
would maintain freedom of worship.
Anecdotes of the Late Dr. Samuel Johnson, LL.D. -- Hester
Thrale Piozzi
The Thrales were Johnson's best friends in the second half
of his life; he spent a great deal of time with them over a period of twenty
years or so. Mrs. Thrale didn't like James Boswell, and when Boswell was
writing his mighty biography of Johnson she decided to publish this book on her
own rather than help him. It's somewhat more negative than it might have been,
since she was still hurt by Johnson's unreasonable anger over her
remarriage (Johnson thought it would have been more seemly for her to remain a
widow, plus her second husband was Catholic.) Still, although colored by later
quarrels, the great admiration and powerful affection between Johnson and the
Thrales is obvious, even though Johnson could be difficult and sometimes
exasperating (for example, when he was in a peevish mood he had an annoying
habit of contradicting anything anyone said.) Luckily Mrs. Thrale kept a diary,
and so had a record of some of Johnson's best conversations. A good book.
Underground -- Haruki Murakami
A sobering and engrossing book about the gas attacks on the
Tokyo subway in March 1995. There were four teams of attackers, each team
consisting of a man assigned to release the gas and a getaway driver. They were
all members of Aum Shinryko, a doomsday cult headed by a messianic lunatic
called Asahara. The attackers and Asahara were all sentenced to death, but
that's mainly symbolic since Japan has no procedure in place to execute anyone,
so it's really imprisonment for life. Because of this Murakami was able to
speak to most of the attackers (a couple were still on the run when he wrote
the book, though they were caught afterwards.) It's a chilling picture of how a
cult controls its members -- Aum used solitary confinement, electric shocks,
and drugs. Even bearing in mind that the attackers were often trying to make
excuses for themselves, it's frightening. Several told Murakami that they now
recognized that what they did was wrong but they'd probably do it again.
Sejanus His Fall -- Ben Jonson
A verse play about Lucius Aelius Sejanus, the right-hand man
of the Emperor Tiberius, who for years was the most feared man in Rome. In his
mid-sixties Tiberius became disgusted with Rome and left permanently for Capri,
no one knows why; he appointed Sejanus as consul and left the administration of
the Empire up to him. Sejanus soon became a tyrant, ruling the Empire to suit
himself and controlling the flow of information to Capri. The play deals mostly
with Sejanus's last days, when his power and arrogance were at their height and
he was laying plans to kill all the Caesars and make himself Emperor. But he'd
underestimated Tiberius, who it turned out was a lot more aware of the real
state of Rome than Sejanus had thought; Tiberius called him to appear before
the Senate to be given a great reward, and when he got there he was arrested
and horribly put to death. Jonson got in some trouble when the play came out,
since most people took it as an allegory for the recent sudden fall of the
former royal favorite, the Earl of Essex, which it probably was, actually.
Plum Pie -- P.G. Wodehouse
A terrific collection of short stories featuring all the
usual suspects -- golf, Ukridge, Mr. Mulliner, the Drones Club. There's a great
Blandings story where poor Lord Emsworth has to try to retrieve a stolen dog by
breaking and entering, a job for which he may be the least suited person ever,
and an outstanding Bertie Wooster story where a lowlife threatens Bertie with a
false breach-of-promise lawsuit and Jeeves gets him out of it by convincing the
lowlife that Bertie is actually broke and that he, Jeeves, is really a
creditor's agent posing as a valet, keeping an eye on Bertie so he can't go on
the lam. I loved it.
Bracebridge Hall -- Washington Irving
Sort of a continuation of his Sketch-Book, this book
describes a gathering of friends and guests at Bracebridge Hall, a British
estate based on one Irving visited in Birmingham, for the Christmas season.
There's no plot, as such; Irving, in his persona of Geoffrey Crayon, is among
the party, and he describes the house and guests in a series of sketches and
stories, including a long novella. They were all well-written.
The Porcelain Thief -- Huan Hsu
A family memoir about being American-born Chinese. The
writer is second-generation American; the book is his family story, told around
the McGuffin of some valuable porcelain that belonged to his
great-great-great-grandfather and was lost during the Japanese occupation.
There's a great deal of interesting information about porcelain and how it was
made in the old days, and the current thriving trade in faking antique
porcelain that now occupies most of the craftspeople in the old
porcelain-producing towns. The author goes to Taiwan and then China to meet and
interview his older relatives, which is fairly difficult, first because his
Mandarin is only so-so, second because of the generation gap and cultural gap,
and thirdly because of a general reluctance to talk about some things. For
instance, he eventually realizes that his great-aunt doesn't want to tell him
where his great-great-grandfather is buried because she thinks that if people
see a stranger visiting the grave they'll assume there's something valuable
buried there and violate the grave to find it. He also faces bureaucratic
hostility from people who fear, probably reasonably, that any inquiry from an
outsider might upset their status quo. It doesn't help that his family
Anglicizes their name as the Wade-Giles Hsu, rather than the pinyin Xu, which
is itself a political statement. (Taiwan uses Wade-Giles while China uses
pinyin, so just the act of using Wade-Giles amounts to a rejection of the
official "One China" policy.) I liked it.
The Mating Season -- P.G. Wodehouse
A Bertie Wooster novel, set during the period when Bertie is
in constant danger from the drama queen and general silly twit Madeline Basset,
who wrongly imagines that Bertie is in love with her and dramatically resolves
to marry him every time her own engagement runs into trouble. This time her
fiancé (Gussie) gets arrested, and Bertie, to prevent the engagement from being
broken off, has to take Gussie's place on a country visit. But Gussie's case is
unexpectedly dismissed and he follows along immediately, leading to a very
awkward situation where Bertie is pretending to be Gussie, Gussie is pretending
to be Bertie, Jeeves is pretending to be Gussie's valet, and Bertie's friend
Pirbright, just to round things out, is pretending to be Bertie's valet. There's
a great scene when, having been roped into performing for a local benefit, they
have to go on stage to do a vaudeville act, and since the depressed Gussie has
lost interest and just stares indifferently straight ahead, Pirbright has to
try to deliver both sides of a comedy routine by himself.
The Guts -- Roddy Doyle
A novel about the later life of Jimmy Rabbitte, who's
appeared in several of Doyle's novels set in the Barrytown area of Dublin.
After the Irish economic collapse, Jimmy and his wife have kept themselves
solvent with a sort of nostalgia music business where they do
where-are-they-now promotions for bands from thirty or forty years ago. Jimmy
has abdominal cancer and spends the novel getting treatment and patching up
some of his family relationships, and also reestablishing old friendships with
other former members of his first band, The Commitments. It's got a good
understated theme of finding things to enjoy even while life is punching you in
the teeth. I liked it a lot, but for a while I had a sense of something
missing; I finally realized that I was expecting explanations of how the
Rabbitte family was coping with the enormous cost of cancer treatment, but then
I remembered the book is set in Ireland where you don't have to sell your house
to pay for chemotherapy.
The Mutiny of the Elsinore -- Jack London
Jack London's racism is often regarded merely as a product
of his times, which I have a bit of a problem with since he so often goes out
of his way to extol the white race, but this book, written late in his career,
might as well have been commissioned by the KKK. It's an outright paean to
white supremacy, whose narrator, a passenger on a sea-voyage, spends all his
time thinking about how repulsive the non-white crew is, and dwelling on how
right and proper it is that he, a white man, should sit with the white officers
and watch the non-white crew slave away in their inferior way. That's almost a
direct quote, by the way, I'm not parodying him. He himself does no work, but
he glories in how the super-whiteness of his white ancestors gives him the
right to order around the scum. After the ship's officers all die in the
mutiny, the narrator takes command and dominates the crew through the sheer
power of whiteness; they meekly return to duty and carry the ship to port for
their own executions, helpless against the moral force of the narrator's
conquering white ancestry. Usually it's London's nauseating love-scenes that
make me want to throw up, but this time the whole book was puke-worthy. I kind
of feel bad for having read it.
Emma -- Jane Austen
Austen is supposed to have said of this novel that "I
have written a heroine that nobody but me will much like"; she's probably
right. Emma is pretty annoying, a self-important twit who's convinced she's
always right; worse than that, she's a dreadful snob, pushing a woman dependent
on her into refusing a marriage proposal from a man she likes, purely because
she considers the man's social standing too low. The only time I really liked
her was after Mr. Knightley rebukes her for her rudeness to poor Miss Bates,
and Emma feels genuinely sorry and ashamed. It was well-written, though.
Eggs, Beans, and Crumpets -- P.G. Wodehouse
Another collection of funny reminiscences from the Drones
Club. The title comes from the Drones' habit of addressing each other as
"old bean", "old egg", or "old crumpet"; this
emphasizes their interchangeable lack of personality and also saves Wodehouse
from having to come up with names for all of them. In one story, "A Bit of
Luck for Mabel", the best joke is the last line, where, after sitting
through the wastrel pest Ukridge's story of how he got engaged to a girl named
Mabel by assuming a fake background and personality, only for her to
accidentally discover the truth and ditch him, the narrator remarks that it
would make a good magazine story; Ukridge says it needs a grand title, like
"The Fall of Honest Worth" or the equivalent, and the narrator dryly
says "I'll think of something."
Hedda Gabler -- Henrik Ibsen
A very depressing play from Ibsen's middle period. Hedda,
the anti-heroine, is married to a man named Tesman, but Ibsen chose to
emphasize her maiden name, I think as a way of telling us she never loved her
husband. Tesman is a respected academic and in line for a well-paid
professorship, so Hedda has married him for security. That security is
threatened by the return to town of another scholar, a reformed alcoholic named
Eilert who has astonished everyone by resurrecting his potential and writing a
well-received book; suddenly he appears to be a rival for Tesman's presumptive
professorship. We soon learn that Eilert was once Hedda's lover, and that he is
now finishing his next book, a masterpiece. Fearing for her security, and
jealous that Eilert has done something great without her inspiring him, Hedda
tempts him to drink and steals the manuscript, leading him to think he has lost
it. When he tells Hedda he has (as he thinks) lost his masterpiece through
drunken carelessness, she gives him a pistol and tells him he can still do a
magnificent thing by killing himself. When he leaves Hedda burns the
manuscript. Seemingly she has settled everything, but soon she gets a triple
shock: Eilert, instead of embracing the "cold, clean, brilliant"
death she had romantically imagined, has in fact gotten drunk at a whorehouse
and shot himself by accident; a doctor has recognized the pistol and he lets
Hedda know he will be blackmailing her for sex; and Tesman, appalled at Hedda's
behavior, has dedicated himself to re-creating Eilert's manuscript from his
notes. Faced with all this, Hedda goes off stage and kills herself. There
really seems to have been a sort of cult of the "magnificent death"
in Scandinavia; Ibsen brings it up in several plays, his argument always being
that suicide is neither romantic nor edifying and is rather an admission of
failure than a grand rejection of societal norms. In European novels of about a
hundred years ago, if an author wanted to suggest a character was immoral or
unhampered by convention, the shorthand way of showing it was to have the
character attend a performance of Hedda Gabler.
The Body Keeps the Score -- Bessel Van der Kolk
Van der Kolk is an iconoclast, with plenty of people willing
to call him a quack. That's a word that gets thrown around a lot in psychiatry
circles, though, since psychiatry is notoriously short on scientific rigor and
the only axiom they all agree on is that every approach but their own is
obviously foolish and wrong. Anyway Van der Kolk has a lot of experience and he
argues that talk therapy by itself is less useful than when combined with some
sort of physical therapy, since the effects of trauma are felt throughout the
whole body rather than just in the mind. He therefore recommends that talk
therapy should be complemented with things like yoga and other more esoteric
therapies like eye-movement exercises. The effectiveness of these other
therapies hasn't been rigorously tested in a laboratory environment, but that's
really hard to do with psychiatric treatments, where finding a control group is
usually difficult and might even be unethical. (You can't really give patients
in danger of self-harm a placebo treatment.)
The Wild Duck -- Henrik Ibsen
A play about lies and idealism, and an argument where no
one's right. A young man, Werle, returns from abroad to visit his poor friend
Ekdal, who lives in a tenement with his wife, young daughter, and elderly father.
Werle is consumed with guilt because his father (Werle senior) once framed the
older Ekdal for his own financial crimes, leading to the family's disgrace and
ruin. The Ekdals don't know this and survive on charity work given them by
Werle senior. Old Ekdal has declined mentally and physically, and the younger
Ekdal has constructed a sort of small nature preserve where his father can trap
rabbits, to let him pretend he's still capable of hunting and so retain some
dignity in his own eyes. Werle recognizes Mrs. Ekdal as a former servant of his
own family, and eventually guesses that the Ekdals' child is really Werle
senior's illegitimate daughter. Against Mrs. Ekdal's advice he frenziedly
reveals everything to Ekdal, who is understandably upset; overhearing the
commotion, the daughter thinks she's to blame and shoots herself with the old
man's pistol. It's partly a warning against closing your eyes to deceits that
may come back to haunt you, but it's mainly a condemnation of fanatical
idealism, shown in the awful picture of Werle standing over Ekdal as he holds
his dead daughter, exulting that it's wonderful that this has happened because
it will inspire Ekdal to achieve great things.
A Few Quick Ones -- P.G. Wodehouse
An excellent collection of short stories from all over
Wodehouseistan: Mulliner, golf, the Drones. There's a terrific Bertie Wooster
story where Jeeves coolly saves the day by whacking Bertie on the head with a
frying pan. It was great.
The Master Builder -- Henrik Ibsen
A strange play, that may be about madness or may not, I
can't decide. The Master Builder, Solness, has achieved great commercial
success by taking advantage of many strokes of fortune; most of these were
lucky for him but unlucky for someone else, and he wavers between feeling
guilty and feeling that he's marked by Destiny. He is building a church with a
great steeple -- a job he didn't really want, but took anyway, to keep it out
of the hands of his assistant, out of fear that his success is all luck and his
assistant may be a better architect than he is. During construction a young
woman named Hilda arrives in town and seeks Solness out, telling him that years
before, when she was a young girl, she had met Solness at another job site and
he had promised her a tower and a kingdom, and she claims to have taken these
promises seriously. Solness -- who does not remember her -- wonders if she is
mad or just calculating, and then wonders if she's actually confirmation of his
idea that he only has to wish for something for it to happen. Although he is
afraid of heights, Hilda convinces him to climb to the pinnacle of the steeple
he has built; he loses his footing and falls to his death, which must be a
challenge to stage.
Two More Pints -- Roddy Doyle
A collection of very good short dialogues, all between two
Irish friends sitting in a pub and discussing the news. I was interested to see
how positive they were about the President, adopting him as an honorary
Dubliner named Barry O'Bama.
A Doll's House -- Henrik Ibsen
A play from Ibsen's "realistic" period. The
heroine, Nora, is married to a banker named Torvald, whom she hero-worships.
Torvald has recently fired one of his clerks, the pretext being some long-ago
financial misdeeds, but the real reason is that the clerk has known Torvald
from childhood and so can't reasonably be ordered to call him "sir",
which rankles on Torvald's self-importance. As the story progresses we find
that Nora, at a time when Torvald was seriously ill, saved his life by paying
for his treatment with money from her father's estate. Torvald thinks she
inherited the money, but in fact she leveraged her father's small estate to
borrow the money without telling her husband. The fired clerk, who owns the
debt, has discovered that Nora forged her father's signature after he died to
get the loan; he threatens to expose her unless Torvald gives him his job back.
At her wits' end, Nora is convinced that Torvald will insist on taking the
blame for her crime to save her from disgrace, and to spare him she resolves on
suicide. Before she can act, though, Torvald gets a letter from the clerk
telling him everything; he storms at Nora, alternating between rage and
self-pity, blaming her for destroying his career. When a second message
arrives, telling them that the clerk has had second thoughts and decided not to
publish after all, Torvald is overjoyed and "forgives" Nora,
expecting that everything will return to normal. But the shock of having her
image of her husband destroyed has changed Nora; she tells Torvald she now
realizes that she has spent their whole marriage living as his toy doll, and in
order to live as a real person she is leaving him. The play was denounced from
every pulpit in Europe for depicting a woman leaving her husband. It's a very
powerful last act.
Ugly Americans -- Ben Mezrich
An account of Americans trading in the Asian markets --
Osaka, Tokyo, Hong Kong -- in the nineties. The author buys in too much to the
cowboy mythos, with the Americans roaring around Tokyo on Ducatis and throwing
Roman-emperor parties, with gorgeous Asian women hanging all over them all the
time; I felt like those scenes were written with a movie script in mind. It had
a good picture of how arbitrage works: the McDonald's on 12th Street is selling
hamburgers for a dollar, while the McDonald's on 15th Street is selling them
for $1.10; the business of the arbitrageur is to buy burgers at 12th Street and
then run over and sell them at 15th Street, without getting in a traffic
accident on the way, and outrunning all the other guys doing the same thing. It
was pretty good.
Nothing Serious -- P.G. Wodehouse
A collection of short stories, mostly about golf, with a
couple of Drones adventures thrown in. I'm always amazed that Wodehouse can
actually make golf, one of the most boring topics imaginable, interesting and
funny. His characters take devotion to golf to absurd lengths. One of them
sniffily dismisses a man who concedes a hole just because he didn't want to
play his ball from where it had landed inside a hornets' nest; another, having
sent a ball through a window into a stranger's house, insists on coming inside
and playing the ball from where it lies on the dining room table. Very good
reading.
Sartor Resartus -- Thomas Carlyle
An extraordinarily strange book, one of Dad's favorites.
It's cast in the form of a dim-witted and crotchety Editor of an English
magazine trying to make sense of a mystical German work on the philosophy of
clothes, by one Teufelsdrockh ("Devil-Shit") whose grandiose German
titles mean that he is a graduate of "Thwack-Ass Academy" and the
Professor of "Things-In-General" at the University of
"Don't-Know-Where". Through the double lens of Teufelsdrockh and the
Editor, Carlyle lampoons German idealistic philosophy with his Observations on
Clothes. In the second part of the book, trying to get some sense of
Teufelsdrockh's life and ideas, the Editor looks through a collection of paper
bags forwarded to him from Don't-Know-Where, holding a mishmash of papers by
and about Teufelsdrockh in no sort of order. Carlyle skillfully constructs a farrago
of nonsense that lets Teufelsdrockh's life illustrate Carlyle's own religious
awakening, moving from the "Everlasting No" (denial of God and
assertion that all faith is a conscious lie) to the "Centre of
Indifference" (agnosticism) to the "Everlasting Yes" (faith in
God and uncompromising rejection of evil.) Very entertaining.
Joseph Anton -- Salman Rushdie
Rushdie's autobiography, of course spending the major part
of it dealing with his death sentence. He was raised in India but went to
school in England as a teenager and stayed. He remarks that the three worst
crimes to commit in an English public school are "to be foreign, to be
clever, to be bad at sports"; you can get by with only two, but if you're
all three, well, good luck. He describes his development as an artist and a
craftsman, going into great detail on all the threads in his life that wound up
combining to produce The Satanic Verses. He does a really good job
making you feel the indignation that the book took him five years of painstaking
effort and yet people dismissed it in a moment without reading it, only on
someone else's word (Khomeini never even saw a copy of the book before issuing
his death sentence.) More maddening than that was the endless victim-blaming,
which I remember was the main text of all the think pieces at the time;
"He brought it on himself," everyone said, instead of "How is it
that a modern-day national government ordered a man killed because of a novel,
and everyone is just okay with that?" Rushdie contends, I think with
justice, that the real problem was that he wasn't actually murdered. Had he
been killed, the same people chastising him in the press would have lauded him
as a martyr, and he could have safely become a saint instead of remaining an
inconvenient presence. The book pushes over into self-aggrandizing a bit,
though; Rushdie always shows himself getting the last word, delivering the
unanswerable retort (easier to get away with since he tells the book in the
second person.) He also draws amazingly unflattering portraits of all his
ex-wives. The first, he says, starts demanding huge amounts of money after The
Satanic Verses becomes a success. The second he describes as outright
insane, a pathological liar and thief. It's with the third he's the most obviously
dishonest, drawing their disagreements as perfectly understandable on his side
and irrational on hers -- "She wanted more children, which he didn't
want; he wanted to move to New York, which frightened her"
(emphasis mine.) It sounds a lot like making excuses for dumping her in favor
of his fourth wife, a woman half his age, whom he describes as selfish and
bratty. It was an engrossing read.
Ghosts -- Henrik Ibsen
Probably his most open attack on conventional morality and
the hypocrisy and suffering caused by subordinating personal well-being to
public appearances. The heroine is a widow named Helene, who has used her
inheritance to build an orphanage. She tells the local pastor that she intends
to dedicate it to her late husband; he doesn't approve, because people might
wonder why she would give her husband's name to such a low charity, associated
with immorality and prostitutes. The pastor had always told Helene to put up
with her husband's bad behavior so the town wouldn't learn that a leading citizen
was an abuser and philanderer. The pastor is shocked to learn that not only did
ignoring the man's sins fail to reform him, but that he gave his wife syphilis.
She sent their son to a distant school to keep him away from his father, and in
fact built the orphanage just to use up their money to make sure the son would
inherit nothing from his father and so have a chance for a clean life. However,
when the son comes home from school it becomes clear that he has syphilis (he
was infected in the womb) and is slowly going mad. It only gets worse when
Helene has to tell him to break his engagement because his fiancée is his
illegitimate half-sister. The reviewers savaged the play, partly because Helene
suffers disaster even though she always acted in line with strict conventional
morality, and partly because of the character of the pastor, who shows no
interest in helping or consoling anyone and is concerned with nothing but
avoiding public scandal. It's a powerful play.
The Top of His Game -- W.C. Heinz
A collection of first-rate sports writing, covering the
forties through the seventies. There's some excellent war reporting from when
he was in Europe in WWII, which seems rather out of place here but is very good
anyway. The articles concentrate on boxing, baseball, and horse racing, the
only sports Heinz really cared about. His story "Death of a Race
Horse" has as much feeling packed into nine hundred words as I can
remember, maybe the best piece of on-deadline sports writing ever. My favorite
one was "Brownsville Bum", with its right-between-the-eyes
description of the life and death of Bummy Davis, a retired welterweight boxer
who died fighting off four armed robbers with his fists. The later part of the
book isn't as good, consisting of excerpts from a book Heinz wrote in the
seventies when he was old and tired, a where-are-they-now book in which he
interviewed retired athletes in order to write about how much better everything
was when he was younger.
The Postman Always Rings Twice -- James M. Cain
A noir novel, about a drifter in the thirties who gets hired
on as a mechanic and general man-of-all-work at a family-run gas station and
restaurant, where he starts an affair with the proprietor's wife. The two of
them plot to kill the husband, but the plan comes to nothing and the drifter
takes off, only to return some months later and try again. No postman appears
or is even mentioned in the whole book, which puzzled me, but maybe the title's
a metaphor -- the postman may be death, or Fate. The characters are loathsome
(they're supposed to be) so you don't really sympathize with anyone, but it was
a good story.
An Enemy of the People -- Henrik Ibsen
A play about civic responsibility and integrity.
"Jaws" was a very loose adaptation of it. The hero, Dr. Stockmann,
lives in a town that derives a lot of revenue from its mineral springs and the
bath houses and health spas built around them. Stockmann's investigations of
local health problems reveal that the springs are heavily polluted by runoff
from the tannery, the town's other big business. (Ibsen doesn't actually spell
it out, but at that time leather was tanned by soaking it in urine, so the
runoff was contaminating the spring water with human waste.) The mayor, not
wanting to spend the money to clean up the problem and also fearing a loss of
tourist money, orders Stockmann not to report his findings. When Stockmann
persists, his supporters desert him out of fear of public anger. The newspaper
refuses to print his report and instead runs editorials attacking him as a
dangerous crackpot. At a town meeting he is not allowed to speak and the mayor
declares him a public enemy; he loses his job, his children are expelled from
school, and a mob destroys his house. At first disbelieving and then angrily
despairing, by the end of the play Stockmann has become cheerfully defiant,
publishing his report in outside news sources and refusing to leave town. It's
an unusually upbeat ending for an Ibsen play.
Prolegomena To Any Future Metaphysics -- Immanuel Kant
A bit of a petulant book. Kant was unhappy with the
reception of his magnum opus, Critique of Pure Reason, which even he
admitted was "dry, obscure, and long-winded"; he wrote this book to
protest that everyone should have treated it with more respect. He makes the
usual complaints of all disappointed authors, condemning his critics as being
too unintelligent to understand his work or too lazy to put in the necessary
effort. He even includes an appendix in which he kvetches about a book review
practically line by line, a sure way to make yourself look like a crank. For
all that, Kant was no crank but a highly intelligent and methodical thinker,
and in this book he explains the thinking behind his exceptionally thorough
(and very, very German) approach to metaphysics. He notes that metaphysics, as
a field of study, had in his time fallen from its position as a highly regarded
field of scholarship, and that probably no one would thank you for calling them
a "learned metaphysician" -- this has only become more true in the
centuries since, which I think rather shows the failure of Kant's attempt to
set metaphysics on solid grounds of reasoning so that it could be studied
"like any other science". Certainly no one now would regard
metaphysics as a branch of science. Kant draws a distinction between analytical
reasoning, which explains a concept but does not add anything to it, and
synthetical reasoning, which can extend a concept and give it extra dimensions.
Unlike mathematics, he says, which can be grounded on pure reason -- in
principle, a person who had spent all their life in a dark room could reason
out all the axioms and theorems of mathematics from first principles --
metaphysics is synthetical. Kant thought that the idea that cause must follow
from effect is knowledge that can only be gained by experience (modern
neurobiologists now think that that knowledge is actually innate in humans) and
therefore metaphysics cannot exist independent of experience. Here he differs
strongly from the "idealists" of the 17th and 18th centuries, like
Berkeley and David Hume. All agreed that a thing as it appears to our senses
and the same thing as it really, essentially is -- the famous
"thing-in-itself" -- are fundamentally different. The idealists
argued that that meant that the world of the senses must be regarded as an
illusion and only the "thing-in-itself" regarded as "real".
If nothing can be based on the evidence of the senses, then all knowledge of
reality must necessarily be derived purely from reason. Kant argued the opposite,
and showed that no other branch of knowledge can be based on pure reason the
way mathematics can, because mathematics is fundamentally different. In that,
at least, I think he succeeded, since it's now generally accepted that nothing
else can be "proved" in the same way that a mathematical theorem can
be proved, demonstrating the absolute truth of a proposition for all time. An
interesting book, but it could have stood to be less whiny.
Uneasy Money -- P.G. Wodehouse
A comic romance, wherein the hard-up Lord Dawlish discovers
that an eccentric American millionaire he barely knew has died and left him a
huge fortune, for no better reason than that Dawlish once helped him improve
his golf swing. On finding out that the late millionaire had a niece named
Elizabeth in Long Island who has been left with nothing, he writes to offer her
half the money but is proudly rebuffed. So he goes to America to try to talk
her into taking the money. Traveling under his family name he meets Elizabeth's
worthless brother, and so gets invited to the farm she's renting, where they
form an immediate friendship based on their mutual love of bee-keeping. You can
see it's necessary to the plot that Dawlish and Elizabeth should fall in love
and get married, but the roundabout way they take of getting there is very
entertaining. Good book.
Mike and Psmith -- P.G. Wodehouse
A school story, with a bit of an odd history. The hero is a
British schoolboy of the 1890s named Mike, but the original novel (simply
called Mike) is kind of flat until the appearance, in the second half,
of the new student Psmith ("The 'P' is silent"), a far more
interesting character who steals the rest of the show. So the book was
eventually re-published under this new title without the first half, rather as
if they'd re-published The Pickwick Papers leaving out everything before
Sam Weller shows up. This makes the story start off rather abruptly, but
Psmith's inspired self-confident insolence makes up for it, and makes the usual
school-story devices -- the putting in their place of overbearing
school-masters, the drama of the big cricket-match -- more palatable. Wodehouse
said that Psmith is the only one of all his characters who was modeled on a
real person. I wonder what the original thought when he read the books.
South of the Border, West of the Sun -- Haruki Murakami
A story about a boy with the strange name Hajime
("Begin") who as an only child feels lonely and isolated. As often
happens in Murakami stories, Hajime makes one friend, a girl named Shimamoto,
also an only child, and they spend all their time together until her family
moves away when Hajime is twelve. Though he sometimes thinks he sees her in the
street, he does not meet her again until he is in his thirties and she comes
into the jazz club he owns and manages. By this time he has married, and the
two of them start a pattern of meeting and talking at his club in the late
hours, though she will explain nothing about her strange life. Eventually she
stops turning up and Hajime has to admit to himself that he has, emotionally,
been having an affair, and now must decide whether to pursue Shimamoto and make
the affair physical, or let it go and stay with his family. I thought it was
pretty good.
The Lady From the Sea -- Henrik Ibsen
A tragedy about a woman named Ellida who was engaged to a
sailor and promised to wait for him, but -- after the sailor murdered his captain
and fled, never to be heard from again -- considered the engagement broken and
married a doctor. The doctor has taken her to the seaside in hopes of improving
her health and spirits after a stillbirth, but the sailor returns and demands
she abandon her husband. The doctor, after some inward wrestling, tells Ellida
that he will not oppose her choice, whatever it is, and she ultimately rejects
the sailor. I really liked the scene where another vacationer, a would-be
sculptor, proposes to the doctor's daughter, and says he will be a strong and
sure husband because he has his art to live for; when the daughter asks him
what his wife will live for, he says that she will live for his art too, of
course, and patronizingly explains to her that that's what makes a woman
fulfilled and happy. It's scenes like this, I think, that fuelled some of
Ibsen's negative reviews; when you see a character say something on stage that
you yourself take for granted, and see that it makes him sound like a
self-satisfied ass, you either have to reconsider your own attitudes or else
get angry. (I also think Ibsen meant us to understand that so conventional a
person, whose first rule in life is worrying about what other people will say,
can never really be an artist.)
Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit -- P.G. Wodehouse
A Bertie Wooster book, where Bertie goes down to his Aunt
Dahlia's place; she's trying to sell off her money-hemorrhaging weekly paper to
a pair of stuck-up bores and she needs Bertie's social skills to keep everyone
in a good mood. Unfortunately, wherever Bertie goes he runs into trouble, and
his arrival at his aunt's house is soon followed by the arrival of his
ex-fiancée Florence (who despises Bertie for not letting her mold him into an
intellectual giant), her current fiancé Cheesewright (who despises Bertie
because he's convinced Bertie is trying to steal Florence away from him), and
the would-be Dictator Spode (who despises Bertie on general principles).
Naturally complications ensue. Jeeves has gotten Bertie out of innumerable
jams, and it's always great, but the scene where he serenely tells Bertie that
the best thing to do would be to cosh Spode when he isn't looking, and calmly
produces a blackjack with a "You may want this, sir," may be the
highlight of his career. It was fantastic.
John Gabriel Borkman -- Henrik Ibsen
A late melodrama, a winter's tale about the Borkman family,
ruined and disgraced by the crimes of John Gabriel, head of the family, a
banker who secretly used his clients' money to fund his own schemes and lost it
all. The play takes place some years after Borkman's release from prison; we
find that on his return home he moved up to the top floor and has not come down
since. Most of the play involves dialogue between his estranged wife and his cousin
(whom he loved as a young man but jilted to marry for money), the two of them
arguing over Borkman in the past and Borkman's son in the present. It's
appropriate that the play is set in midwinter, with the house frozen in a
storm, since the characters are all frozen in the past, the women endlessly
rehashing their old grievances while Borkman sits in unrepentant state above,
waiting for the townspeople to come and apologize for not appreciating his
genius. It's an unpleasant story.
The Alchemist -- Ben Jonson
Jonson's most successful play, a farce about a servant who,
with his employer out of town, uses the man's fine house, and the help of a
couple shills, to pose, in turn, as a doctor, a wealthy trader, and an
alchemist, conning money out of several stupid and overly self-confident
townspeople. It's pretty funny watching the three of them play on their marks'
greed and overawe them with impressive-sounding nonsense. They trip themselves
up in the end, of course. It was pretty good.
An American Tragedy -- Theodore Dreiser
God help us, what a slog. Dreiser had some fervent admirers
in his day, but their praise of him was always very defensive, since his
writing is undeniably clumsy and heavy-handed. My edition has an afterword
where the editor -- defending him! -- admits that Dreiser "crushed the
English language in a leaden embrace." That's pretty accurate. This is the
story, dragged out over eight hundred turgid pages, of a boy named Clyde,
raised by rigid, humorless, evangelical street preachers, whose idea of
parenting is to drag their children around the streets making them sing hymns
and take up collections after the sermon. Clyde has some intelligence and
ability, but as he's raised with no education and no moral grounding -- since
how could he do anything but despise his parents' fanatical unworldliness --
he's weak and spineless. He's never able to resist any temptation, and this
gets him into several disasters, the last and worst coming when he comes East
and gets a promising job, but can't resist secretly dating a woman who works
under him, leaning on her to pressure her into a sexual relationship. After a
few months, as he does well at his job and starts getting taken up into higher
society, he falls hard for a teenage socialite and dreams of marrying her and
so being translated into a life of wealth and ease; he decides to dump his
factory-worker girlfriend, but just at that moment they find out she's
pregnant. Clyde, faced with the prospect of marrying her and abandoning his
dreams, spends months nerving himself up to murder her and eventually tries to
stage a boating accident. When the moment comes to act he sits paralyzed by
fear, and when the boat upsets anyway he treads water and lets her drown; he
convinces himself that because of this he isn't really guilty. His plot is so
clumsy he's caught instantly, and the last third of the book is his trial and
execution, rather more interesting than the rest of it. The story is pretty
memorable, but reading the prose is like dragging your feet through heavy snow.
My copy has an Annie's Book Swap stamp in it, which means I bought it in the
mid-80s at the latest; so it's been sitting on my shelf for about thirty years,
but reading it seemed to take longer than that. I wouldn't recommend it.
This Census-Taker -- China Miéville
I can't really say what this novel was about, though I liked
the prose. It shifts back and forth between first-person and third-person
narration, although both narrators are apparently the same person. The book
opens with the narrator, a young boy, running down into a town from the
ramshackle house up on the mountain where he lives, terrified because he has
just seen one of his parents murder the other -- although he's confused about
which was the killer and which the victim. The leading citizens of the town
either don't believe him or find it easiest to pretend they don't, so he's sent
back home, where he has to live with his father, a silent, distant man who
beats animals (and occasionally people) to death with stones and throws the
bodies into a deep pit in a cave, for what may be religious reasons, I couldn't
tell. Of course we see everything through the eyes of a young boy who doesn't
understand adult motivations. The boy is eventually taken away by a government
official, a census-taker, who seems to have come to town pursuing a runaway
apprentice; it's implied that the census-taker kills the boy's father and
throws him into his own pit, though that's not actually certain. It's strange
that in a Miéville story the deliverer should be an agent of state power, but
on the other hand a coded message from the runaway apprentice warns that the
census-taker is "rogue". Whatever that means. I didn't really get it,
I guess.
Brother of the More Famous Jack -- Barbara Trapido
A sort of Bohemian-academic novel, set in England in the
sixties, about an English-lit grad student who becomes deeply involved with the
family of her graduate advisor, who has the sort of convention-flouting home
life where the children call the parents by their first names. The heroine is initially
seduced by a bisexual colleague who seems to be doing it as a screw-you to the
advisor; she later falls in love with first one and then another of the
advisor's sons. The gushingly adulatory preface may have raised my expectations
too high, but I disliked the characters intensely, especially the advisor, and
I didn't like the book at all.
The Man With Two Left Feet -- P.G. Wodehouse
A collection of early short stories written in the teens for
American magazines, and so heavier on the romance element than his later work.
A couple of them have so much the feel of O. Henry stories that they must be
deliberate imitations: in one, a young man falls for a woman whose mad father
believes himself to be the King of England and won't consent to her marrying a
commoner; with the Yankee can-do attitude that Wodehouse admired, the young man
gets himself elected King of the Festival at Coney Island and asks for the
woman's hand as a royal suitor. In another, a small-town girl pours out her
troubles to a cynical dance-hall hostess, who turns out to be a runaway
small-town girl herself and needing only this push to go back to her
sweetheart. They were pretty good.
Between the Woods and the Water -- Patrick Leigh Fermor
The second volume of Fermor's retrospective of his
walking-tour across Europe in the thirties. He ended the first volume at the
border of Hungary; this one sees him across old Mitteleuropa, through
the Balkans and names now vanished from the map: Moravia, Wallachia,
Transylvania, Yugoslavia. The book ends at the great Iron Gate, a mountainous
gorge on the lower Danube. (He was going to write a third book covering his
final leg, all the way to Istanbul, but he died before finishing it.) The
writing is excellent, and he makes everything sound immensely enjoyable. Also,
either he got a lot more mature and self-confident between the autumn of 1933
and the summer of 1934, or else he stopped worrying about what his mother would
think when she read it, because this second volume is a lot more frank and adventurous
than the first. He not only has a long love affair with a married Romanian lady
(whose name he discreetly disguises), he happily recounts a day when he and a
devil-may-care landsknecht friend went out riding and swimming and met a
couple of farm girls, who willingly knocked off work for a roll in the hay.
Dry Storeroom No. 1 -- Richard Fortey
A very good account of what it's like to work in London's
Natural History Museum, which split off from the British Museum in the 1880s.
The author isn't really in sympathy with the get-up-to-date drive of the
current Board, and there's a lot of good-old-days nostalgia, understandable
coming from someone who worked there all his adult life. Naturally a good deal
of it is taken up with the histories of eccentric caretakers and their odd
habits. I liked it a lot.
Fighter From Whitechapel -- Harold U. Ribalow
A so-so book about Daniel Mendoza, the "Fighting
Jew", who was the bare-knuckle heavyweight champion in the 1790s. At 160
pounds he was really a middleweight, but he was so fast and had such good
defensive technique that he could outlast heavier opponents. He wrote a book
about the science of defense that remained the standard until the end of the
bare-knuckle era. Fighters occupied an odd position in those days;
prize-fighting was technically illegal, and participants were often arrested
and fined; yet the fighters themselves were widely respected and welcomed in
society, so much so that Mendoza appears to have been the only Jew who ever
spoke with King George III. The story's interesting, but the book is written
from a "look how this tough, rich, famous guy was still humble enough to
be an observant Jew, make sure you be like him" angle, and it's pretty
heavy-handed about it.
Eye of the Beholder -- Laura J. Snyder
A very good biography of Johannes Vermeer and Anton van
Leeuwenhoek, who lived and worked on opposite sides of the same square in
Delft, a couple hundred yards apart, for their whole lives. A lot of it deals
with the advances in optical technology being made at the time, with
Leeuwenhoek making the best microscopes in the world and Vermeer using the
camera obscura for his perspectives. It wasn't a quiet time for the Dutch
Republic, either; I was interested to find out that it was Dutch policy to
employ artists as sharpshooters, on the theory that they had better-trained
eyes than anyone else.
Psmith in the City -- P.G. Wodehouse
This follows the careers of Mike and Psmith after they
graduate from school. Mike's father has suddenly gone broke, so Mike can't go
to university and instead gets a job as a clerk in a London bank. He's pretty
depressed about it, since his idea of the good life is to be a gentleman-farmer
while playing cricket for the county; but the tedium of staying indoors all the
time is lightened by the arrival of Psmith, whose eccentric father has decided
he should get a job rather than go to Cambridge. The bank they work at is
obviously modeled on the bank Wodehouse himself worked at for a couple years
before leaving to go into show business; it's a sort of feeder institution, a
place meant to school young men in the business before sending them off to work
in overseas branches. Neither of our heroes take the work seriously, and the
main tension of the story is Psmith's project to fill the time by exasperating
the bank's manager as much as possible without getting fired. It wasn't bad.
Psmith, Journalist -- P.G. Wodehouse
Mike and Psmith have finished university and come to
America; Mike is playing for the English cricket team, on an exhibition tour,
and Psmith has come along to see the country. Wodehouse didn't have much for
Mike to do, and so he spends most of the book off stage playing cricket. In the
mean time Psmith, having befriended a young and ambitious reporter, uses his
social position, money, and chutzpah to make himself editor-in chief of a
milquetoast weekly paper -- a meek, inoffensive home-and-garden kind of thing
-- and change it overnight into a fire-breathing, crusading social-reform
platform, much to the surprise of its usual contributors. The paper tackles a
slumlord, naming names and exposing bribes, and there's a very funny scene
where Psmith and his reporter friend, besieged by gangsters, hold them off by
getting through a trap door onto a roof and whacking anyone who comes up with a
two-by-four, to shouts of praise and encouragement from entertained Irishmen in
nearby buildings. I liked it.
Yours, Isaac Asimov -- Stanley Asimov, ed.
A posthumous collection of letters, edited by his younger
brother. Asimov maintained a public persona of untroubled jovial bonhomie;
the letters are more genuine and practical-minded. I was interested to see that
he was aware that his later novels weren't very good; he hadn't written science
fiction in thirty years because he enjoyed non-fiction so much more, but he
matter-of-factly explained that he knew he wasn't going to live that much
longer and fiction made more money, and he wanted to provide for his family. It
was understandable that his first wife drops out of his letters entirely after
their divorce, but I thought it was kind of weird that though he's always
talking about his daughter he never mentions his son at all. In fact in his
very last letters he mentions more than once how lucky he is to have a beloved
wife and daughter -- you'd never know he even had a son. It kind of cries out
for editorial explanation, but his brother just silently passes over it. I
suppose there must have been a family quarrel.
Volpone -- Ben Jonson
I saw this on stage once, but it was heavily abridged -- I
suppose the director thought a modern audience wouldn't get as much of a kick
out of the self-important, social-climbing Sir Politic Would-Be as the
Jacobeans did. It's a viciously funny story about an old miser named Volpone
("The Fox") who pretends to be chronically ill, while his oily and
manipulative servant Mosca ("The Fly") buzzes around several greedy,
gullible, wealthy townsmen, convincing each one to make huge presents to Volpone
in return for being named his heir. Everyone involved behaves abominably, and
they all trip themselves up in the end through their own greed, whereupon
they're all horribly punished. It was great.
Memoirs of a Cavalier -- Daniel Defoe
A historical novel, purporting to be the memoir of an
English soldier who fought on the side of Charles I against the Parliament in
the seventeenth century. The fictional narrator begins his military career on
the Continent, fighting now on one side, now another in the Thirty Years' War,
and studying the methods of Gustavus Adolphus, before returning to England at
the outbreak of the Civil Wars. He gives a pretty good picture of the course of
the war, which was as much a war of nobles against commons as of Anglicans
against Puritans, doing it well enough that I could quietly ignore the
unlikelihood of one person having been in so many important battles and
witnessing so many vital conversations. He actually does a pretty good job of
spreading the blame around evenly, for the most part; of course, as a cavalier,
he has to regard obedience to the King as paramount, but he does admit that the
Parliament's grievances are legitimate. At times the whole thing seems to have
been written as an exercise in damning the Scots, whom he curses up one side and
down the other for faithlessness to the Stuarts. He describes the fortunes of
the war convincingly enough that it's genuinely chilling when he remarks,
soberly, "This was the first time I heard the name of Cromwell."
I liked it.
The Inventor and the Tycoon -- Edward Ball
I wasn't that interested in this. It's mostly the story of
the oddball photographer Eadweard Muybridge (he spelled his name various ways)
who became notorious after murdering his wife's lover; because he did a lot of
work for Leland Stanford the book presents them as an unlikely partnership, but
I thought that was a stretch. Stanford hired Muybridge to settle a bet on the
old question of whether all four of a horse's hoofs are off the ground at any
one time when the horse is at a gallop; Muybridge proved that they are,
inventing an early form of motion picture in the process. Stanford also hired
him to photograph his family and giant mansion in San Francisco (the area
became known as "Nob Hill" at that time because so many railroad
tycoons built houses there, "nob" being an old word for a pushy rich
asshole.) Ball presents Muybridge's murder case as if it were the crime of the
century, although I don't see what's so especially appalling or even remarkable
about it: Muybridge found out that his son was actually the child of his wife's
lover, and went and shot the man to death. Surely that happened all the time.
The jury seemed to find it understandable, since he was acquitted. The book
does have some good sections on the naked greed and power-mongering of the
California railroad men -- Stanford was governor of the state and president of
the biggest railroad at the same time, and when any newspapers spoke out he
just bought them and shut them down. Overall I thought it was kind of blah.
Full Moon -- P.G. Wodehouse
A Blandings novel, wherein Uncle Galahad sets a new record
by bringing the same man to Blandings as an impostor three separate times, an
achievement even for him. The triple impostor is Galahad's godson Bill, whose
engagement to one of the family's endless crowd of nieces is being prevented by
the draconian Aunt Constance. Bill is a bad actor and keeps giving himself
away, but the undaunted Galahad keeps bringing him back, first as an artist
hired to paint Lord Emsworth's prize pig, then (in a false beard) as an
assistant gardener, and finally, in a triumph of chutzpah, as a *different*
artist hired to paint the pig! That's only one of the three main plot lines,
all of which resolve each other cleverly at the end. I loved it.
1Q84 -- Haruki Murakami
A very good, very interesting, very weird novel set in
Japan. It tells the bizarre love story of Aomame and Tengo, who both had
oppressive and abusive parents; they were students at the same elementary
school, but never spoke. One day when Aomame was being mocked and bullied for
her parents' religious fanaticism, Tengo held her hand for a moment. She left
school soon after and they never met again, but ever since then both of them
have known that they would never love anyone else. As the story begins, it is
the summer of 1984 and Aomame, now in her twenties, is on her way to an
important appointment when her taxi stops in a traffic jam and she gets out and
climbs down from the expressway on a utility stair. She soon finds that
everything around her has changed subtly -- the police are carrying guns, for
example, which she has never seen before -- and she eventually decides that she
has somehow crossed into an alternate version of 1984, which she thinks of as "1Q84"
(an untranslatable pun, since the number 9 is pronounced kyu in
Japanese.) The most visible change is that here in 1Q84 there was recently a
pitched battle between the police and a heavily-armed compound of right-wing
religious fanatics, made up of the same cult that Aomame's parents belonged to.
Meanwhile Tengo, now a writer, is introduced by his agent to a teenage runaway
from the same cult, and he helps her write her autobiographical attack on the
cult as a ghost-writer; this leads agents from the cult to attack both of them,
and they go into hiding. Soon afterwards, Aomame -- who works for a shelter for
battered women and occasionally murders the women's abusers -- is asked by the
head of the shelter to assassinate the leader of the cult, a serial rapist.
(Was Aomame a killer in the real world, too, or is that something that changed
when she came to 1Q84? That question never occurs to her, but it did to me.)
Their run-ins with the cult bring Aomame and Tengo together again, which they
both had always felt would happen, and they set out to escape from 1Q84 and
take up a new life together. I thought it was great.
The Clicking of Cuthbert -- P.G. Wodehouse
His first collection of golf stories, in which he introduces
the Oldest Member, a retired golfer who hangs around the local golf club and
traps people into listening to his rambling stories. I don't know why his
listeners are always so eager to get away, since the stories are really funny,
often turning on the insane lengths his fanatical golfers go to in order to
play the ball as it lies. I particularly liked the story about the young man
snubbed by the snooty Society ladies who disapprove of his trying to meet a
local young woman; the ladies arrange a highbrow dinner party to entertain a
visiting Russian writer, only to find him gloomily dogmatic, domineering, and
egomaniacal, and the party is in danger of subsiding into dispirited silence
until the hero saves the day by talking to the writer about great British
golfers.
Dreamers -- Knut Hamsun
A novel set in a fishing town on the coast of Norway. The
town is essentially ruled by the merchant Mack, who holds a government license
that gives him the exclusive right to buy and sell fish; he is jealous and
watchful of those who are independent of his power, such as the priest and the
telegraph operator. The plot revolves around a break-in and robbery at Mack's
offices; to recover his prestige and show off how wealthy he is, he announces a
reward of double the money that was stolen. This leads an ambitious local to
confess (falsely) in order to get the reward, which causes some confusion.
Unusually for Hamsun the novel ends reasonably happily. It wasn't bad.
My Man Jeeves -- P.G. Wodehouse
A collection of very early Jeeves stories, along with
several stories about a young man-about-town named Reggie Pepper, who is sort
of a proto-Bertie. All of them were later re-written into immensely superior
versions, so reading this was a bit like looking over first drafts of better
stories I've already read. Only of interest to completists.
The Life of Samuel Johnson -- Thomas, Baron Macaulay
A short admiring biography of Johnson. I thought Macaulay
was unreasonably dismissive towards Mrs. Johnson, sniffily tut-tutting that
marrying an inexperienced man so much younger than she was "did her no
credit". Her later negative reputation is probably mostly due to David
Garrick, who didn't like her and would often perform mean-spirited imitations
of her at parties where Johnson wasn't present. But the Johnsons seem to have
had a perfectly happy married life, and there's no question that Johnson was devastated
when she died and he never remarried.
The Looming Tower -- Lawrence Wright
Very well researched. It's an in-depth look at the people
and circumstances leading up to the destruction of the World Trade Center in
2001. The most widely spread background influence is a fundamentalist sect of
Sunni Islam founded in the 18th century by a desert ascetic named al-Wahhab. He
formed an alliance with a sheikh whose descendants are now the royal family,
and thanks to the money and influence of the House of Saud, which funds nearly
every Islamic school not only in Saudi Arabia but throughout the world,
Wahhabism has become hugely powerful, although the leaders of all the other
sects of Islam oppose it. Since Wahhabism rejects civilization and education,
many of its followers are illiterate and have no notion of what's in the Qur'an
beyond what their leaders tell them. Most of the leading imams in the al-Qaeda
organization have no training and no education, which is why they have no
worries about issuing religious judgements that go directly against the Qur'an.
The Saudi government contributed its share by ruthlessly crushing dissent,
which meant that ordinary people protesting their legitimate grievances against
the government were thrown into prison and tortured, turning them into
anti-Saud fanatics. In fact al-Qaeda was and is primarily dedicated to
destroying the Saudi government and is only concerned with America tangentially
-- none of them ever gave a thought to America until after Desert Storm, when
the American troops stationed in Saudi Arabia took too long to get recalled. It
got worse when a terrorist group occupied a prominent Muslim temple and the
Saudis called in American troops to clear them out (all the troops had to
undergo a pro forma conversion to Islam so they'd be allowed to enter
the temple, which further infuriated the fanatics.) I hadn't known that the
al-Qaeda leaders never really expected the attack on the World Trade Center to
succeed, and when it did they didn't really know what to do. It wasn't exactly
an enjoyable book, but I'm glad to have read it.
Japan, the Beautiful, and Myself -- Yasunari Kawabata
This was Kawabata's acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in
Literature. In it he relates the discipline of Zen Buddhism to artistic creation,
saying that what they have in common is a devotion to simplicity, which he
thought was the truest path to beauty.
Finding Zero -- Amir D. Aczel
An account of trying to find the earliest use of a written
character for zero. Not very interesting. The author did stumble across a stone
marker that has what is probably an early zero on it, but his exuberant belief
that this is the very first one doesn't seem based on much besides him wanting
it to be. He also devotes several pointless chapters to trying to debunk the
usefulness of the law of the excluded middle, giving the phrase "not
unkind" as an example of a statement that a thing both possesses and does
not possess the same quality at the same time. He's wrong, though: "not
unkind" is a litotes, where "unkind" doesn't mean "absence
of kindness" but "the opposite of kindness." So describing
someone as "not unkind" means that they're not kind and also not
actively mean. On the kindness axis they're right at the origin.
No Hurry -- Michael Blumenthal
Contemporary poetry, with some very good imagery. Didn't
grab me quite as much as his poetry from the early nineties.
Jeeves in the Offing -- P.G. Wodehouse
A Bertie Wooster novel, wherein Bertie, having seen Jeeves
off on his annual fishing vacation, goes to visit his aunt in the country,
expecting nothing more trying than helping to entertain a visiting American
couple doing a business deal with Bertie's uncle. When he arrives, though, he's
surprised to find his former nemesis Sir Roderick Glossop (now a friendly ally
after Bertie helped him during the blackface incident) posing as the butler in
order to observe the Americans' son, who has a reputation for bad behavior.
Also visiting is the Reverend Aubrey Upjohn, Bertie's former schoolmaster and
the terror of his childhood, as well as the usual pair of sweethearts in
difficulties, in this case Bertie's ex-fiancée Bobby and her current fiancé
Kipper, an old pal and schoolmate of Bertie's who's in trouble because he wrote
a nasty article about their old school that a biased court might find
libellous. Bertie's efforts to keep all parties happy land him in the soup,
only to be saved by Jeeves's timely arrival. It was pretty good.
Criticisms and Appreciations of Charles Dickens -- G.K.
Chesterton
Critical essays on all of Dickens's books, some of them
good, some appalling. His general-overview chapter was so nasty the editor of
my copy omitted it entirely, only noting that it wasn't useful; I had to go
find another edition to see what the story was. It turns out Chesterton argued
that in Our Mutual Friend, the Jewish character Abraham Riah (a gentle,
friendly, honest old man) was too good a person to be a genuine Jew, and
Dickens put him in as a blind, since the "real" Jews in the book are
the villainous bankers and money-men. They're actually Anglicans, but
Chesterton says we know they're "really" Jews because of their dark
hair, their greedy, grasping character, and the natural repulsion we feel for
them. I felt dirty after reading it, but I can't agree with the editor's
decision to leave it out, since knowing how Chesterton thinks affects how you
understand the rest of his criticism. I mean, if he's so conspiracy-minded that
he thought Dickens hid secret anti-Semitism in his novels (as if anyone would
have needed to use dog-whistle hate speech against Jews in 1860s England!) it
gets harder to take any of his other insights seriously.
Coined -- Kabir Sehgal
A book not so much about money as about currency and the
concept of trading. I thought the writing was a little dull, and although I was
interested in the first part of the book where he talks about protein swapping
in prehistoric bacteria, that being their only medium of "exchange",
I found the rest of it unremarkable.
When We Dead Awaken -- Henrik Ibsen
Ibsen's last play, heavily depressing. Arnold and Maia are
staying at a mountain spa; they are unhappy in their marriage and disappointed
with life. Maia meets Ulfstein, a loud, brash, hard-drinking outdoorsman, very
different from her husband; she becomes fascinated by his casually violent life
and goes off into the mountains to watch him hunt for bear with his dogs. Soon
after, Arnold recognizes another visitor to the spa: it is Irena, a model who
posed for his best sculpture some years before. Irena is clearly not well and
is shadowed at a distance by a nun, apparently in case she tries to hurt
herself. They also go off into the mountains together. Irena tells Arnold that
she is already dead, and has been ever since she posed for him, since, she
says, he took out her soul and put it in his sculpture. He takes her to mean
that she loved him and he refused to love her back, preferring his art; he
admits this is true, saying that had their relationship been romantic the
statue wouldn't have been as good. Irena tells him that she had been planning
on murdering him but has now decided not to, since she can see he's as dead
inside as herself. At the same time, Maia stonily refuses Ulfstein's sexual
advances just before the four of them all meet. Arnold and Maia confront each
other about their unhappiness and agree to part. Ulfstein senses a storm
approaching and says everyone must return to the spa. The fastest way is to go
down the mountainside, so he takes Maia down first and tells the others he will
return for them. As they descend out of sight, Maia singing happily about
freedom, Arnold and Irena agree to go higher up the mountain to find a
spiritual reawakening; the storm hits and we see a landslide carry their dead
bodies down the mountainside. Then the whole audience goes home and commits
suicide, I guess.
Letter To His Father -- Franz Kafka
A very long letter, almost an essay, that Kafka wrote in his
mid-thirties, in an attempt to stand up to his father's emotional abuse. It
seems to have been prompted by the elder Kafka's opposition to his son's
planned marriage (which wound up never happening.) The letter is written in a
detached tone, almost clinical; it felt to me as though even as an adult Kafka
didn't dare let his rage show openly. In fact he didn't even have the nerve to
give the letter to his father; he gave it to his mother instead, but she didn't
have the nerve either, so the elder Kafka never read it. I thought the most
telling part was where Kafka takes his father to task for excusing his own
cold, sneering behavior as a parent by saying "I can't lie as other
fathers do," which is only (as Kafka points out) an implicit argument that
no parents really love their children. It reminded me of how Nero was said to
believe that all men were secretly as evil and corrupt as he was himself, but
lacked the courage to show it. It was touching but depressing.
The Storm -- Daniel Defoe
A long and thorough piece of journalism on the hurricane of
1703, the heaviest and most damaging wind-storm ever to hit Britain, crossing
England diagonally from southwest to northeast, wrecking ships, collapsing
houses, felling trees, and causing tremendous destruction among fields and
livestock. Defoe says it hit in late November, but he was reckoning by the
Julian calendar, so we would now say it hit in early-to-mid-December. It's
mostly straight reporting, but Defoe can't resist moralizing on the wrath of
God; he's inclined to regard the storm as England's punishment for not fighting
hard enough against the Spanish in their recent war. Kind of incongruously he
also includes a defense of scientists against charges of atheism.
Hot Water -- P.G. Wodehouse
A funny novel that begins when the hero, Packy, a young
American millionaire visiting England, answers his hotel's lobby phone and gets
yelled at by another guest rudely demanding that the hotel barber be sent up to
his room. In the spirit of fun, Packy goes up himself and starts cutting the
guest's hair. The guest turns out to be Senator Opal, a die-hard Dry legislator
and drunkard. The laugh Packy gets out of the Senator's explosive reaction to
his amateur haircut is worth it by itself, but he also meets the Senator's
daughter Jane and falls for her, eventually traveling to France hoping to see
her again at her vacation resort. The resource and optimistic can-do spirit he
shows in rescuing the Senator from being blackmailed with a letter he wrote to
his bootlegger wins Jane's heart, and everything ends happily. I liked it.
The Castle of Crossed Destinies -- Italo Calvino
An interesting story about a group of medieval travelers who
meet in a strange castle. Something about the place prevents any of them from
speaking aloud, so they tell each other their stories by laying out cards from
the Tarot, suggesting details about themselves and their histories with the
characteristics of the cards and leaving the others to fill in the rest with
their imaginations. No one reshuffles the cards; rather, each person builds
their own story by branching off from the previous one, until finally the whole
deck is laid out and all the travelers can trace their own stories across the
pattern. It was pretty good. I liked the afterword, in which Calvino describes
an abandoned plan of writing a modern-day equivalent, where a group of
travelers meet at a deserted motel and mutely try to tell each other their
stories using pages from newspaper comic strips.
The Adventures of Captain Bonneville -- Washington Irving
One of the "American" stories that Irving wrote
upon his return from England, to prove that his time abroad hadn't Europeanized
him. Bonneville was an Army captain who undertook a three-year mission of
exploration across the Rockies and up and down the Pacific coast; Irving bought
his journal and logs from him and turned them into this book. It's a very good
picture of the American West in the 1830s. Bonneville could stand on a high
ridge and see nothing but buffalo all the way to the horizon; he describes the
tremendous mountains of buffalo skulls, higher than ten men, where the Indians
had been piling them since time immemorial. He naturally rates the Indians
according to how friendly to whites they are, but Irving is careful to draw our
attention to the fact that every hostile incident Bonneville relates was in
fact provoked by the whites; the trappers who acted as Bonneville's guides made
it a practice, when they had a grudge against some tribe, simply to kill the next
member of that tribe they met, regardless of circumstances. It's good reading.
The Letters of Samuel Johnson, Vol.1
The first volume of his collected correspondence. Naturally
this one covers the longest period, because it wasn't until later in his life,
after he became famous, that people started saving his letters. A lot of them
are humdrum, things like thank-you letters and letters written trying to get
various jobs when he was younger. A surprisingly large number are letters
written on behalf of other people; Johnson was the softest touch ever, and all
kinds of people roped him into using his influence and eloquence to get them
jobs, or put forward their names as charity cases, or to have loans forgiven.
Some of them are very sad reading, especially the devastated letter he wrote to
his friend, the Reverend John Taylor, soon after his wife died. The book
contains several photos of letters, and I was surprised to see how bad his
handwriting was -- of course his eyesight was very weak, but trying to decipher
his letters by candle-light must have been near impossible. I bet people saved
his letters to read during daylight.
Geek Sublime -- Vikram Chandra
A book about geek culture, sort of, pretty uneven, but with
some good sections. I liked the part where he slammed the Silicon Valley
attitude that tries to paint techies as modern cowboys -- an embarrassingly
pathetic attempt to pretend that writing code is macho and the geeks are really
the cool kids. It's the same as the thinking behind programming scenes in
movies, where the super-buff and edgily cool hero stares intently at the dozens
of windows opening and closing on the screen, typing at manic speed as techno
music blasts and the camera angle swoops around, when in fact the biggest
component of programming is time spent just staring into space.
Uncle Dynamite -- P.G. Wodehouse
A novel about Uncle Fred, England's foremost liar, and his
nephew Pongo. Fred is concerned to find that Pongo has had an argument with his
longtime fiancée, the good-natured sculptor Sally, and gotten engaged on the
rebound to the icy highbrow Hermione, daughter of the egomaniacal Sir Aylmer;
Pongo has not endeared himself to Aylmer, having clumsily broken several of his
curios, including an ugly bust. Uncle Fred, being a friend of Aylmer's nephew
Bill, who is the actual owner of the estate but is too cowed by his
authoritarian uncle to assert himself, borrows one of Sally's spare sculptures
and gets Bill to introduce him into the household under the false identity of
Major Plank, the African explorer, so he can replace the broken bust with no
one the wiser. However, due to Sally's being distracted by the problems of her
worthless younger brother Otis (who is being sued by Aylmer because Otis, when
publishing Aylmer's memoirs, accidentally switched the text with a volume of
erotica) Fred has borrowed the wrong bust, mistakenly taking one inside of
which Sally has hidden a valuable necklace so a friend of hers can smuggle it
through US customs. So, while at the estate posing as Major Plank, Uncle Fred
needs to get the bust back, replace it with another so no one will notice, get
Aylmer to drop his suit against Otis, get Hermione to dump Pongo, get Pongo to
apologize to Sally, and get Bill to stand up for himself, while defending his
false identity against the suspicious local constable and despite the
unexpected appearance of the real Major Plank, all without losing his aplomb or
letting any of his ridiculous lies trip up any of the others. It was great.
Much Obliged, Jeeves -- P.G. Wodehouse
Written when Wodehouse was in his nineties, this has funny
parts but it seems more like an outline than an actual novel. Bertie tries to
help a pal get elected from a country borough and runs up against his nemesis Spode,
who threatens Bertie in a desultory sort of way. The novel works on the
sentence level, but apparently Wodehouse didn't have the energy to write great
comic scenes any more so he just suggests them, and the important parts all
happen off stage. We only get a rather lame second-hand report of what should
have been the heart of the novel, a public meeting where Spode gets pelted with
vegetables and Bertie's pal gets out of his unwanted engagement by publicly
endorsing the other candidate. I found it really unsatisfying; Bertie spends
the novel sitting around as people come in from off stage to tell him what's
happened.
The Letters of Samuel Johnson, Vol.2
Letters of the 1760s and early 1770s. By this time Johnson
was well known, and more importantly he'd lived in London long enough to
acquire some social polish, so he had a wider circle of friends; in particular
he'd met and befriended both James Boswell and Henry Thrale, who inspired him
to write more often. He did conscientiously write every so often to old
friends, but generally those letters consist of little more than an apology for
not having written lately, and the excuse that as nothing ever happened to him
he had nothing to write about. With Boswell and the Thrales -- Henry Thrale,
Hester Thrale, and their oldest child, Hester Maria -- it was different, and
his letters to them are cheerful, friendly, often self-mocking, and full of
reflections and advice. They're also a picture of how hard his life was -- he
was chronically ill, with problems that 18th-century medicine couldn't treat,
and was nearly always in pain; many of the letters mention off-hand, as a
matter of course, that he is writing in the middle of the night because his
coughing prevents him from sleeping. With all this I was struck by the polite
firmness of his letters to the Prime Minister, when the government voted him
(Johnson) a merit-based pension, which would lift him out of poverty for the
first time in his life; Johnson calmly wrote to say that he would only accept
it if there were no conditions (he meant that he wasn't willing to become a
paid apologist for the government.) A couple of the letters to Mrs. Thrale are
in French -- probably because they deal with sensitive family issues, and
Johnson didn't want the servants reading them -- and I was going to go find my
French dictionary and translate them, but I was relieved to find that Dad had
already done it and stuck the translation in the back of the book.
The Adventures of Sally -- P.G. Wodehouse
Half theater story, half love story. The theater half is
much better. Our heroine Sally and her worthless brother have been making a
living in New York vaudeville until, finally reaching legal age, they come into
modest inheritances. The brother immediately becomes a stuck-up, self-satisfied
jerk, only coming to the farewell party Sally's boarding house throws for
her in order to feel superior, although he was living there himself only months
before. Sally meets two men who both fall for her, an Englishman and his
younger cousin. The younger cousin is the black sheep of his family because he
has rebelled against the dictatorial rule of his older relatives and set out to
make a living outside the family business. When Sally's idiot brother loses all
his own money and all of hers as well, the older cousin loses interest and goes
home, while the younger cousin does well with a dog-breeding business and Sally
marries him. Kind of forgettable, but the theater scenes are well-drawn and
funny.
The Valley of the Moon -- Jack London
I really disliked this, although it had interesting parts.
It was written toward the end of London's life, when he had grown disenchanted
with the Socialist movement and decided that the root of all human problems is
living in cities, and he has his characters leave Oakland to wind up living on
a ranch in the Sonoma Valley, near a wise neighbor who is obviously an
idealized version of London himself. The heroine -- whose name, honest to God,
is "Saxon" -- and her husband seem to do nothing apart from talk to
each other about how incredibly perfect white people are, how the government
owes them because their ancestors came across the plains, and how immoral and
wrong it is that all the good land they see is farmed by Portuguese and
Chinese. (Oh, and there's a long digression on how the Chinese are inferior
because they do nothing but work all the time, unlike white people who know how
to enjoy themselves in manly ways like riding and shooting.) It's possible that
London's manic insistence on Anglo-Saxon superiority had its roots in him
finding out that John London was not his father and that he was actually the
bastard son of an Irish con man -- which he frantically denied all his life --
but that doesn't make it any more fun to read.
The Heart of a Goof -- P.G. Wodehouse
Another collection of the Oldest Member's golf stories,
generally arguing that self-confidence in one area of life reinforces it in
others, such as in the story of the duffer who, after playing unexpectedly well
one day, decides that the garishly ugly golf pants he was wearing were what
made the difference, and so improved his game by wearing them every day despite
the objections of the other members, whose criticism had always previously
cowed him but whom he now sets at defiance. A good book.
Light in August -- William Faulkner
A dark and terrible story about race and lynching, set in
Mississippi in the 30s. It mostly concerns a foundling named Joe Christmas, who
is watched obsessively at the orphanage by the janitor, clearly mad, who is
convinced that the boy's father was black (we never learn if this is really
true) and preaches at him insanely about it. At the age of five Christmas is
taken away from the orphanage by a farmer, a brutal Methodist fanatic who beats
him for not being able to memorize the Catechism without troubling to learn
first whether he knows how to read. In his late teens Christmas finally turns
on the farmer and kills him; he then sets out on his own, living mostly as a
white man but occasionally "passing" in black communities. He makes a
dark joke of having sex with white prostitutes and telling them afterwards he's
really black, to laugh at their hysterics. (Conversely, when he wanders North
and pulls the trick on a prostitute there, he's appalled in his turn to find
out she doesn't care, and he beats her half to death.) He winds up in the
fictional town of Jefferson, working at the saw mill and bootlegging whiskey on
the side, in partnership with the worthless "Joe Brown" (an alias),
who has abandoned a pregnant woman in Alabama. The two of them squat in a shack
on the property of a middle-aged woman who has lived there as a hermit since
the rest of her family, all abolitionists, were lynched by the townspeople
decades before; Christmas secretly begins a sexual relationship with her. In
late summer she's murdered and her house burned down; it's left unclear whether
Christmas or Brown did it, but once Brown tells the police that Christmas is
really black, the manhunt goes out for Christmas. He's arrested, but before the
trial he's beaten, castrated, and murdered by the local commander of the
National Guard. It was very well written but reading it was emotionally
draining.
Schindler's Ark -- Thomas Keneally
An astonishing book. The thing I always come back to about
Oskar Schindler is that everyone who knew him -- his wife, his friends,
everyone -- agreed that he was a wholly ordinary man who never did anything
remarkable in his life before the war or after it. He seems simply to have been
lifted out of himself by the terrible need of the war, and used an entire
lifetime's worth of courage and daring in just a few years. He made immense
profits from the factory where he employed the Polish Jews, and used every last
pfennig of it saving all his workers, spending vast amounts on bribes and on
luxury goods to use as bribes. Somehow he even managed to buy weapons from the
Czech underground and secretly arm the camp Jews with them, just in case. I was
haunted by the scenes when Schindler moved all the workers from the factory in
Poland to a safer one in Czechoslovakia, and by some mistake a train of about
300 of them was diverted to Auschwitz, and the people on the train -- grown
women with every reason to be cynical -- calmly assured one another
"Schindler will come for us." And he did! Imagine the crushing
weight of making yourself responsible for so many people! Schindler faced down
the SS with just unbelievable nerve, adamantly insisting on the release of
every single person named on his list, even though the SS could simply have
shot him with no consequences. When a camp guard objected that a nine-year-old
girl could not possibly be a skilled munitions worker, Schindler invented, on
the spot, the ridiculous lie that the girl was absolutely necessary because of
her long fingers, so she could polish the insides of the shells, and the guard
gave in. Maybe even more incredible was his clearing-out of his camp at the end
of the war. Haunted by the fear that the camp guards might execute all the
workers, Schindler spent large bribes to get the camp commander transferred to
the Russian front; and then, when the surrender became official, Schindler
assembled the SS guards and told them to put down their weapons and go home --
"It is time now to be men again" -- and they did! It's an
appalling story, and I actually wept several times when reading it, but I'm
glad to know as much as I can about Schindler. A worker in the camp literally
ripped out his own dental work to make a gold ring for him, and had the camp
rabbi inscribe a line from the Talmud on it: "Who saves one life, it is as
if he saved the entire world." Baruch HaShem yom yom.
A Short Autobiography -- F. Scott Fitzgerald
A collection of autobiographical essays put together
posthumously by an editor. I felt like they gave a better picture of
Fitzgerald's public persona than they did of the man himself. He affected a
pose of being bored by everything (seriously, "bore" seems to have
been his favorite word) although what was so fascinating about his inner life
that everything else was dull compared to it was something he never explained.
In his private letters his voice is very different, so I suppose his air of
ennui was something he cultivated, perhaps to keep an emotional distance
between his public and private lives. The essays were sort of interesting but
not that memorable.
Pigs Have Wings -- P.G. Wodehouse
A Blandings novel, wherein Lord Emsworth's neighbor Parsloe,
sick and tired of always losing fair contests to Emsworth's prize pig, brings
in a ringer pig from Scotland. Parsloe is forbidden to drink by his new
fiancée, and since misery loves company he makes his pig-man go on the wagon as
well. Over at Blandings, Uncle Galahad is helping yet another of the family's
bottomless supply of nieces resist Aunt Constance's demand that she marry a
wealthy socialite instead of her hard-working sweetheart. Parsloe's disgruntled
pig-man heads to the Blandings kitchen to cadge a few drinks, which ultimately
leads to Galahad and Parsloe kidnapping each other's pigs, while the sweetheart
comes to Blandings under false pretences (by far the most popular way to arrive
there) and gets engaged to the niece, while the socialite runs off with
Parsloe's fiancée; he doesn't mind, though, since the private detective hired
by Galahad turns out to be Parsloe's old flame, long estranged from him by a
misunderstanding. Parsloe marries the detective and Galahad switches the pigs
back when no one's looking, leading to another agricultural-fair triumph for
Lord Emsworth, who is too absent-minded to have noticed anything happening. It
was great.
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman -- Haruki Murakami
I remember just about nothing of this book, which usually
means I didn't like it. It's a collection of short stories, none of which have
really stayed with me.
Song of Wrath -- J.E. Lendon
An examination of the origins of the Peloponnesian Wars
(which lasted on and off for about forty years, with intervals of weary peace
between) and specifically the events of the Ten Years' War of 431-421 BCE.
Amazingly well researched -- the notes and sources run to over two hundred
pages. Our main source for those events is the great historian Thucydides,
whose reputation for objective accuracy has withstood centuries of academics
looking for idols to topple. (He doesn't even pull punches when describing his
own defeat by the general Brasidas at the siege of Amphipolis.) The author is
concerned to show that Thucydides' description of the basic cause of the war --
Sparta's resentment of the growing power of Athens -- was meant to represent
"power politics" as a true but regrettable explanation of the way
things sometimes work, not as an immutable law of how things must always
happen. In fact men and countries go to war for many reasons other than
considerations of pure power; many of these reasons are sentimental and even
irrational. One of the lessons Thucydides never loses a chance to drive home is
that war makes people worse, and after years of war the most upright men
casually commit atrocities from which in better days they would have recoiled
in horror; both sides began by making excuses to prosecute unjust invasions,
continued by breaking oaths and betraying allies, and ended by slaughtering
whole cities. The book is full of great things I hadn't known -- for example,
the word "trophy" comes from the Greek verb meaning "to
turn"; a winning army would set up its trophy at the place where the
losing army turned to run. People have studied hoplite tactics by watching
films of Korean riot police, whose shields and poles are remarkably similar in
size and shape to hoplite equipment. The Athenians were so proud of forcing a
Spartan army to surrender at Sphacteria that they took all of the Spartans'
shields and hung them up on the Acropolis -- a couple of them are still there.
It was a really, really interesting book.
Lafayette in the Somewhat United States -- Sarah
Vowell
A good book, mostly about Lafayette's tour of the US in the
1820s, where he was met by cheering crowds at every stop; Vowell thinks that at
least part of his great popularity was due to the fact that he was one of the
last living links to the Revolution, to which the Americans of the bitterly
divided 1820s looked back as a mythical Age of Heroes -- an early example of
our national propensity for glorifying the past, which is the source of so much
acrimony in the current election cycle, as Vowell does not fail to note. I
liked it.
Doctor Grimshawe's Secret -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
An unfinished novel, published posthumously. Hawthorne seems
to have been about halfway through the third draft, in which he was working
backwards from the ending but didn't make it to the beginning. Some characters'
names change, some appear or disappear, and others have their functions in the
story radically revised. It's more of interest as an artifact than a novel,
although it has some very good Gothic horror scenes -- Doctor Grim's house full
of spiders stays with me.
The Upright Thinkers -- Leonard Mlodinow
A good book on the evolution of cognition. I was really
interested in his idea that towns and cities -- which I had always thought were
made necessary by agriculture -- might actually have begun as places for tribes
to meet, rather than to reside, since humans needed to meet in order to
exchange learning and ideas. Tribes separated by distance, or by limits on how
many people a given area could support, could meet up in towns to talk about
things bigger than any one tribe. It could have started with something like
"Okay, this season Bill's tribe will fish out of Red Rock Lake and Joe's
tribe will fish out of Big Tree Lake. And nobody go north of the hill with the
bare top, Jim's people saw a lion there." And then as long as people were together
other things would probably come up, like "It turns out those crawly
things are good to eat if you pull their shells off" or "Hey, I
chewed the leaves from this plant and my headache went away." I liked it.
The Purloined Paperweight -- P.G. Wodehouse
A funny novel about a playwright who has, through unexpected
family deaths, inherited an unsellable white elephant of a country house and is
stuck with it. To raise money he wants to sell a valuable old French glass
paperweight to a fanatical American collector, but since the paperweight is an
heirloom of the estate he's not allowed to sell it, so he has to work out a
plan to steal it from himself. Luckily in the process both he and his
good-natured niece meet the loves of their lives, a retired vaudeville actress
and a writer of crime thrillers, respectively. Judging from the blurbs and
front matter, my edition seems to be a special printing aimed at paperweight
collectors, which goes to show there's a niche for everything. I liked it a
lot.
Selected Sermons -- John Henry Newman
Oh my God I hated these. Newman was originally an Anglican
and later a Catholic, but in his teens he was an ardent evangelical and he
never really left it behind. His sermons are heavy on wrath, emphasizing that a
true Christian should regard God as an enemy and that you can never feel
sufficiently worthless. The proper state of mind is, toward oneself, utter
loathing; toward God, "holy fear". This is important because without
a constant sense of the terror of God's anger and how much we deserve it, we
might fall into the dreadful sin of doing the right thing only because it is
the right thing, rather than because we fear the consequences of disobeying. He
also disapproved of science and said that the proper attitude of humanity
toward the universe is adoration rather than explanation. His Catholic sermons
are just the same as his Anglican ones except they have some passages about the
Virgin Mary, which kind of feel like they were just added as local color. I was
also repelled by his constant reference to God's Elect, which he justified like
this: religious opinions differ widely among nations and even among Christians;
but there can be only one truth and all others are wrong; therefore only those
who hold exactly the right beliefs, which must be a tiny number, are destined
for Paradise, while everyone else will be punished eternally, which they
totally deserve.
Pearls, Girls, and Monty Bodkin -- P.G. Wodehouse
Wherein we finally meet Gertrude, the fiancée for whose sake
Monty has spent years attempting to fulfill her father's condition that he get
and keep a job for a whole calendar year; it turns out she wasn't worth it,
since she's rather a selfish pain in the neck and her father is worse. Monty
has kept up his end of the bargain by keeping a job in a Hollywood studio for a
year; his fiancée’s father claims that job doesn't count, on the trivial
grounds that Monty blackmailed his boss to get the job in the first place.
Crushed, Monty still resolves to start all over again, but fortune favors him
when Gertrude dumps him to marry a humorless goon. During a night club raid,
Monty sees the superior qualities of his secretary when she sucker-punches the
cop who's about to arrest him; the secretary is also in love with Monty, as it
happens, so everything ends happily. I really liked the character of Ivor
Llewellyn, the shrewd and tactless Hollywood mogul. It was very funny.
The Girl on the Boat -- P.G. Wodehouse
An early novel, I would guess adapted from a stage musical,
not very good. I liked the subplot about the nebbishy man who falls for a
big-game hunter when she shows him her elephant gun, but the main plot put me
off -- it's all about a man who, infatuated with a woman he meets on a ship,
fakes various dangers to make himself seem heroic to impress her. When
everything is exposed, and she tells him off, instead of reforming he hijacks
her car, kidnaps her, and tells her they're going to keep driving around until
she agrees to marry him, which she eventually does, which Wodehouse apparently
considered a happy ending. I thought the hero should be horsewhipped and then
sent to jail, myself.
Children of Earth and Sky -- Guy Gavriel Kay
An action-intrigue story, set in an imaginary version of
fifteenth-century Venice and Istanbul with the names changed. The prose was
good but I didn't like the way the novel was constructed; there are six main
plot lines about six main characters, but there's no protagonist and no core
story. Also none of the main characters grows or changes in any real way so I
had no real sense of anything happening. My usual rule is, if you can't
complete the sentence "This is the story of how..." then the book
isn't well plotted. I found it unsatisfying.
Paradise -- Donald Barthelme
An odd sort-of comedy about a middle-aged architect
"with a tragic sense of brick" who after his divorce lives alone in
an undecorated New York apartment too big for him, until he happens to meet a
trio of gorgeous lingerie models in financial difficulties who invite
themselves to move in with him. Every other chapter is a dialogue between the
protagonist and an unnamed third party, who doesn't seem to be a therapist but
I'm not sure what their relationship is. I got the idea that we weren't
supposed to trust the protagonist's story, but I'm not sure to what extent --
did he imagine it all, or was it real and he just imagined the sex parts? Was
the whole thing some sort of wish-fulfillment daydream about his roommates? I
didn't really get it.
Jill the Reckless -- P.G. Wodehouse
A love story, about as serious as Wodehouse gets, meaning
it's still a comedy but the plot isn't farcical, and there are parts that are
meant to make the reader feel sad. A good deal longer than most of his books; I
suppose it was sold to a magazine as a serial. It's a "woman gets dumped
by a cad, realizes her pal is the guy she should marry anyway" story, set
against a background of a stage musical touring the boonies while getting ready
to open in New York; Wodehouse knew all about that and the story is pretty
lively. The best part of the book is when the cad turns up again in New York
and is forced to reveal to his hero-worshipping friend that he dumped the
heroine because her family went broke; the subsequent telling-off is epic, a
very satisfying take-down. I liked it.
With Burning Hearts -- Henri J.M. Nouwen
A beautiful short book about the journey to Emmaus. Nouwen
compares the tired walk of the downcast disciples to our own journey through
life, dispirited by all the troubles that befall us. He makes the point that
Jesus didn't simply appear to the disciples; he walked beside them
unrecognized, and the disciples invited him in. He says that life is full of
loss, and we should not deny our grief but experience it fully, so that instead
of resentment we can continue through life with gratitude. A moving book.
Indiscretions of Archie -- P.G. Wodehouse
I thought this was awful, a first for a Wodehouse book. It's
the story of a wealthy hotelier whose daughter comes back from a trip to
announce she's married, and the husband turns out to be a worthless layabout
named Archie whose plan is to sponge off the family money. Archie, besides
being lazy, is stupid, careless, greedy, and incompetent at everything except
playing practical jokes on his father-in-law. The real reason I couldn't stand
it is that the book presents Archie as the hero and the father-in-law as the
buffoonish antagonist. I abandoned it halfway through, though I did skip to the
end to see if Archie got any kind of comeuppance; he didn't.
Dante -- T.S. Eliot
A critical appreciation of Dante, whom Eliot considered one
of the two best writers in European history (Shakespeare being the other.)
Eliot learned Italian in order to read him. I hadn't known that Dante titled
his work simply The Comedy; it was Boccaccio, a generation later, who
called it "the divine Comedy ", and the nickname stuck. The
book was written at a time when leading critics like Paul Valery taught that
you should separate Dante's poetry from his teaching, rejecting the very idea
of "philosophical poetry". Eliot is concerned to show that Dante's
philosophy is integral to his poetry, so much so that the poetry cannot be
appreciated separately from it, and that "philosophical poetry" is
only as good or as bad as the poet. "We assume that what we do not like in
our time was never good art, and that what appears to us good was always
so." It was very interesting.
The Two Cultures -- C.P. Snow
A 1959 lecture on the unnecessarily antagonistic
relationship between the sciences and the humanities. Snow, a physical chemist,
recounts a story of a dinner party where, nettled by the arts faculty's
contention that scientists are illiterate, he pointed out that none of the
humanities people would be able to give an adequate explanation of even simple
concepts like mass or acceleration, even though such a question would be the
scientific equivalent of asking "Do you know how to read?" He blames
over-specialization in education (he means British public education, but it has
a wider application) which leaves each camp ignorant of the other's
achievements and also fosters an unhealthy "team spirit" that doesn't
allow for mutual cooperation, thus damaging everyone involved. Well argued.
Aunts Aren't Gentlemen -- P. G. Wodehouse
The last Bertie Wooster novel. Sent by his doctor to breathe
the healthful air of the countryside, Bertie immediately runs afoul of a local
squire when he stops to pet a cat. It turns out the cat is the best pal of the
squire's race horse, and the squire is convinced that Bertie is a professional
race-fixer who aims to nobble the horse by kidnapping the cat. Things don't get
easier when Bertie's aunt, who has wagered more than she should have on the
other horse, decides that kidnapping the cat is a pretty good idea and orders
Bertie to get to it. This leads to a funny sequence, a vaudeville show writ
large really, where the aunt keeps sending people to snatch the cat and Bertie
keeps rounding the cat up and bringing it back, while the squire becomes ever
more convinced that Bertie is the villain. Jeeves saves the day in the end, of
course. I liked it.
The British Museum is Falling Down -- David Lodge
A comedy about academia, one of Dad's favorite genres. The
hero (Adam) spends a day at the Reading Room in the British Museum (now
relocated to the ugly London Library, alas) attempting to work on his graduate
thesis, but he can't get any work done because he's constantly distracted -- by
fellow students who would rather gossip than study, by strange phone calls from
mysterious Americans, and most of all by worries that his wife might be
pregnant. Adam is Catholic and a lot of the book deals with the problems that
the Church's ban on birth control causes for people without the money to raise
children, and their consequent nervous reliance on "natural" family
planning ("Vatican Roulette", as Adam bitterly calls it.) It was
funny in that Kingsley Amis, life's-really-crap-so-you'd-better-laugh kind of
way.
The Energies of Men -- William James
This is the essay where James coins the phrase "second wind"
to describe the process of consciously overcoming fatigue, whether physical or
mental. "On any given day there are energies slumbering in us which the
incitements of that day do not call forth, but which we might display if these
were greater." He expands this into an excellent description of clinical
depression: "We feel as if a sort of cloud weighed upon us, keeping us
below our highest notch of clearness in discernment, sureness in reasoning, or
firmness in deciding. Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half
awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked... In some persons this
sense of being cut off from their rightful resources is extreme." James
contends that only a constant habit of seeking out and embracing new and
unfamiliar things can keep our lives from settling into a sort of unproductive
trance. Beautifully written and extremely well argued.
The Gospel of Relaxation -- William James
A well-written essay from the turn of the last century on
the necessity of not wasting mental and physical energy on trivial things,
because we need it for important stuff. He argues that the mind is less
independent of the body than 19th-century philosophers generally believed. For
example, he says that when a man gets angry, then by acting on it -- say,
striking a blow or something -- he feeds the emotion and just gets angrier. So
by exercising restraint in our physical actions, which are under the control of
the will, we can exert indirect influence on our emotions, which are not. Very
well argued.
The Diary of a Superfluous Man -- Ivan Turgenev
A depressing novella, cast as the diary of the last two
weeks of the life of a man named Tchulkaturin. In the first entry we learn that
a doctor has just told Tchulkaturin that he does not have long to live, and he
has decided to start a journal and write down the important events of his
life...except that he realizes he has never done or experienced anything really
important, and the most significant thing in his life was an unrequited love
that led to a farcical and inconclusive duel. I think Turgenev was drawing a
portrait of what he saw as the spiritual malaise of mid-century Russia, which
he blamed on the practice of serfdom. A good story.
First Love -- Ivan Turgenev
A tragic novella that Turgenev called his most
autobiographical work. It's the story of a sixteen-year-old named Pyotr, whose
genteel rural life is disrupted when a new neighbor moves in, an elderly
princess, who's both boorish and impoverished but whose rank makes it
impossible not to socialize with her. The princess has a daughter, Zinaida,
beautiful and witty, and Pyotr falls in love with her, but she's twenty-one and
at that age five years is an unbridgeable gap. The princess wants to marry
Zinaida to some rich suitor, and her parlor is crowded with eligible nobility,
whom Zinaida heartlessly delights in setting against one another. Zinaida
resists her mother's match-making, and at first Pyotr admires her independent
spirit, until he realizes that she's actually in love with someone; she admits
this when he presses her about it, but the shattering blow comes later, when
Pyotr realizes that Zinaida's lover is his own father. We learn all this in
retrospect, as a story that the grown Pyotr relates to his friends, so we also
get to hear the outcome: Pyotr's father borrowed money from his wife to set
Zinaida up with a husband in the city, where soon after she died during the
stillbirth of her baby, presumably Pyotr's half-brother. A very Russian story;
I read somewhere that the Tsar read it aloud to the Tsarina and they both loved
it.
Culture and Anarchy -- Matthew Arnold
I picked this up years ago knowing nothing about Arnold (in
his time he was a popular poet, considered a peer of Tennyson and Browning,
though he's forgotten now) just because I read an essay by Paul Fussell in
which he remarked that this was the book he most wishes he had written. I
finally got around to reading it and my opinion of Fussell has been lessened.
It's astonishingly condescending, even for a Victorian; this is the book that
introduced the word "Philistine" in its modern sense, and it draws a
self-adulatory picture of a small coterie of praise-worthy defenders of
"culture" (which he defines, pretty well actually, as "the best
of what has been thought and said") against the anarchy of the masses,
stupid people who can't appreciate anything. It's the great tragedy of Arnold's
life that he never heard the word "sheeple"; he was really born to be
an Internet commenter. All the more so because he ends all of his arguments
with statements like "...as will be perfectly clear to anyone willing to
think rationally," a cheap way of awarding yourself the victory by just
defining your own position as the only rational one. The whole book could be
summed up in one sentence: "Oh my God I'm just so much smarter and better
than other people!" I did not like it.
The Letters of Samuel Johnson, vol. 3
Letters of the mid-to-late 1770s and early 1780s. Johnson
discussed the war in America fairly often in its early days, but when it became
clear that the war was going badly for England he just lumped it in with what
he thought was a general decline of British prestige since the 1740s. He was at
an age where many of his early friends started dying, and he wrote kind and
consolatory letters to their survivors, particularly to the Thrale family when
his close friend Henry Thrale died. It's also the period when he wrote many
letters (some of them under assumed names) as part of a campaign to commute the
death sentence of Parson Dodd, who was condemned for commercial forgery. Dodd
was guilty, and Johnson disliked him, but he thought it was irreligious to
execute a clergyman in public, so he worked hard though unsuccessfully to have
Dodd transported to the penal colony instead. He even wrote Dodd's final
letters for him. The campaign having failed, Johnson wrote Dodd a final letter
that's just a masterpiece of solemn consolation.
Mike at Wrykyn -- P.G. Wodehouse
The first half of the novel Mike, republished after
the second half was taken out and published separately, not very interesting. Mike
without Psmith is a foil without a principal, and the school-story formula --
cricket, contests of will with oppressive school-masters, lessons about school
spirit -- is dull and predictable.
Quentin Durward -- Sir Walter Scott
An adventure novel, about a young Scots archer in the
mid-1400s going to Europe to seek his fortune and ending up in France in the
service of Louis the Prudent, fighting in the campaign against the rebellious
Charles the Bold, duke of Burgundy. Scott had a serious hate-on for Louis,
structuring the whole story to praise the pig-headed Charles for his
go-straight-at-'em approach to problem-solving, as opposed to what he
considered Louis's disgusting and cowardly preference for diplomacy and
overcoming his opponents by outsmarting them. I admit I was astonished when
Scott sneered at Louis's policy of stopping a fight after he'd gotten what he
wanted, rather than continuing on with war for its own sake. (Mark Twain hated
Walter Scott, and considered him personally responsible for the development of
duelling culture in the American South, and after reading this I can see why.)
Scott also plays to his audience by holding up Louis's pious Catholicism as
further evidence of his worthless character, while quietly glossing over the
fact that his hero, as a fifteenth-century Scot, would of course have been a
Catholic himself. The fight scenes are very good, but I didn't like the way he
presents the Gypsies as inherently venal and treacherous.
Service With a Smile -- P.G. Wodehouse
A Blandings novel, terrifically funny, with poor Lord
Emsworth beset by a group of boys camping nearby, who are supposed to be awed
by the beauty of Nature but spend most of their time amusing themselves by
playing stupid practical jokes, such as convincing him that one of their number
is drowning in order to get him to jump into the lake with all his clothes on.
He doesn't need the aggravation, especially since, as usual, several people are
plotting to steal his prize pig. Luckily Uncle Fred pays a visit, bringing with
him (under a false identity, of course) the fiancé of one of the infinite
number of family nieces, every single one of whom is determined to marry
someone other than whomever Aunt Constance has picked out for them. Constance
herself wants to get married this time, but her lover is too intimidated to
propose, which is certainly understandable. Fred, with his endearing disdain
for the truth, gets everyone out of their difficulties with a deft mixture of
lies and blackmail, and everything ends happily. I loved it.
Come Back, Dr. Caligari -- Donald Barthelme
A collection of absurdist short stories, most of them
excellent. I read these thirty years ago, and I remember thinking they were
funny, but the existential parts were over my head then. The author has a knack
for phrases -- "that is not what I said but what I should have said, it
would have been brilliant"; "For half a second there is half a
smile". Good book.
The Fuck-Up -- Arthur Nersesian
A dark comedy about a directionless loser living in New York
in the early eighties. I think the message of the book is that however low you
fall, you can always fall farther. At the start of the book the hero loses his
job as a movie-theater usher and gets kicked out of his girlfriend's apartment
at the same time; he fakes references to get an under-the-table job as the
night manager at a gay porn theater and wangles a house-sitting gig by
pretending to be gay. He's hardly been on the job any time before he and the
other manager join in on a scheme to skim the receipts, which gives you some
idea of both the sort of person he is and his planning skills, considering the
theater is owned by the kind of people who have leg-breakers on the payroll.
After screwing up the job and the house gig, and also getting badly hurt
several times -- the final time getting beaten almost to death by a group of
middle-school kids -- he lives destitute and half-mad on the streets until
being taken in by the woman his only friend killed himself over, and who hates
him. It was well written but I didn't enjoy it, really.
Journal, 1803 -- Washington Irving
His earliest surviving diary, covering July and August of
1803, when he was twenty and working as a law clerk in New York City. He found
the work dull and yearned to travel, so when his employer asked him to come
along on a land-speculation journey to upstate New York, as far as the border
of Canada, he leapt at the chance. He seems to have had a marvelous time,
sailing up the river to Albany and then by ox-cart, on horseback, and on foot
through Utica and all the way to Oswegatchie, which took most of the summer. He
describes it all with endearing enthusiasm -- stretches when the horses were
shoulder-deep in mud and the travelers had to cling to trees and tow the horses
along; chasing deer for fun through the shallow part of the Black River;
catching sight of the tattered red coats of British deserters in the forest. He
even makes the group's headlong flight from a disturbed hornets' nest sound
like a fun adventure. I got the impression I would have liked Irving a lot.
Black Sun Rising -- C.S. Friedman
A fantasy novel; it's set on another planet and there's some
hand-waving to pretend all the magic is due to natural forces of the planet
reacting to the human colonists' psychic emanations, but whatever, demons,
spells, magic swords, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a
duck. The interest comes from the main characters: one is a priest of a local
monotheistic religion (more like a druid, really -- his priesthood doesn't
practice celibacy or pacifism) and the other is a fallen prophet of the same
religion -- a man the hero was brought up to idolize, but has now become a
monster of cruelty and sadism. Naturally the two of them end up having to work
together. As is usually the way in these stories, they overcome their
antagonist only to find a greater villain looming behind; of course that will
be the plot of the sequel. It actually felt like the main point of this book
was to set up the contrasting stories of the two leads: there's clearly a
redemption arc for the one and a fall-from-grace arc for the other developing,
and at some point they'll intersect. I thought it was pretty well done.
Herman Melville -- Elizabeth Hardwick
A critical appreciation of Melville. There is no really good
biography of him, since even though he was not a secretive man we just don't
know anything about his inner life. He kept a journal and was a prolific
letter-writer, but he mainly kept to what he saw and whom he talked with, never
really talking about himself. He had a lot to be bitter about -- chronic bad
health, poverty constantly at hand, a son who committed suicide, a family that
didn't believe in him, a public that didn't appreciate his best work -- but was
he actually bitter? No one can say. Hardwick draws a picture of a man of
immense poetic conceptions who had no one to share them with. For a while he
was a neighbor of Hawthorne, whom he admired greatly, but Hawthorne was at a
point in his life where he was more interested in his career and family than in
having long talks about art with a younger writer, so that was no help. Later
in life some people thought he was morose, but he may just have given up on
finding someone to talk to and settled into the dull routine of customs work
while writing only for himself at night. Good book.
Persian Poems -- Peter Washington, ed.
An excellent anthology of Sufi poets of the eleventh,
twelfth, and thirteenth centuries: Omar, Attar, Sana'i, Rumi, Hafiz. Their
works combine religious contemplation with appreciation of the good things of
this world, laid out with beautiful imagery. Sana'i, for example, wrote on the
theme that joylessly clinging to the letter of the Qur'an is sterile and a
departure from true Islam, and that asceticism leads only to a malnourished
body and soul: "The goat does not fatten on the call of the goat-herd."
I really liked it.
Ukridge -- P.G. Wodehouse
A collection of short stories about the misadventures of
Stanley F. Ukridge, a character Wodehouse clearly liked more than I do. Ukridge
is a pest, making his friends' lives miserable as they have to rescue him from
the collapse of one failed get-rich-quick scheme after another. He's never
grateful, of course. He's also a sponge and a leech, constantly turning up at
his friends' apartments and telling them he needs them to pay the taxi that
just brought him there. The stories are narrated by his old school-mate Corky,
who puts up with Ukridge in a sort of I-wonder-what-will-happen-next kind of
way, although honestly if I were in Corky's position I'd just punch Ukridge in
the face every time I saw him and hope he eventually took the hint.
Passages From the American Note-Books -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
About twenty-five years' worth of Hawthorne's diary,
starting fairly soon after he graduated from Bowdoin and running until 1853,
when he left America for a diplomatic post in England. It's a good look at
Boston, Concord, and Salem in the first half of the century. It covers his
period at the Brook Farm socialist experiment, as well as his reactions to
public opinions of his writing. He got along well with his neighbors, finding
Emerson very congenial. He was endlessly astonished by Thoreau -- he initially
saw him as a mere dreamer, someone who wanted to live like an Indian while
staying in the civilized world; but he couldn't reconcile that with the fact
that Thoreau was the most practical man he knew, not just in the woods, where
he seemed to find plants by instinct and managed canoes so well they seemed to
be moving by themselves, but in the village as well, where he could repair
anything, use any tool, do any job, manage any business affair, with apparently
effortless ease. Hawthorne took several lengthy trips to western Massachusetts,
visiting the colleges there and admiring the scenery, occasionally going on
mountain walks with Melville. He was a good describer of nature; it's good
reading.
The Truth According to Us -- Annie Barrows
A family-story novel -- is it a "saga" if it
covers only two generations, or do you need more than that? Anyway it's set in
small-town West Virginia during the Depression, and the main character is Willa
Romeyn, thirteen or so, who is just now getting old enough to understand the
reasons behind her family's fall from prominence in the town. At the center of
it is her father, a man with the dangerous gift of being charming; he's faithless,
unreliable, and a compulsive liar, and everyone knows it, but no one seems able
to help themselves and they rely on him anyway, even though he lets them down
every time. I actually liked the framing story better, the story of a senator's
daughter who, disowned after refusing to marry a rich twit, gets a job with the
Writer's Project, a division of the WPA that sent people all over America to
write municipal histories; she boards at the Romeyns' house while writing the
history of their town, and the clash of the demand from the pompous small-town
luminaries for a fawning hagiography against her own determination to write a
book that's both true and readable is pretty entertaining.
Sam the Sudden -- P.G. Wodehouse
The first appearance of Wodehouse's inept criminals, the
housebreaker "Chimp" Twist and the con artist couple the Molloys.
They learn that a certain house has the loot from a bank robbery in it, and
they set out to get a hold of it, each planning to double-cross the other, of
course. Unluckily for them the house has just been rented by the hero of the
novel, Sam, an American who -- in a fit of impulsiveness remarkable even in
Wodehouse -- has taken the house because of the girl who lives next door; he's
never met her but he fell in love with her photograph in a magazine and is
determined to marry her. Sam isn't particularly good at anything, being
naturally something of an idler, but on the strength of his family connections
he's gotten a job at the newspaper where the girl works. He makes rather an ass
of himself both at work and at home, but the girl inexplicably falls for him
anyway, and while Chimp and the Molloys are busy back-stabbing and getting in
each other's way, Sam finds the loot and turns it in for a reward, enabling him
to get married. It was very funny.
Biographical Writings -- Samuel Johnson
Just what it says on the tin: a collection of biographical
articles written for magazines at various times. A good number of them are
actually translations from the French, but Johnson was a very free translator
and felt at liberty to rephrase or emphasize parts he thought were more
important, and also to put in digressions where he thought the moral of the
story could stand a little pointing up. Many of the articles, like the Life of
Boerhaave, were about men he sincerely admired. It was good reading, but I
thought the editor was a little overzealous; I didn't need a footnote every
single time Johnson changed a word from the original.
The Piazza Tales -- Herman Melville
His only collection of short stories, including
"Bartleby the Scrivener", one of the best American stories of the
nineteenth century. It also includes "Benito Cereno", which I read in
high school and remember vividly, a story about a slave-ship uprising and the
dangers of being deceived by appearances. The canvas falling off the ship's figurehead
to reveal the skeleton of the crucified slave-trader above the slogan
"FOLLOW YOUR LEADER" is one of the most striking images I can
remember. It also probably contributed to the decline of Melville's reputation,
since Melville was an abolitionist and the nation didn't welcome a story that
sympathized with black slaves rising up to kill white slavers. Maybe that's why
he took the book's title from the story "The Piazza", which is kind
of bland and forgettable.
Not George Washington -- P.G. Wodehouse and Herbert
Westbrook
The only book I know of where Wodehouse worked with a
collaborator; it's just as well, I didn't like it at all. It incorporates some
autobiographical material, with the young protagonist coming to London and
trying to break into the writing business; but the protagonist is pretty
unsympathetic. He no longer loves his country fiancée but doesn't have the
nerve to either marry her or break it off, so he starts publishing under
various pen names and tells her he's unsuccessful and can't afford to get
married. In the mean time he becomes engaged to the woman his only friend
loves, without telling either the friend or his first fiancée. Losing the
second fiancée due to sudden financial hardship, he falls back on the first
fiancée, without her ever finding out about the second one. The title was
appropriate, I guess, but it just wasn't funny.
Roderick Random -- Tobias Smollett
I didn't like this much, mainly because the hero was so
annoying. This was both intentional and unintentional: intentional because
Smollett was consciously writing a picaresque, Gil Blas sort of story, where
the hero is meant to be partly a figure of fun and suffer comical setbacks that
he brings on himself; unintentional because a picaresque hero should be likeable
and charming enough, despite his flaws, that the reader is glad when he comes
to prosperity in the end, and since Smollett was himself a mean, perpetually
angry person he couldn't pull that off. He says that Roderick's character is
"composed mainly of pride and resentment", much as his own was, and
didn't see why that made it impossible for anyone to like Roderick. I bet he
also wondered why he himself had no friends. Over the course of his adventures
Roderick joins the Navy, deserts, crosses over Britain and Europe, and works
variously as a surgeon, pharmacist, and house-servant, but his goal in life is
to be independently wealthy, and to this end he sponges off his childhood
friend Strap while posing as a moneyed gentleman and trying to marry for money,
livening things up with petty quarrels and stupid practical jokes. He also
signs on to a British slave ship as a surgeon, and after carrying hundreds of
African slaves across the Atlantic and selling them in the West Indies, the
only remark he has to make is that he's glad to be rid of the slaves since
having them on board made too much work for him! The scumbag. I wouldn't
recommend it.
Look At Me -- Jennifer Egan
A depressing novel, mostly about identity. The two main
characters, whose lives intersect briefly but catastrophically, are a fashion
model and a small-town school teacher with a secret. The model, after almost
dying in a car crash, has to have her face surgically reconstructed, and faces
the challenge of looking completely different after a life of defining herself
entirely by her appearance. I liked how totally un-self-aware she was, clinging
to a sort of trashy cynicism and feeling superior to the shallow people she's
surrounded herself with; she attempts suicide halfway through the book but when
the attempt fails her behavior doesn't change in any way. She only escapes by
selling her public identity to a web site, a prescient forerunner of social
media (the book was written in 2000) and moving on under a new name, hoping to
leave her self-destructiveness behind with her celebrity. Speaking of
prescience, the other main character, the school teacher, is a mole sent by a
terrorist organization to live in New York and await instructions to kill and
destroy. We learn that he's had several lives in several different countries
before coming to America, and is something of a chameleon, expertly mimicking
the habits and speech patterns of people around him. In a strange perversion of
the "journey of self-discovery" trope, he steals the terrorist cell's
treasury and sets off across America to find himself. It was well-constructed,
but none of the characters are at all likeable (I'm sure that's deliberate) so
I didn't enjoy it as much as I might have.
The Letters of Samuel Johnson, vol. 4
Letters from the last few years of his life. In these years
he was nearly always ill, and his letters grew less frequent; he apologized to
his correspondents for this, explaining that he thought it would be tiresome
for them to get letters that just said "Well, still sick." He also
ended his long correspondence with Hester Thrale after her remarriage to a
Catholic; his more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger letter explaining that she was
hurting herself, her family, and her country is surprising reading nowadays, as
are his letters to her daughters assuring them they were doing the right thing
by leaving their mother's house and refusing to speak to her. His handwriting
got even worse at this period, especially following what seems to have been a
small stroke in 1783. Even in his last illness he was constantly writing
letters on behalf of other people, trying to promote their interest with
booksellers, or get them government jobs or places in charity houses.
Nearly every letter of these years includes a solemn instruction to think
constantly of the next life.
When True Night Falls -- C.S. Friedman
The sequel to Black Sun Rising. Mostly an
action-adventure story, with our heroes having to cross a long stretch of
dangerous territory, fighting off predators and escaping rockfalls,
earthquakes, and the desert, while also being pursued by deadly enemies, all so
they can get to the villain's capital, except they're not actually sure what
they're going to do when they get there. The action is interleaved with
philosophical discussions on what degree of cooperation with a lesser evil is
acceptable to destroy a greater evil, the nature of repentance, and just how
little chance of achieving a goal there needs to be before you give it up. It
certainly kept me reading, and although I guessed how the villain would be
defeated -- because it's exactly the same problem and solution that was used in
a Stephen R. Donaldson story ten years before this book came out -- I enjoyed
it anyway. The two leads' character arcs aren't finished so it's not surprising
that this stage two villain turns out to be only another plateau on the way to
facing the Big Bad Guy.
The Syndic -- Cyril M. Kornbluth
A science fiction story that's more a philosophical
discussion of models of government than a novel. The setting is a near-future
North America whose eastern and western sections are run by libertarian-fantasy
regimes that grew out of organized crime. The hero works for the eastern group,
"The Syndic", whose longtime friendly rivalry with the western group
("The Mob") is deteriorating since the Mob has started dealing with
the remnants of the old Federal Government, now a stateless oligarchy based in
Iceland. (The rest of the world appears to have degenerated into depopulated
barbarism, for some unexplained reason.) The hero sings the praises of the
laissez-faire meritocracy of the Syndic, although the Syndic is actually a
feudal aristocracy whose leadership is explicitly closed to anyone outside of
the right family, and the hero knows that, but it doesn't seem to register. The
actual action of the plot is kind of stupid, and overall I didn't think it was
that interesting.
The Letters of Samuel Johnson, vol. 5
A short volume of appendices, including letters whose date
or addressee can't be determined, and some of doubtful authenticity -- a lot of
his letters are a bit mutilated, since people would cut off the signature as a
keepsake, and sometimes the addressee's name would be on the other side of the
paper from the signature. It also includes translations of the letters he wrote
to his doctor, which were all in Latin.
Kafka On the Shore -- Haruki Murakami
This was a puzzling book. It's a strange retelling of the
Oedipus myth, and appropriately the whole book is a series of riddles, although
in this case it's the reader who has to solve them. The Oedipus figure is a boy
from Tokyo, whose abusive father (a sculptor) has harangued him all his life
that he is cursed. On his fifteenth birthday the boy runs away from home,
renaming himself "Kafka" after the sympathy he feels with the spirit
of Kafka's writing. He appears to have an imaginary friend, "the boy named
Crow", who provides him emotional support -- "kafka" is Czech
for "crow" -- but it's also possible the boy named Crow is a
time-displaced version of himself. The plot revolves thematically around blood
and the separation of the body and the soul, as Kafka befriends a Tiresias
figure, a transgendered person who is also a hemophiliac, and who tells Kafka
the Greek story about how Zeus once split all humans in two, and now everyone
goes through life seeking the other half of themselves. Two of the main
characters are bodies that have lost their souls (this is why they cast fainter
shadows than other people.) There are scenes where the perspective changes from
first-person to third-person to second-person; if I followed it right, this
seems to indicate that Kafka's soul leaves his body several times in the course
of the book (a feat made possible by the McGuffin, an "entrance
stone") and in the course of these journeys Kafka's soul kills his father
while his body has sex with his mother. There's more to it than that, but I
know I didn't really get it all. I'll have to read it again.
The Small Bachelor -- P.G. Wodehouse
An early novel, set in Greenwich village and poking fun at
the universal experts popular at the time, who sold pamphlets on everything
from correct posture to learning to sing. The hero is George (he lives in a
"small bachelor apartment", ergo he must be a small bachelor) who
though shy and awkward is still smart enough to ignore the endless advice
streaming from his universal-expert friend and get himself introduced to a
woman he met by chance in the street ("That's not how my pamphlet on
Finding a Wife says to do it!") It was pretty funny.
The Last Light of the Sun -- Guy Gavriel Kay
A historical novel, set in an imaginary version of Wales and
England during the reign of Alfred the Great. It's primarily a coming-of-age
story, as the main character is a chief's son from one of the three counties of
Wales (I'm not going to try to remember the fake names) as he goes through the
canonical steps to manhood: first real loss, first real heartbreak, first night
with a woman, first killing. This is set against the broader background of the
long years of fighting off the Viking invasions on the eastern and western
coasts of Britain. The title comes from the general sense that the British
islands are the very ends of the earth, the last place touched by the light of
the sun (and metaphorically by the light of civilization, shining in those days
from Constantinople.) I thought it was very good; the character and dialogue
are excellent, and I liked the way the characters had a dim sense of a larger
significance to their actions, the more important task of settling civilization
itself lying behind their quotidian battles. Good reading.
The Nature of the Beast -- Louise Penny
The latest in a mystery series Mom likes, starring a retired
Surete inspector who lives in an out-of-the-way village in Quebec. Although his
obscure little village has a murder nearly every other week, it's never gotten
involved with wider politics until now, when several people are killed because
it turns out there's a superweapon hidden in the woods nearby. The plot assumes
that Gerald Bull -- a real-life weapons designer who was assassinated in 1990,
probably by Mossad -- had partners who continued his work, eventually building
a colossal Howitzer, standing 300 feet tall with a barrel over a yard wide and
more than 1600 feet long, so powerful it could throw a projectile into low
Earth orbit. (Saddam Hussein commissioned Bull to build this, though in real
life it was never completed.) They then abandoned it in the woods in Quebec,
for stupid plot-contrivance reasons, and no one noticed them assembling it or
ever stumbled across it even though it was built on a spot so close to town
that a small boy can get there on his bicycle in the space of an afternoon. I
liked the book for the good description of the relations between the characters
-- the retired Chief Inspector, the man he trained as his successor, and the
younger woman who actually succeeded him -- but the plot is just ludicrous. It
would require the resources of a government to build that thing. And when the
murderer gave himself away by stealing the firing mechanism, what was he
planning to do with it? Did he think he could haul a three-thousand-ton
Howitzer away behind his pickup truck? And who would buy it anyway? It was
already obsolete by the early nineties; any buyer would be better off spending
their money on SCUD missiles. The author has also decided the hero needs a
super-genius serial killer nemesis, so we've been introduced to a Hannibal
Lecter clone that the hero put away years ago, and who apparently constantly
preys on his mind although we've never heard of him before, so we can have a Red
Dragon scene where the hero has to match wits with the imprisoned killer to
solve another crisis on a time limit, and also clearly to set up a sequel where
the killer escapes and hunts down the hero, and I'm too bored to even finish
this sentence. It wasn't very good.
The French Revolution -- Thomas Carlyle
I knew this would happen going in, but I was both very much
in and very much out of sympathy with this. On the one hand, Carlyle was a
compassionate man who felt deeply the justified sorrow and rage of the French
lower classes, and expresses it well. On the other hand, Carlyle was also a
committed believer in aristocracy and he views the Revolution and its aftermath
as the result of the individual will and actions of a small number of
extraordinary men, whereas I consider it a mass movement that would have
unfolded largely the same way regardless of what leaders arose. Carlyle laments
that if only Mirabeau had lived longer everything would have been different; I
think that Mirabeau was a leader only because he was expressing what the masses
wanted, and if he had tried to lead things in a different direction he would
have lost influence quickly. The people were hungry, and lectures from the
government weren't going to fill their stomachs. Also it repels me that although
Carlye was genuinely empathetic to the French, he clearly finds the death of
Louis more tragic than the deaths among the peasantry. Carlyle also thinks the
chaotic upheavals in the French leadership in 1793 and 1794 are proof that
people can't govern themselves, while I would say that a country that's being
invaded by land and sea by seven different countries from the north, south,
east, and west, all at the same time, can't be expected to behave normally.
Seven Brief Lessons on Physics -- Carlo Rovelli
A collection of a series of newspaper articles, each
explaining some principle of science for the general reader. I thought they
were pretty well written.
The Last Days of New Paris -- China Miéville
A new record: I never even made it past the epigraph.
Judging from the book jacket, this seems to be a story about post-WWII refugees
escaping from their Nazi-controlled Europe into the history we know by means of
mid-century Surrealist art; but the epigraph, a quote to the effect that
criticism of Surrealist art can be summed up as "What does Papa say I may
think and feel about this?" is so arrogant and self-worshipping, and made
me so angry before I even got to page one, that I just couldn't bring myself to
read the book. Of course choosing just that quote for the epigraph is a way of
insulating yourself against criticism by implying that critics are too inane
and frightened to understand the challenging reality of your work. Fuck you,
China Miéville, and you too, whatever head-up-your-ass artist was the source of
that quote in the first place.
The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu -- Joshua Hammer
An excellent book. Timbuktu has been a capital of
scholarship at many different periods across its long history, and its climate
is ideal for preserving manuscripts, so books of incalculable value still
survive there: ninth-century hand-written Korans, medical textbooks from the
1100s, manuals on conflict mediation from the 1300s. Unfortunately Timbuktu has
also been a target for various marauding armies across its history, so ancient
manuscripts were kept within families --stored behind false walls, hidden
beneath floors, even locked in metal chests and buried in the desert. The book
is mainly about a man named Abdel Haidara, scion of a scholarly family, who
starting in the late sixties spent forty years travelling around Mali finding
books, some of which had been buried since the Middle Ages, by convincing their
guardians that the books were in danger from termites and that they needed to
be restored and copied in libraries in Timbuktu. By the 2000s Timbuktu had
several climate-controlled libraries holding in all about 490,000 manuscripts;
Haidara got international organizations to fund much of the work by promising
to digitize the manuscripts and make them available to everyone. (They used
high-resolution digital cameras, since generally the manuscripts were too
fragile to be scanned.) Everything was going great, in fact, until Timbuktu
fell under attack again, this time from a combination of Tuareg separatists and
the Mali branch of al-Qaeda, which took the city in mid-2012 and held it until
they were driven out by a French expedition in 2013. The al-Qaeda leader
announced that he would destroy all the manuscripts, but they didn't get around
to it right away, so Haidara and his family and friends spent months secretly
smuggling all the manuscripts out, taking them by Jeep, mule, and raft to
Bamako, six hundred miles away. It was a fearful risk, and they would have been
tortured and killed if caught, but they succeeded in rescuing nearly
everything. Only a couple thousand manuscripts on public display were too
noticeable to remove, and Haidara had to hope that al-Qaeda would be too busy
bulldozing cemeteries and cutting people's hands off to remember about
the books, but just about the last thing they did before the French drove them
out was to pile up all the books they could find and burn them. The bastards.
The book had several pictures of the manuscripts, amazingly beautiful works of
art with gorgeous illustrations and calligraphy, many of them with very wide
margins, which were included on purpose so that scholars could add annotations,
which they often did; there are many manuscripts that have scholarly
conversations in the margins that run for centuries. In fact one reason Haidara
wants to digitize all the manuscripts is to provide everyone with proof that
the 19th-century belief that Africa was a savage wilderness until the Europeans
arrived -- which many people believe even now -- is totally false. I loved it.
Crime Partners -- Donald Goines
An action novel, set in New York around 1970, featuring a
black militant who calls himself Kenyatta, whose organization targets drug
dealers and racist cops and kills them. The book is nominally the story of the
pair of NYPD detectives -- one black, one white -- on his trail, but it's
obvious the author's sympathy is with Kenyatta. The plot involves a pair of
career criminals (the "crime partners") who ally themselves with
Kenyatta in order to pull off a big robbery; Kenyatta needs the proceeds to pay
off someone who can provide him with a list of the higher-ups in the New York
drug business. One of the partners is cynically going along with Kenyatta's
rhetoric in order to steal the money, but the other is drawn in to the
black-power mentality, which threatens their relationship. Realistically,
everything goes to hell and most of the characters get killed in a messy
shootout. The writing is more robust than skillful, but it certainly kept me
turning the pages.
Death List -- Donald Goines
This is the sequel, in which Kenyatta finally obtains the
list of high-up drug dealers and sets out to wipe them out, while predictably
getting double-crossed by the white guy who sold him the list. The detectives
pick up on the trail of the two robbers from the last book and track down
Kenyatta's offices in the city; he finds out about this and realizes it can't
be long before the cops find his headquarters, a farm outside the city. In a
conscienceless move, Kenyatta rounds up nine or ten of his most loyal
followers, packs up the treasury, and flees the farm without warning any of the
others, leaving the remaining forty or so to be surprised by the police. The
last part of the book is a colossal gun battle in which nearly everyone at the
farm is killed while Kenyatta and his crew get away. I thought it really
undermined Kenyatta's us-against-them rhetoric that he just split and left all
his friends to die.
Kenyatta's Escape -- Donald Goines
While his abandoned followers fight off the police, Kenyatta
and his crew hijack a plane from LaGuardia. They kill several of the crew and
order the pilot to take them to Algeria, or any other mostly-black country he
can reach. The pilot tells them he'll have to land to refuel in order to make
an international flight, so they decide to go along. Unfortunately one of the
passengers is a white air marshal, who thinks the blacks will cower and drop
their weapons as soon as he confronts them; in the shootout that follows the
pilot is mortally wounded, and he crash-lands the plane in the desert in
Nevada. A bunch of hippies from a nearby commune come by on motorcycles to
investigate, and Kenyatta's crew kill several of them and take their bikes,
riding them to the commune, where they take the group's cars and drive out of
the desert towards LA.
Sabbatical Journey -- Henri J.M. Nouwen
Nouwen spent ten years as the pastor at Daybreak, a center
for the mentally disabled. In 1995 the Daybreak committee essentially ordered
Nouwen to take a sabbatical, since they were afraid he was working himself to
death (they were right.) This is the journal he kept during his year away from
his pastoral duties, and also his last book, since he died only a few days
after his return. What struck me most was that although he had been sent on the
sabbatical to rest -- and he agreed that his work was wearing him down and he
needed rest badly -- he didn't rest at all; during the entire year I don't
think he spent more than three or four days in the same place. He was travelling
constantly, all over the US and Europe, visiting relatives, speaking at
symposia, meeting with his publishers, and conducting weddings, funerals, and
baptisms for his friends, all while writing two different books, on top of
keeping a journal. The journal is full of optimism, looking forward to a future
of renewed energy and faith, which on the one hand made me sad because I knew
he died almost immediately after finishing it, but on the other hand made me
glad that he was able to maintain a hopeful attitude despite his depression and
loneliness. He had a powerful need for affection and approval, and tended to be
downcast when he felt neglected, which I sympathize with, and he used his
journal to make himself feel better. It's also full of the sort of reflections
that occur to a prayerful man who needs to write sermons; my favorite was his
musing on the miracle of the loaves and the fishes, and remarking that maybe
the real miracle was that Jesus trusted the people not to hog the food and to
have faith that there was enough for everyone.
Fist Stick Knife Gun -- Geoffrey Canada
A memoir of growing up in the South Bronx and the violence
that went hand in hand with poverty. He tells the story of how his older
brother, at age six, came home without his jacket because a bigger boy knocked
him down and took it away, and their mother ordered him to go back out and
fight for it -- adding that if he came back without it she'd beat him worse
than the other boy did. With a community ethos like that it's hardly surprising
that violence only got more intense as the children got older, progressing from
kids fighting with their fists to high school students carrying and using
knives. Canada recalls the arrival of handguns in the neighborhood in the
sixties, which probably had more to do with cheaper methods of making guns than
anything else -- just how once one carpenter gets a power saw, every carpenter
has to get a power saw, once one guy in the neighborhood has a gun, everybody
has to get a gun. After going to college at Bowdoin, and living for the first
time in a place where violence was not a constant presence, he was shocked at
returning to New York, like a Northeasterner returning to the winter after
years in California. He started a foundation in Harlem whose goal was to give
children somewhere to go and things to do in order to keep them off the streets
and in school. The writing was journeyman-quality, but the subject matter was
interesting.
Kenyatta's Last Hit -- Donald Goines
The end of Kenyatta's story. The author seems to regret
making Kenyatta abandon his followers so he retroactively makes everyone okay
with it -- the few escapees we last saw fleeing the farm and swearing vengeance
on Kenyatta are now working for him again with no signs of hard feelings. Set a
year later in LA, this book finds Kenyatta having set up a new militant
organization with the same aim of killing the white drug lords who profit off
pushing their drugs in black communities. His group locates the local drug
kingpin and launches an all-out assault, with two teams of a couple dozen men
each attacking his office building from different approaches. In a surprising
anticlimax, both teams are immediately trapped by the kingpin's far better
prepared men, and the assault is a total failure; every one of the crew,
including Kenyatta, is killed and their bodies dumped for the NYPD detectives,
still on the trail, to find in the desert. Only one guy, Kenyatta's closest
disciple (who was injured and couldn't go on the raid) survives to continue the
fight. I think it's likely that for Goines, Kenyatta represented his resistance
to his own addiction to drugs, and the ending of the story represents Goines'
hopeless despair at his failure to escape heroin. Goines was shot to death
right after this book came out (the murder was never solved) so we'll never
find out what happened with the escaped disciple. It was a real downer.
Love Among the Chickens -- P.G. Wodehouse
In which the perennial pest Ukridge gets married, to an
overly angelic woman whose total blindness to Ukridge's selfish uselessness I
found more annoying than endearing. Ukridge attempts to start a chicken farm,
of all things, and enlists his old school friend Garnet for moral support;
Garnet goes along, more out of a morbid curiosity as to just how everything
will inevitably go to smash than out of any illusions about Ukridge's business
sense. Naturally Ukridge's chicken farm is a model of self-important idiocy,
and Garnet keeps out of the way by working on his latest novel and trying to
win over his fiancee's father, who lives nearby. It's not at all surprising
when a crowd of unpaid creditors descend on the farm and seize everything, and
I think we're supposed to be ruefully admiring of Ukridge's undiminished
self-confidence when he immediately starts making plans to start a duck farm
instead, but in fact I couldn't help thinking how much better off every single
person in the book would be if only Ukridge were to drop dead.
The Cape Cod Mystery -- Phoebe Atwood Taylor
The first novel by Dad's favorite mystery writer. In his
records I found three separate sets of annotations dated years apart, the
earliest of which referred to other notes even earlier; he must have read it at
least six times. It's set in Wellfleet on the Cape in 1931. As a mystery it's a
little weak -- logistically it's obvious there's only one character who could
have committed the murder, but the motive is something the reader couldn't
possibly have known about and it's only explained in the murderer's post-suicide
confession. On the other hand, it's both interesting and funny, and a good
picture of life on the Cape during the Depression. Some of the characters go to
a silent movie (Dad notes that "talkies" didn't make it to the Cape
for years afterward) and when asked how it was, sum it up as "the reel
broke four times and the pianist fell asleep." The hero is Asey Mayo, a
man-of-all-work who sets out to solve the crime because his boss is the
suspect. (Dad notes that the boss is "a bit of a bumpkin for a Harvard man
-- but his family was wealthy.") Asey, a retired sailor, is about sixty
and has been all over the world and met all kinds of people, and is full of
folksy wisdom ("They can call fried flounder fillay of sole, but it's
fried flounder all the samey.") I liked it.
Billy Budd, Foretopman -- Herman Melville
A classic sea story, really well-written. It was his last
book, written just for himself, since he wrote it in the early 1890s when he
had long stopped publishing. I read this in high school but its central
conflict escaped me then. Billy is an 18th-century sailor who gets pressed out
of his merchant ship into a British man-of-war. He's oppressed, for no reason,
by the ship's master-at-arms, Claggart, who shows a friendly face to Billy but
at the same time causes his underlings to make Billy's life difficult.
Eventually Claggart falsely charges Billy with mutiny, and the astonished and
enraged Billy loses his temper and hits Claggart, killing him instantly, for
which the Captain reluctantly hangs him. Much is made of the unknown cause of
Claggart's hatred, and the impossibility of ever learning the truth since
Claggart is dead, and when I was seventeen I thought the point of the story was
that sometimes people do things for no reason. Reading it again, I now think it
couldn't be more obvious that Claggart was sexually attracted to Billy, and
hated him because of that, and his attempt to have Billy put to death was
really an attempt to remove a temptation (and also to punish Billy for
awakening desire in Claggart.) I think the Captain realized that, too.
My edition uses the original text from the posthumous
printing of 1920-something; there's been a scholarly edition since then,
which makes a number of changes, but honestly I think that when, say, Editor
Smith makes changes based on "this is what Melville really meant",
the real goal is to have a standard text called "The Smith Edition".
How the hell do you know what Melville "really" meant? No one else
does. As a general thing I prefer to use whatever edition of a book the author
printed originally. I don't even feel like reading later editions by the
authors themselves, since at best that's an uneven collaboration between two
mismatched people -- the author and the author thirty years older -- and at
worst it's a case of "my original editor wisely removed these three shitty
chapters but I'm so rich and influential now that I can insist on putting them
back in", which has never produced a good result ever.
The Perfection of the Paper Clip -- James Ward
A book about stationery, which in England is a more generic
term than it is here -- they use it to mean any kind of desktop stuff, like
pens, staplers, notebooks, and so on. It's really a hobbyist's
affectionate appreciation of his hobby -- the sort of book that only works if
the author really loves the subject, which Ward clearly does. I laughed at his
description of the sense of betrayal he feels when he pushes down on the
stapler and only gets and empty impression on the paper because it's run out of
staples. I particularly liked the chapter on the development of the
high-lighter pen; apparently its unusual shape is the result of a designer
pounding his fist on a rejected clay model in frustration. Well worth reading.
Mansfield Park -- Jane Austen
Her third novel, very well written, but I found the heroine
uninteresting; she didn't have the pluck of Elizabeth Bennett or the
intelligence of Elinor Dashwood. She spends the whole novel constantly worrying
whether she's being conventional enough. I mean, the story is meant to be
driven by the plot questions of "Will I be able to avoid marrying the cad
my family likes, will my cousin see through our neighbor's false front before
getting engaged to her?" But the heroine is much more concerned with
"Am I self-effacing enough, am I sufficiently subservient to my aunts, am
I as repelled by any hint of worldliness as perfect rectitude requires?"
And what was up with 19th-century English people marrying their first cousins
all the time? You'd think the C of E would have had something to say about
that.
Bachelors Anonymous -- P.G. Wodehouse
An excellent late novel featuring the shrewd, blustery movie
magnate Ivor Llewellyn, divorced from his fifth wife and wary of anyone trying
to become the sixth. His attorney Trout, as it happens, belongs to a small
group called Bachelors Anonymous; whenever a member starts to feel like getting
married, he calls the group for help and someone comes to provide moral support
until he can conquer the fatal urge. The hero of the story is Joe, a playwright
who falls in love at first sight with Sally, a reporter who comes to interview
him about his first produced play; Joe has come to work as a writer for
Llewellyn's studio. Since Llewellyn has to travel to England, Trout recommends
he take along a chaperon, lest he should come home married again. Joe goes
along, but he neglects his fiancee-repelling duties to pursue Sally, who has
inherited a lot of money from a former employer on the condition that she quit
smoking. The private detective assigned to make sure Sally stays off cigarettes
is engaged to a deadbeat nobleman, a louse who was once engaged to Sally, and
who tries to break things up between Sally and Joe so he can win her back and
get the money. Annoyed that Joe has been so negligent as to let Llewellyn agree
to a dinner date, Trout himself comes to London to keep everyone on the
straight and narrow, so the story winds up with all the right people married
and unmarried, respectively. I thought it was great.
Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War -- Herman Melville
Melville's last published book, a collection of poetry and
essays about the Civil War. (He wrote a couple more volumes of poetry after
this, but they were privately printed editions of only a dozen copies or so.)
Reviews at the time were mixed, determined more or less by which side the
reviewer supported. I am of course wholly in sympathy with Melville's pro-Union
abolitionist stance, so the Atlanta Journal wouldn't call my opinion reliable,
but I thought it was a good book. The poetry is robust, powerful, and wearily
sad, with very striking imagery. It conveys a strong feeling of just how tired
and heartsick everyone was by the end of the war. The essays' arguments for
graceful submission by the losers and graceful reconciliation by the
winners are commonplace but well expressed.
The Dream of a Queer Fellow -- Fyodor Dostoyevsky
A strange novella about a man who has resolved to commit
suicide. He sits at his table with a revolver but is bothered by thoughts of
the unkindness he showed earlier that day, when a little girl approached him in
the street to ask for help with something but he only waved her away. Brooding
on this he falls asleep in his chair and has a strange dream where he shoots
himself and is buried, but is then lifted out of the grave by a mysterious
presence who whisks him across space to another planet, which he finds is a
Utopia, like an Eden where the people never fell. They astonish him, but he
finds that his mere presence corrupts them; they soon learn to lie, and not
long afterward they begin to murder and fight wars. Appalled, he tries to
persuade them to return to their former state, but they refuse, and he awakens
at his table. Shaken, he decides that the dream was a message to remind him of
humanity's potential for goodness, and he resolves to continue living in order
to persuade people to turn away from evil and embrace goodness, beginning by
going out to find the girl who'd spoken to him and get her the help she needs.
The editor of my edition thought the story was meant as a statement of what
Dostoyevsky hoped to accomplish with his writing.
Playing the Numbers -- Shane White, Stephen Garton, Stephen
Robertson, and Graham White
A very good book about the old racket of "the
numbers", which I had heard about in many gangster movies but never really
understood. It was a kind of lottery, whose attraction for poor people was the
low fee and high reward -- you could wager as little as one or two cents, and
the standard payoff was six hundred to one. (Since the odds of winning were a thousand
to one, this was a great deal for the people running the game.) The hook was
the method used to make sure the lottery wasn't rigged: it was understood that
the winning daily number would be made up of a combination of specified digits
of three different figures having to do with interest on the national debt,
which were posted at the New York Currency Exchange every day at ten AM. To
prevent raids there were no betting parlors, and bets were placed with local
"numbers runners" in each neighborhood. The game started in Harlem
and was run by a cluster of numbers bosses who came and went, sometimes
skipping town to avoid paying if too many people hit the right number on a
given day. It was a mixture of old and new -- the numbers bosses had modern
staffs and invented new accounting methods to run their businesses, but they
were generally known as "Kings" or "Queens", an old-style
voodoo tradition, possibly because several of the early bosses came from the
Caribbean. It was almost entirely a black business until the mobster Dutch
Schultz started muscling in to take the business for himself; the Kings and
Queens wouldn't go without a fight, though, and some of them held Schultz off
until he was assassinated for unrelated Mob reasons. The numbers game mostly died
out when the legal lotteries came in. It was well told.
The Heat's On -- Chester Himes
A hard-boiled cop novel, about two black New York detectives
in the sixties investigating the disappearance of a guy who may or may not have
been murdered, no one's sure. The writing was good and the story was exciting
and suspenseful; the solution was something the reader couldn't have guessed,
but then it was a thriller rather than a mystery. What struck me most was the
way the black characters switched context -- they behaved naturally among
themselves, but when white people were on the scene they subtly changed,
putting on a show of good-natured slow-mindedness, masking their real
intelligence behind a non-threatening facade. It wasn't even really acting so much
as encouraging the white people to see what they expected to see. Good book.
Galahad at Blandings -- P.G. Wodehouse
Lord Emsworth is finally free of his bossy sister Constance,
who has not only remarried but moved to America. Returning from the wedding,
however, he's appalled to find that another sister (he has four, each more
unpleasant than the last) has ensconced herself at Blandings, and even worse
has brought along a friend whom she's determined to make Lord Emsworth marry.
Luckily for Lord Emsworth, his brother Galahad is always on his side against
their sisters, and he cheerfully adds getting rid of the sister and her friend
to his to-do list, which already includes reconciling two different pairs of
estranged lovers, as well as getting a young friend out of trouble for
impulsively socking the local constable in the eye and stealing his bicycle. He
eggs on the sister's friend's appalling young son into pestering the estate's
prize pig, the one subject on which Lord Emsworth reliably springs up from
being a doormat to stand up for himself, and the resulting blow-up rids the
estate of sister, sister's friend, loutish boy, and all; and while the dust
settles Galahad deftly manages his other business and everything ends happily.
It was great.
Secret Lives -- Ngugi wa Thiong'o
Short stories from the sixties, mostly set in and around
Limuru in Kenya just before and just after independence. They're very good,
very evocative of the characters' feelings about the British, about the Mau Mau
Uprising, about the conflict between the cities and the rural areas. One
excellent story was set in a bar, with an older man telling the life story of
another man, recently dead, whom he had known from childhood. Their lives had
taken different paths due to random chance: the narrator went to a
government-run elementary school while the other went to a local school. During
the Uprising the British troops shot the local teacher and burned the school
down (they did this to many non-government schools, suspecting they taught
anti-British sentiment) so the narrator's friend never got an education and
lived a life of menial poverty. It was a melancholy story but very well
written.
Ascending Peculiarity -- Edward Gorey (Karen Wilkin, ed.)
A posthumous collection of interviews, which he affected a
pose of disliking even though he gave them all the time. He was,
unsurprisingly, a bit of an eccentric person, although he says his childhood
was wholly normal. He called himself "undersexed" and didn't consider
himself either gay or straight; he adopted the word "asexual" when
that term became popular in the eighties. He was fascinated with dance and for
decades attended every single performance of the New York City Ballet; he
maintained that the best, most natural performance he ever saw was Diana Adams
rehearsing "Swan Lake" while wearing sweats and chewing gum. Either
he genuinely had nothing to say about how he did his work and what his writing
process was like, or else he was stonewalling, because he never answered
questions about how he worked with anything other than "Oh, I don't
know." He did say that his public persona was about half real and half put
on, but he wasn't sure which half was which. A big part of every interview is just
him evading questions, so the book was interesting but a little frustrating.
Friends and Enemies -- Adlai Stevenson
A collection of articles Stevenson wrote during his trip to
the Soviet Union in 1959. I was very struck with the way he energetically
defended the Republican administration against criticism by the Russian
officials he met with, despite the fact that he had run against Eisenhower
twice. (I don't think I need to draw a parallel with today, right?) He had the
feeling that the Russians were secretly impressed that he -- a defeated leader
of the opposition -- was allowed to visit other countries and speak to foreign
ministers. The writing is clear and articulate, and funny in an understated
midwestern way; he dryly describes how Kremlin functionaries came unannounced
to his hotel room and informed him that he was about to pay a call on
Khrushchev to express his admiration of the USSR and his gratitude for being
allowed to visit. His conclusion from speaking with Khrushchev was that the
Soviets were reluctant to start a war because it would retard their economic
progress, which they thought was the key to world domination. The book was
written before Mao split with Moscow, and the threat of a joint Sino-Russian
economic juggernaut was what really concerned Stevenson. Very interesting
reading.
Crown of Shadows -- C.S. Friedman
The end of the story begun in Black Sun Rising,
wherein our heroes finally confront the big boss bad guy. I wasn't expecting
the way the villain is finally defeated, and I really liked the way the
decisions the heroes make that lead to that defeat also satisfyingly complete
their character arcs. One thing struck me as a little jarring: during the
post-climax denouement, one of the two main characters (Vryce), whose essential
characteristic is a never-say-die refusal to give up, finds himself in a room
with the other main character (Tarrant) and a third party who confronts
Tarrant, intending to kill him. Vryce gets between them and can prevent it, but
Tarrant tells him "Get out, there's nothing you can do" and he just
leaves. It was a classic example of someone acting wholly out of character just
because the plot requires it. That aside, I thought the whole story was pretty
good.
Death Lights a Candle -- Phoebe Atwood Taylor
Her second book. This one is a murderer-among-us story, as a
motley group of people is snowed in during a spring blizzard on the Cape and
one of them gets poisoned. (Because I've read Dumas -- and Pratchett -- the
title tipped me off that the poison was administered by means of arsenic-soaked
candle wicks.) As Dad remarks in his notes, it's obvious that Taylor didn't
decide who the murderer was until the last minute, as she spends most of the
book making sure everyone in the house can be suspected. This rather backfires
-- when considering whether the narrator's friend Rowena might have done it,
Asey Mayo (now the chief of police) points out how odd it is that Rowena
insisted the narrator come with her to the Cape, ostensibly to paint her house,
in March of all times; but when Rowena doesn't turn out to be the killer, that
just gets forgotten and no explanation is ever given. In the end Asey simply
announces that he has discovered that one of the guests has been borrowing
heavily from the victim and was about to be cut off (which the reader couldn't
have known) and aha, there's your motive, so-and-so is the killer. He
immediately admits it and mwah-ha-has about how he'll escape and get away with
it all, except that in his master plan he didn't consider that the police chief
might carry a gun. So as a mystery it fell flat as your hat, but I liked it
anyway.
The Haunted Pool -- George Sand
A 19th-century rural novel, about a Provence widower in his
twenties whose father-in-law (who also owns the farm where he works) essentially
orders him to remarry. It's a business decision, really; with the rest of the
family having more children, they will have to bring in someone to take care of
the hero's three small children. The farmer lays out the criteria: better an
older woman, preferably a plain one, someone who has little enough chance of
ever marrying that she'll be grateful even for a marriage that means raising
someone else's children. The plot, such as it is, involves the hero setting out
to make a business offer to one woman but deciding on his own to marry another;
that takes up about half of the book, and the second half is just a long
description of what country weddings were like when the author was young. It
wasn't bad.
Little Green -- Walter Mosely
A novel about a private detective -- more of a
"fixer", really, since he doesn't seem to have a license and is very
much a don't-involve-the-cops kind of guy -- named Ezekiel ("Easy")
Rawlins, set in southern California in the late sixties. It's part of a series
but I haven't read the earlier books. Rawlins has one of those noir-story
relationships where his best friend is a conscienceless stone-cold killer who
is devoted to him for some reason. The friend hires him to find a young man who
seems to have been given LSD unawares at a party and wandered off. This is
Rawlins's first encounter with hippie culture and he's surprisingly sympathetic
to it considering he's a black veteran in his late forties. Rawlins finds the
young man easily enough, but he's come down from his acid trip covered in blood
and in the possession of a big bag of cash, also covered in blood, and nothing
but hazy memories of drug hallucinations. Rawlins spends the book finding out
what happened and dealing with the aftermath, while wondering if the counterculture
portends any change in race relations and having conversations about Chester
Himes novels. I thought it was very good.
Death in the Pot -- Morton Satin
A book about food poisoning throughout history. The parts
about the actual mechanism of food poisoning were interesting, but I didn't
think much of the rest of the book, which, as the author admits right at the
beginning, is necessarily all speculation. There's no way to know if historical
outbreaks of disease were caused by food poisoning or not; the symptoms
described in historical records could be made to fit any number of disease
vectors. So most of the book is just an extended game of what-if.
The Mystery of the Cape Cod Players -- Phoebe Atwood Taylor
Her third mystery, narrated by a wealthy Boston spinster in
her fifties, exactly like the narrator of the first two in everything but name.
The narrator is sent by her family to stay on the Cape so the healthy sea air
can help her recover from pneumonia. On her first night there a troupe of
entertainers, lost in the fog, seeks shelter at her place; Dad notes that there
were a lot of such troupes during the Depression, especially early on as people
who'd lost their jobs had to find something to do. In the morning the troupe's
magician is found shot dead outside the house, and Asey Mayo turns up to figure
out what's what. This one is better constructed than the last, since it's
possible for the reader to solve the mystery, or it would be if the first
sentence of the book didn't make it clear who the killer was. Dad's main
comment on the book was that he couldn't see how a person who would tear a
living animal in pieces with his bare hands could pass for normal in ordinary
life.
If I Were You -- P.G. Wodehouse
A very funny how-the-other-half-lives story, wherein a young
earl (Tony) finds out that his nanny switched her own son for the earl when
they were babies, and so the loutish working-class Socialist barber (Syd) whom
the whole family dislikes is the real earl. Having fallen in love at first
sight with the barber-shop assistant, Tony willingly makes the switch, and most
of the novel is taken up with their misfit lives: the family decides to reduce
Syd to despair by telling him he can't possibly be an earl without learning
correct behavior, which they straight-facedly tell him means spending all his
time going to improving lectures and classical concerts, when he's not riding
and shooting; while Tony's customers at the barber shop are reduced to terror
by his incompetence with the shaving razor but are too British to complain. Syd
and Tony become friends when Syd escapes from constantly falling off his horse
to find refuge in the barber shop and lecture Tony on the right way to shave.
It all ends happily, of course. I thought it was great.
Vile Bodies -- Evelyn Waugh
His second novel, a satire on the self-consciously Bohemian
life of the well-off partiers of London in the twenties, known collectively as the
"Bright Young Things", of which Waugh himself was one. It's mostly an
anti-romantic comedy, with the protagonist, Adam, constantly trying to scrape
together enough money to marry his girlfriend Nina, set against the backdrop of
endless drinking at elaborate parties that no one really seems to enjoy.
Eventually Nina marries someone else, a wealthy friend who bluffly expects Adam
to be happy for them, though we later see Adam and Nina agreeing in the most
cynical way to let the husband believe the children are his. The novel takes a
bizarre turn at the end, as the last chapter suddenly finds Adam on a
battlefield of a titanic global war against an unspecified enemy, soldiers
killing each other with heat rays and leprosy bombs. Waugh's marriage was
breaking up right then, so I can see he'd be making strange decisions, but I
wonder why his editor didn't take that part out.
Lingo -- Gaston Dorren
A very interesting book about European languages. It's
really a collection of linguistic trivia, but done well -- a book touching on
sixty different languages can't have the depth needed for a thematic argument.
I was most struck by the author's contention that Slovenian, Serbian, Bosnian,
Croatian, Bulgarian, and Montenegrin are all the same language, and their speakers
only maintain a pose of not understanding each other out of mutual dislike --
much the same way as a Colombian and a Puerto Rican may pretend not to be able
to understand each other, though anyone who speaks Spanish has no trouble
understanding either one. Good read.
Down and Out in Purgatory -- Tim Powers
A novella about a man who has spent years hunting a man he
hates in order to kill him, but finds out the man has died quietly of natural
causes. Unsatisfied, he arranges his own death in order to follow his enemy
into the afterlife and try to destroy his ghost there. Terrific concept,
I thought, and the story has a go at confronting how the man's obsession
with revenge has literally destroyed his own life, but it kind of deals with
that perfunctorily because the author is more interested in the mechanics of
how the afterlife works. I still liked it, though.
Out of Solitude -- Henri J.M. Nouwen
Three sermons about the difference between solitude and
loneliness. Nouwen notes that in the Gospels Jesus often leaves the people he's
with and goes off by himself to pray; many stories about Jesus begin with the
Apostles having to go out to find him. Nouwen contends that it's a necessary
part of a spiritually healthy life to have moments where you temporarily set
the world aside and consider only yourself and God.
The Pugilist at Rest -- Thom Jones
A collection of depressing but very well-written short
stories about Vietnam, boxing, growing up poor, and living with brain damage.
(The author was serious about "write what you know", I guess.) Nearly
all of his characters spend a lot of time reading philosophy and are generally
heavily influenced by Schopenhauer's pessimism. I really liked it.
The Mystery of the Cape Cod Tavern -- Phoebe Atwood Taylor
Realizing that she's used up Wellfleet's quota of murders
for a hundred years, Taylor moves the action to the fictional town of Wessit,
apparently a haunt of rich celebrities and rum-runners (Prohibition hadn't been
repealed yet when this was written.) The victim this time is the proprietress
of a fashionable summer hotel; the corrupt local cops pin the blame on the
first person they see, and Asey Mayo has to set things right, in the company of
yet another wealthy Boston spinster in her fifties. I liked it mostly for its
picture of the Cape in the thirties: the crucial distinction between
"summer people" (acceptable) and "tourists" (loathed),
Asey's cynical recognition of his role in providing "local color" to
the newspapers. As a mystery it was silly; every single person at the hotel and
in the neighborhood turns out to have a good reason to hate the murder victim,
and most of the story is Asey sorting through motives until Taylor gets around
to deciding who the killer is. I was annoyed at the way Asey confides every
thought he has to the narrator until he figures it all out, whereupon he
suddenly gets all cagey, "Oooh, I can't say till I'm sure," for no
reason at all. Also three different people admit to Asey that they've actually
attempted (but failed) to murder the victim before, and Asey essentially just
says "Oh well, boys will be boys" and lets it go. I agree with Dad
that it wasn't very good.
The Gilded Bat -- Edward Gorey
A bleak illustrated book about a young girl who works hard
to become a prima ballerina, and although successful in her career never
achieves either financial stability or a sense of satisfaction. Then she
dies. Good art though.
The Humorless Ladies of Border Control -- Franz Nicolay
A travelogue of a touring hipster-punk duo through eastern
Europe, the Ukraine, Sibera, and Mongolia in 2012, and then the Balkans in
2013. It was pretty interesting. The author says that thanks to the Internet
there's thriving punk scenes in all kinds of out-of-the-way places; none of
them bought his CDs since they got all his music off torrent sites, but he
always sold out of T-shirts and LPs, both of which are hard to find in that
part of the world. He thinks punk is popular in Siberia and the Balkans because
of the general disgust and nihilism.
Absolutely On Music -- Haruki Murakami and Seiji Ozawa
A record of long conversations about classical music
Murakami had with Ozawa in 2010 and 2011, when Ozawa had a lot of free time
because he was recovering from cancer treatment and couldn't work. I hadn't
quite realized how much of a wunderkind Ozawa was -- he was already
conducting high-prestige performances in his early twenties, and was given
important work at an unusually young age by maestri like Leonard Bernstein and
Herbert von Karajan. (Bernstein used to gripe because the music critic of the
New York Times, who hated Bernstein and roasted everything he did, wrote
laudatory reviews of Ozawa from the start.) I was interested to find that
Ozawa's main interaction with music is reading scores, which he does far more
than actually listening to music. When he was young it was his only way of
experiencing Mahler, for example -- at that time Mahler was rarely performed,
and there were almost no recordings, and in any case Ozawa didn't own a record
player and couldn't have afforded to buy recordings anyway. It's full of
fascinating stuff about the mechanics of conducting and the interrelations
among the members of an orchestra. He explains, for example, that Brahms's
scores include staggered breath marks for the wind instruments, so that (say)
two horn players never pause for breath at the same time, so a note can
continue longer than one person could carry it. It was really interesting.
Sandbar Sinister -- Phoebe Atwood Taylor
Another of Taylor's endless supply of fiftyish spinsters
from Boston visits the Cape in 1934 to stay with a friend, only to find that --
now that she works in a department store, having lost her money when her bank
failed -- the "friend" treats her like a poor relation, expecting her
to do the laundry and make sandwiches for everyone. She's getting ready to
leave when a dead hobo turns up in the boat house and her friend's unpleasant
brother vanishes, only to be found shot to death on a sand dune. Asey Mayo sets
out to figure out what happened, taking the narrator along to help him, since
apparently he can see the "NARRATOR OF THE STORY" light flashing
above her head and so knows she's not the killer. Logistically the murder was
solvable, though the motive was something the reader couldn't have known. It
was better as a picture of the times -- I liked the narrator's delighted glee
when the whole town, including the police chief, gets stinking drunk when a few
hundred bottles of bootleg booze get thrown overboard from a smuggler and wash
up on the beach, and the way the locals complain about this fad of rich people
with their own small planes is scaring the cows. I also liked the way the local
drunk confesses to the murder and everyone just ignores him because they're
used to the way he confesses to everything, which they blame on the fact that
he goes to every revivalist show that comes to town (Dad says these shows were
everywhere during the Depression -- he even mentions "Brother Love's
Traveling Salvation Show" in his notes.)
And The Band Stopped Playing -- Thomas Wolf and Nancy Glaze
A post-mortem of the collapse of the San Jose Symphony,
which went out of business in 2002 after operating for a hundred and
twenty-five years. About half the book is good, talking about the problems of
operating a cultural nonprofit in an area with heavy income inequality. The
Symphony's 89 full-time musicians made an average salary of about $25,000 --
that's the mean, elevated by the higher salaries paid to the premier musicians
and the concertmaster; the median was only about $18,000, barely a living wage
anywhere in the country and negligible in San Jose. At the same time, even
though there are so many of them, Silicon Valley rich people are far less
likely to donate money than rich people in other parts of America. The
rest of the book is less interesting. It was written by a consultant brought in
by the Symphony's major donor (who also paid for the book to be published) and
is basically an I-told-you-so meant to establish that everything would have
been fine if the Symphony had only followed the author's advice. It's also
dishonest, since the book is contstantly saying things like "a close
observer of the proceedings thought... A symposium convened at such a date
concluded... A standard work on nonprofits says..." and it takes some
digging in the (very small print) end-notes to find out that the observer, the
convener of the symposium, and the writer of the standard work were all the
same person, this book's author. The book also barely mentions the San Jose
Symphony's successor organization, Symphony Silicon Valley, which was started
independently by the San Jose Ballet and has become very successful despite
following none of the principles laid out in this book.
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