September 2023 Reading

Since it is highly unlikely that I will finish the book I am reading currently by the end of the day, I’m declaring that I read eight books in September, seven of them fiction and the other semi-fiction.

Semi-fiction is the category I just made up for The Travels of Marco Polo.  Some of what Polo (via his amanuensis) has to say is fairly reliable, but he also writes a fair amount about Prester John, dog-headed people, and various reputed miracles.  If ever a book should be published with a map or two, this is it.  I’d like to see the places he visited plotted on a map and I’d also like a map of where those places are now.  Overall, I’d describe the book as moderately interesting.  I enjoyed this passage:  “At every door of the hall, or indeed, wherever the emperor may be, there stand a couple of big men like giants, one on each side, armed with staves.  Their business is to see that no one steps upon the threshold in entering, and if this does happen, they strip the offender of his clothes, and he must pay a forfeit to have them back again; or in lieu of taking his clothes, they give him a certain number of blows.  if they are foreigners ignorant of the order, then there are barons appointed to introduce them, and explain it to them.  They think, in fact, that it brings bad luck if anyone touches the threshold.  However, they are not expected to stick at this in going forth again, for at that time some are like to be the worse for liquor, and incapable of looking to their steps” (p. 122).  I also liked this take on tattooing:  “This work they cause to be wrought over face and neck and chest, arms and hand, and belly, and, in short, the whole body; and they look on it as a token of elegance, so that those who have the largest amount of this embroidery are regarded with the greatest admiration” (p. 196).  It may be a quirk of the translator, but I also liked this censure:  “The practice is naughty and unworthy of a king”  (p. 301). 

 

Three of the novels I read were the trilogy The Arc of the Scythe, by Neal Shusterman.  The three books are The Scythe, Thunderhead, and The Toll.  I sort of enjoyed them and sort of didn’t.  If there were a three-volume novel about the trolley problem, it would be a lot like this.  It reminded me of the long conversations I had with friends about various philosophical and ethical concepts when I was in high school and college.  From that perspective, I would argue against the premises of the problem as presented in the novel (no plot spoilers!).  That said, the works are somewhat redeemed by the fact that the characters are interesting and the plot has some inventive twists to it.  Those who are not down with reading about death should give these three books a miss.

 

I read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables a long time ago, but had entirely forgotten it.  It’s a fairly straightforward book about what we would call generational trauma nowadays.  Hawthorne says in his introduction, “Many writers lay very great stress upon some definite moral purpose, at which they profess to aim their works.  Not to be deficient in this particular, the author has provided himself with a moral;-- the truth, namely, that the wrong-doing of one generation lives into the successive ones, and divesting itself of every temporary advantage, becomes a pure and uncontrollable mischief;-- and he would feel it a singular gratification, if this romance might effectually convince mankind—or, indeed, any one man—of the folly of tumbling down an avalanche of ill-gotten gold, or real estate, on the heads of an unfortunate posterity, thereby to maim and crush them, until the accumulated mass shall be scattered abroad in its original atoms.”  That quotation gives a fair sample of the prose style, which I enjoy from time to time.  The book works out the sins of the fathers and the children end up able to live happily ever after (I don’t feel bad about plot spoilers for books this old and, frankly, if the reader doesn’t figure out how things are going to end, she or he is clearly not paying attention!).  I was a little disheartened to find some obvious racism in the book.  I knew that Hawthorne ran in the idealistic Concord circles of Emerson, Thoreau, and Alcott and that he had spent some time in some of the local communes; I thought he was better than that.  Oh well.  Readers will want to know that there are casual references to Jim Crow (digression:  I asked my kid about the character of Jim Crow, who turns out to have been a comic Black minstrel figure.  I didn’t want to do a Google search because I didn’t want to wade through the dreck that would result.) and also some terrible stereotypical dialect used by a Black servant.  On the whole, the book was all right, but not fabulous.

 

It has been a long time since I read any Edgar Allan Poe.  I loved his stories when I was a fifth grader.  Poe’s Masterpieces of Mystery is a collection of his stories, including both the greatest hits and some other works.  It turns out that I am no longer a fifth grader.  The Pit and the Pendulum, which used to scare the pants off me, is now mildly creepy.  The Gold Bug is marred by racism.  The deductive detection of The Murders in the Rue Morgue is no longer novel.  What I had flat-out forgotten was that Poe wrote what would be considered hard science fiction, as in The Adventure of Hans Pfall, in which Hans goes to the moon (to escape his creditors, natch!).  In The Tale of Sheherazade, he references not only an automaton that played chess, but also Babbage’s difference engine.  I am glad, more or less, that I revisited Poe, but it will be a long time before I want to do it again.

 

Fifth grade me also read 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne.  My rereading was fun, actually.  I understand why it was such a difficult book for me to get through back then, because it is also hard science fiction, full of math, engineering, physics, and marine biology.  I have never wanted a hypertext version of a book more than while reading this and I amused myself imagining a multidisciplinary curriculum around the book:  there’s geography, geology, the aforementioned math and other sciences, plus ethics.  Students could examine the history of science and determine how plausible the various systems of the Nautilus are.  It’s obviously reading, so it would count as English.  It could also count as foreign language if students read it in French (I am tempted to get a French edition, just for fun!).  I remembered little of the plot.  I was surprised, given the was the book has trickled into popular culture, that neither the nature of Nemo’s crimes nor the nature of the tragedy that drove him to them is described in the book.  It doesn’t even come close to passing the Bechdel test; I’m fairly certain that the only woman in the book is in the photo in Nemo’s room.  Nonetheless, it was an interesting adventure.

 

Finally, I read Horse by Geraldine Brooks.  Wowza.  I love her work generally and this book did not disappoint.  All the storylines are compelling, the characters well-drawn and complex.  If, as I was reading Hawthorne and Poe, I felt that the fatal flaw in American literature is in the racism at the base of our culture, I feel like honest depictions of the cost of that racism as in this book might go a ways toward redeeming some of that original sin.  No punches are pulled.  This is not to say that the book is a simplistic moral tale—it’s an exciting story about horse racing, history, and research.  And it’s beautifully written.  Go check it out.

 

September total:  8

Fall total to date:  8

Year to date total:  63

Even More Not Reading

Yet another book for the not-reading report.  I made it 55 pages into George Eliot’s novel Silas Marner.  And I’m done.  It’s not because I don’t like Eliot.  I enjoyed The Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch, and Adam Bede.  The writing is deft and often lovely.

For example, I offer this quote:  “All cleverness, whether in the rapid use of that difficult instrument the tongue, or in some other art unfamiliar to villagers, was in itself suspicious:  honest folk, born and bred in a visible manner, were mostly not overwise or clever—at least not beyond such a matter as knowing the signs of the weather; and the process by which rapidity and dexterity of any kind were acquired was so wholly hidden, that they partook of the nature of conjuring.” (p. 12)  It’s well-observed and clearly expressed.

 

Or this one, on the village of Raveloe and its culture:  “Raveloe lay low among the bushy trees and the rutted lanes, aloof from the currents of industrial energy and Puritan earnestness:  the rich ate and drank freely, accepting gout and apoplexy as things that ran mysteriously in respectable families, and the poor thought that the rich were entirely in the right of it to lead a jolly life; besides, their feasting caused a multiplication of orts, which were the heirlooms of the poor.”  (p. 36-37)

 

So why am I not finishing?  I don’t like the characters.  Silas is a sad old miser, disappointed in love and faith.  The local squire’s sons are disagreeable fellows.  No one is going to come to a good end and I just don’t want to read through it.

More Not-Reading

Another not-reading report.  Life is short, so I should only read books that I enjoy.  Also, when I move books from the to-read shelf, that means more room for other books.  This particular edition of Plutarch’s Lives of Illustrious Men is certainly very pretty.  It claims to be “Translated from the Greek by John Dryden and Others.”  Who those others might be:  no idea.  I read about 200 pages before I gave up on it.

There were things I did like about the portion I read.  I enjoyed the historiographical nature of the writing, in which Plutarch says, “So-and-so says his father was this guy, but some other reports say it was this other guy, and we can’t entirely discount the notion that he was in fact the son of some god or other.” 

 

In the introductory biographical note about Plutarch himself, I marked this passage for my commonplace book:  “The treasures he acquires of this kind he secured by means of a commonplace-book, which he constantly carried about with him…” (p. xiii).  The recursiveness of copying this into my commonplace book amuses me.

 

That same biographer goes off on something of a rant in the following paragraph:  “We shall more readily enter in the belief that Plutarch collected his materials chiefly from conversation, when we consider in what manner, and on what subjects, the ancients used to converse.  The discourse of people of education and distinction in those days was somewhat different from ours.  It was not on the powers or pedigree of a horse—it was not a match of travelling between geese and turkeys—it was not on a race of maggots, started against each other on the table, when they first came to day-light from the shell of a filbert—it was not by what part you may suspend a spaniel the longest without making him whine—it was not on the exquisite finesse, and the highest manoevres of man.  The old Romans had no ambition for attainments of this nature.” (p. xiii)

 

It was instructive to note that the gulf between the haves and the have-nots has been problematic for a long time, as noted in the life of Solon:  “And the disparity of fortune between the rich and the poor, at that time, also reached its height; so that the city seemed to be in a truly dangerous condition, and no other means for freeing it from disturbances and settling it, to be possible but a despotic power.  All the people were indebted to the rich; and either they tilled their land for their creditors, paying them a sixth part of the increase, and were, therefore, called Hectemorii and Thetes, or else they engaged their body for the debt, and might be seized, and either sent into slavery at home, or sold to strangers; some (for no law forbade it) were forced to sell their children, or fly their country to avoid the cruelty of their creditors; but eh most part the bravest of them began to combine together and encourage one another to stand to it, to choose a leader, to liberate the condemned debtors, divide the land, and change the government.” (p. 135-136)

 

I also liked the opportunity of exploring a culture so different and yet so related to my own.  This is one of those books that were part of the classical education and thus formed, in some part, all those dead white men who created the world we’re soaking in.

 

That same culture, though, ended up being the problem.  I knew about the rape of the Sabine women as just a name.  Reading the account was… difficult.  Basically, the proto-Romans were a bunch of guys.  They kidnapped and raped the Sabine women because, hey, guys need girls.  Time went on, and the Romans and the Sabines (the men who were left behind, presumably) got ready to have a war.  At which time, the raped women got between the combatants and said to the Sabines, “Look, you didn’t rescue us when these guys made off with us.  We’ve tried to make the best of it and we’re now raising families with them.  Don’t kill our husbands.”  They said to the Romans, “Hey, wasn’t it enough to steal us from our homes and families, to rape us and all?  Do you need to kill our fathers and brothers, too?”  So the Sabines and the Romans made peace.  And Plutarch is like, “Hey, these women were awesome!  Worth stealing!  Five stars!  Would rape again!”  (Obviously, I paraphrase.)

 

Ultimately, the so very patriarchal and so very classist tone wore me down.  I had enough.  So I stopped reading.

August 2023 Reading

As is typical, I didn’t get much reading done in August.  I finished three books, two nonfiction and one fiction.

Quentin Bell’s biography of his aunt, Virginia Woolf, was a good read.  The book obviously tells about Woolf’s life, but it also draws a portrait of an era.  Woolf herself comes across as enchanting and flawed and ultimately tragic.  Bell is an engaging writer willing to tell complex tales and to look with reasonable detachment at the deeds of his own family members.  My copy of the book itself was a score from a little free library and it fractured in half.  I may try to find a whole copy to keep (or just keep this one, rubber-banded together, on my shelf.).

 

My church book group is reading Falling Upward:  A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life by Richard Rohr.  As a group, I think we’re on chapter 3, but I finished the whole thing because that’s how I roll.  This is my first exposure to Rohr.  I came in with high expectations, which may have been a mistake.  I liked his ideas, but his writing made it challenging to tease out what those were.  The book is making for good discussion, though, so on the whole I’d call it a success.

 

The best book I read this month, however, is A.J. Glasser’s Witch King’s Oath.  (Obligatory note:  I know and love A.J.  She is an awesome human.  Go buy her book.  I mean it.)  The book is a complex fantasy novel with lyrical, liquid prose.  The characters stick in the mind long after reading.  A.J. has created a fascinating world and I can hardly wait for the next book!

 

August total:  3

Summer total:  12

YTD total:  55