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