Re: What Have You Read Lately? (2024 Edition)

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Skylark of Valeron, by E.E. "Doc" Smith.  Forget Buck Rogers--Smith's Skylark and Lensman series are the principal forerunners of modern "space opera" science fiction.  In this one 1935 adventure we have interstellar wars, intergalactic travel (At a time when the existence of multiple galaxies was still a fairly new concept), hyperspace, disembodied alien intelligences, and a federation of planets.  There's also a superhero scientist who makes the Fantastic Four's Reed Richards look like a middle-school science fair participant.  As no less an authority than Arthur C. Clarke has put it, Smith "holds most of the patents" on Star Wars-type story devices. 

Like most science fiction of its vintage, it comes across as rather unsophisticated in terms of plot and characterization.  There's a great deal of purple pulp prose.  Brilliant scientists often speak like Warner Brothers gangster movie characters.  The very few women in the story--and, to be fair, many of the guys as well--exist mainly to give the big brains somebody to explain their technobabble to.  Still, it's an entertaining read if you can accept the dated-but-vigorous writing for what it is.  Fans of space opera might find it of historical interest, especially if they didn't know that so many familiar concepts were already in use 90 years ago.

I'm not really a fan of space opera myself.  I encountered Skylark of Valeron as a kid in a 1960s paperback edition that I found among the shelves of donated paperbacks in my mother's high school classroom.  I had to spend a lot of time in my tween years going there after school and hanging out and browsing the books while she went about her teacher service work.  After forty-odd years I've finally had a chance to revisit this one.  It's always enjoyable to revisit a long-ago book and see how much of it I remember, especially since I used to be bad about skipping around when trying to read a book-length story.  I must have more or less read most of this one, judging from how much I recognized.

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Read some chapters of Warnings by Richard A. Clarke and R.P. Eddy. Not as good as Perrow's Normal Accidents, Taleb's Black Swan, and Meyer and Kunreuther's Ostrich Paradox.

Also tried and gave up on Fareed Zakaria's Age of Revolutions. Needlessly repetitive.

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Egyptian Made: Women, Work, and the Promise of Liberation, Leslie T. Chang. A worthy successor to her 2008 book on China, Factory Girls.

On a similar topic, I can recommend The Buried: An Archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution by Peter Hessler (husband of the preceding author), which I read last year, and Into the Hands of the Soldiers: Freedom and Chaos in Egypt and the Middle East by David Kirkpatrick, which I'll probably re-read this summer.

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Eat the Buddha by Barbara Demick. Good history of a Tibetan town suffering from cultural genocide by the PRC.

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The Surgeon of Crowthorne, by Simon Winchester.  As much as anything, this is a love letter to the Oxford English Dictionary.  The print version of the OED, which I recall using some in grad school, is an awe-inspiring work.  Multiple, vast, well-produced volumes, filled with hundreds of thousands of words, each with a painstaking etymology and numerous quotes tracing its assorted definitions and shades of meaning down through the centuries.  Though the first edition was not completed until the 1920s, it was in origin a fantastically ambitious Victorian project. 

It was the life's work of editor and academic Dr. James Murray.  Murray enlisted an army of correspondents to search out references and historical uses of words.  Interestingly enough, among the most valuable correspondents that he credited were two eccentric expatriate Americans.  Actually Dr. W.C. Minor, the surgeon of the title, was more than merely eccentric.  After serving as a U.S. Army surgeon in the Civil War, Minor was discharged for showing signs of mental disorder.  He kept saying that somebody was out to get him.  His room was invaded nightly by fiends who crept up through the floor and mistreated him.  His delusions sound not unlike accounts of alleged alien abductions.  Today he would be diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic.

Minor had enough wealth to move to Britain and settle there.  One night, in the grip of his delusions, he murdered an innocent man whom he thought was out to get him.  He was judged insane and institutionalized for what turned out to be the rest of a long life.  Minor's social status and wealth enabled him to set up housekeeping in comfortable quarters at the asylum.  He built up a good private library, and spent his days obsessively indexing the words in his books.  This interest made him just the sort of correspondent Murray was looking for.

Legend has it that Murray, after years of corresponding with Minor, went to visit him and was shocked when his address turned out to be an asylum.  The real story wasn't quite that dramatic, but Murray was indeed shocked when he learned of his valued correspondent's situation.  He didn't let that stop him from visiting Minor anyway, and the two became good friends.  Murray was eventually instrumental in getting Minor returned home to the U.S. for his last years.

A fantastic stranger-than-fiction true story, as well-told as one would expect from Winchester.  Winchester ends with a little memorial to Minor's victim, an Irish laborer named George Merrett.  Minor expressed remorse when he was lucid for what he had done, and Merrett's family is said to have forgiven him.