What have you read lately?

[ab_grp]

Now we are reading Dark Rosaleen (Michael Nicholson), supposedly a historically accurate novel about the Great Famine of Ireland.

Well, for the second time ever, we are putting a book aside.  We have read a lot of books, and they are not all great literature by any means.  What is it about this novel?! I don't know.  The writing is so bland and basic that my husband suggested it sounds like something a high school student would write.  I thought maybe it sounds like an American Girl doll book, though I haven't read any of those and don't really want to cast aspersions in that direction.  For a novel about such a tragic period of time, and a time that must have given rise to many, many interesting people and situations, this book is incredibly boring and not at all compelling.  I looked back at the reviews, and some seem to agree with us, but there are quite a few who really thought this book was excellent.  I feel somewhat validated for wanting to shelve this one midway, given that one reviewer noted that the first half of the book was great but that the second half lacked credibility and fell flat.  Well, I am not waiting for that downturn in an already depressing book.  And not depressing because of the terrible events described therein! Oh my gosh.  I can't imagine caring about these characters at all.  And the villainous "mastermind"... ugh.   I would not be surprised to come upon him twirling his mustache and laughing maniacally at some point.  And of course there's a really mean land owner who behaves terribly and acts like a pig.  Everyone is the same as in every other book, ever.

Anyway, we decided to switch to Redemption (Uris).  I know Uris is not exactly part of the canon, but his writing is infinitely more interesting.  This one is also about Ireland but takes place later on.  We had already read Trinity (Uris), which takes place between the two.

[FishProf]

con't

I was a little afraid to read the older brother's story after the rough edges of Possible Side Effects. But it ended noticeably happier. Comparing the two brothers' stories I get the impression that Asperger's can easily be less of a hindrance than alcoholism. The situation of the Aspergian can be improved by improving self-awareness, society's awareness, and sheer fortitude. But alcohol is just...a blight. (Jackie Gleason did say 'I drank and it worked out for me...hmm'.) Well, that would blend with Robison's point, which he made well. Asperger's is not a disease, just a different way of being gifted.

ETA: And not to minimize the trials or courage of Burroughs, being a gay person born in 1965.

Try A Wolf at the Table about Burroughs alcoholic father. You will leave not wondering why Burroughs was an alcoholic, but how else he could have turned out.

[smallcleanrat]

Thanks for all the recommendations, everyone!

I copy-pasted everyone's suggestions into a spreadsheet and am using a randomizer to choose a reading order.

Looking forward to popping onto this thread now and again as I work through the list!

[hmaria1609]

From the library: Antoinette's Sister by Diana Giovinazzo
New novel about Queen Maria Carolina of Naples and Marie-Antoinette's fave sister.

[apl68]

On the Reliability of the Old Testament, by K.A. Kitchen.  Students of Old Testament history tend to be divided into two principal schools of thought.  "Maximalists" take the traditional view that the historical sections of the Old Testament preserve actual historical accounts of actual events.  "Minimalists" hold that OT history was entirely, or nearly so, the creation of Jews during the Hellenistic era seeking to give their people a longer and more impressive pedigree than was really the case.  Maximalists tend to be Christian and Zionist Jewish scholars with obvious reasons for wanting to demonstrate the truthfulness of OT accounts.  Minimalists tend to be atheists and anti-Zionists with equally obvious ideological investments in dismissing the OT as a collection of fairy tales.

The extremely limited and fragmentary nature of the documentary and archaeological records from Canaan/Palestine/Israel thousands of years ago means that neither school of thought can really "prove" their case, in the way that scholars of more modern times can prove, say, the signing of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776, or that the Holocaust actually happened.  All they can do is try to pull disparate fragments together and interpret and extrapolate from them to try to produce more or less plausible theories about what happened there and then. 

Minimalists have long been in the ascendancy in scholarly circles.  But Kitchen, a renowned biblical scholar and Egyptologist, demonstrates that maximalist interpretations can't just be dismissed.  He marshals an impressive array of sources to contend that the OT accounts of ancient Israel show considerable evidence of a familiarity with social, political, and geographical conditions in the world in which the stories are set that pious fraudsters working in the Hellenistic era are unlikely to have had.  If one reads carefully what the OT accounts actually say--as opposed to some traditional interpretations of them--they often describe what we know of the periods in which they were set pretty well.

Again, it's not really possible at this late date to "prove" or "disprove" the historicity of Old Testament history.  Kitchen at least makes a good case that people who choose to trust the OT accounts are not, as minimalist scholarship would contend, believing things that are obviously untrue to any thinking person.

[Juvenal]

I had a few paragraphs, was editing, pressed the wrong key and--they vanished.  How do you get drafts back?

[apl68]

The Mirage Factory:  Illusion, Imagination, and the Invention of Los Angeles, by Gary Krist.  Los Angeles grew from a modest-sized regional hub into a major city with world-wide recognition within the astonishingly short space of three decades--from 1900 to 1930.  It did so in a region that lacked much of what a very large city would need, most notably anything like adequate supplies of fresh water.  Here's an account of how it happened.  It's told largely through the stories of three of the visionaries who did so much to create the city as it is now--William Mulholland, D.W. Griffith, and Aimee Semple McPherson.

Mulholland was a city engineer who arranged to buy most of the water rights in the distant Owens Valley and built an immense system of dams, reservoirs, and aqueducts to bring the water that L.A. would need to grow.  Griffith was one of the most significant of the pioneering movie directors that built Hollywood into an industry that has had global influence ever since.  McPherson was a pioneering radio evangelist who founded a fairly substantial religious denomination that is still around, and established a template still followed by many televangelists today.

All three have commonly been portrayed as villains--Mulholland for draining an agricultural valley to build a grossly wasteful and long-term ecologically unsustainable city in a nonsensical location, Griffith for making a movie that some blame for having played a major role in enabling the Ku Klux Klan to gain influence (Which didn't actually last all that long, but in the meantime caused black Americans to lose a great deal of the ground they had gained since emancipation), and McPherson for pioneering the excesses of charismatic televangelism, and in the process surviving a scandal that really should have destroyed her reputation.

Krist treats his subjects a good deal more sympathetically.  He portrays them as essentially well-intentioned people who worked hard and accomplished a lot of good.  He acknowledges the wrongs that each did, while suggesting that these should not entirely define who they were.  It's a good example of how historical interpretation of people who are decidedly unsympathetic to today's sensibilities can bring nuance to discussions of those who are in danger of being written off and "cancelled" as nothing more than villains.  None of the three subjects is what would now be considered an admirable person who left an admirable legacy (I certainly don't think that of them).  And yet each did do some admirable things.  It's a good reminder of how history, and historical judgements, just can't be as simple as we keep wanting to make them.

[Vkw10]

The Utterly Uninteresting and Unadventurous Tales of Fred, the Vampire Accountant by Drew Hayes, which I picked up at a Friends of the Library book sale. The deadpan humor, cast of characters, and Fred's ability to get drawn into unusual situations has been a pleasant escape from reality. I bought books two and three from Audible, and enjoyed both. Here's hoping book four is equally good!

[ergative]

The Utterly Uninteresting and Unadventurous Tales of Fred, the Vampire Accountant by Drew Hayes, which I picked up at a Friends of the Library book sale. The deadpan humor, cast of characters, and Fred's ability to get drawn into unusual situations has been a pleasant escape from reality. I bought books two and three from Audible, and enjoyed both. Here's hoping book four is equally good!

That's a superb title.

[mamselle]

I had a few paragraphs, was editing, pressed the wrong key and--they vanished.  How do you get drafts back?

If it happens while you're on-screen, "Ctrl-Z" returns all deleted text from the version you were just working on (that is, on a PC, I forget how MACs do it, might be the funny little squiggly thing with Z, but ask someone who knows MAC to be sure.)

If you deleted a file with your PC file manager open, Ctrl-Z also sometimes works for that, or you can go into your trash and just click on it, then I think you may have to right-click for a menu of options, and choose "return to original file," when it opens...or maybe it's a choice on the task bar.)

If you've closed the document, there may still be a versiin recovery method, but I've not had ton7se that, so can't speak to that option, except on MSW10, I think it's a choice on the large, LH colored task bar as you open a file, on the bottom.

You can also just type your question into a Google or other search field, and many self-help sites will have answers (as well as the standard site from MSW help, which can also be useful, on occasion.)

M.

[apl68]

Inventing the World:  Venice and the Transformation of Western Civilization, by Meredith F. Small.  The thesis is that the medieval and early-modern community of Venice, faced with the challenges of making a living on an inhospitable place by the sea, responded by developing a culture of innovation that led to Venice's having more influence on the development of the modern world than perhaps any other community of comparable size.  Venetians developed modern trade networks and accounting practices, did much to forward the development of printing and modern medicine, pioneered various industrial techniques and technologies, and much more.  There's a lot of history, of course, and also lots of personal observations of today's living Venetian community.  There's a great deal of interesting stuff here.

There are also two issues of concern.  First, Small gives us an awful lot of wonky numbers.  On Page 66 we read that Venice has about 400 acres of land area.  Six pages later read of how Venice's "102 acres (160 square miles) can be walked east to west in two or so hours."  On Page 227 it says that "Venice is about 7 square miles (18 square kilometers), and New York City, in contrast, covers a hundred times that area, at 302 square miles (784 square kilometers)."  We also learn that "New York City has a population of about eight million and attracts thirty-seven million tourists--that's 6.5 tourists per resident."  You don't have to be a mathematician to see the problems with numbers like this, and these are only a few examples.  Small was very much let down by her editors for allowing such easily-catchable errors to see print.  I'm now afraid to trust any of the author's figures, and can't help wondering what less-obvious (to me, at least) errors may lurk in the text.

Second, Small appears so besotted and be-smitten with her Venetian subjects that she often seems to have an exaggerated sense of just how distinctive Venice really was.  For example, she says a good deal about how and why early-modern Venice, that greatly innovative community, developed sumptuary laws and Carnival celebrations.  There's no mention of the fact that sumptuary laws and Carnival celebrations were common across most of Europe in that era.  This lack of context robs the reader of an opportunity to see what was so distinctive and innovative about Venice's particular approach to these things.  General readers could also easily come to the greatly mistaken impression that Venice invented sumptuary laws and Carnival celebrations.  Again, these are only a couple of examples of how Small seems so focused on what makes Venice distinct that she misses the wider context of which Venice was only a part.

These issues are unfortunate, because they keep a detailed study of an undeniably fascinating city and culture from being nearly as good of a book as it could have been.  What's much more unfortunate is what Small, in her afterward, acknowledges about Venice's future--namely, the very real possibility that it might not have one.  The former hotbed of innovation and economic powerhouse has become a (literal) backwater, a fossilized open-air museum and theme-park version of its former self.  It is so overwhelmed with tourism on steroids that the indigenous Venetian community is in danger of being crowded out.  The physical fabric that these tourists are swarming in to see is endangered by the tourism itself, and by climate change.  Neither Small nor a number of other sources about contemporary Venice that I've seen can offer much in the way of plausible solutions.  It looks like Venice, like so very many other fantastic natural phenomena, institutions, cultures, and other human creations with long and fascinating histories, may well perish in our lifetimes.

[hmaria1609]

From the library:
Castles in Their Bones by Laura Sebastian (YA)
New and 1st installment in a teen fantasy series.  I read her "Ash Princess" trilogy and enjoyed.

An Impossible Imposter by Deanna Raybourn
New and #7 in the "Veronica Speedwell Mystery" series

The Dark Queens by Shelley Puhak(NF)
Story of Brunhild and Fredegund, 6th century medieval Merovingian French Queens. I like the front cover illustration!

[mamselle]

Hmmm, crossover interest.

One of your Merovingian queens may have established one of the monasteries whose manuscripts and worship practices I work on.

Small world...in all its dimensions...

M.

[hmaria1609]

Hmmm, crossover interest.

One of your Merovingian queens may have established one of the monasteries whose manuscripts and worship practices I work on.

Small world...in all its dimensions...

M.

I'm looking forward to reading it! I first saw the book on Amazon. :)

[apl68]

The Discoverers, by Daniel Boorstin.  An attempt at a history of human discovery, in many different fields.  The history of geography and cartography, calendars, astronomy, taxonomy, medicine, printing--the list goes on.  It's a fascinating book.  And huge!  It took me months of off-and-on reading to get all the way through it.  If you like to read about the history of the sciences, technology, and ideas, you'll find a great deal of interest here. 

I strongly suspect that specialists in the various fields that Boorstin tries to cover could find all manner of things to nitpick, and probably a fair few more basic things to complain about as well.  I wouldn't take it as gospel on any one subject.  Still, it's a fantastic attempt at a broad, big-picture synthesis.  It's hard not to be impressed by the breadth of the author's study, and by his ambition.  For what it's worth, where Boorstin touches on areas that I know more than the average bear about I found relatively little to quibble with, and no absolute howlers.