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

[hmaria1609]

A graphic novel version of Hamlet with the full text must either have a lot of very crowded captions and word and thought balloons, or a massive page count.

This is "Hamlet" manga edition I read from the library. The layout of dialogue in the play and thought balloons were easy to follow. The manga was over 400+ pages.

I've read and own previous Manga Classics titles including Pride and Prejudice, Anne of Green Gables, Jane Eyre, to name a few.

[Parasaurolophus]

August's haul (with a timely report, for once!):

Keith M. Parsons - Drawing Out Leviathan: Dinosaurs and the Science Wars: A philosophy book on dinosaurs! And one that promises to tackle the social construction question (which W.J.T. Mitchell promised and never delivered on)! How exciting! Except that it's totally meh. It's light on philosophy (even of science), and so, so weak on the social construction (basically, the silly Latour stuff is silly, and that's it, apart from [justifiably] grousing about Mitchell). There's a whole vast universe of things to say about palaeoart and skeletal mounts and how these differ from or sometimes inform science, how they're constrained by science but responsive to classification, etc. But there's none of that in here. I suppose, to be fair, there hadn't yet been much serious work done on social construction when this was written, but even so, the outlines are right there–Parsons even delves deep into the AMNH Brontosaurus skull fiasco! Instead, much of the text reads as a series of petty scores being settled. Oh, and weirdly he spends a whole chunk of a chapter on Ostrom/Bakker and the Dinosaur Renaissance, but somehow concludes that almost nothing they postulated was borne out by subsequent science. But... even by 2001 it was clear (to almost everyone) that Ostrom/Bakker had been substantially correct all along, and that the evidence against ectothermy (and for some version of endothermy) in particular was reaching a critical point. So that was weird, and the rest was meh.

Steve Fiffer - Tyrannosaurus Sue: The Extraordinary Saga of the-Largest, Most Fought Over T. Rex Ever Found: Journalist writes like a journalist, which makes it an easy but frustrating read, and light on the details I'd have liked to learn (while heavy on the things journalists like to write, like describing what their interlocutor looks like/is wearing). The account here is very sympathetic to the Larsons, whom I'd mixed up with the Waltons in my head, so it was nice to come away with a better image of them. The angle here is very much big-government-against-the-little-guy, although that's warranted to a large extent. Bakker shows up a bunch to make some highly annoying interventions. I guess I learned some things, although it's hard to really pin down just what–and I was not intimately familiar with the Sue story before (I knew its broad strokes but no details).

James Herriot - James Herriot's Cat Stories: Read it to the hatchling, and we enjoyed it. It's just a collection of stories published in the other books, but we haven't read all the others, so there was plenty of new stuff in there. A lot of tear-jerkers too.

Becky Chambers - To Be Taught, If Fortunate: A space exploration novella with a fair bit of xenoecology, for which I have an insatiable appetite. It was fun, and good. Not cloyingly positive, like much of her other work (good as that is).

Vernor Vinge - A Fire Upon the Deep: Found this on the free shelf a few months ago, and decided to read it to open up space for dinosaur books/because we have to downsize for a while. Basically, a space opera: a ship fleeing a powerful enemy crashes on a planet inhabited by group minds who coordinate via soundwaves (rather than mystical mumbojumbo like in a lot of '70s scifi). My expectations were quite low, but I was pleasantly surprised: the worldbuilding is quite detailed and well done, actually. I can see why it won the Hugo. The '90s sexism is there, but not too bad, especially past one early scene. I'm curious about the two follow-up novels, which I didn't expect at all. The fact that humans and aliens communicate via usenet is pretty funny (unintentionally so, I'm sure).

[apl68]

I Was a Stranger, by Sir John Hackett.  Hackett was a British general who wrote a bit on military history after retiring from active service.  He's perhaps best known for The Third World War:  August 1985, in which he used his insider's perspective to envision what a war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact might look like without the usual apocalyptic sci-fi speculation.  I've known of his work for many years, but never read any of it.

Only recently I learned that in the 1970s he published a memoir of his experiences in the Market-Garden disaster of September 1944.  He was with the British airborne forces at Arnhem, was seriously wounded toward the end of the fighting, and was turned over to the Germans for treatment just before the remnants of his unit tried to break out toward Allied lines.  After he received lifesaving surgery, members of the Dutch Resistance sneaked him out of his hospital and hid him in a Dutch household.  They spent the next several months nursing him back to health.  Eventually the Resistance helped him escape to Allied territory.

Though it's a fairly exciting wartime memoir in places, what really stands out here is the human interest.  The people in the occupied Netherlands were facing famine by this late stage of the war, yet still worked to shelter and feed trapped Allied servicemen, Jews, and other refugees.  Hackett found himself with a family who bonded with him over shared Christian commitment, and essentially made him one of the family as they nursed him to health.  It's an extraordinary example of what willing people with the right spirit can do in the worst of times.  It's also a fine glimpse at the mundane reality of life in wartime under enemy occupation.

The title comes from Jesus' words in the Gospel of Matthew:  "I was hungry and you gave me food, thirsty and you gave me to drink, a stranger and you took me in, sick or in prison and you visited me.  Inasmuch as you did it to the least of these, my brethren, you did it to me."  He goes on to warn that those who refuse those in need have in effect refused him, and will be punished for it.  The family that took in the wounded Hackett demonstrated just how much they had taken Jesus' instructions to heart.

[fleabite]

Fellow bicyclists, I recommend Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle, by Jody Rosen. Although it is US-centric, several chapters treat other parts of the world. One focuses on a rickshaw driver in Bangladesh. Another puts the spotlight on Bhutan, where the retired king and the current king are both keen bicyclists (despite the mountainous terrain). I was surprised to learn that there were exercycles on the Titanic.

A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them, by Timothy Egan. This is very interesting, although not written like a thriller as some of the reviews imply. It focuses on the history of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. I was shocked to learn that an estimated one-third of native-born white men in Indiana were clansman. I also didn't realize how anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant the KKK was and how deeply it infiltrated elected offices and the judiciary. This book is helpful in understanding the currents in American society that have led to Trump's popularity.

William Blake vs. the World, by John Higgs. I particularly liked the way the author looked at Blake's visions through the lens of modern science to explain how they could have occurred and his serious attempts to interpret Blake's philosophy.

[RatGuy]

Ok, so three or four of my friends were excited to acquire Sally Rooney's new novel today. I'm unfamiliar with her work -- is she worth checking out?

[Vkw10]

Ok, so three or four of my friends were excited to acquire Sally Rooney's new novel today. I'm unfamiliar with her work -- is she worth checking out?

One of her books was long listed for the Booker Prize. Very well-written, but not to my taste.

[apl68]

The Flame Trees of Thika, by Elspeth Huxley.  The author's family moved from Britain to what is now Kenya shortly before World War I, and started a coffee plantation.  This is her memoir of those early girlhood years in a new place.  Huxley's descriptions of the lands and peoples beautifully convey a child's fascination with a new world.  Would that more of today's omnipresent memoir producers wrote like this.  It's easy to see why this became a bestseller in the 1950s, and came to be regarded as a classic.

It's presumably a contested classic in some circles today.  This is, after all, a sympathetic insider portrayal of people who settled somebody else's land, and put those people to work making money for them.  The native peoples here weren't outright enslaved, but they were forced, often brutally, into a very different form of economy and lifestyle against their will.  Nowadays we tend to have a hard time seeing people who do that to others as anything but villains.  Though it's worth noting that those who decry this sort of thing the loudest also, if they're honest, find a lot not to admire about those displaced indigenous customs, in particular their grotesque treatment of girls and women.


Scene in the Ice Blue Eyes, by Percy Winner.  This late 1940s work is the story of a fictional spy named Bond.  No, not that one.  This is about Francis Bond, an American who spent much time in Italy and now works for the British during World War II.  We never get that much of an idea exactly how Bond's intelligence gathering works.  He's involved in some wartime broadcasts from Britain, and makes trips to neutral Portugal and Spain to meet with Axis agents.  Naturally he keeps wondering who he can trust, and who is betraying whom.

Though it's supposed to be a thriller, I didn't find it very thrilling.  We spend most of our time inside Bond's head, and a dark and creepy place that proves to be.  He focuses most of his attention on the woman with the titular ice-blue eyes, whose blood runs as hot as her eyes are cold.  Their stormy relationship is both immoral and seriously unhealthy.  It's the kind of story where the main woman character is merely an adjunct to the man's story--as opposed to the more common romance novel, where it's the other way around. 

I bought it when I stumbled across it a few weeks ago mainly because of the striking cover.  A reminder that obscure vintage books are often obscure for a good reason.  One can't help wondering whether this might not have served as an unacknowledged inspiration for another fictitious spy named Bond....

[hmaria1609]

From the library: The Cold Light of Day by Anna Lee Huber
New and 7th installment in the "Verity Kent Mystery" series
I also read the author's "Lady Darby Mystery" series.

[Parasaurolophus]

September:

Rosemary Volpe - The Age of Reptiles: The Art and Science of Rudolph Zallinger's Great Dinosaur Mural at Yale: I acquired this mainly because it features a fold-out spread of the entire mural. It's basically just a museum puff pamphlet. It has some background detail, including from Zallinger himself, but really not very much. It also features a few wince-inducing errors, including a couple outright howelers, such as the claim that Edaphosaurus was a Jurassic ornithopod dinosaur (IIRC; a dinosaur, at any rate). This comes shortly after it's correctly identified as a synapsid from the Carboniferous/Permian.

Charles R. Knight - Before the Dawn of History: I came across a first edition and so snapped it up. It's a hard book to come by. There are a few interesting insights into Knight's process for palaeoart restorations, and the rest is just descriptions of some of his more famous scenes (mostly museum murals). The focus on intelligence (or lack thereof) is all-consuming. (I imagine that's part of Osborn's legacy?)

Harold R. Johnson - The Björkan Sagas: A librarian friend put this into my hands. It's absolutely bonkers; a mashup of Norse sagas, Indigenous myth, and science fiction, wrapped up in a fantasy setting. It's bizarre (including how it's set on the page) and beautiful, and I loved it. It's really unlike anything else you'll read this year, so well worth your attention.

[AmLitHist]

Jane Eyre, with my really great Women in Lit students.They really got into it and loved it. Next up this week:  Ethan Frome.

[RatGuy]

I've started Dayswork, by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel. This novel was a birthday gift from a poet friend who also knows Habel. It's an account of a woman's investigation into Herman Melville (and his friendship with Hawthorne and his revisions of Moby-Dick). Thematically it's in my wheelhouse, stylistically its something of a departure for me and I'm loving it.

[apl68]

Books on the Spanish Armada of 1588 by Garrett Mattingly, Colin Martin & Geoffrey Parker, and Bryce Walker.  My area of concentration in grad school was early-modern Britain.  My ill-fated dissertation was on English images of Spain during the period.  So I read most of these in grad school back in the day.  I still like to revisit the period now and then.  Opportunities are limited now that I no longer have ready access to a big research library.  But you can always find something on the Spanish Armada.

Mattingly's 1950s work is fine popular history, vividly written and accessible, yet also based on real scholarship.  He pays the most attention of any of the authors to the geopolitical context that led to the Armada campaign.  There are several chapters set outside of Spain and England.

Martin and Parker, writing three decades later for the Armada's 400th anniversary, give context but focus more narrowly on the Armada itself.  They make extensive use of sources that Mattingly's generation didn't have access to, plus the discoveries of then-recent marine archaeology.  Their knowledge of the Armada is extremely granular.  In many cases they even know how much ammunition specific ships carried, and how much they fired!  They analyze this data to give insights into exactly how the English sailed and fought circles around the Armada's vessels.  It's good scholarship, yet still written with an eye to accessibility.

Walker's 1981 book is an entry in a Time-Life series on seafaring.  That means that it's the sort of popular history that's based overwhelmingly on the secondary literature.  For what it is, it's not bad.  It's readable, won't lead readers too far astray, and lavishly illustrated, and uses some of the visuals in a very informative way.

I'd recommend Martin and Parker to anybody wanting to learn more about the Armada.  The Time-Life book would make a useful supplement.  Mattingly's work is a bit dated, though not terribly so, and still a great read. 

[hmaria1609]

From the library: Capital Bluegrass: Hillbilly Music Meets Washington, DC by Kip Lornell (2019)
A local history book of bluegrass music in DC and surrounding environs and the pioneer musicians of the genre. The book includes black and white photos and archival images throughout the text.

If you watched Ken Burns's 2019 "Country Music" documentary, bluegrass music was discussed in one of the later episodes.

[apl68]

I listen to bluegrass when I'm driving sometimes.  When I'm not listening to anime soundtracks.

I grew up knowing an older man who played in a local bluegrass band.  Used to have tapes of their music.  I wonder how much of those recordings still survives?

[Parasaurolophus]

Oops. I forgot one of my September haul:

Adrian Tchaikovsky - Saturation Point: Tchaikovsky is consistently good, and this is no exception. It's basically a modern-day version of J.G. Ballard's The Drowned World (which I should re-read someday...), with clear undertones from (Heart of Darkness (which is true of the Ballard, too). So: near-future clifi, with a focus on an oppressive atmosphere. Not weighty in the same way its influences are, but well-realized and good fun all the same (that it's less weighty probably means it's more fun, really).