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

[apl68]

They Were Counted, by Miklos Banffy.  This is the first volume of Banffy's "Transylvania Trilogy."  It has nothing to do with vampires and werewolves.  It's set in early 20th-century Transylvania, when it was still dominated by a Hungarian minority ruling it as part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  Banffy gives a vivid portrayal of a lost world of aristocratic privilege that somehow lasted into the age of railroads and electric lighting.  It is sometimes funny and often melodramatic, but not nostalgic.  Banffy portrays his Hungarian elites as thoroughly morally, ethically, and politically corrupt.

The titles of the trilogy's volumes--They Were Counted, They Were Weighed, and They Were Found Wanting are an allusion to the famous "Feast of Belshazzar" in the Old Testament book of Daniel, where supernatural handwriting on the wall announced the doom of the Babylonian king and his court.  Banffy was a would-be Hungarian reformer whose efforts both before and after World War I met with little success.  He turned to writing to say what he thought of the careless aristos whom he held responsible.  They got their "handwriting on the wall" warning in time to do something about it, but ignored it instead.  For any attentive observers in today's U.S.--or anywhere today, really--this has an uncomfortably familiar ring to it....

I first learned of Banffy and his work at Neglected Books https://neglectedbooks.com/ He's one of several interesting authors I've discovered there.  Not sure yet whether I'll track down the other two volumes.  Banffy was out of print for some years before being rediscovered a couple of decades ago.  His Transylvania Trilogy isn't too hard to find.

[hmaria1609]

Starting from the library: The Rose of Versailles by Riyoko Ikeda, English translation by Mari Morimoto and Jocelyn Allen
Best selling Japanese manga series about a young woman raised as a son joins the French Royal Guard at the beginning of the reign of Louis XVI.  There was an animated series in the late 1970s in Japan and later syndicated internationally.

[Larimar]

I've been continuing my Agatha Christie kick. I finished Death on the Nile, then went on to Murder on the Orient Express and Sleeping Murder. I had a break between the latter two to investigate the Jane Austen mysteries recommended earlier (thanks for that!), and got my hands on the first two in the series. I liked them, but in the second one Jane was supposed to be falling for the guy she suspected was a notorious smuggler, but I didn't find that aspect convincing. I still have one more Agatha Christie on my to-be-read pile, The Body in the Library. Maybe the public library will have more of the Jane Austen ones.

[Langue_doc]

I've been continuing my Agatha Christie kick. I finished Death on the Nile, then went on to Murder on the Orient Express and Sleeping Murder. I had a break between the latter two to investigate the Jane Austen mysteries recommended earlier (thanks for that!), and got my hands on the first two in the series. I liked them, but in the second one Jane was supposed to be falling for the guy she suspected was a notorious smuggler, but I didn't find that aspect convincing. I still have one more Agatha Christie on my to-be-read pile, The Body in the Library. Maybe the public library will have more of the Jane Austen ones.

Have you read Towards Zero? The Murder of Roger Ackroyd? A Murder is Announced? Three very different themes, other than the common one of whodunit. I liked the second two on your list above, but not so much the first one. I think I couldn't relate to any of the characters.

[RatGuy]

I'm reading The Tiger and the Cage by Emma Bolden. It's a memoir about a woman's struggle with endometriosis specifically and the problematic state of women's health care generally. It's tragic, but the author has also made it tragically humorous as well. I'm surprised at how often I find myself laughing out loud at some of her comments.

[Larimar]

I've been continuing my Agatha Christie kick. I finished Death on the Nile, then went on to Murder on the Orient Express and Sleeping Murder. I had a break between the latter two to investigate the Jane Austen mysteries recommended earlier (thanks for that!), and got my hands on the first two in the series. I liked them, but in the second one Jane was supposed to be falling for the guy she suspected was a notorious smuggler, but I didn't find that aspect convincing. I still have one more Agatha Christie on my to-be-read pile, The Body in the Library. Maybe the public library will have more of the Jane Austen ones.

Have you read Towards Zero? The Murder of Roger Ackroyd? A Murder is Announced? Three very different themes, other than the common one of whodunit. I liked the second two on your list above, but not so much the first one. I think I couldn't relate to any of the characters.

Nope, the ones I listed are the only ones I've read. Thanks for the recommendations. She wrote so many that I have no idea which ones are the best. Glad to be pointed in a particular direction.


Larimar

[apl68]

The Hills Beyond, by Thomas Wolfe.  I thought that this relatively short work by Wolfe would make a good introduction to the author.  The cover claims it's a novel. It's actually a collection of material culled from the great mass of drafts he left behind when he died.  There are many vivid and interesting passages, but overall it reads like what it is--a jumble of material released by an author's estate and admirers to give the author a kind of posthumous zombie publishing career.  Which goes to show that this isn't as recent a phenomenon as people may think (Though in recent years it has really been getting out of hand--way too much recent popular fiction now bears the names of deceased authors such as V.C. Andrews).

Wolfe also, like so many 20th-century literary icons, comes across as somebody who holds most of his fellow citizens and their culture in contempt.  I've often suspected that one of the rewards of liking them is the way they make their fans feel similarly superior.  Can't say as I admire such an attitude.  That said, the satire directed in some places against the myth of the "Lost Cause" of the Confederacy, which had reached a peak in Wolfe's day, was aimed at a target much in need of puncturing.


Alive:  The Story of the Andes Survivors, by Piers Paul Read.  In 1972 an aircraft carrying an Uruguayan college rugby team crashed in a snowy wilderness high in the Andes.  When searchers failed to find them, the survivors faced months of struggling against avalanches, blizzards, and more with nothing like adequate clothing or other gear.  They had no food, and had to force themselves to eat the bodies of their friends who had perished in the crash.  Eventually two of them made a desperate trek out of the mountains to get help.

It really is a wonder that sixteen men survived all that.  It has been called the "Miracle of the Andes."  Some survivors and their families considered it an authentic divine miracle.  They commissioned Read to write this "authorized" account of their ordeal from their interviews.  He did such an effective job of evoking their experiences that Alive has become one of those nonfiction classics that has only been added to, never superseded by, later accounts.  It's the sort of portrait of real people under extreme stress and degradation that is tough to read, and yet prompts admiration for the persistence and resourcefulness on display.

At least some survivors are on record as saying that they didn't feel that Read adequately captured their experience.  Several have over the years published their own first-hand accounts.  I've read one, and may check out another sometime for the sake of getting a different perspective.  Some of the survivors went on to have high-achieving careers.  They felt that, having been given a second chance at such a high cost, they were responsible for making the most of their lives.  Which, now that I think about it, seems like an appropriate theme for the Easter season.

[Langue_doc]

Alive:  The Story of the Andes Survivors, by Piers Paul Read.  In 1972 an aircraft carrying an Uruguayan college rugby team crashed in a snowy wilderness high in the Andes.  When searchers failed to find them, the survivors faced months of struggling against avalanches, blizzards, and more with nothing like adequate clothing or other gear.  They had no food, and had to force themselves to eat the bodies of their friends who had perished in the crash.  Eventually two of them made a desperate trek out of the mountains to get help.

I recall reading about this book, but didn't have the stomach to actually read it. You might like Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air, an account of the ill-fated 1996 Mt. Everest expeditions.

[Parasaurolophus]

Alive:  The Story of the Andes Survivors, by Piers Paul Read.  In 1972 an aircraft carrying an Uruguayan college rugby team crashed in a snowy wilderness high in the Andes.  When searchers failed to find them, the survivors faced months of struggling against avalanches, blizzards, and more with nothing like adequate clothing or other gear.  They had no food, and had to force themselves to eat the bodies of their friends who had perished in the crash.  Eventually two of them made a desperate trek out of the mountains to get help.

I recall reading about this book, but didn't have the stomach to actually read it. You might like Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air, an account of the ill-fated 1996 Mt. Everest expeditions.

There was a movie about the Alive story, also called Alive.


On Krakauer: a good counterpoint is Anatoli Boukreev's The Climb. Boukreev is Krakauer's villain, but nobody on his expedition died and he went back several times to save others. Krakauer, on the other hand, (as I recall) refused to share his oxygen.

[Langue_doc]

Alive:  The Story of the Andes Survivors, by Piers Paul Read.  In 1972 an aircraft carrying an Uruguayan college rugby team crashed in a snowy wilderness high in the Andes.  When searchers failed to find them, the survivors faced months of struggling against avalanches, blizzards, and more with nothing like adequate clothing or other gear.  They had no food, and had to force themselves to eat the bodies of their friends who had perished in the crash.  Eventually two of them made a desperate trek out of the mountains to get help.

I recall reading about this book, but didn't have the stomach to actually read it. You might like Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air, an account of the ill-fated 1996 Mt. Everest expeditions.

There was a movie about the Alive story, also called Alive.


On Krakauer: a good counterpoint is Anatoli Boukreev's The Climb. Boukreev is Krakauer's villain, but nobody on his expedition died and he went back several times to save others. Krakauer, on the other hand, (as I recall) refused to share his oxygen.

I read Boukreev's account as soon as it was published, and also Krakauer's postscript addressing the criticisms, several of them valid, in one of the later editions. I like Krakauer's style of writing, so have enjoyed reading some of his other books--Into the Wild, Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith, and Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town.

ETA: If you like reading about mountaineering, you might have seen David Breashears' film on Mt. Everest. Some of his photographs of Everest are on display in the Asia Society's "immersive photography and video exhibition", COAL + ICE. I saw the exhibit just a week before his death, which was around the middle of this month.

[apl68]

I read Into Thin Air some years ago.  It made me wonder why on Earth anybody would ever want to climb Everest.  I've also read his Into the Wild, about a poor, deluded would-be adventurer who wandered off into the Alaska wilderness and starved to death.

[apl68]

Easter Hill Village:  Some Social Implications of Design, by Clare C. Cooper.  In the 1950s the public housing authority in Richmond, California, built a new housing project at a place called Easter Hill.  They avoided the soul-crushing concrete high-rise approach in favor of a low-rise planned neighborhood of two-story "townhouses."  Most apartments had their own tiny front and back yards.  The neighborhood as a whole had a good deal of open space, and a network of footpaths where people could move among the buildings away from the dangers of traffic.  There were, however, no play areas, no indoor public spaces, and no park benches or other outdoor meeting areas.  Like nearly all low-income housing, the whole thing was built on the cheap.

Cooper had the revolutionary idea, a decade or so after the project was built, of using interviews and questionnaires to ask the residents themselves what they thought of the place.  The resulting book became something of a landmark study in the field.  Residents' opinions were all over the map.  Most thought that Easter Hill Village wasn't a bad place, but fell well short of their ideals.  Nearly every household had children in those baby-boom days, and all there really was for them to do outside was run or bicycle around the paths.  The cheaply-built houses had little visual privacy--the yards had no fences or only very low ones, and no shrubs to keep people from looking inside.  Cheap construction also meant that there was no soundproofing to protect one from hearing everything that was going on outside or next door.  All this made the place feel more crowded.  Larger households had more bedrooms, but no more kitchen or living space.

The study is impressive in how they tried to survey residents' feelings and experiences regarding their environment as thoroughly as possible.  The recommendations at the end of the book suggest ways that future public housing projects could be better designed to meet residents' needs.  Unfortunately all the suggestions would have cost money, and public housing came to be so stigmatized in the U.S. that voters not only didn't want to live in the projects, they didn't want any built anywhere near themselves, and saw no sense in spending taxpayer money on them.  The need for low-income housing is greater now than ever, and the supply of aging public housing stock just gets more and more inadequate.

Easter Hill Village had already, by the time the study was published in book form in the 1970s, gone from being an ethnically and economically diverse community to becoming a place of absolute last resort for black welfare families.  In the early 2000s it was torn down and replaced by a new project with a different name.  Which also seems to have gained a reputation as a crime-ridden and undesirable place to live for those trapped there.  It's lamentable that our society has failed to make available the resources to make public housing projects into better environments.  At the same time, it's hard to see to what extent better design and more generous amenities can fix neighborhoods where fundamental social and family structures have undergone a wholesale collapse.

[hmaria1609]

From the library: The Blues Brothers: An Epic Friendship, the Rise of Improv, and the Making of an American Film Classic by Daniel de Vise (2024)
The story behind the classic 1980 movie and influence of improv. Includes photos from the set and the cast leads.

[Larimar]

Finished my Agatha Christies (at least until I can get to the library) and have now started Galileo's Daughter by Dava Sobel. So far there's been astronomically (pun intended) more about him than about her... not that I'm really complaining because he was an interesting dude. I'm only a few chapters into the book, though, so we'll see.

[spork]

I tried reading The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan. Gave up after a few chapters. The "everything plus the kitchen sink" approach distracted from the premise. Destiny Disrupted by Tamim Ansary is better written stylistically and has a much tighter narrative.