What have you read lately?

[apl68]

My interest in (re)reading wanes.  I pulled Barchester Towers up from the basement "library" and found myself unable to do more than four or five chapters.  Plunk! on the floor by the bed;  I know how it comes out.  A friend thanked me for turning her onto Trollope, in particular, The Way We Live Now, and it appears unlikely I'll ever read it again (as much fun as it was four or five years ago).  Bring on the trash!

No idea if this would interest you, but Jo Walton's Tooth and Claw is basically Trollope but with dragons (A more complete explanation is in this essay). I think it's charming, and figuring out the system that provides biological motivations for Victorian attitudes is a lot of fun.

Apparently when asked if she would ever write a sequel Walton said people who wanted one could read Trollope and imagine the main characters are dragons.

I suppose if I had time I could try doing that with The Warden....

Trollope with dragons has got to be better than Jane Austen with zombies.

[ergative]

Tooth and Claw was a delight. Beat for beat, it is Framley Parsonage, btw.

[onthefringe]

Tooth and Claw was a delight. Beat for beat, it is Framley Parsonage, btw.

Well, Framley Parsonage + additional plot to discuss slavery and women's rights, but Walton's very open about the fact that she stole much of the plot.

[ergative]

Tooth and Claw was a delight. Beat for beat, it is Framley Parsonage, btw.

Well, Framley Parsonage + additional plot to discuss slavery and women's rights, but Walton's very open about the fact that she stole much of the plot.

Yes, of course. You could tie yourself up in all sorts of knots if you go too far in your strict adherence to source material and historical accuracy when retelling Trollope with dragons!

[downer]

Having enjoyed Dear Committee Members, I've started reading The Shakespeare Requirement by Julie Schumacher. The start is great -- but even more depressing about the modern university and the fate of the humanities. Very funny though.

[hmaria1609]

Finished from the library: Treasures of Ukraine: A Nation's Cultural Heritage by Andriy Puckhov et al.
An art history of Ukraine

[Parasaurolophus]

March:

Steve Roud - The Lore of the Playground: One hundred years of children's games, rhymes, and traditions: This was a very dense read, and took up most of the month for me. It was fascinating, though, to learn about how play has changed in the last couple hundred years (basically, these games get restricted to younger and younger people, going from adults to young children, and thus also getting simplified). It's also a really interesting look at British culture, and left me wondering about the poverty of the ludic cultural repertoire in my childhood. Roud is a well-known academic folklorist.

Adrian Tchaikovsky - One Day All This Will Be Yours: Time travel (to murder all other time travellers) and a feathered Allosaurus, so what's not to like? It was quite fun. The narrator adopts the same irreverent tone as in Walking to Aldebaran.

Simon Conway Morris - The Crucible of Creation: The Burgess Shale and the Rise of Animals: (With apologies to FishProf, who recommended it.) This is a bad book, and I hated it. It's poorly written. It's a bad piece of popular science, because Conway Morris never bothers to explain what he can simply assert--including his disagreements with Gould and the reasons behind his own conclusions. There are many pictures, but the quality of the reproductions is so low that it is extremely difficult to make out the structures he references. There are many diagrams, but they're either utterly trivial and uninformative or entirely inscrutable, and as I said, he doesn't like to explain things. In the opening pages, he laments the fact that people these days just throw "isms" at each other instead of having substantive debates on the merits of positions, then immediately argues that Gould is wrong because he's a (Godless) Marxist (I kid you not). He also takes a weird swipe at Derrida and post-modernism, and insinuates that Gould is a postmodernist (!). He basically can't mention Gould without setting up weird straw men. It's a strange crusade against "Steve Gould" (always "Steve", never "Gould"), and given how paltry it is on substance, I'm left to believe that it's personal. But that's weird, too, because Conway Morris cuts a rather heroic figure in Gould's book.

Conway Morris's view of evolution is irreducibly teleological, and the book is suffused with some sort of background theism, with constant (unexplained) references to the "transcendental". He devotes an entire chapter to a supremely annoying conceit of travelling back in time in a submersible and collecting living specimens of the Burgess fauna. This would be merely annoyingly condescending if he didn't blend fact with raw conjecture and pure make-believe, without bothering to indicate which elements are which. I was glad to learn about new discoveries in Greenland and China (though we learn almost nothing about the latter), but honestly, Conway Morris's descriptions of the Burgess taxa are just pale imitations of Gould's--in large part because he can't be bothered to explain anything. (By the by, his account of the discovery of the Burgess shale sounds cribbed from Gould's.) He argues that Gould is wrong about his "inverted cone" of life because all of the Burgess specimens fit into extant phyla (except, he'll say in asides, the ones that don't). He somehow doesn't notice that "the ones that don't" are what matters to resolving this disagreement, and never addresses them. Instead, he simply asserts that they all fit, and illustrates that fact with a couple of cases which he has redescribed. Never once does he bother to start with the basics, and tell us what makes something, say, count as an arthropod or onychophoran (in sharp contrast to Gould). So readers cannot draw their own conclusions based on his text; we must simply take him at his word, and ignore the ones that even he concedes (in passing, with no further explanation) do consistute new phyla.

His arguments against contingency in evolutionary history (such as they are) are straightforwardly stupid (no doubt due in part to his asinine definition of 'contingency', expressed in his glossary. Incidentally, there's no entry for 'transcendence', which shows up an awful lot in the text). It rests in large part on the existence of convergent evolution, which he takes to mean that no matter what, life will find ways to establish itself in the water, on land, and in the air, and there will always be animals that graze and animals that eat other animals (...okay. Yeah.). But then he illustrates it by comparing the sabre teeth of Smilodon fatalis and Thylacosmilus atrox, with the implication being that sabre teeth are evolutionarily guaranteed for top predators (*facepalm*). Incidentally, that brief discussion proceeds entirely without reference to the evolutionary importance, for the development of elongated canines, of the static pressure bite.

And then he spends a page and a half on extraterrestrial life (about which he has little to say) before ending the book.

[FishProf]

Simon Conway Morris - The Crucible of Creation: The Burgess Shale and the Rise of Animals: (With apologies to FishProf, who recommended it.) This is a bad book, and I hated it.

I'm sorry.  I was recommending Gould, not Conway-Morris, but I see now that wasn't clear.

Gould is always fun to read. It was super informative, and did a great job of explaining why they're so interesting. But it's also from 1988, so, you know.

Although he is one of my favorites, his take on the Burgess Shale fossils is not without controversy.  Simon Conway Morris wrote a book The Crucible of Creation: The Burgess Shale and the Rise of Animals which is an alternative interpretation and an attempt to refute Gould's primary thesis.

It's worth a read.

That should have read "GOULD is worth a read."  Mea culpa.

[Parasaurolophus]

Simon Conway Morris - The Crucible of Creation: The Burgess Shale and the Rise of Animals: (With apologies to FishProf, who recommended it.) This is a bad book, and I hated it.

I'm sorry.  I was recommending Gould, not Conway-Morris, but I see now that wasn't clear.

Oh! lol.

Well, I was glad to get an update on the fauna, such as it was. And I certainly got to feel mighty superior, so there's that!

[FishProf]

You're welcome?

[apl68]

The Man of Property, In Chancery, and To Let, by John Galsworthy.  These three novels are usually published in one volume under the title of The Forsyte Saga.  The expanded nine-part (!) series about the Forsytes is also sometimes known by that overall title.  The first trilogy is a big chunk of reading.  Fortunately it's very readable.  The individual novels are of modest length, and they are divided into many fairly brief chapters with evocative titles.  This is the format I prefer for novels that I read, and those that I write for that matter.  It helps a story to move briskly.

Like so much fiction that manages to be both popular and well-reviewed, The Forsyte Saga is essentially a kind of better-written-than-average soap opera.  It tells the story of Britain's rich but untitled Forsyte clan from the 1880s to 1920.  The focus is mainly on several Forsytes who make unhappy marriages, and their efforts to cope with this.  Galsworthy comes across as an advocate of readily available, socially accepted serial polygamy as a cure for this problem.  Now that our society has had a couple of generations of this "solution," we see how well it works as a mass practice.

Galsworthy has been much praised for his social satire.  He makes it clear that when he speaks of "Forsytes" he's referring to a whole social type.  "Forsytes" are anybody with wealth whose lives are all about getting and spending.  They never really create or contribute.  Their view of marriage is transactional, and when they're "in love" it's all about possessing the "beloved," not about that person's benefit.  Hence the unhappy marriages and the sense that they're entitled, when they don't get what they bargained for, to start over with somebody else.  The social satire is amusingly on target--but then it's aimed squarely at the most barn-door of targets.  Doubtless many Galsworthy fans over the years have have broken arms patting themselves on the back for not being Philistine Forsytes.

A more reflective reading of Galsworthy's work might yield the insight that being a crude plutocrat is not necessarily the only way to be a "Forsyte."  That Forsytism is really in a way the human condition.  That, if we're really honest with ourselves, we've all got some Forsyte in us, whenever we imagine that our lives are all about ourselves and not about something bigger than that.

I've seen The Forsyte Saga described as "a comedy of manners."  It's really more of a tragedy.  Galsworthy says of the early Forsytes that they belonged to "some primitive sect," but upon becoming rich joined a tony congregation in the Established Church.  Their religion became another possession, rather than a reminder that we all belong to somebody bigger than ourselves.  They ended up devoting their whole lives to obsessing over wealth that they couldn't take with them, when they could have been practicing love of God and their fellow man as a way to send it on ahead.

[hmaria1609]

I saw the 2002 adaptation of The Forsyte Saga on PBS's "Masterpiece Theatre" in college. The 2nd season covered the younger Forsyte generation. Actor Damien Lewis had his big break as Soames on this adaptation.

[spork]

Looking for a good non-fiction contemporary history of China for a fall undergraduate honors course. As usual, academics who write books have a terrible understanding of the importance of narrative. Style is often just as bad, if not worse.

[hmaria1609]

Started from the library: A Sinister Revenge by Deanna Raybourn
New and #8 in the "Veronica Speedwell Mystery" series.

[kaysixteen]

Just polished off the latest 'Pennsylvania Dutch mystery (with recipes), by Tamar Myers, 'Meat thy Maker'.