What have you read lately?

[ergative]

Flyaway, by Kathleen Jennings. It's a superb book! It starts out as a sort of moody tale in a young narrator, keenly aware of how to be good and sweet and tidy and domestic, tells us about her life in a way that makes it clear that something terrible happened to her father and brothers, and her mother is controlling her in some way to make sure she never thinks about it or asks questions or remembers what happens. But of course she does start asking questions, and half the book is about her quest (well, day-trip) to find out what's what.

But the other half of the book is this wonderfully skillful interlacing set of local folklore that's also not at all local, but Australian-flavored variants of European folklore that have been brought to Australia and turned native. There's this elegant symmetry between the people, European immigrants who have become local to their areas, and the tales they brought with them, that are recognizable (one of them is clearly a descendent of the Pied Piper of Hamlin) but also undeniably Australian too. And the truth of what happened to this narrator's family lies in the intersection of these tales, which are both folklore and family history, together with her own investigations. It's so, so, so good.

[paultuttle]

Just re-read the entire Harry Potter series, this time in the order the author intended (the immediately previous time, I read them in reverse order, including back-to-front within some of the volumes).

____

Side note: I like re-reading old favorites in different ways. Sometimes I choose a specific section and read just that, so that counts as my most recent re-reading. Other times, just for the new experience of the old favorite, I open the book randomly and read alternately forward and backward until I finish. Still other times, I start at the end and read backward, paragraph by paragraph. And in each case, I find that after I've satisfied my urge to re-read that book, it takes anywhere between several days and several months before I pick it up again, eager for a new experience with the old favorite. Curiously, I often am able to juxtapose—as I re-read—my memory of first reading a particular passage with my current reactions, which provides a many-layered perspective to my understanding of what a "favorite book" is to me. For some books, it's almost as though I'm accreting layers of mother of pearl memories into a single overwhelming feeling of what that particular book means to me.

_____

Started yesterday on The Lord of the Rings. Currently walking into Bree and sympathizing with Sam's unease at his first sight of humans' tall buildings.

Received the first three volumes of Robert Jordan's "Wheel of Time" series for Christmas. Am now on page 83 in the first book.

Will probably alternate between the old favorite and the new interest over the next few vacation days.

[Parasaurolophus]

December's meagre haul (in fairness, I've been writing and parenting hard):

Alastair Reynolds - Inhibitor Phase: I was glad to return to the Revelation Space universe and find out more about the period before humanity started beating back the inhibitors, although it's been so long and I've forgotten so much that I was a little confused at times. It was a lot of fun, though, and even gripping at times.

Anne Lamott - Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year: This was hilarious, and it was lovely to read it now, as the hatchling nears the end of his first year. It was a great way to put things in context, not least because I'm also keeping a daily journal. It's a tad dodgy in places, though.

Received the first three volumes of Robert Jordan's "Wheel of Time" series for Christmas. Am now on page 83 in the first book.

I love The Wheel of Time; I've read the whole thing twice, and the first ten books six times. The first three are great but old-school fantasy, the remainder a hugely rich political and anthropological tapestry. Hit me up if you ever wanna talk about it!

[FishProf]

"AntiFragile" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.   I think there were some good ideas in there, but it became a tiresome slog though cherry-picked anecdotes and poorly-articulated (if not thought out) critiques.  Taleb has such a sneering¹, mean-spirited style that it became difficult to hear the message through the vitriol.  There were discussions in my own areas of experience that rang false and made me question how accurate he is in areas I lack familiarity.

¹ It was an audio-book and I agree that some of the sneering tone may have been exacerbated by the reader.

I read Thomas Sowell's "Basic Economics" right before that (note to self - put an intellectual palate cleanser in between next time) and I found that interesting, but not novel, and slanted by its omission of the more interesting things economics could speak on.

Time for a Jack Reacher novel, methinks...

[ciao_yall]

"AntiFragile" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.   I think there were some good ideas in there, but it became a tiresome slog though cherry-picked anecdotes and poorly-articulated (if not thought out) critiques.  Taleb has such a sneering¹, mean-spirited style that it became difficult to hear the message through the vitriol.  There were discussions in my own areas of experience that rang false and made me question how accurate he is in areas I lack familiarity.

I have read his work and heard him speak. He's a big sneerer in real life.

[Parasaurolophus]

"AntiFragile" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.   I think there were some good ideas in there, but it became a tiresome slog though cherry-picked anecdotes and poorly-articulated (if not thought out) critiques.  Taleb has such a sneering¹, mean-spirited style that it became difficult to hear the message through the vitriol.  There were discussions in my own areas of experience that rang false and made me question how accurate he is in areas I lack familiarity.

I have read his work and heard him speak. He's a big sneerer in real life.

All this makes me want to listen to the audiobook, even though I know it'll drive me up the wall.

[FishProf]

"AntiFragile" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.   I think there were some good ideas in there, but it became a tiresome slog though cherry-picked anecdotes and poorly-articulated (if not thought out) critiques.  Taleb has such a sneering¹, mean-spirited style that it became difficult to hear the message through the vitriol.  There were discussions in my own areas of experience that rang false and made me question how accurate he is in areas I lack familiarity.

I have read his work and heard him speak. He's a big sneerer in real life.

All this makes me want to listen to the audiobook, even though I know it'll drive me up the wall.

I got it from my local library.

[ab_grp]

Now we're back to the Wool trilogy with Dust, supposedly also a final book.  So far it's hard to recall what happened to who when since the second book went back in time and this one is in the timeline of the first one.  I'm hoping to finish this series and get to more of The Expanse before I hear any future plot points or reveals from the TV series.

We finished this one a night or two ago.  We were both fairly pleased with how the trilogy wrapped up.  It seems as though the author's strategy was to avoid discussing details that might have been difficult to explain, but there didn't feel like there were too many loose ends.  It certainly wasn't a great series, but he pulled it off a bit better than I had expected him to.  As in the previous two books, the big picture keeps expanding as the story unfolds, but it's hard to describe the plot without giving important plot points from previous books away. 

We moved back to the Expanse series with Nemesis Games.  Thankfully, the most familiar characters from previous books have already arrived on the scene.  It's hard to get into some of these books without a foothold when there are too many characters. 

It looks as though the audio book threads are old, and I never know the rules for bumping up a thread or leaving it dead and starting a new one.  Given that some have been mentioned here, I will note briefly that I just finished an amazingly great one (in my opinion) on the Apollo 8 mission.

Alastair Reynolds - Inhibitor Phase: I was glad to return to the Revelation Space universe and find out more about the period before humanity started beating back the inhibitors, although it's been so long and I've forgotten so much that I was a little confused at times. It was a lot of fun, though, and even gripping at times.

Thanks for this review, Parasaurolophus! We haven't read that one yet, but it sounds good.  I think I have probably forgotten enough to be confused at this point, too.

[Vkw10]

The Utterly Uninteresting and Unadventurous Tales of Fred, the Vampire Accountant, which I listened to while driving from SC to Texas. I generally avoid vampire tales, but couldn't resist listening to the Audible sample when that title showed up in a search for books about accounting. Light-hearted entertainment, but I found myself liking Fred and the gradually building cast. I've purchased the next volume in the series and look forward to seeing how the author makes taxes lighthearted.

I also caught up on Lois McMaster Bujold's Penric series, with Assassins of Thasalon and Knot of Shadows. Both were excellent, as usual for LMB books. Penric and his demon Desdemona are fantastic characters.

[apl68]

Inside the Victorian Home:  A Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian Britain, by Judith Flanders.  This is a good example of how the history of everyday life can be as fascinating as that of history's more dramatic moments.  Flanders employs an impressive variety of personal memoirs and correspondence, examples from fiction, advice books, and other contemporary sources to draw a detailed (and well-illustrated) portrait of a world of experience entirely unfamiliar to us today.  And yet this was also a society where mass media, mass consumerism, mechanization, and other forces which have done so much to make today's world were beginning to emerge. 

The focus is mainly on the middle classes.  The poor had little house to keep, while the elaborate establishments of the very rich were a world of their own that has been much described elsewhere.  Middle-class Victorians were beginning to have modern expectations of domestic comfort and convenience--but didn't have just a whole lot of either, by modern standards.  Maintaining such comfort as there was took an enormous amount of labor.  One has to feel for the busy housewife.  And even more for the maids-of-all-work who had to handle most of the dirty and heavy work, in return for low wages, poor living conditions, and continual reminders of their inferiority.

Speaking of continual reminders of inferiority--Flanders sometimes sounds a little too much like the sort of historian who often judges and finds wanting the people of earlier generations for failing to be more like those of today.  They did so many things wrong, and and were so wrong-headed!  That the poor, miserable things had the misfortune to be born too early to be more enlightened is only somewhat of a mitigating factor for their failures to be more like us.  Even an aspect of their society that might be expected to appeal to the modern reader--the Victorians' habit of diligently recycling and repurposing--is made to look like another example of mindless adherence to over-elaborate rules and concerns about status.

Actually, to be fair, Flanders is at least some of the time more fair-minded toward her subjects than that last paragraph makes it sound.  She's aware, for example, that some later portraits of the age by those who experienced it as frustrated youths--Edmund Gosse's memoirs of his father, Philip, for example--were deliberate hatchet jobs.  I do find her attitude a little prosecutorial at times, though.  Ruth Goodwin, whose re-enactments of life a century and a half ago qualify as walking in somebody else's moccasins, writes with more empathy toward her subjects, and shows more recognition that people's customs in earlier times often made more sense on their own terms than we today give them credit for. 

Flanders is still quite a good resource on the era for those interested in it.

[ergative]

I really like Flanders's work on the Victorians. She expanded the last chapter of the Victorian Home into an entire book called The Victorian City, about London street life, and it was equally fascinating. I do agree, though, that she doesn't have the fond affection and slightly prickly defense that Ruth Goodman has. I enjoy both of their work.

[hmaria1609]

I checked out and read Flanders'sChristmas: A Biography (2017) from the library a few years ago. I thought it was ok.

[Harlow2]

Last week I stumbled on a fascinating new book in the library: The Bookseller of Florence.[ It's a wonderful history of the city in the 1400s, of many of the cross-disciplinary intellectual ferment of the time, and of how the old Roman manuscripts in the monasteries were being dusted off and translated into the Florentine dialect—and then the influence of the "classics" on Florentine thinking. I was surprised to read about the 70% literacy rate, which included girls and women. 

  I was going to just read the library version but kept having to stifle the impulse to take out my pen and start underlining, so I bought it.

[apl68]

Last week I stumbled on a fascinating new book in the library: The Bookseller of Florence.[ It's a wonderful history of the city in the 1400s, of many of the cross-disciplinary intellectual ferment of the time, and of how the old Roman manuscripts in the monasteries were being dusted off and translated into the Florentine dialect—and then the influence of the "classics" on Florentine thinking. I was surprised to read about the 70% literacy rate, which included girls and women. 

  I was going to just read the library version but kept having to stifle the impulse to take out my pen and start underlining, so I bought it.

Thank you for not annotating a library copy!  Would that all were so considerate....

That sounds very interesting.  I may have to look that one up.

Wonder how they figured the literacy rate?  Some years ago David Cressy estimated literacy rates in 17th-century England based on the proportions of adults who could sign their own names to a loyalty oath everybody was required to sign.  Got quite a fascinating monograph out of it.  One of the best things I had to read in grad school.

[mamselle]

There is more recent work on that, I'd have to look it up, but it's the same test I just used for an individual whose gravestone I described recently: she signed deeds and mortgages she executed with her name, not an "X."

M.