What have you read lately?

[Langue_doc]

+1 to Camus; "Huit Clos" (No Exit) is another fun one.

Not to be nitpicky, but Sartre's play is Huis Clos in French.

Incidentally, we're discussing The Plague in one of my book groups. Having read the book first in French before reading the English translation ages ago, I keep hearing the French intonation now as I'm reading the English version.

[mamselle]

Of course, and thanks for the correction.

M.

[apl68]

In an Antique Land, by Amitav Ghosh.  Jewish communities have traditionally treated any writing containing the Name of God as too holy to treat casually.  Synagogues often had a special repository called a "geniza" where old sacred texts could be safely stored before receiving a proper ceremonial disposal.  A geniza in Cairo managed to go for many centuries without ever receiving a good purge.  The Cairo Geniza is famous in biblical scholarship as the source of many of the oldest Hebrew Bibles (aka "Old Testament") texts in existence this side of the Dead Sea Scrolls.  Since medieval Jews tended to invoke the Name in all sorts of documents, including mundane personal and business correspondence, the Cairo Geniza came to contain a priceless grab-bag of texts of interest to historians of all sorts.

Amitav Ghosh was a scholar from India who used texts from the Cairo Geniza to reconstruct the lives of certain medieval Jewish merchants.  These merchants were great travelers--from North Africa, through the Arabian Peninsula, all the way to India's Malabar Coast.  Ghosh goes to an impressive amount of effort to try to bring these long-ago figures to life through the fragments that they left behind.  Tracking down these fragments proved quite the adventure, as the discovery of the Cairo Geniza by 19th-century scholars and antiquarians led to its collection becoming dispersed around the world.  In an Antique Land alternates chapters on the lives of Ghosh's subjects with chapters on his own experiences in trying to research them.

He spent quite a bit of time across the 1980s, off and on, conducting research in rural Egyptian communities.  People in communities, like the one where I live, with limited opportunities for diverse contacts can be kind of embarrassing in their dealings with strangers from unfamiliar backgrounds.  The fellahin that Ghosh encounters take this quality up to eleven.  They're constantly asking embarrassing questions about, and expressing horror regarding, such Indian customs as worshiping cows and burning the dead.  They also, among themselves, practice a good deal of old-school peasant conflict, even including the barbaric institution of blood feud.  Ghosh portrays himself as a tolerant sort prepared to make all sorts of allowances toward others in the interest of getting along.  He does admit that now and then his impatience and temper get the better of him.  He nonetheless comes across as developing a real appreciation of, and understanding toward, the fellahin as human beings.  This makes him more sympathetic--in both senses of the word--than the sort of educated progressives who express mostly contempt and disdain toward the 98% of humanity who are less evolved than themselves.

Ghosh uses his experiences in his quest to advance a thesis to the effect that modern nation states are in some ways more closed and xenophobic than the medieval world.  For all its hardships and endemic warfare, the medieval era was a time when people had a lot of freedom of movement around much of the world.  Boundaries between religions were also more permeable than one might think--a surprising number of medieval holy men were venerated by adherents of more than one faith.  It's an interesting thesis.  To me, though, Ghosh's accounts seem mainly to show that human beings haven't undergone any fundamental change over the past thousand years.

[Parasaurolophus]

October:

Riley Black - The Last Days of the Dinosaurs: An Asteroid, Extinction, and the Beginning of Our World: This was a fun read. Trying to explain the end-Cretaceous extinction in a series of vignettes featuring prehistoric fauna as characters is... well, it's an interesting exercise, and difficult to pull off. Black isn't entirely successful, with the general shape of the story being somewhat uneven. But it was a wacky idea, and reading it was fun. I certainly learned a few things, some of which I think I'm more likely to remember--especially about the aftermath of the impact. I'd have liked a little more about the immediate effects of the impact--Brusatte does a great job of this in The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs--but that's also well-trod ground, whereas the aftermath isn't. There's a smack of teleology about some of the evolutionary details, but it comes and goes.

J.R.R. Tolkein - The Fellowship of the Ring: Well, it's serviceable, but nothing like as good as The Hobbit. The pacing is mostly slow but also somewhat erratic, with a lot more direct worldbuilding than story, and more tell than show. The Mines of Moria also loomed larger in my memory. Shrug. It's not bad, and it's certainly impressive as a historical achievement, but The Hobbit just did it all so much better.

Patrick Rothfuss - The Name of the Wind: I picked this up in a book box years and years ago, and never read it. I read it this time because I wanted to make space on my bookshelf, and based on the back-cover summary I figured I wouldn't like it enough to keep it. I was wrong. This is a fantastic piece of fantasy, and had me gripped almost the whole way through (I wasn't super into the storytelling conceit, especially at the beginning; I don't think there's anything wrong with it as such, but it felt a little more forced, and a little more traditional, than the rest of the story). I especially appreciated the relatively robust system of magic (I could read any number of pages about the University!), I thoroughly enjoyed the street urchin material, and I was delighted by the events surrounding the Draccus at the end. In short, I loved it.

[apl68]

October:

Riley Black - The Last Days of the Dinosaurs: An Asteroid, Extinction, and the Beginning of Our World: This was a fun read. Trying to explain the end-Cretaceous extinction in a series of vignettes featuring prehistoric fauna as characters is... well, it's an interesting exercise, and difficult to pull off. Black isn't entirely successful, with the general shape of the story being somewhat uneven. But it was a wacky idea, and reading it was fun. I certainly learned a few things, some of which I think I'm more likely to remember--especially about the aftermath of the impact. I'd have liked a little more about the immediate effects of the impact--Brusatte does a great job of this in The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs--but that's also well-trod ground, whereas the aftermath isn't. There's a smack of teleology about some of the evolutionary details, but it comes and goes.

I read The Last Days of the Dinosaurs a few months back.  I quite enjoyed it.

[Juvenal]

The first in what seems (is) a long series.  Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series, here Master and Commander.  I'm afraid that a few chapters in I started my "power skipping" and then "setting aside."  No great grief at draining the exchequer, since it was one book of three at "$1 for three" book sale at my local library.  I value my time at more than the book merited.

My real beef is how unreadable it was.  Not being all that familiar with history-prose, but not wholly.  So did I find what I expected?  Sort of: Ill-defined characters, the squalor of being a sailor, floggings, cannon specs, baffling ship maneuvers, and a blizzard of technical sailing terms.  Mostly undefined.  So, things like "futtock" are mentioned in passing.  Does the crew do futtock duty?  No clue.

On the other hand I found out the origin of the often-used term now, and its much more technical meaning then: "mainstay."

I will pass on all the subsequent volumes.  The book focus on maritime matters reminds me of Samuel Johnson's, "Being on a ship is like being in jail, but with the prospect of drowning."

[mamselle]

The first in what seems (is) a long series.  Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series, here Master and Commander.  I'm afraid that a few chapters in I started my "power skipping" and then "setting aside."  No great grief at draining the exchequer, since it was one book of three at "$1 for three" book sale at my local library.  I value my time at more than the book merited.

My real beef is how unreadable it was.  Not being all that familiar with history-prose, but not wholly.  So did I find what I expected?  Sort of: Ill-defined characters, the squalor of being a sailor, floggings, cannon specs, baffling ship maneuvers, and a blizzard of technical sailing terms.  Mostly undefined.  So, things like "futtock" are mentioned in passing.  Does the crew do futtock duty?  No clue.

On the other hand I found out the origin of the often-used term now, and its much more technical meaning then: "mainstay."

I will pass on all the subsequent volumes.  The book focus on maritime matters reminds me of Samuel Johnson's, "Being on a ship is like being in jail, but with the prospect of drowning."

The film with Russell Crowe is excellent.

M.

[FishProf]

The first in what seems (is) a long series.  Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series, here Master and Commander.  I'm afraid that a few chapters in I started my "power skipping" and then "setting aside."  No great grief at draining the exchequer, since it was one book of three at "$1 for three" book sale at my local library.  I value my time at more than the book merited.

My real beef is how unreadable it was.  Not being all that familiar with history-prose, but not wholly.  So did I find what I expected?  Sort of: Ill-defined characters, the squalor of being a sailor, floggings, cannon specs, baffling ship maneuvers, and a blizzard of technical sailing terms.  Mostly undefined.  So, things like "futtock" are mentioned in passing.  Does the crew do futtock duty?  No clue.

On the other hand I found out the origin of the often-used term now, and its much more technical meaning then: "mainstay."

I will pass on all the subsequent volumes.  The book focus on maritime matters reminds me of Samuel Johnson's, "Being on a ship is like being in jail, but with the prospect of drowning."

The film with Russell Crowe is excellent.

M.

I have listened to the entire series (2x) on audiobook (20 plus novels) and the first is by far the weakest.  I find the whole thing hugely enjoyable.

[ergative]

The first in what seems (is) a long series.  Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series, here Master and Commander.  I'm afraid that a few chapters in I started my "power skipping" and then "setting aside."  No great grief at draining the exchequer, since it was one book of three at "$1 for three" book sale at my local library.  I value my time at more than the book merited.

My real beef is how unreadable it was.  Not being all that familiar with history-prose, but not wholly.  So did I find what I expected?  Sort of: Ill-defined characters, the squalor of being a sailor, floggings, cannon specs, baffling ship maneuvers, and a blizzard of technical sailing terms.  Mostly undefined.  So, things like "futtock" are mentioned in passing.  Does the crew do futtock duty?  No clue.

On the other hand I found out the origin of the often-used term now, and its much more technical meaning then: "mainstay."

I will pass on all the subsequent volumes.  The book focus on maritime matters reminds me of Samuel Johnson's, "Being on a ship is like being in jail, but with the prospect of drowning."

The thing about that series is that, if you stick with it, you really do learn all the nautical jargon--or, at least, enough of it so that a sequence in which people are, say, trying to find a place to anchor safely at an island when the wind is wrong, is desperately tense and your heart is in your throat the entire time.

A lot of book 2 takes place on land, and introduces Diana Villiers, who's lots of fun throughout the rest of the series. You might find that it's a good way to get more invested with the characters if you interact with them on land, and then when they go back to sea it goes down more easily.

There's a fabulous sequence in one of the mid-series books in which Aubrey is fleeing from a pursuing French warship in the seas south of the Cape of Good Hope, which RJ Barker basically stole wholesale in the last book of his superb Bone Ships trilogy. It made me feel like we shared a very special moment, when I recognized that chase while reading the book (it's really the culmination that makes it clear where it came from) and then read his author's note in which he confessed what he had done.

FishProf, you might enjoy RJ Barker's books. They're very heavily influenced by the Aubrey & Maturin series, but then do wildly fabulously imaginatively different things with the concept of nautical fantasy.

[hmaria1609]

Starting: What the Dead Leave Behind by Rosemary Simpson
It's the 1st installment in the "Gilded Age Mystery" series set in NY City. The story opens at the start of Great Blizzard of 1888.
I've checked out all the novels in this series so far from the library.

[Morden]

In an Antique Land, by Amitav Ghosh.  Jewish communities have traditionally treated any writing containing the Name of God as too holy to treat casually.  Synagogues often had a special repository called a "geniza" where old sacred texts could be safely stored before receiving a proper ceremonial disposal.  A geniza in Cairo managed to go for many centuries without ever receiving a good purge.  The Cairo Geniza is famous in biblical scholarship as the source of many of the oldest Hebrew Bibles (aka "Old Testament") texts in existence this side of the Dead Sea Scrolls.  Since medieval Jews tended to invoke the Name in all sorts of documents, including mundane personal and business correspondence, the Cairo Geniza came to contain a priceless grab-bag of texts of interest to historians of all sorts.

Amitav Ghosh was a scholar from India who used texts from the Cairo Geniza to reconstruct the lives of certain medieval Jewish merchants.  These merchants were great travelers--from North Africa, through the Arabian Peninsula, all the way to India's Malabar Coast.  Ghosh goes to an impressive amount of effort to try to bring these long-ago figures to life through the fragments that they left behind.  Tracking down these fragments proved quite the adventure, as the discovery of the Cairo Geniza by 19th-century scholars and antiquarians led to its collection becoming dispersed around the world.  In an Antique Land alternates chapters on the lives of Ghosh's subjects with chapters on his own experiences in trying to research them.

He spent quite a bit of time across the 1980s, off and on, conducting research in rural Egyptian communities.  People in communities, like the one where I live, with limited opportunities for diverse contacts can be kind of embarrassing in their dealings with strangers from unfamiliar backgrounds.  The fellahin that Ghosh encounters take this quality up to eleven.  They're constantly asking embarrassing questions about, and expressing horror regarding, such Indian customs as worshiping cows and burning the dead.  They also, among themselves, practice a good deal of old-school peasant conflict, even including the barbaric institution of blood feud.  Ghosh portrays himself as a tolerant sort prepared to make all sorts of allowances toward others in the interest of getting along.  He does admit that now and then his impatience and temper get the better of him.  He nonetheless comes across as developing a real appreciation of, and understanding toward, the fellahin as human beings.  This makes him more sympathetic--in both senses of the word--than the sort of educated progressives who express mostly contempt and disdain toward the 98% of humanity who are less evolved than themselves.

Ghosh uses his experiences in his quest to advance a thesis to the effect that modern nation states are in some ways more closed and xenophobic than the medieval world.  For all its hardships and endemic warfare, the medieval era was a time when people had a lot of freedom of movement around much of the world.  Boundaries between religions were also more permeable than one might think--a surprising number of medieval holy men were venerated by adherents of more than one faith.  It's an interesting thesis.  To me, though, Ghosh's accounts seem mainly to show that human beings haven't undergone any fundamental change over the past thousand years.

I haven't read any of his non-fiction, but I enjoyed the Ibis trilogy (Sea of Poppies; River of Smoke; Flood of Fire) about the Opium Wars.

[apl68]

The Return to Camelot:  Chivalry and the English Gentleman, by Mark Girouard.  The late 18th-early 19th centuries saw a notable revival of interest in the Middle Ages.  This led to a widespread idea that modern codes of "gentlemanly" behavior were derived, and perhaps should be derived, from medieval chivalry.  Girouard, a noted architectural historian, examines the influence of such ideas on literature, art, architecture, and society.  The book is a visual feast.  There are dozens of full-color plates, and many good black-and-white illustrations.  The text is also very engaging.

Girouard introduces many figures from the period.  Some, such as Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelites, one would expect to see in any work on this subject.  Others are a good deal more surprising or obscure.  Then there are the real eccentrics--such as the incredibly honor-bound "four friends of Baddesley Clinton," whose story would make a perfect bestselling romantic tearjerker; Charlie Lamb, the radical atheist and vegetarian who "knighted" his pet guinea pigs; and Lord Elgin, who nearly went broke trying to stage a full-dress jousting tournament in the opening years of Victoria's reign (If only the weather had been more cooperative...). 

The visuals and glimpses of stranger-than-fiction eccentrics make this a fun read.  But it is also a serious work of social history.  Girouard  makes a good case that chivalric ideals proved influential in Britain during the 19th century.  Their influence peaked in the latter part of Victoria's reign, just as Britain's global economic and political power reached its peak.  This makes it a phenomenon worthy of study.  Girouard tries to avoid exaggerating the re-imagined chivalric ideal's influence, and is by no means uncritical of it.  Still, he clearly thinks that, at its best, the ideal had its worthy points, and benefited many.

[apl68]

I first encountered The Return to Camelot in college, after growing up reading my share of Arthurian stories, fairy tales, and some Cervantes.  It made a vivid impression.  I was glad to have a chance to re-read it after so many years.  Some thoughts:  First, the chivalric ideal, with its inherent elitism, stress on individual glory-seeking, and tendency to romanticize warfare, has always been a challenge to reconcile with New Testament Christianity.  Some understood as much back in the day.  Scott's Ivanhoe critiques chivalric values, even as it was popularizing them in the early 1800s.

Second, for all the ideal's problems, an elite class could certainly do worse than try to pattern its conduct after the code of chivalry as re-imagined in the 19th century.  Those gentry who honestly tried to live up to such ideals make an attractive contrast with the Philistine plutocrats, crude dictators, and bloodthirsty revolutionaries who have run so much of the world over the past century or so. 

Which brings us to the idea that the Victorian age deserves far more credit for progressivism than it is often given.  There's a good bit of evidence in Return to Camelot for saying that the period was, in some ways, as progressive an age as the world has ever seen.  Life expectancies and standards of living were clearly rising.  Yes, there was widespread colonialism, slavery, and other forms of exploitation.  There was absolutely nothing new about any of this.  What was novel was just how widespread the idea that all of these practices were wrong became.  The Victorians and Edwardians had reason for feeling like they were moving in the right direction.  Then World War I blew it all up.

For the elite, the ones most attracted to chivalric ideals, for the most part as unaware as most elites are of just how fortunate they really were, it must have been a great time to be alive.  It's hard not to feel sorry for the elite youth of the waning years of the 19th century.  They grew up in a world of optimism and privilege, and then came of age just in time to see World War I and its aftermath destroy forever that world they were brought up to inherit.  I suspect that the baby boomers can identify with their disappointment at just how radically the world of their adulthood turned out to be unlike what they'd experienced growing up.  So it is with our efforts to create paradise in the here and now.

For me, the most arresting image in the whole book is Walter Crane's painting "The White Knight," which is reproduced on one of the color plates and on the book jacket.  It shows a knight riding through a hilly, dreamlike landscape.  When I was younger I went walking a lot in the woods near the family home.  One evening the light was such that I almost felt like I had walked into that picture.  Timber clear cutting has since utterly devastated the landscape of that spot.

[Parasaurolophus]

November:

Patrick Rothfuss - The Wise Man's Fear: Every bit as riveting as the first, although I still have some reservations about the framing device. I ploughed through it in no time flat, and I'm very sad that it seems we won't be getting the concluding volume any time soon, if at all. Then again, it seems like there are far too many threads for a single volume to weave together. I suspect that may be what's holding Rothfuss back: it's just too hard to deliver a satisfying ending in one book, given what still needs to happen and the pace at which the previous two books unfolded.


Patrick Rothfuss - The Slow Regard of Silent Things: A fun aside into Auri's life, roughly contemporaneous with the main story. It's a recognizable portrait of OCD, and I rather enjoyed it. But I would still like a novel about Auri's time at the University, and what pushed her into the Underthing.


Rivka Galchen - Little Labors: A fun little book of anecdotes about the early life of her child. A few were very funny, most were quite relatable. A brief but fun distraction.

[hmaria1609]

From the library: Sister Novelists by Devoney Looser
Biography of Jane and Anna Maria Porter, two sisters who were best selling novelists in early 19th century UK. They were a major influence on the historical fiction genre. In addition to their novels, the Porter sisters had fascinating lives and met many of the greats of society of the day and royalty.

I didn't know about these two sisters before checking out this book! It's been a worthwhile read.