What have you read lately?

[ergative]

Books 1 and 2 of the Harry Potter series, all of the Lord of the Rings series, and several one-offs from other writers.

Is it just me, or do other people also read several books at a time, moving forward on each one when they're in range of that volume they set down on the bedside table, mantel, coffee table, or bookshelf?

I used to hate being in the middle of more than one book at once, but these days I'm like you--although it's more format than location. I've usually got one audio book for commuting, cleaning, etc., and then a physical book or non-fiction book, and then an e-book or fiction book. Sometimes I've got a literature going and a non-fiction and an SFF going at the same time, to suit all moods.

[ab_grp]

I don't usually listen to too many fiction books at once, though I also have an audio book or two going (usually one fiction, one non-fiction), as well as the physical fiction book we read together.  I do have several non-fiction books that I'm currently reading.  They are compilations, so they're pretty easy to switch between and are not super-technical. 

[hmaria1609]

From the library:The Last Crown by Elżbieta Cherezińska, translated by Maya Zakrzewska-Pim
Story of Queen Swietoslawa the Bold One who ruled in the early 11th century. The novel is the sequel to The Widow Queen.

[ergative]

From the library:The Last Crown by Elżbieta Cherezińska, translated by Maya Zakrzewska-Pim
Story of Queen Swietoslawa the Bold One who ruled in the early 11th century. The novel is the sequel to The Widow Queen.

Ah, I gave up on the The Widow Queen when I slammed headfirst into two characters named, respectively, Bolesław and Boleslaw. That's just rude.

[apl68]

Headlong Hall and Nightmare Abbey, by Thomas Love Peacock.  Both short novels satirize philosophical trends and culture of the Romantic era.  They include characters based on such real-life figures as Shelley and Coleridge.  I lack the erudition to catch all the allusions that were present in both stories, but I could catch enough to have a lot of laughs.  Highlights include the discussion of ghosts in Nightmare Abbey that is disrupted by an actual "ghost," and the ensuing pandemonium.

[Hegemony]

I love Nightmare Abbey! There is also Crotchet Castle.

[apl68]

The Klondike Fever:  The Life and Death of the Last Great Gold Rush, by Pierre Berton.  This 1950s work is still considered the classic general history of the 1890s gold rush to the Klondike.  I first read it some years back.  My first reading about that rush was an early 1960s book for younger readers called The Alaska Gold Rush, by May McNeer.  This was one of the old Landmark Books series, with evocative illustrations by Lynd Ward.  I loved that book when I was growing up, and still do.  I didn't realize at the time that most of it seems to have been more or less cribbed from Berton's then-recent book.

Berton of course goes into a lot more detail.  He tells so many fascinating stories here!  Many of them seem highly improbable.  But Berton does seem to have worked hard at documenting them, so most of them probably do have a good basis in fact.  Berton's own father was a Klondike stampeder who stayed in the Yukon, and Berton himself grew up in Dawson City at a time when the whole gold rush business was still very much a living memory.

This makes me want to know more about the gold rush in the Far North.  Any one of Berton's chapters contains enough material that one could go in much deeper.  He also has startlingly little to say about the experiences and perspectives of the native people whose lands were suddenly inundated by gold hunters.  It's a surprising omission from a writer who went on to gain quite a reputation for what would now be called "wokeness."

[apl68]

Jesus Freaks, by Voice of the Martyrs.  Voice of the Martyrs is an advocacy group--a legit one, with transparent finances and an actual history--that documents persecution of contemporary Christian minorities worldwide.  They aren't the only persecuted religious or other minorities, of course, but persecution of Christian minorities in the modern world is very widespread in the Middle East, in sub-Sarahan Africa, and in the Indian subcontinent.  Arrests, beatings, and in some places, murders, still occur on a regular basis.  Most First-Worlders aren't aware of the problem, just as they are largely unaware of pressing problems being experienced elsewhere in the world in general.

Jesus Freaks contains accounts of people who have suffered for being Christians from the first century on.  Although there are some possibly apocryphal ancient saints' legends here, the great majority of the accounts are from the twentieth century and on.  Many of them are from within the past 20 years.  Some of the recent ones have directions to podcasts of people involved telling their own stories.

Many of them speak of how they seek to show love for and pray for those who have mistreated them and their loved ones.  Which is exactly what Jesus told his followers to do.  Sometimes these prayers are answered--there are several accounts of persecutors of Christians who turned Christian when they realized that these people that they were trying to intimidate had something that they wished that they had too.  It's all a moving reminder of the commitment it takes to follow Jesus in any society.  And of how those of us who don't face persecution must try to support those of us who do.

[Parasaurolophus]

It's early, but I won't finish any other books before the end of the month. So, January:

David Hone - The Tyrannosaur Chronicles: The Biology of the Tyrant Dinosaurs: An informative read, but the writing leaves something to be desired in places. In particular, a number of things are only partially explained, including things for which an explanation is promised earlier. The section on prey is pretty much all padding, as evidenced by the fact that stegosaurs are included rather than simply dismissed (because, obviously for anyone who's marginally informed, time and geography wouldn't permit it). It's a fine book, but it could have been better (frankly, I think that Mark Witton's blog posts are generally more informative). My main complaint actually has to do with an illustration: Hone argues for feathered Tyrannosaurs, but Scott Hartman's restoration isn't feathered.

Harry Turtledove - The Road Not Taken: Just a short story, but a fun one. Imagine that the trick to FTL travel is so simple that it could have been discovered at almost any point in human history, but wasn't. Now imagine that aliens invade wielding... matchlocks.

Daniel H. Wilson - The Andromeda Evolution: A sequel to Crichton's The Andromeda Strain, which I found in a book box. Really kind of meh. It's a serviceable thriller, and does a fair job of capturing Crichton's style. But this wasn't Crichton's best story, and stretching it out like this does it no favours. The addition of a pile of robotics porn is dull, and Wilson asks us to suspend disbelief a few times too many and too early in the story. Also, the story-telling conceit driving the narration doesn't work.

Poul Anderson and Mildred Downey Broxon - The Demon of Scattery: Another book box find, I took it because I enjoy Anderson's retellings of the sagas. I thought this would be that, but it isn't--it's a wholly invented story set around the second raid of Scattery Island, ~835 CE. It's okay--it's strongly inflected by the revenge horror of the 1970s (e.g. I Spit On Your Grave), so... well, that is what it is. I could have done without the sexual violence, which is not treated sensitively (worse, it ends in reconciliation). Although that's not inaccurate to the period, it's really not narratively necessary or earned. Surprisingly, the book is filled with illustrations--wildly inaccurate and fanciful illustrations, which Anderson takes a dig at in the historical note. (Also weirdly, judging from the historical note it sounds like Broxon was the primary author, even though she's listed second.)

[hmaria1609]

Ah, I gave up on the The Widow Queen when I slammed headfirst into two characters named, respectively, Bolesław and Boleslaw. That's just rude.

I missed seeing this!
I enjoyed reading the sequel, seeing how Queen Swietoslawa's story ended. The book could've been edited some--it dragged at one point! Aside from that, I'm glad to have read Swietoslawa's story.  This duet was the author's first novels to be translated in English outside of her native Poland.

[apl68]

Just finished gradually reading through a big collection of Washington Irving's works, including Bracebridge Hall and Tales of a Traveler.  It took a while to get through about 700 pages altogether.  These were all collections of shorter pieces, of course.  I had a good time at it.  Irving can be great fun to read.  His long essay "Abbottsford" gives an interesting portrait of Walter Scott, whom Irving apparently got to know pretty well.  Although I've read a fair amount of Irving elsewhere over the years, I found only a couple of pieces here that I'd read before.

The volume I read was one I found during my travels last year.  It was published in 1883.  And bore a signature from a previous owner dated 1883.  It's remarkable how fun a 140-year-old book can be.  I wonder whether that long-ago owner enjoyed it as much as I did?

[apl68]

Salem Chapel, by Margaret Oliphant.  Our late friend and colleague mamselle recommended this to me a few months back as a rare example of a work of literature that presents a realistic and honest view of life in an evangelical church community, as opposed to the far more common approach of pandering to reader prejudice by portraying them as cult-like villains who make life miserable for the protagonist.  I had supposed that Salem Chapel would be something of a slice-of-life story.  Turns out it has some sensational, melodramatic sections of a sort that fit all sorts of stereotypes about Victorian-era popular fiction.

When not pursuing the sensational plot, though, it is indeed a pretty fair portrayal of that sort of church community.  The people of Salem Chapel are the kind of people who don't roll very high in society in terms of education, wealth, and social status.  Their most eminent members are small-time shopkeepers and tradesmen.  They're what any fair-minded observer would recognize as "good people," hard-working, stable, cheerful, and generally pretty easy to get along with.

They've also fallen into complacency.  They come from a faith tradition that once manifested real spiritual power in contrast to a hidebound and worldly Establishment and its traditions.  But they haven't experienced actual persecution--as opposed to mere occasional ridicule and disrespect--in living memory.  Having shaken off the dead hand of outworn institutions and traditions, they've been unable to resist the temptation to form institutions and traditions of their own.  They're mainly interested in living in a safe little bubble of their own.  They want a minister who will help them to do that, instead of mobilizing them to carry the Gospel into the world.

As for their new pastor, the novel's protagonist, he is a recent seminary graduate whose education has left him feeling a cut above the people he is there to serve.  He can preach lively sermons, and even draw new attendees to the church, but inwardly he still lacks emotional maturity.  He demonstrates this by developing a hopeless infatuation for a beautiful young lady of means who is both a practicing Anglican and above his station in life.

The reader really roots for him to mature and start responding to his congregation with the sort of combination of grace and challenge to strive in the faith that a good pastor can bring.  He doesn't make it.  Maybe God will eventually make him into a mature leader, but he's not that at the story's end.  Meanwhile the congregation finds a new pastor whom they consider more compatible.  They go on being merely good people, when they could be so much more.

[apl68]

Incidentally, the biblical place-name "Salem" is a perennially popular choice among congregations choosing a name for themselves.  My father's first pastorate, before I was born, was a church named Salem.  Newlywed Mom and Dad had to make a 5-6-hour round trip every Sunday to get there, since Mom was still in college and they had to live close to her school.  They'd drive out to the town where Salem was early each Sunday morning, spend Sunday with the congregation, make the long drive home that evening, and be ready to get back to work and studies on Monday morning.

The churches I knew growing up were socially a cut below Oliphant's Salem Chapel.  They were small, working-class congregations that could only afford a part-time "bi-vocational" pastor who worked the same sort of day job his flock did to make ends meet.  After I and my brother were born, Dad even felt it necessary to give up better-paying union masonry work, which required travel to distant construction sites, in order to remain close to family and pastoral responsibilities.  Between his bricklaying, whatever stipend the church managed to pay him, and Mom's school teaching, we got by.  From the time I turned 13 my brother and I also spent our summers working full-time as laborers with Dad.

Dad spent most of his life as a bi-vocational pastor.  When he hurt himself in his early 60s and had trouble laying bricks, he went to work for a local auto body shop.  He retired from that at age 70, but kept pastoring his church.  Nine years later, he still does.  I guess Dad's the sort who'd rather wear out that rust out.

All of which is to say that I have a lot of personal experience with the kind of evangelical/Nonconformist/low-church congregations that Oliphant writes about in Salem Chapel.  It's refreshing to see a fundamentally honest portrayal of that world.

[ergative]

Oh, I loved Salem Chapel. I discovered Oliphaunt a few years ago, and I find that her tales are a really interesting counterpart to Trollope, especially her Chronicles of Carlingford, of which Salem Chapel is one, which sit in the same niche as Trollope's Barsetshire books. All of the stuff about evangelical vs. hidebound safe bubbling went completely over my head; I thought it was neat to read a book about a pastor  getting a job in a system that was not the Church of England, but that was about the extent of it for me. What really struck me about that particular lack of fit between pastor and people was how much it all mirrored the trials of landing a tenure-track job in academia. I've thought this before with respect to curates in Trollope and Oliphaunt's work: they are just the adjunct lecturers holding on by their fingernails waiting until a TT job falls vacant. But in this one, the metaphor extends in a different direction: Vincent got himself an R1 PhD, and then landed a TT job at a SLAC, and can't handle the change.

Another thing that I quite liked about this book was how, despite its putative focus on Vincent, it strikes me as being much more interested in having a conversation about mothers, and the efforts they expend for their children. I don't remember the exact details, but I recall that there was one plot element about a mother trying to protect or recover her missing children; and another mother whose daughter needs to be rescued, and then Vincent's mother (possibly the same as the second?) trying to smooth things over with respect to his job. The whole book is about mothers trying to protect their children in various ways, with varying degrees of melodrama and success. It's a kind of perspective that makes sense, given that Oliphaunt was widowed young and had too support her own children with her writing.

I recommended it quite highly to my mother, and then she took my copy of my book to a party and lost it, so I had to replace it, and she still hasn't read it, to my knowledge.

[apl68]

Salem Chapel does have some themes in common with Trollope's Barsetshire books, doesn't it?  I hadn't realized that until you pointed it out. 

Yes, mothers acting on behalf of their children is a major theme of the book.  Mrs. Vincent is indeed not the only one.  It is strongly implied that another aggrieved mother ends up taking some very extreme measures.

Likening Vincent to a an R1 PhD who finds himself at a SLAC is a good analogy.  I suppose there are many educated professions in which that sort of thing can happen, including libraries.  Educated professionals tend to get their training in a particular kind of big, urban environment.  Many of the places that need them to serve offer something very different. 

I've found that the best fit often comes when the professional comes from the sort of environment where the service takes place and has an understanding and appreciation of it.  I'm not a great librarian, really, but I am a good fit for our community because I grew up in a similar one elsewhere in the state.  Dad has been a good fit for the congregations where he has pastored because, even though he went to college and formally studied for the ministry, he also spent his life making a living the way the members of the flock did.  They understood each other.  It was the same with his father before him, although Papaw was a case of a layman being called to preach later in life.