What have you read lately?

[apl68]

Water:  The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource, by Marq de Villiers.  An overview of the global water situation published around the turn of the century.  It looks at how much usable--for agriculture and human consumption--water is available in different parts of the world, and finds that many nations and regions within nations are heading fast for serious water stress.  Many regions have already maxed out their water resources.  Villiers also looks at how humans have recklessly damaged water resources around the world, through pollution, ill-considered dam building, over-pumping aquifers, and an insistence on settling and developing agriculture in places, such as much of the American West, where water resources just aren't adequate. 

It's a bad situation--and this is what things were like two decades ago!  In most places the situation has deteriorated a good deal since.  Things are getting truly dire in the Middle East, for example.  Though no climate change denier, Villiers has little to say about climate change, since there was less sense of alarm about it than we have now.  His book reminds us that climate change, as bad as it's getting, is only one of many factors in the problematic global water situation that is now developing.


Landscape and Memory, by Simon Schama.  Schama has been writing these huge, lavishly-illustrated intellectual histories for many years now.  This is one of his older works, which I had somehow missed until recently.  It's a look at how Western cultures over the centuries have looked at and valued the natural landscape.  There's lots of study of different kinds of myth-making around forests, mountains, waterways, etc.  It's Schama, so it's very informative and entertaining.  But where exactly was he going with this?  Well, at least he makes the point that there's always been a great diversity of views--there's no one "Western" view of what nature or landscape is or should be.  Be that as it may, the world's landscapes all seem to be generally heading in one direction, and it's not a good one.

[downer]

Currently finishing off Signal Fires by Dani Shapiro. It's a tale of middle class families and the effects of a traumatic incident. It's good, and occasionally the writing is beautiful.

Recently finished Pineapple Street: A Novel by Jenny Jackson. It was entertaining and interesting, mainly about the tribulations of being young and wealthy while living in Brooklyn. There are some serious aspects to it too.

[ab_grp]

Now we are reading The 100-Year-Old Man who Climbed out the Window and Disappeared, thanks to the recommendation from ergative! We just started but are enjoying the writing style (kind of reminds me of Tove Jansson?) and are looking forward to reading about the man's adventures.

Just finished this one last night and didn't want it to end! Ergative, thank you so much for the recommendation.  It was such a delightful book.  I just recommended it to a couple friends yesterday.  There was another writer it sort of reminded me of, but I can't remember who now.  Anyway, we loved it.  And I ordered the movie!

I'm so glad you liked it! Some of the prose style reminded me a little bit of Alexander McCall Smith. I'd be curious to know who it reminded you of, if you ever remember.

I think I have figured it out.  I'm listening to Leave it to Psmith (P. G. Wodehouse; narrated by Jonathan Cecil) right now.  I've read it several times and always enjoy it.  I think that's what the writing in The 100-Year-Old Man who Climbed out the Window and Disappeared reminded me of.  Also, this version of Leave it to Psmith is (currently?) free on Audible to Premium Plus members.  I'm not sure if that's the only tier for which that's true, but I would recommend taking a listen if it's available.  There are other versions available for $, and I was afraid that the free one would be lackluster, but the narration is right on IMO.  I'm glad I went back to look for this post, because I forgot we have the movie of The 100-Year-Old Man... to watch.
   

[hmaria1609]

Started from the library: Conquer the Kingdom by Jennifer Estep
New and #3 in the "A Gargoyle Queen" trilogy.

Next will be Maryland in the French & Indian War by Tim Ware
Local history book from Arcadia Publishing.

[hmaria1609]

From the library: A Tempest at Sea by Sherry Thomas
New and #7 in the "Lady Sherlock" series

[Parasaurolophus]

April:

Adrian Tchaikovsky - Children of Memory: This series is fantastic, and this was a fun addition, though it felt weaker than the others, somehow. I'm not sure exactly how; it may have been because this time they discover a human colony, rather than some other earth critters. Or maybe it's that the conceit, though clever and interesting, is kind of confusing for most of the novel, and readers can't quite scrape together enough clues to puzzle it out. Still, it's good. And I enjoyed the Norse inspiration.

Adrian Tchaikovsky - Guns of the Dawn: I didn't expect to like this very much, but I loved it. It's sort of Pride and Prejudice, except with an Elizabeth drafted to fight in France during the Revolutionary Wars and with a more enjoyable Mr. Collins analogue. And, for once in this kind of thing, the Brits aren't really the good guys.

David Norman - Dinosaur!: I picked this up for a dollar years and years ago, and decided I should finally get around to reading it. It's horribly outdated, of course, since it's from 1991. Norman seems to have an axe to grind against Bakker, which is especially weirdly manifested because he'll dismiss Bakker for reasons which, since I read Bakker recently, I can confidently assert are the same things Bakker said. At the same time, he gives a lot more shrift to biomechanically silly (even for the 1990s!) ideas from others, such as Ostrom's suggestion that Triceratops's frill was attached to its neck (or, indeed, his own view [at the time] that Iguanodon's thumb claw is a defensive weapon). But, you know. It's not bad for a popular-facing work on dinosaurs at the time. It's populated with some interesting art, although it doesn't always match what he's saying (the Giraffatitan at the end, for example, has some serious splay to its forelimbs, despite these being described as 'columnar'), and despite it being very much of its time (i.e. lots of shrinkwrapping, a few Burian/Parker clones, that weird '90s Parasaurolophus sail, etc.). Only the tail end talks about the show, which I don't think I ever saw (though I did collect the magazine).

Mark Witton - The Palaeoartist's Handbook: Recreating Prehistoric Animals in Art: A must-have for anyone interested in palaeoart. I don't have any intention of ever producing any, but the detailed treatment of the different aspects of restoring extinct creatures is super informative for just appreciating it. Witton is always a pleasure to read on the subject, both because he knows so much and also because he communicates it so clearly, and with references. It's copiously illustrated, too, both with his own work and that of other major palaeoartists of the post-Yesterdays era. The illustrations are so, so helpful for understanding the points being made on each page. You'll find most of the book's material scattered across his blog, but this didn't feel at all like I was re-reading the same stuff.

[apl68]

Mark Witton - The Palaeoartist's Handbook: Recreating Prehistoric Animals in Art: A must-have for anyone interested in palaeoart. I don't have any intention of ever producing any, but the detailed treatment of the different aspects of restoring extinct creatures is super informative for just appreciating it. Witton is always a pleasure to read on the subject, both because he knows so much and also because he communicates it so clearly, and with references. It's copiously illustrated, too, both with his own work and that of other major palaeoartists of the post-Yesterdays era. The illustrations are so, so helpful for understanding the points being made on each page. You'll find most of the book's material scattered across his blog, but this didn't feel at all like I was re-reading the same stuff.

Now that must be interesting.  The theory and practice of reconstructing the appearance of long-ago creatures has changed so much over the years.  It would be interesting to know more about the principles that lie behind it.


I just read F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night.  Fitzgerald is one of the more readable of "classic" authors.  But I've about had my fill of his stories about rich people who can't seem to get their acts together.  In this one you find yourself wanting to take Dr. Dick Diver and try to slap some sense into him before it's too late.

[Parasaurolophus]

Mark Witton - The Palaeoartist's Handbook: Recreating Prehistoric Animals in Art: A must-have for anyone interested in palaeoart. I don't have any intention of ever producing any, but the detailed treatment of the different aspects of restoring extinct creatures is super informative for just appreciating it. Witton is always a pleasure to read on the subject, both because he knows so much and also because he communicates it so clearly, and with references. It's copiously illustrated, too, both with his own work and that of other major palaeoartists of the post-Yesterdays era. The illustrations are so, so helpful for understanding the points being made on each page. You'll find most of the book's material scattered across his blog, but this didn't feel at all like I was re-reading the same stuff.

Now that must be interesting.  The theory and practice of reconstructing the appearance of long-ago creatures has changed so much over the years.  It would be interesting to know more about the principles that lie behind it.

It's totally worth the forty bucks on Amazon!

Alternately, if you want to get a sense of what's what, you can check out his blog, where he discusses the process of researching and making palaeoart in great depth. (He's both a palaeontologist and a palaeoartist, incidentally.) I read through the whole thing obsessively a few months ago. It was great fun, and I learned so, so much.

[ergative]

There's an artist on instagram who goes by Himapaan, who does some great whimsical illustrations of what look to me entirely plausible dinosaurs.

This is my favourite, but Parasaurolophus may prefer this one (unless you don't care to be a beast of burden.) I also like pirate dino.

[FishProf]

I've finished the first collection ofthe Elric of Melniboné series by Michael Moorcock.  Series in italics because this is really a collection of novels from the Elric Saga which are not all clearly linked.

My interest stems from (as I said earlier) learning of the character from Dungeons and Dragons sourcebooks, and I can clearly see how Gygax et al. drew from these books in designing the game system.  In many ways, D&D feels more like Elric (and the books from Newhon of Fafhrd and The grey Mouser) than it does Tolkien.

The books are fun and entertaining, but the character of Elric changes from  book to book, and not in a clear manner of character development.  Between one book and the next, he goes from idyllic and optimistic about his future as emperor to bent on the complete destruction of his nation and civilization with ZERO explanation.  He isn't a hero, or an anti-hero, but more of a doomed hero wielding an evil sword he cannot survive without.  The mix of sword and sorcery is interesting, but inconsistent.  Elric vacillates between the Gandalf Problem and the Deus-ex-machina problem.

I conclude that there isn't (or wasn't during writing) a clear, overarching plot to the story being told.  It feels more like a series of more or less unrelated adventures with the same character (like Jack Reacher novels, for example).  I don't think I'll persist with all the books, at least not now.  They may become an occasional palate cleanser in the future.

Here is the list of the Books contained in the compendium I just finished, if anyone is interested.
1) Elric of Melniboné
2) The Fortress of the Pearl
3) The Sailor on the Seas of Fate
4) The Weird of the White Wolf
5) The Singing Citadel

[Parasaurolophus]

There's an artist on instagram who goes by Himapaan, who does some great whimsical illustrations of what look to me entirely plausible dinosaurs.

This is my favourite, but Parasaurolophus may prefer this one (unless you don't care to be a beast of burden.) I also like pirate dino.

Those are great! (And IMO some are clearly inspired by Dinotopia, which is all to the good! ;) )

[apl68]

Communications, by C.B. Colby.  From the 1950s into the early 1970s C.B. Colby wrote dozens of books for younger readers on a variety of technical subjects.  These "Colby Books"--they were actually branded as such--were a staple of school and public libraries for years.  Each one was a slim hardcover with 48 pages, mostly photographs, with a concise, informative text.  The later DK Eyewitness Books were an evolved successor to this format.  The Colby Books had fewer and larger pictures, and fewer words with larger print.  They were also all in beautiful black-and-white.

I read several Colby books as a kid.  I've collected a couple over the years.  They're hard to find, since they were mostly sold to the library market and long since worn out.  Some especially fondly-remembered titles are pricey collectors' items now, if you can even find a copy for sale online.  Communications is a Colby Book that I noticed recently has never been weeded from our library's collection.  Old popular nonfiction like this often provides a great snapshot of what was once considered the state of knowledge in a given field.  We read about such marvels as the first Touch-Tone telephone; a rotary-dial phone with a programmable speed dial using punch cards; Teletype and Telex machines; and the very earliest communications satellites.  There's even a mention of the experimental technology that led to fiber optics.


The Weaker Vessel:  Women's Lot in Seventeenth-Century Britain, by Antonia Fraser.  This is quite an interesting wide-ranging survey of women's experiences in a past time and place.  Early Modern Britain was my area of concentration when I was a PhD student in the 1990s.  I was too naive going in to grad school to realize that an Early Modern Europeanist would essentially never again have a chance to be hired in academia in the U.S.  The tenure-track history pie was shrinking fast, and Early Modern Europeanists were not about to get a slice of what was left.

At least I got to spend six years studying a fascinating period in history.  I'm amazed that I can't recall reading this one during grad school.  Seems like I recall my advisor not being a great Antonia Fraser fan.  It's a shame.  This seems quite a good survey of the subject.  Now and then a book like this reminds me of why I've always found the period so well worth study.  I guess for Americans today it's just all old dead white people stuff that's totally irrelevant.

[downer]

I listened to Trust by Hernan Diaz. It won a Pulitzer Prize and was on 2022 top ten lists.

It took a little patience to get into it, but it was interesting and thoughtful, with different layers of narrative. Big themes about capitalism and some about gender roles.

[Juvenal]

I thought this extract might amuse forumites.  If you like it, you might like the book.

"Mostly she wore, in the daytime in the winter, a tweed skirt, a sweater-set, and a necklace.  The skirt looked as if a horse had left her its second-best blanket; the sweaters looked as if an old buffalo, sitting by a fire of peat, had knitted them for her from its coat of the winter before; the necklace (sometimes it had earrings to match) was made of seeds or acorns or sea-shells that had been gathered and varnished by her children, if you were lucky--by her charities, if you were unlucky.  These necklaces were worse than conversation-pieces, they were collection boxes; admiring one was as good as signing a check.  As my wife said, 'It was a black day when Quakers first made jewelry.'  (Flo was not a Friend, but a friend of Friends.)"

From a book that's about seventy years-old (1954) and does not have so much a plot as linked character studies of academia and academics, and it's loaded with--well, allusions of all sorts woven into the story, such as it is, that keeps one saying to oneself, "Oh, I get that," or "Oh, I think that might be an allusion," and they are mostly from the humanities, such as literature, art, history, music, Biblical, psychological, and... Even the title is a playful allusion (to a piece of music).  The book becomes less antic toward the end.

The author (the first-person narrator is more or less the author) is a man after my own heart when it comes to an oblique aside, often inverting a commonplace. It was his only "novel," but he was a poet/critic of considerable stature, very fond of Robert Frost (who gets more than one walk-on allusion/quotation in the book)

And the author and the book?  Randall Jarrell, Pictures from an Institution.

The somewhat insufferable novelist, "Gertrude Johnson," visiting at the fictional "Benton," (Sarah Lawrence, maybe) gathering material for another of her scarifying works, is reputedly based some on Mary McCarthy.  I think they stayed friends.

If you want to read the first "chapter," go here:

https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/393759.html

[hmaria1609]

From the library: Pan Tadeusz: the Last Foray in Lithuania by Adam Mickiewicz, English translation by Bill Johnston
A Polish literary masterpiece published in 1834--it's a novel in verse.