What have you read lately?

[Parasaurolophus]

I'd be curious to hear this also.

PM sent!

Hmm, it even beats Proust? (Or do his various volumes count as different books?)

M.

Yup! They're infinitely long--literally. Of course, that makes them much less interesting than Proust. I also have, in my back pocket, an article that identifies a story which contains all of Proust, and everything else, too, for that matter. It's also infinitely long--possibly indenumerably infinite, depending on how we articulate it (and whether we accept it in the first place).

[mamselle]

Wow.

Parasaurolophi must have pretty big back pockets....

M.

[ab_grp]

Wow.

Parasaurolophi must have pretty big back pockets....

M.

Those pockets are filled with some really interesting stuff, too!!

We finished Bird Box last night.  I'm glad we took a chance on it and felt the author pulled off the suspense really well with some smart pacing.  He builds the dread carefully, and some of his writing seemed particularly good.  We made it to the end without figuring anything important out ahead of time, and we had a number of fun discussions during while trying to predict the outcomes.  It's unusual to see a story like this with some real cleverness, not too similar to other such tales.  It was very enjoyable, and we will be picking up the sequel. 

After that, we started on Morning Star, which was our next book in the Red Rising series I've mentioned here before.  As with previous novels in the series, it often comes off as melodramatic.  I told my husband while reading it last night that I felt as though I needed to be wearing a turtleneck and have someone playing bongos.  The story has always grown more interesting in the previous novels, so we shall see.

[hmaria1609]

From the library:
The Library of the Dead by T.L. (Tendai) Huchu
The 1st in a new series called "Edinburgh Nights." A secret library underneath the Scottish capitol--who knew?!

Lightbringer by Claire Legrand (YA)
#3 and finale in the "Empirium Trilogy"

I've been to the main national library near the bridge just at the (end/beginning? I think) of the Royal Mile....is this some ghostly mirrorplace beneath it?

(That might be why I missed the main librarian the day I was there.....)

M.

Haha, made you look! Yes, the National Library of Scotland is by George IV Bridge, top of the Royal Mile. I've been in too--the ground floor has an exhibit gallery off to the side.  And a reproduction of Edinburgh in 1700 over the entrance. Loved that!

In the novel, the Library of the Dead is located in the Calton Hill area.

[apl68]

I'd be curious to hear this also.

PM sent!

Hmm, it even beats Proust? (Or do his various volumes count as different books?)

M.

Yup! They're infinitely long--literally. Of course, that makes them much less interesting than Proust. I also have, in my back pocket, an article that identifies a story which contains all of Proust, and everything else, too, for that matter. It's also infinitely long--possibly indenumerably infinite, depending on how we articulate it (and whether we accept it in the first place).

Thanks for the article.  It left me scratching my head, not being a mathematician.  It also reminded me of an article I saw years ago that mentioned Borges' "Library of Babel" in a discussion of how it is possible to envision sets that each meet the definition of "infinite," and yet some can be bigger than others.

I had never heard of Forrest J. Ackerman's cosmic report card story.  Sounds more like nonfiction to me....

Interesting to note that Guinness now considers Proust's magnum opus to be the longest novel.  In my older edition of Guinness it was a toss-up between Jules Romain's Men of Goodwill and Yamaoka's Tokugawa Ieyasu, which took decades to serialize.  Apparently Romain's work has been reclassified as a series, while Proust's is considered a single unitary work of fiction.  I wonder how these definitions come to be made?

[Parasaurolophus]

Thanks for the article.  It left me scratching my head, not being a mathematician.  It also reminded me of an article I saw years ago that mentioned Borges' "Library of Babel" in a discussion of how it is possible to envision sets that each meet the definition of "infinite," and yet some can be bigger than others.

Yeah, the different magnitudes of infinity are really trippy when you first learn about them. Despite that, though, they're also pretty intuitive: there's an infinite number of numbers between 0.1 and 0.2, and betwwen 0.2 and 0.21, etc., so it's pretty clear that if you assigned one natural number to each number between 0 and 1, you'd fall hopelessly behind really quickly. So it's clear that there are infinitely many more numbers between 0 and 1 than there are natural numbers.

What I always found less intuitive and trippier was that the same isn't true of even and odd numbers--there are exactly as many odd numbers as there are even + odd numbers (or even as there are even + odd).

Interesting to note that Guinness now considers Proust's magnum opus to be the longest novel.  In my older edition of Guinness it was a toss-up between Jules Romain's Men of Goodwill and Yamaoka's Tokugawa Ieyasu, which took decades to serialize.  Apparently Romain's work has been reclassified as a series, while Proust's is considered a single unitary work of fiction.  I wonder how these definitions come to be made?

Yeah, I don't buy it. Seems rather just so to me.

[apl68]

Some noted Latin American authors lately (In translation):

Dom Casmurro, by Machado de Assis.  Machado de Assis was a contemporary of novelists like Henry James and Edith Wharton.  Like them, he wrote about the marital trials and tribulations of the "one percent" of his day.  Common folks only get an occasional walk-on part.  This one is interesting in having a first-person narrator, rather self-centered (naturally), with a dry sense of humor and a tendency to write in many brief chapters.  He tells of how his mother superstitiously vowed when he was a baby that he would go into the priesthood, and spent his youth trying to push him into it; how he fell in love with a pretty neighbor girl and decided that the priesthood wasn't for him; managed to worm his way out of the priesthood and into a legal career; married the girl of his dreams; and finally lets unfounded (probably) jealousy ruin his relationship with with wife, best friend, and son.  It ends with all the cast either deceased or alone--exactly what you'd expect from a Serious Literary Classic.

Interesting for the way it depicts religious devotion that springs overwhelmingly from superstition and ritual, with no real spirituality.  The narrator grows up manifesting his faith mainly in efforts to make "deals" with God to say a certain number of ritual prayers whenever he wants something--something he never follows through with--and yet he nearly becomes a priest, simply because his mother offered him as a kind of human sacrifice as a way of making her own "deal" with God.  It's sad to see people settling for such a thin gruel of faith when there's a great feast of faith out there waiting to be claimed.


The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho.  This reminds me a bit of Redfield's Celestine Prophecies.  I came away feeling as though I had plumbed the shallows of religion, philosophy, and life's great questions.  The message seems to be that You are the Hero of your own Story.  A popular message, no doubt.  It puts me in mind of Francis Chan's parable about the extra who appeared for a couple of seconds in a crowd scene in a blockbuster movie and then rented a local movie theater for "his" big premier.  The movie of life is not all about us.  It's delusional to imagine otherwise.  Again, it's sad to see people settling for messages like this when there is a far greater and more hopeful Good News out there.


Ficciones, by Jorge Luis Borges.  Finally got around to reading this!  I now understand why, when I read some excerpts from Barry Lopez' story collection Winter Count to my mother some years back, she acted like it seemed familiar.  Mom taught Borges for years in her undergrad Latin American Literature classes.  Some of Lopez' stories owe an obvious debt to Borges.

Borges himself has earned a place in world literature through his baffling stories that turn our understandings of reality and knowledge upside down and inside out.  I suspect he may be popular with those readers who can recognize most of his vocabulary and learned allusions, because it gives us an excuse to pat ourselves on the back for being able to catch all this stuff.  Borges is something of a literary equivalent of those T-shirts that say, in Latin, "If you this shirt can read, too much education you have."  I get the distinct impression that Borges had fun pulling his readers' legs, in the most learned way possible.  His Ficciones can sometimes be kind of fun to read.  Though Barry Lopez and Italo Calvino are more accessible.

[ergative]

Ficciones, by Jorge Luis Borges.  Finally got around to reading this!  I now understand why, when I read some excerpts from Barry Lopez' story collection Winter Count to my mother some years back, she acted like it seemed familiar.  Mom taught Borges for years in her undergrad Latin American Literature classes.  Some of Lopez' stories owe an obvious debt to Borges.

Borges himself has earned a place in world literature through his baffling stories that turn our understandings of reality and knowledge upside down and inside out.  I suspect he may be popular with those readers who can recognize most of his vocabulary and learned allusions, because it gives us an excuse to pat ourselves on the back for being able to catch all this stuff.  Borges is something of a literary equivalent of those T-shirts that say, in Latin, "If you this shirt can read, too much education you have."  I get the distinct impression that Borges had fun pulling his readers' legs, in the most learned way possible.  His Ficciones can sometimes be kind of fun to read.  Though Barry Lopez and Italo Calvino are more accessible.

I both have that t-shirt and adore Borges's stories. Not because of the allusions (I don't recall that as a characteristic of his work, which I suspect means I missed most of them) but because of the mind-bendingness of his imagination.

[apl68]

Ficciones, by Jorge Luis Borges.  Finally got around to reading this!  I now understand why, when I read some excerpts from Barry Lopez' story collection Winter Count to my mother some years back, she acted like it seemed familiar.  Mom taught Borges for years in her undergrad Latin American Literature classes.  Some of Lopez' stories owe an obvious debt to Borges.

Borges himself has earned a place in world literature through his baffling stories that turn our understandings of reality and knowledge upside down and inside out.  I suspect he may be popular with those readers who can recognize most of his vocabulary and learned allusions, because it gives us an excuse to pat ourselves on the back for being able to catch all this stuff.  Borges is something of a literary equivalent of those T-shirts that say, in Latin, "If you this shirt can read, too much education you have."  I get the distinct impression that Borges had fun pulling his readers' legs, in the most learned way possible.  His Ficciones can sometimes be kind of fun to read.  Though Barry Lopez and Italo Calvino are more accessible.

I both have that t-shirt and adore Borges's stories. Not because of the allusions (I don't recall that as a characteristic of his work, which I suspect means I missed most of them) but because of the mind-bendingness of his imagination.

I know what you mean about the mind-bending imagination.  It has gotten to be popular in contemporary popular fiction to try to bend the readers' (or viewers') minds.  The creators we have today haven't caught up with Borges!

[hmaria1609]

Having a fantastical adventure with The Wisteria Society of Lady Scoundrels by India Holton.  It's the 1st installment in the "Dangerous Damsels" series.
I like the Bronte sisters are getting a shout out for their novels as well as the author being inspired by them.

[ab_grp]

After that, we started on Morning Star, which was our next book in the Red Rising series I've mentioned here before.  As with previous novels in the series, it often comes off as melodramatic.  I told my husband while reading it last night that I felt as though I needed to be wearing a turtleneck and have someone playing bongos.  The story has always grown more interesting in the previous novels, so we shall see.

Just finished this book last night.  Like the others, its story eventually became more interesting as the action and intrigue started in earnest, centering on the hierarchical Society ruled by the Sovereign and the various forces trying to make deals and power plays.  The series has a number of great characters to root for (though still not the protagonist, who is still overconfident and naive) and a bunch of villains who are written complexly enough that there is room for some thought about good versus bad.  There was one perfect line amongst the often eyeroll-worthy dialogue and narrative, but I'm not sure if it was an intentional homage or not given the probably reading audience.  We really do enjoy the series despite some of its failings, as the good parts are pretty good and the overall story has legs.  It feels as though this was meant to be the final book of a trilogy with a very neatly wrapped-up ending, but there are two more in the saga.  Those take place a bit in the future, so we'll check them out at some point.

Now we're reading the final book in the Protectorate trilogy (O'Keefe), Catalyst Gate.  This has been one of my favorite series so far.  Aliens, spies, AI, political intrigue... lots of fun, and I really like the interactions between characters.  Hopefully this one will meet or surpass the bar set by the first two and round out the trilogy well.

[Parasaurolophus]

June's haul, before I forget them all:

Cathy O'Neill - Weapons of Math Destruction: A book about the pernicious influence of algorithms on our lives. While informative and well-written, it was kind of underwhelming. I mean, it was interesting, but felt like fairly small potatoes. Mostly, it felt like she was in love with her characterization of these algorightms as WMDs, but they mostly didn't live up to their designation. And the solutions prescribed seemed like bandaids for a severed limb.

Michael Cadnum - Raven of the Waves: I found this in a book box years ago (in California, a day after my defence, I think), and had very low expectations of it. It's historical fiction for youngish teens centred on the dawn of the viking age, and it's actually pretty OK. It's clearly written by a poet, in the sense that the flow is weird, the continuity is a little off, and he does a poor job with communicating causality, but it was a perfectly enjoyable read. The period combat leaves something to be desired, and the armour is a common misconception, but on the whole, this was a decent effort. I'd  be interested in reading some of his other work.

Charles Stross - Wireless: The Essential Charles Stross: Some of these were pretty fun, although many cried out for novel-length treatments (especially the novellas, Missile Gap and Palimpsest, but also the short story Rogue Farm). Not my favourite kind of scifi--a lot of it is rooted in the cold war--but it was pretty interesting and effective, even if I'd have liked something more outlandish. The intro was pretty rad, I have to say.

I don't recall if I ever added my review of Stross's short story Antibodies. In case I didn't: I don't remember much about it now, save that I thought it was an intriguing premise but didn't quite work.

[apl68]

London:  The Biography, by Peter Ackroyd.  A great big book about a great big city!  Ackroyd takes a thematic approach, with numerous chapters, many brief, about all sorts of subjects.  There are chapters on London's clubs and restaurants, on its long-buried rivers, on its now-lost holy wells, on prisons and madhouses, on the development of the Cockney dialect, on such specific neighborhoods as Southwark, and much, much more.  The amount of detail is fascinating and impressive.  But Ackroyd spreads his coverage so thin that the phrase "A mile wide and an inch deep" sometimes comes to mind.

There are frequent free associations between this and that.  Sometimes these come across as insightful.  Sometimes--the discussion of the rhyme "London Bridge" that turns into an assertion that children were once sacrificed to the god of the Thames is a good example--they seem rather fanciful.  Ackroyd puts a lot of emphasis on the seamy side of London life.  It's clear that life has been miserable and often violent for most Londoners for most of the city's history.  A recurring theme is the contrast between the authorities' efforts to impose order and the inhabitants' resistance to any sort of order.  One gets the impression sometimes that Ackroyd has been reading his Michel Foucault.  That observation is not meant as a compliment.

Another theme is the notion that London has never ceased being a "pagan" society.  It's true enough that London seems never to have been dominated by New Testament ethics and morality (What place ever has been?  Jesus made it clear to his followers that following him was about striving to spread and exemplify his teachings in an evil world, not to somehow make the world good).  But Ackroyd really does, in the midst of digressions about obscure, eccentric clubs and enumerations of all the dozens of kinds of fish once caught in the Thames, slight a very long history of Christian practice in London.  Catholic/Anglican churches are usually mentioned only in connection with archaeology or architecture.  Evangelical Nonconformists are only mentioned now and then as part of broader observations about London's "radical" traditions.

Obviously Ackroyd was going for an impressionistic approach.  He does indeed give a great mass of vivid impressions, which leave the reader wanting to know more about all kinds of things.  Next time I think I'll look for a more focused approach to London's history.  And maybe something more chronological.

[mamselle]

For a more balanced, sympathetically informed view on ecclesiastical relationships in Londinium, as it was once called, I'd start with the formation of the early buildings and congregations that preceded the Anglican establishment in the 1500s, something on printing in London from the 1600s-1900s (who does he think printed all those Dissenters' sermons, tracts, hymnals and treatises--and ordered, and read them?) and the way they gave safe harbor to Catholic non-juring priests escaping the French Revolution? Such shelter was not always ungrudging, but still...Cheverus was sheltered at Tottenham Chapel for a couple years before he made it to the Americas.

A study of the evolution of Christopher Wren's churches (all of them--sorry I don't know a recent book to recommend at present) would also point up the fact that while many were indeed built on early worship sites that probably pre-dated the arrival of Christian missionaries from Germany in the very earliest centuries, not all were, and the growth of parishes continued, whether under the Pope or the Crown, so that new as well as old buildings were required.

It sounds in part like he's parroting Lethaby ('Londinium,' 1924) on architectural aesthetics, Jungian psychology, and sociology: that work has a similar tone and can be disproved in several instances (as I did on an assigned pre-comps paper): he worked from his own impressions and not actual architectural and sociological studies. More useful might be Percy Scholes on Dissenters' music, or the study of liturgical history by (A-- & E---, I always called then "Addlepate and Eggsheels," to the point I can't recall their true names...mea maxima culpa...).

I might agree that it's never quite been "all one thing or the other," confessionally speaking, but that's the nature of a large city. Since Canterbury and York had more ecclesial power after the 1530s, the Anglican bishops of London were more functionary (but one signed the midwife's license I found, so they did have some power...ahem). And he may have had some wish partially to defeat the British tendency to romanticize pagan practices, which might not necessarily have included infant sacrifices to the Thames, but could have...Molech-like practices were not limited to the Eastern Mediterranean.

Being more secularly important, more tied to royalty, and more of a military center, there were indeed always competing interests and philosophical approaches to life, so the sense of a "hodge-podge" of thoughts is not wrong, either. The Oxford Medieval History book, and some of the musical entries on hymnals and composers centered in London, in Grove's Dictionary of Music; and the Art Encyclopedia entries on other British architects, like Gibbs, or the Adams, might also give a better sense of solidity and structure.

A wry thought...Perhaps Peter Ackroyd is related to Roger? (;--})

M.

[hmaria1609]

The Empire's Ruin by Brian Staveley
The 1st installment in the "Ashes of the Unhewn Throne" series.  I've read the "Chronicle of the Unhewn Throne" trilogy; the new novel picks up some years afterwards.

Apl68, I've read and enjoyed Peter Ackroyd's Thames: the Biography from the library.