Book reviews, 2019

An asterisk (*) means that the book was one of my dad's.

Hope Never Dies -- Andrew Shaffer

Oh, this was so disappointing. It's a terrific setup with a story that doesn't live up to it. It's a buddy-cop story, about Joe Biden and Barack Obama livening up their retirement by investigating a murder. But Shaffer didn't or couldn't write a story as insane as the premise. There are a couple good flashes -- Biden terrifying the Secret Service by driving hell-for-leather in a highway chase, Obama coolly facing down a warehouse full of outlaw bikers with a sawed-off shotgun -- but Shaffer apparently didn't have the nerve to just take the premise and run with it, instead wasting time with hopeless attempts at realism. Like anyone bought a book about a former President running around fighting crime because they wanted to read about Joe Biden getting lectured on proper procedure by local police. The Onion would have done it better.


Hitman Anders and the Meaning of It All -- Jonas Jonasson

A tall tale about a dissatisfied hotel clerk who meets a woman on a park bench who cadges his lunch; the woman is a defrocked priest, and her angry cynicism appeals to the clerk, so the two of them team up to exploit the dim-witted criminal Hitman Anders, who lives at the clerk's hotel. Anders is a small-time leg-breaker, but with intelligent management he soon brings in a big profit. Unfortunately in one of his jail stays he gets religion, but the duo sees a way forward: they start a church with Anders as the preacher and the two of them as the silent backers, counting the money in the sacristy while the crowd eats up Anders's disjointed sermons about salvation through getting drunk. They keep meaning to run off with the take but somehow they never get around to it, even when unfinished business from Anders's first career leads to a shootout at the church. I liked it, but not as much as his other two books; the fault may have been in the translation from the Swedish.


Big Money -- P.G. Wodehouse

I thought I'd read all of Wodehouse, but it turned out there was another! I actually read it twice, because while writing this I had to go get the book out to remember what the characters' names were -- astonishingly, no one was named either Bill or Sally -- and I ended up reading the whole thing again. It's the story of two school friends (Berry and Biscuit) now in their twenties and broke, who both want to get married but can't afford it. Biscuit is the impoverished son of an impoverished earl, while Berry was raised by a rich aunt who blew all her money on wild schemes, so Berry only inherited a pile of worthless stocks and properties. Berry works as a secretary for a testy American millionaire named Frisby. When Frisby's bossy sister sends his niece (Ann) over from New York to get her away from the actor she wants to marry, Berry gets Biscuit's aunt hired as her chaperone; Biscuit adroitly gets engaged to Ann, while Berry manages to unload one of his worthless properties -- an American copper mine that's never produced anything -- to a friend of Frisby's. However, when Biscuit goes to ground in the suburbs to make sure he doesn't get arrested for debt before the wedding, which might scare off the family, he meets Berry's neighbor and falls in love; meanwhile, Berry meets Ann in a restaurant and falls in love at first sight. While all this is going on, we find out that Frisby lied to Berry about the worth of the mine and is manipulating the stock price to make a fortune. Everyone arrives at the same house in the suburbs at the same time, and we end up with Berry marrying Ann, Biscuit marrying the neighbor, the hired thugs beaten and disarmed, and Berry and Biscuit making a giant fortune off Frisby's dealings while Frisby gets the consolation prize of marrying Biscuit's aunt. I loved it.


The Voices Within -- Charles Fernyhough

A very interesting and well-written book about people who hear voices, and what kinds of connections there are between that and how people talk to themselves. What "voice" is speaking when you listen to yourself thinking? How does it happen that some people experience that voice as coming from somewhere outside themselves? My experience of thinking about books I've read often takes the form of a dialog between "me" and another voice representing a literary critic who's generally wrong but willing to listen. Of course the other voice is me as well, but to what extent do I distance it from "myself" for the sake of the dialog? If I distanced it enough, would I start to experience it as independent of myself? And what about people who don't think in words at all? When I'm alone I often talk to myself, but I speak out loud as though there were someone else listening. If someone overheard me, would they think I was insane? The author makes the point that someone listening in on me might not be able to follow what I was saying, since when I'm talking to myself I don't go to any effort to be clear, because of course I already know what I'm going to say. It was a thought-provoking book. I liked it.


The Illustrated Compendium of Amazing Animal Facts -- Maja Säfström

Sabine gave me this for Christmas, which was touching because she gave me what she likes best herself: funny stories about animals. I already knew that emus can't walk backwards, but I hadn't known that octopuses have three hearts and frogs can jump up to 45 feet. The illustrations are nice, too.


*The Erasers -- Alain Robbe-Grillet

His first novel, a detective story on the face of it, but one that turns out to be either a meditation on destiny or an absurdist commentary on doing your duty, I'm not sure. Maybe it's both. The main character is a detective sent to Rouen on behalf of a legendary commander of the Sûreté, though sometimes it seems as though the detective actually is the commander in disguise. He's come to investigate a murder that never happened -- there was a botched assassination attempt, and the intended victim bribed a doctor to report him dead so he could lie low -- but the detective doesn't know that, though we the readers do. He's puzzled to find that everyone describes the murder suspect as looking exactly like him. The detective, for what reason I didn't understand, stops at every stationery store looking for a specific kind of artist's gum eraser, which he describes in painstaking detail, though he never finds one. He seems more interested in the eraser than the murder suspect, actually. He follows a meandering trail through the city; what motivates him to take one street instead of another, follow one lead instead of another, isn't clear, though it does let him re-create the crime scene and leads to a confrontation with the original victim in what is almost a reenactment of the attempted murder. I got the feeling that that was what had been intended all along. Was the detective really the intended assassin without knowing it, and the original assassin just a setup man? Were they really the same man? It was a strange story and I enjoyed reading it.


Trailer Trash -- Angie Cavallari

A pretty good book, often funny, about growing up in a series of trailer parks in the eighties as the child of the park manager, and the various park residents the family had to deal with: drunk, mean, insane, or all three. I sympathized with the narrator, whose parents would never buy an air conditioner despite the shattering summer heat. It wasn't bad.


*"Gentlemen, More Dolce Please!" -- Harry Ellis Dickson

A funny memoir of the BSO. Dickson played violin, and later first violin, for the BSO for fifty years; he wrote this about thirty years in, when Steinberg was the conductor, a few years before Ozawa's tenure started. (Dickson was Kitty Dukakis's father, but he wrote the book well before Dukakis was governor.) It's full of funny stories about the musicians and conductors, who were either eccentric by nature or became so under the pressure of the job. There's a great scene where Dickson recounts a time when he and Leonard Bernstein tried to explain baseball to Charles Munch and got nowhere. The title comes from Koussevitzky's favorite piece of advice to the orchestra; for a long time the BSO had only one woman, the principal harpist Olivia Luetcke. Still, that was one more than most orchestras had, and in fact when the BSO travelled other venues tried to keep her out by telling her there was no women's dressing room, but Luetcke defiantly dressed inside her harp case. In Dickson's time the BSO was run in Byzantine secrecy by the largely anonymous board of directors, a group of Boston Brahmins of whom it was understood that they would make up the annual budget shortfall out of their own pockets. I really enjoyed it.


Bad Blood -- John Carreyrou

A really good book, the story of a med-tech startup in Silicon Valley called Theranos that was a fraud from the beginning: the founder, Elizabeth Holmes, faked all the results and lied to investors and customers for years before it all came crashing down. The writer is the Washington Post reporter who exposed the fraud in the first place; when his story came out, Theranos's value went from nine billion dollars to zero almost overnight. The founder and her right-hand man were both arrested and are currently awaiting trial. It reads like a thriller; you're constantly asking yourself how a twenty-year-old college dropout with no background in medicine or science managed to keep the fraud going for so long. Part of the answer is that she filled the board of directors with elderly men from non-technical fields, like Henry Kissinger and George Schultz, whose interest in Holmes seemed creepy to me. The writer agrees, constantly using words like "enthralled" or "smitten" when talking about executives and journalists who simply accepted everything Holmes told them at face value; the writer of a fawning cover story about her for Fortune magazine later admitted he hadn't even tried to verify anything she said independently. Holmes and her chief exec, who was also her boyfriend, though they lied about that to the board, ran the company like a parody of the Caine Mutiny, bullying and harassing employees and apparently driving one former employee to suicide. They seem to have been true pathological liars, faking results for investors and showing regulators a fake lab (the real one, where all the machines that didn't work were, was in a hidden room) and unleashing storms of litigation on anyone who said (correctly) that the claims Theranos made about what its product could do were impossible. This wasn't just theft; people got sick and died because they relied on the faked results from Theranos's fraudulent machines. It's an infuriating read, not least because there are so many people involved who should go to prison but will just walk away. If no one is willing to enforce the law, can you really say it's a law at all?


Half of a Yellow Sun -- Chimamanda Ngoze Adichie

A dark novel about the Nigerian civil war of 1967-9 and the short-lived separatist nation of Biafra (the title refers to the Biafran flag.) The first third covers the lead-up to the war, starting with the mess the British left behind, and the series of coups and counter-coups as various groups seized control. The basic problem was that "Nigeria" is an artificial nation created by the British, who just arbitrarily drew lines on a map and threw together large groups of Africans who were divided by language, religion, and ethnicity. After Gowon's coup in 1966, the central government decided to gerrymander the Igbo-majority Eastern Region; the Igbo took this as a move to reduce them to an underclass in Nigeria, and the Eastern Region seceded, founding Biafra. The Biafrans never had any chance of winning, and the second part of the novel is a picture of heroic endurance as the embargoed Biafrans slowly starve to death. It was well written but very bleak.


Barracoon -- Zora Neale Hurston

A fascinating book based on a series of interviews Hurston had in the 1920s with a former slave called Cudjo, who as far as anyone knows was the last surviving African who was brought across the Middle Passage on a slave-ship. He was a Yoruba from what is now Benin, whose real name was Kossola; he was taken in a raid on his village by the slavers of Dahomey, who sold him to an Alabama captain in 1860. Importation of slaves was illegal then so the slaves were smuggled ashore by night. Kossola/Cudjo was sold to a plantation where he worked until the end of the Civil War. By the time Hurston met him he was almost ninety and somewhat testy, and it took her a lot of time to persuade him to talk to her. The book was never published until this last year. According to the introduction that was partly because publishers weren't interested in the subject, partly because Hurston transcribed Cudjo's words more or less phonetically, which led some black scholars to accuse her of "letting down the race", and partly because Hurston fleshed out the book by including information from earlier interviews by another researcher without giving her credit.


How Long 'Til Black Future Month? -- N.K. Jemisin

A short story collection. The title was the cleverest part of the book, but I liked a lot of the stories. The best, I thought, was "L'Alchimista", a story about a talented and temperamental chef who's approached by a stranger who pays her a lot of money to cook unheard-of meals out of bizarre ingredients, which turn out to be alchemical recipes. The ending surprised me. Less successful was "The Ones Who Stay and Fight", which is a response to Ursula K. LeGuin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas", a classic story about a utopia where every citizen eventually learns the awful truth that all the bliss of their city depends on a scapegoat, an innocent child who lives in torment. When I first read that story in college, I thought the point of it was to make me, the reader, recognize that that's the world I live in right now, and ask myself what I'm going to do about it. I later came around to Lucy's way of looking at it: that the scapegoat is there because we, the readers, need it to be there to make the story work. LeGuin first describes the utopia, and then asks the reader, you can't believe this, can you? Well, what if I show you that it all rests on something evil, can you believe it now? And the "ones who walk away" are refusing to accept that a prosperous society can't be built except on human torment. Jemisin's story essentially argues that they're wrong, that no society can exist without crushing someone, and the only thing to do is to make sure that the people getting crushed deserve it. I thought Jemisin's approach wasn't great; it's told in the second person, and there's too much "You're thinking this, you're going to say that," which takes me out of the story because I can't help objecting that I actually wasn't thinking that, and can't you just tell the story instead of doing a carnival mind-reading act?


The Labyrinth of the Spirits -- Carlos Ruiz Zafón

I loved his first book, The Shadow Of the Wind, and his next two weren't bad, but I didn't like this one. The problem is that he can't ever let the story be over -- he's constantly going back to the same people and expanding the back story: there's always one more complication to the situation, one more person who was really behind it all, and eventually it just gets ridiculous. Also, I'm really fed up with the story trope where the bad guy tries to goad the hero into killing him, as if the dubious moral victory of manipulating someone into a violent act is somehow worth dying for. "Yeah, yeah, go ahead and kill me, then I'll win!" No you won't, you'll be dead.


The Bastard of Istanbul -- Elif Shafak

Shafak is Turkish, but she wrote this novel in English while living in London. It's an inter-family saga, dealing with American expatriates and their second-generation children returning to Istanbul to sort out the family's dirty laundry. Apparently it's the very first Turkish novel to deal directly with the modern consequences of the Armenian genocide; Shafak was arrested for publishing it in Turkey. The main characters are nineteen-year-old cousins: Asya, a Turk living in Istanbul, and Armanoush (Amy), her Arizonian step-cousin, the daughter of an American woman who married a Turk pretty much just to piss off her in-laws from her first marriage, who were Armenian. (Got that? Amy is half-Armenian, and she has a Turkish stepfather, who is Asya's uncle.) Asya is illegitimate; her mother Zeliha is the family's free-spirited black sheep. Amy goes to Istanbul and stays with Asya and her family while trying to research what happened to her Armenian ancestors. It's surprisingly coherent, even though the story changes focus constantly, jumping around from Amy and Asya's exploration of modern Istanbul, to the teenage years of Asya's mother Zeliha, to the pre-marriage life of Amy's mother, to the pre-WWI lives of both girls' great-grandparents. I realized early on that Zeliha won't tell Asya who her father is because Asya was born as the result of a rape, and that the rapist was probably either Zeliha's father or brother (turned out it was the brother, that is, Amy's stepfather.)  It also turns out that Asya's Turkish great-grandfather was really an Armenian who adopted the identity of a dead Turk to save his family in 1915, and further that he was related to Amy's Armenian father, which is kind of a lot to swallow, but hey, magical realism. It was pretty well-written, and I liked the characters.


*Rhymes of a Red Cross Man -- Robert W. Service

A short volume of war poetry. Service, a Canadian, was rejected from the Army in World War I for being too old and in bad health, so he joined the Red Cross and spent the war as a stretcher-bearer. The poetry is of its time; some of it is the sort of musings-of-working-class-philosophers popular a hundred years ago, like the soldier who has a German at his mercy but lets him go because he has a young daughter, and then reflects "I 'opes 'e made it 'ome, an' wonders, 'ow'd 'E 've treated me?" Some others seemed less music-hall and more honest, like the ones about being on your own in the dark and the freezing cold, and being afraid and wishing you were home again.


McGlue -- Ottessa Moshfegh

An experimental novella, a story told in the first person by a man with severe brain damage. Unsurprisingly the narration was incoherent and it was hard to get a sense of what was actually happening. I admire the author's ambition but I didn't enjoy the book or get anything out of it.


Difficult Loves -- Italo Calvino

A short story collection. I gather there have been several books with this title, not all of which have the same content. My edition contains eleven short stories, some of them very short, mainly revolving around emotional repercussions of trivial events. The best was "Smog", a story about a man who moves to a new city that's heavily polluted; because of the smog he has to make a greater effort than he ever needed before to see  people, and the same effort leads him to understand people better than he ever has and to reconsider past relationships in a new smog, so to speak. I also liked a pair of stories that show the same woman's adventure, first from a male stranger's point of view and then from hers.


The Odyssey of Homer -- Emily Wilson, translator

I last read the Odyssey in Richmond Lattimore's translation in 1997, so when Lucy gave me this for Christmas I reread it. You know, Odysseus would have gotten home a lot sooner if he hadn't had to nursemaid his brain-dead crew, who can't go three verses without doing something moronic. I was really struck, this time through, by the scene where Odysseus meets Achilles in the underworld. Achilles reminds him of the prophecy that said Achilles would have to choose between a long quiet life and a brief but glorious one; Achilles says he made the wrong choice, and if he could he would choose to be still living, even as a farmer on someone else's land, rather than being the most honored among the dead. I liked the translator's notes, too; for example, she points out that the eating scenes are as much fantasy as the other scenes in the poem, since in Homer's time even the wealthiest Greeks mainly lived on grains like barley, along with staples such as cheese and olives, only rarely eating meat and then mostly at religious festivals. The great feasts we see at the households of Odysseus, Nestor, and Menelaos form a staggering display of wealth and generosity that belongs to a bygone Age of Heroes.


Picasso at the Lapin Agile and other plays -- Steve Martin

I only remember the title piece, a funny play set at a dive bar in France where the young Picasso meets the young Einstein and they get into an argument about art and science, while various groupies come in and out trying to seduce both of them, and a time-travelling Elvis drops by to get inspired. I liked it, but I have no memory of the rest the book; I think they were brief one-act plays, but I'm really guessing.


Your Seven-Year-Old -- Louise Bates Ames and Carol Chase Haber

One in a series of books that tell you what to expect from children at certain stages of their lives. This one says that seven-year-olds tend to withdraw and need personal space, which can make them seem moody. Certainly my god-daughter needs alone time after being at school all day; this was especially true last spring. Other things from the book that matched real life: seven-year-olds tend to be very concerned with fairness; they worry that new things will be too hard; they often feel like they're being picked on; and they cry easily. The book is pretty dated -- I was astonished at some of the entries in the letters-from-parents section. "Dear Dr Ames, my seven-year-old is inattentive at school. His father beats him every day, but he's not getting better, what could be wrong with him?"


Ceremonies in Dark Old Men -- Lonne Elder III

A play from the sixties, set in a failing Harlem barber shop that's also the home of the main characters. The barber, an old man, sits in the empty shop all day playing checkers with his equally old friend. The barber's two sons have no jobs and just sort of idle along, while their sister supports the whole family with her secretarial job, and resents the shit out of all of them for it. The older brother makes a deal with a local thug to use the barber shop for making and selling illegal corn liquor; the same thug recruits the younger brother as a burglar. It all goes to hell, of course. I think the title refers to the barber and his friend, who spend their time in their rituals of drinking, playing checkers, and insulting each other, tacitly accepting the idea that their fate is out of their own hands. I liked it but I bet it would be much better on stage.


Between the Assassinations -- Aravind Adiga

A collection of stories set in a fictional city on the southwest coast of India in the late 1980s, between the assassinations of Indira Gandhi and her son Rajiv Gandhi. (No relation to the Mahatma. Indira Gandhi was Nehru's daughter; she married a man named Ghandy, who later changed the spelling of his name for political reasons.) The stories mainly deal with the local fallout of corrupt national politics. Some are darkly comic, like the Catholic school teachers who take their students on a school trip to see a movie but find out that it's being shown in a theater that mostly shows porn. Some are just depressing, like the one about a reporter who investigates a hit-and-run incident where a driver killed a young boy, only to find that everyone knows who did it, but no one will do anything because the driver is rich; the paper won't even run the story. I liked the one about the small factory owner who gets fed up with minor government functionaries coming to extort bribes, and finally loses his temper and blows up at the latest arrivals, telling them he has friends who can make them disappear. To his own surprise the bluff works and they run off. It was pretty good overall.


Reaching Out -- Henri J.M. Nouwen

A reflection on loneliness. Nouwen had episodes of depression throughout his life and often felt lonely even in company. He believed (but had trouble putting into practice) that the spiritual life, which involves reaching out to fellow humans and to God, cannot be fulfilled without also reaching "out" to your own inner self.


Life Among the Savages -- Shirley Jackson

A married-with-kids memoir, not very interesting. It covers a few years when Jackson and her husband and two small children lived in rural Vermont, playing their city-folk-in-the-country ignorance for laughs. There's almost no mention of Jackson's career; the only time it comes up is also the only scene in the book I thought was genuinely funny, when Jackson is being admitted to the hospital for the birth of her third child (she smoked all through the taxi ride to calm her nerves!) and has to tell the clerk what she does:
"Profession?"
"Writer."
"I'll just put 'housewife'."
Apart from that it was really pretty forgettable.


The Dead and the Gone -- Susan Beth Pfeffer

A YA apocalypse novel, following the life of a New York teenager named Alex during the year after a global catastrophe. His parents are among the missing, and he has to take care of his two younger sisters as the state of the city gradually worsens. They're held together by their devout Catholicism -- Alex even continues going to school, where the priests become even stricter. The story deals well with the hard realities Alex has to face -- first taking money from his father's desk, later breaking in to abandoned apartments to look for food, eventually scavenging from the bodies of the dead. There's a gripping scene where he goes to Yankee Stadium to walk up and down among the laid-out corpses, looking for his mother. I read it while snowed in at Denver Airport and it did make me notice how much food there was available all around me. I liked it. 


A Gentleman of Leisure -- P.G. Wodehouse

A novel from 1910, so obscure that I had to get a print-on-demand copy. It's clearly adapted from a stage play; it has Wodehousian elements, but without the smooth execution he learned later. It's the story of a wealthy English idler named Pitt, who falls for a girl on the liner to America, but never finds out her name. On arrival in New York, he makes a bet that he can break into a house and steal something without being caught; by good luck, he catches a burglar breaking into his hotel room that very night and recruits him to help him out. The burglar helps him break into a likely-looking place, but they get caught by the owner, who happens to be the chief of police, but luckily he's on the take, so they pretend that Pitt is a well-known jewel thief from England and they just need to make arrangements for the chief to get his payoff. Naturally the police chief's daughter is the woman Pitt saw on the liner; this causes a lot of complications when they all meet at the same country house in England a year later. The young Wodehouse nervously apologizes to the reader for the "workmanlike series of miracles" that makes the plot come out all right; he hadn't yet grown into the chutzpah of juggling sixteen miracles at once and daring the reader to object. I read it for the sake of completism, but it isn't what you'd call required reading.


The Secret Pilgrim -- John le Carré

A novel that's really a short-story collection, featuring an MI6 agent filling in his time until retirement by teaching classes to trainees. He brings in George Smiley to give a talk on theory and practice, and each question and answer sets the narrator off remembering an episode from his own career. The stories are meant to portray his progression from idealism to disillusionment; they were mostly pretty good, but the best part is in one of the framing scenes, when a trainee asks Smiley what the point of an intelligence service is, since newspaper reporters can gather information just as well if not better. Smiley agrees, but explains that a government will never trust information that it didn't have to pay a heavy price for, so the intelligence services won't go short of work. Not one of his better books, but it had some good parts.


The Harmony Silk Factory -- Tash Aw

A novel set in Malaysia, back in the thirties and forties when it was British Malaya. It tells the story of local legend Johnny Lim, an engineer turned businessman turned crime lord. The book is divided into three sections, each telling the story of Johnny Lim's rise and fall from a different point of view. The first is the narrative of Johnny's son Jasper, reflecting on his father's life and career while running his father's funeral in the sixties. The second is told in extracts from the diary of Jasper's mother Snow, who died giving birth to him in 1942, and we see that Jasper and his mother tell quite different versions of the same events -- on the one hand, Jasper's story of how Johnny met Snow and his relationship with her father (which Jasper could only have heard from Johnny) is nothing like Snow's account; on the other hand, Snow's ideas of what Johnny's business was are nothing like Jasper's. The third section is the reminiscences of Johnny's friend (and possibly lover), an Englishman named Peter who lives a sort of Conradian drunken-failure-in-exile life in Rangoon, as he attends Johnny's funeral and tries, unsuccessfully, to speak with Jasper. Peter's version of Johnny's story is nothing like either Jasper's or Snow's. We never get Johnny's viewpoint so we're left with these three accounts, and left to wonder just how much truth there is in anyone's idea of someone else's character. I liked it a lot.


Paper -- Mark Kurlansky

I like Kurlansky's prose style, but I think it's really a major drawback that I came out of this book without a really clear idea of the actual process of making paper.


The Invention of Curried Sausage -- Uwe Timm

A German novel, a kind of memory-story, told by a narrator who eats currywurst (a popular German street food: pork sausage steamed, then fried, then sliced and tossed in ketchup mixed with curry powder) in Berlin, and compares it with the currywurst he used to eat as a child in Hamburg. On a business trip to Hamburg he goes to see the neighbor, Lena, who used to sell it in his street; she's now in a nursing home, and she tells him the story of how she came to invent currywurst in the first place: during the last week of the war she met a soldier named Bremer in an air-raid shelter and took him home, and then the next morning convinced him to stay at her apartment rather than return to the front lines and be killed for nothing. Over the course of the story Lena has to maintain several fictions: she has to convince her pro-Nazi block warden that there's no one else in her apartment; she has to hide the fact, in the face of a Gestapo investigation, that she and her boss have been serving contaminated food to pro-Nazis at the canteen where she works; and she has to convince Bremer that the war is still going on (so he won't leave.) She stole sausages from the canteen to feed Bremer and made up the sauce from supplies pilfered from arriving Allied soldiers. It was a good book.


William Tell Told Again -- P.G. Wodehouse

A very early book, a brief retelling of the William Tell story with drawings by some turn-of-the-century cartoonist. It wasn't bad.


Under the Jaguar Sun -- Italo Calvino

Calvino's last book, left unfinished when he died. He meant it to be a thematic collection centered on the five senses, but he only finished three stories. The "taste" story, "Under the Jaguar Sun", involves a couple traveling around Mexico looking for pre-colonial food, while hardly noticing the legacy of colonial violence. The "hearing" story, "A King Listens", is about a paranoid ruler who lives in a castle shaped like an ear (like the legend of Dionysios) which was meant to let him hear anyone plotting against him, but instead inundates him with voices he can't distinguish. The "smell" story, "The Name, the Nose", was less coherent than the other two and I got the feeling Calvino hadn't really finished it. It's about three different men who all notice a scent that they take to be the perfume of an alluring woman, although it turns out to be the scent of Death.


Buzz -- Thor Hanson

A very good book about bees. Honeybees get all the press, but Hanson's interested in all kinds of bees -- sweat bees, mason bees, carpenter bees (a constant problem any time I've renovated a house!) There's a good scene where Hanson describes how he walked by a dirt cliff and saw a few bees coming out of holes, and how he suddenly saw it not as a big pile of dirt but as a gigantic beehive home to tens of thousands. There's an interesting description of the honey-guide, an African bird that is known to lead humans to beehives, apparently so humans will break open the hive for the honey, leaving the bird to eat the bee eggs. Such symbiotic behavior must have taken a long time to develop, and Hanson theorizes that honey would have been an excellent high-nutrient food for early humans in the process of developing bigger brains.


Razor Girl -- Carl Hiaasen

Hiaasen's books usually involve a likeable hero making sure a collection of awful people get what's coming to them, which makes fun reading. This time he seems to have forgotten about the likeable part; every single character in the book is a piece of shit, and I didn't enjoy anything about it.


Fenway 1912 -- Glenn Stout

A well-written book about Jerome Kelley, the architect who designed and built Fenway Park in its first iteration. There's a whole lot of detail about building the park -- why it's designed the way it is, why the left field is so short (there was a railroad line in the way) and the difficulties of pouring concrete during the cold winter of 1911-12. Kelley's crew dug up the sod from the old Huntington Grounds and carted it over to use in Fenway, which I hadn't known. The building of the park covers the first third or so of the book, and the rest follows the Red Sox season. The 1912 team is still the best Boston team ever, going 105-47 behind Tris Speaker and Smoky Joe Wood, who led the league in almost everything. They won the pennant going away, despite Protestant-Catholic friction in the clubhouse, and beat the Giants in an eight-game Series. (Game 2 was called due to darkness and recorded as a tie.) It was widely believed at the time that the players, mad at their skinflint bosses, colluded to make sure the series went the distance, so as to make more money. The Sox won in the tenth inning of game eight when Fred Snodgrass dropped an easy out for a two-base error, and Speaker later drove the runner in. (Dad remembered that the headline on Snodgrass's obituary, sixty years later, read "Dropped Fly Ball In 1912 World Series".) Good book.


The Rhino with Glue-on Shoes -- Lucy H. Spelman and Ted Y. Mashima (eds)

A fun book about odd logistical problems veterinarians face at zoos. Turns out that tranquilizing a hippo is more trouble than you might think. Also the animals quickly learn to recognize the vets, and are understandably hostile; apparently monkeys can piss on people with surprising distance and accuracy. A lot of the stories were pretty funny. The title story was about a rhino that was listless and off its feed. What happened was, rhinos have three huge toenails on each foot and they put a lot of weight on them when they walk; and the packed dirt at the zoo was much harder than the soft earth of the rhino's native habitat, so its toenails had gradually worn down and it was walking on the soles of its feet, which isn't natural for a rhino, and it was unhealthy because its feet hurt. They dug up the enclosure and improved the soil, and in the mean time they made gigantic horseshoes out of cast aluminum and glued them to the soles of the rhino's feet until its toenails grew back.


Against Depression -- Peter D. Kramer

A book largely about the magical thinking that believes artistic talent and emotional torment are inextricable, and why it is that so many people insist on seeing mental illness as a blessing in disguise. Wherever Kramer speaks, he inevitably gets an audience member standing up to say "But if Vincent van Gogh had been treated for depression we wouldn't have all his magnificent paintings." There's a lot wrong with that: for one thing, it imagines that the reason we appreciate art is that we're all sadistic voyeurs who get our enjoyment from the pain of the artist, which is a horrible way to look at it. More importantly, it overlooks that van Gogh only painted when he wasn't depressed, and his mental illness interfered with his work rather than midwifed it. Also, of course, if he could have gotten effective treatment for his illness, he probably wouldn't have killed himself at age 37. Nobody argues that the emotional insight you get from suffering through cancer treatment is so valuable that we shouldn't cure cancer.


Something I've Been Meaning To Tell You -- Alice Munro

Her third book, a collection of stories from the early seventies. The title story is a horrible sibling-rivalry/possibly-murder story, told from the point of view of a plain-Jane older sister with a lifelong jealousy of her beautiful younger sister. The story moves back and forth between 1910 and forty years later, two periods when the younger sister was involved with an out-of-towner who didn't take her seriously. Both time he leaves town without warning; the first time it's to take off with another woman, and the second time, really just to be cruel, the older sister gives the younger sister the idea that he's gone off with another woman again. Soon afterwards the younger sister dies, and the older sister spends the rest of her life quietly playing gin rummy with her brother-in-law.  We see it's always on her mind to bring something up -- "There's something I've been meaning to tell you..." -- but she never does. The story implies a lot of things that might have happened: was the younger sister planning to kill her husband so she could marry the out-of-towner? Did she kill herself after he left? Did the older sister lie about the other woman just to drive the younger to suicide? Did the older sister -- or the brother-in-law -- kill the out-of-towner? I kept thinking about it for a long time after I read it. A lot of the stories had unexpected endings. "How I Met My Husband" is about another woman who fell for a stranger, who promised to write to her; for over a year she would wait at the mailbox for his letter, until she understood he wasn't going to write. She ended up marrying the mailman, who thought she was waiting at the mailbox every day to see him; she never told him the truth. It was a good book.


*Ravens In Winter -- Bernd Heinrich

An enjoyable book by a naturalist who spent several years trying to figure out how, when, and why ravens communicate with other ravens about food. Why do ravens gather around in trees above carrion and croak for so long before eating? Why do other ravens sometimes appear after the first ravens call, and sometimes don't? Why do the first ravens sometimes welcome other ravens and sometimes fight them off? He tentatively concludes that coherent groups of ravens (technically it's an "unkindness" of ravens, but that seems silly) have surprisingly big territories and are most likely made up of large extended families. He spent a whole lot of time lugging dead sheep and cows around remote forests in Maine, keeping track of when ravens found them and what they did over the next several months. He must be an incredibly active person, since he blithely talks about carrying hundreds of pounds of meat long distances through the forest, and climbing hundred-fifty-foot trees to lie in wait (and getting down by just jumping the last forty feet into deep snow drifts!) There are a lot of careful, precise drawings of ravens, too. Good book.


The Spy and the Traitor -- Ben Macintyre

Books about espionage always suffer from problematic sources, but this one more so than most. It's about Oleg Gordiensky, a high-ranking KGB officer who passed intelligence to MI6 for years before defecting to England, where he still lives under a false identity. The book covers his early career in intelligence, his ideological shift away from Marxism, his careful secret meetings with British spies, his discovery by the KGB and his successful flight to the West. The thing is, I didn't really believe a lot of it; the entire story rests on nothing but Gordiensky's unsupported word. Gordiensky's story of his escape makes him sound like a movie hero -- according to him, he realized he'd been blown because he came back to his apartment to find that the third lock on his door, which he never used, was locked, telling him that the KGB had been searching his home. That may be true, or he could have made it up; there's no way to know. He claimed that he knew the identities of Soviet spies in the west, but just hadn't been able to bring the evidence with him; by an odd coincidence, the people he named just happened to be opponents of the person whose support Gordiensky needed most, Margaret Thatcher. Macintyre never considers the idea that Gordiensky might have been making things up, not even to rebut it. I'm even less convinced by Gordiensky's claim that throughout the early eighties he was telling the Thatcher government to outspend the Russians -- the idea that the Reagan/Thatcher spending spree was actually a clever strategy to lure the Soviets into bankrupting themselves to keep up is a retroactive justification that conservatives invented in the nineties. Macintyre was insufficiently skeptical, and it hurt the book, I think irreparably.


*The Castle -- Franz Kafka

A novel about a minor government functionary named K who has been summoned to an unnamed village, which he finds is governed by bureaucrats who all live in a castle that overlooks the town; no one is allowed to go to the Castle, and the people simply await the arrival of instructions. No one is expecting K, and it turns out his summons was a mistake, but since the Castle cannot make mistakes, his presence is an anomaly. He spends the novel trying to find out what he was summoned to do, and becomes obsessed with seeing and speaking to a bureaucrat named Klamm, convinced that Klamm can resolve all his difficulties. The novel is written in German, but klamm means "liar" in Kafka's native Czech,  so he probably wouldn't be much help even if K could find him, which he never does. Kafka never finished the novel, but according to Max Brod he'd planned to have it end with K, worn down from his hopeless task, dying of exhaustion. There's possibly a pun; schloss, "castle", sounds a lot like schluss, "ending". I sympathized with K but the book was dispiriting overall.


Dust Tracks On a Road -- Zora Neale Hurston

Hurston's autobiography. It was interesting but I don't know how much of it to rely on. She lied about her age in it, for one thing, saying she was ten years younger than she really was; and according to sources I've read -- even by Alice Walker, her greatest admirer -- a lot of other things in the book aren't true, either. She mostly lied to avoid having to give credit for things to people she didn't like, I guess. Apart from that, her publishers made her take out things like attacks on American imperialism. And on top of everything else I wonder how honest it was possible for a black woman to be in 1942 America. A lot of the book reads to me like Hurston was saying what white people wanted to hear. She couldn't possibly have really believed that race prejudice was in heavy decline in America. And her get-ahead-on-your-own-merits philosophy would only be valid if black Americans had equal opportunities, which they don't now and had even less eighty years ago. I thought the book was full of crap, honestly.


How To Make Your Mind Free -- Master Ben Xing (Zhi Wei, trans.)

In Fuzhou I went to the temple of Kaiyuan, or Guan-Yin (the Chinese name of the Bodhisattva Avelokitesvara, "The One Who Hears The Cries Of The World") where I met the abbot, a well-known Buddhist scholar. It was a festival day, so he was out greeting visitors, and he was giving everyone who came a present, one of his own books about Buddhism. I talked to him briefly, and when he found out I don't read Chinese, he sent a messenger to his office and kept the whole line waiting until the messenger came back with three books in English, which he gave me. The translation is inept -- I think it must have been done mostly with the help of Google Translate -- so some of it is kind of unintentionally comical, but they were a present so I felt obligated to read them anyway. Buddhist cosmology is very complicated and I have trouble with it even in scholarly translations; here it's really incomprehensible. One thing that surprised me was Master Xing's repeated assurance that it's not necessary to comprehend the nuances of Buddhist teaching; it's much more useful to spend time chanting Buddhist mantras, even mechanically repeating things you don't understand, because you'll unconsciously absorb self-improvement from them.


You Too Can Have A Body Like Mine -- Alexandra Kleeman

A satirical horror novel, that pulled me in with the satire but leaned way towards the horror later on. It's a body-horror story about a woman who thinks of herself as A, and calls her roommate B and her boyfriend C. B seems at first to be both anorexic and suffering from body dysmorphia, bizarrely trying to reshape herself into being more like A; but eventually I realized that A is actually projecting her own problems onto B. A herself is haunted by food and body image, obsessively watching commercials for skin care products and artificial foods that have no actual caloric content, while C is fascinated with a TV game show where couples try to tell each other apart from crowds of doubles dressed like them. After C breaks up with her and she gets in a fight with B, A becomes more and more absorbed and repelled by her body, and she eventually joins a cult that's a what-if-they-went-all-the-way picture of fruitarians and that kind of people: the cult members measure their spiritual progress by how many kinds of food they stop eating, eventually eating nothing but steadily lessening amounts of the artificial food from the commercials, and gradually starving to death. The cultists all wear sheets, too, like kids dressing up as ghosts, to hide their bodies and also so no one can tell each other apart. The way A escapes the cult is funny, but as a whole the book was pretty damn disturbing.


The Palm-Wine Drinkard -- Amos Tutuola

A surreal, tall-tale kind of novel, narrated by a Nigerian villager who has lived his life idly, doing nothing but drinking enormous amounts of palm-wine, made from the sap of the date-palm tree. But the man who taps the trees and makes his wine dies, and no one else can make palm-wine as good as his was, so the narrator sets out to find the "Dead-Man's Town" and get the tapster back. He goes through various adventures on the way, escaping from monsters into a city hidden inside a large tree, rescuing a farmer's daughter from a tribe of skulls that roll along the ground, that sort of thing. I liked the writing: it's in English but it's distinctly African, apparently shaped by Yoruba folk stories, and making no attempt to sound European.


In Vino Duplicitas -- Peter Hellman

An enjoyable book about the only big wine-counterfeiting case that's been prosecuted in the US. Wine counterfeiting is pretty common, but it generally doesn't go to court: it's too arcane for the prosecutors, the victims are too embarrassed to testify, and the vintners don't care; their attitude is that anybody selfish enough to spend ninety thousand dollars on a case of wine deserves whatever he gets. This one wound up going to trial in spite of most victims' unwillingness to testify -- the CEO of Petco, who'd spent millions on fake wine, avoided subpoenas by having himself driven to work in the trunk of his car -- because one of the Koch brothers, who have no shame, was taken for millions and wanted revenge. The forger was a man of mystery called Kurniawan (not his real name, it turned out) who made his money by preying on the ego of self-important rich people who wanted to be sophisticated, but who apparently never thought it was odd that a guy whose background no one knew had an unlimited supply of bottles from vintages that were famous for being rare -- great burgundies from the war years, for example. (It so happened that the years 1942-3-4 were terrific years for burgundy, but the vingerons made almost no wine during the war, partly because they were busy helping the Resistance and partly because why bother making wine when the only people you could sell it to are Nazis?) Kurniawan would pay wait staff to save used bottles of the real thing for him and later refill them; most high-end restaurants now smash empty wine bottles for just that reason. Failing that, he would buy up bottles of an old but cheap vintage -- say Domaine XYZ had a so-so year in 1967 but a fantastic year in 1968; Kurniawan would buy up all the 1967 he could get and doctor the labels, then carefully open the bottles, mix in a cheap recent vintage to make the older one taste better, then reseal them and sell them as 1968. When the FBI raided his house they found a small but effective wine-faking factory in his kitchen; despite the smoking gun -- including boxes full of fake domaine-stamped corks and carefully drawn fake wine labels, along with chemical baths to make them appear old -- the main charge was wire fraud, which carried the heaviest penalty of anything they could charge him with. He's in prison now, awaiting deportation when he gets out, because he was in the country illegally; probably he was acting as an agent for bigger fish in Indonesia and China. I liked the book a lot. There was a funny aside about how the FBI agent in charge of the case and the US attorney prosecuting it went to Burgundy to gather information from the vingerons; they visited dozens of famous wine estates, where the vingerons offered them samples of many of the best wines on Earth, and they couldn't drink any of them because they were law officers working on a case and it would be improper. I don't even like wine and even I feel like that's tragic.


*The Voyage of the Beagle -- Charles Darwin

Darwin's journal of his five-year circumnavigation of the globe in the 1830s, published soon after he came back. The first part of the book is pretty light-hearted, showing Darwin happily exploring South America, and making friends among the gauchos; I always thought gaucho meant "farmer", but Darwin uses it to mean anyone who lives outside of a city. He was struck by their great politeness -- "In two years I cannot recall even a single instance of discourtesy" -- and by their amazing dexterity with the lasso and the bola, neither of which he had ever seen before. He tells a story of how some gauchos taught him to throw the bola, which he managed well enough when he was standing on the ground, but when he tried to throw it from the back of a moving horse he tangled it in his own horse's legs and ended up hanging upside down from a tree; the gauchos solemnly told him he was the first man they had ever seen go hunting and catch himself. In Brazil he encountered his first skunk; he calls it by its Spanish name, zorillo, because there are no skunks in Europe. He was astonished at the smell, of which he says, rightly, that no description can do it justice. "The Zorillo walks the forest unafraid, confident in his power, for neither man nor dog will molest him ... certain it is, that animals of whatever degree are more than willing to give way for the Zorillo." On the other hand, in Brazil he also saw slaves in person for the first time, and got into a furious argument with the Beagle's captain about them: the captain said the slaves maintained that they were happy, and when Darwin countered that the slaves would certainly be brutally punished if they said anything else, the captain threw him off the ship, though he calmed down later. In a way the journal is a bildungsroman, understandable because Darwin was only twenty-two when they set sail; over the course of five years he slowly and painfully becomes aware of his race and class prejudices. At first he judges the indigenous people he meets simply by how much they live like Europeans, going so far as to consider the people of Tierra del Fuego as little better than animals and contemplating their extinction without regret. Over the course of years, though, daily contact at close quarters led him to see them differently. He mentions one occasion when he hired some native Chileans to guide him through the jungle to see a volcano; when he gave them money to buy tents and food for themselves, they gave the money back, saying they could sleep as they were and they could find food wherever they went, an example of self-reliance that would put the Stoics to shame. As he continues around the world he makes an effort to keep seeing colonial culture as good -- there's a long passage where he does his best to convince himself that the European missionaries have improved the lives of the Polynesians -- but he finally grows out of that and soberly concludes his journal by saying that "If the misery of the poor comes not from nature, but from our institutions, great is our sin." I had two copies, Dad's Harvard edition and a paperback I bought somewhere thirty years ago; the paperback included an appendix that reprints a long article by the captain of the Beagle, written to oppose Darwin's matter-of-fact acceptance of the Deep Time hypothesis by insisting that the Earth is only six thousand years old. That wasn't really worth reading even as a curiosity, so I kept Dad's edition and gave the other one to the library.


The Lost Detective -- Nathan Ward

A book about Dashiell Hammett's career as a Pinkerton detective, for which surprisingly little evidence exists. Hammett had a lot of dinner-table stories about his Pinkerton days -- the time he was offered money to assassinate an IWW organizer in Montana, the time he climbed a smoke stack on a ship to find stolen gold -- but where they can be checked they're invariably untrue. In fact for a while Ward wondered whether Hammett ever really worked for the Pinkertons at all; but he eventually did find enough of a documentary trail to conclude that he did, though his stories about it were mostly made up or exaggerated. (It's hard to believe, for example, that Hammett could have climbed up inside a smoke stack not once but twice, at a time in his life when he'd only been released from the tuberculosis sanatorium for a couple months and had to hold on to the backs of chairs just to walk across a room.) A lot of the stories gained legitimacy from being repeated in print by Lillian Hellman, but whether she believed they were true, or was just preserving his legend, who knows. Appropriately, writing this book involved a lot of detective work; I thought it was pretty enjoyable.


The Elephant's Journey -- José Saramago (translated by Margaret Jull Costa)

Saramago won the Nobel Prize about twenty years ago; this was his second-to-last book, though it's the first I've read. According to the author's note, Saramago was in a restaurant in Italy where he saw a series of small statuettes of European landmarks headed by an elephant; obviously it was meant to represent a journey, and asking about it he learned that John the Colonizer, king of Portugal in the sixteenth century, gave an elephant to the Holy Roman Emperor as a wedding present. The novel is the story of the elephant Solomon, his keeper, and their guards making the long trek from Lisbon to Vienna by way of northern Italy, crossing the Alps and sailing up the Danube. It's a good book, interestingly written and surprisingly funny.


How To Set Your Mind At Rest -- Master Ben Xing (Zhi Wei, trans.)

The second of the three books I got in Fuzhou. the title refers to a story about Huike, the second patriarch of Zen in China: Huike came to Bodhidharma's cave and asked him to set his mind at rest. "Bring me your mind and I will do as you ask," Bodhidharma said. Huike said "I have searched for my mind, but I cannot find it." Bodhidharma said, "There, I have set your mind at rest." The translation from the Chinese was often incoherent. I mainly remember a story about the Buddha: A student asked the Buddha, what is the difference between being enlightened and not being enlightened? The Buddha answered, “A man is struck by an arrow. If his misfortune tangles him in grief, so that he can think of nothing but his suffering, in this way his mind becomes attached to the arrow. This is no different than being struck again by a second arrow without pulling out the first one. Shot by the second arrow, not shot by the second arrow: this is the difference between the enlightened and the unenlightened.”


Tribe -- Sebastian Junger

An excellent book about social cohesiveness. Junger concentrates on soldiers, particularly on how the US makes almost no effort to reintegrate returning soldiers into society. He says that people recover better from trauma when they have a strong relationship with a community, which America not only doesn't have, it seems to go out of its way to prevent. I've read that the Navajo, for example, in addition to a going-to-war ceremony, have a coming-back-from-war ceremony, where returning soldiers are ritually welcomed back into the community. More largely, he deals with the implications of no one feeling really responsible for anyone else. He also talks about the dangers of faction politics: no anthropologist would expect a tribe whose two main factions spoke about each other with open contempt to last very long. He thinks it starts young: in hunter-gatherer societies, a baby spends about 90% of its time being carried or held. Apparently babies only get attached to stuffed animals in cultures where they're left alone at night! It was really thought-provoking.


The Long Haul -- Finn Murphy

A memoir by a guy who makes his living driving a big rig, a moving-company eighteen-wheeler. I hadn't realized there's a social hierarchy among truck drivers, but of course there is, because people can be douche bags about anything. The freight haulers look down on the moving-company guys, calling them "bedbuggers". The author says he makes more money than the freight guys and he gets to be his own man, though from what I can see he's just as much at the beck and call of his contractors as the freight guys are from their companies. I didn't really like the author that much, because early on he goes off on a riff about how most truckers are stupid because they fool themselves with a cowboy myth about how they're free and self-reliant, unlike the saps who work office jobs, and how he, the author, is too smart to buy into that crap -- except it's obvious that he totally does. I wonder if the other truckers dislike him not for social-class reasons but just because he's a stuck-up jerk.


As You Wish -- Cary Elwes (with Joe Layden)

An oral history of the making of The Princess Bride. On Kate's recommendation I got the audio version, because it's narrated by Cary Elwes with help from Rob Reiner, Robin Wright, and other people from the movie; it was the right call. They all agreed that it's their favorite movie they've worked on and that the making of it was tremendous fun. Cary Elwes and Mandy Patinkin trained for their sword fight by practicing four or five hours every day for months under the direction of an old-school Hollywood fencing master who'd worked with Michael Curtiz. No one could say enough about Andre the Giant, whom everyone agrees was just the nicest guy ever. He called everyone "Boss", not because he was bad with names but because he thought it made people feel more at ease around him. What a great movie. I watched it again after reading this.


The Yacoubian Building -- Alaa Al Aswany

An Arabic novel, set in and around a multi-purpose ten-story building in downtown Cairo, criticizing the corruption and poverty of modern Egypt. The building was erected by an Armenian financier during the reign of Farouk, but occupied by the military after Nasser seized power; as the book opens (around 1990) it's mostly home to rich supporters of the regime and their hangers-on, who both serve and prey on them, while the tiny storage sheds on the roof are colonized by desperately poor Cairenes who bribe an opportunistic janitor to let them live there; he has no authority to charge them anything, but who can they complain to? The whole building is a microcosm of modern kleptocratic Egypt. The book follows the stories of several of the people who live and work in the building: the doorkeeper's son who becomes a jihadist and dies carrying out an attack on a government official, the rooftop seamstress who achieves security as a wealthy man's mistress until she gets pregnant and the man's wife hires men to beat her until she loses the baby. It was dark but well told, sometimes gripping.


An Author Bites the Dust -- Arthur W. Upfield

I'd never heard of Upfield, but I picked this up in a used book store in Seattle. It was in a rack full of books by Upfield, an Australian who wrote a series of mystery novels in the forties and fifties featuring a half-European, half-Aboriginal police inspector named Napoleon Bonaparte, Bony for short. The proprietor was friendly so I wanted to buy something; I picked this one for the title. It's clearly a roman a clef, but I'm not familiar enough with mid-century Australian literature to know who anyone's supposed to be. The murder victim is a writer and critic, the head of a literary circle who all puff each other's books in the papers while putting down as "nonliterary" any writers who put out exciting or well-written books. I liked the story -- Bony is a good character, and the dialog was clever, and I didn't guess who did it; but the solution of the puzzle was dumb. Bony gets the answer because a stray cat just happens to drop a lost ping-pong ball that has the fatal clue hidden inside it near his feet. If you need that much help you shouldn't be a fictional detective.


The Bus Driver Who Wanted To be God -- Etgar Keret

A short story collection, pretty good, I thought. The title story follows a bus driver on his route as he reflects that his iron adherence to schedule and refusal to wait even a few seconds for a late passenger is his way of reinforcing the moral underpinnings of human society. I liked how totally unaware the driver was that he was a comic figure. There was also a strange story about a post-suicide afterlife, where the spirits of suicides have to continue on with the same routines of their earthly lives, only with even less purpose; the main characters set out to meet a kind of afterlife Messiah, a man who claims to have returned to the afterlife after having killed himself a second time. Good writing.

*Bodies in a Bookshop -- R.T. Campbell

A mystery, not very good, revolving around the murder of a bookseller and a customer in a locked office in a book shop, poisoned by a sabotaged gas-ring for heating the tea kettle. The mystery and the solution were both silly, and for me the only interest of the book was the descriptions of the visits of the detective's long-suffering leg man to various book sellers and their book stores.


Dance of the Happy Shades -- Alice Munro

Her first book, a collection of stories mostly about youngish girls in prewar rural Ontario and their struggles with expected gender roles as times change. Almost half of them are clearly autobiographical, dealing with her father's dying fox-breeding business and the inexorable progression of her mother's Parkinson's disease. A lot of small human moments stand out -- a girl accompanies her father as he makes the rounds of his illegal mink traps, and they have an unspoken agreement that he won't condescendingly tell her to be careful where she steps and she won't ask embarrassing questions about what he's doing; a pair of teenagers are disappointed to find out that the powerful closeness they feel during sex doesn't persist beyond the act; a girl suddenly realizes that the woman her father is talking to was his sweetheart once. The story the book is named for draws its title from a scene in Gluck's Orfeo et Euridice, the inter-scene ballet danza degli spiriti beati, which is more usually translated "dance of the blessed spirits". It's about an elderly small-town piano teacher and her tiny business, her few pupils the children and grandchildren of former students who continue to send them only out of a sense of obligation. Every year she has the students give a little recital at her decaying house, and all the parents sit and applaud fixedly while counting the minutes until it's over. One year, by some miscommunication, a group of children from the special-needs school -- who are normally never allowed to mix with the other children -- unexpectedly appears at the recital, and the resulting social awkwardness probably spells the end of the recitals and the teacher's business, but she's too busy appreciating the music to think about that. I liked it.


The Municipalists -- Seth Fried

A near-future urban dystopia, narrated by a government bureaucrat named Henry who works in the federal city-planning department. I think the author's idea was to start out making the reader dislike Henry, and then make him likable by the end. It didn't work, though, because he did too good a job with the disliking part. Henry is a rule-worshipper and company man, and we first see him while he's prissily rebuking an underling for falling short of a quota by 0.27 percent. That scene poisoned Henry for me permanently; nothing the author could possibly do after that could make me like him. Which is too bad, because the plot was interesting: another city-planning agent, Henry's hero, has gone rogue and become an urban terrorist, disrupting all the agency's plans, and Henry is sent to gather information along with the agency's perkily annoying AI, OWEN. Henry and OWEN are soon attacked by the urban guerrillas and they have to go off-mission to fight back. It turns into an adventure story, with pretty good fights and chase scenes and banter between the uptight human and free-spirit AI, and a good scene where we learn that the rogue agent's motivation was figuring out that all the urban-renewal the city-planners push for only benefits the rich at the expense of the poor. Henry's character development was poorly handled, though, and it really threw me off the whole book. There's no way a guy who reprimands an employee over a quarter of a percentage point, and can't understand why the employee is upset, could turn into someone who can instantly intuit the nuances of wordless glances he sees two strangers exchange, in just a couple days. Or in a million years, either.


The Greater Journey -- David McCullough

The subtitle of this book is "Americans in Paris", and for a long time I didn't read it because I assumed it was about Gertrude Stein and the ex-pats of the twenties, and I feel like I've read all I ever need to read about them. I was wrong, though: it's actually about nineteenth-century Americans who had to travel to Europe, and Paris particularly, because they were artists or doctors or scientists who had reached the limits of what they could learn at universities in the US, which were far inferior to schools in Paris. Oliver Wendell Holmes spent years studying in Paris hospitals, where he learned about carbolic acid treatments, which led him to force the nascent AMA to adopt antisepsis rules when he returned to America. Many brilliant careers of nineteenth-century Americans were founded on studies in Paris: Saint-Gaudens, John Singer Sargent, Samuel Morse, James Fenimore Cooper. Women who had no opportunities in the US had great careers in Paris: America's first female doctor, Elizabeth Blackwell, had to get her degree in Europe because there were no medical schools in the US that accepted women. The artist Mary Cassatt, who could find no mentor in America, befriended Degas and Monet and produced a series of brilliant Impressionist paintings. It was really well-written, and all the individual stories hung together to paint a vivid picture. I thought it was great.


Pale Guardian -- Barbara Hambly

Another book about the Ashers and their friend the sixteenth-century Spanish vampire Don Simon. In this one Mrs. Asher is working as a nurse and X-ray technician on the battle front in Europe in 1915; there's yet another older vampire making yet another ill-advised deal with a human organization, and once again the Ashers team up with Don Simon to stop them. Most of Hambly's recent books have been unoriginal and repetitive, but I kept reading because I enjoyed her prose; in this one, though, the prose was merely competent, and by the end I thought "Well, so much for that." Hambly has suddenly written so many books in the last few years that I've suspected she's ill and needs a lot of money for medical bills; if that's true then this book may be a sign that she's taken a turn for the worse.


Irrationally Yours -- Dan Ariely

A collection of columns from the Wall Street Journal, answering questions from readers from the viewpoint of behavioral economics. There's a fun contrast between his Dear-Abby tone and the content of his answers, which generally involve diminishing marginal utility (often a solution becomes less useful the more you apply it, but the cost of applying it remains the same), loss aversion (people fear losing more than they enjoy winning), and status quo bias (people don't sufficiently appreciate that making no changes is a choice that carries costs.) Of course they're newspaper columns so he never goes into real depth on anything, but the real-life examples in the questions make good illustrations of the principles he's discussing.


The Fifth Season -- N.K. Jemisin

I hadn't heard of Jemisin until I met her briefly at the Hugo Awards in San Jose in 2018, where she won her third consecutive Hugo for Best Novel. This is the novel that won her her first. It's a far-future story, set scores of thousands of years from now, in an age when tectonic activity has hugely increased and there are terrible civilization-destroying eruptions every couple hundred years, along with near-constant lesser quakes and disasters. We get three alternating narratives, two in the omniscient third person and one in the second person, concerning a young girl, a young woman, and an older woman, though it wasn't long before I realized that all three were the same person at different times in her life. I'll call her Essun, since that's the name she uses in later life. Essun is a member of a despised underclass that has the power to sense and calm earthquakes, but generally can't do it without killing people nearby. The young-girl story thread tells how she's taken from her parents at a young age and trained to be, essentially, a slave of the state, sent here and there to use her powers to repair quake damage, and in the mean time living in a barracks and doing as she's told. The older-woman thread shows us Essun in middle age, living quietly in a rural hamlet where no one knows about her powers. At the start of the book Essun comes home one day to find that her husband has killed their young son and run off with their daughter, because he found out about Essun's powers; almost immediately afterwards the world is shaken by a tremendous cataclysm that rips open the center of the continent, starting a terrible "Fifth Season" that will probably last for thousands of years, maybe forever. Essun, though, can only think about her children, and sets off south in pursuit of her husband. The main action of the book happens in the young-woman thread, which tells how she's sent on a mission with a fellow-slave called Alabaster. They're under orders for him to get her pregnant on the way, which as you can imagine doesn't give either of them a reason to like the other. Alabaster is withdrawn and moody, and we find that he's both highly intelligent and supremely talented at their earth-managing powers, and that he knows a lot more about their society than she does. At this time in her life Essun hasn't yet realized how carefully her education was structured to lead her away from thinking about certain topics -- history, astronomy, technology are all derided as useless -- and she's puzzled and resentful of Alabaster's very different attitude. Their mission -- which ends up involving one of the vast crystal obelisks that orbit the Earth, no one remembers why -- turns into a disaster, and the two of them end up escaping to an island, where they live a reasonably happy life among the island's outlaw community for a few years, until their masters come to bring them back and destroy the island. Essun escapes, which is how she came to be living in the rural town we found her in to begin with. On her journey south she finds an underground city, made by people with powers like hers, and there she finds Alabaster, who survived the attack on the island, and who is also the person who ripped open the continent. He says he had a good reason, which I suppose we'll find out in the next book. I really liked this, and I'll keep reading the series, but there are several hard-to-read scenes involving terrible violence against small children, so don't read this on a day when you're already feeling low. (I think the reading public may have become desensitized to rape scenes, so the new shock tactic is harm to children.)


*The Rutland State Sanatorium -- Paul Dufault, MD

A pamphlet on the history of the TB sanatorium where uncle George worked, written after it closed in the sixties (because penicillin made it unnecessary.) There were some pretty appalling descriptions of old-timey treatments for tuberculosis -- back in the nineteen-aughts they used to just pour whatever they could find down the patient's gullet: turpentine, whiskey by the quart, anything corrosive. A few years later they tried artificial pneumothorax, which means collapsing your lungs on purpose! Compared to that, Rutland's regimen of lots of sunlight, fresh air, and fresh milk seems idyllic.


Ex-Libris -- Ross King

A novel about a bookseller, which can hardly go wrong for me. The hero is Isaac, a widower who owns a small bookshop on London Bridge during the reign of Charles II. He's hired, through unnecessarily complicated intermediaries, by a woman who's inherited a run-down estate from her father, recently executed for his part in the English Civil War. She explains that she's trying to restore the house and grounds, and she has a list of books that have gone missing from the library that she wants him to find. Simple enough, until she adds that she doesn't want replacements, she wants the very same copies that were in the library before. The book then follows two paths: Isaac's largely hopeless search for the books in the 1660s, and the story of a young librarian and his star-crossed lover who try to save the contents of the library of the King of Bohemia from Catholic book-burners after the Habsburgs defeated the Protestant Union at Prague in 1620. Of course the books the woman wants Isaac to find came from that library. I didn't think there was enough connection between the two stories, and the conclusion was pretty unsatisfying, but I was really into all the seventeenth-century book-selling parts.


George Silverman's Explanation -- Charles Dickens

A collection of three novellas, none of which I'd read before, which is surprising. The title story is a melodrama about a shy man whose quiet self-effacement has caused him to be misunderstood and unfairly disliked his whole life; I didn't like it much. The best one was "Hunted Down", an outstanding revenge story.


The Patch -- John McPhee

His first new collection in eight years. The first half is a series of essays related to sports -- McPhee's hobby of collecting lost golf balls, which he takes to such lengths that he carries a tool he calls a "grabber" on his bike rides in case he sees a lost ball on the other side of a fence; the surprising fact that McPhee's father (a football coach) invented the equivalent of Gatorade long before the coaching staff at Florida did, but he didn't put sugar in it so no one would drink it; stories about encountering bears on hikes through New Hampshire. The second part is a long assembly of unconnected fragments that he calls an "Album Quilt"; he went through his uncollected writings, about a quarter million words, and picked out good sentences or paragraphs to build a sort of collage. It was fun to read. I particularly liked his lengthy build-up about the burdens of being a writer that describes how you must withdraw from society into your writing den, "shut the door, draw the bolt, and in lonely sacrifice watch the Mets game."


The House of Hunger -- Dambudzo Marechera

A powerful story collection, including one long novella ("The House of Hunger") and nine or ten shorter stories. The prose is kaleidoscopic, rapid-fire shuffling through scenes and images, meant to convey the emotional experience of being down and out: nearly always in a state of confusion from hunger, unrestful sleep on the street, alcohol, and impotent rage against the British and the white rulers of Rhodesia in the seventies. Most of it is autobiographical details of living destitute in London and Bulawayo. What I remember best is a scene where two squatters who live in a warehouse have gotten hold of a stolen goat, but the older one doesn't want to slaughter the goat even though they've been hungry for weeks. "What the hell! At least we have got that within us which does not kill, even when all the bloody world around us is killing."


Elastic -- Leonard Mlodinow

A book about thinking creatively. It didn't make an impression on me; just now I had to think a long time before I remembered what was in it. Mostly I remember passages about cultivating neophilia, or a love of new things, as a means of keeping yourself from getting into a rut. It just didn't hold my interest.


The Vegetarian -- Han Kang

An exceptionally disturbing body-horror novel. It's about a woman living in contemporary Seoul, named Yeong-hye, who starts having nightmares about blood that lead her to stop eating meat. Her family persecutes her for it, because they perceive it as disrespectful to her husband, although he himself is much less bothered about it than they are. There's a horrible scene, in effect a rape scene, where her parents and brothers hold her down and force meat into her mouth. Yeong-hye's family is so outraged at her disobedience that they don't see her developing mental problems, and their violence only makes things worse. She ends up divorced and institutionalized, and the later half of the book deals with her sister visiting her at the asylum, where she refuses to eat and is constantly trying to go outdoors and take her clothes off, since she's retreating from the violence of life by imagining she can become a plant. The emotional pressure eventually leads her sister to have a breakdown of her own, and the book ends on a miserable downer. I appreciated that it was well written, but I didn't enjoy it at all.


¡Gracias! -- Henri J.M. Nouwen

Nouwen's journal of seven or eight months he spent in Bolivia and Peru in 1980 and 1981, back when he thought his calling would be to minister to the poor in Latin America. He spoke Spanish, but still had to take intensive classes to be fluent enough to speak with poor villagers. It was Nouwen's first experience with real, crushing, inescapable poverty, and it led him to study and appreciate the liberation theology of the Peruvian philosopher-priest Gustavo Gutiérrez. I was struck by Nouwen's meditations on how knowing people's names, sharing their houses, hugging them, and letting them know that you love them, is God's work, far more so than preaching is. "Theology is not a way of thinking but a way of living." "A true liberation theologian is not just someone who thinks about liberation, but someone whose thought grows out of life of solidarity with those who are poor and oppressed." Excellent book.


Bruce Lee -- Matthew Polly

I expected to like this, because I liked both of Polly's previous books and it's an interesting subject. But it turned out to be a hagiography, happily hand-waving away the young Bruce's anti-social behavior, and not noticing any connection between the adult Bruce's vocal championing of peaceful self-discipline and the fact that as a teenager he was a vicious bully. If Polly had thought about that, and what connection kung fu had with Bruce's growth as a person, it would have been a better book, but he didn't. Instead the book is a repetition of myths about Bruce's life: mastered kung fu at an early age, studied philosophy in school, founded a successful martial arts business, became famous. In fact Bruce only studied kung fu in Hong Kong for three years before he left for America; his loud-mouthed self-glorification and put-downs of traditional teaching were just the egotistical boasting of a conceited young man who imagines he's discovered things no one else knows, as he himself admitted later in life. He was a drama major in college and his interest in philosophy came later. His kung fu school never went anywhere, largely because he was constantly getting into pointless arguments with his students that usually led to life-long grudges, and he was much better known in Seattle as a cha-cha teacher. Polly trots out the stories of grudge matches Bruce fought in the sixties, like the famous fight with Wong Jack Man, as though they were movie scenes, with Bruce easily smashing his comically inept opponents, just ignoring that none of the fights were recorded and all the reports he relies on came from Bruce's friends. He never even mentions that other witnesses tell the stories differently -- according to other people who were there, the fight with Wong Jack Man was more or less a draw that ended because Bruce ran out of breath. (One of the reasons he designed his Jeet Kune Do exercises the way he did was that he realized that the way he fought tired him out too quickly.) Anyway I quit half way through. A real biography of Bruce Lee remains to be written.


The Alchemist -- Paulo Coelho

An allegorical novel based around the idea that "when you really want something to happen, the whole universe will conspire to make your wish come true." This is so obviously false there's no point even discussing it, so I thought the book was basically worthless. The scenes where the hero works at the crystal shop were kind of interesting though.


The Poison Belt -- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

The second Professor Challenger story, miserably bad. The professor calculates that an upcoming area of the interplanetary aether will suffocate all life on Earth as the planet passes through it. (It was known fifty years before this that there is no aether, but Doyle never learned that or didn't care, I guess.) Challenger and his friends barricade themselves in a sealed room with oxygen tanks, hoping to ride it out. They leave the servants outside to die; it never seems to occur to any of them to try to save them, and it may not have occurred to Doyle. It was both dull and terribly written.


Ancient Rome on Five Denarii a Day -- Philip Matyszak

A good travel guide for people visiting Rome in AD 200, from getting there (the port taxes are lower at Puteoli than at Ostia!) to getting around (don't go sight-seeing in the Subura slum) to avoiding the police (the vigiles' first and last approach to every problem is to give everyone in reach a thump on the skull) to how to behave at dinner (bring indoor shoes and your own napkin.) There's also a lot about the layout of the city and the sights to see on each of the seven hills. I liked it a lot.


Barsk: The Elephants' Graveyard -- Lawrence M. Schoen

An SF novel, set in the far, far future, where humanity is extinct and the galaxy is populated with sapient versions of Earth animals -- so there are cat-people, cattle-people, otter-people, and so on. Most of the action is set on a planet called Barsk, which is where the elephant-people live; they're an oppressed minority, not allowed off-planet, and they have some kind of not-clearly-defined relationship with the galactic government that involves being left to run their own affairs as long as they pay a tribute of pharmacology from plants that grow only there. That whole aspect was never sufficiently explained -- why put a hated minority in charge of essential supplies, why can only the elephant-people make the drugs from the plants, why is the Senate secretly trying to subvert the agreement when they could just annul it and no one would care? When the author kept emphasizing the point that all the other animal-people find the elephant-people revolting because of their hairlessness, I guessed that it must have something to do with a racial memory of humanity; I was right, but I felt like the setup and resolution of that question wasn't really enough to drive the story, and the author saved too much content for the sequel that I think could have been put to better use strengthening this book.


Wisdom in Chan World -- Master Ben Xing (translated by Zhi Wei)

The third of the books from Kaiyuan Temple; chan is the Chinese pronunciation of the Sanskrit dhyana, which is pronounced zen in Japanese. The translation was even less comprehensible than the others, if anything. The only thing I remember from it is a story that goes like this: a restaurant owner needed to hire a manager, and interviewed three candidates. He asked each one, "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?" The first candidate answered "The chicken"; the second answered "The egg." The third answered, "If the customer orders chicken, the chicken comes first. If the customer orders egg, the egg comes first." The third one got the job. The point of the story, as I understand it, is that Buddhists consider metaphysical speculation useless except as it directly applies to everyday life.


The Yellow Eyes of Crocodiles -- Katherine Pancol (translated by William Rodarmor and Helen Dickinson)

A French novel, pretty good I thought, about a woman named Josephine living in a poor section of Paris. Her good-for-nothing husband has just run off with the hairdresser and gone to run a hatchery in Kenya that raises crocodiles (in order to make fake designer goods out of their hides.) Josephine is left working three jobs to support her two young daughters, and also to support her husband, since he tricked her into signing a form making her responsible for the loan he used to buy into the crocodile place. Her sister, who's married to a wealthy publisher, makes her a proposition: you have talent, I have a famous name and a business connection, why don't you write a novel and we'll put my name on it? I'll have fun hyping it on the book-tour circuit and you'll get all the money, which I don't need anyway. Josephine agrees, but the deal gets strained when the novel turns out to be a runaway best-seller and everyone keeps pestering the sister about when she's going to write another. I enjoyed it, especially because the deadbeat husband eventually gets eaten by crocodiles, but I was thrown a little because the story involves several families, and they all act as though they're co-workers or something. Parents, spouses, children, siblings, there's just a total absence of any familial affection, and no sense that anyone thinks that's unusual. I found that off-putting.


The Galosh -- Mikhail Zoshchenko (translated by Jeremy Hicks)

A collection of short-short stories from Soviet magazines in the twenties, all about the inevitable puzzlement and confusion of adapting to a wholly new structure of government. Naturally a lot of them deal with shortages. There's a funny story about a man who gets an apartment with a working bathtub, and all his neighbors hang around his apartment at all hours waiting their turn to take a bath. I liked it.


The Invisible Hook -- Peter T. Leeson

A pretty good book about the economics of seventeenth-century piracy. Leeson argues that the buccaneers had solid reasons of economic self-interest for everything they did, from incorporation articles to torturing prisoners. The Caribbean pirates, within their own small realm, had constitutional government, with separation of powers and universal suffrage; every crew voted on articles of incorporation, in which they spelled out details such as health insurance and workers' compensation, and they split up the powers of government among separate, elected officers (the captain commanded in battle, for example, while the quartermaster was in charge of dividing the loot.) Leeson argues that the pirates weren't particularly more enlightened than anyone else; their behavior, he says, had economic roots, among others the "agency problem": the owner of an ordinary ship was in effect an absentee landlord, whose economic interests ran counter to the crew's, so the owner needed a local agent, the captain. The captain's interests were also opposed to the crew's, so he needed tyrannical power to compel their cooperation. A pirate ship, however, was the common property of the whole crew, and both crew and officers had the same interests, so cooperation didn't need to be enforced. Leeson further argues that the same "invisible hook" of individuals pursuing criminal self-interest sometimes led to (from our point of view) good social results: black and mixed-race pirates voted with the rest, and Leeson makes a good case that they were better treated, and relied on for more important work, than blacks in merchant crews. Good read.


Exhalation -- Ted Chiang

Ted Chiang writes about one story every other year, but they're all terrific. This is his first collection in about fifteen years. A lot of it is taken up with a long novella called "The Lifecycle of Software Objects", which was actually my least favorite but still good. The two best were "Exhalation", a story about a society of mechanical constructs who are powered by compressed air, and how they behave when the air pressure starts dropping; and "Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom", about a con artist who joins a therapy group as part of a scam and winds up getting enough out of the therapy that she changes her whole life. I loved it.


The Refrigerator Monologues -- Catherynne M. Valente

I really enjoyed this. It's a series of stories narrated by dead women in a sort of club in the afterlife. What the women have in common is that when they were alive they were all the romantic partners of superheroes, and now they're bitterly narrating their stories for each other, all of them royally pissed off that they died just because a male protagonist needed a tragedy in act two to spur his emotional journey.


State of the Union -- Nick Hornby

A series of short vignettes set in a pub across the street from a therapist's office, where a man and a woman meet every week before going across the street for couples therapy. We never see the therapy itself, or anything of their lives aside from this brief weekly interlude. I liked it a lot.


Why We Run -- Bernd Heinrich

A book about long-distance running. Since the author is a naturalist I was expecting studies of animal running studies and why the human body is capable of running ultramarathon distances, and there is some of that, but mostly it's memoir and reflections on why the author enjoys running, which didn't hold my interest.


The Old Man and the Gun -- David Grann

A collection of three longish true-crime essays; after reading it I went and found my copy of Grann's essay collection The Devil and Sherlock Holmes, which I read about ten or eleven years ago, and saw that all three essays were included in it, but I had no memory of them at all, although I have clear memories of five of the other essays in that book. Was I not paying close attention to these three? Is it just that I don't find true-crime stories as interesting as baseball and giant squid? Or is it just random chance? Who knows. Anyway these three were about career criminals. One was an oddball named Tucker who made a life out of robbing banks, getting caught, and then escaping from prison; he robbed his last bank at the age of 79. You'd think a guy who could escape from prison over a dozen times could think of something more useful to do with his life. Another was about a seriously creepy asshole who made a game out of assuming false identities so he could keep attending high school even in his thirties, several times assuming the identities of actual missing children and preying on their relatives, apparently out of pure sadism. The writing was good but I didn't really enjoy reading about them.


Pillar of Fire -- Ray Bradbury

A collection of a few experimental one-act plays from the sixties. I found all of them dull and pointless; what I chiefly remember is that Bradbury's extensive stage directions take up almost as much space as the dialogue.


Rhesos -- Euripides

An unusually short play, though there's no obvious place where you could say "something's missing here." Over the last couple hundred years there's been an ongoing dispute over whether it's actually by Euripides, partly because of some vocabulary and syntax used in none of his other plays, but more because there are no female characters, which is unique for him. I gather current thinking is that it probably is by Euripides, but written very early in his career. The action involves the late arrival of the Thracian king, Rhesos (like, ten years late) to bring help to the Trojans besieged by the Greeks. Hektor berates Rhesos for dragging his feet so long, scorning his excuse that he's been busy fighting off an invasion from Scythia, but figures, well, better late than never, and brings him into camp. A Trojan named Dolon volunteers to sneak across the lines and listen in on what the Greeks are saying; he plans to wear a wolf skin and stay on all fours, to go unnoticed. However, half way there he crosses the path of Odysseus, who happens to be on his way to spy on the Trojans in the company of his ally Diomedes. They capture Dolon immediately, and Diomedes laughs at him for spying so incompetently -- like, what was his plan if someone got suspicious of the funny-looking wolf? A disguise that can't withstand close examination is the same as no disguise, he says, and contrasts the successful expeditions that Odysseus has undertaken into Troy itself: Odysseus disguised himself as a poor, lame beggar, and before going he instructed his own men to beat the crap out of him so that no matter how close anyone looked, he would still look like what he was trying to seem. To save his life, Dolon tells the Greeks that Hektor is staying in the forward encampment that night, and Odysseus and Diomedes at once set out to slip into the camp and kill Hektor; but Athena appears and tells them that they aren't fated to kill Hektor, so as a consolation prize they locate the tent of the recently-arrived Rhesos and kill him and his guards, stealing their world-beater Thracian horses on their way out just to rub it in. The next morning there's some grumbling among the Thracians that Hektor had Rhesos killed as a punishment for his tardiness, but Hektor looks over the scene and announces that so crafty a feat could only have been managed by Odysseus, which everyone has to agree to. That's the drawback of being cleverer than anyone else, I guess. Then there's a strangely irrelevant scene where Rhesos's mother, the muse Euterpe, shows up to announce that yes, it was Odysseus, and to let everyone know that Rhesos will soon be resurrected, become immortal, and go off to live in a cave for some reason, though why any of the Trojans should care about that, I don't know. I have two versions of this, the Oxford Classics edition and the great Richmond Lattimore's translation; obviously I don't read Greek well enough to offer an opinion based on syntax, but the action seems Euripidean enough to me, particularly the night-scene among Odysseus, Diomedes, and Dolon. It's actually a pretty funny play, particularly in the Lattimore version.


Women of Trachis -- Sophokles

This is the only Greek tragedy I've actually seen on stage, at Brandeis in 1990. As I recall, the set and costumes looked like the designers watched too many science fiction movies from the sixties, but the performance was good. I particularly remember the closing line, when Hyllos, enraged at his father's fate, yelled that "There is nothing here that is not the work of Zeus!" and there was lightning and a shocking thunderclap and a smash-cut to total darkness. Really effective.
We open with Herakles's wife Deianeira lamenting his long absence. A herald arrives with a procession of prisoners (the women of Trachis, who form the chorus) and the news that Herakles has been kept away because of his feud with a king in Euboia, who promised a great prize to anyone who could defeat his son in an archery contest. Herakles won, but the king wouldn't pay up, so Herakles threw the son off a cliff. In punishment, Zeus sent Herakles off to Lydia to be a slave for a year; when the year was up, Herakles came back, killed the king, and sacked the city.
Deianeira is kind to the captives, and feels sorry for one in particular, a strikingly beautiful woman with a tragic air. Another newcomer tells her that the herald has not told the whole story: the beautiful captive is the king's daughter, Iole, and she was the intended prize in the archery contest; the king went back on his word because he knew that Herakles, in one of the fits of insanity to which he was subject, had killed his first wife.
Deianeira is now worried; not because Herakles has brought a junior wife home, which was ordinary and expected at the time the play is set, but because Iole is so beautiful and so much younger than she is, so she fears that Iole may replace her in Herakles's affections. She tells the story of how Herakles saved her from being raped by the centaur Nessus, by shooting him with a poisoned arrow; Nessus told her that she could make a love potion from his blood. To make sure of Herakles's continued devotion, Deianeira coats a robe with the blood and tells the herald to take it to Herakles. But after sending it, she's gripped with foreboding: why, she suddenly thinks, would the dying Nessus want to do her a good turn? Her fears are soon realized when her son Hyllos comes to tell her that her robe has poisoned Herakles; she goes off stage and kills herself.
The last scene -- an episode in the Greek sense, an action scene "between two odes" -- shows Herakles returning to curse Deianeira, but forgiving her when Hyllos explains what happened. Herakles is so strong that the poison can only kill him slowly, and he's in terrible agony, so in fear of being overcome by pain and setting a bad example of weakness, he tells Hyllos to build a pyre and burn him alive. Hyllos says he will build the pyre but refuses to light it, from filial piety; Herakles agrees to this and they all exit, Hyllos pausing to deliver his furious closing line.
I own a few editions of this: three scholarly translations, the Loeb Classical edition in Greek, and the poetic translation by Ezra Pound. I don't really judge Pound's work fairly because he was a wholehearted supporter of Hitler. "Anti-semite" isn't a strong enough word; he was a Judenfresser, a Jew-eater, in the real German sense.
My edition contains several forewords and an afterword by various pro-Pound writers, some who try to play down his Fascism and some who defend it as free speech, but all of whom unite in hero-worship of his work. It's a red flag I've learned to look for in literary criticism. Most editors say something reasonable like "there are a few approaches to take here, you can prefer one or the other, I prefer this approach for these reasons." If an editor instead says "stupid people have used stupid approaches to get their awful results, but My Hero gave us this Work Of Genius that rightly reveals all other attempts as worthless garbage", that's a sign that you've got a follower instead of a scholar. (You see the same phenomenon in lots of fields -- martial artists, for example, whose martial philosophy is based on a personal admiration for a teacher rather than a thorough understanding of their teaching.)
Anyway I found Pound's version unreadable. The editor gleefully talks about how stripped-down it is, how non-ornate compared to other translations, how its characters talk as real people talk. This is wrong twice; first, the language the Athenians heard on stage was not the language anyone spoke in daily life. It was poetry, and highly structured poetry at that, following extremely rigorous metrical patterns and building up tremendous rhetorical power in ways not possible in English -- in The Persians, the Messenger's speech building up to the defeat at Salamis uses fifteen different words that contain the syllable tel, which is the main component of the Greek word for "fall", spaced out in such a way that when he comes to the actual word "fall" it hits like a wave crashing. Nothing remotely like this comes across in Pound, who has kings and gods speak as if they're gossiping at the market. Second, Pound's "ordinary language", which he wrote in 1957 but is more informed by his pre-war life, sounds far more dated now than any 19th-century speech about how "the glorious son of Zeus and Alkmene came and closed with him in combat." One of the forewords sniffs "Why should Greek tragedy always sound like an Elizabethan play?" Like it's any better that it should sound like an East End music hall in 1925. I suffered along as Pound had the Greeks say things like "Lemme hear it!" and "Who's this bloke?" but when the Messenger said " 'Arf a mo'!" I gave up.


Oh What a Lovely War -- The Littlewood Theatre Workshop

The script of a collaborative anti-war stage show from the sixties, put on by an avant-garde group in London who wanted to criticize British jingoism. It's a mixture of realism and surrealism, with a backdrop that shows real WWI images while comic-hall soldiers struggle incompetently on the stage, and real WWI songs like "Keep the Home Fires Burning" interspersed with angry satire like the title song. It didn't come through very well in print, which is hardly surprising.


Sexual Perversity in Chicago -- David Mamet

A dating-and-relationships play from the seventies. There are four characters: Dan and Deborah, who meet, start dating, and break up over the course of the play, and their best friends: Dan's co-worker Bernie, a crude, loud-mouthed misogynist who talks non-stop about all the women he scores with, and Deborah's roommate Joan, a bitter anti-romance cynic who believes all relationships are doomed. Dan and Deborah are both kind of dumb and easily manipulated, and Bernie and Joan work independently to break them up; Bernie because he needs a single Dan to be his bar buddy and admirer, Joan because she doesn't want Deborah to move out. It's really funny and well-written but also nasty and sordid. I was in a production of this in college, playing very much against type as Bernie; it was a lot of fun.


The Duck Variations -- David Mamet

A play from very early in his career, a series of scenes with two men sitting on a park bench watching ducks, and having wandering, discursive conversations about their lives. More than in most plays, the actors make all the difference; Mamet purposely wrote dialogue that can't be read for pleasure. It has to be informed by the actors' voices; without them it's flat and unmemorable.


The Acharnians -- Aristophanes

His earliest surviving play, and apparently only the third one he wrote. It was put on in 425 BCE; the year before he'd put on a now-lost play called The Babylonians, which made its target, the politician Kleon, so angry he tried to have Aristophanes prosecuted for insulting the people, but the court told him to suck it up and go home. Athenians had, even by our standards, amazing latitude of speech; the only things you couldn't say in public were anything attacking the state religion or any declaration that democracy was a bad form of government. Laws about slander did exist, but they only covered saying something that, if taken seriously, would prevent a person from participating in the democracy: suggesting that a person wasn't a legitimate Athenian citizen, for example, or accusing them of a crime for which the legal punishment would be loss of voting rights. As far as calling them immoral, stupid, or incompetent, the sky was the limit.
At this time the war with Sparta had been going on for six years, and after Perikles died in the plague Athens seemed to have no clear idea of how to proceed. The Athenians carried on the war at sea, choosing not to face the Spartan troops on land, which meant that every spring, when the mountain passes cleared, all the inhabitants of the rural demes had to leave their farms and live inside the city walls in makeshift shelters and on short commons -- it's not surprising that the plague broke out in the city soon afterwards -- and after six years everyone was getting pretty fed up with it. Kleon was the biggest war hawk, which was why Aristophanes attacked him so often.
The comic hero in this play is Dikaiopolis ("the just city") who is so frustrated at the conduct of the war, and the refusal of the Assembly to listen to sense, that he gets an immortal friend to magically grant him the ability to make his own peace treaty that covers only him. So he goes back home, where he can now live on his farm in peace and trade with anyone he wants to. He's threatened by a chorus of Acharnians; the deme of Acharnia had a name for being belligerent, possibly because their territory contained the only temple to the war god Ares in Greece. (Unlike the Romans, the Greeks did not go out of their way to worship Ares, whom they considered bloodthirsty and hostile to humanity.) The Acharnians want to stone Dikaiopolis as a traitor; he boldly tells them he'll make his case with his head on a block, and if he doesn't convince them they can cut it off. (This is a parody of the lost Telephos of Euripides, and there's a funny scene where Dikaiopolis runs to Euripides's house and borrows his old Telephos costume to make his speech land better.) In Dikaiopolis's speech he lambasts the war hawks, like Kleon and the general Lamachos, for stretching out the war for their own profit, accusing them of eagerly seizing on false excuses so they can send the poor men out to die while they sit at home getting rich. Lamachos himself turns up as a character, but Dikaiopolis boots him out based on his magical one-man peace treaty. A series of characters from all over Attika come around asking Dikaiopolis to share his peace with them, but he tells them they wouldn't listen to sense before so they can't share now; their only road to peace is to return to the Assembly, vote down Kleon and the war hawks, and make a treaty of their own. The play won first prize, so probably the jury agreed with Aristophanes. The play ends with Dikaiopolis celebrating the annual Country Dionysia -- a poignant reminder that no rural Athenian had been able to do that in their own home for six years -- and winning the drinking-contest, while Lamachos is carried home from the battle-front moaning about his heroic sprained ankle. I have two editions of this, Douglas Parker's translation from the Mentor series and Jeffrey Henderson's translation. Parker's translation is funnier and probably more accurate -- he doesn't shy away from the sometimes really startling obscenity -- but Henderson's has better footnotes, with a wealth of information about the scenes where the chorus picks out individual members of the audience to insult, and clear explanations of all the puns that don't come across in English.


The Seven Against Thebes -- Aischylos

I have five versions of this: Penguin Classics, Prentice Hall, Gilbert Murray's 19th-century translation, the Loeb Classical edition in Greek, and the one from Dad's two-volume Aischylos by David Grene. I was surprised to find that The Seven Against Thebes isn't the actual name of this play, but rather a nickname people gave to it, and the real name has been lost -- as if everyone got so used to saying "the Jupiter Symphony" that they forgot it's actually Mozart's Symphony no. 41. The Prentice Hall editor makes the case that since this is the third play in a trilogy whose first two plays are known to have been called Laios and Oedipus, it's likely that this play originally took the name of its main character, Eteokles.
The action takes place in the agora of Thebes, although the play never uses its name and only calls it "the city of Kadmos", both because Athens had a grudge against the Thebans and to emphasize the strength of the city's "Sown Men", the descendants of the warriors who grew out of the earth where Kadmos sowed the dragon's teeth. Thebes is under siege by a foreign army led by Eteokles's brother Polyneikes; the two were supposed to share power in the city, but Eteokles banished Polyneikes, for what reason we don't know, although "Polyneikes" means "much strife". In any case the Thebans we see are wholly on the side of Eteokles, maintaining that if Polyneikes had a real grievance he's forfeited it by leading a foreign army against the city.
We open with the chorus of the young women of the city panicking at the assault they know is coming, and clinging to the statues of the gods; Eteokles enters to rebuke them for spreading anxiety when the city needs to stand united, and also sternly tells them that the way to gain the favor of the gods is to fight your own battles and not helplessly fall at their feet, a very Aischylan attitude.
Over the course of the arguments we get a recap of the doom foretold for the Theban ruling family: the oracle told Laios that his city would be safe when he had no descendants; the oracle later told Laios's son Oedipus that he was fated to kill his father and have sex with his mother; after Oedipus's sons treated him badly, he cursed them, saying all they would inherit of Thebes was enough ground to die in.
This is all important because I don't agree with the Penguin editor that the trilogy offers no solution and simply ends nihilistically with the whole family wiped out. I think the trilogy must have been mostly about how men should behave in the face of unavoidable necessity, what the Greeks called ananke (presented here as prophecies and curses for dramatic reasons.) Laios defied necessity; Oedipus ran away from it; neither of these approaches worked. Eteokles, on the other hand, aware both of Laios's oracle and Oedipus's curse, decides that his only way forward is to act as the occasion requires, and let necessity work itself out without trying to defy or avoid it.
The longest part of the play is the discussion of the champions, where the field commander enters to tell Eteokles which enemy leaders are attacking which of the city's seven gates, and Eteokles replies with a description of the Theban defending that gate. Some editors imagine the Theban champions standing silently on stage and being sent off gate by gate, but I prefer to think that Eteokles has already placed the Thebans at their gates, and he interprets the arrangement of enemies sent to attack them as signs of the gods' will -- that's why he says things like "Ha, Hermes has designed well here!"
This interpretation also makes Eteokles's determination more visible: he has already assigned himself to the defense of the seventh gate, in order to quiet the fears of the chorus, and when he hears that the man leading the attack on the seventh gate is his brother Polyneikes, he acknowledges that whatever way he turns, necessity will always find him; so rather than changing his arrangements he goes to fight his brother, knowing that if they kill each other Laios's oracle will be fulfilled and the city will be safe, because Laios will finally have no descendants.
(At the last minute Oedipus's daughters Ismene and Antigone appear, but they're so out of place that they must be an interpolation -- they were probably added to the play after Aischylos's death because of the popularity of Sophokles's later tragedy Antigone. Probably the lines they speak were actually spoken by the chorus in the original. But it's clear from the text that in this version of the story Oedipus only had two children.)


The American Dream -- Edward Albee

A one-act play, a social satire on American family life. I remember pretty much nothing of the play, but I do remember the afterword, in which Albee spends several pages arguing that theater critics should only be allowed to criticize technical aspects of the writing and performance, and that writing anything that criticizes or disagrees with the arguments of the play is effectively libel, which is the most creative way of whining about a bad review that I've heard lately. Grow the fuck up, Albee.


The Zoo Story -- Edward Albee

A one-act play about an ordinary New Yorker named Peter who lives a quiet, contented life, who's sitting at a park bench one day when he's accosted by a stranger, a man named Jerry. Jerry is clearly on the edge of violence, disappointed by life, and alternating between nihilism and a desire for human contact. He insists that Peter listen to his story about going to the zoo, but never gets to it, instead digressing into tirades against his landlady and her dog, which he seems to have killed, and interrogating Peter about his own life. He becomes contemptuous and insulting, and then starts shoving; Peter tries to leave, but Jerry takes out a knife and threatens him with it. When Jerry drops the knife, Peter instinctively grabs it, whereupon Jerry jumps onto it, committing suicide. As Jerry dies he ponders aloud whether he really meant that to happen all along. I bet it would be pretty shocking on stage.


The Bacchae-- Euripides

The first thing everyone says about this play is how different it is from all the other tragedies that have survived. It was apparently the last play he finished, and not produced until after he died. It's a strange play all about the god Dionysos, who was involved in almost every aspect of Greek religion: aside from being the god of wine and drunkenness (under the cult name Bacchos) he was also the god of the theater (all plays were performed at Dionysiac festivals, overseen by his high priest); he had a shrine at the oracle of Delphi, where he was supposed to be in residence half the year while Apollo was away doing other things; and he was also involved in some way with the Eleusinian Mysteries, the central sacred cult of Greece, which were so secret that we know very little about them, except that they were central to the worship of the Earth Mother Demeter and her daughter Persephone (although the Greeks thought it was unlucky to speak the names of the gods of the underworld, so they usually called her Kore, which means "the Daughter".) We don't know how Dionysos was involved, except that there he was invoked as Iakchos, apparently a personification of the ecstatic shout Iakche!
This play revolves around his strangest and most frightening aspect: the god of divine madness. Dionysos arrives to announce to the audience that he intends to punish the city of Thebes, where he was fathered on a Theban woman by Zeus, because they don't honor him properly. He's led a band of Maenads, women who exercise religious ritual through the Bacchic frenzy, to the city, and they have drawn in the women of the royal family. The young king, Pentheus ("grief") is furious at the presence of the Maenads and the behavior of the previously respectable women, now running naked on the mountaintops and tearing apart live animals and eating them. Not recognizing Dionysos, he has him arrested, and Dionysos comes quietly. Pentheus's wiser older relatives warn him not to interfere with the women, because it's dangerous to try to defeat madness with reason (that is, to try to force people to express only one part of their human nature) and even more dangerous to defy a god. Pentheus won't listen, though, and orders Dionysos imprisoned. Thus by refusing to accept the madness of the god when it's offered as a gift, he has to suffer it as a torment; Dionysos (who gives the impression that he can hardly keep from laughing, though Pentheus doesn't notice this) slyly encourages his obsessive fear of women and his prurient desire to watch and even participate in their mad ecstasy, step by step, until he ends by persuading Pentheus to disguise himself as a woman and go up the mountain to spy on the rites. The women, their sight captured by the god, see Pentheus as a wild animal and tear him apart, eating his flesh and dancing in triumph. The play ends with Pentheus's mother carrying his head down from the mountain with his blood on her lips, believing she has killed a lion; the women return to a normal state and see what they've done, and the royal family, now polluted, has to go into exile, and the revenge of Dionysos is complete.
No two people agree on what this play means. My own view is that it's largely about the conflict of the rational and the irrational, and more importantly, about what happens when people try to make one of them the only arbiter of human life. It's important to remember that Euripides was not an atheist! He clearly had real problems with the way gods treat people, and with the way people use the gods as excuses for their own behavior, but he was sincerely religious. He was himself an initiate of Eleusis, and the way the chorus attacks the sophists and intellectuals of his time (what was generally called the New Learning) seems to show that he was dismayed to see outsiders attempting to understand an irrational mystery with rational tools; to an initiate, it would be clear that no one could understand a mystery without directly experiencing it, and their incomplete understanding could only pollute the truth.
I have three editions of this: the Prentice-Hall edition, an excellent academic translation by Paul Woodruff (which has a photo of Elvis in his Army uniform on the cover, for some reason) and the Loeb Classical edition in Greek. Both the translations are line-by-line editions meant to be studied, not performed, so they give a very accurate rendering of the original.


Ion -- Euripides

A play from late in his career, dealing more explicitly than any of his other plays with the anger men cannot help feeling towards the gods. The god Hermes quickly fills us in on the background: Kreousa, the daughter of the king of Athens, was raped by the god Apollo and gave birth to his child in secret. She took the baby to the cave where the rape happened and left him there, either to be rescued by his father or to die of exposure. Apollo brought the baby to his shrine at Delphi, where he has lived nameless for twenty years; Hermes tells us that the boy will soon be named Ion, through the machinations of the god. The play proper begins as the carefree boy cleans the altars and sings in praise of Apollo. Kreousa arrives and the two speak; she sympathizes with his orphan plight and says that wherever she is, his mother must miss him. She tells him that her husband Xouthos, now king of Athens, has come to ask if he will have a son. She, however, has come ahead to ask a secret question of her own: she explains that "a friend" had a child by Apollo and exposed it, and she wants to ask the oracle, on behalf of her "friend", if the child still lives. The boy is horrified that someone would accuse Apollo of a crime in his own temple, and advises her not to ask.  Just then Xouthos turns up and the couple go into the shrine, leaving the boy to make a long, angry speech about the gods, probably speaking for Euripides:

If a man acts wrongly, the gods punish him!
Shame, if the gods betray the laws
They have themselves forged!...
You cannot justly blame men for following
What you consider good. You are our teachers!

This must have been a shocking scene in Athens, a man directly accusing a god of doing wrong. Euripides doesn't let up, either, drawing an effective word-picture of Kreousa seized by the god in the middle of gathering flowers and dragged into a cave, screaming for her mother.
The oracle tells Xouthos that he has a son already, and it will be the first person he meets after he leaves the shrine (thus having the oracle tell a direct lie, obviously at the command of Apollo, another turn that must have shocked the audience); Xouthos embraces the boy and says he will name him Ion (a pun on the verb "to come out" in Attic Greek.) This leads to the action of the rest of the play, an honestly not very interesting intrigue story, as Kreousa and her attendants plot to kill Ion rather than let the bastard son of a foreigner become king of Athens (Xouthos is not Athenian, having married Kreousa as part of a military alliance, and the Athenians will only accept his heirs if they are also Kreousa's sons.) However, Apollo sends his birds to foil the plan, and Kreousa, delighted to find out that Ion is really her son, diplomatically bows to Apollo's plan and lets Xouthos believe he is Ion's father, thus establishing -- in the play's logic -- that all the Ionian Greeks are descended, through Ion and his mother, from the first king of Athens, and therefore Athens is the preeminent city. Euripides may have felt safer including a bitter attack on the immoral conduct of the gods in a play that celebrated Athens and provided a religious justification for her empire.
I have three copies of this: the Prentice Hall edition, the Oxford Classics edition, and the Loeb Classical edition in Greek. The Prentice Hall editions are uniformly excellent, but this one was really superior.


The Persians -- Aischylos

The Persians is the only surviving tragedy that deals with current events; it tells the story of a messenger bringing news of the disastrous defeat at Salamis to the queen and a chorus of elderly Persians, who then raise the ghost of Darius to ask for advice. Greek playwrights seem generally to have avoided contemporary subjects, possibly because their audience was more emotionally involved in the play than modern audiences are. The playwright Phyrinichos once put on a current-events play (The Capture of Miletos) that was so upsetting that the city made him pay a fine. On the other hand, the outcome of the Persian invasion of 480 BCE so perfectly illustrated the essential Greek ideas of hubris and nemesis that it simply cried out to be put on stage.
When Darius is raised from the grave, he sternly explains this to the Persians. (The Greeks would have considered that Darius's ghost, coming from the underworld, would possess the wisdom of the chthonic deities.) Hubris is the quality of unrestrained ambition; for the Persians to have had the wealthiest and most powerful empire the world had ever seen, and then try to seize still more, is a sign that they were unsatisfied with the gifts of the gods and tried to go beyond the natural limits of human affairs, an act that the gods always punish severely.
I have five versions: the Penguin Classics edition, the Loeb Classical edition in Greek, Dad's two-volume Aischylos, the Oxford Greek Dramas edition, and the excellent Prentice Hall edition. The Penguin editor briefly dismisses The Persians as an exercise in triumphalism and lets it go at that. The Prentice Hall editor goes much more deeply into the background, noting that the reason this play was put on at this time was that the career of Themistokles, the hero of Salamis, was starting to fail -- he was ostracised a couple years later -- and Aischylos probably wrote the play to emphasize the debt Athens owed to Themistokles. The play's choregos (a sort of executive producer, who paid for whatever the public funds didn't cover and was in overall charge of the production) was no less a person than the young Perikles, which argues that the play was much more important than the Penguin editor claims. It's also significant that the Persian characters say "Ionians" as a metonym for "Greeks"; Aischylos did this in order to downplay the fact that the Ionian Greeks actually fought on the side of the Persians, an embarrassment to the pan-Hellenic agenda that Athens was trying to push at the time.
Historians debate about whom to trust when Aischylos's account differs from that of Herodotos. On the one hand, Aischylos personally fought at Salamis, and his audience would have been full of people who were there; on the other hand Aischylos was an entertainer, not a historian, and the audience would have accepted that he was using poetic license. For example, for dramatic purposes Aischylos writes as if the whole war was just the battle of Salamis, which lets him build up the overwhelming might of Xerxes's army and then show it destroyed in an instant. The Messenger, probably voicing Aischylos's own philosophy, says that If there were any men who did not believe in the power of Zeus, they would build an altar and sacrifice after seeing this. (Also for dramatic purposes, or maybe just out of ignorance, Aischylos acts as though the Persians also worshipped Zeus and Apollo.)
To be fair, there is a good deal of triumphalism in the play; the Messenger recites a list of cities and islands under the Persian sway, which would have pleased the Athenians of 472 BC because all those places were now under Attic rule. According to the Prentice Hall editor, who saw a performance in Athens in 1965, the scene where the queen asks who rules in Athens and what sort of army they have, and the chorus replies that the Athenians call no man master and their army crushed the Persian host at Marathon, brought the audience roaring to their feet. The other big show-stopper is the Messenger's report of the commander's war-cry, which is probably Aischylos's rephrasing of what Themistokles actually said when the Greek ships raced towards the Persian fleet:

Onward, sons of the Greeks! Set free the land of your fathers!
Rescue your sons, your wives, and your holy places,
Shrines of ancestral gods, and tombs of those who begot you!
To battle! Winner takes all!


David Bowie: The Last Interview -- Dennis Johnson, ed.

A really interesting collection spanning his whole career. They're in chronological order, but the editor also selected them so they cover most facets of Bowie's diverse interests: rock and roll, fashion, Japanese Kabuki drama, British punk, German aesthetics, drug culture, even mime. He was an excellent interview, taking people's questions seriously and giving considered, thoughtful answers. One of the interviewers told a great story about how she'd heard a rumor that Bowie, at one time, collected his own semen and kept it in a jar, but she couldn't work up the nerve to ask him about it, even though she had a reminder written right across the top of her notes. Then, when she left her notebook behind and had to go back for it, Bowie met her at the door with a grin and said "I guess you'll never know." I really enjoyed it.


The Suppliants -- Aischylos

In the Greek, the title is in the feminine gender, so it specifies that the suppliants are women. The suppliants are the Danaides, the fifty daughters of Danaos, who form the chorus, in an unusual play structure where the chorus is the protagonist. Because the chorus is much larger than in the later plays (where the usual number was reduced to twelve at some uncertain date) it's possible this is an early play; but it's also possible that Aischylos went back to the larger number in order to strengthen the delivery of the choral odes, which are even more prominent than usual in this play and are also the most beautiful of any we have. The Loeb editor thought that this play probably survived because of the beauty, dignity, and high moral tone of the choral odes.
The Danaides are Egyptian, but ancestrally Greek. The wanderer Io, driven from her home in Argos by the jealous Hera, finally came to live by the Nile, where Zeus relieved of her torments and also got her pregnant. Several generations later, this resulted in two brothers, Aigyptos and Danaos; the one had fifty sons, the other fifty daughters. Aigyptos wanted to marry his sons to Danaos's daughters; revolted at this, Danaos and his daughters fled. The play opens as they arrive in their ancestral city of Argos, seeking protection from the pursuing Aigyptoi. Pelasgos, king of Argos, arrives to ask who they are and what they want. After they explain, there follows a debate that makes up the heart of the play. Pelasgos considers a list of reasons he shouldn't give them shelter: he had no part in the discord between Aigyptos and Danaos; under Egyptian law, the Danaides are legitimately at the disposal of the men of their family; the Danaides don't even look like Hellenes and he would have guessed they were Libyan; his first responsibility is to Argos and its people, and he shouldn't lightly expose them to a devastating war. The Danaides urge that they are Hellenes by ancestry, and even Argives, since their foremother came from Argos, and they therefore have a kinsman's claim on Pelasgos; that incest is repellent to the gods; that the present necessity of sheltering a suppliant is paramount over the possible consequences of war; and if he refuses, the Danaides plan to hang themselves in the shrine. Pelasgos realizes that he faces bad consequences either way: on the one hand, a war; on the other hand, dreadful ritual pollution. He's most swayed by the appeal to religious duty: Zeus protects the suppliant, and of all things his anger is the most to be feared. Still, his support is lukewarm, and it's only turned to resolve when a crew of Aigyptos's soldiers arrive and go straight to the shrine to drag the Danaides away from the altars, ignoring the Argives and sneering at the gods.

 Do you think you have come to a land of women?
 You are fools, if you think that barbarians can behave without respect
 in the land of the Hellenes! 
 
I have four copies of this -- Penguin Classics, Dad's David Grene edition, the Loeb Classical edition in Greek, and a thorough line-by-line exegesis from the Cambridge Press. The editors all spend most of their time explaining the background and speculating about what was in the other two plays known to have been part of this trilogy, The Egyptians and The Danaides (it's known that Pelasgos was killed in the war with Aigyptos, that the Danaides killed all but one of the Aigyptoi, and that Aphrodite sorted it all out in the end.) No one really addresses what Aischylos was trying to say. It seems to me that he was making the same kind of force-versus-reason argument as in the Oresteia: the Danaides -- meant to represent the Greek half of the clan's ancestry -- appeal to Pelasgos on the grounds of family ties and the law of Zeus; the Aigyptoi, representing the barbarian half of their ancestry, make no appeals at all but go straight to bloodshed.


People of the Book -- Geraldine Brooks

A novel about a woman named Hanna, a professional book restorer, who's come to Sarajevo to restore a fourteenth-century Hebrew codex of the Haggadah, the book that contains the ritual of the Passover seder. (The Sarajevo Haggadah is real, but everything in this book is invented.) She examines the book and notes several things about it -- a bit of cat hair on one page, a dragonfly wing in the binding, a wine stain, a place where metal clasps were once attached, and most puzzling of all, the imprimatur stamp showing that the book was once examined by the Holy Office (the Inquisition) and allowed to pass. Alternating chapters through the rest of the book tell the story of the codex and how it got from medieval Spain to Sarajevo, of all places, tracing its journey backward from real history in the twentieth century (the Bosnian curator saved it from the Nazis by giving it to a Muslim friend, who hid it under the floor of his mosque) to invented history all the way back to the 1300s, each episode explaining one of the things Hanna found when she examined the codex. I liked those parts, but I could have done without the other alternating chapters, set in the present, which tell Hanna's life story, which isn't interesting. Hanna has a difficult relationship with her critical and demanding mother, she doesn't know who her father is, she falls in love with a Serb librarian so unconvincingly that I think that's only there because her editor told her she had to have a love interest, and of course she's betrayed by her beloved mentor. Man, I'm glad I never had a beloved mentor who taught me everything I know, shaped my life, and meant the world to me. The suspense of waiting for them to inexplicably turn against everything they stand for and betray their favorite student would be harrowing.


The Incredible Dr. Matrix -- Martin Gardner

A collection of Gardner's recreational-math magazine columns about his fictional friend "Dr. Matrix", a con man who makes his money with numerology, impressing gullible people by demonstrating unexpected relationships among numbers and finding imaginary significance in them. This lets Gardner both set up mathematical puzzles and preach against pseudo-science. There could hardly be anything more infuriating to a mathematician than people who use flimflam to pretend that numbers mean something they don't.


The Pioneers -- David McCullough

The first of his books I've read that I didn't like. It starts strong, with a thorough description of the creation of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, and then moves into the story of the settlers by telling the story of the Cutler family and their expedition to Ohio, and then, well, that's that. I suppose McCullough meant the story of the founding of the town of Marietta to stand as a microcosm of the whole Northwest Territory, but if he did it doesn't work. Chapter after chapter I kept saying "Fine, but so what?" I also found the settlers profoundly unsympathetic, even with McCullough bending over backwards to apologize for them, just cavalierly hand-waving away their happy participation in the brutal genocide of the Indians of the Ohio river valley. The good prose just doesn't make up for the ham-handed treatment of racial warfare and the inherent dullness of the source material. Just a big disappointment.


Prometheus Bound -- Aischylos

This was the first Greek tragedy I read, in the Penguin Classics edition in college. Dad and I piled up a surprising number of editions between us -- I have eight, counting that Penguin edition, a few modern scholarly translations, the poetic translation by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Eric Havelock's idiosyncratic Marxist version, plus I slowly sounded out the Greek in the Loeb Classical edition, trying to work out the literal meaning.
The setting is the most remote of any of the surviving tragedies: the uttermost edge of the world, far in the dim past, right after the war of the Olympians against the Titans. The demons Might and Violence, servants of Zeus, drag Prometheus on stage and force the unwilling Hephaistos to crucify him on a rock, driving an adamantine wedge right through his chest. (I imagine Prometheus was a dummy wearing a mask, and an actor inside the rock would speak through the mask.) Might taunts Prometheus, sneering that he doesn't live up to his name (Prometheus means "wise-before-the-event", or Foresight.) Prometheus does not respond, but after the others leave he laments his predicament, calling on the earth and wind and water to witness his pain. (He doesn't mention the sky, because Zeus who put him here is the lord of the sky.) He acknowledges, however, that he came to this pass knowingly, because unlike any of the gods he knows the future.
Most of the play is taken up with various people coming to see Prometheus and try to talk him into apologizing to Zeus: the daughters of Ocean (who make up the chorus), Ocean himself, the tormented wanderer Io, and finally Hermes. As Prometheus tells the story, Zeus planned to destroy humanity and create a better race in their place; Prometheus thought they deserved to live, and so he gave them fire and taught them how to plant crops and practice medicine. Interestingly, he says -- and his hearers agree -- that the best thing he did for humanity was to take away their ability to foresee their own deaths. Even when his hearers are sympathetic, as Ocean and his daughters are, they still rebuke Prometheus for being arrogant, and they argue that resignation to Zeus is the only path.
Prometheus remains defiant; he even maintains a sense of humor, though some of the translations don't bring that out. He tells the stories of other Titans who opposed Zeus, like Typhon and Atlas, who were all struck down by Zeus's lightning; after a while you realize that Prometheus is making the point that supreme power can't be opposed with violence, and the only good plan is to use cleverness. Prometheus is cast down, but he still has a weapon: he knows that Zeus is going to bed a woman who is fated to bring forth "a son greater than his father", and thus bring about his own overthrow. Only Prometheus can prevent this, and he won't do it until Zeus frees him.
The best scene is when the scornful Hermes arrives to tell Prometheus to come across with the name or else be punished even more harshly; Prometheus puts Hermes in his place, reminding him that Zeus is not the first nor the second ruler of the Universe Prometheus has seen, and he can fall just like his father and grandfather did. There's a great delivery when, after Prometheus cries out in pain, Hermes smugly says Zeus knows not that sound, and Prometheus darkly replies Time teaches all things. The play ends with Zeus's wrath casting Prometheus, still on his rock, down into Tartarus, "as far below Hades as Hades is below Heaven."
This was the first play in a trilogy; the others, now lost, were called Prometheus Unbound and Prometheus the Fire-Giver. A couple of my editions include all the surviving fragments of those plays, from which we know that the chorus of the second play consisted of freed Titans, and that Herakles and Mother Earth appear as characters.
One thing that stands out to me is that nowhere in the play do we get Zeus's side of the story. I think the second play must have shown the other side of the argument, maybe explaining why Zeus wanted to destroy humanity and why Prometheus wanted to preserve them. I think also that over the great span of time (the second play takes place tens of thousands of years after the first) we would see that Zeus, shown as young, brash, and tyrannical in this play, would grow in wisdom over time, symbolized by his reconciliation with Foresight (in the person of Prometheus) and the last play would end with Zeus emerging as a ruler not only powerful but just. I notice that in this play Zeus is called by the titles that emphasize his power -- astrapaios (lightning-striker), makaron prytanis (lord of the immortals), and so on -- but never by the titles that have to do with his role as a giver of justice, such as hikesios (protector of suppliants) or xenios (friend of the stranger).
I liked Browning's translation, which is in blank verse except when the characters are singing, which she represents with rhyme. (Rhyme wasn't used in Greek poetry, but their metric forms, which depend on the fact that Attic Greek was inflected, can't be represented in English, and the music is all lost anyway.) One thing I didn't care for though is that she represented Prometheus's yells of pain as Ahh, ahh, which to me sounds more like he was getting into a hot tub than being nailed to a boulder. Most translators just add a stage direction (there are no stage directions in the original) that says something like "Here Prometheus yells in pain." That's not a bad idea.
Eric Havelock's version is really off the wall. He read the whole play as an allegory, and instead of using the characters' names he calls them things like Controller, Executive, and Deputy, terms that don't appear in the Greek and make everything seem robotic. The Greek playwrights probably chose to write about one subject rather than another because real events set them thinking along those lines, but applicability isn't the same thing as allegory. Havelock tried to write the whole thing in rhyming verse, which only makes it more ridiculous. When Prometheus is listing the benefits he gave humanity, Havelock has him say

And now, my triumph intellectual!
Next I invent the count numerical,

...which makes him sound like the Major-General in Gilbert and Sullivan singing his patter-song, rather than a crucified Titan defying the gods.


The Crucifixion of Intellectual Man -- Eric A. Havelock

This was exactly as pretentious as you'd expect from the title. It's a book from the fifties all about how Real Thinkers are ostracized by society (I imagine Havelock coughing and pointing to himself.) I read it because his translation of Prometheus Bound makes up the second half, meant to illustrate his arguments from the first half. I say I read it, but in fact I just read the first couple chapters and skimmed the rest to get to the play, because I felt early on that I'd already gleaned as much of his argument as I needed to.


Philoktetes -- Sophokles

Odysseus arrives on the island of Lemnos in the company of Neoptolemos, son of Achilles, during the last year of the Trojan War. (Neoptolemos would only have been ten or eleven years old, but here Sophokles makes him an ephebe, a young man of eighteen or so.) Odysseus explains that ten years before, the Greeks marooned the archer Philoktetes here, because he'd been wounded in the foot by a serpent (after trespassing on a sacred shrine, apparently) and the Greeks were repelled by his constant shrieks of agony and the appalling smell of his incurable suppurating wound; they were also afraid of religious pollution, fearing that the company of a man so obviously god-cursed would be a bad omen. Now, however, Odysseus has captured a Trojan seer who has foretold that the war will end this summer if the Greeks are joined by Neoptolemos and Philoktetes, who bears the terrible bow of Herakles; it was Philoktetes who lit the pyre where Herakles burned himself to death, and Herakles gave him the bow in gratitude. So Odysseus has fetched Neoptolemos, and has now returned to Lemnos to get Philoktetes; but he doesn't want to show himself right away, since Philoktetes -- understandably pissed off about being abandoned on a desert island for ten years -- would probably just shoot him with one of Herakles's arrows, coated with the poison of the Hydra. So, as is his way, he's devised a plan: Neoptolemos will go find Philoktetes, and win his friendship by claiming to be an enemy of the Atreidae and of Odysseus; then wait for Philoktetes to collapse from pain, as he does periodically, and take the bow. Neoptolemos says he'd rather go attack Philoktetes to his face than deceive him with lies; Odysseus wearily answers I was young once too; but with age you will see there are other ways of valor. Reluctantly, Neoptolemos agrees, and he goes to find Philoktetes, who lives in a cave and survives by shooting birds with his bow; occasionally sailors stop by the island to take on water, but no one will take him away with them, for the same reasons the Greek army wouldn't.
Philoketes takes to Neoptolemos right away; Sophokles portrays him as a forthright, endearing young man, quite unlike his usual image as a raging, bloodthirsty brute. Philoktetes lets Neoptolemos take his bow, and then is consumed with frustrated rage as he finds out it was all a plan by Odysseus, who now comes on stage to tell him that he must come with them to Troy, willing or not. He furiously condemns Odysseus for his craftiness and deceit; Odysseus, rather in the tone of an adult talking to children he knows won't understand, answers

Where a kind of man is needed, I am that kind of man.
 If the times called for scrupulous men,
 you would find no one more upright and honest than I.
 But where victory is to be won, I will win it.

He explains about the prophecy, and adds his persuasions: the great healer Asklepios is at Troy, and he can heal Philoketes's wound; Philoktetes can win fame as the taker of Troy and return home healthy and rich with loot. Philoktetes angrily refuses. After a crisis of conscience, Neoptolemos repents and gives the bow back to Philoktetes, who immediately tries to kill Odysseus with it, but fails when Neoptolemos spoils his aim. Both Neoptolemos and the chorus rebuke Philoktetes for his pig-headed selfishness, choosing to remain nursing his pain and his grudge on Lemnos rather than being healed and winning fame as the hero of the Greeks, all because he can't bear to do anything that would help Odysseus and Agamemnon, whom he blames for all his woes, choosing to ignore his own responsibility for having violated the sacred shrine in the first place. Philoktetes replies that he would suffer anything at all rather than let his enemies laugh at him. Neoptolemos can't change his mind, and resigns himself to failure, when suddenly the deified Herakles appears and tells Philoktetes to stop being such a whiny bitch and get moving. This is really the only case in any of the surviving tragedies where an unresolvable problem is resolved by a god turning up to set everything right.
I think pretty clearly Sophokles wanted to say something about the short-sighted mulishness of people who refuse, out of spite, to act in their own best interests; but I wonder why he drew Neoptolemos so differently from the way he's portrayed in other sources. None of my editions go into that (I have four: Oxford Classics, the Focus translation by Seth Schein, the Loeb Classical edition in Greek, and a little two-staple stage-reading edition that I have no idea where I got it.) I wonder if it was some kind of topical allusion that we don't have the context for.


Elektra -- Sophokles

Elektra was Orestes's older sister; as Sophokles tells the story, it was Elektra who carried the child Orestes out of the house, sending him out of the country with his tutor, to save him from Aigisthos. As the play opens it's been ten years or so since the murder of Agamemnon, and Aigisthos rules in Mykenai, married to Klytamnaestra, and everyone pretends everything is fine, except Elektra. She won't go along with the status quo, in contrast to her sister, who privately tells Elektra that she hates the regime but goes along and does what she's told out of fear. Most of the play consists of various characters arguing with Elektra, urging her either kindly or sternly to give up mourning her father and acknowledge Aigisthos as the true king. Because she refuses, Elektra has to live like a servant, dressed in castoffs and fed on scraps, with no hope of escape -- Aigisthos will never allow her to marry, because he can't afford for her to have children. Her only hope is that someday Orestes will return; though when he does, they don't recognize each other at first. Orestes, having praised Elektra's uprightness, goes inside to kill their mother, then waits for Aigisthos to come home and seizes him to kill him too.
I have three translations of this: the Loeb Classical edition, a collected Sophokles by the University of Chicago professor David Grene, and the Oxford edition, translated by the poet Anne Carson. I liked Carson's best, partly because of the exclamations. In Greek tragedies there's generally a lot of yelling in grief or pain, sometimes off stage, sometimes on. Grene, feeling that the Greek exclamations didn't convey anything to moderns, translated them as Alas, or just Oh, which I think comes across as half-hearted. Since the characters aren't saying anything coherent, just yelling wordlessly, I think it makes more sense to leave the Greek originals. Carson agrees, writing them as AI, AOI, OTOTOI or O MOI MOI, which to me convey a booming, echoing feeling of wailing desperation.
I was amazed, though, that Grene, a deeply educated classicist, could be so completely wrong about the play. He describes Elektra as basically a non-person, someone so brutalized that she no longer has a real identity and only exists as a reflection of the other characters. The Oxford editor is much more in line with my own view, seeing Elektra as someone who, living in a society based on a lie, won't give up the truth, not for fear of punishment nor hope of reward. The editor quotes an observation by the late William Arrowsmith, who likens Elektra to a political radical: someone who strikes a tuning fork to sound the true note and won't let it be drowned out. I love that idea! It gives rise to a whole orchestral metaphor that now dominates how I think of the play: before a concert begins, the oboe sounds the A above middle C, for the rest of the orchestra to tune around. In this metaphor, Aigisthos is the oboe, and he's sounded a false note: this is a just state, my reign is not founded on treachery and murder, everything is normal. Everyone else goes along, tuning their voices to the false note, except Elektra, who insists on singing the true note.
This explains why everyone is so bothered by Elektra, and why they constantly try to change her mind rather than just ignore her: they feel the dissonance when her true note interferes with their false note, and hearing dissonance makes people feel uncomfortable and angry. They should be angry at themselves, but it's easier to be angry at Elektra, the more so because they know she's right. And of course Orestes does arrive and her patience is rewarded. I don't know if Sophokles was inspired to write this play by some specific event of his times, but I think he was drawing a general lesson that even a lone person, unable to fight against a powerful oppressor, can still resist by refusing to agree with the oppressor's false worldview. After all, if enough people acted like Elektra, Aigisthos would never have been able to hold the throne in the first place.


I Only Read It for the Cartoons -- Richard Gehr

A pretty readable history of cartooning in the New Yorker. The author laments that the New Yorker is the only remaining first-class magazine that still prints cartoons, and even there the current regime has cut back on the number of cartoons (to fit in more advertising) and now only prints cartoons that fit into certain defined square-inch limits on the page. The actual subjects are influenced by the taste of the cartoon editor; some buy office humor, some buy home-and-family humor. (They all buy cat cartoons, though.) There's a lot of detail about famous New Yorker cartoonists; I had never known that Gahan Wilson was the nephew of both William Jennings Bryan and P.T. Barnum! Imagine the holiday dinners?


The Bookshop of Yesterdays -- Amy Meyerson

A novel about a woman named Miranda, in her mid-twenties and living on the east coast, who unexpectedly inherits a book store on the west coast from her uncle, who was her adored hero until she was ten, when he had a falling-out with her parents and refused to ever see or speak to her again. Now that he's dead he's not only left her his book store, he's sent her the first of a long series of clues in an elaborate literary-themed puzzle to lead her to the very, very obvious conclusion that he was really her father and her "mother" is really her aunt. I didn't like it.


Number One Chinese Restaurant -- Lillian Li

I picked this up hoping for a running-a-restaurant novel, which I always like; but it turned out to be a family-quarrel story, with a bunch of unlikeable drunks and incompetents stabbing each other in the back over petty bullshit. I gave up after fifty pages or so.


Medea -- Euripides

This is one of the plays where we know the exact date: it was presented at the City Dionysia in the early summer of 431 BCE. The war with Sparta had not yet begun, and Euripides had leisure to think about other things. This is one case where I think we can guess with some confidence what led Euripides to pick this subject particularly. Twenty years before this, the Assembly had changed laws about citizenship: previously anyone with one Athenian parent was a citizen, but now people could only be citizens if both their parents were Athenian. This had shattering effects on families: any Athenian married to a non-citizen now had children that not only could never have full legal rights, they couldn't inherit property. So if a man wanted children to carry on his business and maintain the family's standing in the city's religious ceremonies and festivals, or even to preside at his funeral -- all of these were enormously important to the Greeks -- he would have to divorce his wife and marry an Athenian woman to have legitimate children. If he was a decent man he could maintain his former wife and children as metikoi (resident aliens) but they couldn't compel him to. This tore apart families and caused a lot of resentment and infighting. In 431 BCE the first generation affected by the new law was just turning twenty -- the age when people were allowed to bring cases before the Assembly -- and there was a flood of lawsuits.
It was against this background that Euripides decided to tell the story of an episode in the life of the hero Jason: after his famous voyage across the Black Sea, he brought the Argo back to Greece, bearing with him not only the Golden Fleece but also the sorceress Medea, daughter of the king of Kolkhis; to help Jason, Aphrodite caused Medea to fall in love with him so she would use her magic to help him overcome the impossible tasks her father set to prevent him from taking the Fleece. In return Jason married her, and together they had two children. Now, however, they have come to Corinth, where the king, Kreon (not the same Kreon who was Oedipus's brother-in-law) is willing to help Jason recover his kingdom of Iolchos (from which he was wrongly disinherited by his uncle, which was why he went off to get the Fleece in the first place) but to seal the alliance he wants Jason to marry his daughter Glauke. Medea is understandably pissed off, and when she hears that Kreon -- having heard about her angry reaction -- is planning on exiling her, for fear she'll use her magic against Glauke, she goes postal. When Jason arrives to consult her, she blows up and accuses him -- with good reason -- of ingratitude, since it was with her help that he won the Fleece and escaped with it; but now that he doesn't need her any more, he's forgotten all about her in order to run after someone else who has something he wants. He answers with realpolitik: Medea is not a Hellene, and her children cannot inherit the throne of Iolchos, while Glauke's children can. Medea and the children, he says, can continue to live with him; but Medea furiously counters that Glauke will be the "real" wife, and will have the management of the household, which would make Medea subordinate to her; plus Glauke will naturally favor her own children over Medea's. Jason is trying to treat Medea decently, but there's no denying that he's not willing to give up his dream of reclaiming the throne in order to live as a landless non-citizen with her.
Up until now Medea's anger has been wholly sympathetic, but now she lets her rage drive her beyond what's reasonable. She is no longer driven by authedia, justified anger, but menis, uncontrollable rage. Menis is a word usually used only for the wrath of gods; the only other place I can think of where it's used to describe a human is for Achilles in the Iliad. Medea pretends to agree to Jason's offer of support, but then brews a magic potion to kill both Glauke and Kreon. Then, in order to hurt Jason as much as possible, she stabs both of her own children to death and gloats over his horror. She even uses her magic to fly away with the bodies, just so Jason can't perform the death rites or hold a funeral. It's a really appalling ending, and the play finished dead last in the voting. According to an ancient scholiast, Euripides added the detail about Medea killing her children to the story. Maybe it was just to push the drama over the top, or maybe he was saying something about the effects the unfair inheritance legislation had on Athens. Either way it's really memorable. I have two copies, the Oxford Classics edition (more accurate and with lots of excellent supporting material) and the Oliver Taplin translation (more readable.)


*American Gothic -- Steven Biel

A book all about Grant Wood's famous painting, which the author says is probably the best-known and certainly the most parodied of all American paintings. Dad had a folder full of nothing but cartoons and parodies of the painting: there's a great New Yorker cartoon of the farmer and the woman walking out of the Chicago Art Institute on a weekend, and nearly a hundred others. I just yesterday saw one that showed the pitchfork lying on the ground and the man and woman looking out from the windows, self-quarantined. It's an easy target for parody because everyone recognizes it immediately. Wood was driving through Iowa during the depression and saw the house, which was the part he painted first, adding the figures later. Wood's sister posed for the woman; the man is his dentist. A lot of the book goes over the changing appreciation of the painting over time: initially seen as a criticism of the joyless Puritanism of middle America, it later came to be seen as a celebration of the resilience of the American spirit. All Wood ever said about the figures was that they were the sort of people he imagined living in a house like that; art students ever since have puzzled over who they are -- husband and wife, father and daughter, employer and servant? -- and what the relationship bewteen them is. I had never noticed, until this author mentioned it, that the pattern of the lace on the woman's dress is a miniature reproduction of the trim on the house, which to me seems to suggest a sense of being trapped. I enjoyed it.


Oedipus the King -- Sophokles

Probably the most famous Greek story. The title in Greek is Oidipous Tyrannos, which is hard to translate because "tyrant" has a different meaning in English than in Attic Greek. The significance is that Oedipus is a tyrannos -- a ruler who came to the throne through some method other than inheritance -- as opposed to a basileus, a ruler who inherited his place from his father. Oedipus rules in Thebes because the people acclaimed him king. He also married the widow of the previous king, which didn't hurt. (Except that it did, but I'm getting ahead of myself.)
This is the most tightly plotted of any of the surviving plays, laid out almost like a mystery novel. The people of Thebes come as suppliants, begging Oedipus to use his great intelligence to save Thebes from the plague that besets it, as he once saved them from the Sphinx. He tells them he has already sent his brother-in-law, Kreon, to Delphi to find an answer; even as he says it, Kreon returns, bearing the word of the oracle: Apollo is punishing Thebes for not avenging the murder of the previous king, Laios. The murderer, says the oracle, is in the city, and must be killed or exiled in order for the plague to be lifted. Oedipus begins an investigation into the killing, questioning witnesses and distinguishing between hearsay and direct evidence, very like a modern police show. He's misled because the sole survivor of Oedipus's fight with Laios and his men, upon his return to the city, lied about what happened, claiming that Laios was killed by a group of bandits, to make his running away seem less shameful. Oedipus finds that that man is still alive and orders him brought to the city. In the mean time he summons the prophet Tiresias to ask about the oracle's words. Tiresias knows the truth but has not spoken, since it would do more harm than good. Oedipus is relentless, though, and gets Tiresias to admit the truth: You are yourself the one you seek. To Oedipus this seems impossible, since he does not associate the man he met -- travelling modestly with few attendants -- with Laios the king, and in any case the witness said that Laios was killed by a band, not by one man alone. He concludes that Tiresias has some grudge against him and has spoken a false prophecy, maybe supported by Kreon, who would inherit the throne if Oedipus were exiled. In a fit of temper he orders Tiresias away and threatens to banish Kreon; his wife Jokasta, in making peace between them, brings out the story of how Oedipus was once told by the oracle that he would kill his father and have sex with his mother, and therefore never returned home to Corinth. When Jokasta  learns that Oedipus fought and killed a man and his servants who attacked him "at a place where three roads meet", she realizes the truth and pleads with Oedipus to abandon his search. Oedipus is committed to saving the city, though, so Jokasta silently exits to kill herself. Everything falls apart when the witness Oedipus called for arrives, just at the same time as a messenger from Corinth, who happens to be the shepherd who rescued the baby Oedipus when Laios exposed him on the mountainside to die (because of a prophecy that he would be killed by his own son) and brought him to Corinth, where he was adopted by the childless king and queen. When the witness admits that he lied and that Laios and his servants were killed by one man, Oedipus is overwhelmed by the sudden realization that he has not only killed his father but married his mother; he runs off stage to confront Jokasta, and finding her dead he lets out the most awful howl in the history of the theater -- an ancient scholiast says that the audience at Athens went white when they heard it -- and staggers back on stage, having torn out his own eyes.
I think Oedipus blinds himself not only because he's "seen too much" but because he didn't want to have to see his parents again (we know from Homer that the blind remain blind in the underworld.) That also explains why he didn't kill himself: he didn't want to have to face his father without time to steel himself to it.
I have four copies of this: the excellent Prentice Hall edition, the Loeb Classical edition in Greek, the Oxford Classics edition, and a no-frills paperback translation by Peter D. Arnett that I think was the one I used in college. Generally the editors debate the question of Oedipus's guilt or innocence. I agree with the Prentice Hall editor that Oedipus must be considered blameless; he killed Laios in self-defense, not knowing who he was, and he had never seen Jokasta and didn't know who she was either. Also the play goes out of its way to show Oedipus as a good and compassionate man: his first words are to call the Theban suppliants O tekna, "My children," and everything he does in the play is solely to uncover the truth in order to save Thebes, even when it becomes clear that the truth will be devastating to him personally.
The thing that's most troubling about the story is that the whole thing was caused by the god Apollo, apparently for no reason. It was Apollo who gave Laios the oracle that made him expose Oedipus to die; It was Apollo who gave Oedipus the oracle that made him turn away from Corinth and take the road toward Thebes, where he would meet Laios; it was Apollo who sent the Sphinx, who was the cause of Oedipus saving Thebes and being acclaimed king, thus leading to marrying his mother; it was Apollo who sent the plague to Thebes; and it was Apollo who gave Kreon the oracle that brought everything to light, a pyramid of self-fulfilling prophecies that destroyed three innocents. Sophokles was more conventionally religious than Euripides, but he clearly had some of the same theosophical doubts about the way the gods treat men.


The Library Book -- Susan Orlean

A book about the fire that destroyed the main branch of the Los Angeles Public Library in 1986. It follows two threads: the story of the fire itself and the story of the man accused of setting it (he wasn't convicted and he died in the nineties.) The case against him is murky; on the one hand he sometimes claimed he did it, but on the other hand he was a known liar and attention hound. He changed his story dozens of times. Arson is the most difficult of crimes to prove, and Orlean also mentions that in 1986 the standard for declaring a fire to be arson was essentially "the investigator's gut instinct." The fire itself was terrifying: the library was built in 1926, and could almost have been designed to maximize fire damage. Once the fire took hold, even firefighters in full gear could only stay in the building under a minute before having to rotate out. It got so hot that anything that could burn, burned: even the air caught fire! Almost a million books were destroyed, along with all kinds of irreplaceable collections. The books that didn't burn were soaked, and the city of LA got the port fisheries to let them put the books in their gigantic freezers to stop mold from growing -- once a book has mold it's unsalvageable. The books sat in the freezer for years while book preservers rigged up a machine that let them put soaked books in a vacuum chamber and squeeze the water out of them. I was surprised to learn that arson attempts are common at libraries; that's why book-return slots are separate from the main building, because people throw lit matches into them at night. One problem Orlean faced was that she looked for contemporary newspaper accounts of the fire, but could only find them in Russian; this was because the Chernobyl disaster happened on the same day, and every newspaper in the world used all its space for that -- except for Pravda, which didn't mention Chernobyl at all and so had plenty of room for the library fire. A really good book.   


Von Ryan's Express -- David Westheimer

An extraordinarily good thriller, a World War II prison-escape story. The author was a POW himself and there's a lot of authentic detail. The main character is Ryan, a hard-core Air Force martinet, who, after being shot down, arrives at a POW camp in Italy to find himself the ranking officer. The first half of the book tells the story of Ryan taking command of the slovenly, dispirited prisoners and recalling them to a sense of discipline, overcoming a lot of resistance to do it; the prisoners grumblingly nickname him "Von Ryan" for his uncompromising militarism. After Italy surrenders, the POWs are loaded on a train bound for a Nazi prison camp deep in Germany. Ryan decides to hijack the train and bring all the POWs to freedom in Switzerland; the second half of the book is the story of the train ride and the escape, really captivating. An excellent read.


*Microcosmographia Academia -- F.M. Cornford

A funny book from the turn of the last century, a Greek parody: it's what you'd get if Aristotle had written a treatise on academic office politics. I thought it was great.


*The Odes of Pindar -- C.M. Bowra (ed.)

A collection of the triumphal odes Pindar wrote for the victors of the various Greek games -- Pythian, Isthmian, Olympic. They're the only part of his work that's survived. Although they were written for specific occasions, he has a lot of room to work, and long digressions about the champion's ancestors or home city often turn into longer digressions about the nature of human life and how we should conduct ourselves, along with irrelevant asides taking nasty jabs at Pindar's rivals. A common theme is a warning against overrating human agency, reminding us that the outcomes of our life usually have more to do with chance than we want to believe. The writing is kind of tangled by modern standards, and I generally had to read each one several times before I really got it; but I find it pleasant that I can know the name of someone who won the Olympics in 446 BCE.


Plan B -- Chester Himes (sort of)

A posthumous book cobbled together out of fragments found among Himes's papers, kind of dishonestly presented as the last "Harlem Detectives" novel. There's a long introduction to this by a Himes scholar -- he was really highly regarded in France, and there are university classes on him there. The introduction talks a lot about where the inspiration for the story came from, but what it carefully doesn't say is "This is a mishmash of an unfinished novella from the eighties combined with two different abandoned stories from the sixties, plus a couple sketchy outlines for never-written stories that allowed us to drag in his most popular characters Grave Digger and Coffin Ed, all scabbed together by another guy after Himes died." It's a surreal race-war story, about what might happen if the racial anger in America boiled over into an actual shooting war. Himes would have handled it better; I would rather have read his actual novella, even unfinished, than this hodgepodge.


Oedipus at Kolonos -- Sophokles

This play deals with the end of Oedipus's life; it was probably the last play Sophokles finished, and it was produced posthumously by his grandson Sophokles the Younger. Kolonos is just outside Athens; it was Sophokles's native deme, and there was a sacred grove there dedicated to the Furies.
The blinded, footsore Oedipus arrives in Kolonos, led by his daughter Antigone, and rests on a stone; local villagers arrive and tell him he needs to move, because he's trespassing in the shrine of the Furies. Oedipus tells them they have fulfilled a prophecy, because Apollo has told him that when he reaches the shrine of the Furies it will be time for him to die. When the locals find out who he is, they debate driving him out, afraid of the ritual pollution he carries, but the inviolability of the sacred grove, plus the power and dignity of even the downfallen Oedipus, restrain them. He asks where he is, and what is the government -- monarchy or democracy? They answer that he is in Athens, ruled by Theseus. (Sophokles calls him king by will of the people, an invention that lets him pretend Athens has always "really" been a democracy.) Oedipus tells them to send for Theseus, since he has good news to tell him: the oracle has declared that whatever land holds Oedipus's tomb will be blessed. As the messenger leaves, Antigone's sister Ismene arrives, with news that civil war is impending in Thebes. Ismene has heard of the oracle, and more importantly so has Oedipus's brother-in-law Kreon, who exiled Oedipus years ago; he's on his way to seize Oedipus and bring him back. Theseus arrives, and it turns out he's heard the oracle too; Oedipus tells him that the presence of his tomb will defend Athens in a future war against Thebes. (In Sophokles's time, Athens and Thebes were bitter enemies.) Theseus protests that Athens and Thebes are friendly, and in a line widely-quoted in antiquity, Oedipus tells him Only the gods never age; all else Time crushes to nothing. Theseus welcomes Oedipus, telling him soberly I know I am only a man; I have no greater claim on tomorrow than you. He goes off stage to sacrifice to Poseidon; while he's gone Kreon arrives and seizes Ismene, to force Oedipus to return. The two have a long philosophical debate on the nature of guilt, the heart of the play, in which Oedipus argues that since he committed his crimes unknowingly, his behavior was not evil. (A lot of the ancient scholiasts objected to the play's argument because they didn't like a story where the hero suffers undeservedly; even Mary Renault, writing in the 1960s, couldn't bear it, and had her Oedipus say that he had actually known all along what he was doing.)
Kreon loses the argument, so he has his men seize Antigone too, only to be stopped by the return of Theseus, who makes what was surely a crowd-pleasing speech about how Thebes sucks compared to Athens: You have come now to a city that acknowledges Justice! Kreon slinks off, muttering threateningly, and you'd expect the play to be over, but then we get another episode where Polyneikes arrives as a suppliant to ask Oedipus to come to Thebes with him, since whichever side has Oedipus with them is bound to win. Oedipus rebukes his son for acquiescing in driving him from home and then never helping him in his exile, only thinking of him again when he needs help; he tells Polyneikes to abandon his war against his brother, and adds that if they do go to war he curses them both: You will inherit only just enough of my land to be buried in.
As Polyneikes exits, thunder booms from the clear sky, which Oedipus takes as a sign of his impending death. He and Theseus go off stage deep into the sacred grove, and Theseus returns alone, shaken, having seen a sight he won't describe.
This is I think the most mystical of the surviving tragedies; the death of Oedipus, with Theseus gnomically implying that he may have been physically translated to the afterlife, probably has a lot of (necessarily obscure) resonance with the Eleusinian Mysteries, which were kept so secret that we now have no knowledge of them. The play also contains a lengthy description of propitiatory sacrifices to the Furies and the gods of the underworld generally -- the most detailed such description we have, in fact -- which Sophokles would have known well, since he was a native of Kolonos, and an initiate of Eleusis, and a priest. (He was also the treasurer of Athens, by the way, and was twice elected as a general; the ancient Greeks had no conception whatever of a separation between society and the artist.)


Notes of a Young Black Chef -- Kwame Onwuachi with Joshua David Stein

The problem with writing an autobiography when you're 26 is that your career is still very much in progress and you're certainly using the book to promote your ongoing vision of yourself rather than tell a true story. I was hoping to get a view of what the heavily white and privileged fine-dining business looks like to a poor black man trying to work in it, how he was treated and what he got out of it. There was some of that, but not enough. Mostly it was about starting his first restaurant in DC, which failed after a few weeks, mostly because it had a fixed menu that was too expensive. Onwuachi talked about how he appeared on a reality cooking show during the run-up to the restaurant's opening, and how he wasn't really himself on the show but played an exaggerated "character" for the sake of the audience; he's clearly doing exactly the same thing with the book. It wasn't great.


*On Farming and Classics -- David Grene

Grene's autobiography. He divided his time between teaching Greek and Latin at the University of Chicago half the year, and running a small farm in Ireland the rest of the year. Naturally Dad loved it. It sounded like a pleasant life.


The Card -- Michael O'Keeffe and Teri Thompson

A middling book about a Honus Wagner baseball card issued over a hundred years ago, which is something of an obsession among collectors because few exist and fewer are still in good shape. I liked the parts about the "authentication" business that's sprung up around collectibles over the last twenty years. The authors point out that the agency owners have various vested interests in making sure a card gets a high rating (like because they owe the owner a favor, or because they own the card themselves, which they're not required to disclose), and none of the authentication agencies have any objectively measurable standards, so their rating comes down to "Because I say so." It's a sleazy business. The authors spend a lot of time arguing that a collector/authenticator artificially cleaned up a certain Wagner card to make it look better before sealing it in plastic (he did, I looked it up and he admitted it later after the book came out.) Doing that makes a card worth much less to collectors; there doesn't seem to be any good reason why, but one thing the book gets across is that collecting is an inherently irrational activity. Mostly it wasn't very interesting.


Andromache -- Euripides

Andromache was the wife of Hektor; after the fall of Troy, the Greeks threw her son Astyanax off the walls and gave her as a slave to Neoptolemos, the son of Achilles. Neoptolemos was a brutal, violent man: he killed Priam, the ancient king of Troy, as he knelt at the altar of Zeus for sanctuary, and this appalling impiety was one of the reasons for the sufferings of the Greeks on their return from Troy. The play opens some years later, with Andromache in a similar position: Neoptolemos, now married to Hermione, the daughter of Helen and Menelaos, has gone to the oracle at Delphi to ask why his marriage is childless. Andromache, who has had a son with Neoptolemos, fears that Hermione will connive at her murder while Neoptolemos is away, so she has sent her young son into hiding and has herself run for protection to the altar of Thetis, the sea-goddess who was the mother of Achilles. Andromache laments all her sorrows since the rape of Helen, and on cue Helen's daughter arrives: the play draws Hermione as an awful bitch, crowing over her beauty, wealth, and power and gloating at Andromache's misery and reduction to slavery. Menelaos soon enters as well, announcing that he has found out where Andromache's son is hidden and will now kill them both. Andromache is saved by a triple intervention: the goddess Thetis appears and tells everyone to calm the hell down with all the arguing in her sanctuary, and she causes her old boyfriend Peleus, king of Aegina and Achilles's father (and Neoptolemos's grandfather) to arrive and face down Menelaos. Then Orestes unexpectedly turns up with the news that Neoptolemos, at Delphi, arrogantly condemned Apollo for helping Paris kill Achilles, and Apollo struck him down for his presumption. With Neoptolemos dead, Orestes demands Menelaos live up to his old promise that Hermione should marry Orestes, and he takes her away, leaving Andromache and her son at peace in the household of Peleus. I only have one copy of this, the Oxford Classics edition, whose editor argues in the introduction for a performance date of around 425 BCE. If that's correct, then the character of Menelaos and Hermione in this play is probably a product of the recently-begun Peolponnesian War; Peleus makes a crowd-pleasing speech to the effect that only the brutal savages in Sparta would violate a sanctuary or plot the death of an infant, and showing the king of Sparta as a coward who talks big to a pleading woman but backs down when confronted by the elderly Peleus would also have gone over well in Athens.


*Dialogues of the Hetaiarai -- Lucian

A series of imagined short dialogues between Athenian prostitutes, from around the first century CE. It's a satire of high-minded philosophic dialogues, but it's also genuine and funny, showing the daily concerns of the women's lives, the gossip, the rivalries, the worries over paying the rent, the small quarrels over fabrics and cheeses. I liked it a lot.


Agamemnon -- Aischylos

I wrote my senior thesis on the Orestes plays of Aischylos, of which this is the first. In college I relied on the excellent Prentice-Hall scholarly edition, translated by Hugh Lloyd-Jones, which only has two or three lines of text on each page because all the rest of the space is taken up with footnotes. Since then I've accumulated the Penguin edition (Robert Fagles), Dad's two-volume set (David Grene), the Loeb Classical edition in Greek, Gilbert Murray's rhymed-couplets translation, and Ted Hughes's free-verse translation.
This is a hero's-return story, Agamemnon returning from winning the Trojan War and immediately getting murdered by his wife Klytamnaestra. It's the end of Agamemnon's story, but the beginning of his children's. The whole trilogy is concerned with justice and the righteousness of blood feuds; I think Aischylos was arguing that the institution of courts and state control of crime and punishment is necessary because it's not human nature to be restrained in revenge. Klytamnaestra had a legitimate grievance against Agamemnon, because he had killed their daughter Iphigeneia by sacrificing her to Artemis at Aulis, and if she had just killed Agamemnon she would have been within her rights, as the ancients looked at it. But she overreached herself: she struck the body a third time after he was already dead (this is actually blasphemous, since at a sacrifice the "third offering" was for Zeus); she mutilated the body; and she refused to let her daughter perform the funeral rites. Also her grudge against Agamemnon didn't justify exiling her own son so she could make her lover the king, or murdering Kassandra, whom Agamemnon had brought back as a slave.
The chorus is really evocative in this play; they get really eloquent when condemning Paris and Helen for starting the Trojan War. The hel element in her name can mean "destruction", and the chorus curses her as helenas helenandros heleptopolis, "death of men, death of ships, death of cities."
Agamemnon appears in only one scene, speaking first at line 810 and exiting at line 974, meaning he appears in fewer than 200 lines out of 1600. Aischylos seems more interested in Kassandra, whose scene with the chorus after Agamemnon and Klytamnaestra have exited makes up almost half the play. Kassandra, who knows the future and the past, retells the history of the whole family, from Agamemnon and his father Atreus back through their ancestors Pelops and Tantalos: all of them guilty of kin-murder and blasphemy. She foretells that both she and Agamemnon will soon be killed, and with her second sight she sees the Furies perched all along the roof of the house, like vultures; she cries out against them, but none of the chorus can understand her, that being the second part of Apollo's curse. It's a great scene, ending powerfully with Kassandra pulling off her ceremonial robe and stamping the wreath and wand of her priestesshood into the dirt before proudly walking into the house to be murdered.


Sitting It Out -- David Westheimer

A prison memoir. Westheimer was a USAF pilot who was shot down in 1942 and spent the rest of the war as a POW, first in Italy and later in Germany. The chief thing he remembered was how heavily the time hung on their hands. They would stretch out chores to make them take longer; when he repaired his uniforms, if an inch of it looked like he hadn't sewed it with a machine, he'd unstitch it all and do it again. Also they were always hungry. You know how when you're cooking, you occasionally taste a spoonful to see how it's coming along? In the camp they had a strict rotation so everyone took it in turn to be the taster, and so get an extra spoonful. Comparing the two camps, Westheimer said that the German guards were more bribable than the Italians, but also more cruel -- they would fire their rifles into the camp at random times, for example, or line the Russian prisoners up at their bunks and then loose the guard dogs on them. Though they stopped doing that after the Russians killed the dogs and ate them. When the prisoners were moved to Germany, Westheimer carefully destroyed any part of his papers or uniform that might give away that he was Jewish, and often sweated over whether he'd missed anything. It was a good book, but naturally when so much of it is about dealing with boredom it can't help dragging occasionally.


Hekuba -- Euripides

The Greek army, on its way home from Troy, has stopped over on the coast of Thrace to raise a tomb for Achilles. Living in their encampment is Hekuba, former queen of Troy, now a camp slave. Of her many children, ony three survive: her daughter Kassandra, now a slave in Agamemnon's household; her daughter Polyxena, who is with her in the encampment; and her son Polydoros, whom Priam sent out of the city to stay with his friend Polymestor, king of Thrace. The play is divided into two main actions. In the first half, Odysseus comes to tell Hekuba that, because of a vision, the Greeks are going to sacrifice Polyxena at Achilles's grave. Hekuba pleads with Odysseus (referring to a shared history between them that must take place in sources now lost) but Odysseus advises her to make peace with fate. (Odysseus is a distinctly worse person in Euripides than in other sources, and I've wondered if Euripides was using him to criticize some public figure of the time, drawing a comparison that we don't understand but his audience would.) Polyxena is taken off stage, and later Agamemnon arrives to give Hekuba the cold comfort of telling her how her daughter died nobly. She's hardly had time to mourn when a messenger arrives to tell her that her son's body has just washed up on shore; Polymestor, now that Troy has fallen, has murdered Polydoros and thrown his body in the sea, in order to seize the Trojan treasure Polydoros had brought with him. The second half of the play now begins, with Hekuba demanding that Agamemnon help her take revenge on Polymestor in the name of justice. Agamemnon -- who is always portrayed as a vacillating and uncertain man in Euripides -- just wants to get things over and go home, and is unwilling to start another war in Thrace right after ten years of fighting in Troy, so he just tells Hekuba to take her own vengeance and he won't interfere. Hekuba tells the messenger to keep her son's death secret so she can pretend not to know about it, then lures Polymestor to the encampment with the promise of telling him where Troy's secret stashes of treasure are hidden. He goes offstage into her tent, where Hekuba and her fellow slaves kill his two sons and stab him in the eyes. He re-enters blinded, and demands that Agamemnon (who has returned, drawn by all the shouting) kill Hekuba, as a wrongdoer. In a very Greek move, Agamemnon convenes a battlefield trial. Polymestor argues surprisingly coherently, considering he's only just had his eyes cut out, that he killed Polydoros out of friendship for the Greeks, because he was the last heir of Troy, and Hekuba isn't justified in avenging a killing done for reasons of state. Hekuba points out that Polymestor has not delivered Polydoros's treasure to the Greeks, which shows he murdered him for gain. Agamemnon declares that justice has been done and packs everything up to sail for home, leaving Polymestor cursing. This is a pretty unusual story in that it's the only Greek story I can think of that shows wronged women taking direct revenge by personally killing their enemies, and presents this as an admirable thing. Every other Greek woman who kills anyone is shown as a villain.


The Moons of Jupiter -- Alice Munro

A short-story collection from the early eighties. A lot of them deal with the problems of middle age, when your relationships with your parents and your children both change dramatically. The title story is about a woman named Janet, who has come to Toronto to be with her father while he dies; she's staying in the apartment of her younger daughter, who's away on vacation, and thinking about her older daughter, who left years ago and doesn't communicate with the family. She's trying to make peace with her father's decision not to have surgery that could extend his life by a few months; but when he tells her he's changed his mind and decided on the surgery after all, she becomes anxious about the risks of the surgery. She wanders into a planetarium and sits through a lecture to try to distract herself. She's struck by the presenter's story about how our picture of the solar system is constantly changing based on new observations, and how even a simple fact -- how many moons does Jupiter have? -- can be replaced by new information. She comes back to the hospital more resigned to the fact that her father and daughter make their decisions for themselves, not for her, and sits down to have what may be their last conversation, about the moons of Jupiter. Some of the others were more light-hearted -- a couple stories about a woman's memories of her aunts' visits to her mother when she was a girl; a man driving two women home from an academic conference in silent embarrassment as the women argue about love and sex; two women in a nursing home getting into jealous arguments about who's going to get along better with a new arrival. In "Prue", she describes the main character with a paragraph that could describe herself: "She presents her life in anecdotes, and though it is the point of most of her anecdotes that hopes are dashed, dreams ridiculed, things never turn out as expected, everything is altered in a bizarre way and there is no explanation ever, people always feel cheered up after listening to her." I liked that so much I wrote it down so I wouldn't forget it.


Unbowed -- Wangari Maathai

Maathai's autobiography. She won the Nobel Peace Prize in the early 2000s for her work founding the Green Belt movement, which began as a campaign to plant trees to fight deforestation and eventually turned into a larger movement to end inter-tribal violence in Kenya and promote democracy. She was arrested numerous times under the Moi regime, but eventually the internal and external pressure she helped orchestrate forced Moi to end the one-party system in the nineties. The regime retained power with a 30% mandate by promoting tribal conflict; Maathai founded a political party that didn't run anyone for any office, but instead tried to get all the opposition parties to put aside their differences. They finally succeeded in 2002, ousting Moi in the first Kenyan election that international observers rated "free and fair". The writing drags in places, but it's still pretty good.


The American Plague -- Molly Caldwell Crosby

An excellent book about yellow fever and the careers of some pioneering doctors: Carlos Finlay, who realized that a certain species of mosquito was the vector for yellow fever, and Walter Reed, who designed the experiments that proved Finlay right. Reed and his colleagues experimented on themselves and also on volunteers from the US Army base in Cuba where they did their work. Unusually for their time, they told the volunteers what they were doing and what the risks were. The experiments involved placing a glass jar full of infected mosquitoes on the skin and allowing them to bite, which must have taken tremendous nerve. Several of the patients and doctors died, including Reed's chief assistant, which weighed on him. It was a gripping story; most of it read like a thriller, only slowed down by episodes about bureaucratic interference and depressing stories about colleagues who tried to discredit Reed and take the credit for themselves after he died of appendicitis in 1902. I enjoyed it.


Pounding Nails In the Floor With My Forehead -- Eric Bogosian

A series of monologues, alternatingly angry, funny, and puzzled. I saw Bogosian do it on stage at the ART in the late nineties; I'm not sure what reading the book cold would be like, since I read the whole thing with Bogosian's powerful performance echoing in my mind.


The Evil Garden -- Edward Gorey

A book about a phlegmatic Edwardian family going for a stroll in a public garden, apparently unsurprised by the bears, poisonous fumes, and carnivorous plants that gradually kill them all. The art really complements the text. I really liked the picture of a man in a sweater and straw hat standing calmly as a boa constrictor envelops him: Great-uncle Franz, beside the lake, is being strangled by a snake. It was great.


Wit -- Margaret Edson

A play set in a hospital ward where the main character is dying of cancer. She's a college professor who taught classic literature; she was the sort of teacher who's proud of giving most of her students failing grades. Over the course of the play, as her last visitors come and go, she wonders about how she got to be that way, and whether her deep contempt of popular fiction was really merited. That sounds simplistic but I found it gripping.


The Libation Bearers -- Aischylos

The second Orestes play, the revenge part of the story. It's set at Agamemnon's grave, which Orestes and his sister Elektra are both visiting for the first time. Orestes arrives secretly, with only his friend Pylades, having been told by Apollo to avenge his father through stealth rather than by raising an army. Elektra comes with a chorus of libation bearers, bringing ritual offerings to Agamemnon, the first to be brought in the ten years or so since his death. The reason behind the change is that Klytamnaestra has had a nightmare vision of her own death, and hopes to propitiate her husband's spirit by giving him the withheld offerings; but she doesn't dare face Agamemnon's grave herself, so she's allowed Elektra out of confinement to bring the libations. Elektra sees footprints near the mound and realizes that some brave man has defied Aigisthos to honor Agamemnon; Orestes emerges and there's a recognition scene.
The whole middle third of the play is an eerie invocation of the dead, as Orestes and Elektra pour out the offerings and cry out for Agamemnon's ghost to return and help them. At one point they both kneel and pound on the earthen grave-mound with their fists, which must have been terrifying to a Greek audience.
Orestes goes from the grave to his mother's house, posing as a stranger from Phokis, bringing the news that Orestes has died. After the initial shock, Klytamnaestra is elated, and invites him in for a victory feast, sending a messenger to Aigisthos with the good news. Unusually, the chorus intervenes directly, telling the messenger to tell Aigisthos to come alone. He does, and Orestes reveals himself and kills him. This leads to a scene of tremendous drama, Orestes facing his mother over the dead Aigisthos, determined on revenge but daunted by the impiety of it. At this point Pylades speaks for the only time, reminding Orestes that Apollo has ordered this killing, and that to refuse is to defy Heaven. Make all mankind your enemy, rather than the gods. It's such a powerful speech, in only three lines, that I'm inclined to think that "Pylades" is really Apollo himself in disguise.
Orestes kills Klytamnaestra, wrapping her in the same shroud she threw over Agamemnon to trap him (she'd kept it hanging up as a trophy.) The Argives gather and cheer the overthrow and the return of the true heir, but Orestes, in solving the problem of the first play, has created another: he sees the avenging Furies coming after him for spilling his own family's blood, and flees the stage in terror, ending the play in medias res.


Pilgrim at Tinker Creek -- Annie Dillard

A really interesting book, sort of a nature book and sort of an exploration of theodicy, the attempt to vindicate God from the presence of evil in the world. It's a narration of a year spent living by a creek in the Blue Ridge Mountains. It must be partly fictional: the narrator seems to live entirely alone and never mentions any other people at all, and also apparently has nothing at all to do the whole year except sit and look at the creek. Though the book was written when Dillard was in her mid-twenties, the narrator's voice sounds a lot older and more tired to me. If I didn't know I'd say it was written by someone in their fifties. Near the beginning of the book the narrator, watching a frog in the creek, suddenly realizes that the frog is dying -- a water bug has fastened on to it and has injected a liquefying poison so it can suck out the frog's insides, leaving a deflated skin behind. It's a horrible sight, and leaves the narrator reflecting that you can't spend more than a few minutes watching the way insects live without starting to doubt the goodness of God. The whole book is about that, really, attempting to reconcile her immanent sense of God's goodness with the visible cruelty of the world. There's a really arresting description of a mystical experience she had, when she was looking at a cedar tree and it suddenly shone with fiery lights without being consumed -- very like Moses and the burning bush, though she doesn't say that. The vision soon faded, but ever since then the image of "the tree with the lights in it" has stayed with her.
My edition has a 25th-anniversary afterword where she recalls the strange experience of becoming a literary celebrity. I liked the story she told about some young magazine writer interviewing her, who clearly hadn't grasped the book's metaphysical underpinnings:
WRITER: I notice you mention Eskimos a lot, in a book set in Virginia. Why are they important to you?
DILLARD: Well, I think the vast silence of the tundra brings to my mind the thought of the soul emptying itself in preparation for experiencing the presence of God.
(Long, long pause)
WRITER: I don't think my editor will go for that.


Notes of a Crocodile -- Qiu Miaojin

A Taiwanese novel written the year before Qiu killed herself at age 26, almost certainly due to the pressures of being an open lesbian in Chinese society. Half of it is a story about a crocodile wearing a human suit and musing on human society, where everyone has powerful opinions about crocodiles even though most of them have never met one, and never even realize that the person in the suit is actually a crocodile. The other half is the story of the unnamed narrator, a college student whose friends nickname her Lazi; this may be a phonetic pronunciation of the word "lesbian", and in fact I've read that it's now a popular nickname among Chinese-speaking queers because of this book. Lazi's story is told in a patchwork of narration, letters, diary entries, and fourth-wall addresses to the reader, in no sort of order; it covers a couple years at college, with her unhealthy crush on an older woman and the support she gets from her small circle of lesbian and asexual friends. It was a somewhat chaotic book, but I liked it a lot.


The Sting of the Wild -- Justin O. Schmidt

Schmidt is an entomologist who specializes in the Hymenoptera, which includes nearly all the stinging and biting insects. He's been stung by just about every one of them, and as a hobby he maintains a "Pain Index" that rates insects according to how painful their sting or bite is. He describes each one's initial impact, duration, and crescendo of pain, as if he were writing a wine list: "hot and smoky", for example, or "imagine W.C. Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue", or "like a migraine but in the tip of your finger." (For the record, the top of the index is the bite of the bullet ant, which he describes as "pure, intense, brilliant pain...like walking over flaming charcoal with a three-inch nail embedded in your heel.") The index is just an appendix; mostly the book is all about the behavior of stinging and biting insects, and non-stinging insects that imitate their stinging cousins for camouflage. One of the reasons stings can hurt so much is that the insects have colossally powerful muscles around their venom sacs, basically to make sure they can inject all of their venom before the victim can escape. I've always wondered why venom that causes so much pain doesn't also cause tissue damage; the answer is that the peptides that make up the venom act mainly on central nervous system communication, causing your nerves to register pain far out of proportion to the volume of the venom. I really enjoyed it.


A Tomb For Boris Davidovich -- Danilo Kiš

A Yugoslavian short story collection from the seventies, generally on the theme of betrayal and deception. The main characters are mostly idealistic revolutionaries who are either condemned by the party, or else become corrupted: a tailor commits a brutal murder on the say-so of a party official; a soldier fighting the Fascists in Spain is broken for criticizing the Soviets; a poet's work is suppressed because the censor imagines he sees anti-communist imagery. The title story is about a hero of the revolution now imprisoned and awaiting his show-trial, arguing with his interrogator about the role of truth in history. They were pretty good.


The Obelisk Gate -- N.K. Jemisin

The sequel to The Fifth Season. Is it a sequel if it picks up right where the last one left off? I'm not sure. Anyway, we get three narratives again, one from Essun's point of view, one from her missing daughter Nassun, and one from Schaffa, one of the slave-drivers of the now-destroyed continental civilization, whose job was keeping the orogenes (people like Essun who have the power to control seismic events) in line. Schaffa was the one who led the attack on the island where Essun and Alabaster were hiding, and he was badly hurt during their escape; he's suffered some brain damage and memory loss, and the mechanism in his spinal column that allows an outside entity to control his actions (hinted at in the first book, confirmed now) doesn't work as well as before. Nassun's story begins the same day as Essun's did: the day she walked into the living room to find that her father had beaten her baby brother to death after discovering he had orogenic powers; she has those powers too, and her father sets out with her to find a place he's heard of where orogenes can be "cured". Over time Nassun's traumatized paralysis turns into a determination to learn to use her powers as well as possible. Meanwhile, in the secret community she found in the last book (a titanic underground geode called Castrima), Essun is getting some explanations from Alabaster: he used his powers to rip open the continent so that an orogene can harness the released geological energy and use the orbiting obelisks to recapture the Moon. Then he has to explain to her what the Moon is; it turns out that some cataclysmic event changed its orbit to a huge ellipse, so that it now only approaches the Earth every few thousand years, which is related to the enormously chaotic tectonic events of the last several tens of thousands of years. Alabaster thinks that recapturing the Moon will stabilize the system and end the Seasons. Essun remembers the folk story that Father Earth hates humanity because they stole his only child, and realizes what it means. The problem is that Alabaster, pushed beyond himself by the effort of using the obelisks to crack the Earth, is dying, and Essun will have to be the one to capture the Moon. The action of Essun's narrative is understanding all of this, plus fighting off an army from a surviving city that's besieging Castrima for its resources. Meanwhile Nassun and her father, to the south, come to what was once a sort of backup school for training slave-orogenes; Schaffa arrives soon after and -- in a confusing welter of what he wants and what the thing half-controlling him wants -- kills the teachers and tells Nassun he's there to protect her. In a neat piece of symmetry, Essun destroys both the entire invading army and the city it came from in a terrifying display of the obelisks' power, while at about the same time Nassun's father tries to kill her and she uses her nascent power to turn him to glass and shatter him, setting the stage for Essun and Nassun to meet at cross purposes in the third book. It was absorbing.


A Covert Affair -- Jennet Conant

This whole book is one big bait-and-switch. It purports to be a book about Julia Child's work for the OSS during the war and the CIA afterwards; but in fact it's a book about a different OSS agent, Jane Foster, who was later accused of being a Soviet double agent, though she was never tried for it. Conant uses the fact that Foster knew Julia's husband Paul in the OSS, and that the Childs occasionally saw her socially after the war, to plaster the Childs on the book's cover and even mention "JULIA CHILD" in the subtitle, although Julia hardly appears in the book at all and when she does it's not important to the book's story. It really annoyed me. Conant may as well have titled it "I know no one cares about this forgotten painter who may or may not have been a Soviet spy, so I'll just pretend my book is about something else entirely."


The Eumenides -- Aischylos

The third Orestes play, and the conclusion of the trilogy. We open at the shrine at Delphi, where Orestes has been ritually cleansed of blood-guilt by the god Apollo; Apollo has also caused the Furies that pursue Orestes to fall into a deep sleep. He tells Orestes to go to Athens. After they exit, the ghost of Orestes's mother Klytamnaestra enters and wakes the Furies, demanding that they continue their pursuit of her son. The Furies angrily rebuke Apollo for interfering with their prerogatives, but he shouts them down and kicks them out. They cast about for Orestes's trail and head off for Athens, where they find him clinging for protection to the statue of the goddess Athena. They demand his surrender, and he refuses, citing his cleansing at Delphi; they don't accept this, and to lure him out of the altar's protection they sing a Binding-Song, clearly a magic spell, which I bet was really terrifying to an audience that believed unquestioningly in such things. The appearance of Athena stops their song, and after hearing what each has to say for themselves she convenes a trial, with herself as judge and a panel of Athenians as the jury, with the Furies as the prosecutor and Orestes defending himself with Apollo as a witness. It's apparent that neither side is really sure of its legal ground; Apollo delicately offers a bribe, while the Furies threaten to devastate Athens if they don't get their way. In the end the jury is tied, and Athena casts the deciding vote, announcing that the Furies' obdurate insistence on the letter of the law unjustly ignores Orestes's obviously unique circumstances. (Aischylos, in a Just-So-Story aside, makes this the origin of the Athenian rule that when a jury was deadlocked, the defendant was acquitted.) Apollo and Orestes exit triumphantly, leaving Athena to deal with the Furies' wrath: she tactfully reminds them that she could destroy them with her father's lightning, and offers instead to command the Athenians to build a shrine to the Furies, where their role as defenders of familial obligation will always be honored. They agree, and go off singing praise of Athens, where the capricious chaos of the blood feud has been replaced by the certainty of the law.


*The Garden of Heaven -- Hafiz

A collection of Persian poems from the fourteenth century, by the great Sufi poet known as Hafiz. They're generally on the themes of disappointment, both romantic and religious, and the drowning of sorrow in sensual pleasure (which, in the Sufi tradition, had a double meaning indicating ecstasy in the perception of God.) I've read that they're very moving and beautiful in Persian, but I found this translation kind of flat.


I'd Die For You -- F. Scott Fitzgerald

A collection of unpublished stories, mostly from the end of his career. The editor really tried to sell the idea that the stories were all rejected by the magazines for being too dark and ahead of their time, but having read them I'm sure they were rejected because they aren't that good. They have occasional good scenes, but they were almost all written in the late thirties when Fitzgerald was drinking himself into the hospital. The exception is one he wrote in 1921 or so, a really funny satire on the publishing industry. (Unsurprisingly his publisher didn't like it and Fitzgerald put it in a drawer and apparently forgot about it.)


*The Birth of Tragedy -- Friedrich Nietzsche

An oddball book that's really more about the young Nietzsche's obsession with Wagner than it is about Greek tragedy. Nietzsche draws a distinction in art between the Dionysian (disorder and irrationality) and the Apollonian (order and rationality) and says that most art is destroyed by the conflict between them. He speaks as if Dionysos and Apollo were real entities, which I understand is a dramatic convention but it was still weird. He argues that Athenian tragedy was the highest form of art (remember that the original performances were set to now-lost music and involved dances) because it seamlessly blends Apollo and Dionysos without invalidating either. Fine, well done, says you; but it becomes evident that Nietzsche is only bringing it up because he wants to argue that European opera is the rebirth of Athenian tragedy, and that Richard Wagner is therefore the greatest artist ever. Many scholars think that Nietzsche was a closeted homosexual, and I'd say this book is evidence in their favor. (Wagner despised Nietzsche, by the way, and told people that Nietzsche's mental problems were a symptom of "excessive masturbation". I don't know if he was counting the writing of this book, but he could have.)


The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao -- Junot Diaz

A depressing novel about a nerd named Oscar, narrated by Oscar's sister's boyfriend, Yunior. Oscar is a parody of a nerd: fat, graceless, self-absorbed, obnoxious, the sort of person everyone avoids. His life is clearly filled with yearning, but the only facet of that that Yunior recognizes is his obsession with girls. Yunior's idea, of course, is to fix Oscar by making him more normal: work out, study less, stop reading comic books. Oscar attempts suicide during college and later goes about it more thoroughly by spending a month creepily stalking a woman in the Dominican Republic until her boyfriend's thugs kill him. I didn't like it. Even if a make-fun-of-the-smart-kids story wins the Pulitzer, it's still a make-fun-of-the-smart-kids story.


Where Nobody Knows Your Name -- John Feinstein

A book about life in the minor leagues. It was all right. Feinstein follows the stories of nine minor leaguers in triple-A ball during the 2012 season; all nine are former major leaguers trying to make it back. They were sent down for various reasons: injuries, mostly, or loss of control (pitchers) or hand-eye coordination (batters). Of course if you asked them, every one of them would say it was bad luck or that they just never got a chance. It's less interesting than it could be, because reading it in 2019 I know that none of the nine ever made it back to the majors, and that a couple of them were domestic abusers, which Feinstein either didn't know or (like baseball itself) chose to ignore.


The Unincorporated Man -- Dani Kollin and Eytan Kollin

I got about half way through this and quit. It's a sort of libertarian Utopia story, set a few hundred years from now after society collapsed and was rebuilt on libertarian principles. The plot involves the discovery of a cryogenic capsule containing the book's Mary-Sue hero, a tech billionaire who froze himself before the collapse and now needs to come to terms with the new world. Fortunately he's a perfect human being who easily masters all the details of future society. In this future everyone is assigned a labor contract at birth, which is traded on a stock market, and no one has any say in their own lives unless they've managed to work long enough or get lucky enough to buy a majority of their own contract. Everyone approves of this arrangement because it's good Utilitarian logic, of course. As usual with polemic stories, every single person in the far future is intimately familiar with every detail of our time, for some reason. Taxes haven't existed for centuries, yet people gasp and shrink in horror when someone says the word "taxman". Also the authors can't seem to decide whether society collapsed because of the flaws of social democracy or because people developed a dependency on VR technology. I could go on, but my point is that the book's imagined future doesn't reflect the way actual people actually behave. I couldn't finish it.


*The Sweet Cheat Gone -- Marcel Proust

The sixth volume of Remembrance of Things Past. Most of it is taken up with the narrator's anguish after finding that Albertine has left him. He lies around the apartment miserably, writing arrogant letters intended to show her that he doesn't care at all that she's gone. He soon hears she's been killed in an accident, and is devastated anew; I did wonder if that was just a story the narrator made up so he could pretend she would have come back to him eventually if she hadn't died. He decides the best way to deal with his grief is to pay spies to run around and dig up everything that can possibly be dug up about Albertine, and since he's already convinced that what they'll tell him is that she was a confirmed wanton who had lesbian affairs with every woman in France every second she was out of his sight, laughing at him all the time, that's what he gathers from their reports, although in fact the reports don't show anything in particular. He goes off on a long visit to Venice with his mother -- the same visit he kept putting off because he couldn't stand to leave Albertine unwatched -- and meets his childhood sweetheart Gilberte Swann again; her mother Odette has remarried since Swann's death and Gilberte uses her stepfather's name, both to pretend she's not Jewish and to pretend she was born an aristocrat. The narrator and Gilberte may start an affair, or I may be reading too much into it. In any case the narrator is surprised to find that Gilberte is soon to marry his friend Saint-Loup, and doubly surprised to hear that Saint-Loup is homosexual; although it's clear that the rumors that swirl around Paris society are mostly lies, so it's possible the narrator just wants to believe that, especially if he's a closeted homosexual himself, as I think he is. The problem is that once I've become convinced that the narrator is both a liar and a self-deceiver, I can't decide how seriously I can take anything he says. I thought about giving up here, but a certain we've-come-too-far feeling made me resolve to read the last book.


The Frogs -- Aristophanes

An excellent comedy from the last years of the fifth century BCE. The god Dionysos, upset at the terrible state of affairs in Greece after thirty years of internecine war, decides to go to the underworld and bring back Euripides to put some heart into the people. Aristophanes portrays Dionysus as a shameless coward; at one point he runs into the audience begging his own high priest (who sat in the front row) to protect him, which must have gotten a big laugh. The first half of the play is the journey to Hades: Dionysus stops by Herakles's house to ask directions, since Herakles has been to Hades on one of his labors, and then crosses the Styx, comically terrified of the croaking chorus of frogs who surround his boat, calling out brek-kek-kek kek! Once in the underworld, he finds that the chair of Excellence In Poetry is actually occupied by Aischylos, and he decides to hold a trial to determine which poet he should bring back. The whole second half of the play is taken up with the poetic battle between Aischylos and Euripides: Euripides mocks Aischylos for his grand solemnity, poking fun at the way so many of his plays begin with the main character sitting in dignified silence and leaving the audience to wonder what's going on; while Aischylos criticizes Euripides's repetitive meter, pointing out that the key line in most of his speeches always follows the rhythm of the phrase "I lost my little bottle of oil". (Greek poetry didn't use rhyme, and the metric patterns were all-important.) This makes for a great running gag, as every time Euripides quotes one of his own speeches Aischylos always jumps in at the critical point with "...I lost my little bottle of oil." It's the sort of joke that I bet got funnier every time he did it; by the fourth or fifth time the audience must have been busting a gut. It's not all literary criticism, though; more practically, Dionysos wants to know what advice the poets would give to the current generation for dealing with the dire straits they find themselves in, particularly on the question of recalling the exiled general Alkibiades (Aischylos is for it, Euripides against.) Aischylos makes a strong speech arguing that Athens should recall the exiles who took part in the oligarchic rebellion against the democratic government six years previously, since the Athenians need all the help they can get, and in general concentrate on patching things up in Greece so they can better defend against the real enemy, Persia. This was so well received that The Frogs not only won first prize, Aristophanes was awarded an olive wreath and a pension from the city, and the play was put on again the following year, a unique honor. In the end Dionysos declares Aischylos the victor and returns with him to the surface, leaving the chair of Excellence In Poetry to Sophokles, with instructions to keep Euripides away from it. (Sophokles died just before the festival in 405 BCE, after the play was written but before it was put on, so Aristophanes only had time to write in a quick reference to him.) I have four copies: Penguin Classics, which is strong on the literary duel but glosses over the vulgarity so much it's practically bowdlerized; the Focus translation by Jeffrey Henderson, which is serviceable and has excellent footnotes; the Mentor translation by Richmond Lattimore, which is the funniest one and doesn't pull any punches with the dirty jokes; and an old copy from a hundred years ago that Dad picked up somewhere, a student edition with blank trace-paper after every page for taking notes, heavily used by a student in the 1920s with exceptionally neat handwriting who apparently had a very conscientious teacher who was full of topical explanations. It made good reading.


*Twentieth-Century Interpretations of The Frogs -- David J. Littlefield, ed.

A collection of scholarly essays on The Frogs. Some were good, some were dull. Worth reading if you have a strong tolerance for academic writing.


Character Parts -- John Mortimer

A collection of Mortimer's interviews with various people for the Sunday Times. They're really good, really interesting, even when the interviewees are British politicians from the sixties I've never heard of. Mortimer managed the interviews extremely well. He didn't give the impression that he came in with a list of questions, with one exception -- he asked everyone he ever interviewed whether they believed in immortality, which I got the feeling was something he was very concerned with personally. (Mick Jagger: "What a question to ask me during the World Cup!")


Generation Chef -- Karen Stabiner

A fly-on-the-wall account of the opening of a new restaurant. It's mainly about a cook named Jonah Miller, who talked some investors into backing his Basque restaurant in New York when he was only 24. It's interesting, although unreasonably biased toward Miller, casting all the blame for the divisive environment on the business partners and making excuses for Miller's temper tantrums and inflexibility. I actually thought the better part of the book was the digressions on how it became possible for very young cooks with no business experience to start their own restaurants without ever working as a head chef or a sous in someone else's restaurant, which has been the usual path for over a hundred years. I didn't like Miller and I doubt I'd want to eat at his restaurant, but the book wasn't bad.


K -- Tyler Kepner

A pretty good history of pitching from the 19th century to today, organized in chapters devoted to certain pitches and the people who threw them: the curve ball, the spit ball, the fadeaway, the fork ball. I liked it.


*The Past Recaptured -- Marcel Proust

The seventh and (finally!) last volume of Remembrance of Things Past. This one moves forward in time, to just after World War I; the narrator is hesitantly returning to society after spending long years at a series of health spas, trying to treat his worsening asthma. The people he knows are of course older now, though the narrator is given to melodrama so he thinks everyone looks like an old wreck. He's surprised in turn that people talk about him the same way; he overhears servants saying "that's Madame's ancient friend." At the receptions he attends, he looks around and sees a crowd of parvenus, people who only he seems to remember were once nobodies, now leading society with what seems to him shallow and imitative grace and wit. Everyone else is either too young to remember their origins or willing to pretend otherwise; the narrator never reflects -- I doubt Proust did either -- that the grand society of his youth probably rested on exactly the same basis. The narrator's voyeurism has grown with age, though he hasn't grown any more honest about it. There's a scene where he earnestly explains how he just happened to walk into the wrong building on a dark night, which just happened to turn out to be a gay brothel, where he just happened to go into a room where he could sit and spy on the customers through a peephole. I mean, what is there to say about that, you know? Most of the second half is taken up with another episode of involuntary memory: heading to a house party through a courtyard, he steps on an uneven flagstone just at a certain time of the evening and it brings back a whole flood of unorganized memories. He goes inside, sits in a side room by himself, and spends the rest of the book thinking about involuntary memory and how it could be used as a literary framing device, a way to recapture the past. The novel ends with the narrator planning out how he's going to write this novel.
Well, it took me three years to get through the whole thing. I didn't enjoy all of it, but on the whole I think it was worth reading.


The Naked Olympics -- Tony Perrottet

A very good book about the Olympics in Hellenic times, with a day-by-day account of the events. Nothing like the original Olympics exists now; it was an athletic, religious, and nationalist extravaganza. To the Greeks, it was like a combination of the Super Bowl, Easter Mass at the Vatican, and the Miss America pageant, all held during a patriotic rally. They were called "Olympics" because they were dedicated to the Olympian gods, but they weren't held anywhere near Mount Olympus itself, which is in Thessaly. The Games were held at Elis, largely because it was a little place in the middle of nowhere and so no one else's prestige was threatened by such an important festival happening there. For the whole month before and after the Games, all of Greece maintained a holy truce, so that everyone could travel and compete with impunity. Under the rules, even if you came face to face with your father's murderer, all violence was forbidden under penalty of sacrilege. The Games lasted five days: there were opening ceremonies on the first day and chariot races (the main event) on the second. The third day was the running events, plus the children's events (which no one really cared about, apparently) followed by the great religious rite in honor of Zeus and the Olympians, culminating with the sacrifice of a hundred bulls. Day four had the wrestling and boxing, and the pankration, the all-in fight, which had no rules and continued until someone surrendered or died. The fifth and last day was the presentation of the awards and a gigantic party. I really enjoyed it.


Outsider in Amsterdam -- Janwillem van de Wetering

I picked this up in the Rijksmuseum this summer. It's a murder mystery from the seventies; according to the preface, the author spread out his compulsory military service over many years by serving as a part-time police constable. I'm sure his heroes are based on people he knew. They're a senior and junior detective from the Murder Brigade; the younger is a bit of a hippie, though they're both musically inclined and when the case isn't going anywhere they spend their time jamming in their office, only mildly rebuked by their grouchy superior. They're called to investigate a death in a bar/commune/spiritualist headquarters; the building is an ancient maze on a canal with many ways in or out, and our heroes have to decide if the victim was murdered or just fell and hit his head while on drugs. The commune turns out to be a scam and a drug front, and there are fights, motorcycle chases, and a shootout between speeding boats, interspersed with the two cops slouching around Amsterdam talking about life. I enjoyed it.


Purple Hibiscus -- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

A dark and powerful novel about a Nigerian teenage girl named Kambili. She and her brother Jaja and their mother all live in terror of her father, a religious fanatic and appallingly violent man, given both to sudden fits of rage -- as when he smashes half the living room because his wife hasn't dusted yet that day -- and to even worse coldly-thought-out acts of cruelty, as when he makes Kambili stand in the bath and pours boiling water over her feet because she wasn't paying close enough attention to her school work. All of this is kept a terrible secret; the neighbors think, or pretend to think, that Kambili's father is an upright man, even praising him for not divorcing his wife when she only had two children (not knowing, or pretending not to know, that his wife has suffered several miscarriages due to his violent beatings.) Adichie does a really good job of showing how Kambili's father controls his children through terror even when he's not present -- Kambili and Jaja spend a weeks-long visit with their aunt, far away from home, but still keep to the schedules their father wrote out for them and don't dare to watch TV or listen to the radio. Even more effectively, Adichie really gets across how Kambili and Jaja still love their father and desperately want his approval. It's ultimately their mother who can't take it: she murders their father and then loses her mind, while Jaja takes the blame to shield her and goes to prison.


The Love-Girl and the Innocent -- Alexander Solzhenitsyn

A play set in a gulag in Siberia, following several prisoners all condemned under Article 58, the Stalin-era law that allowed for imprisoning anyone suspected of "counter-revolutionary" behavior, which meant anything any person with connections didn't like. The main character is Nemov, a man just arriving at the gulag who seems incapable of disillusionment -- he's surprised anew every day at the mutual back-scratching and corruption that makes the camp function. He falls for a fellow prisoner named Lubya, but is crushed to find that she regularly has sex with the camp doctor in order to make sure he treats the prisoners with at least some of his medicines before selling the rest on the black market. It would be a hard play to put on stage -- there's a huge number of extras, trucks coming on and off, fist fights on a roof top, and several scenes set in a working iron foundry, including scenes where molten iron gets spilled on the floor. I found it off-putting.


Out Of Their League -- Dave Meggyesy

A really good memoir of high school, college, and pro football, and the way players are manipulated by the coaches, who set themselves up as all-powerful father figures, with the players as the perpetual children always trying to win their approval. Meggyesy played for Syracuse and then for the old St. Louis (now Arizona) Cardinals in the sixties. He says the coaches turned their approval on and off like a faucet: when you were playing well you got a pat on the head, when you were hurt you got the cold shoulder and snarls that you could play just fine if you weren't such a sissy. Over his career the Cardinals froze him out more because he was attending grad school in the offseason, protesting in favor of civil rights, and opposing the war in Vietnam; all of these were anathema to the NFL, which both then and now expected the players to devote 100% of their life to football. After retiring and writing this memoir, Meggyesy spent the next 35 years as a director of the NFL players' union. It's a condemnation of the sport that Meggyesy's admirable qualities were precisely what made the NFL mistreat him.


Caesar's Last Breath -- Sam Kean

A very readable book about air generally, and how humans interact with it. My favorite part was the description of how our atmosphere developed: according to current consensus, the atmosphere we've got now is actually the fourth one the planet has had, the previous ones having been dissipated by such things as worldwide volcanic activity (before the tectonic plates solidified) and the impact of the Mars-sized body that tilted the Earth and created the Moon. On a more human scale, the book covers such things as anaesthesia, gas warfare, the effects of nuclear bomb tests on our lungs and teeth, and the strange career of a 19th-century French stage performer named Pujol who made a long career out of his novelty act of farting musically. Kean makes sure to note that after his retirement from the theater Pujol opened a bakery, where he apparently made great bran muffins. I enjoyed it.


Antigone -- Sophokles

I was in a student production of Jean Anouilh's WWII adaptation of this in college (I played a guard, I had three lines, and my biggest scene was the one where I sat frozen in the act of playing cards with the other guards while the Chorus exposited things.) Its theme of the courage of the individual against the oppressive power of the state made it timely: Anouilh's version was actually written and performed in France during the Nazi occupation, which amazes me, but I've read that the sort of person who could thrive under the Nazis had no imagination and I suppose wouldn't be capable of seeing the application of a story from thousands of years ago to himself.
The story is very simple: after the battle where the Seven Against Thebes were defeated, Kreon was the last man of the royal family and so became king. He decreed that the body of his nephew Eteokles -- who died defending the city -- should be buried with all the usual rites, but that the body of Eteokles's brother Polyneikes -- who led the invading army -- should be left to rot in the sun, and eaten by scavengers. (In fact he left all the invaders to rot unburied, which was a horrible act of impiety in the eyes of all the Greeks, and eventually Theseus turned up with an army to kill Kreon and bury all the dead, but that's outside the scope of this play.)
The brothers' younger sister, Antigone, defies the decree and holds a funeral rite for Polyneikes. She goes out in the night, avoids the guards, and casts dirt over the body with the proper prayers and offerings. In the morning the guards see the dirt on the body and draw lots to see who has to go tell Kreon. Kreon blows up and lays about him, accusing the guard of taking a bribe and the chorus of being glad to see him defied. He exits to see for himself, and the chorus sings the most famous of all choral odes, sometimes called Sophokles's "hymn to Man".

Numberless are the world's wonders,
but none more wonderful than Man! The storm-gray sea
yields to his ship's prows, the waves bear him high;
the holy and inexhaustible Earth is carved
with shining furrows where man's plows pass over,
year after year...

The ode praises the deeds of humanity over forty-five lines, building up to the rule of law, which the Greeks considered the greatest of all accomplishments. They end by saying

When the laws are kept, how proudly the city stands!
When the laws are broken, what of the city then?

The ode sets up the agon of the play, the debate on law between Kreon and Antigone, who has been caught. Kreon argues that the law is the king's will; Antigone argues that the law is what the gods command, and what everyone agrees is right: a wrong act cannot become right because a king decrees it so.

It was not Zeus who cried this decree,
nor was it Justice who lives with the gods below.

Kreon, seeing force fail, applies more force: he says he will have Antigone executed. Antigone answers that as a mortal she must die, with or without Kreon's decree, and it's better to die than to submit to evil; and she adds further that all the chorus agrees with her but is too afraid to say so. Kreon, knowing no path other than force, redoubles his anger and has her taken away to be entombed alive.
Over the next four scenes, various people come to Kreon to tell him his decision is wrong: his niece Ismene, his son Haimon, the seer Tiresias. When Kreon angrily rejects them all, Tiresias utters a terrifying prophecy that Kreon has angered the Furies, who are coming for him, his family, and his city.

These words are the arrows I fire at you, Kreon.
You cannot escape them by running!

Kreon is shaken at last and asks the chorus for reassurance; the chorus finally speaks the truth, that only Kreon believes he is right and all mankind, as well as heaven, earth, and the underworld, is against him. Kreon gives in and goes to free Antigone from her tomb; getting there he finds that Haimon has already broken it open to free her, but found her dead, having hanged herself. Before Kreon's eyes, Haimon curses him and stabs himself. Kreon then returns to the city to find that his wife has heard the news of Haimon's suicide and killed herself at the family altar, cursing Kreon before she died. Kreon collapses and prays that he might die soon, leading to a dark and terrible exchange:

CHORUS:
Death comes when it will. Meanwhile there is work to do.
Leave the future to itself.
KREON:
All my heart was in that prayer!
CHORUS:
Then pray no more, Kreon. The sky is deaf.

I have four copies of this: the Loeb Classical edition in Greek, the Oxford Classics edition, my paperback Arnett translation from college, and a translation by Fitts and Fitzgerald. The Fitts/Fitzgerald version is excellent reading, really flowing and powerful, but somewhat abridged -- they not only leave out some lines of disputed authenticity, they omit or reword passages that mention figures of Greek myths, on the grounds that no one will recognize the allusions today, a decision I don't agree with at all. I also could have done without their snide put-downs of other translators in the footnotes.


Clinging To the Wreckage -- John Mortimer

Mortimer's autobiography, covering the first half of his life, which is mostly his law career; it ends right before he started writing the Rumpole stories. The biggest influence in his life was his father, a looming presence of overflowing disdain and disapproval. Bizarrely, the senior Mortimer went blind while John was at school but refused to acknowledge it; the subject was not allowed to be raised and it was just never mentioned, which gave his home life a surreal quality. The father sounds like a real piece of shit, but John gives the standard abused child's defense that outsiders just didn't understand the family. It was less interesting than his other writing.


The Human Stain -- Philip Roth

My friend Harold once remarked that nobody likes both John Updike and Philip Roth. I don't like Updike, so I decided to try Roth; I picked this one for the title. I admired the skilful prose but morally I found the book nauseating. It's basically an old white guy defending old white guys against baseless, hysterical accusations from conniving and evil younger women. The main conflict involves a retired college professor who's harassed by the younger female dean, who falsely accuses him of racial bias, sends him threatening anonymous letters, and generally persecutes him relentlessly. We get her interior monologue and we see that all her actions are based in resentment, because he's just so incredibly smart and competent that it makes her feel small; naturally it turns out that her big self-realization is that she wants to have sex with him. I really felt like throwing up. (There's a whole subplot where we find that the professor is actually a light-skinned black man who's been passing as a Jew since World War II, but it felt to me like Roth put that in as his idea of proof that the professor couldn't possibly be racially biased.) Of course we couldn't get out of the book without a scene at the end where a dignified old black academic puts a liberal in his place by denouncing political correctness, a standard "What Black People Would Say If They Really Understood Racism, By A White Guy" scene. I hated it. At least Updike was only a narcissist.


*How Proust Can Change Your Life -- Alain de Botton

I picked this up expecting literary criticism, but it's actually a self-help manual, drawing facile pop-psychology lessons from a superficial reading of Proust. I thought it was terrible.


Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford -- George Randolph Chester

I got this because Asey Mayo, in the Phoebe Atwood Taylor novels, was always referring to it. I think it was a magazine serial originally. It's a reasonably funny book from a hundred years ago about a con man who travels around America getting rubes to invest in his house-of-cards financial schemes, which always collapse leaving him holding all the money and on a train out of town. The author seems to have sporadically felt remorseful about making a bad guy his hero, so the con man occasionally gets beaten up by irate victims. Life was a lot easier for con men at the turn of the last century: no one ever asks the hero to pay for anything in advance!  


Lives of Girls and Women -- Alice Munro

Her second book, and the only one published as a "novel", although in fact it's a series of linked short stories. Munro said that the setting was autobiography but the events weren't. It's a bildungsroman: the main character is Del Jordan, who (like Munro) grows up in the poorest part of a poor town in rural Ontario in the thirties and forties, living in a falling-apart farmhouse where her father breeds silver foxes for their fur and her mother slowly succumbs to Parkinson's disease; she gets an education through force of will and leaves town for the city to become a writer. All her life, though, she carries with her the expectations her small town burdened her with. She feels guilty taking time for herself to write, for example: in her town, a woman who was ever unavailable to her husband or children would be considered monstrous, a freak of nature.


Intimacy -- Henri J.M. Nouwen

Ironically, I didn't connect with this. It's a book from the sixties about college campuses, and Nouwen's idea that student unrest was largely caused by a longing for intimacy, which had its roots in an inability to reach for spiritual intimacy with God. It's extremely dated and I didn't really get anything out of it.


In Love & Trouble -- Alice Walker

Her second book, written fifty years ago, decades before she went off the deep end and started ranting about Jewish lizard people. It contains her most famous story, "Everyday Use", about a black Southern woman (Mama) and her older and younger daughters: the older daughter is returning home for the first time since she left for a community-funded college education. It's a rocky visit. The older daughter has changed her name from Dee to Wangero, to honor her African heritage; Mama objects that Dee was named after her aunt, who was named after a grandmother, and the name goes back all the way to before slavery times, so what about that heritage? There's a debate to be had about that, but Wangero doesn't choose to have it, just brushing aside Mama's concerns and posing the two for photos, clearly meaning to use them as a "look how far I've come" display in her city life. The real impasse comes over a pair of heirloom quilts that Mama has given to the younger daughter; Wangero objects that she should get them instead, since her sister won't care for them properly. Mama answers that family heirlooms are meant to be used, because their function is to remind the family of their loved ones, not to hang on a wall to impress strangers. Wangero ends by shouting at Mama that she doesn't understand her own heritage and storming off. Wangero, I think, imagines herself an adult, but she hasn't yet learned the difference between academic study and lived experience.


Bowling Alone -- Robert D. Putnam

A book about community organizations in America, and what the author sees as the decline of in-person social engagement. Putnam seems unaware that he's largely just duplicating the cultural-change arguments of the Middletown Studies, which were performed in the 20s and make mostly the same case against radio that he makes against TV and the Internet. I found the book almost unreadable; Putnam is so determined to show that he's done his research that instead of just saying "trade union membership proportionally decreased throughout the seventies and eighties", he says "Union ABC had a membership of X in 1968, but declined to a membership of Y in 1987; Union DEF had a membership of X in 1967 but Y by 1982; Union GHI...." and so on for two long paragraphs. And he did that five or six times in every chapter. If he'd had a better editor the book would have been half the length and I would have done less skimming.


The Fifth Risk -- Michael Lewis

An infuriating book about the many, many responsibilities of the executive branch and how the current administration is ignoring most of them. The transition teams the Obama administration put together just sat in their offices waiting for their replacements to arrive, and for most of them no one ever came and they just had to leave on inauguration day. The few departments where someone did turn up, it was always some ignorant appointee who waved away the briefing folders and said things like "Tell me the top three things on your list." Lewis sums up the attitude of the people the Trump team brought in as "Government is stupid and bad and everything it does is stupid and bad." There was an incident forty years ago when an Air Force plane carrying two nuclear bombs broke apart in midair over North Carolina; one of the bombs was destroyed in the breakup, but the other deployed and armed itself. When the recovery team found it, they found that three of the four fail-safes had failed, and only the fourth fail-safe had saved half the state from being blown to hell. Why did the bomb have four fail-safes in the first place? Because the Department of Energy decided it should, that's why. But government agencies aren't allowed to advertise themselves, so most people don't know what they do. A huge part of the DoE budget is cleanup projects. There's an area of Washington State where there was once a nuclear weapons facility; the ground there is heavily contaminated and the DoE has been spending billions of dollars a year for thirty years to decontaminate the area and prevent the radioactive waste from getting into the river and the groundwater. A big chunk of the state's population lives there, and the worst possible thing that could happen to them would be a big cut to the DoE budget; yet Trump campaigned on a promise to do just that, and the people there voted for him. That's just one instance out of thousands and thousands of desperately important things that only the federal government has the resources and the will to do, that this administration has just stopped doing because they don't know and don't care.


Heartland -- Sarah Smarsh

A book about growing up in middle America, mostly centering on the cycles of poverty and lack of education that have kept Smarsh's family trapped in lower social class for generations. It's narrated as a sort of letter to the child Smarsh never had, since not getting pregnant as a teenager was her first step towards getting enough of an education to get into the middle class, and continuing not getting pregnant was how she stayed there. She uses the phrase "flyover country" a lot, and recounts how surprised she was, when she traveled to the coastal states, to find that no one ever used it; that phrase was actually coined by people in middle America to describe how they imagined people on the coasts looked at them. It was pretty good.


In Character -- John Mortimer

Another collection of Mortimer's interviews with various people for the Sunday Times. This is actually the first one, I read them out of order. A lot of them are with people who were involved in the Profumo Affair, a political sex scandal that rocked Britain in the sixties but even in the early eighties, when the book was written, had been largely forgotten, to Mortimer's obvious astonishment. He generally gets people going by asking about their childhood and what influence their parents had on them, a subject pretty much anybody is willing to talk about at some length. I really enjoyed them.


How To -- Randall Munroe

A funny book, illustrated with stick-figure cartoons, about the worst ways to do things and what would happen if you tried them. Like, say, crossing a river by getting rid of all the water. Or helping your friend move by placing shaped explosives under their stuff to throw it through the air to where you want it. I thought it was great.


Bed -- Tao Lin

A collection of short stories, most of which I didn't like. Lin doesn't care very much about plot or character; it seems like his main interest is in crafting memorable and gripping individual sentences, which he does very well. One of the stories is called "Love Is a Thing On Sale For More Money Than There Exists", for example. A different story had a scene where, sitting at an otherwise unremarkable family dinner, the narrator says of a character that "He had a look on his face like he might scream in such a horrifyingly quiet, mutated, and frequencyless way that the rules of the universe would then have to be changed."


The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency -- Alexander McCall Smith

I read one other book by McCall Smith and didn't like it, but Lucy started reading this series and recommended it to me so I picked it up, and it was much better than the other book I read. It's not really a mystery, more of a "what are you going to do about it?" story. The book introduces us to Mma Ramotswe, a Motswana woman in her thirties living in Gaborone, the capital of Botswana. (Motswana = "person of the Tswana", Botswana = "land of the Tswana", Setswana = "language of the Tswana".) Mma is a Setswana title, it's pronounced like "Ma" but with a heavily emphasized "M". She grew up in a village, and later married an abusive musician who abandoned her after their baby died. As the series opens, her beloved father has just died, and she sells some of the cattle he left her to buy a house in Gaborone and open a one-person detective agency. She hasn't had much formal education, but we establish her wit and toughness right away, as her first case is to look for a missing husband, and she sets a trap for the crocodile that she realizes ate him. She gets several more cases -- finding a missing boy, getting rid of a freeloader posing as a relative, figuring out why a local doctor is sometimes competent and sometimes not -- while at the same time hiring her only employee, Mma Makutsi, and agreeing to marry her best friend, the mechanic Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni. Nothing very big happens, and it made me think of Johnson's contention that life is made up of little things. I really enjoyed it.


Iphigeneia Among the Taurians -- Euripides

Some versions of the Iphigeneia story hold that Artemis spirited her away at the last minute, leaving a deer in her place for Agamemnon to sacrifice -- a lot like the Abraham and Isaac story, except that Iphigeneia's survival was known to no one, not even Agamemnon. This play follows that tradition; it's less a true tragedy and more of a comedy with tragic elements.
Iphigeneia now lives on the Crimean Peninsula, serving as a priestess for the Taurian people, who sacrifice any strangers who arrive to Artemis. There's a long dramatic-irony scene, where Iphigeneia laments that she can never see her family, or lay offerings on their graves, not knowing that her brother Orestes is actually nearby, having been sent by Apollo on a mission to seize the local statue of Artemis (which miraculously fell from the sky) and bring it to Athens. There's also some irony when Iphigenia further laments that the gods can't really want human sacrifice and it must be a warped practice of wicked humanity; here Euripides is slyly saying something pious while implying the opposite, since in his opinion, I think, the gods definitely did kill humans for fun.
Orestes and his friend Pylades are captured and brought to the temple to be sacrificed. Orestes refuses to give his name, not wanting the Taurians to boast that they killed the heir to Mykenai, so Iphigeneia doesn't know who he is. She knows he's Greek, though, so she asks a lot of questions about the Trojan War -- what happened to Achilles, to Kalkhas, to Agamemnon? Orestes tells her they are all dead, but their sons are alive. Hearing this, Iphigeneia decides to send a plea for help to her brother, and offers to spare one of the two if he will carry a message for her to Greece. Orestes agrees, ordering Pylades to take the message while he himself stays. Iphigenia dictates the letter to Pylades -- unknowingly revealing her identity to the Greeks -- and then makes Pylades swear to deliver the message to Orestes. Pylades laughs and says it's the easiest oath he's ever sworn, and hands the letter to Orestes, leading to a joyful reunion: an anagnosion scene, literally "the ending of not knowing". After this the play becomes a comedy, with the three Greeks tricking Thoas, king of the Taurians, into allowing them to carry the statue of Artemis to the sea to be ritually cleansed, and telling the guards they have to avert their eyes from the sacred ceremonies, then running off and carrying the statue onto Orestes's waiting ship and getting away, with Thoas prevented from chasing after them because Artemis appears and tells him to let it alone. Thoas obeys, ending the play by remarking that he who hears the words of the gods and doesn't heed them is mad. This is another line that I think could be given another meaning: on the surface it's a conventional piety, but a good actor could deliver it in a way that really says "the gods are powerful and without restraint, so we have to run to obey them out of fear for our lives".


Anthony Bourdain: The Last Interview -- Helen Rosner, ed.

I like Bourdain's writing, but I feel like in interviews he was deliberately staying "in character", and it made them feel very stagy and artificial. I also have no patience with the way he had no patience with people who don't eat at restaurants that cost a thousand dollars a plate because they're too expensive. It really irritated me the way he would wave his hand and say "You can scrape the money together somehow." Like how, robbing a bank? He rhapsodizes about how even when he was down and out in the eighties he still found the money to eat sometimes at the best restaurants in New York, but he doesn't mention that the way he "found the money" was by dealing heroin. While I'm on the subject, I feel like someone should really have taken Bourdain aside and explained to him that the Asian people of the world don't actually need a white savior to get righteously indignant on their behalf about the way Europeans don't properly appreciate the deep cultural roots of Asian food. Tony, you're still white. No amount of screaming about how Americans ignorantly insult the spirit of Laos by holding their chopsticks too far up from the middle is going to make the Lao nod admiringly and say "That guy really gets us."


Tears of the Giraffe -- Alexander McCall Smith

The second Mma Ramotswe book. In this one she's hired by an American woman to find out what happened to her son, who disappeared in Botswana ten years ago. At the same time she gets another client who wants to know why his wife is away so much, so she promotes her secretary Mma Makutsi to assistant detective and has her look into it. While this is going on, the maid of Mma Ramotswe's fiance, Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, is plotting against Mma Ramotswe, because she's a terrible maid and terrible cook and she knows she'll lose her job after the wedding; she tries to plant evidence to have Mma Ramotswe arrested, but it goes wrong and she winds up getting arrested instead, without Mma Ramotswe ever finding out anything about it. Meanwhile Mr. J.L.B Matekoni, a kind man who spends a lot of his free time voluntarily fixing things at the city orphanage, is more or less bullied by the orphanage matron into adopting two of the orphans: a nine- or ten-year old named Motholeli, who's in a wheel chair, and her withdrawn younger brother Puso. The children belong to the San people, the nomads of the Kalahari; the Batswana call them Basarwa, "the people who do not raise cattle". The children's mother died and, having no one to take care of him, the tribe buried the baby Puso along with the mother; five-year-old Motholeli dug him up and ran away, ending up at the orphange. Mma Ramotswe is surprised to find out that she's adopted two children without being consulted, but she cries at their story and takes them in. She and Mma Makutsi both solve their cases, and in each case they decide to suppress some of the truth to avoid uselessly upending people's lives. Good book.


Thermopylae -- Paul Cartledge

An unapologetically pro-Spartan history of the onset of the Persian Wars and the battle of Thermopylae. You don't usually get historians telling that story from a Spartan point of view, what with the Spartans being, you know, wholly unsympathetic humorless bloodthirsty militaristic brutal assholes, but there it is. That aside, it's full of thorough research, including a whole appendix identifying and correcting Herodotos's account of all the nations in Xerxes's army and their commanders, which I haven't seen anywhere else. He also spends two very interesting chapters discussing how Thermopylae was mythologized in antiquity and how it's been mythologized in modern times, going so far as to argue that the east-vs-west paradigm was at the foundation of the Bush administration's war policy. There's good background and a very convincing reconstruction of all three days of the battle. I was also pleased that Cartledge did not, as so many others do, neglect to mention that alongside the 300 Spartans there were 700 Thespians and 400 Thebans, along with 900 helot slaves. On the other hand, he does digress fairly often in order to downplay the importance of the battles of Marathon, Artemision, and Salamis (all Athenian victories) to insist that the real decider was the battle of Plataea, where Greek armies under Spartan command finally defeated the Persian invading armies (which were largely composed of fellow Greeks, actually, which set the stage for both Athens and Sparta to go to war against various Greek cities even decades later with the justification that they had sided with the Persians.) The truth is that every battle of the war was the decisive one, since if the Greeks had lost at Artemision then Salamis wouldn't have even happened, and if they hadn't won at Salamis then Plataea wouldn't have happened either. Still, if you don't mind filtering out some propaganda, it's a good read.


Morality For Beautiful Girls -- Alexander McCall Smith

The third Mma Ramotswe book. In this one she's hired to look into a suspected case of attempted poisoning at the farm of an important government official, while Mma Makutsi sets out to look into the background of the five finalists for a beauty contest, on behalf of the contest manager, who doesn't want any scandals turning up later. Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni has a severe depressive episode and can't work. Mma Ramotswe addresses several problems at once by sending him to the orphanage, where the matron sets him to spending time with a silent, withdrawn boy recently arrived from no one knows where; meanwhile Mma Ramotswe moves the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency into the back office of Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni's garage, Speedy Motors, both to save rent and so Mma Makutsi can keep an eye on the two apprentices while Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni is at the orphanage and Mma Ramotswe is away at the government official's farm. Mma Makutsi realizes that the two apprentices, party-loving boys in their late teens, are just the people who would know about all the girls in town, so she easily finishes her case with their help. Mma Ramotswe finds that the problem at the farm is the government official's high-handed way of controlling the lives of his family and employees, and she tells him that the only poison is the unspoken anger and resentment his behavior has caused. It was really good.


The Hike -- Drew Magary

A deconstructed fairy tale, sort of. It's about a guy named Ben, in his late thirties, married with three kids. He's away from home on some sort of business trip. He gets to his hotel early, so he decides to take a short hike in the woods behind it before dinner, and he has a pleasant walk, and then just like that the world gets jerked out from under him: he comes across a pair of men moving the dismembered body of someone they've obviously just murdered, and when they turn and notice him he sees they have dog's faces. He runs away, of course, but somehow the path doesn't lead back where he came from, and after escaping from the dog-face men (temporarily) he ends up following a long, torturous journey of self-discovery, fighting off strange monsters and figuring out odd clues, with only a mean-tempered talking crab for company. I liked it, although it did follow a bit of a video-game pattern (fight, puzzle, magic item, reward, repeat.) The genuine pathos of a family man badly missing his wife and kids really lifted the book up, I thought. Also, I thought I'd predicted how the ending would go but I was totally wrong, which was nice.


The Kalahari Typing School For Men -- Alexander McCall Smith

The fourth Mma Ramotswe book. Her adopted children have been taunted at school, for being orphans and for being part of an ethnic minority. Motholeli, who's older, is able to face it out, but Puso takes to acting up at home and Mma Ramotswe and her husband go for advice to Mma Potokwane, the orphanage matron. Mma Ramotswe has a client who was recently robbed; while the gun was pointing at him, he says, all he could think about was a bad thing he had done as a teenager, decades ago, and he wants Mma Ramotswe to find the people involved so he can confess and make amends. Mma Makutsi, who's desperately poor and has to take care of her brother, who's dying of AIDS (though the Batswana never say the word AIDS, only calling it "that disease"), borrows some typewriters from the secretarial school she attended and sets up an evening class to teach men to type, so they can get office jobs. Again, not a lot really happens, but the important part is how it's told. Also there's a lot of discussion of cattle, which can only make a book better.


Murderers and Other Friends -- John Mortimer

The second volume of Mortimer's autobiography; this one's a lot more interesting, as it deals with his criminal law practice and the oddball clients he had to defend. He also mentions the Rumpole stories and the TV show they spawned, which is what made the difference between Mortimer struggling and being well-off, but you can tell he rather resents being known mainly for Rumpole when he considers his other works superior.


Iphigeneia at Aulis -- Euripides

This play wasn't produced until after Euripides died, and the general consensus among classicists is that he wasn't finished with it. The ending, particularly, is sketchy and could very plausibly be just a first draft.
The Greek fleet is wind-bound at Aulis; the seer Kalkhas has told Agamemnon that the goddess Artemis is angry, and won't be appeased until Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter Iphigeneia. Agamemnon has summoned Iphigeneia with the story that she is to be married to Achilles, but then repented and sent a second message home telling them to ignore the first message. As the play begins we find that Menelaos has intercepted the second message and Iphigeneia will soon arrive. Agamemnon and Menelaos debate the issue in the play's agon, or main contest, and end up switching positions: Menelaos has to concede that it's not a good bargain to kill a blood relation in order to recapture an in-law, while Agamemnon gives in to his fear that, if he cannot appease Artemis, then the army will revolt and the expedition will be lost; with Agamemnon seen as unlucky or impious, there might even be a general uprising and the whole family could be overthrown and lose its power and status. The chorus rebukes them both, arguing that no reward is worth murdering a child. Iphigeneia and her mother arrive and meet Achilles, and all of them learn the truth at the same time. Achilles rebukes the Atreidai and tells Iphigeneia that he'll defend her against the whole Greek army, if necessary. Iphigeneia, to save Achilles and to prevent a battle of Greeks against Greeks, goes consenting to be sacrificed.
George Dimock, the translator of the Oxford Classics edition, argues bizarrely that the whole Trojan War is therefore Iphigeneia's fault. That's so stupid that the Oxford general editor, William Arrowsmith, added a preface of his own just to argue against Dimock. Arrowsmith's opinion is that Euripides meant to show the young Achilles -- somewhat callow and priggish in this play -- learning to be a hero by watching Iphigeneia.
I myself read this play as a criticism of the whole Greek world. The ancient Greeks were exceptionally competitive -- it was a fundamental building-block of their culture -- and they were obsessed with timē, which means "honor" but with a heavy overtone of "reputation". Where Achilles represents aristeia -- the blameless striving to "be best" -- the Atreidai represent philotimia, love of reputation, or the desire to have everyone say they're the best. Euripides, I think, saw philotimia as the root of all Greece's problems, the reason the Peloponnesian War started in the first place and the reason both sides passed up opportunities to negotiate a peace: they wanted to win, and to be seen to win, rather than to live virtuously. What Agamemnon really wants is to be acknowledged as the commander of all the Greeks; what Menelaos really fears is that everyone will laugh at him as a man who cannot control his wife; and in the end they both decide that those things are more important than the life of an innocent relative. I'm sure Euripides meant the audience to see their own terrible behavior in the brutal self-absorption of the Atreidai, with Iphigeneia standing for all the children of the Greeks killed in thirty years of a war only fought for pride.


*The Wasps -- Aristophanes

A very funny play produced in 422 BCE; it contains Aristophanes's last attack on the war-hawk demagogue Kleon, who was killed at the battle of Amphipolis soon afterwards. The play is a send-up of the Athenian jury-system; every year a jury pool was chosen by lot, 600 men from each of the ten phylai established by Solon the Lawgiver in the sixth century BCE, for a total of 6000. Criminal trials seated a jury of 501; civil trials, 201. For a hundred years or so jury duty was just another obligation of citizens; but after years of war with Sparta, they apparently often had trouble meeting the quorum, so Kleon got the Assembly to pass a law that each juror would be paid three obols a day. That wasn't a living wage, but it was enough to be attractive to elderly men, who had no sort of pension.
Aristophanes would likely have opposed the idea just because it came from Kleon, but he also had political fault to find with it: paying the jurors meant more poor people would be on the jury, and they'd be more likely to vote against wealthy men like Aristophanes and his friends. He snidely suggests that many of the plaintiffs are dressed in borrowed rags, and carry onions to make themselves weep, to work on the jury's sympathy.
The action of the play involves a father and son named Philokleon and Bdelykleon (literally "lover of Kleon" and "hater of Kleon"; my translation -- I only have one, Dad's Penguin Classics edition -- calls them Prokleon and Antikleon.) Antikleon has set his slaves to surround his father's house with a net and not let him leave; he announces that this is because his father has a dangerous addiction and needs to be protected from himself. The slaves try to guess what it is -- drink? gambling? prostitutes? Antikleon grimly says it's worse than any of these: his father is a phileliastes, a lover of trials. He's addicted to jury service! Prokleon gets up very early, to make sure he gets a seat on a jury, but gets caught in his son's net. The chorus, a group of elderly jurors dressed as wasps, come looking for their missing compatriot and buzz angrily around Antikleon. To hold them off, he agrees to a debate. This is the agon: Prokleon and Antikleon now debate the pros and cons of jury service (on the one hand Prokleon gets paid, has something to do, and gets flattering attention from rich and powerful people; on the other hand the pay isn't much and most of the heavy tribute Kleon keeps arguing for goes into his own pockets.) The debate ends in an impasse, so Antikleon arranges a household trial where Prokleon sits as a jury of one in a dispute between two dogs over who stole some cheese and wouldn't share. Prokleon votes to convict, but Antikleon switches the urns, shaking Prokleon's confidence. While everyone's off stage, the chorus hammers Kleon and his supporters and also lambasts the audience for not properly appreciating Aristophanes's play from the year before, The Clouds.
I think there are two levels to the action: Antikleon, in so far as he represents opponents of Kleon, wins the argument, and shows that even in a democracy the people don't really rule if they let themselves be led. On the other hand, in so far as Prokleon represents the old-fashioned values that Aristophanes admired -- austerity, courage, self-discipline -- while Antikleon, representing the younger generation, seems to be mainly concerned with having a good time, Aristophanes is also saying that it's not enough to oppose bad policies; the party opposing Kleon must provide actual positive leadership.


The Full Cupboard of Life -- Alexander McCall Smith

The fifth Mma Ramotswe book. Mma Ramotswe is distracted from wondering when Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni will get around to actually setting a date for their wedding by a client, a wealthy woman with four suitors; she wants Mma Ramotswe to determine which of the suitors like her for herself and which are only after her money. All she can think of to do is to go and see what the suitors' relatives are like. In the mean time, Mma Potokwame volunteers Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni for a publicity stunt where he will jump out of an airplane to raise money for the orphanage. For once he's able to say no to something, but Mma Potokwame has already announced it on the radio. Mma Ramotswe gets him out of it by persuading his older apprentice, Charlie, to jump in his place, on the theory that it will impress all the girls. The jump goes well, and with all the crowd gathered at the orphanage, Mma Potokwame rounds up the local Anglican bishop and tells Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni that it's time he married Mma Ramotswe already, so they have an impromptu wedding under the acacia trees. It was well told and funny.


Liquid Rules -- Mark Miodownik

A good book on the properties of liquids, really engaging. I thought the most interesting parts were the chapter on jet fuel, which includes a full explanation of hydrocarbons and the phenomena of surface tension and wicking (I had never realized that it's wicking action that fills the paintbrush with paint) as well as a reflection that the various safety announcements before takeoff never include "Oh also, you're sitting on top of forty thousand gallons of kerosene"; and the chapter on soap, with a good explanation of what's happening when you wash your hands. (Water won't get oils off your hands because water molecules have polarized electric charges and oil molecules don't. But the stearate molecules in soap have a carbon end and a charged end, so the carbon end bonds to the oil and leaves the charged end "sticking up" away from the oil; so the oil ends up surrounded by a cloud of charged stearate ends, which effectively makes it polar, so water can bind to it.) I liked it a lot, although the author's narrative device of thinking about various fluids while on a plane flight, constantly wondering what the woman in the next seat thinks of him, felt kind of creepy.


*Women at the Thesmophoria -- Aristophanes

The Thesmophoria was an annual fertility ceremony held in the autumn, a religious rite dedicated to the Mother and Daughter (Demeter and Persephone.) Only adult women could attend; it was one of the few times women could meet in public without the supervision of men.
This is a really funny play, poking fun at Euripides, who was certainly in the audience watching it. As the play opens, a fictional "Euripides" comes on stage to let us know that the women of Athens are going to use the Thesmophoria to hold a trial, where they will condemn Euripides, in absentia, for slander (because of the way his plays insult women) and vote on their revenge.  Euripides tries to persuade his fellow-tragedian Agathon to attend the Thesmophoria dressed as a woman (this is a dig at Agathon for being effeminate) but Agathon says he has more to fear there than Euripides does, since the women of the city are jealous of him because he's prettier than most of them. In desperation Euripides turns to a relative (the play just calls him kedestes, "kinsman", meaning any close relative by marriage) and gets him to agree to attend. There's some slapstick as they shave Kinsman and put him in a dress, ending with a ludicrous disguise that probably had him looking as convincing a woman as Arnold Schwarzenegger in Junior. Kinsman goes to the ceremony and tries to defend Euripides against slander, but takes the wrong tack by arguing that women are actually much worse than Euripides draws them, and so the women of Athens should actually be grateful. That goes over as well as you'd expect and Kinsman is exposed. The best part of the play follows, as Euripides turns up to try to rescue Kinsman using a plot device from one of his own tragedies; when it fails Euripides goes off and comes on again, trying a plot from a different tragedy. He repeats this six or seven times, and it gets funnier every time. When all of his plots fall flat, Euripides finally makes a deal with the women, promising not to slander them any more if they let Kinsman go. The women agree and the play ends happily. 
I have two copies of this, the Loeb Classical edition in Greek and Dad's Penguin Classics edition, which has some good footnotes; among them, the editor notes that "this takes the cake" is probably the only phrase coined by Aristophanes that has survived into modern English.


The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, volume XX: Johnson On Demand -- Samuel Johnson

The final volume, at long last; I appreciate thorough scholarship, but I don't know why it had to take 65 years. The editor says in the foreword that they had to think a long time to come up with a title that wasn't "Miscellany". That's effectively what it is, though. It's a collection of bits and pieces that Johnson was hired to write at various times: introductions, prefaces, book reviews, occasional editorials for the Gentleman's Magazine. They made good reading, especially the places where Johnson had a platform to write against colonialism and imperialism, repeatedly opposing the colonialist propaganda with the charge that the Europeans had simply invaded countries where they had no right to be, enriching themselves by robbing the natives and killing anyone who objected, then praising themselves for spreading civilization. It was a bold stance to take in the 1760s.


Elektra -- Euripides

Euripides's take on the Elektra story, very different from either Aischylos's or Sophokles's. Unlike their strong, confident Orestes, Euripides shows a hesitant, uncertain avenger who has to be goaded on by his sister, a much less sympathetic Elektra, who in Euripides's telling is released from the palace and married to a gentle and good-natured farmer who respects her and lets their marriage remain a marriage in name only. Instead of a heroine powerfully championing the truth against oppression, here she seems more like an unpleasant fanatic, constantly complaining of ill-treatment when her life is actually pretty nice. Orestes, in this telling, gets close to Aigisthos by deceit and stabs him in the back, instead of facing him boldly; and then he can't bring himself to kill Klytamnaestra until Elektra calls him a coward and pushes him to it. Even then he hides inside the house and stabs his mother as she comes in, so he won't have to confront her. As soon as the deed is done, both are suddenly gripped by remorse, and the gods Castor and Pollux appear to tell them their deed was unjust, even though it was commanded by Apollo, and they pronounce exile on Orestes.
The play amounts to a deliberate rejection of the reconciliation of men and gods that Aischylos and Sophokles described, and returns to Euripides's indigestible awareness that a god commanded a mortal to do wrong. I have two copies, the Oxford Classics edition and Dad's copy of the 19th-century Gilbert Murray translation, which he bought at the old Landry Book Store in Westborough (the bookmark is still in it.) Both Murray and the Oxford editor argue that Euripides's main motive is to make people feel compassion; the Oxford editor goes on to say that Euripides contends that humans are essentially helpless to do anything lastingly good.


The Love Poems of Rumi -- Deepak Chopra, ed.

What actually seems to have happened here is that several of Rumi's poems were loosely translated into English by a man named Fereydoun Kia, and then Deepak Chopra took those translations and freely rendered them into what's in this book, which I would have to call a collection of new poems inspired by Rumi, rather than an actual edition of Rumi. None of them really impressed me.


*Instantanés -- Alain Robbe-Grillet

This is the first book I've read in French in a long time. I had to keep going back to the dictionary. The title means "Snapshots", and that's what it is: a collection of brief moments in time. A man stops and looks at a woman's face on an subway poster; a man near the top of an escalator turns to look behind him, and the people below him turn to see what he's looking at; a couple walk down a beach, watching the tide come in towards the tidewall. There's no interior viewpoint; we only see all these people from the outside, so we just have to wonder what they're thinking. Does the face on the poster remind the man of someone? What was the man on the escalator looking for? I liked it.


*The Masters -- C.P. Snow

A novel from his "Strangers and Brothers" series, the fourth one published and the fifth chronologically, if I've got that right. Mom says it's the best of them. I'll take her word for it because it was interesting but I don't feel the need to read the others. It's set at an unnamed college at Cambridge University, narrated by Lewis Eliot, a law professor, I think in his thirties. Eliot is married, but I suppose his wife must have some socially unacceptable problem, since she's only mentioned once, when another professor briefly says "when your wife is well again". It's set in 1937, and the Master of the college is dying of cancer, so the whole book is taken up with the campaigns of the two candidates to succeed him. (Snow wrote the book in the fifties, so the sense of the futility of all the effort they're going to, for such a trivial outcome, in the face of the oncoming war, is written with deliberate hindsight.) The election itself is really just the backdrop for Eliot -- one of life's born observers -- to examine the behavior of all the other professors and think deeply about what sort of people they are. Eliot seems to consider himself a bit above it all, which didn't endear him to me, but I suppose I'd understand him better if I'd read the other books in the series. Oh well, ars longa, vita brevis.


In the Company of Cheerful Ladies -- Alexander McCall Smith

The sixth Mma Ramotswe book. The cases in this one are mostly non-client-related. Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, having moved in with Mma Ramotswe after their wedding, has rented out his old house, and is distressed to find out that his tenant is using it as an illegal speakeasy. Mma Makutsi, whose brother has died, uses the money from her typing school to take dancing classes in the evening, where she meets a kind man named Phuti. Charlie, the apprentice, foolishly gets involved with an older woman married to a wealthy man. Mma Ramotswe is paralyzed by the reappearance of her violent first husband, Note, who still fills her with fear, threatening to challenge the legality of her second marriage unless she pays him off. Mma Makutsi picks up the slack at work, with the help of their new factotum, Mr. Polopetsi. They find out that Note was already married when he married Mma Ramotswe, and the discovery that he was never legally her husband at all helps her resolve not to be afraid of him. Reinvigorated, she manages to close down the speakeasy and chivvy Charlie back to work, and then takes on an unusual case: Phuti's father, fearing his shy son will never propose, hires Mma Ramotswe as a go-between to arrange a marriage between Phuti and Mma Makutsi. The scene where Mma Ramotswe orders Note to go away and never bother her again was worth the whole book. I loved it.


The Stone Sky -- N.K. Jemisin

The conclusion of the story of Essun and the broken Earth. It's a good book, though not as engaging as the first two because we have to get through quite a lot of exposition about how things got to the state they're in now, narrated by the mysterious Hoa, who we find has been the narrator of the second-person sections all along, and who has been alive since the time tens of thousands of years before when he and a few others were the last survivors of the losing side of a race war after the dominant group wiped their people out; Hoa's people appear to be the source of the ability that allows Essun and people like her to manipulate seismic events, though it's not clear how that gene got transmitted to the current generation. Anyway what happened was that the powerful civilization that wiped out Hoa's people also built the orbiting obelisks, whose purpose was to create perpetual free energy by tapping the Earth's core; Hoa and his fellow survivors were only alive because their masters needed their powers to activate the network. However, two things went wrong: Hoa and the others decided to sabotage the launch, and then while they were at it everyone found out that the Earth is a conscious entity, both powerful and angry, and the Earth itself interfered with the launch with the aim of wiping out human life, and the two conflicting sabotages broke everything, scattering the obelisk network and throwing the Moon into its eccentric new orbit. Got all that? Back in the action of the book, both Essun and her daughter Nassun are separately heading for the original control center, on the other side of the world from where humans now live, with conflicting goals: Essun wants to complete Alabaster's mission by taking control of the obelisks to recapture the Moon and stabilize the system, while Nassun wants to complete the Earth's mission by taking control of the obelisks to wipe out all life on the planet. Jemisin did a really good job of developing Nassun to make her motivation understandable, but the plot kind of requires some hand-waving as to how the pre-teen, untrained Nassun can be stronger and more adept at controlling her powers than her mother, who's honed them for decades. Jemisin has to fall back on making Nassun "just special" in a never-explained way, which is really nothing but asking the reader "Look, accept this so that the story comes out the way I want it to, okay?" It also wasn't clear to me why the Earth needed Nassun at all, since we'd previously seen it could take control of the obelisks itself. It was still a good book, though. The one thing that bugged me was that on the first page of the first book, the narrator made a huge big deal out of how people talk about "the end of the world" but they only mean the downfall of civilizations and that sort of thing, they never mean it literally -- until now, because "this is the way the world ends -- for the very last time." And then it doesn't. So this wasn't a story about the actual end of the world either, which in retrospect makes the preface seem pointless.


Ali vs. Inoki -- Josh Gross

Not great. It's the story of the time in 1976 when Muhammad Ali, then the heavyweight champion of the world, agreed to fight an exhibition against Antonio Inoki, a professional wrestler, in Tokyo. Gross tries to sell it as the first MMA fight, insisting it was real and both men were trying to win, and casting it as a great victory for wrestling, which is just bullshit, really. The fight was a boring fifteen-round clown show, fought to a clearly pre-agreed draw, with Inoki lying on his back with his feet up nearly the entire time, and Ali wandering along the ropes making faces and sticking his tongue out at the audience. The crowd booed and threw garbage into the ring the whole time. Gross is constantly describing the inner states of the fighters -- "Ali was thinking this, Inoki was determined that this other thing" -- although he never spoke to either of them, or even to the trainers or the referees, and all his information about the fight was third-hand at best. He spends a lot of the book on puff pieces about various little-known characters in the world of professional wrestling, which was dull and also sounded like he copied off their publicists' press kits. Also, even though he must have known that most people would buy the book only because of Ali, he uses a lot of pro wrestling slang without explaining it. I don't know what the distinction is between catch wrestling and hook wrestling, or the difference between a "work" and a "shoot", and I don't care enough to look them up. In short, I thought the book was a pile of invention built on a false premise, and I didn't enjoy it.


Blue Shoes and Happiness -- Alexander McCall Smith

The seventh Mma Ramotswe book. The agency solves a mysterious rash of blackmail cases (the culprit is the local paper's agony-aunt columnist) and cracks a fraudulent scheme where a doctor is substituting generic medicine but charging his patients full prices. Mma Ramotswe figures out that the staff unrest at a business is caused by the presence of a hornbill on the grounds, an unlucky bird in Botswana culture, but no one wants to say so because they don't want to admit to being superstitious; Mr. Polopetsi tries to solve the problem by simply sneaking in at night and kidnapping the bird, meaning to set it free in the jungle, but he accidentally kills it. On the domestic side, Mma Ramotswe briefly considers dieting before deciding not to bother, and Mma Makutsi negotiates status with some of her fiance's relatives. I liked it.


Dead Girls -- Alice Bolin

An essay collection. The first part of it is all about the TV show trope of centering a crime story around the victim, inevitably a young beautiful white girl, and the investigator's obsession with her, which often has an undercurrent of sexuality that edges on creepy. The famous example is Twin Peaks, but it's been done dozens of time since then: The Killing, Pretty Little Liars, True Detective, even Riverdale. There are four essays on that, generally pretty good, though at times the author disappears under her sources -- the first one is almost a book report on the essay "Picturing America" by Greil Marcus: most of it is "Marcus says", "Marcus thinks", "Marcus discusses". The others have some of that too, though not as much: "As Nelson writes", "Walter reported", and so on. The last of those was the best, all about her father's love of mystery novels and Steig Larsson; I had not known that the Swedish title of the first book is Men Who Hate Women. Bolin thinks that the Larsson books are wolves in sheep's clothing: under the protective disguise of feminist disapproval, they happily portray endless graphic violence against women.
The rest of the book is mostly memoir: stories about her weird roommates in LA, her teenage interest in witchcraft, her concern that she might be autistic. She candidly admits that she titled the book after the first section because that would sell better, but I thought the personal essays were more engaged.


Give a Girl a Knife -- Amy Thielen

This was about half a woman-working-in-the-Brooklyn-restaurant-business memoir and about half a living-in-an-unheated-shack-in-the-Minnesota-woods-with-my-sculptor-boyfriend memoir. Guess which half I liked better.


The Good Husband of Zebra Drive -- Alexander McCall Smith

The eighth Mma Ramotswe book. Mma Makutsi, whose prickly personality has become more pronounced since she got engaged to a wealthy man, has had enough of answering to a boss and quits the agency. With Mma Ramotswe away in Mochudi looking into a strange case where several patients have died in the same bed at the same time of day in successive weeks, Mr. J.L.B Matekoni has to fill in on a suspected-adultery case; although he mistakes the identity of the husband and ends up following the wrong man around, in the process he finds out that the man he's been following is engaged in corporate espionage. Charlie the apprentice also quits, to start his own taxi company, but has to return after he gets distracted and runs a red light, wrecking his uninsured car. Mma Makutsi, after being put down by a former classmate, comes back to work and pretends she never left. Mma Ramotswe solves the hospital case, which of course was caused by an uneducated cleaning woman unplugging life-support equipment so she could run her vacuum cleaner (McCall Smith must have heard the old chestnut about the IT guy who wondered why a workstation crashed at the same time every Tuesday.) She agrees with the head of the hospital to make sure the cleaning woman doesn't find out what happened, which I liked.


Two For the Road -- Roddy Doyle

Another in his series of all-dialog short-short stories, involving two Irishmen in a pub talking about the news. They were well-written and often funny, but I remember the book as a downer because so many of the stories had the men talking about musicians who had recently died and getting depressed. Still good, though.


The Glorious Nosebleed -- Edward Gorey

An alphabet book of Gorey's wonderful line art, with some Tom Swiftie touches (a panel with three confused-looking Edwardian men looking at empty shelves in a basement, with the caption "They searched the cellar Fruitlessly.")


Life, on the Line -- Grant Achatz and Nick Kokonas

A restaurant memoir, one of my favorite kind of books, even when (as now) I wouldn't eat at the restaurant. Achatz is a molecular-gastronomy chef, the kind of chef whose kitchen serves things like a single raspberry filled with rose essence and encased in a thin bubble of mozzarella. I admire the creativity, in an abstract way, but I wouldn't eat there. I'm not going to pay a thousand dollars a head in order to eat thirty-five one-bite courses, most of which require the waiter to tell me how to eat them ("You need to wave this vanilla bean in front of your nose just before I pour the hot grenadine onto the cacao nibs." I'm not making that up.) It's also a story of Achatz's battle with mouth cancer and his recovery, but I would have more interest in him as a sympathetic character if he weren't also the sort of chef who screams at people and pretends it's passionate leadership. I wouldn't work for anyone who would fire a waiter on the spot for dropping a glass in the kitchen, and then add that the waiter is lucky Achatz is too busy to give him the usual reaming before throwing him out.


Billie Holiday: the Last Interview -- Khanya Mtshali, ed.

It's hard to decide how much reliance to put on these interviews, since all of them were put into their published form by white men, most of whom had agendas, conscious or otherwise, about black women, about the music business, about drug addiction. The last one -- from just the day before she died -- is entirely in the first person, and reads like Holiday's last testament about her life and how cruel the justice system is to people with narcotics convictions; but it was ghost-written by a white man, and Holiday may not even have been conscious that day so he may have been just writing down what he remembered she said, or what he thought she should have said, earlier in their acquaintance. The early ones are PR exercises, of course, but you do get some of her real attitudes about musicians she liked (such as Louis Armstrong and Count Basie) and ones she didn't (such as Artie Shaw, who made her use the back stairs instead of riding the elevator with the all-white band, and made her sit backstage by herself when she wasn't actually singing.) 


The Binding -- Bridget Collins

A novel set in an imaginary world where books are created by people with magical powers called "binders", who take people's traumatic memories and inscribe them in books, thus making the client forget the whole trauma. It's also a love story, pretty well handled; I liked both the main characters, even when they acted like pricks -- it was honestly understandable given their circumstances. I didn't really care for the conceit of the story, though: naturally the trauma-books are supposed to be kept private, but in fact there's a thriving black market in them, as voyeurs read them for titillation, which Collins several times implies is the real motive behind all reading of fiction in the real world, which pissed me off.


*Greek Piety -- Martin P. Nilsson

A scholarly book, dryly written but interesting, about ancient Greek religious practices. I was most struck by the archaeological evidence that shows that people made physical offerings much more frequently to little shrines of local gods than they did to the great shrines of the Olympians, which seems to suggest that people generally felt that the gods of Olympus were too big and important to be concerned with the troubles of ordinary people.


The Birds -- Aristophanes

An extraordinary comedy, a fantastic extravaganza full of spectacle: I counted twenty-eight different birds in the chorus, each of which would have sported his own distinctive bird costume. It must have been very expensive, but Athens was flying high just then: they were full of themselves after recent victories in the war against Sparta, and the great armada had been sent to Sicily but hadn't yet been destroyed, taking the empire with it. Mostly that's what this play is about: the distinctly Athenian quality of polypragmosyne, or spectacular restless energy. William Arrowsmith defined it as "enterprise, daring, ingenuity, originality, curiosity" but also "instability, discontent with one’s lot, persistent and pointless busyness". The two main characters are Peisetairos ("persuader") and Eulpides ("self-confidence".) They've left Athens to escape their debts, and are looking for a place with fewer laws and taxes, where adventurers can do well for themselves and live a life of ease. They meet the king of the birds, the Hoopoe, and talk him into convening a parliament of Birds; this is where the chorus enters, one by one, with the two Athenians exclaiming over their plumage and wondering at all the different kinds of birds. ("Mostly geese and cuckoos, though," says Eulpides, looking at the audience.) With some fast talking the Athenians convince the Birds that they should be the real rulers of the world, and that they should build a city in the air -- Nephelokokkygia, or "Cloud-Cuckoo-Land" -- to block the offerings from human temples, and refuse to allow them to proceed until the gods turn over their authority to the Birds. The new city is a success, so much so that Peisetairos is made the new ruler, and there are great comic scenes when various pests turn up trying to ply their annoying trades -- inspectors loking for bribes, layabouts hoping to get hired as the official poet, charlatans selling fake oracles. Peisetairos boots them all out, with pointed references to real people like them in the audience, which must have been a big hit. Finally a delegation from the gods shows up, led by Herakles -- always a simple-minded glutton in comedy -- who is easily swayed by promises of endless food and booze, and they agree to the Birds' terms and turn over Zeus's sceptre, and Peisetairos, now transformed into a Bird himself, becomes the ruler of the world and marries Sovereignty, here shown as a gorgeous woman. It's tremendous blasphemy, of course, but the Athenians, even while laughing, must have seen the warning: Peisetairos is an embodiment of what you might call the "Athenian Dream", a life of unbridled arrogance and triumph. With the city right in the middle of a tremendously risky and over-confident military expedition, I bet some Athenians stayed awake thinking about the play that night.


Julia Child: the Last Interview -- Helen Rosner, ed.

Not that great. It only contained a few interviews, none of which told me anything I hadn't known. And the so-called "last interview" was just two pages of some magazine asking the 92-year-old Child boilerplate questions to which she gave boilerplate answers.


Chronicle of a Death Foretold -- Gabriel García Márquez

A bloody story about a murder in a small town in Colombia that no one really wanted to happen, even the murderers. It's told out of order, but the basic facts are that soon after a wedding the groom drags the bride to her mother's house and rejects her, saying that she isn't a virgin. Her brothers beat her until she tells them (apparently lying) that the man was her former boyfriend, Santiago. The brothers proclaim that honor requires them to kill Santiago, and they go to the butcher's to get knives, loudly telling everyone they intend to kill Santiago, in order to make sure that either Santiago hears about it and leaves town or else someone stops them. No one takes them at all seriously -- the policeman just takes the knives away and sends them home to sleep it off. Even though the whole town soon knows about it, somehow no one tells Santiago, since they all assume that someone must have told him already, or that it's not worth mentioning since no one believes they'll really do it. The brothers decide that honor has been satisfied because the police stopped them, but when they see Santiago outside his house they change their minds and stab him to death. It was a well-told story about an astonishing piece of futility.


Proof -- David Auburn

A play about a woman named Catherine. We're introduced to her in a long conversation with her father; we eventually realize that the father has died recently and the conversation is taking place in her mind. Her father was a John Nash figure, a famous mathematician who suffered a long period of mental illness, during which Catherine left her own academic career to live with and look after him; he recovered, but was no longer able to produce new mathematical work; then he grew worse again, then died. The main action of the play involves a grad student named Hal who's been looking through years of the father's nonsensical notebooks in the hope of finding something legitimate; just as Catherine is in the middle of a huge fight with her older sister, who controls the estate and is now selling the house and trying to get Catherine to go to a mental hospital, Hal comes downstairs to tell them he's found a notebook with an incredibly elegant and important proof involving prime numbers. Catherine sullenly tells them that the notebook is hers, not her father's; Catherine sees this as proof of delusion and starts making plans to have Catherine committed, while Hal, though dubious at first, studies the notebook and soon concludes that it's not the father's work and so must be Catherine's. Mostly it's a painful play about family quarrels and the roles adult children have to play in taking care of their aging parents. I'd like to see it on stage.


The Children of Herakles -- Euripides

This is a play from early in Euripides's career, I would say; it makes a point of showing Athens as being brave, dependable, and true to religion and hospitality, so the older, disillusioned Euripides would probably have written it differently. It's a god-demands-sacrifice story, which I think is a dramatic way of asking "If you could get what you want, but at the cost of making someone else suffer, how should you behave?"
After Herakles died, his asshole cousin -- the same one who sent him on all his labors -- didn't want the young Heraklidai growing up with ideas about getting back at him, so he decided to wipe out the whole family. Herakles's nine or ten children were too young to protect themselves, so the play's hero, Iaolos, who was Herakles's best friend and adventuring buddy, takes all the children, along with Herakles's elderly mother Alkmene, out of Argos. He goes around Greece looking for sanctuary, but everyone's afraid of the power of Argos and no one will take them in. The play begins as Iaolos and his charges arrive in Athens and gather at the altar of Zeus, protector of suppliants. The king of Attika, Demophon the son of Theseus, comes by to ask them what's up; when he hears their story, he swears to take them in and protect them, both out of piety and because Herakles was his father's friend.
A herald from Argos appears, and demands that Demophon turn over the family. After some back-and-forth about whether Argos has the right to arrest outlaws outside their borders, and why they were outlawed in the first place, the herald abandons legal arguments and falls back on force: give them up, he says, or the army of Argos will destroy your city. Demophon tells him to get out, and announces to the Athenians that it's better to do the right thing and suffer for it than to buy safety by behaving wrongly. So everyone gears up for war, and following the usual practice Demophon sends a messenger to the oracle. the answer comes back that in order to win, the Athenians must sacrifice a girl to Persephone.
Without any debate, Demophon tells Iaolos about the message, and says that he will not kill his daughter, and he won't order any Athenian to kill their daughter either. Iaolos agrees that Demophon is right, and says When I see your father in the underworld I'll make him proud by telling him how you behaved today. Herakles's oldest daughter, Makaria, after hearing the news, decides to sacrifice herself (by jumping off a cliff, according to the Athenian ritual), thereby fulfilling the prophecy and saving both her family and the Athenians without making anyone do anything wrong or impious. Iaolos tries to talk her out of it, but she answers that the Heraklidai have nowhere left to go, and even if the Argolids left the girls alive, it wouldn't be worth living if all their brothers were killed. She goes off stage to die, but first commends the care of her brothers to Iaolos and says Raise them to be men like you. That choked me up a little.
Thanks to Makaria's sacrifice, Iaolos is miraculously restored to the prime of life and he and the Athenians go out and destroy the Argolid army, vividly described to Alkmene and the children by a series of messengers. They return with Herakles's cousin captive, and debate about what to do with him, until he volunteers that if the Athenians kill him and bury him honorably, his spirit will protect the city against the descendants of Herakles in the future. Euripides certainly put in this scene because the Spartans accounted themselves as descended from Herakles, and the Peloponnesian Wars were just getting under way, but it seemed jarring that the end of the play talks about defending Athens from the children of Herakles when the whole action of the play has been Athens defending them. Good story, though, despite the odd ending.


The Miracle At Speedy Motors -- Alexander McCall Smith

The ninth Mma Ramotswe book. Mma Ramotswe is harassed by vicious anonymous letters, which turn out to come from Mma Makutsi's mean-spirited and incompetent classmate from secretary school, Violet Sephotho, who seems to be turning into the series supervillain. While she's sorting that out, a woman who was adopted as a child hires her to find her real family; she gets things wrong and "reunites" her with a long-lost brother who, it turns out, isn't related to her at all. When she goes back to explain her mistake, though, it doesn't matter, because both "brother" and "sister" are lonely people who are happy to have someone else in their lives, related or not.  Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni spends money he can't afford to take Motholeli to Johannesburg on a forlorn hope that a doctor there has a miracle cure for her spinal condition that will let her walk again. The scene where they come back disappointed was pretty crushing.


Vallista -- Steven Brust

This came out a couple years ago but I missed it until now. The original book in this series (back in the eighties) was obviously an adaptation of someone's D&D campaign, and this one was kind of a return to his roots. It's basically a dungeon crawl: for plot reasons, our hero (Vlad) goes into a mysterious castle and can't get back out without exploring the whole place, fighting monsters and solving problems along the way. There are also some callbacks that try to integrate what were probably throwaway elements in the books from 35 years ago into the overarching story arc that the author developed later, which is impressive in a nerdy kind of way.


Protecting the Gift -- Gavin de Becker

A book all about keeping your kids from being molested, which made heavy reading. One big takeaway was that mothers should be willing to trust their first reactions: if you get a creepy vibe from the guy in the elevator, wait for the next one. Don't tell yourself you're being silly and get on just because you're afraid of seeming rude. Nearly all predators are men (almost 100% are heterosexual men, in fact) and they take advantage of the fact that our society trains women that they must always be available to any approach from any man, and the thing most to be avoided is to make any man feel uncomfortable, even a stranger. The section on baby-sitters was also interesting: if you don't feel fully confident in your baby-sitter, stop using them. Don't wait for proof, because "proof" would be your kid getting hurt. Statistically, parents who set up a hidden camera because they don't trust the babysitter always end up firing them, so don't bother with the camera step and just get straight to the firing. Another lesson: teach your kids to ask for help. Most people aren't predators, so it's better odds to approach a random stranger than it is to wait for someone to notice you're vulnerable and approach you. Also, the huge majority of children who are molested or abducted are victimized by someone they know, not by strangers. I was interested in his aside about dogs: it's a commonplace that dogs can sense bad people, and that your dog reacting in a hostile way to a person is a sign that the person is untrustworthy. I've always believed that myself. But de Becker argues that what's probably happening is that you sense something wrong with the person, and the dog is actually reacting to subliminal signs from you. After all, your dog knows you far better than it knows a stranger, and even though you don't trust your own instincts, your dog does. I'd never considered that.


The Trojan Women -- Euripides

A drama of grief, set a few days after the fall of Troy, as the women captives -- all their husbands, fathers, and brothers dead -- wait in their prison camp to learn what will become of them. Unusually for a Greek tragedy, it contains no peripeteia, or reversal of fortune: the women are miserable at the beginning and still miserable at the end. In fact nothing really happens in the play at all, except that the women talk about what they've lost and how they feel about it. The whole play is really one long lament of the evils of human suffering inseparable from war: Edith Hamilton, the great classicist, said that Euripides was the only writer in the western world who really believed that the triumph of victory is never worth the pain and grief it brings with it. (Although actually this play reminds me a lot of Mark Twain's "The War Prayer".)
We see the desolation of the women from several viewpoints: Hekuba, queen and now a slave, her husband and sons dead, her daughters also slaves. Hekuba's daughter Kassandra, a virgin priestess, raped in the aftermath of the city's fall and now doomed to cross the sea as a concubine of the enemy commander.  Hekuba's daughter-in-law Andromache, widow of Hektor, taken to be the slave of the son of her husband's killer, not even allowed to stay long enough to tend to the funeral rites of her young son, whom the Greeks threw off the walls of the city to his death. Helen, waiting in fear for the arrival of her wronged husband Menelaos, who has resolved to execute her. We also see the herald of the victorious Greeks, who has the unpleasant duty of telling the women what will happen to them, and who pities them but has no comfort to offer beyond a sort of "Well, that's war" attitude.
It was widely believed in classical times that the gods brought about the Trojan War for their own purposes, and this fits with Euripides's general theme of charging the gods with treating humans indifferently and even brutally. If the gods do evil, then they are not gods.
I have two copies of this: the Loeb Classical edition in Greek and the Edith Hamilton translation, published along with the screenplay of the 1971 Katherine Hepburn - Vanessa Redgrave movie. In an all-time display of contararianism, the Loeb editor argues that not only is it not an anti-war play, it's not even an angry play. I really don't know where to start with that.


James Baldwin: the Last Interview -- (no editor listed)

Four long and fascinating conversations, from an appearance on Studs Terkel's radio show in 1961 to an interview that took place only two weeks before he died of cancer in 1987. The biggest difference I saw was his growing disillusionment: in 1961 he still talked about becoming "reconciled" to America, while in 1987 he said that America was so morally and ethically corrupt that there was "nothing in American life to aspire to, nothing at all." One thing he repeated right along was that the problem with white people is that they always want to "make a new start", as though the crimes of four hundred years could just be wished away. "You cannot escape anything you have done. You have got to pay for it, willingly or unwillingly." I was interested to see that he had Toni Morrison's latest novel, Beloved, in his last days, but didn't read it, because, he said, her writing was so powerful that it required great mental and emotional resources to read it, and he was spending those resources on cancer treatment so he had none left for Toni Morrison. A really good book.


The Bookshop -- Penelope Fitzgerald

A depressing novel about a middle-aged widow who opens a small bookshop in a coastal town in southeastern England, some time in the fifties. The shop does moderately well, helped along by her controversial decision to carry the just-published Lolita, but she's eventually forced out of business and out of town by the local parochial tyrant who wants to be the only arbiter of The Arts in town. The novel ends with the widow leaving on the ferry and feeling ashamed of her total defeat. I didn't like it.


The Club -- Leo Damrosch

In 1763, worried about Samuel Johnson's isolation and depression, a group of his friends formed a group to meet at a tavern every week to eat, drink, and talk all night. With typical Augustan arrogance they just called it "The Club", and it continued for the rest of Johnson's life, with a really remarkable membership: Edmund Burke, Joshua Reynolds, Edward Gibbon, Adam Smith, David Garrick. Most of the book is taken up with miniature biographies of the Club members and their relationships to Johnson. There was technically a rule about electing new members, but it was understood that the real qualification was Johnson's approval. (That's how Boswell became a member, although no one but Johnson wanted him.) It was good reading.


Alkestis -- Euripides

Probably the earliest surviving play of his. In the prologue we learn that Apollo, exiled from Olympus for killing the Python, purified himself by taking service under a mortal, Admetos of Thessaly. He's now leaving because he has foreseen Admetos's approaching death. (Apollo was never associated with death, and funerals were held far away from his temples.) Because of his friendship with Admetos, Apollo has given him a gift: the Fates have agreed that Admetos won't die if he can find someone to volunteer to die in his place. From people going in and out of the palace, we learn that no one would volunteer, so Admetos's wife Alkestis, rather than leave her children fatherless, has elected to die for him. Just after she dies, Herakles arrives on the way to one of his labors. Herakles hasn't heard the news, and Admetos, unwilling to lose face by turning away a guest, lies and says everything is fine. Herakles goes in and drinks and makes merry, angering all the household, until a servant clues him in. Herakles is both embarrassed and angry, and he decides to both atone for his faux pas and make Admetos pay for luring him into it. He sets off to find Death, who must be on his way to collect Alkestis, and beat him until he agrees to let Alkestis come back. While he's off doing that, Admetos comes out in Alkestis's funeral train, bewailing her death, and blaming everyone he knows for not volunteering to die for him, especially his parents. In his infantile self-pity he curses them for murdering her; the chorus, though, turns on him and condemns him for spoiled selfishness: Suffering has come as a surprise to you, as if it never came to any man before you. You child! And when Admetos collapses and wails about the unfairness of it all, the chorus coldly says This helps neither the dead nor the living. Herakles, having beaten up Death, comes back with Alkestis, disguised in a veil, and tells Admetos that she's a prize Herakles won in a funeral game; he compels Admetos to take her in and look after her while Herakles goes off on his labor, thus making Admetos break the promise he made to Alkestis that he would not take another woman into his house before his children were grown. Then Alkestis is revealed, Admetos is properly rebuked, and the play ends happily.
I have three editions of this: The Penguin Classics edition, William Arrowsmith's Oxford Classics edition, and the poetic translation by Ted Hughes. I've never read any Hughes aside from his Greek translations, but those are excellent: powerfully written, mostly faithful, with some additional scenes for the benefit of modern theater (in his Alkestis, Herakles's drunken feasting is much longer, with pantomime recreations of his labors). The Oxford edition was good too, though marred by Arrowsmith's odiously self-righteous pedantry about the final scene, where Alkestis does not speak. I got the feeling that Arrowsmith was frustrated that he just couldn't be contemptuous enough of anyone who disagreed with his position that Alkestis's silence is not only dramatically necessary, but so obviously necessary that only fools with stupid agendas could possibly think otherwise. That's a sign of someone who's been withdrawn from other people too long.


Tea Time for the Traditionally Built -- Alexander McCall Smith

The tenth Mma Ramotswe book. Mr. Molofololo, the owner of the Gaborone soccer team, hires the agency to find out why the team has been on a losing streak; he's sure someone on the team has been bribed to lose on purpose. After speaking with the team (and getting a crash course on soccer from her young son Puso) Mma Ramotswe realizes that the cause of the team's poor performance is Mr. Molofololo's micro-managing interference, particularly his insisting on the team wearing the ill-fitting shoes he picked out. Meanwhile Violet Sephotho has gotten herself hired at the furniture store that Mma Makutsi's fiance Phuti runs, with the object of insinuating herself with the wealthy Phuti and stealing him away. Mma Makutsi enlists Charlie the apprentice mechanic to find out why Violet's sales pitches are so successful; it turns out she gets men to buy a lot of beds by quietly promising to have sex with them. When Phuti finds this out he fires Violet without Mma Makutsi having to get involved and look petty.


Hippolytos -- Euripides

Euripides seems to have written two versions of this play, of which this is the second. The first was badly received; according to the second-century BCE scholar Aristophanes of Byzantium (not the comic playwright) the first version was "unseemly and reprehensible". In the extant play, Hippolytos, son of Theseus, is a nature-lover, and dedicated to the virgin goddess Artemis; that's fine as far as it goes, but he also openly rejects and scorns Aphrodite, who punishes him for mocking her by making his stepmother Phaedra fall madly in love with him. We find Phaedra, not having eaten for many days, sitting outside by a stream, having decided that the only honorable solution to her unconquerable passion is to let herself die. In her weakness, her nurse manages to get the truth out of her, and immediately breaks her promise to keep quiet by going straight to Hippolytos and trying to talk him into having sex with Phaedra. Hippolytos is justly revolted, but he overdoes it, since he's really a self-righteous prig, and he spends a long speech cursing the nurse and Phaedra and all women. When Phaedra hears about it, she goes off stage to kill herself, but first writes a false letter to Theseus accusing Hippolytos of rape. This seems out of character for the Phaedra we've seen so far, but I guess she was really mad about the speech? When Theseus reads the letter, he banishes Hippolytos and also curses him in the name of Poseidon; soon afterwards he finds out that Poseidon has sent a bull from the sea to trample Hippolytos and kill him. When he learns the truth he's appalled, of course, and when the dying Hippolytos is brought on stage Theseus asks his forgiveness and the two are reconciled. Hippolytos blames Aphrodite, and gasps Euripides's most heartfelt line: 

Alas! If the curses of mankind could only reach the gods!


Martin Luther King, Jr: the Last Interview -- (no editor listed)

A wide-ranging collection of interviews, from a talk in the fifties about the "New Negro" to an intense conversation about moral leadership that took place only ten days before he was murdered. There's also a long interview with Mike Wallace from 1958, on the difference between desegregation and integration, that Wallace couldn't find anyone willing to publish so this is its first appearance. There's even one of the advice columns King wrote for Ebony magazine, in which he generally advises people to look for solutions to domestic problems within themselves instead of despairing waiting for someone else to change.


Fabulous Monsters -- Alberto Manguel

A pretty good book comparing fictional characters that reappear in different forms across time, like the colossal strongman with a highly specific weakness (Achilles, Milo, Superman) or the ordinary person out of their depth (Monsieur Bovary, Alice.) Manguel is enormously well-read and I found the essays really interesting.


Hotbox -- Matt Lee and Ted Lee

A good book about the catering business, full of interesting details. The big thing I take away is that in lean economic times the rich people have parties that are just as extravagant as ever, but they're more vigilant about keeping the rabble out, to keep it quiet. Some of them even require the service staff to sign NDAs. I'm glad I got out of food service before the fad for food sensitivities came in. When I was cooking, I only had to be concerned about vegetarians and people who were allergic to nuts. Now every other diner imagines they're gluten-intolerant or they have a laundry list of things they won't eat, and everyone expects you to make something special for them. I wouldn't succeed as a caterer now because I would just remind people that they knew what the menu would be when they got the invitation, and they can damn well eat what they're given or go hungry. It's all the more annoying when the woman who makes a scene because there are croutons in her salad still wants extra cake afterwards. It's even harder for cooks these days: every dinner I ever catered was at a church or convention hall or that kind of place, all of which had their own kitchens. They weren't always the best kitchens, but they were there. Customers today want to have catered events in places that weren't meant for that, like in banks or offices or even the God-damned Henry Clay Frick Museum (seriously!) where there's no kitchen and all the food has to be cooked off-site and trucked over in rolling racks known as hotboxes, which means you better be really good at estimating how much of each course the diners are going to want. God, imagine catering a dinner at the Frick house? What if you trip and a drop of the borscht hits a Vermeer?


The Double Comfort Safari Club -- Alexander McCall Smith

The eleventh Mma Ramotswe book. In an unexpectedly dark turn of events, Mma Makutsi's fiance Phuti gets hit by a car and has to have a foot amputated; his aunt, who resents his getting engaged, won't let Mma Makutsi see him in the hospital, or visit him in his house where the aunt has moved in while he's recuperating, because she's hoping to break up the engagement. Eventually Mma Makutsi has to recruit the no-nonsense Mma Potokwame to come from the orphanage and use her powerful personality to force their way in. Before they do, though, Mma Makutsi and Mma Ramotswe have to go all the way to the Okavango Delta (I looked it up, it's about eleven or twelve hours north of Gaborone, almost at the border of Zambia) on a case: a lawyer has hired them to fulfill a bequest of a deceased client, an American woman who has left money to a safari guide who was kind to her when she was there a few years before. The problem is that by the time she made the will she didn't remember the guide's name or the name of the place where he worked, so the ladies just have to head to the delta and try to figure it out, which they do, after a couple false starts. There are great scenes where the guide poling them along to the camp in a flatboat cheerfully reminisces about all the tourists who have been killed by hippos or crocodiles or snakes or lions, right here on this very stretch of river!