Book reviews, 2020

 

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

 

Ready For Revolution -- Stokely Carmichael

An as-told-to autobiography, narrated to his friend Michael Thelwell, who taught at UMass when I was there. It starts with his upbringing in Trinidad and ends with his emigration to Ghana and then Guinea later in life, but the great majority of it is taken up with his days as a leader of SNCC and the Freedom Rides, organizing black voter registration in southern states. Carmichael was a gifted organizer and he spent a lot of time coordinating SNCC activities with other groups -- the NAACP, the SCLC, the Black Panthers. One thing he wanted to get on the record was that although all these groups had different philosophies they all had the same aim, and reports in the papers that Carmichael and John Lewis and Martin Luther King and Bobby Seale were all mutually opposed were just propaganda spread by divisive white supremacists. Two things really stood out for me: one was Carmichael's slow realization that he, and in his view most other black activists, had implicitly followed the call for integration without really grasping that when white people said "integration", what they really meant was "assimilation". The other was his open admiration for strong-man leaders throughout the third world. The analogy that occurred to me was that, from my point of view, the important thing about the American founders is that they overthrew an oppressive colonial regime and established a reasonably working democracy; while from a black man's point of view, it would be more noticeable that the founders were mostly slave-holding anti-humanist aristocrats who were philosophically opposed to individual liberty. By the same token, when I look at Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Kwame Nkrumah, or Seikou Toure, what I see is men who ruled by force, suppressed democracy, imprisoned their political opponents, and abolished elections to make themselves rulers for life; but what Carmichael saw was a group of nationalist leaders who drove out European colonial powers and established local independence, which naturally from his view is the far more important aspect. It's a lengthy book but it really kept me reading.

 

Six Degrees of Separation -- John Guare

A play about a wealthy New York couple named Kittredge who get taken in by a con artist calling himself Paul and claiming to be a college friend of their children (and also to be the mistreated, estranged son of the actor Sidney Poitier.) They're initially charmed but later recognize his dishonest, violent character and break off contact; but they soon find that Paul is now conning their acquaintances by claiming to be Mr. Kittredge's illegitimate son, unacknowledged due to racism. Paul is eventually arrested after one of his victims commits suicide, and for complicated Stockholm-syndrome and white-guilt reasons Mrs. Kittredge tries unsuccessfully to help him. With the right cast I bet it's really powerful.

 

The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor -- Gabriel García Márquez

This was originally a series of newspaper articles from the fifties, ghost-written by Márquez under the by-line of a sailor from a Colombian Navy destroyer that foundered in the Caribbean, who survived almost two weeks alone in a raft with no food. The articles caused a stir because the Colombian government wanted to publicize the sailor as a propaganda hero who braved a terrible storm, while Márquez dwelt more on the corruption and incompetence of the navy -- exposing, for example, that there was no storm and that the ship foundered in the first place because it was poorly maintained and dangerously overloaded with illegal contraband that the officers were smuggling, and that the search for survivors was half-hearted and abandoned early. It's straight reporting, not novelistic at all; I wouldn't have guessed Márquez wrote it if his name weren't on it.

 

The Saturday Big Tent Wedding Party -- Alexander McCall Smith

The twelfth Mma Ramotswe book. Mma Makutsi finally marries Phuti in this one, not without complications, naturally. There's more back-and-forth about Mma Ramotswe's irrational attachment to her barely-running white van, which I'm getting a little tired of. The actual cases are more interesting than the background for a change, with Mma Ramotswe investigating the revenge killing of a farmer's cows and also proving that not only is Charlie the apprentice not the father of his girlfriend's twins, but she never said he was and doesn't care about him anyway. I enjoyed it.

  

Hippolytus in Drama and Myth -- Hazel E. Barnes

A study of variants of the Hippolytos story and its use on the Greek stage. Euripides is known to have written two plays with this title; the surviving play is a major rewrite of the first version, which was badly received and considered "unsuitable", we don't know why. Euripides chose to emphasize Hippolytos's devotion to Artemis; the idea that Hippolytos's oath of celibacy was an affront to Aphrodite, who therefore engineered his downfall, appears to be original to Euripides. Barnes thinks that the mother-son pair of Hippolyta and Hippolytos is probably a remnant of an older tradition of a later-forgotten god, whose male and female aspects eventually got divvied out into two legendary figures. I was supposed to read this in college but didn't; just as well, since you really have to know a lot more about Greek tragedy and history than I knew then in order to get a lot out of it.

 

The Economist's Hour -- Binyamin Appelbaum

A scholarly book on how economists gradually got involved in government policy over the second half of the twentieth century. He subtitled the book "False Prophets", referring to the way they make and erase predictions -- like the way the Reagan administration promised their tax cuts would generate more revenue in business prosperity than they lost in taxation, and then (when that didn't happen) insisted that they had never promised that in the first place. Appelbaum argues that those cuts' main architect, Milton Friedman (an extreme libertarian) didn't even expect the cuts to generate revenue; what he wanted was for the cuts to blow a hole in the federal budget, so the administration would then have to cut back on spending that Friedman disapproved of, which was basically anything other than the military (he wanted to end all government spending -- national parks, public schools, libraries, everything.) There's no shortage of intellectually dishonest arguments for Appelbaum to point out -- Friedman and his allies argued against government regulation of industries, claiming that the market was better at it because people would just sue the manufacturer if their goods were faulty; leaving aside that most people don't have the resources to sue a corporation, the court system is not part of the free market, it's an example of government regulation, just less efficient than making regulatory laws in the first place. It took some work to get through it but it was very well argued.

  

Stealing Buddha's Dinner -- Bich Minh Nguyen

A memoir of growing up in the Midwest as a Vietnamese immigrant. Her name is pronounced "Bic", like the pen but with a very short i; but of course her white classmates called her "Bitch", and her parents refused to allow her to adopt a new name that would sound less out of place in small-town Michigan. Small, dark, foreign, she remembers her childhood as being lost in a sea of tall, blond Dutch-Reform Christians who despised outsiders. She grew up with the idea that the key to becoming American was to eat American food, rather than the Vietnamese food her family ate at home; and she feelingly recalls her love affairs with potato chips, tamales, and anything served at the diners her family never went to. The title refers to the offerings of food that her grandmother left every day before her shrine of the Buddha; Bich occasionally took and ate them just to see what would happen. I liked it.

 

A Gentleman in Moscow -- Amor Towles

Tied for my favorite book of the year. It tells the story of Count Rostov, who as a young man published a widely read populist and anti-Tsarist poem, having to flee Russia as a consequence. He returned during the October Revolution to help his elderly mother flee the country, but remained himself. As the novel opens he is tried before an early Soviet tribunal as a "social parasite" because he lives an aristocratic life at a fictional Moscow hotel, and does nothing to forward the Revolution; he expects to be executed, but the tribunal spares him out of respect for his past literary work and he's sentenced to house arrest at his hotel for the rest of his life. Over the next forty years he becomes ever more enmeshed in the life of the hotel, taking over as the restaurant headwaiter, adopting a child orphaned by her parents' political arrests, carrying on a relationship with a hotel guest, allying with the hotel workers in their silent but all-consuming war of attrition against the apparatchik hotel manager. It's superbly written and it really made me love the main characters. What a good book.

 

*The Owl in the Attic -- James Thurber

An early collection, maybe his first, mostly pieces from the New Yorker; it includes a parody of Fowler's English Usage and a great series of spoof pet-advice columns with cartoons. I loved it.

 

Fragments -- Aischylos (Smyth, 1922)

Fragments -- Aischylos (Sommerstein, 2008) 

Two editions from the Loeb Classical Library, put together 85 years apart. In the interim a large number of papyri were recovered at the site of Oxyrhynchus outside Cairo, and these finds were incorporated into the new edition, plus the whole thing was retranslated by someone who didn't go to school before the Civil War. They now fall into two kinds: passages preserved in their entirety because some other ancient author quoted them (Death the Healer, do not disregard my prayer! For you are the only physician for ills that are past remedy: pain cannot touch a dead man.), and incomplete passages from the papyri, where most lines have parts missing and filling in the missing parts requires guesswork. It was really interesting.

 

Lou Reed: The Last Interview (no editor named)

What I took from these was that Lou Reed was a disagreeable, even combative person who was always on the lookout for a reason to lose his temper. He also thought, with how much truth I don't know, that the music press generally is filled with idiots who have no ear for music and no capacity for understanding it. The interviews weren't very useful, since they're essentially all repetitions of "Here's how Lou Reed fumed at my first question, picked a fight, and then stormed off calling me an asshole." 

 

The Factory -- Hiroko Oyamada

A strange novel about three people who get hired at their town's major employer, a huge factory that takes up an enormous amount of land, with its own restaurants, housing, bus services, woods, and parks; nobody seems to know exactly what the factory makes, and our heroes' jobs are all weirdly pointless -- one is assigned to a team of shredders, endlessly destroying the day's make-work papers; another is set to proofreading long, nonsensical documents that appear to apply to nothing; the third is a recent biology Ph. D who's asked to conduct a decades-long study of the various mosses that grow on factory property, filing reports that no one reads. All of them are puzzled by the surprising crowds of wildlife around the factory -- flocks of big black birds, packs of river rats (nutrias), swarms of sewer lizards. There's a lot of interesting social criticism as the three of them spend years hiccupping their way through their meaningless daily routines, accomplishing nothing, often wondering why but always too anxious or habit-driven to find out. In the end the three of them slowly transform into a bird, a rat, and a lizard, answering the question of what it is the factory produces (and why, out of all its conveniences, the one thing it doesn't have is a cemetery.) It was pretty good.

 

Lysistrata -- Aristophanes

The best-known of the Greek comedies, first put on at the winter dramatic festival of 411 BC, when Aristophanes was hugely frustrated at the unquenchable belligerence of the Athenian war faction, which had refused two separate offers at a negotiated peace on favorable terms even after the Athenian navy was destroyed at Sicily in 413 BC. The war faction had managed to install a body of ten elder statesmen, the Probouloi, who could override the votes of the Assembly and keep the war going. In the play the goddess Aphrodite inspires an Athenian woman named Lysistrata with a plan to end the war. Lysistrata literally means "disbander of armies", and it was also probably a reference to the priestess of Athena, the most important woman in the city, whose name was Lysimache and who was known to oppose the war. Lysistrata gathers the women of Athens and Sparta and proposes her plan: until the men of the city agree to a negotiated peace, none of the women will have sex with any of the men. After the Spartan women depart to set the plan in motion in Sparta, the Athenian women seize the Acropolis, where the city's treasury was held, in order to make sure that the Probouloi can't finance any new war projects until the peace is concluded. The chorus of men fights the chorus of women and runs away in humiliating defeat; Aristophanes means the united front of the women to show up the vacillation, infighting, and failure of will among the men, who represent not just the men of Athens but the cities of Greece. There are some great set-pieces with various husbands turning up trying to talk their wives into returning home, and wives teasingly leading the men on until Lysistrata comes out to cock-block the men and send them home in even greater frustration. After a pathetically short resistance the men collapse completely and agree to all the women's demands, and the Spartans arrive to make an honorable peace and everyone gets to go home to bed.

I have four copies of this: the Loeb Classical edition in Greek, the Mentor edition, the Signet edition, and a pre-war hardcover copy of Dad's, translated by Jack Lindsay. They vary wildly in quality. This is one play that absolutely cannot be bowdlerized; any attempt just makes the play a ridiculous failure. None of the stage business makes any sense unless you realize that the men are all wearing enormous fake dicks, which get bigger and more awkward to walk around with as the play goes on. And since basically every other line in the play is a dirty joke, trying to castrate them just makes the play pointless. The Mentor edition, although it had useful footnotes, was particularly egregious: when Lysistrata brings in the women from other cities, one of them is described in the stage directions as a "steatopygous Korinthian". It took me quite a while with a Greek dictionary to work out that steatopygous is a neologism that the translator must have coined, meaning, more or less, "having an enormous ass". The translator was so prissy that he took an entire scene whose jokes revolve around a stereotype that Spartans had big tits and Korinthians had big butts, and played it down so much that none of the jokes work, and even in the stage directions he couldn't bring himself to explain what was happening, but had to invent a word in Greek just so he wouldn't have to say "ass". Good God.

  

Thinking in Systems -- Donella H. Meadows

A good book about systems theory. The big thing I got from it was a section about taking different approaches to problems. The example she gave was regulating the water level in a bathtub: the obvious way to do it is to adjust the inflow by controlling the faucet, but you can also adjust the outflow by increasing or decreasing the width of the drain.  What struck me about that is that you can make progress towards your goals in life both by increasing your efforts to reach them and by working to decrease the obstacles between you and them. I liked it.

  

Helen -- Euripides

A tragicomedy produced at the city Dionysia of 412 BC, the year after the destruction of the Athenian navy and the consequent destabilization of the democracy. Euripides here uses a tradition from the epic poet Stesichoros (his works are mostly lost now, but there are descriptions of them in Plato) that Helen never went to Troy at all; the "Helen" that ran off with Paris was an eidolon, a phantom, and the real Helen was carried off by the gods to Egypt, where she has been waiting patiently this entire time for Menelaos to come get her. After we have all this explained to us, Menelaos in fact arrives, on his way home from Troy, accompanied by the phantom Helen, whom he of course thinks is the real one. He's astonished to find another Helen in Egypt; she explains that, because they were angry at Paris for choosing Aphrodite over them in the beauty contest, Hera and Athena punished him by creating a fake Helen to run away with him, so that he never actually got his promised bribe of the most beautiful woman in the world. This is the hard core of the play: by showing that the colossal expense of blood and death spilt at Troy was a giant waste that didn't even recapture the right woman, Euripides is saying that the Athenian war faction is pursuing a war that is just as destructive and just as pointless. The real Helen and the phantom Helen are also, I think, meant to illustrate the difference between real, inner piety and empty observance of external forms. Menelaos doesn't believe Helen's story at first, until one of his sailors comes on stage to tell him that the Helen that sailed with them has inexplicably vanished. Convinced, Menelaos now comes up with a comic scheme to frustrate the Egyptian prince who has been pursuing Helen, replace his wrecked ship, and escape from Egypt with Helen and his men. The play must have made a big noise, since the Women at the Thesmophoria of Aristophanes, put on the next year, contains a long parody of it.

I only have one copy of this, the Oxford Classics edition, translated by James Michie and Colin Leach.

 

The Phoenician Women -- Euripides 

Euripides's take on the Matter of Thebes: it covers the battle of the seven against Thebes, the deaths of Eteokles and Polyneikes, and Antigone's rebellion against Kreon and subsequent exile. The Phoenician women of the title are a chorus of travelers on their way to the oracle at Delphi, who are trapped in Thebes by the war. The play was put on at the city Dionysia in 408 BC, when Athens had suffered several disastrous losses in their war against Sparta, and were only a few years away from total defeat. The chorus probably represents the innocent victims of war, who in Euripides's view would be the main body of the people of Athens and their allies, who were stuck in a titanic war none of them wanted, because a bloodthirsty minority had seized control of the government. The narrator and main character is Jokasta, the queen of Thebes, who in this version of the story did not commit suicide after Oedipus's self-blinding. The characters are drawn quite differently than in Sophokles; in this version Eteokles is unquestionably in the wrong, openly admitting that he wronged his brother because he loves power and will never surrender it. Kreon is also much more sympathetic; when Tiresias tells him that in order to make sure that Thebes wins the battle he must sacrifice his son, he instead sends his son on a made-up errand to the oracle at Dodona to get him out of the way; the son finds out, though, and sacrifices himself at the altar of Ares. Thebes wins the war, but most of the characters are killed and then Jokasta kills herself after all. The play is kind of chaotic, almost more a collection of incidents than a drama; most scholars think that a lot of the text is interpolated, probably by later writers trying to fill in gaps in damaged manuscripts. The editor of my copy says it is "not an easy play to understand, or to like." I have to agree; I can't really think of any lines that struck me particularly, or remember more than the general shape of the plot.

I have one copy, the Oxford Classics edition, translated by Peter Burian and Brian Swann. Swann is a contemporary poet; I believe Burian translated the Greek literally for Swann, who then turned the literal translation into English poetry. 

 

Ursula K. LeGuin: the Last Interview (David Streitfeld, ed.)

A collection of interviews that didn't really tell me much about her, her books, or her working process, so I'm not sure what the point of it was, really. I was surprised to see such a successful writer, who won so many awards, venting what really sounded like jealous resentment against other writers, particularly Philip K. Dick, for some reason.

 

The Limpopo Academy of Private Detection -- Alexander McCall Smith

The thirteenth Mma Ramotswe book. In this one, the author of the manual of private detection that the detective agency regards as its Bible unexpectedly comes by to pay a professional-courtesy visit. Naturally it turns out he's a small-time private eye from rural Indiana, and he had the manual privately printed and is amazed that Mma Ramotswe has read it; but he's also friendly, clever, and level-headed, and his advice helps Mma Ramotswe see her way to solving several cases. It was a good read.

 

Memories of My Melancholy Whores -- Gabriel García Márquez 

I think this was his last book. It struck me as something of a Márquez-ian retelling of Kawabata's The House of the Sleeping Beauties. The narrator is a third-rate writer, a man who has never had an emotional connection with anyone, and who by his own count has had sex with more than 500 prostitutes in his time. For his 90th birthday he decides to give himself a present: he arranges for his usual whorehouse to supply him with a fourteen-year-old virgin. When he goes in to the room where she lies drugged, however, he decides to simply sit and look at her naked body. He arranges for this to be repeated over and over, convincing himself that he has fallen in love; for someone like the narrator, this kind of relationship -- where the object of his affection is literally an object, a girl always motionless and silent, upon whom he can project whatever reality he wants -- is probably the only kind of "love" he can imagine. It was, as you may imagine, really creepy. I hated it.

 

Abolition Democracy -- Angela Y. Davis

A short book consisting of interviews Davis gave after the news broke of the abuse at Abu Ghraib prison. She compares it with her own time in prison and argues that prison abuse is a consequence of imperialism, comparing the sexual abuse perpetrated on prisoners by American soldiers overseas to the sexual component of lynching blacks stateside. She further argues that the American prison system is just a perpetuation of slavery under another name and that it amounts to a legalization of sex abuse. Powerful and cogent.

 

The Minor Adjustment Beauty Salon -- Alexander McCall Smith

The fourteenth Mma Ramotswe book. Everyone at the agency is feeling a little awkward because Mma Makutsi is obviously pregnant, but no one feels like they can bring it up until she says something about it. The cases in this one involve Mma Ramotswe looking into an inheritance case and finding a lot of dirty laundry, which she sensibly leaves alone, and also finding out who's behind a whispering campaign to wreck a local business. Of course it's Mma Makutsi's old spiteful classmate Violet Sephotho, who appears to be behind every shady deal in Gaborone. Violet's kind of getting on my nerves, actually, but the important part of the book was the home lives of the detectives, with Mma Makutsi's husband standing up for her against his overbearing relatives, and Mma Ramotswe's husband, conscious that Mma Ramotswe is really the main breadwinner since his auto business is declining, resolving to support her more and starting by learning to cook. The characters are what I really like about the series so I enjoyed it.

 

*Trent's Last Case -- E.C. Bentley

I had heard of this before because Raymond Chandler spends a chunk of his essay "The Simple Art of Murder" ripping it to shreds, but reading it myself I think Chandler had a reading comprehension failure. It's pretty clear, I think, that the financier intended only to wound himself as part of a scheme to get his secretary hanged for attempted murder, and his death was an accident; but beyond that, Chandler seems not to have realized at all that the book is a send-up of murder mysteries, with its hero, Trent, blithely making preposterous assumptions after looking at people's shoes in a closet, and that sort of thing. In fact Trent draws entirely the wrong conclusions from the evidence -- he gets the whole thing wrong not once but twice! 

 

Orestes -- Euripides

A late play, probably put on in 408 or 407 BC, when the Peloponnesian War was fast closing in on its final disaster for the Athenians. Euripides takes a famous episode that the Athenians have always prided themselves on -- the establishment of the court of the Araeopagos that delivered Orestes from the Furies -- and reshapes it to shame the Athenians on their conduct throughout the war. In this play, instead of being ritually cleansed at Delphi and going straight from there to Athens, Orestes is incapacitated from the guilt and madness of the Furies, only able to speak coherently when calmed by his sister Elektra; and the two of them are held prisoner in Argos, soon to be sentenced to death by stoning for the killing of their mother. Menelaos -- their uncle -- returns from the Trojan War, and Orestes and Elektra appeal to him for help. The main part of the play turns into a debate among Orestes, Menelaos, and Tyndareus (the father of Klytamnaestra and Helen, and so Orestes's grandfather and Menelaos's father-in-law) on the subject of human versus divine justice. Ultimately Menelaos refuses to help, because he's unwilling to take an unpopular stand when everyone already blames him for the war. Far from ending the family curse and healing the legacy of murder that has haunted the Atreidae for generations -- as he does in Aischylos -- Orestes, furious at Menelaos for abandoning him, decides to kidnap Helen and her daughter Hermione and threaten to kill them in order to escape. Tyndareus, neutral until now, obviously cannot stand by, and everything develops into a big standoff, with massive bloodshed certain, but then the god Apollo suddenly appears. He takes Helen and sends her off to Olympus, orders Orestes and Hermione to get married (which she agrees to strangely unprotesting, considering Orestes was holding a knife to her throat just a few minutes ago) and sends Orestes off to Athens to get acquitted, minimizing Athens's involvement and leaving them nothing to be proud of. It's a dark play.

I only have one copy of this, the Oxford Classics edition, translated by John Peck and Frank Nisetich.

 

J.D. Salinger: The Last Interview -- (David Streitfeld, ed.)

Only one of these was really an "interview", a brief conversation Salinger had with a high-school reporter in his home town. The rest are extraordinarily un-self-aware essays by dipshits that are basically "I rented a cabin to spy on Salinger, and I climbed on his garage roof to look in his windows, and I hid behind a tree to watch him walking his dog, and he didn't want to talk to me, the weirdo." The only part of the book really worth reading was the excerpts from the transcript of the court case where he sued a publisher for printing a pirate edition of his early stories.

 

The Handsome Man's De Luxe Cafe -- Alexander McCall Smith

The fifteenth Mma Ramotswe book. This one is mostly an outright comedy, as Mma Makutsi, having reduced her hours at work due to her new baby, decides to invest in a new restaurant. She quickly gets in over her head, being taken in by a crowd of the swindlers who lie in wait everywhere for every new restaurant business, and after a period of pretending everything's fine she goes for help to Mma Potokwame, who sorts it all out. I loved the scenes with the incompetent chef pretending he knew how to cook fashionable French food.

 

Night Watch -- Terry Pratchett

Maybe my favorite of his books. I've read it four or five times probably but I felt like reading it again for some reason.

 

Herakles -- Euripides

A dark and terrible play, all the more shocking because it's about Herakles, the most popular of Greek heroes, who, because of his legendarily genial, friendly character and larger-than-life heroics and partying, usually only appeared in comedies. In the play, Herakles's wife Megara and their children, along with his father Amphytrion, are persecuted by the usurper Lykos; Lykos has overthrown Megara's father Kreon, and he fears that when her children grow up they'll seek revenge, so he's decided to murder them all now. He's not worried about Herakles because he knows Herakles has gone off to the underworld on one of his labors, and he doesn't believe anyone could return from that. Herakles's family have fled for sanctuary to the altar of Zeus, where Lykos follows them and tries to argue them into surrendering. Lykos and Amphytrion debate the character of Herakles and the nature of justice, and Amphytrion clearly wins the argument, but Lykos says he's sick of talking and orders his men to stack wood around the sanctuary and set fire to it, declaring sophistically that he's not violating the sanctuary since the Heraklidae are killing themselves by stubbornly remaining at the altar instead of coming out. At the last minute, however, Herakles comes home, having not only brought the giant hound Kerberos up from Hades but also freed Theseus from his imprisonment there. Herakles frees his family and kills Lykos, and the audience was probably starting to stretch and look for their cloaks, since the story is clearly over; but Euripides now brings on Iris, the messenger of the gods, who tells us that the goddess Hera is so angry that Herakles completed all his labors, not only not getting killed but winning undying glory, that she's sent her servant Madness to drive Herakles insane so that he'll kill his whole family. A horrible episode follows, with Amphytrion telling us how Herakles, believing he was on a battlefield, hunted his own wife and children through his house and killed them all. Then we come to the second, more important debate of the play: Theseus, hearing about what's happened, comes to offer Herakles sanctuary in Athens; Herakles, having recovered from his madness, answers that he is resolved on suicide. The two of them debate the nature of the gods and the question of moral accountability. Theseus argues that because Herakles was insane -- and because his insanity was deliberately caused by the gods -- he's not responsible. Herakles rejects this, and says that no extenuating circumstances can free him from blame. Theseus shrewdly points out that the gods themselves have committed obvious crimes, and yet they go on with their lives -- Herakles is holding himself to a higher ethical standard than the gods, an act of hubris. He adds that it would be a crime against Greece for its greatest hero to die like a coward (the Greeks considered suicide disgraceful.) Convinced by Theseus's arguments, and by the genuine friendship behind them, Herakles takes up his club and bow and follows Theseus off stage, while the audience probably sat dumbstruck for the next hour. It's a dreadful story.

I have two copies of this, the Loeb Classical edition in Greek and the Oxford Classics edition, translated by Tom Sleigh.

 

The Assemblywomen -- Aristophanes

A comedy put on in 391 BC. The title in Greek is Ekklesiazousai, "Women of the Ekklesia". Ekklesia literally means "those who are called forth"; it was what the Athenians called their legislature, and it's usually translated "assembly", but I have also read editions that use the title The Congresswomen or Parliament of Women. Of course the real Assembly consisted only of men; in this play the women of Athens, led by one Praxagora (this appears to be a portmanteau of praxis, "taking action", and agora, the public square) disguise themselves as men and infiltrate an early-morning meeting of the Assembly, where they take advantage of the half-asleep, hung-over men to propose a new law that from now on women will run the government while men stay at home; there are enough disguised women present to carry the vote, Praxagora is elected Archon, and the men are all turfed out. Unlike in Lysistrata, where the women's rebellion is ad hoc, this time the women mean to reform Athens entirely, creating a sort of communist collective where everyone lives in state-run dormitories where there is no private property and no restraints on sex. Aristophanes is lampooning the various constitutional changes proposed by Athenian demagogues in the years since their defeat at the hands of the Spartans, essentially saying "All right, what if we went whole hog?" Interestingly, Aristophanes's comical Utopia -- except for the sex part -- sounds an awful lot like the ideal society described in Plato's Republic, so much so that it seems like a parody, except that it can't be, because Plato didn't publish the Republic until 375 BC. It's possible Plato was already, in the 390s, publicly discussing the ideas that later became the Republic; it's even possible that the Republic was influenced by The Assemblywomen and not the other way around -- Aristophanes and Sokrates were on good terms, and it's known that Plato regarded Aristophanes as a serious thinker whose ideas were worth listening to. This is not to say that Aristophanes actually thought women would be better at running the city than men; he's showing reform taken to comical extremes -- since everything is held in common, old and unattractive women have as much claim on handsome young men as young women do, and the new Assembly quickly makes rules that give ugly women priority in claiming men for sex. Of course he's also saying that the current Assembly is so ineffective and unmanly that it could be replaced by a bunch of women in men's clothes and no one could tell the difference.

The play has no parabasis, the interlude where the actors leave the stage and the chorus leader makes a speech lampooning current public affairs, calling out attendees in the audience by name. Maybe Aristophanes wasn't confident enough to attack individuals under the post-defeat regime, or maybe it's a sign of the declining importance of the chorus; the play also has no choral odes, and the places where they should be just have the note xorou, "Put a chorus here", apparently meaning that Aristophanes just hired a musician to fill in the odes.

I have two copies of this, the Loeb Classical edition in Greek, with a facing-page translation by Jeffrey Henderson, and the Mentor edition, translated by Douglass Parker. The Henderson translation is much better, with better narrative flow; the Parker translation is too afraid of the dirty jokes to work. 

 

Run Man Run -- Chester Himes

A cat-and-mouse story: an off-duty white cop, having drunkenly wandered away from his car, comes across three black restaurant workers on the late-night shift at a diner and accuses them of stealing it. Waving his gun around he accidentally-on-purpose shoots one of them, and then shoots at the other two because they saw it; he kills one, but the third guy gets away, and the rest of the book is the cop hunting the third guy so he can't spoil the cop's story of heroically stopping a robbery. The cop's story is full of holes, but the other cop investigating is the first cop's brother-in-law. It was an exciting read.

 

Tigana -- Guy Gavriel Kay

An early novel, not my favorite of his. It's an action-adventure story, following a group of inhabitants of a fictional peninsula resembling medieval Italy, who are oppressed east and west by two separate foreign conquerors; their plan is to provoke the two foreign warlords into fighting each other so they can overthrow both of them and restore native rule. The plot is kind of weak and it's not nearly as well-written as his later books.

 

The Woman Who Walked in Sunshine -- Alexander McCall Smith

The sixteenth Mma Ramotswe book, in which Mma Makutsi prods Mma Ramotswe into taking a vacation. She goes, but can't resist secretly keeping tabs on what's happening while she's away; when the agency gets a case involving a political scandal, Mma Ramotswe worries that Mma Makutsi has assigned it to their part-timer, Mr. Polopetsi, because she doesn't know how to handle it herself. What follows is a tangled story where Mma Ramotswe tries to help Mr. Polopetsi without Mma Makutsi finding out, while simultaneously solving an unrelated issue of vandalism and child abuse, while Mma Makutsi handles other cases and also deals with an outsider's scheme to leech off the agency's reputation. The schemer is Violet Sephotho, of course, who never has anything to do other than try to make trouble for our heroes. It was well told.

 

The Murder of Herodes -- Kathleen Freeman 

A collection of trial records from Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. Athenian trials were conducted wholly by the jury, which was either 201 or 501 men depending on the nature of the charge: there were no attorneys or public officials involved. (There was a magistrate, but his only job was to keep order and make sure everyone spoke in their proper turn.) Anyone could prosecute a case against anyone else, with the condition that unless a certain non-trivial percentage of the jury voted to convict, the prosecutor would have to pay a heavy fine to the accused. The cases are fascinating and tell us a lot about the private lives of the Athenians; my only complaint is that for nearly all of them we have only one speech, either for the prosecution or the defense, which were preserved for their literary qualities, and we don't know how the cases turned out. Was Euxitheos guilty of the murder of Herodes, or was Herodes's family just trying to muddy the inheritance battle? Did Lysias's slave die under interrogation inadvertently, or were the torturers bribed to make sure he died before they got to the important questions? We'll never know.

 

Disgraced -- Ayad Akhtar 

A one-act, one-scene play, winner of the 2013 Pulitzer, featuring the tensest dinner party ever: Amir, a Manhattan lawyer, and his wife Emily, an up-and-coming painter, host a Jewish couple: Abe, Emily's art dealer, and his wife Jory, another lawyer at Amir's firm. Amir, despite his secular attitude, is uncomfortable with his WASP wife's use of Islamic themes in her art, while Emily and Abe have had a secret affair in the past, which Emily is over but Abe isn't; and they've all just found out that Jory is being promoted at the firm rather than Amir, partly because Amir -- at Emily's insistence -- appeared as a character witness for a local imam and it made the papers. Everyone tries to be civil at first but it soon devolves into bitter political argument, and Amir -- who was presented sympathetically at first, which is why it was so shocking -- eventually shouts anti-Semitic slurs at Jory and hits Emily. Just reading the play was exhausting; if I saw it live I'm sure I'd need a drink afterwards.

 

After Thermopylae -- Paul Cartledge

A long exegesis of various surviving versions of the "Oath of Plataea", which may or may not have been a binding oath all the mainland Greeks took before the Battle of Plataea, to fight to the death and to continue to resist the Persians whatever the outcome of the battle. Cartledge assigns a lot more importance to the supposed Oath than other historians do; he does have a bee in his bonnet about how the Battle of Plataea is criminally overlooked (among the admittedly small group of people who study ancient Greek history.) It's true that Plataea was the final battle of the Persian War, and therefore decisive; but the truth is that every battle of the war was the decisive one -- if the Greeks hadn't won at Salamis, Plataea would never have happened; if they hadn't won at Artemisia, Salamis wouldn't have happened; and so on. Cartledge is also enthusiastically pro-Sparta, an unusual position among historians, and he's inclined to see the general view of Greek history as having a pro-Athenian bias, heavily influenced by Athenian propaganda. That's probably true, but Cartledge seems to think that you can study propaganda to discover what isn't being said; I think that just leads to making up whatever you wanted to be true. "Well, if that's propaganda, then what really happened must be my pet theory!" It's still erudite and readable history, as long as you remember to discount the source bias.

 

The Coroner's Lunch -- Colin Cotterill

The first in a mystery series, set in Laos in 1976, a few months after the Pathet Lao overthrew the monarchy. The hero is Dr. Siri Paiboun, an elderly doctor who went to medical school in Paris in the twenties. Now in his mid-seventies and a widower, he wants to retire, but the new regime has put him in charge of the Vientiane morgue because there are so few doctors in Laos, most of them having fled across the Mekong to Thailand. The fact that Siri has no training as a coroner is less important than that he's a dedicated Communist who spent forty years in the Lao jungles fighting the French, the Americans, and the royalists. He's not always in the Party's good graces, though, what with being an iconoclast who doesn't mind calling senior officials stupid in public. He's also outspoken about the Lao government's bad treatment of the Hmong people; and, as it turns out, he's not willing to just rubber-stamp dead bodies that some people don't want examined too closely. He also sees ghosts, who give him hints where to look in his investigations. I really liked Siri, and I liked the supporting cast -- his old jungle-fighting comrade who's now a cynical member of the Lao politburo; the nurse kept in her position by institutional sexism who's trying to get sent to medical school in Russia; the hospital attendant with Down's syndrome that Siri looks after; and another old jungle-fighter, now running a noodle stand, who is obviously carrying a torch for Siri. I enjoyed it a lot.

 

Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? -- Kathleen Collins

A collection of powerful short stories from the sixties, mostly about being a black woman in America and trying to relate to other black women and to white people. I liked her unusual approaches -- there's one story that sometimes drops into play format because the narrator has trouble with emotional closeness, while "Interiors" and "Exteriors" tell the story of the same failing marriage as it looks to the spouses and as it looks to their neighbors. The title story is nearly all interior dialogue, as the participants in a pair of interracial relationships begun during the Freedom Rides either overcome the prejudices of their backgrounds or don't. Probably "Documentary Style" made me the most uncomfortable, with its depiction of a black filmmaker who is aware of his strong need for approval and affirmation from white people but can't rid himself of it, and resents both them and himself because of it. An excellent book.

 

I Hear She's A Real Bitch -- Jen Agg

I had high hopes for this, since it's a book about restaurants from a viewpoint I haven't read before, that of an owner-investor rather than a worker; but it didn't tell me much. Agg has the conviction that people come to a restaurant for the decor and the ambience, not for the food, which naturally puts her at odds with the chefs she hires -- her story is that somehow every chef she's hired has been a hostile, uncooperative jerk, which, you know, what do all these relationships have in common? Speaking of relationships, there are long stretches of the book where she departs from restaurants entirely to talk about her marriages; these sections were so uninteresting that I just flipped the pages muttering "Don't care, don't care, don't care" until we got back to restaurants again. I doubt I'd get along with Agg. Here's an example: when discussing chef Kate Burnham and her lawsuit that ignited scandal across Canada about the toxic atmosphere of open sexism and harassment in so many professional kitchens, Agg makes the whole thing about herself -- she mentions Burnham's name once in the twenty pages she spends talking about it. It also irritated me the way she went on about rugged self-reliance and shit when her parents financed her first restaurant and her husband financed the next one. I didn't enjoy it.

 

Precious and Grace -- Alexander McCall Smith

The seventeenth Mma Ramotswe book. Mma Ramotswe has made Mma Makutsi a partner in the detective agency, but Mma Makutsi spends most of the book worked up about her tireless nemesis, Violet, who is now hosting a radio show and is campaigning to have herself named Botswana's "Woman of the Year". Mma Ramotswe mainly handles the book's primary case, tracking down a white foreigner's childhood nanny, while also rescuing Mr. Polopetsi from a pyramid scheme. The book has some good reflections on the value of forgiveness and how all of modern political culture is built around retribution instead. I liked it.

 

*Two Satyr Plays -- Euripides and Sophokles

The satyr-play was the slapstick parody put on after the end of a tragic trilogy, where the playwrights made fun of their own plays, to show they weren't getting above themselves by taking their work too seriously. The only complete satyr-play we have is Euripides's Cyclops, a send-up of a trilogy that hasn't survived, wherein the cyclops -- quite unlike Homer's brutish monster -- is a clear parody of the Athenian philosophers of Euripides's day; Odysseus and the cyclops trade sophistry while Silenus and the satyrs egg them on and get everybody drunk. We also have about half of a satyr-play by Sophokles called Ichneutai ("The Searchers"), which was discovered among the Oxyrhynchus papyri; it follows the story of how the child Hermes stole the cattle of Apollo. In this version Apollo sends a crowd of satyrs to find out where the cattle went. They follow the trail, tripping over themselves and complaining, until they find Hermes; but they're frightened off by the sound of the lyre, which Hermes has just invented. Apollo turns up to see what's taking so long and the fragment ends. The translations are by Roger Lancelyn Green; they're good, but I thought he was really over-reaching himself when he decided to add his own ending for Ichneutai. It would have been better without. 

 

Thirty-Three Teeth -- Colin Cotterill

The second Siri Paiboun book. This one goes more deeply into a side-issue from the first book, which is that Siri is apparently the unwitting host of the spirit of a thousand-year-old shaman, who still has enemies from the spirit world hunting him, and they don't care that Siri is just a bystander. This is a bit of change of direction, as I had thought the whole seeing-ghosts thing would be a minor character-development issue rather than a major plot point. After some bodies turn up in Vientiane, a corrupt judge sends Siri off north to Luang Prabang, leaving Nurse Dtui to look into the bodies by herself; while up north, Siri meets the deposed King Sisavang, whose royal shaman fills him in on his in-dwelling shaman's background. There's a great scene where a Party official calls a meeting of Lao spiritualists and tries to get them to convince the spirits they host that ghostly possession is not good Communism. I loved it.

 

The House of the Unexpected Sisters -- Alexander McCall Smith

The eighteenth Mma Ramotswe book. Mma Ramotswe and Mma Makutsi disagree on whether a client is telling the truth, and they end up conducting separate parallel investigations. Mma Ramotswe meets her previously unknown half-sister, and finds out that her mother was her father's second wife. I didn't like it as much as most of the others; some plot lines that were really resolved a while ago come back for no good reason, while several of the series tropes -- the endless trouble-making of Violet Sephotho, Mma Ramotswe's always-unreliable white van, Charlie's fecklessness -- have started to seem less like running gags and more like hiccups that have gone on too long. 

 

The Suppliant Women -- Euripides

Another tragedy on the Matter of Thebes, written about twenty years before The Phoenician Women. The title in Greek is Hiketides ("The Suppliants") but it's in the feminine gender. The suppliants are the mothers and widows of the Argive soldiers whose corpses all lie unburied outside the walls of Thebes, a dreadful impiety in Greek eyes. This is one of the episodes in their history that the Athenians were most proud of, because they acted disinterestedly in the service of justice, gaining nothing but reputation: Theseus made war on Thebes, and when he won he wouldn't let his army sack the city, because they'd come to enforce the nomima pases Hellados, the universal law of the Greeks; the Athenians just buried the dead and left. The ancient editors called it an "encomium of Athens", which is probably true -- Euripides was not yet disillusioned when he wrote it -- but I think the idea behind the play was to criticize the conduct of fifth-century Athens. The play centers around two debates, which are really the same debate looked at from two angles. The first debate is between Theseus and his mother Aithra; Theseus, still young and headstrong, more interested in fighting than in politics, is at first inclined not to help the Argives, since their invasion of Thebes didn't have divine sanction, and the course of prudence would be to avoid war with a powerful enemy when you have no direct reason to get involved. His mother counters that the laws of Greece and the gods are greater than prudent self-interest. She convinces him and he sends a message to Kreon requesting him to bury the bodies. A Theban herald arrives, and he and Theseus have more or less the same debate, but more angrily, this time with Theseus appealing to the higher law, while the herald dwells on the immediate consequences to Athens. They digress for a bit to argue whether despotism or democracy is the better form of government; Theseus's proud boast that in Athens the poor dared to talk back to the rich probably got a big hand, but it's worth noting that Theseus never actually answers the herald's charge that democracies are easily swayed into rushing into wars they had better have stayed out of, and I bet Euripides meant those lines to stick in the audience's heads. The herald warns Theseus not to meddle with things that don't concern him, and Theseus -- we're meant to understand that he has matured through the course of the play -- replies that what he is concerned with is what is right, not what will bring him advantage. We might expect the play to end with the Athenian victory, but Euripides always wants to remind us that no war is really glorious: we get a moving description of Theseus personally doing the slaves' work of washing and burying the dead, and then he returns to Athens bringing the ashes of the Seven Against Thebes so that the king of Argos can end the play with their funeral oration.

I have two copies of this, the Loeb Classical edition in Greek and the Oxford Classics edition, translated by Rosanna Warren and Stephen Scully. 

 

Shakespeare Our Contemporary -- Jan Kott

The title is meant to argue that Shakespeare is not at all dated, but that his themes and situations are timeless and have application to ordinary people's lives just as much today as when they were written. (Absolutely true!) The text rather contradicts the title, though, since Kott is constantly saying things like "can only be seen in this light" and "the only possible interpretation is." It's Kott's highly personal and idiosyncratic Marxist reading of Shakespeare; some of his ideas would have made rather more sense to people behind the Iron Curtain sixty years ago than they do to me now. For example, he read A Midsummer Night's Dream as a terrible nightmare about the rude mechanicals being brutally crushed by elfin governmental power, rather than as the light-hearted comedy everyone else sees.

 

The Journey of Ibn Fattouma -- Naguib Mahfouz

A fable about a man disillusioned by the corruption of his home city; when he asks his teacher how a people that follow Islam can become corrupt, the teacher says that to find the answer he must go to the far-off city of Gebel. Ibn Fattouma sets out on a long allegorical journey, passing through many imaginary cities -- the city of uninhibitedness, the city of war, the city of freedom, the city of justice. All these cities -- probably representing different epochs when one culture or another made itself dominant in the world -- make war on one another and frustrate the search for truth. In the last city, the city of the sunset, ibn Fattouma and other pilgrims set out in a caravan across the desert, in order to escape before the armies of the other cities come there as well. The novel ends with ibn Fattouma catching sight of distant Gebel from a mountaintop, and descending to continue towards it; though since Gebel seems to be the city of perfection, we're probably meant to understand that ibn Fattouma will never actually reach it. 

 

The Pickup -- Nadine Gordimer

A novel about a rich white South African girl named Julie who meets an immigrant Arab man named Abdu and starts dating him, at first in a sort of liberal-street-cred sort of way, showing off her lower-class non-white boyfriend to her idle-rich coffee-house friends; when she finds out he's overstayed his visa and will soon be deported, she abruptly marries him, and even she isn't sure how much of their relationship is real attraction and how much is a white-savior attempt to rescue a downtrodden immigrant from deportation -- and there's a strong element of rebellion-against-my-controlling-genteel-racist-father, as well. Abdu gets deported anyway, and to everyone's surprise Julie goes with him, to be met with bemused uncertainty from Abdu's family as well as a sense that Abdu is constantly waiting for her to pack it in and go home. She resolutely sets out to learn Arabic and gets a job teaching English to teenagers, while Abdu restlessly works all avenues to get another visa; when he gets one and leaves for America, Julie decides to stay with her Arab in-laws, reasoning that if she doesn't really feel at home there, well, she's never felt at home in South Africa either, and at least here she's taken on her own terms as an adult instead of as a useless adjunct of her influential parents. I didn't always like the prose but a lot of it was pretty memorable.

 

Fragments -- Sophokles

 

The Loeb Classical edition of fragments of Sophokles that survived as quotations in other works. The best ones are the ones that survived for their pithiness -- Whoever approaches danger boldly, his talk is straight and his purpose is not shaken -- while others survived because they were used as illustrations of rare usages in Greek grammar, or because they seemed to support someone's beliefs about where boundary lines should be located. It also contains the partial text of Ichneutai ("The Searchers") from the Oxyrhynchos papyri.

 

Disco For the Departed -- Colin Cotterill

The third Siri Paiboun book. This one has Siri going north to the caves where he and his fellow rebels hid out during the civil war, to figure out why there are bodies buried under the concrete walk next to the old headquarters. The book neatly juxtaposes the comedy of the bemused Lao watching the Vietnamese engineers stubbornly construct a road that ends twenty yards away from where the Russians built a bridge across the river -- because neither side will admit that their orders had a typo -- next to the genuinely moving story of Mr. Geung, sent to a reeducation camp by Siri's superior Judge Haeng, who took advantage of Siri being out of town to get rid of Mr. Geung because he didn't like having someone with Down's syndrome working in the hospital. Geung, abandoned in the jungle by the truck driver, spends the whole book walking back to Vientiane, despite ripping his feet bloody and coming down with dengue fever, kept going by the single-minded conviction that his friends need him. I thought it was great. 

 

Silence -- Jane Brox 

A not very interesting book about silence and silent communities, like certain monasteries and old-time prisons where the prisoners were never allowed to speak. The main thing I remember is that I remain unimpressed by Thomas Merton.

 

Anarchy and Old Dogs -- Colin Cotterill

The fourth Siri Paiboun book. In this one Siri manages, in the course of investigating how a Russian engineer came to be electrocuted in his bathtub, to prevent a Royalist coup in Laos. I liked how Siri appreciates the stagnation of the communist Lao government and its almost helpless reliance on support from Vietnam ("The government was starting to look like a depressingly unloved relative who'd come to visit for the weekend and stayed for two years") but is still willing to give it a chance rather than give up on Lao self-determination. I enjoyed it.

 

Where the Crawdads Sing -- Delia Owens

A good novel about a girl named Kya who grows up in poverty in a marsh cabin in North Carolina; when she's very small her mother abandons her to be raised by her drunken, abusive father. During her father's increasingly long absences she learns to fend for herself; eventually he doesn't come back, and she lives a solitary life as "the marsh girl", avoiding the social workers by hiding in the marsh and looked down on by the locals. She makes friends with a nature-loving boy but is furious when he goes away to college; she then gets involved with Chase, the local high school sports hero. From here on the book moves backwards and forwards in time, between her meeting Chase and later on when she's being tried for his murder. Chase led her on, in a thrill-of-the-chase kind of way (ha ha) until she found out he was engaged to a local girl; then, after she angrily rejected him, he became obsessed with her, stalking her and attempting rape. He's eventually found dead, apparently having fallen from a watch tower, and Kya is arrested, but despite the best efforts of Chase's family and the local police she's acquitted. She goes on to become the nationally recognized expert on the flora and fauna of the Carolina coast, and also (under a pen name) a famous poet, and marries the nature-loving boy when he comes back from college, although he's never really sure whether she killed Chase or not. I liked it.

 

I Was Told There'd Be Cake -- Sloane Crosley

A collection of essays that could be summed up as "privileged white chick complains about her privileged white chick problems."  They're supposed to be funny but I didn't even smile once.

 

The Colors of All the Cattle -- Alexander McCall Smith

The nineteenth Mma Ramotswe book, and probably the last one I'm going to read. Mma Potokwame convinces Mma Ramotswe to run for the Gaborone city council, in order to vote down a development deal that will put a loud casino right next to the Gaborone cemetery. Inevitably her opponent for the council seat is Violet Sephotho, which drives Mma Makutsi into a frenzy of poison-pamphlet writing, none of which Mma Ramotswe uses, sensibly running on her own honest reputation instead. I liked the writing and I still like the main characters, but I'm tired of most of the repeating story elements and I think the series can continue without me.

 

Taco USA -- Gustavo Arellano

A really good history of Mexican food, going back to explain the origins of masa (the cornmeal dough that is the base of tamales and tortillas) and nixtamalization, the practice of soaking the corn kernels in lime water, which softens the masa, makes it taste better, kills any toxic fungi, and adds vitamin B -- all that even though lime water is poisonous! There's a lot of stuff on how Mexican food became popular among Anglos, starting with the old nineteenth-century tamale wagons, to getting coopted by ambitious white restaurateurs, to getting reclaimed by indignant Mexicans. There's a lot of ethnic tension to it -- for example, wheat-flour tortillas were originally popular among poor field laborers, because they stretch better and hold their texture longer, so they could make burritos that they could carry to work easily. Since poor field laborers were often Indians, burritos were sometimes disdained as "Indio food". There's still some foodie snobbery in restaurant advertising -- where "Authentic Mexican Food" used to mean "not made by white people", now it often means "we don't make Tex-Mex"; both Tex-Mex and Californio cuisine being derided as Johnny-come-lately aberrations by central Mexico cooks. I think it's ridiculous, myself -- central Mexico food is excellent, but come on, don't act like you're too damn good for fajitas. And try running a Mexican restaurant anywhere without serving chips and salsa and see how long that lasts. I really enjoyed it.

 

The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax -- Dorothy Gilman

This is the first in a series Lucy recommended to me, I think from the late sixties. The eponymous Mrs. Pollifax is a Massachusetts widower in her sixties, who falls into a long depressive episode leading to a near-suicide. She decides she needs a new career to keep her interested in life, and thinks, "Well, I always thought I'd be a good spy," so with what we are to learn is characteristic directness she drives down to Langley and walks into CIA headquarters to volunteer. Through a series of miscommunications she winds up in the office of a senior official who happens to have an urgent need for an innocent-looking courier to pick up a message in Mexico City, and since no one could be more innocent-looking than Mrs. Pollifax he hires her and sends her off to Mexico, where the operation goes wrong and she's abducted along with another agent. She winds up masterminding their escape, helping her wounded fellow-agent and a political prisoner make their way out of Communist Albania. It was a good read. 

 

The Hobbit -- J.R.R. Tolkien 

We read this aloud to the kids in the early days of the pandemic. They were really absorbed in it -- little Ole ran and hid when big Ole read the giant spiders in a creepy, scratchy voice. Sabine cried and hid under the covers when Thorin cursed Bilbo for trying to make peace, and later jumped up and ran around the room cheering when Gandalf came back to help Bilbo. It was a lot of fun. Ole's favorite part was the dwarves' tea party at Bilbo's hobbit-hole, while Sabine loved the scenes with Beorn.

 

Fragments -- Euripides

A two-volume book from the Loeb Classical Library, collecting all the fragments of Euripides preserved in other sources; there are a whole lot of them, because Euripides was the most popular of the Athenian playwrights in the centuries after his death. Some of them are interesting and some aren't, depending on why they were preserved. For example, some are just lines quoted in a history of grammar to illustrate some obscure usage, or in a work of geography to show the ancients' opinions on where boundaries were. Much better reading are lines preserved for their pithiness or apt application: Speak not to me of Wealth! I do not admire such a god, of whom even the basest man can get possession.

 

My Side of the Mountain -- Jean Craighead George

One of my favorite books when I was a kid. I read it over and over and I totally believed that a 12-year-old boy could run away to live off the land in the Catskills and do just fine. I read it to the kids; little Ole liked the scene where Sam has to chase off all the animals making a mess at his "Halloween party", while Sabine wanted a lot of explanation about things like how Sam made salt by boiling hickory branches. It was fun.

 

Range -- David Epstein

A book on the value of generalization over specialization. I was a little iffy on it; while I agree with the thesis -- humans obviously evolved to be generalists, and real innovation comes from cross-germination of ideas across different fields -- I think the book argues the thesis fairly weakly. It opens with a contrast between Tiger Woods (who obsessively trained for nothing but golf literally before he could walk) and Roger Federer (who played around with many different sports before settling on tennis in his teens.) But both Woods and Federer are among the most accomplished athletes ever in their own fields, so their example doesn't make the case that one is better than the other. Much of the book is similarly anecdotal. Also, this is just a guess, but there's a certain unevenness that gives me the feeling that the author wanted this to be a science book and the publisher wanted it to be a business book.

 

The Amazing Mrs. Pollifax -- Dorothy Gilman

The second in the series. The CIA sends harmless-looking Mrs. Pollifax to Turkey, where she's supposed to make a drop of a package containing money and a passport for a Russian double agent who wants to defect. However, thanks to a different double agent, the operation is blown and Mrs. Pollifax has to recruit a friendly National Geographic photographer to help her rescue the agent and get her out of the country by a different route, with the assistance of a band of anti-Communist gypsies. It was a page-turner.

 

Tails and Tales -- Suze Craig

A series of articles a friend's mom wrote for an agricultural paper, all about running a family farm in eastern Massachusetts in the seventies and eighties. It wasn't a subsistence farm, which is why the articles are funny rather than gloomy. I liked them.

 

What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker -- Damon Young

A collection of essays about living in the black part of town, having to interact with Trump voters, and cultivating white friends so you have a white guy to answer the door when the neighbors call the police because you have the basketball game on too loud. There's an interesting essay about going to the same mediocre barber for fifteen years out of loyalty and the sense of guilt when he finally started going to a better one. I don't think white people have the same weird fetish about touching black men's hair that they do for black women's hair, but there's clearly still a big pile of cultural baggage built up there. It was a good book. 

 

Born a Crime -- Trevor Noah

Noah's autobiography of growing up in South Africa under Apartheid. The title is literally true: since Noah's father was white and his mother was black, both of his parents had committed a crime and his actual existence was illegal. His mother had to walk him to school from the other side of the street, since if they walked together in public she could be arrested and have her son taken away. Noah learned to speak several different languages, and gave an interesting cultural illustration: he lived in a neighborhood of Xhosa speakers, and one day some teens from another neighborhood started following him. He heard them talking in Zulu about mugging him; but when he turned around and spoke to them in Zulu, the threat disappeared and everyone got along fine. The book does a good job of lightening up the heavy stuff about Apartheid and Noah's mother's violent boyfriend, who regularly beat her and eventually tried to shoot her to death, with funny episodes like the bafflement of the uneducated teenagers in his song-and-dance band when they performed in front of a big, mostly white crowd, and their best dancer -- whose name was Hitler -- went into a big routine and all the band started chanting "Go Hitler! Go Hitler!", and had no idea why the crowd got angry. It was a very good book.

 

Wealth -- Aristophanes

A comedy based on the commonplace Greek idea that the god of Wealth must be blind, since wealth clearly does not go to the deserving and virtuous but is distributed at random. The action begins with an Athenian named Chremylos (which means "hounded by debt", more or less) who returns from Delphi, having asked the Oracle there how he should educate his son: to be honest, which would mean a life of virtue depressed by poverty? Or to be dishonest, which would mean a life that would be discreditable but comfortable? The Oracle's answer was that Chremylos should invite home with him the first man he met after leaving Delphi, who turned out to be a blind beggar. Speaking with the beggar, Chremylos is amazed to learn that he is actually the god of Wealth, blinded long ago by Zeus to make sure that good men did not have worldly success. Although Wealth is afraid to oppose Zeus, Chremylos takes him home and calls in doctors to cure his blindness. There's an extended comic debate where the goddess of Poverty -- an angry, repellent hag -- comes to Chremylos and argues that people are actually far better off poor than rich. Chremylos argues her down and cures Wealth's blindness, with the immediate result that -- now that he can see -- Wealth abandons all the mean rich bastards and goes to the homes of the virtuous. An immediate consequence is that people stop sacrificing to the gods, because they don't need to ask for help when all the good people have money and will gladly help others with it. (This is also a sneaky way of saying, without actually saying it, that because the gods are suddenly deprived right after Wealth became able to reward the virtuous, then the gods must not be all that virtuous.) Hermes, the messenger of the gods, turns up to read Chremylos the riot act, but he's so hungry that he ends up taking a job cleaning Chremylos's kitchen.

I have two copies of this, the Loeb Classical edition in Greek and a translation by Wayne Amber and Thomas Pangle, included with The Birds and Peace in a collection called Aristophanes' Critique of the Gods. The play is certainly staggeringly impious, showing the extraordinary license the Athenians allowed to their comic playwrights. 

 

A Brightness Long Ago -- Guy Gavriel Kay

An action-intrigue story, set in a fictional version of pre-Renaissance Italy, showing the foolishness of the condottieri fighting and scheming among the cities of Italy while Constantinople is under siege by the Saracen army that will destroy it. It hasn't stayed in my memory the way other books of his have.

 

Curse of the Pogo Stick -- Colin Cotterill

The fifth Siri Paiboun book. It's early in 1978 and the Pathet Lao has been in power for two and a half years; Siri is 74 and still not allowed to retire. As his boss drags him around northern Laos as part of a look-how-great-the-Party-is tour, he gets kidnapped by a group of Hmong villagers who want him (or rather Yeh Ming, the thousand-year-old shaman whose spirit lives within him) to exorcise a possessed villager. Back in Vientiane, Nurse Dtui starts a relationship with the police chief and spots a bomb planted in a corpse in time to stop the fill-in coroner from blowing himself up. Not a lot of plot, but what there was was well-told.

 

The Knights -- Aristophanes

His fourth play, put on at the winter festival in 424 BC, when he was only 22. Though he wrote more ambitious and funnier plays later, he remained proudest of this one, because it was the most dangerous: it was an open attack on the general Kleon, the most influential man in the city. Aristophanes had taken some shots at Kleon in his previous play, and Kleon had prosecuted him for it; Aristophanes came back with a whole play depicting Kleon as a crude, vulgar demagogue who advanced himself through blackmail, extortion, and stealing the credit for the accomplishments of better men. Aristophanes was genuinely sticking his neck out; according to tradition, he couldn't find any actor who dared to play the part of Kleon, so he played it himself, wearing an ugly mask with purple stains on the mouth and chin to suggest a habitual drunkard. In the play a good-natured but easily-led old man named Demos ("the people") is robbed and cheated by his chief servant, a Tanner (Kleon's day job) who controls Demos with lies and flattery while gorging himself on all the best food and drink. Demos's other servants, sick of the Tanner's ascendancy, go down to the cheap markets to find someone to rival him. They locate a Sausage-seller, someone even more shameless and amoral than the Tanner, and they bring him back to the estate, where he out-maneuvers the Tanner at his own game. The Tanner is sent off in humiliating disgrace, crying "But I stole for the good of the city!" whereupon the Sausage-seller suddenly reforms, becomes an upstanding man of good character, and restores Demos to youth, valor, and good sense, decreeing an end to all the customs and political practices that Aristophanes didn't like. It's all very funny, though notably less light-hearted than his other comedies. The play won first prize, but Kleon was reelected only a few weeks later and prosecuted Aristophanes again, this time making him pay a large fine, and (according to the later play The Wasps) sent thugs to beat Aristophanes up, forcing him to flee the city for a while.

Just how much of Aristophanes's criticism is legitimate is uncertain. He opposed Kleon because he was the head of the pro-war faction, but also because he was from the lower classes and opposed the interests of rich people like Aristophanes. Aristophanes was against the war on principle, but also because wars generally increased the power and influence of the lower classes at the expense of the wealthy. It was against the law in Athens to say in public that democracy was a bad form of government, so Aristophanes was careful to blame everything on bad leaders; but it's clear he thought the masses were too quick to jump one way or the other, and he would have preferred a more limited democracy, where the real decision-making power remained in the hands of his own class.

I have two copies of this, both good: the Loeb Classical edition in Greek, and a print-on-demand paperback of John Hookham Frere's 1909 translation that I picked up somewhere, I don't remember where.

 

Jorge Luis Borges: the Last Interview (no editor named)

The great majority of this was just excerpts from the 1968 book Conversations With Jorge Luis Borges; there are only two other entries, a literary interview from 1980 and the "last" interview of 1985. I was surprised to see that Borges was, apparently quite sincerely, a severe critic of his own work, and he generally thought the books that won awards were his worst ones. I thought it was odd that everyone addressed him as just "Borges"; I don't know if that's an Argentinian thing, or an eccentricity of his own. Naturally everyone wanted to talk about his progressive blindness, and he admitted that it was always work for him not to be angry about it. He also said he thought it helped his career as a poet, since people naturally associate blind poets with Homer and Milton; but that may have been a joke. It's not always easy to tell with him. The part that stuck with me the most was the bit in the 1985 interview where the interviewer asked him if he'd forgiven Péron; he said he believes more in forgetting than forgiving, since forgetting someone removes their power over your thoughts and is also the best form of revenge. It was pretty interesting.

 

Peace -- Aristophanes

An incredibly blasphemous comedy put on at the City Dionysia in 421 BC, just as the Peace of Nikias was settled, supposedly ending the Peloponnesian War. It would turn out to be a cease-fire that only lasted seven years, but no one knew that at the time, and Aristophanes was in great spirits because the peace party, which he favored, was in the ascendant; his enemy Kleon, the leader of the war hawks, had been killed the year before, along with the Spartans' best general, Brasidas. The play opens with a parody of the myth of Bellerophon: an Athenian called Trygaios ("wine-maker") harnesses a giant dung beetle and rides on its back to heaven, where he intends to charge the gods with treason against Greece for their general mismanagement of everything. He gets there to find that the gods have all gone off somewhere human prayers can't reach them, leaving the terrible ogre War in charge. War is preparing a great mortar in which to grind all Greece to paste, but he's lost both his pestle (Kleon) and his backup pestle (Brasidas.) He goes off stage to find a replacement and Trygaios comes out of hiding to dig up Peace from the pit where War has buried her. He tries hard but can't succeed until he calls down for help, and peace-lovers from all over Greece arrive to dig. The politicians and philosophers just get in each other’s way and accomplish little, but the farmers manage to free Peace; Trygaios apologizes to her for the way Athens repeatedly rejected her, and the Greeks bring her down to earth in honor while War stumbles around heaven uselessly, and everything ends with a huge party. It's all very funny. I particularly remember the bit where the returned Trygaios tells the audience that from heaven they all looked like a scummy set of criminal low-lifes, and they look even worse close up!

I have two copies of this, the Loeb Classical edition in Greek and a translation by Wayne Amber and Thomas Pangle, included with The Birds and Wealth in a collection called Aristophanes' Critique of the Gods.

  

The Big Activity Book For Anxious People -- Jordan Reid and Erin Williams 

A half-comic, half-serious book about coping with anxiety. It alternates advice about working through difficult feelings with activities both silly and useful: making lists of things you can handle and things you can't and ranking them, doing dead-end mazes that have no solution, and reading articles like "Obscure Diseases You Almost Definitely Don't Have". I liked it.

 

The Elusive Mrs. Pollifax -- Dorothy Gilman

Third in the series. The CIA sends Mrs. Pollifax to Bulgaria, to deliver some passports to the Bulgarian underground, but hides other information in her luggage without telling her. On arriving in Sofia, though, she sees a young backpacker get arrested by the secret police, and while helping the backpacker's friends she finds the papers the CIA hid on her, which leads her to change her plans, and she ends up travelling clandestinely all over Bulgaria, avoiding both the secret police and her Tourist Bureau minder, eventually leading the Bulgarian underground in an assault on a state prison to free the backpacker and a number of other political prisoners and get them out of the country. I liked it.

 

Broken Verses -- Kamila Shamsie

A good novel set in contemporary Pakistan. The hero is Aasmaani, a TV producer in her thirties; her mother Samina, a famous women's rights activist, disappeared when Aasmaani was a teenager, a year or two after her lover, Pakistan's greatest poet, was beaten to death by government thugs. (Samina left Aasmaani's father to live with the poet, which may be why Aasmaani never uses his name and only calls him "the Poet".) Aasmaani is now working on a TV epic starring a famous actress named Shehnaz, who was a great friend of Samina's; Shehnaz has lived in retirement for over ten years so her return is a sensation. Aasmaani has always held out hope that her mother is still alive somewhere, and though Shehnaz gently discourages this belief, Shehnaz's son shows Aasmaani some papers he's found in his mother's house, letters written in a private code that only the Poet, Samina, and Aasmaani know. Faced with evidence that the Poet is still alive and held in prison, Aasmaani is sure that her mother is alive as well, though her father, sister, and friends all warn her against self-delusion. Eventually Aasmaani realizes that the letters are fakes, written by Shehnaz's son in the misguided hope of helping Aasmaani move on, and she has a breakdown, later recovering to accept for the first time that her mother killed herself. It sounds depressing but I found the ending hopeful.

 

Leaves of Grass -- Walt Whitman

I'd read parts of this before, but I'd never sat down and read through the  whole thing. I actually read through three copies: a facsimile of the first edition of 1855; the Signet reprint of the edition of 1867, which is the one I used in college (I bought it at the old Goliard Books on Pleasant Street); and a leather-bound copy of the final edition of 1892, the "deathbed" edition. The first edition contains twelve long poems, while the final edition contains over 400 poems of varying lengths, plus 37 years' worth of edits to the original twelve. (I like the first edition best, although my personal favorite, "Starting From Paumanok", wasn't added until 1860.) I find the poetry brilliant -- vibrant and powerful, life-affirming in the best way, and full of the proud confidence of someone who knows he has talent to burn. The first edition has a portrait rather than a byline, but you couldn't really say it was published anonymously since he names himself right away in "Song of Myself": Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a Kosmos. My copy of the 1855 edition includes an appendix with contemporary reviews; notably, everyone who hated it is someone I've never heard of, while the names of all the reviewers who liked it are still familiar today -- Emerson, Charles Eliot Norton, Edward Everett Hale.

 

The Merry Misogynist -- Colin Cotterill

The sixth Siri Paiboun book. I'm generally turned off by any book that has scenes told from a serial killer's point of view, and this was no exception. I just skipped those chapters, which meant that for me most of the interest of this one was Siri, Phosy, and the very pregnant Dtui searching for their mentally ill homeless friend who's gone missing.

 

A Palm For Mrs. Pollifax -- Dorothy Gilman

Fourth in the series. The CIA sends Mrs. Pollifax to a health clinic in Switzerland, to look for leads about some stolen plutonium. No one there is who they appear to be, of course, and luckily one of the guests is an international jewel thief, whom Mrs. Pollifax catches in the act. She makes him return the stolen jewelry and recruits him to help her mission; she not only finds the plutonium but prevents a coup d’état in a fictional European country. The thief goes straight and joins Interpol, naturally.

 

The Horse and His Boy -- C.S. Lewis

We read this aloud to the kids. I say "we" but in fact Ole senior read most of it. The kids were fascinated; little Ole needed me to stay by his bed so he could hold my hand when things got scary, and Sabine needed me to reassure her that the horses would be okay in the end, but they both cheered the appearance of Aslan and laughed when Rabadash got turned into a donkey.

 

...This Season's People -- Stephen Gaskin

Gaskin was a hippie who founded a large commune called "The Farm" in Tennessee in the seventies. This book is sort of an extended ramble about his spiritual ideas; it doesn't really have a thesis, but he seems generally to have believed that the elements that most religions have in common -- kindness, mercy, caring for your fellows -- must be the real essence of religion, and everything else is cultural window dressing. Not a lot of the book has stayed in my mind, to be honest, but I remember being struck by things he said that are now so common as to be unremarkable, but in 1971 were unheard of, even revolutionary -- the idea that it's best to comfort children when they cry, rather than to make them stop crying, for example.

 

Love Songs from a Shallow Grave -- Colin Cotterill

The seventh Siri Paiboun book. Investigating a strange series of sword killings, Siri is coming to the conclusion that the killer is a Vietnamese soldier; since that would be embarrassing to the regime (dependent on assistance from Vietnam), Siri's superiors send him off to accompany a diplomatic mission to Cambodia. This first exposure to life under Pol Pot is horrifying enough for Siri's senior diplomat friend Civilai; but for Siri -- who can talk to the dead, remember -- it's crushing. Siri gets imprisoned and tortured, barely escaping from the madmen of the Khmer Rouge, and it's saying a lot that coming back to the barely-functional communist regime in Laos feels like reaching safety.

 

Music For Wartime -- Rebecca Makkai

A short story collection, beautifully written; some of the stories are moving, some absurd. There's one about a small-town minister who faces a big problem when a traveling circus's elephant dies and the circus takes off in the middle of the night, leaving the elephant carcass behind, and somehow it falls to the minister to have to take care of the body. Another story has a young boy, a few years into learning the violin, sit and listen to an ancient Romanian Holocaust survivor play the violin, and he realizes he must be a real musician because he can hear the Romanian's history in his playing. I also liked "The November Story", about a reality-TV producer whose relationship is falling apart so she tries to manipulate a couple people on the show into falling for each other.  The most interesting, I think, was "Cross", a story about an orchestra musician who comes home after some months' absence to find that while she was away there was a fatal traffic accident on her street, and some people have set up a shrine to the dead driver in the musician's front yard; the musician is sympathetic, but also kind of weirded out to have to detour around a makeshift altar with a cross and flowers in order to walk to her front door, while being glared at by the mourners who come to the shrine every day.

 

Mrs. Pollifax On Safari -- Dorothy Gilman 

Fifth in the series. The CIA sends Mrs. Pollifax on a safari in Zambia, because they believe that one of the members of the safari is the infamous assassin "Aristotle". Her job is just to take lots of pictures on the safari and make sure she gets at least one good full-face shot of everyone there. But she runs into a friend from a former case who is now running guns to cross-border rebels, and ends up having to change her plans in order to identify "Aristotle" herself and prevent him from killing a local head of state. It was entertaining.

 

Epigrammata -- Paul Friedländer and Herbert B. Hoffleit

A scholarly collection of bronze-age Greek inscriptions, things fired onto earthenware or carved on stone monuments or graves. There's even some graffiti; of course most bronze-age graffiti is long gone because it was written in paint or the like, but there were a few determined or bored soldiers who left behind such epigrams as Archon, son of Amoibichos, and Ax, son of Nobody, wrote me. It was dry but interesting.

 

Slash and Burn -- Colin Cotterill

The eighth Siri Paiboun book. In this one the Party sends him along on a mission to recover the body of a downed American pilot, in the company of a group of overheated alcoholic Americans. It's an interesting experience to read a story where the Americans are the enemy, although with Siri's usual good-natured cynicism he's happy to make nice with anybody and they all spend a lot of time getting drunk. The mission gets sabotaged, though, by agents of both local and American politicians who are covering up their war profiteering, and Siri and his friends make an unlikely alliance with the American grunts to make sure the truth gets out. It was a good book.

 

Mourning Becomes Electra -- Eugene O'Neill

A cycle of three plays -- Homecoming, The Hunted, and The Haunted -- that constitute a retelling of the Oresteia of Aischylos, set in antebellum America. The Agamemnon figure is a general returning from the Civil War, whose wife poisons him and whose children later murder her lover. O'Neill, perhaps unsurprisingly, manages to make 19th-century New England enormously more bleak and depressing than Heroic-Age Mykenai: unlike Klytamnaestra in the original, the general's wife has always hated him and kills him just to be rid of him; and although O'Neill has her commit suicide instead of getting axed to death by her son, he also has the children's lives end miserably -- whereas in Aischylos the son is cleansed and exonerated by Apollo and Athena, and the daughter marries happily, here the son eventually kills himself out of guilt, while the daughter (who was herself obsessed with her mother's lover, an element absent in Aischylos) ends up living out her wretched life as a solitary madwoman in a decaying house. One of my college professors told me that O'Neill's father supposedly asked him why he wrote plays that made people want to go home and kill themselves. 

 

Out -- Natsuo Kirino

A crime thriller, following a woman named Masako, who has been working the night shift at a boxed-lunch factory ever since losing her office job due to institutional sexism. She is the informal leader of a crew of four women; when the youngest of these women impulsively murders her abusive husband, she naturally calls Masako for help. Masako organizes the crew to dispose of the body; they don't carry it out perfectly, but when police discover pieces of the dismembered body in some public trash cans, they assume the yakuza murdered the guy over gambling debts. Most of the book deals with the fallout: the crew turning on each other, the strain caused by keeping the secret from their families, and the yakuza boss who got blamed for the murder hunting them. It kept me reading! There were some creepy stalking and rape scenes I could have done without, though.

 

All The Names -- José Saramago

A novel of bureaucratic absurdity: José, a middle-aged minor clerk, has worked for decades in his city's enormous Central Registry, recording and filing statistics in an endless, inefficient routine -- birth, education, marriage, death, discard. Because he lives in a bachelor apartment attached to the complex, he can come in the side door in the middle of the night and wander up and down the huge alleys of files, sadly contemplating the far end of the building, where the overworked clerks toss the cards of those who have died into a cobwebbed heap that will never be sorted. One night he randomly picks up a card of statistics that has somehow become separated from the birth certificate it should be attached to, and he becomes obsessed with finding the woman it belongs to. The card has no name, so he has to follow the statistics; for example, by breaking into the school she attended and searching the old boxes of dusty files there trying to find a match. It's mostly a story about coping with death, I think, but also a depiction of how we think of our lives as rational sequences, making decisions based on deliberate consideration, when in fact most of our actions are taken simply on impulse, and we rarely consider what led us to do one thing rather than another. I liked it.

  

13 Ways Of Looking At a Fat Girl -- Mona Awad

A series of slice-of-life short stories, following some years in the life of a woman named Lizzie, who starts as an overweight adolescent and becomes an adult who progresses through obesity to weight-loss to anorexia and finally to an acceptance of herself and her body, I hope a lasting one, though the book leaves that open. What I remember most is the really disturbing way that Lizzie's mother's approval of her goes up and down based on her weight -- when Lizzie is at her unhealthy skinniest, her mother always wants to take her to parties and work events, clearly feeling validated in some way that her daughter is so conventionally attractive -- that she's succeeded. It was creepy.

 

Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station -- Dorothy Gilman

Sixth in the series. Mrs. Pollifax is now married again, to retired judge Cyrus Reed, whom she met on the safari in the last book. The CIA calls her away from building their new house to send her on a tourist group to China, as part of a plan to spring a political prisoner from a work camp; one of the other tourists in the group is also a CIA plant, but she doesn't know which one. Unfortunately it turns out that several of the other tourists are Russian agents, whose mission is to assassinate the prisoner the CIA wants to break out, and to frustrate the Russian mission and further her own Mrs. Pollifax has to stage a lot of accidents, including starting a stampede and getting into a fight at the edge of a cliff, in what I think is the first scene where Mrs. Pollifax actually kills someone. Of course her usual combination of resolution and ingenuity pulls the whole thing off. 

 

Be Here Now -- Ram Dass

I thought the title was the best part of this; it's the excellent advice that a guru gave him, after he got fired from Harvard and decided that LSD hadn't given him the spiritual awakening he wanted so he went to India, as a lot of hippies did. There's a brief autobiography at the beginning, but far the greater part of the book is a sort of stream-of-consciousness discussion of religion and spirituality, printed in all caps on brown grocery bag paper with lots of hippie line art. It varies in interest -- some of it is pretty jejune, like a sketch of his own face in the mirror with WHO AM 'I' on either side; other parts are more interesting, contemplations of the OM mantra with NOBODY IS GOING ANYWHERE -- NOBODY IS COMING FROM ANYWHERE -- WE'RE ALL HERE going up and down the page. I think a yogi would say it doesn't matter that some parts of it are more compelling than others, since you're supposed to experience the whole thing in your mind at once. I did enjoy it, though I can't say what all of it means. Ram Dass couldn't say either, of course. If I could internalize the message of the book's title I'd be a calmer and happier person, I think.

 

The Inside Game -- Keith Law

Law read Daniel Kahneman's book Thinking, Fast and Slow, and decided to write a book of his own about how Kahneman's ideas show up in baseball decisions, particularly the way people believe unfounded things for no reason other than that they've heard them repeated so often (pitching wins championships; you've got to protect your best hitter by putting your second-best hitter right behind him in the lineup; some players just know how to win.) He's at some pains to show that complaining about such fallacies isn't just buzzkill carping; they have strong effects on the way managers make important decisions that will affect their teams for years. Take coaching performance; if coach X makes lots of stupid decisions, but the team wins anyway, many people assume coach X must be a good coach by definition, because "The only thing that matters is winning!" That's harmless if you're a fan who wants to assign praise and blame according to your own ideas -- fine, more power to you -- but a GM who has to decide whether to renew coach X's contract can't afford to think like that, because the GM's concern is not "How well did the team do under coach X last year" but "How well is the team likely to do under coach X next year and the year after that?" If you know, from direct observation, that coach X tends to make stupid decisions, you have to recognize that your team won not because of, but in spite of coach X, and that luck isn't consistent from year to year but the tendency to make stupid decisions is. Good book.

 

Everybody's Favorite Duck -- Gahan Wilson

A very funny send-up of classic detective novels, starring parodies of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe and Archie as they work to foil the evil plot of a cabal of parodies of archetypical villains Fu Manchu, Dr. Moriarty, and Fantômas. The plot involves taking over an analogue of Disney World that revolves around a cartoon duck, and using the animatronic model of the President to replace the real one. The action was over-the-top insane and I laughed all the way through it.

 

The Woman Who Wouldn't Die -- Colin Cotterill

The ninth Siri Paiboun book. In this one Siri goes to investigate the case of a woman who was shot dead; the entire village watched her body burn at the funeral, but now she's back living in her house as if nothing happened, claiming that as a result of her experience she can now talk with the dead. Siri (who really can talk with the dead, remember) eventually realizes that the whole thing is a scheme to get the government to dredge a stretch of the Mekong, ostensibly to find a murdered VIP but really to recover a boat sunk during the war, a boat with looted artifacts on it. Most of the artifacts are ancient Lao statues of the Buddha, whose spirits call out to Siri. He and his friends frustrate the treasure-hunters and return the Buddhas to their proper places, of course. Good book. 

 

West Winging It -- Pat Cunnane 

A memoir of working as a junior staffer in the Obama White House. He was mainly stuck with trying to keep visitors happy; there's a good story of how he was on a boat with a bunch of the press getting footage of Obama at the slave-trade citadel in Ghana, and one of the reporters dropped some piece of equipment overboard and got pissy when Cunnane didn't produce a replacement out of thin air. It was sometimes funny but kind of shallow; Cunnane's big accomplishment was arranging for Obama's car interview with Jerry Seinfeld to take place on the White House grounds. Mildly interesting.

 

The Spiderwick Chronicles:

The Field Guide

The Seeing Stone

Lucinda's Secret

The Ironwood Tree

The Wrath of Mulgarath

-- Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black

This is a young-adult series that Sabine lent to me, about the three Spiderwick children, who move, along with their mother, into the rambling old house once owned by the kids' great-great-grandfather, who mysteriously vanished a hundred years ago. Naturally the house is full of secret passages, hidden rooms, and temperamental brownies. The surrounding woods are full of fairies, dragons, and mean-tempered goblins, whose king, Mulgarath, is bent on conquest and destruction of the humans. The story follows the Spiderwick children following clues left by their great-great-grandfather and making allies among the magical creatures to fight the goblins and wreck Mulgarath's plans. It wasn't bad.

 

Thick -- Tressie McMillan Cottom

A collection of essays on blackness in America. The title essay is a long discussion of beauty standards, particularly how the standard of beauty for a black woman is quite different depending on whether the group using the standard consists of black women, white women, black men, or white men. As a woman with very dark skin, she gets the where-are-you-from quizzing not only from white people but also from other black people. She dismisses the everybody-gets-a-trophy platitude that everyone is beautiful in their own way, since, as a society, we clearly do not believe that to be true; there's too much profit to be made by setting an unachievable standard and convincing everyone a) that it's possible to achieve and b) that they should feel bad for not achieving it. There's a lot of context that I think you'd need to be younger and more social than I am to get. According to Urban Dictionary, "thick" means "neither skinny nor fat", but I get the sense she's using it to mean having real ownership of both your own body and your own body image. 

 

Mrs. Pollifax and the Hong Kong Buddha -- Dorothy Gilman

Seventh in the series. A Chinese national named Sheng Ti, whom Mrs. Pollifax recruited in the last book, is now in Hong Kong, and his reports don't line up with the reports from the CIA head of station there, so the CIA sends Mrs. Pollifax to make clandestine contacts with both and find out what's going on. The head of station has been turned, thanks to his heroin addiction, so Mrs. Pollifax is taken and tortured, and eventually rescued by her husband with the help of Sheng Ti. The head of station heroically redeems himself by sacrificing his life to save the rest of them and everyone heads home to recuperate.

 

Lamb -- Christopher Moore

The comic memoir of Jesus's childhood best friend, Biff, who has been called back to life in the present day in order to write a new Gospel, telling the story of Jesus's childhood escapades and his pre-ministry travels in the Middle East and India. The writing wasn't bad but I found it kind of tiresome; it was like being at dinner and having to listen to a long story from someone who thinks he's really, really funny. The only scenes I liked were the ones with the Roman centurion (in this book all the Roman soldiers Jesus interacts with are the same person at different times of his life.)

 

Fragments -- Aristophanes

The Loeb Classical edition of the fragments of Aristophanes that don't belong to the surviving plays. I was surprised to find that they're not actually that interesting; the thing is, comedy relies quite a lot more on context than tragedy does, and isolated lines from a comedy are really just setups that fall flat without their punch lines, or vice versa. There aren't a lot of pithy lines that stand alone, such as you find in the tragedies. Most of them are just bits that survived by accident, or because of contemporary references we don't understand, or to illustrate unusual examples of Greek grammar.

 

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

Some of this was pretty accurate -- the jealousy of the mother's attention, the acting as though minor mishaps are really disastrous failures,  the quarreling with siblings, the tendency to jump in and correct other people's mistakes; but according to the book a lot of a typical eight-year-old's time is spent defining relationships with others, and we spent the whole year in quarantine like everybody else so none of that took place.

 

Feathers -- Thor Hanson

A well-written, interesting natural history of feathers. There's a section on how paleontologists came to suspect that birds are descended from dinosaurs; the consensus now, it appears, is that feathers originally provided an evolutionary advantage by helping dinosaurs run faster, and gliding and flying came later. There's a whole lot I didn't know about feathers! No artificial material is as good an insulator as down; but we use artificial jacket filler anyway, both because there just isn't enough down for all the jackets we use and because unlike external feathers, down isn't waterproof, so down jackets can get waterlogged. To draw the finest possible lines you need quills made from crow feathers, but even though crows are far from being endangered it's still illegal to kill one for its feathers. You can tell what a feather does by its shape -- keeping-warm feathers are axially symmetrical, while on flight feathers the vane (the hard keratin part) is on one side or the other. Feathers aren't just flying waterproof insulation -- they also help birds fly silently and convey temperature, pressure, and wind speed information to the brain constantly, as if a jet pilot could feel the entire plane at once and minutely adjust any part of it at will. What a good book.

 

Lab Girl -- Hope Jahren

The memoir of a widely respected geochemist who studies fossil forests and uses isotope analysis to study the environment. The thing that struck me most was that even though she's internationally famous she's still dependent on wangling one three-year grant after another to keep her research funded, a nonstop process that's not made any easier by her also needing to find funding for her lab assistant and Platonic life partner, a good-natured but emotionally damaged guy named Bill who she met when she was in grad school because he was working in her lab and sleeping under a lab bench. It was a nice description of a lifelong non-romantic partnership, a story that doesn't usually get told, and I liked it. I also particularly remember her saying that a mushroom is just the genitals of a gigantic organism made of white thready fibers that can extend for miles underground. It stays with me.

 

Motel Chronicles -- Sam Shepard

A collection of autobiographical vignettes, mostly about bumming around hick towns in California and working odd jobs while trying to learn to write. It's nearly all description: desolate stretches of scrub land, dead crows, nowhere towns, empty highways. You feel like you need to scrub the dust off yourself after you read it. 

 

Mrs. Pollifax and the Golden Triangle -- Dorothy Gilman

Eighth in the series. The CIA sends Mrs. Pollifax on vacation to Thailand, with her husband Cyrus along for camouflage, to make a pickup from a local agent. But they find the local agent murdered, and then Cyrus gets kidnapped by drug barons looking for the information the murdered guy was carrying, and Mrs. Pollifax has to improvise, organizing jungle rebels to take down the drug barons' camp and rescue Cyrus while putting a dent in the heroin trade. It was pretty good.

 

Seven Greeks -- Guy Davenport

The collected verses of Greek poets whose work survives only in fragments. I was already pretty familiar with Sappho, Herakleitos, and Diogenes, but I knew Anakreon only from his appearance in Renault's The Praise Singer, and I had never encountered Alkman, Archilochos, or Herondas. I liked how Davenport resisted "filling out" the poems and just left the lacunae as they are, indicating missing words or lines with ellipses. Many of the fragments are the kind of lines that stick in your head: Herakleitos's If every man had exactly what he wanted, he would be no better a man than he is now; Diogenes's The gifts of the gods are simple, it is we that have complicated them; and, of course, Sappho's You make me hot.

 

Brotopia -- Emily Chang

A journalist writing an investigatory takedown on the frat-boy culture of Silicon Valley. The male heads of tech companies, who are all invested in a libertarian idea of meritocracy, insist that the absence of women in their ranks shows that men are better suited to abstract thinking; the truth is more that venture capitalists give money to men but not women, and then those men hire all their friends from college, who of course are all men, and so the circle rolls on. Chang tells the story of an auto-learning experiment: a company wrote a program to sort through resumes and recommend them based on key words and experience; and the program got information about which of its recommendations led to successful hires, so it could learn and improve its recognition. But what ended up happening was that the program noticed that very few women it recommended got hired, so it "learned" that women are not suitable hires and started rejecting applications just because they were from women. So the tool just became a reflection of the sexist culture that produced it. It's a good read when you're sick of hearing tech bros talk about entrepreneurial spirit without mentioning that Jeff Bezos's parents gave him a half million dollars in seed money and Bill Gates's mother was on the board of IBM and sold the company on MS-DOS.

 

Six and a Half Deadly Sins -- Colin Cotterill

The tenth Siri Paiboun book. This one involves a convoluted revenge plot where an enemy of Siri's, a spiteful murderer nicknamed The Lizard, arranges for Siri to receive a series of traditional Lao woven skirts in the mail, each with a severed body part, to lure him into investigating; the body parts are a red herring because the skirts are impregnated with contact poison, in order to kill Siri and his wife slowly. The story was silly, and The Lizard was unconvincing, but I mainly read the books for the relationships among Siri and his friends, so I still liked it.

 

Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH -- Robert C. O'Brien

We read this to the kids. They were very sympathetic to the poor field mice and worried that the tractor would tear up their home, but disappointed that they didn't find out where the rats went at the end, which I think is some good literary criticism.

  

Finder -- Suzanne Palmer

I actually read this in 2019, when it came out, but somehow I forgot to put it on my list. It's an SF novel by my friend Suzanne, set in the 24th century and featuring a hero in his mid-thirties named Fergus. Fergus grew up in Scotland, on an Earth slowly trying to repair the environmental catastrophes of the industrial age; he lived in a household abusive enough that at fifteen he ran away as far as he could. Twenty mostly misspent years later, Fergus works as a freelance recoverer of things, tracking down people and things that have been lost or stolen. The story takes him to the Cernee system, a collection of widespread space-station communities orbiting a group of artificial suns. He's on the track of a stolen spaceship, but before he really gets started he gets caught up in local politics, where the politicking involves armed ambushes and blowing up public transit. Naturally the guy behind the bombing is also the ship thief, so Fergus's goals align with the local good guys, although he doesn't really play well with others and neither do they. A whole lot needs to happen before Fergus can leave with the ship recovered and the Cernee chaos settled, but Fergus manages it all through ingenuity, luck, and bloody-mindedness. It was well-written and exciting and funny and I thought it was great.

 

Driving the Deep -- Suzanne Palmer

The sequel to Finder. This one finds Fergus returning to Earth for the first time since he was a teenager, partly to check on the storage unit he's been maintaining all this time out of Scottish Presbyterian guilt, and partly to get some alone time to assess how he's doing after being experimented upon by powerful and terrifying aliens. The minute he gets there, though, he's tackled by an obsessive retired cop who mistakenly thinks he was behind a big art theft; before he can get that straightened out, the AI of the ship he retrieved in the last book contacts him to tell him that unknown hostile forces have attacked its shipyard and kidnapped the shipbuilders, and the ship has come to round up Fergus to go find them, and it means right now. The cop gets dragged along in his wake, and the two of them end up on one of Saturn's moons, where Fergus has deduced that a number of missing scientists are being held and forced to work on some secret illegal project. Having reluctantly set aside their differences, Fergus and the cop stage a complex and dangerous rescue mission that takes up most of the book, built mostly out of audacity, high adrenaline, and an ability to improvise when things go sideways, and they manage to retrieve the shipbuilders and other kidnapped scientists, wreck the illegal project, frustrate the bad guys, and get away clean, solving the art theft for good measure. As before, it was well-written and exciting and funny and I loved it.

 

*What's the Matter With the Red Sox? -- Al Hirshberg

A book from the seventies listing the many, many reasons the Red Sox kept assembling powerful teams that somehow never won the pennant, including the team's historical fascination with slow-moving right-handed power hitters; the practice of building teams to take advantage of Fenway Park without considering how well those teams would play on the road; bad luck; lousy trades; and general ineptitude. Tom Yawkey was still alive then so the book doesn't dwell on the most important reason: Yawkey was a drunk who hired his drinking buddies to run the team, and those drinking buddies were all racists. The book's really a period piece now, thank God.

 

Dinosaurs on Other Planets -- Danielle McLaughlin

Her first book, a collection of mostly very good short stories about life after the economic collapse in Ireland. They're hard-times stories, all about poverty and failed relationships and coming to terms with grim truths. I liked the book a lot, but by far the best story was "Night of the Silver Fox", which struck me so much that I went around telling the plot to everyone I know: an Irish teenager named Gerard works as a crate-carrying assistant to an independent trucker. He only has the job because the trucker owes his family money; in fact the trucker hasn't managed to pay Gerard for weeks and Gerard will soon be going hungry. The trucker is counting on payment from the farm they're delivering fodder to; Gerard is also looking forward to the farm because he has a crush on the farmer's daughter, who's a year or two older than he is. When they get there, though, the farmer doesn't have the money, and the trucker threatens to just turn around and leave without unloading, but the daughter takes the trucker into the barn to pay him off with sex, leaving Gerard sitting awkwardly in the kitchen with the half-drunk farmer, who soon starts weeping. Gerard is so uncomfortable he goes out to the truck, but the cab is locked and he doesn't have a key, and since he's unwilling to go into the house or the barn he just has to stand next to the truck in the cold rain, without his jacket, which he left in the kitchen. Eventually the trucker and the daughter come back and they unload the truck in the rain; the daughter brings Gerard his jacket and puts it on him, which he takes as a kind of unspoken apology, an "I'm sorry I had to do that in front of you" gesture, which makes him feel better. Back in the truck on the way home, still unpaid, Gerard is thinking "Well at least there was that, it wasn't unrelievedly terrible", and then as he shifts his weight in his seat he realizes that the daughter stole the wallet out of his jacket. The story haunted me; I had to go for a long walk after reading it.

 

Orphans of the Carnival -- Carol Birch 

Julia Pastrana was a real-life Mexican woman born in the 1830s with a collection of birth defects that left her looking startlingly apish -- her whole body was covered with hair, and she had a heavy jaw and protruding nose and lips. As a teenager she was sold to a freak show and toured Europe as "The Ugliest Woman In The World". This is a novel that retells her story, concentrating on her inner life and the inner life of the showman who ran her career, eventually marrying her -- when she died after a stillbirth, he had her stuffed and continued displaying her body. The book has a lot of sympathy for Julia, and surprisingly also for her husband. Julia has three classes of relationships -- with "the public", with people who meet her as an individual, and with other freaks -- and she's very conscious of how she has to change her voice and behavior to navigate each kind. It's well-written but inevitably kind of creepy. There's a framing story of an unsuited, unhappy twenty-first-century couple, who I suppose thematically illustrate the difficulty of an artist trying to share a life with a non-artist, but the narrative device connecting them to Julia is that one of the modern couple salvages, off a trash pile, what I spent the book thinking was the remnant of Julia's wooden doll, but was revealed at the end to be the disintegrating remains of her taxidermized dead baby. Bleah. 

 

Norse Mythology for Bostonians -- Rowdy Geirsson

This was originally a long-running series on the McSweeneys web site, thirty or so episodes of a drunk guy in a bar in Boston retelling the story of the  Prose Edda to the other guys while they watch the Bruins game. It's really, really funny, even if you haven't read the Prose Edda.

"There’s this guy Odin n’ he’s the guy who’s fuckin’ in chahge’ah evuhrything, n’ when I say evuhrything, I mean fuckin’ evuhrything. N’ Odin here, he’s got a shit-ton’ah othah names as well n’ if yah really that bo’h’d yah can go n’ look ‘em up fah yah fuckin’ self but the main thing tah know is that he’s the top fuckin’ dog in the mind’ah a Viking even if he’s alsah kindah a creepy bastahd who poked his own eye out n’ wandahs ‘round in the middle’ah the night talkin’ tah a couple deranged fuckin’ bihrds that he wears on his shouldahs like a fuckin’ freak who got just lost on his way out tah Cahvah tah ‘ttend King Richie’s fuckin’ faihre."

I loved the web series, so when it was collected as a book I bought it, but the author ill-advisedly changed the framing device, recasting the whole thing as a mysterious found recording and adding a lot of pseudo-academic footnotes. No kidding, I think the story is genuinely diminished without the frequent interruptions where the narrator breaks off to yell at the Bruins goalie on TV, and the academic satire stuff just fell completely flat. I highly recommend reading this, but look up the series on the web, don't read the book. 

 

Mrs. Pollifax and the Whirling Dervish -- Dorothy Gilman

Ninth in the series. The CIA sends Mrs. Pollifax to Morocco to meet up with an agent named Janko, and accompany him as his aunt to provide tourist cover while they make contact with the members of a CIA network throughout Morocco and identify which one is a mole. Janko is inexplicably hostile, and Mrs. Pollifax eventually realizes that he's an impostor alerted by the mole; after surviving the false Janko's attempt to murder her, she has to flee across Morocco to warn the remaining agents in the network while still trying to find out which one is the mole, and also find out what happened to the real Janko. It was well paced.

 

Soldiers' Pay -- William Faulkner

His first novel, not very well received at the time. It picks up on a train carrying returning soldiers from World War One; one of them is a pilot escorting another pilot to his home town. The second pilot has a head wound, so bad that the military hospital has just given up and sent him home to die. He's blind and mentally almost absent; the only person he recognizes is the first pilot. When they arrive they're accompanied by a woman they met on the train, who has fallen for the wounded pilot out of a general desire to be a martyr, and a cynical older GI who's decided the escort needs help dealing with what's sure to be an awkward homecoming. Sure enough, they have to find the wounded pilot's elderly father and tell him that his son is not dead, as was wrongly reported, but that he's blind and non compos mentis and dying; the father doesn't seem to hear the second part and believes his son is always just on the verge of getting better, and he presses the son's fiancée, who's spent the war helling around with the local wild kid, to set a wedding date. It all ends miserably, of course.

 

Lost Connections -- Johann Hari

I didn't get very far in this. It starts out all right, making the case that a powerful component of treatment for depression is maintaining a sense of social connection, but then it veers off into a long straw-man-riddled argument against antidepressants and therapy. Not worth reading.

 

My Name Is Red -- Orhan Pamuk

Pamuk won the Nobel Prize fifteen years ago and I'd never read anything of his, so when I ran across this in a used book store in Seattle I bought it. Turns out it's generally thought to be his best work. It was written in Turkish; either Pamuk was heavily influenced by Jorge Luis Borges and Umberto Eco, or else the translator thought that sounding like them would best represent Pamuk's prose style in English. It's a murder mystery, or rather a novel about art that uses elements of murder mysteries. (It's not actually a mystery because the solution of the crime is not solvable by the reader, and anyway is incidental to the point of the novel.) It's set in 16th-century Constantinople and it concerns the murder of a miniaturist painter by one of his three students, but we don't know which one. Every chapter has its own narrator -- each of the three students, the investigator, interested third parties, the dead body where it's hidden in a well, the devil, various inanimate objects, the color red, and the murderer. Of course that means the murderer acts as the narrator more than once, in the chapters he narrates under his real identity and the ones he narrates as the murderer; I tried to decide, on stylistic grounds, which narrator was also the murderer, but the narrators have a kind of dual awareness: as actors in the story they're limited to the knowledge they have in the story, but as narrators they're aware they're speaking to an unseen audience, and the murderer therefore disguises his speaking style. This is a deliberate echo of the argument in the story, and the reason for the murder: an ongoing debate about art, on whether the highest form of artistic greatness is to execute the traditional forms exactly as the Islamic masters had done for a thousand years, so that even an expert could not point out a difference between one painter and another; or to follow the "Frankish" (European) idea of developing a personal style, so that even a non-expert seeing a painting will know who the painter was. It was complex and might have gone on a little longer than necessary but I still liked it. 

 

I Shot the Buddha -- Colin Cotterill

The eleventh Siri Paiboun story. An unusual trope subversion: when a group of villagers believe that evil spirits are possessing people and tricking them to their deaths, Siri investigates and finds out that they're absolutely right, that's exactly what's happening. So the real investigation becomes, what's happened to bring nature out of balance around here, and what can we do to set it right? I thought that by itself would have made a good story, and the side plot about trailing a kidnapped Buddhist monk into Thailand really should have been a separate book.

 

Courtesans and Fishcakes -- James Davidson

A terrific book on attitudes to food and sex in ancient Greece, very readable. It's partly written to refute Michel Foucault's absurd, reductionist idea that the Greeks divided everyone into two classes, the penetrators and the penetrated, with the penetrated -- receiving men and all women -- contemptuously sneered at by the penetrators. It was for this reason that Foucault dismissed the standing and influence of the hetairai, the hired courtesans, since according to his dogma no one in the "penetrated" class could have a real voice. The hetairai actually wielded a good deal of influence; in Athens, where adultery was punished by death, hired women were the only option for a lot of men; and at the elegant drinking-clubs -- symposia -- that all better-off citizens belonged to, common streetwalkers (pornai) would have been out of place. The hetairai were famous for gracing a room in every way -- they were well-dressed, poised, educated, witty, and good company. They didn't necessarily have sex for money, either, though that did happen. It would be silly to think that clever, well-bred, intelligent women who were often present when the most powerful men in Athens were drinking and relaxing couldn't use their position to influence decision-making in the polis.

Everyone belonged to such drinking and eating clubs because Athenians didn't approve of people who kept to themselves, but also because it was a way of showing that you were keeping yourself within acceptable social bounds. At Delphi, the heart of Greece, right over where the Oracle sat, was carved midén ágan -- "Nothing too much." The Greeks despised gluttony as a failure of self-control, especially in a democracy, where people suspected that private excess would lead to public excess. Greeks classified a meal in three categories: drink (watered, because they didn't approve of drunkenness either, except on specific ritual occasions); sitos, the staple; and opson, the relish. So sitos might be bread, and opson would be whatever you put on the bread to make it taste better. Someone who overdid it on the opson would be snickered at as an opsophage; this was one of the favorite accusations Aristophanes levelled at certain Athenians in his plays. It was closely connected with fish: even wealthy Greeks lived primarily on barley, cheese, and olives, eating meat only on religious occasions, when there was an animal sacrifice. Davidson even argues that the practice of sacrifice was central to democracy: when a priest killed an animal, the carcass was divided into equal portions and given out to the attendees by lot -- so you were just as likely to get a pound of gristle as a pound of meat, however rich you were. (Wealthier Athenians generally found reasons to sacrifice an animal every now and then, because if they didn't they'd get a name for being greedy and unsocial, which would hurt their public reputation, enormously important in a participatory democracy.) But fish weren't used for sacrifice, and anyone could buy fish in the market, so most people used fish or fish paste as an opson, and calling someone a "fish-eater" meant you were looking sideways at them for indulging themselves too much. There were philosophers who made a point of eating plain food with no opson at all, but people didn't think much of them either, because Greeks regarded asceticism as overdoing it in the other direction. I really enjoyed it.

 

The Burial at Thebes -- Seamus Heaney

A retelling of the story of Antigone, written during the invasion of Iraq and using Kreon as a George Bush figure, not very effectively. I thought the allusion was kind of labored, and actually just putting on a good production of the original play would have done a better job of criticizing the war. Sophokles doesn't need touching up.

 

The Progress of Love -- Alice Munro

The last of her books I hadn't read, a short story collection thematically linked by concerns about what becomes of young love as life goes on and how people deal with the change, as well as how society's view of love and marriage has changed since Munro was young, before the war. All of them were touching; I liked "The Moon in the Orange Street Skating Rink" the best, a story about two college-bound teenagers in rural Ontario who fall for the same local girl, and both of them have to think hard for the first time about what they really want out of life. There's also a couple really disturbing stories, one about a woman who drops in on her neighbors with a pie only to find they've both committed suicide, and another about a passenger on a plane who thinks -- but isn't sure -- that a young woman in her row is secretly trying to ask for help out of fear of the man she's with. An excellent book.

 

The Day I Almost Destroyed the Boston Symphony Orchestra -- John Sant'Ambrogio

Less interesting than the title leads you to expect. It's a collection of reminiscences of a career playing in various orchestras around the United States. By "destroyed" he means that during a performance he strayed off the correct tempo into a closely related one, leading the other members of his row to follow him in confusion, which threw off the whole string section, and could have brought the whole orchestra into startling discord, except that the conductor and the first violin between them managed to get everyone back on track before the whole piece fell apart. The book was mildly interesting, but it was self-published for a reason, if you know what I mean. 

 

Ten Caesars -- Barry Strauss

A history of Rome from Augustus to Constantine, concentrating on the emperors Strauss considers the most important. He does make an effort to say something about most of them -- so there's a whole section on, say, Marcus Aurelius, and then a page or two each about the reigns of Commodus, Pertinax, and Julianus, before getting to the next big section on Septimius Severus. He does have to give up on that a couple times -- for instance, there was a stretch in the third century when there were twenty emperors in thirty years, many of whom reigned for only a month or two, and who generally accomplished nothing anyway, so he has to say "never mind, let's just move on to Diocletian." Most of it is charted territory for a reader who already knows a lot of Roman history, but it's well written and has some good asides; I was interested by his argument that for all the strict hierarchy that developed over the centuries, the Empire was surprisingly open to new ideas and new blood. Many of the more enterprising emperors came from outside Rome, outside Italy even, and succeeded in revitalizing Roman laws and policies. Good book.

 

The Republic of Wine -- Mo Yan

An absurdist novel about modern China, set up as a series of letters between a young aspiring writer and his hero, Mo Yan. The young writer sends increasingly autobiographical stories, to which Mo Yan responds encouragingly; and interspersed with this we get chapters of the novel Mo Yan himself is currently writing, The Republic of Wine, about an ineffectual government inspector who has gone to a famously heavy-drinking district of China to investigate rumors of cannibalism. I never really connected with it; the translator admits in a preface that she hasn't even tried to explain the vast web of local references and linguistic peculiarities that inform the novel, because they're just too complicated and incommunicable to non-Chinese, and because of this the novel is hard to understand. Why bother translating it then, I thought, but of course translators need work regardless.

 

Himalayan Dhaba -- Craig Joseph Danner

A novel that really should have felt bleak but didn't. It's the story of a doctor named Mary, recent widow of another doctor, who is invited to come work at a clinic in the same remote Himalayan town that her husband once volunteered in; having nothing to keep her at home, she goes, only to find that the local doctor has gone off on family business, with no indication of when he'll be back, and she's stuck running the clinic on her own, though she speaks the language poorly and the local nurses clearly don't think she's up to it. Alongside this there's a secondary story of a British hiker and stoner who breaks his neck, gets kidnapped from the clinic, and then gets kidnapped from the kidnapper in a really odd turn of events. I wasn't super involved with the story but I did like it.

 

The Saucier's Apprentice -- Bob Spitz 

A travelling-around-Europe-studying-at-restaurants memoir, which should have been good reading, but the author is kind of a prick, and at every location he's much more interested in talking about how tiresome the other food tourists are, and how much more he knows than they do, than in talking about the actual cooking he's doing. The passages where he deludes himself into believing that the restaurant chefs can all sense that he's special and different to all the other students and that they respect him for it are almost but not quite entertaining in their sheer desperation.

 

Roumeli -- Patrick Leigh Fermor

A travelogue describing Fermor's wanderings of eighty years ago around northern Greece, which in his love-of-the-past way he liked to call by its old Attic name, Roumeli. My favorite parts of the book deal with his eccentric search through Missolonghi for a pair of shoes that once belonged to Lord Byron; but most of it is really an elegy for a detached rustic life that was almost vanished even then. The book is full of loving descriptions of remote three-day peasant weddings, old independence fighters squatting in corners clicking the amber beads of their komboloi, country hunters carefully dismounting their donkeys so that the rifles slung on their backs never point at anyone, ancient monks in nearly deserted mountain monasteries still assembling at the banging of the semandron; all things Fermor knew no one would see again before too long. The writing is wonderful.

 

The Starless Sea -- Erin Morgenstern

My other favorite book of the year. Zachary, a grad student, is wandering the stacks of the college library during the winter break when he comes across an interesting-looking old book, apparently a short story collection; as he reads the first story, he realizes it's retelling an incident from his own childhood when he saw an incredibly realistic painting of a door in an alleyway, reached for the doorknob, then changed his mind and never saw the painting again. The book doesn't seem to be part of the library system, and he can't make out an author or publisher; all he can see is a logo that looks like a bee, a key, and a sword. He spends the winter reading and rereading the book, which describes a vast and wonderful library that exists on the other side of temporary doors, and searching online for the logo; the search attracts some attention, apparently, because he gets an invitation to a literary-themed New Year's masquerade, where he meets a woman named Mirabel, who made the doors, as well as a fellow book-lover named Dorian, who (it turns out) once belonged to the great library, and to whom Zachary is immediately attracted. Outside the party he's accosted by a woman who wants the book he found, and who manages to ask politely for all of two minutes before threatening to cut Zachary's hand off. He gets away from her, with Dorian's help, and goes through one of Mirabel's doors and finds himself in the library. Long sections of the novel are just descriptions of the tremendous maze of stacks and side chambers and reading rooms and hidden passages, all of which follow each other apparently endlessly, and I would happily have read twenty times as many pages just describing the library, but there was a plot to be getting on with, and Zachary (along with the allies he makes along the way) needs to follow a series of clues through forgotten old books to find out what happened to all the people who used to live and work in the library, where the doors went, why the crazy hand-chopping woman was after the book he had, and in general what's going on, and also find Dorian again and ultimately set sail on the Starless Sea. I loved it so much that when I finished I just read it again from the beginning.

 

Mrs. Pollifax and the Second Thief -- Dorothy Gilman

Tenth in the series. The CIA receives a cryptic message from a former agent asking for Mrs. Pollifax to be sent to meet him in Sicily, where she helps him steal art forgeries that are being used to fund various criminal enterprises; she has to deal with the assassin "Aristotle" again, this time permanently.

 

The Mouse and the Motorcycle -- Beverly Cleary

We read this to the kids; I think it's the first time I've been through it since Mom read it to my first grade class in the McCarthy school library. The kids loved it; when Ralph figures out that he has to say "Vrooom vrooom" to make the toy motorcycle go, that made so much sense to them that they thought he was dumb not to realize he has to make a different noise for the toy ambulance. It was a lot of fun.

 

Extra Virginity -- Tom Mueller

This started out as a pretty interesting study of the international olive oil trade, which is littered with fraud -- the great majority of oil sold as "extra virgin" is adulterated with lower-grade oil. Unfortunately the author strayed off into my-palate-is-more-sophisticated-than-yours territory, which was tiresome, and also he fell in love with the people at a small family olive business in Italy and turned half the book into a commercial for them. I didn't finish it.

 

Burn the Place -- Iliana Regan

Kind of a mix-and-match book, constructed out of the standard building blocks of restaurant books and addiction memoirs. All the episodes are sincere but I've seen them all before -- the childhood bonding with the parent / uncle / wise neighbor over really learning about food by foraging for mushrooms / making your own pasta dough / eating the traditional dish that's incredibly superior to the debased version served in American restaurants; the teens and twenties with their stumbling into your parents' house drunk / getting fired for drinking and stealing / drunkenly ruining your relationships; then the redemption arc. The writing was pretty good but the actual story blurs in my mind with the details of so many other memoirs that are basically the same. In this one the redemption arc begins with managing to get a job at Grant Aachatz's Chicago restaurant Alinea, then leaving to start her own small business, and eventually founding Elizabeth, another successful Chicago restaurant. Nothing about it really stayed with me.

 

Multiple Choice -- Alejandro Zambra

Just what it says on the tin: it's a book in the format of the standard Chilean academic test, their version of the SAT. It starts out seeming to be a criticism of standardized tests particularly and the world-view behind them generally (the test instructions say to relax and be confident, because you're prepared for this -- "You were not educated, you were trained.") The questions are absurd and have no obvious answer: "Which of the following words do not belong in this list? Cut, paste, cut, paste, undo." As the test moves into the "sentence completion" segment, the book turns more into an attack on the Pinochet regime and the Chilean government generally. It was a bit gimmicky and I don't know if the gimmick could have held up for a longer book, but as it was it's an odd and interesting bit of Dadaist social criticism. I liked it.

 

Beloved -- Toni Morrison 

A tremendously dark and powerful novel; I've read that academics generally consider it the best book about American slavery. It's set in Ohio in 1873; a former escaped slave named Sethe lives with her teenage daughter Denver in the house of her sort-of-mother-in-law, who died some years before. We get her story in a series of flashbacks, sparked by the arrival in town of Paul D, another slave from the Kentucky plantation where she grew up. After the plantation's owner killed her slave-husband, the heavily pregnant Sethe fled across the river, carrying her baby daughter; the flight scenes are harrowing, Sethe walking on bare feet torn to shreds, keeping her daughter quiet, and getting to Ohio with help from two strangers, one a boatman who risks his life every day helping runaways, the other a vagrant woman who helps Sethe deliver her baby. She settles in the house of her slave-husband's freed mother, and lives as part of the community for a couple years, until a group of slave-takers come for her and her children; with nowhere to run, she kills her older daughter and is in the process of strangling the toddler Denver when the horrified townspeople come and drive off the horrified slave-takers. After this Sethe is shunned, and Denver, never understanding what happened, lives in fear, while their house is thenceforth haunted by the angry ghost of the older daughter. Sethe calls her Beloved, that being the only word she could afford to put on her daughter's gravestone. (I didn't understand why her daughter, who must have been at least two years old, didn't have a name yet.) When Paul D arrives, he drives out the ghost; the next day a young woman calling herself Beloved appears from nowhere, and Sethe takes her in, believing her to be the incarnation of her dead daughter. Beloved becomes more and more unbalanced and demanding, eventually growing bigger and bigger as Sethe wastes away; Denver reaches out to the community, and the black women of the town all come to Sethe's house to exorcise Beloved, who disappears. Paul D is left to comfort and care for Sethe, and life moves on with the crimes of the past laid to rest. There's a lot going on here, obviously. On the most basic level, it's clear that Sethe cannot survive and thrive while in isolation from the community of black women; it's they who exorcise the ghost. On another level, it's also clear that life cannot move forward until old ghosts are laid and old crimes are repented and paid for; who will exorcise America's ghosts, and when will America pay for its crimes against the slaves? It's a book to keep you awake at night.

 

Forty Centuries of Ink -- David N. Carvalho 

A natural history of ink, written in 1904 when ink was a more immediate concern for most people than it is now. It's pretty dry, but full of interesting stuff about lamp-black and iron-gall. Not bad.

 

The Rat-Catchers' Olympics -- Colin Cotterill

The twelfth Siri Paiboun book. Now almost eighty, Siri gets himself and his friends assigned to tag along with the Lao team to the 1980 Olympics in Moscow, which is a stretch, but hey, it's a comic mystery. There are some funny scenes as the "medical" team admits that their real job is to act as moral support for the untrained Lao athletes as they come in last at every event. Naturally there's a murder, but it wasn't really interesting and it was so ancillary to the real interest of the book -- Siri and his friends cynically poking fun at the idea of the Olympics -- that I don't even remember who did it.

 

Eager -- Ben Goldfarb

All about beavers! I enjoyed this book a lot, and also found it convincing: I'm all in now on reintroducing beavers. I had always read how Wyoming is so arid and drought-ridden and wondered "Why do people ranch there then?" And the answer is, when the Europeans came, Wyoming was all wetlands and meadows; but the settlers killed all the beavers, for their fur and to drain the meadows for pasturage, and without the beaver ponds the water table sank lower. Also without the beaver dams, watercourses run faster and cut their central channels deeper, which means they get narrower, which means fires can jump across them more easily. The beavers haven't made a comeback because the cattle eat all the riverside growth. 25 years ago a federal committee convinced some ranchers to fence off their riverbanks during the summer, in order to let the riverside plants grow during their most vulnerable season, and to stop shooting beavers. There were photo sequences showing the same river valley year by year and you wouldn't believe the change. The ranchers were convinced because there have been two severe droughts and several minor ones in that time, and their streams never stopped running, but their neighbors' streams did. Also fish can swim right through beaver dams; most dams are for water control, not hydro power, so all the work we do to put up so many concrete dams is just trying to recreate the beavers' work but not doing as good a job! Also hydro dams eventually get clogged with sediment and the turbines stop working, and what you're left with is a sterile pond; when a beaver pond silts up it turns into a meadow. The book argues that since the average age of dams in America is sixty years, and so many of them are unnecessary or even counterproductive, we'd be better off drawing down and dismantling a lot of them and reintroducing beavers instead, so we can concentrate money and maintenance effort on the hydro power dams. There's a lot more! Beavers almost always drop trees in the direction of their lodge, where it's easier to drag them. And they eat willow trees but not all the way down -- they leave enough that the tree can grow back next year. It's called coppicing, and we may have learned it by watching them! Beavers were also an unsung hero in the revitalization of Yellowstone: the park reintroduced wolves, who killed off many of the overpopulated elk; without the elk eating all the riverside growth, the beavers came back, and so the water table rose. And for plant health, having the water table closer to the roots is even more important than not being chewed on. The book also mentions that conservationists have a grudge against C.S. Lewis, because in Narnia he showed Mr Beaver eating fish; so most people in England wrongly think beavers eat fish and so oppose reintroducing them! It was a great book. 

 

White Fragility -- Robin DiAngelo

A book about conducting racial-sensitivity training. The title comes from the way so many white training attendees cry, or yell, or storm out, or shout abuse, when confronted with the fact that America was built on racial inequality right from the very beginning, and white people all benefit from living in a society that was rigged in our favor, and we all have unexamined assumptions about race that we'd be better off without. Everything she says is so obvious that I'm actually more interested in the backlash against it, not only from predictably offended whites but also from some black writers, like John McWhorter of the Atlantic, who slammed the book for "talking down" to black people (not its intended audience, though!) Obviously McWhorter is more qualified to talk about race prejudice in America than I am; but on the other hand I wonder how much of his position is due to market forces. What I mean is, there's clearly a space available in the pundit market for a black guy who says racism isn't that serious and white people don't need to feel bad; did McWhorter occupy that space because that's what he really believes and the space was there waiting for him, or did he see the space was there and modify what he said in order to fit into it? And to what degree might that be true of all people who get paid to argue positions in public?

 

City of Light, City of Poison -- Holly Tucker

An entertaining book about "the affair of the poisons", a grisly period in the 1670s when the infighting at the court of Versailles turned deadlier than usual: courtiers went from buying poisons to facilitate abortions for themselves or their friends, to using the poisons to cause abortions among their rivals -- and from there to just poisoning the rivals. Pity poor Nicolas de Reynie, the Paris chief of police, who was both competent and honest: he had to investigate rich and influential aristocrats and have roadblocks put in his way at every turn, even when he had evidence that a royal favorite had colluded in trying to poison the King himself. He did have an advantage: since, under a medieval law that still stood, selling or using poison was by definition witchcraft, he could use the power of the Church in the service of the law, since charges of witchcraft couldn't be waved off the way charges of murder could. In the end he made hundreds of arrests that led to dozens of executions and a host of lesser sentences, and seems to have brought the poisoning madness to an end. The whole thing was so embarrassing that the King ordered it all hushed up and the records were burned, but the careful de Reynie kept duplicate records, so we can still see all the dirt on everybody. I liked it. 

 

The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh -- Arnold Pomerans, translator

The great majority of these are to his brother Theo, who must have been a saint. Vincent was an all-or-nothing enthusiast all his life, often to the point of obsession. He was brought up in the family art dealership; always profoundly unhappy and depressed, he turned to religion for consolation and became fired with evangelical zeal, eventually making himself so unpopular that he lost his job. He went to an abbreviated seminary course in Amsterdam, determined to become a Protestant missionary to coal miners in England. His letters from that time are all high-flown passages about strict morality, as he was living an ascetic life, sleeping on straw in a hut in Belgium. He eventually found that his zeal didn't quiet his depression and he started having episodes that he couldn't describe clearly; to his brother he called them "fits of madness", though Theo never repeated that to his parents since their father already thought Vincent should be in an asylum and Theo had enough trouble keeping peace between them. After abandoning his plan to be a missionary Vincent became obsessed with his cousin Kee, and his letters from this time alternate between bordering-on-creepy discussions of her and grand schemes of renunciation where he would go live as a hermit. He'd always been skilled at drawing, but he didn't take up the idea of painting for a living until he was almost thirty; characteristically, he would adopt a school or teacher with worshipful admiration only to dismiss them as useless six months later. Theo supported him all this time, both emotionally and financially; none of his paintings ever sold, and Theo paid all his bills even while Vincent, in paranoid episodes, accused Theo of hiding his paintings in a storeroom and colluding with their father to make sure no one saw them. Poor Theo. He never gave up, though: it was Theo who got Vincent to go to the sanatorium at Arles, and paid for it. The letters from that time are chaotic; Vincent appears to have cut his ear off in a dissociative state -- he woke up with blood everywhere and no idea at all what had happened. Theo was also the critic whose opinion Vincent most valued; many of the letters include sketches of paintings in progress.  Sabine asked what I was reading, and when I told her she asked wasn't I trespassing, since the letters weren't written to me? I told her I thought Theo published them because he wanted people to understand his brother. I do feel like I understand some of his work better now.

 

Foals in the Field -- Ben M. Baglio

Sabine lent me this. It's a YA book, part of a series about a tween girl whose parents are veterinarians; it would only have been surprising if the heroine and her friend didn't save the struggling horse farm from the machinations of greedy people who want the land for a resort, but it was reasonably well told.

 

Mrs. Pollifax Pursued -- Dorothy Gilman

Eleventh in the series. It's kind of a running-away-to-join-the-circus story; Mrs. Pollifax finds a fugitive hiding in her closet, having fled from kidnappers. She calls her spy friends to hide her and the fugitive in a travelling carnival (just why the CIA would hide agents posing as carnies in a two-bit fairground in rural Maine is never really explained) and Mrs. Pollifax figures out what the kidnappers are after (they wanted the fugitive in order to put pressure on her college boyfriend, who's due to become king of a fictional African country) and solve an unrelated murder at the carnival while she's at it. It was kind of farcical but I still enjoyed it.

 

Isokrates, vol. 1 -- George Norlin, translator

The Loeb Classical edition of the surviving works of Isokrates, the leading rhetorician of 5th-4th century BC Athens. He was acclaimed as one of the "Ten Orators", although he wasn't technically an orator at all because he had a weak voice, so he wrote his speeches down and hired people to read them out for him. This first volume contains his didascalic writings, essays written in the form of a teacher speaking to a student. They're generally addressed to rulers of the Greek world, on the subject of how to rule best; he emphasizes that only virtuous men can rule well, so most of his advice has to do with arete, the Greek ideal of striving for perfection in certain aspects of human endeavor -- although he often repeats that in most human affairs you'll do most good and least harm by falling short rather than overreaching.

 

The Histories -- Tacitus

A history of Rome from the Year of Four Emperors (AD 69, the year after Nero killed himself) to the death of Domitian in AD 96. His essential position is that with Rome having reached the scope it had, only an emperor could keep order among the legions and thus prevent civil strife; but if the emperor was a fool (like Galba) or a tyrant (like Domitian) all the good points of having an emperor were undone. What really struck me was just how awful civil war was among the Romans -- every rival Caesar had armies that were mostly German or Eastern mercenaries, who treated every Roman province as a resource to be looted; and ordinary Roman citizens were robbed, raped, and murdered by every legion that passed by. When Tacitus says that it was the legions that chose the emperor, he wasn't kidding -- it would be more accurate to say that only the legions counted for anything at all, and the civilian population was wholly expendable. Tacitus himself belonged to the senatorial class, and he's mostly concerned with the balance of power between the emperor and the Senate; he thought that it was the general laziness and corruption of the Senate that allowed tyrants to be tyrannical, since the senators were too worried about their own property and comfort to defend their political liberties.

Tacitus is famous for having a terse, direct Latin style, which you would think would suit my limited reading capacity in Latin; but he uses rhetorical devices such as parallelism and deliberate discord that tend to puzzle me. Luckily the Loeb editions have a facing-page translation. I can appreciate the pithiness, though: Tacitus tended to end his chapters with epigrams, some of them so good you get the feeling he wrote the chapter just so he could use the epigram. Faciliore inter malos consensu ad bellum quam in pace ad concordiam -- "We find it easier to agree on war than on how to live together in peacetime." Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant -- "They make a desert and they call it peace."

 

The Raging Tide -- Edward Gorey

A choose-your-own-adventure book where none of the choices lead to anything, and the characters wander back and forth in bleak Edwardian anomie, perfectly captured by Gorey's lovely line art.

 

The Life of Agricola -- Tacitus

Agricola was Tacitus's father-in-law, a successful general and governor of Britain for six years during the reign of Domitian. This was Tacitus's first book, published during the reign of Nerva, because it would have been suppressed if he'd published while Domitian was alive: he charges Domitian with cutting Agricola's governorship short and then never using him again -- depriving Rome of the services of a useful and intelligent man -- out of jealousy. He also repeats rumors he's heard that Domitian had Agricola poisoned, though he acknowledges that he knows of no proof. He says that Agricola lived in times that were "not conducive to living a moral life", and the editor of my copy thinks that Tacitus was writing an apology for Agricola (and by extension himself) for having served under a tyrant. A big chunk of the book is a description of the tribes of Britain and a history of the campaign against Boudicca. Good reading. 

 

The Germania -- Tacitus

An ethnography, a description of the life and customs of the German tribes. It's a work of scholarship, since Tacitus had not been to the German territories and was epitomizing other writers. All Romans seem to have been fascinated by the great height and strength of the Germans; Tacitus explains it by noting that German women married later and didn't start having children until their twenties, instead of in their mid-teens the way Romans did. (He also notes that nearly all German women, of whatever class, nursed their own babies instead of giving them to wet-nurses, the usual Roman practice.) Tacitus says that the Germans governed by assembly, in which everyone had the right to speak, apparently an ancestor of the Scandinavian Althing; and that they had to hold their assemblies at times and places appointed long in advance, since they did not live in settlements but in homesteads, each far from its neighbors, so that no invasion could deliver a devastating blow. This didn't make them antisocial, though: he also says that the German custom was to welcome anyone who appeared at their door and feed them as much as they could hold, regardless of how poor the homestead was. He adds that Germans were tremendously powerful swimmers, and that they were indifferent to cold and hunger but slowed by heat and thirst. Tacitus's gift for epigrams is on display here as well: Alios ad proelium ire videas, Chattos ad bellum -- "Other tribes go to battle; the Chatti go to war." Unfortunately an off-hand remark he makes early on took on a life of its own: he says that the Germans appear to be unrelated to the migratory tribes around them and that they are native to their own territory. This got taken up by the pan-German movement and was part of the justification for the "Aryan" rhetoric of the German nationalists, even though Tacitus was just saying that the climate of the German territory was so bad that he couldn't picture anyone moving there from somewhere else.

 

Dialog Upon Oratory -- Tacitus

A minor work on the history and usefulness of rhetoric. It's in the form of a conversation among four real-life people Tacitus knew, all of them senators and well-regarded lawyers; two of them reproach a third for turning his talent to writing poetry instead of making great speeches. The third defends poetry and charges that oratory has fallen into decadence, a consequence of the general decline in education. A fourth man gives what seems to be Tacitus's own opinion: rhetoric is a powerful tool when it's able to operate freely, but under the Imperium, Romans no longer have the freedom of speech they once possessed. Therefore great oratory is no longer possible, because the freedom to speak fearlessly (and, just as important, to develop a powerful personality that is capable of speaking fearlessly) no longer exists, having been sacrificed for the sake of freedom from civil strife. You know, the emperors and their defenders always harped on this idea that only imperial power could prevent civil war, but just in the first century of the empire there were nine civil wars, along with less widespread violence at every change of emperor. How much worse could a Republic have been?

 

The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books -- Edward Wilson-Lee

A book about Columbus's younger son, who got screwed out of his share of the family inheritance, and who spent most of his time on a scheme to create a great private library. Naturally a lot of the book deals with Columbus (the son went with him on at least one voyage) and although the author is straightforward about Columbus's narcissistic madness (he seems to have believed that the prophecies of the Bible referred to him personally) it's still more pro-Columbus than I like. The part of the book I remember best is that the son seems to have been the first librarian to collect ephemera -- he made room in the library for sheet music, political pamphlets, popular ballads, the 16th-century equivalent of drugstore paperbacks, and like that. He died in poverty and the library was mostly lost. The book was mostly a downer and I didn't really care for it.

 

The Hapless Child -- Edward Gorey

A dark mirror of the kind of Edwardian story where a lot of terrible things happen to an innocent, who in the end is recognized as a princess or what have you and enters on a life of privileged bliss. In this story the girl loses her father in the war, her mother gets depressed and kills herself, the uncle who takes her in dies in an accident, she gets bullied, robbed, and sold into slavery, gets consumption, goes blind, and is eventually run over in the street by a car driven by her father, who came back alive after all. The art is appropriately gruesome. 

 

Don't Eat Me -- Colin Cotterill

The thirteenth Siri Paiboun book. It's mainly a comedy about Siri and his merry-prankster friends trying to make a movie using a camera stolen from the set of The Deer Hunter while avoiding interference from the Ministry of Culture, but there's also a very heavy-handed B-plot delivering a clunky message about how horrible it is that people eat animals. Also, the revelation that the series punching bag, Siri's comically inept boss Judge Haeng, is secretly a fiendishly clever manipulator who's been slowly building up a master plan to destroy Siri all along was so out of left field and so out of sync with what happened in earlier books that it basically destroyed the whole series.

 

Death With Interruptions -- José Saramago 

A satire about an unnamed country where one day people suddenly stop dying. Most people are happy about it until they realize they will be stuck caring for their invalid relatives forever. A clandestine "travel service" springs up, with fed-up caretakers and overwhelmed doctors ferrying the incapacitated-but-not-dead to the neighboring country, where they die as soon as they cross the border. Saramago gets some dark comedy out of the debate among the priesthood, since the Church is opposed to euthanasia but the cessation of death threatens the dogma of the Resurrection. Just as things are getting unmanageable, the papers get a notice from death (who signs her name with a small d) apologizing for the inconvenience and informing everyone that "the experiment" is over; people will go back to dying again, but from now on everyone will get a letter a week in advance to ease the process. As you can probably imagine no one's really happy about that either. The rest of the book follows death's new letter-writing campaign and a problem she runs into where one man, a cellist leading a quiet life in the city, keeps not dying on schedule; death finds that the letter she sent him has been returned, and when she sends it again it comes back again. She goes to investigate, intending to deliver the letter in person, but she ends up falling in love with the cellist, and the novel ends with the letter undelivered. I liked it.

  

Homegrown -- Alex Speier 

A rah-rah book about the building of the Red Sox team that won the 2018 world series. It held my attention, but it's not really the uplifting read the author meant it to be, since the Sox got cost-conscious all of a sudden and a year later the only player remaining from that title team was Bogaerts.

 

Geek Love -- Katherine Dunn

I hated this. It's a novel about a family of carnival freaks and their awful emotional infighting, told in retrospect by a now-adult survivor who is far more concerned with her hurt feelings than with all the torture, incest, and murder. The sections that cover her adult life are kind of a recapitulation of her childhood in a minor key, as she latches on to another selfish manipulator whose deceitful tortures only point up how much better her older brother was at it. The time I spent reading this would have been better spent doing almost anything else.

 

Meditations -- Marcus Aurelius

This was his commonplace book, a collection of quotations, reflections, and maxims for self-improvement, written in Greek; it doesn't have a title -- he didn't write it for publication, just for himself -- so it's generally been known as the Meditations, Greek for "things to oneself". Mostly it's notes to himself about Stoic philosophy (If there are briars in the road, it is enough to turn aside from them. Do not add, "Why were such things made in the world?"), self-control (Put an end once for all to this discussion of what a good man should be, and be one.), and being a man who wants to be virtuous but also has to run a government (To expect bad men never to do bad things is to hope for the impossible. To tolerate their offenses against others, and expect none against yourself, is both unnatural and foolish.) It's well worth reading.

 

The 13 Clocks -- James Thurber

We read this to the kids. They really liked the Golux and the indescribable hat -- they had fun trying to describe it -- and they clapped approvingly when the evil Duke got eaten in the end.

 

Secondhand -- Adam Minter

A fascinating book about what happens to all the stuff you donate after you leave it at the charity shop. Shirts mostly get made into rags. There's a resale market for women's jeans but not men's jeans, so those end up in China where people salvage the zippers and buttons and use them to make counterfeit Levi's. A lot of junk sales go to buyers from poor countries who resell it to poorer countries. The "recyclable" stamp is largely propaganda by the petroleum companies: most plastics are not recyclable, and the ones that are can't be mixed together. In practice the only plastics that get recycled are soda bottles and white milk cartons; everything else goes to the landfill or in the ocean. The book is clearly in favor of reducing the amount of stuff you buy and keep, and there's a lot to be said for that, but it can be taken too far. Dad had a lot of knick-knacks; his attachment to them was what gave them value. Since he died that value is gone, but that doesn't mean it was never there. That aside, it was a great book.

 

Rules of Civility -- Amor Towles

A New York novel, set in 1938 but told in flashback from the sixties. Our hero, Katey, remembers her first year in New York with her high-energy roommate Eve, two small-town girls assuming the sophistication of the big city. At a jazz bar they meet a man named Tinker, who clearly belongs to the society they're aping, and the two soon become unspoken rivals for his attention. He clearly prefers Katey, but after the three of them are in a car crash where Eve is badly hurt, Tinker gets engaged to Eve out of guilt. Eve takes to drinking and eventually ends the engagement and heads off to California; Katey is left to clean up the mess, but she manages to avoid rebounding with Tinker and builds a life of her own. I was slow warming up to it at first just because it wasn't A Gentleman in Moscow, but the writing is excellent and I did get invested in Katey's story eventually. Good book. 

 

Mrs. Pollifax and the Lion Killer -- Dorothy Gilman

Twelfth in the series. Mrs. Pollifax and Kadi (the fugitive from the last book) go to Kadi's boyfriend's fictional country for his coronation. A dissident has been dressing up as a lion-man and murdering people with claw-like weapons. There's a whiff of Great White Savior here as Mrs. Pollifax transcends the locals' superstition to find the killer and also makes archaeological discoveries that will bring a financial windfall to the country. I didn't like it that much. 

 

Strange Pilgrims -- Gabriel García Márquez

A collection of stories written late in his life. They're all about dislocation, featuring characters who lead a stranger-in-a-strange-land life: the exiled president of an overthrown South American republic living in Geneva and scraping together the money he needs for an operation; a woman's car breaks down and the bus that picks her up drops her off at a mental hospital, where she's held as an uncooperative patient; a Colombian woman on honeymoon in Paris is hurt and taken to a hospital, and her non-French-speaking husband spends weeks fighting the dismissive bureaucracy to be allowed to visit her, not knowing that her body has already been sent back to Colombia for the funeral. They're very well written, but most of them tended to bring me down.

 

Isokrates, vol. 2 -- George Norlin, translator

The second volume of the Loeb Classical Isokrates in Greek with a facing-page translation. This one contains his major political treatises, including Panegyrikos, On the Peace, and Against the Sophists. Panegyrikos is a celebration of Athens and how it deserves its place as the leader of Greek thought, with emphasis on the high points of virtue that the Athenians were proudest of -- Theseus championing the widows and orphans of the attackers of Thebes; Demophon defying Argos to defend the children of Herakles; Athens defeating Sparta in the sixth century but refusing, out of piety, to allow their allies to destroy the city (naturally he doesn't dwell on the time the reverse happened in the fifth century); Athens standing alone against the Persian landing at Marathon. On the Peace is an angry condemnation of the recently-concluded peace treaty with the shah of Persia, which contained a number of clauses Isokrates found shameful, including abandoning Greek allies and recognizing the shah as an arbiter in Greek affairs. Pretty much all of Isokrates's writing was aimed, in one way or another, at getting the Greeks to stop stabbing each other in the back long enough to force barbarian power and influence out of the Greek world. Against the Sophists is his championing of his own ideals of philosophy. He was well-educated as a young man, and he knew Sokrates, but he disagreed with Plato as to the proper definition and use of philosophy. Plato considered the philosophy a matter of epistemology and abstraction -- there was a sign over the door of the Academy that read No entry without mathematics -- while Isokrates thought that philosophy was a matter of studying virtue and ethics and then applying them in practical matters for the good of the community and the individual.  

 

Magic Tree House #10: Ghost Town at Sundown -- Mary Pope Osborne

Magic Tree House #15: Viking Ships at Sunrise -- Mary Pope Osborne

Magic Tree House #28: High Tide in Hawaii -- Mary Pope Osborne

Sabine lent me these; they're part of a young-reader series about two kids whose tree house sends them through time to have adventures, where they do cool things like meet Saint Patrick and learn how to surf. I probably would have liked them when I was little. 

 

Ants Among Elephants -- Sujatha Gidla

A memoir of twentieth-century Indian politics from an unusual viewpoint, that of an untouchable-caste Communist who hated both Gandhi and Nehru. It was an interesting look at caste politics in post-Raj India, but I think the author was a little over-credulous in repeating her radical uncle's stories. I don't believe, for example, that Nehru cowered back in his train car because the uncle shook his fist at him from track-side. Worth reading, though. 

 

Prince: the Last Interview -- Hanif Abdurraqib, ed.

A collection of interviews from throughout his career, including the first and last, with an appreciative essay by the editor. They vary entertainingly, from Prince talking engagingly about music, to repeating conspiracy theories (he believed in chemtrails, for instance), to patiently dismissing stupid questions. Some of his oddball persona was certainly cultivated for dealing with intrusive media -- one interviewer noted that Prince played an electronic keyboard during the entire interview, and would segue into the Twilight Zone theme when he thought a question was dumb -- but more of it was real. He would go to rap shows and complain about the curse words. There was a lot of information about his vegetarianism, about stage shows, about who he looked up to musically (James Brown and Joni Mitchell, for two) and how he often stayed up late just playing music by himself for hours. It was an interesting read. 

 

The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl -- Arthur Allen

A good book about typhus, which is spread by lice. It tells the story of the biologist Rudolf Weigl and one of his students, Ludwik Fleck, who found a typhus vaccine in a research lab in Lvov in Poland in the twenties and thirties. When the Nazis came, they commandeered Weigl's laboratory and had him set up a vaccine factory for the German troops who were getting typhus on the eastern front; Fleck was sent to Buchenwald, and eventually ordered to recreate Weigl's vaccine there. Both Weigl in Lvov and Fleck in Buchenwald worked to sabotage the Nazis. Weigl requisitioned thousands of Polish intellectuals and Jews, who would otherwise have been killed, to man his vaccine factory, and used his Jewish workers to smuggle typhus vaccine into the Jewish ghettos. (Jews historically have not gotten typhus, because only body lice carry it and they live in clothes, and Jews ritually wash themselves before Sabbath services, so the lice never have time to breed; so the Jews in the ghetto were getting typhus for the first time and had no traditions on how to recognize or treat it.) Meanwhile Fleck took advantage of the ignorance of the Nazi pseudo-scientists and made two strains of vaccine, so that the vaccine sent to the German army was inert and did nothing, while he saved the real vaccine to secretly inoculate the Jews in Buchenwald. It was an inspiring story, and both Weigl and Fleck survived the war, which let the book have a happy ending. What stays with me most is the image of the "feeding rooms" in the Lvov laboratory -- one of the stages of making the vaccine was to centrifuge lice that had been feeding on human blood; so Weigl would fill little boxes, perforated on one side, with lice, and strap them to people's legs to let them feed. I have a powerful mental image of hungry Polish and Jewish intellectuals sitting around wooden tables with lice boxes strapped on them, smoking and discussing politics and literature. People are capable of anything.

 

Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone -- James Baldwin

A novel that opens with a famous black actor named Leo having a heart attack on stage. As he recuperates in the hospital, various people come to visit him and he reflects on his relationships with them in extended flashbacks. The most important are with Barbara -- his co-star in the play, a white woman with whom he has had a powerful loving friendship and on-and-off sexual relationship for decades -- and his brother Caleb, who after being wrongfully imprisoned as a teenager channeled his rage into evangelical Christianity. The story isn't autobiographical, but the experiences are: Leo's fight with his disapproving family over pursuing a career in the arts, his coming to terms with being bisexual, his ambivalence over being a famous black man in white society ("You are news," they said; but I'd learned long ago that when you are news you are nothing.) It's a good book but it wasn't well received. The Times panned it; Mario Puzo's nauseatingly condescending review is the canonical example of criticism that hasn't held up. Puzo's biggest complaint is that he can't believe that a beautiful, successful, rich white woman would still love her black bisexual best friend so deeply after twenty years, which I suppose tells you a lot about him; oddly, Puzo doesn't even mention the strangest scene, the young Leo having incestuous sex with his older brother, which I thought really came out of left field.

 

*Letters to Felice -- Franz Kafka

Kafka met Felice at a dinner in Prague in 1912; she was there to visit Kafka's friend Max Brod, who was a relative of hers. Apparently they made inconsequential chit-chat for a half hour or so, and soon after that they started corresponding. I found it strange that over the next year Kafka went from calling her "Fraulein Bauer" to using the informal du to calling her "my dearest", even though the two of them hadn't met in person again since the dinner. In fact the whole course of their romance -- which lasted four years and during which they got engaged and broke it off twice -- was conducted almost entirely by letter; they met in person only a half-dozen times, rarely unchaperoned. Kafka's manner the whole time was torn -- he would and he would not. He sometimes wrote Felice several times a day, always complaining that she didn't write back often enough; but he spends most of the letters insisting that he's not good enough for her, and trying to argue her out of what he called her "wholly mistaken" good opinion of him. He eventually broke it off for good when he found out that he was dying of tuberculosis; he said, and no doubt meant, that he didn't want her to ruin her youth caring for an invalid, but I can't help feeling that he was also relieved. Poor man, he was probably glad of an excuse to be done with the whole thing for good. I can't say they make rewarding reading. 

 

Severance -- Ling Ma

A cynical satire on late-stage capitalism disguised as an apocalypse novel; those are really popular these days, unsurprisingly. Although this was written before the COVID pandemic. Part of it is office-satire: the hero, Candace, has an unfulfilling job at a publisher coordinating specialty editions of the Bible, and an unfulfilling relationship with a distant guy; as a plague originating in China spreads and shuts down the whole world, her bosses ask her to stay and keep the office open while they all take off for places they think will be safe. The book alternates chapters between her bizarre life continuing to work at the office in the increasingly deserted city, and her equally strange life on the road a few months later, after her job finally ends, traveling with a dozen other survivors led by an increasingly unstable religious nut called Bob. The in-the-city Candace wanders around an empty New York taking pictures to post on a blog she's not sure anyone can see, while the on-the-road Candace copes with plague victims -- they're kind of unthreatening zombies, as the fever makes them return mentally to some past experience and act it out over and over again until they die of exhaustion -- and plans to get away from the group before Bob figures out she's pregnant. It really kept me reading.

 

88 Names -- Matt Ruff

The first of his books I've read that I haven't liked. The main character is fairly uninteresting, a guy who makes a living by including novice video-game players in his online multi-player party, letting them complete high-level games they couldn't manage on their own. A spiteful ex sets up a scheme to make him think that a new novice client is actually Kim Jong-Un. He even thinks "I wonder if this is my spiteful ex setting me up", but he falls for it anyway, mostly because of some supposedly un-circumventable security thing that confirms it (it's never explained how the ex faked the security thing.) I found the whole story uninspired and boring, and I was put off by the long scene where Ruff includes a fight between two groups of protesters on a train, whose only purpose was to allow Ruff to say "let me stop the book for a while so I can give you lectures on abortion and gun control that have no relation to the story at all." It was unskillful.

 

The Glass Hotel -- Emily St. John Mandel

A novel about a Ponzi scheme and the people whose lives were knocked off course when the scheme collapsed. The details of the scheme are copied from Bernard Madoff's Ponzi scheme (complete with the investigator who figured it all out years before anyone else but couldn't get anyone to listen) but the story is invented. Kind of strangely, it starts with a long narrative about a guy named Paul, all about his directionless life, his drug problems, and his attempts to be a positive presence in the life of his younger step-sister Vincent; but once Vincent enters the story, she becomes the main character and Paul really disappears. I'm not sure why Mandel did that. Anyway, Vincent, working at a hotel, hooks up with a financier named Alkaitis (the Bernard Madoff figure) and he more or less hires her to act as his wife (he can't actually marry her because he can't risk her getting access to his financial records, though she doesn't know that.) The part I liked best was the story of the small inner cadre at Alkaitis's firm who were in on the scheme. It was really believable the way one of them started living in his imagination in a parallel universe where he'd done the right thing when he figured it all out, instead of going along. And I thought the best scene in the book was the one where two of them sit wearily on a stairway landing (they're taking the stairs because angry investors are mobbing the elevators) and one asks the other, "Why did Alkaitis pick us? Would other people have refused to do what we did? Did he see something about us he understood and we didn't?" It really stayed in my mind. I thought the coda at the end, about one ruined investor and what he did over the next few years, wasn't as strong as the rest of the book.

 

Factory Girls -- Leslie T. Chang 

Chang was a Wall Street Journal correspondent in China in the 00s, and over her years there she kept track of a number of young Chinese girls who came from the provinces to the cities in order to work in factories, driven by poverty, the lack of personal freedom for women in rural communities, and the total unfulfilling emptiness of life on inland half-acre farms where there's no work and nothing to do. More than half the things you use in everyday life were made in factories by girls like these, from sink sponges and tooth brushes to car radios and sunglass frames. The girls live in dormitories and are constantly underpaid -- the factories hold back months of wages so they can refuse to pay them if the girls quit. Most of them plan to better their careers and maybe enter management by taking English classes and computer classes, but a lot of these are taught by fly-by-night charlatans and mostly the rural teenagers don't know the difference. Many of them get caught up in pyramid schemes, which are occasionally outlawed in China but never for long. The factories do give women a chance to exercise some control over their own lives for the first time, but they also exploit them ruthlessly -- the ads all say "female workers wanted" because the factories can treat them worse than they do men and never worry about consequences. It was well-told and eye-opening.

 

Ranger in Time: Night of Soldiers and Spies -- Kate Messner

Ranger in Time: Attack on Pearl Harbor -- Kate Messner

I read these to the kids. It's another time-travel series, aimed at a little older audience than the magic tree house one. The books follow the adventures of a rescue-trained golden retriever named Ranger, who has a mysterious first-aid kit that takes him on rescue missions through time, where he has to do things like guide a Revolutionary War soldier back to his own lines through a dark night, or lead a pair of Japanese-American children to safety during the bombing of Pearl Harbor, while the omniscient narrator explains the relevant history. I would have liked these when I was eight or nine.

 

Wandering Along the Way of Okinawan Karate -- Giles Hopkins

A collection of philosophical essays on the martial arts combined with reflections on nature on long walks through the woods. One thing he wonders about is, considering we live in a time and place when it's no longer necessary to fight constantly, are we really "training" in the sense people trained in the 18th century? I myself haven't been in a fight in over twenty years. Using Bayesian analysis I can state with a very high degree of confidence that I'm not going to be in a fight tomorrow or the next day. So I sometimes wonder if I'm really just play-acting. He also talks about the leaves on the trees, and how we only really notice them when they change color right before they die; he draws an analogy to our own physical skills, which we tend to take for granted and not think about how great it is to possess them until they start to fade. Just a few months ago I was doing Shisochin -- a kata I learned in 1990; in thirty years there's probably never been three days in a row when I haven't done it -- and I had to stop half way through because I couldn't remember how it went. So I know what he means. It was a good book.

 

White Pine -- Andrew Vietze

A fairly interesting book about the New England white pine and its great importance to colonial America. The crown claimed rights over all pine trees, and royal surveyors would go through the woods looking for trees suitable to make masts for the navy, marking them with a blaze indicating that the tree was off limits to local lumberjacks; this went over as well as you'd expect, and eventually the governor had a hard time finding anyone willing to go off in the woods claiming trees, even with bodyguards. There was a lot of good detail about pine trees, but the writing was no more than competent.

 

Mrs. Pollifax, Innocent Tourist -- Dorothy Gilman

Thirteenth in the series, and the last good one. By way of the CIA, Mrs. Pollifax's old friend Farrell recruits her to come with him to Iraq in order to recover the manuscript of the last novel by an executed Iraqi dissident. At the rendezvous, instead of the manuscript they find a dead body; with the help of a local precocious kid, they escape the trap and flee to the protection of a desert sheikh, who helps them elude secret police from both Iraq and Jordan as well as a crowd of Jordanian terrorists. There's a good shoot-out at the end.

 

The Wizard and the Prophet -- Charles C. Mann 

An extraordinarily good book about long-term solutions to climate problems. Mann presents the issue by way of fascinating biographies of two accomplished twentieth-century ecological scientists, William Vogt and Norman Borlaug. Vogt argued for what Mann calls the "prophet" solution: cut back, learn to live within narrower limits, ease the strain on the Earth's resources by conserving energy and reducing our population. Borlaug, by contrast, favored what Mann calls the "wizard" solution: use intelligent engineering to make our resources more productive and ease the strain on the Earth's resources by making the Earth better able to support us. Obviously there's a lot to be said for both solutions -- and one of the great things about the book is that Mann does say a lot, presenting everything in favor of both sides in great detail without favoritism -- and the natural response is to say "Why choose? Can't we mix both approaches?" The problem is that won't always work. An example is the problem of Shanghai, which is located in the estuary of the Yangtze river; given current trends, more than half the city will be underwater within thirty years. Twenty-five million people live there. Should China take the Prophet approach and move the city further up the river, building a new city, or better a group of new cities, that will be smaller, designed from the start with water control in mind, and less vulnerable to catastrophe? Or should they take the Wizard approach, leave the city where it is, and construct efficient and long-lasting water defenses? Each approach would cost about the same amount of money and effort; China isn't going to be able to do both; and they have to decide very soon. The book is full of examples like that, all of them hugely important problems that will have to be addressed within my lifetime. I'm glad I read it.

 

Hunter S. Thompson: the Last Interview -- David Streitfeld, ed.

A collection of rambling interviews, mostly about whatever facet of US politics was on his mind at the time, with a lot of digressions about odd things that had happened to him. They're pretty funny. I liked the last interview quite a bit, especially since Thompson often put out a kind of I'm-impatient-with-how-much-less-knowledgeable-than-me-you-are kind of energy; in this one -- only a few weeks before he killed himself -- the interviewer was a star-struck college student, stumbling over her questions and pausing out of sheer nervousness, and Thompson quite gently steered her through it, giving her sound advice on how to conduct interviews without being overbearing or anything. It made me like him better.

 

Ysabel -- Guy Gavriel Kay

A fantasy set in modern-day France, involving two teenagers who get caught up in a battle between two men whose reincarnations have been fighting each other over the same woman for thousands of years. This is the first of his books I've read where the magical elements are at the forefront of the story, rather than being included as background to make the book fit into the "fantasy" marketing category. On the other hand, the real interest of the story is the relationships among the non-magical characters; they were well-drawn, and as usual with Kay I liked the prose. It was pretty good. 

 

The Line Tender -- Kate Allen

A very good YA novel about a girl named Lucy, eleven or twelve years old, who lives with her father in Rockport on Cape Ann; her mother, who died a few years previously, was a marine biologist who studied sharks. Lucy's best friend is her next-door neighbor Fred, a tremendous nerd and great guy who's also fascinated by sharks, among many other things. There's a great episode that illustrates their friendship: when Lucy, home alone, gets her first period, she goes next door to get advice from Fred's mother or older sisters; Fred is home alone too, as it happens, but he calmly goes to the bathroom cabinet and gets her something for the menstrual pain, without embarrassing her in the process. A terrible accident happens near the middle of the book -- real-life Lucy, who is also from Rockport, tells me that that particular accident is the constant nightmare of every parent on Cape Ann -- and book-Lucy spends the rest of the story coping with it. So the mood of the novel changes unexpectedly half way through, but I didn't find that hurt the story. I liked it a lot.

 

The Bookshop Girl -- Sylvia Bishop

Sabine lent this to me. It's an excellent children's book about a girl named Property Jones, so called because she was found abandoned in the lost-property bin in a book store. The proprietors take her in and raise her in the store. When Property is a little older, the Jones family is unexpectedly chosen to succeed the retiring owner of the vast Book Emporium, England's best and weirdest book store. They're delighted to explore the bizarre and wonderful shop, only to find that the previous owner retired suddenly because he bought a folio in Shakespeare's handwriting on credit, and then spilt jam all over it; he needed to leave town in a hurry to avoid the creditor. The creditor comes calling and demands both the Emporium and the Joneses' original store as payment of the debt. With the help of the Emporium's cat, Property realizes that the folio was a forgery, and the Joneses set an elegant trap for the forger and everything ends happily. I loved it.

 

I Am China -- Xiaolu Gou

Obviously a novel about dissident artists in contemporary China can't have a happy ending, but somehow it wasn't depressing. It's sort of an epistolary novel-within-a-novel; the framing story is about a translator working in London who is given a mass of papers under circumstances obviously designed to avoid censorship from the Chinese government, with the suggestion that she could turn them into a book. They turn out to be letters between a musician named Jian and a poet named Mu, both Chinese nationals; they're not in any sort of order and the translator gradually works out the story of how Mu and Jian met, fell in love, lived together, were violently separated when the Beijing police raided one of Jian's concerts, and spent years trying and failing to find each other again. It was a sad story but I liked it. 

 

Bad Feminist -- Roxane Gay

A collection of essays generally on the theme of not beating yourself up for not being ideologically perfect. Gay has an image in her mind of an ideal feminist but her real life differs from it in a lot of ways -- she listens to popular music that has awful misogynistic messages, she puts up with men's bad behavior because calling them out is too risky, she sometimes needs to cry at work. But, she says, better to be a bad feminist than not a feminist at all. The essays are well-written, self-accepting, and often funny. I liked it.

 

The Annals of Imperial Rome -- Tacitus

His last book, covering the age of the Caesars from the accession of Tiberius to the death of Nero. Although he said his goal was to write sine ira et studio, "without anger or zeal", it's clear that Tacitus considered Nero little more than a disgusting nonentity, and he concentrates more on the two men he regarded as the real rulers of Rome for most of Nero's reign: the general Burrus and the philosopher Seneca. Upright men who worked together well, they kept the government running while keeping Nero in line and exercising intelligent foreign and domestic policies, all the time leaving Nero the credit in order to maintain his popularity with the plebeians. It worked well for a long time, until Burrus finally died of natural causes and Nero decided to make a clean sweep by ordering the elderly Seneca to commit suicide. Things went to hell pretty much right away after that, with Nero's popularity and health declining steeply until he ended up fleeing Rome in the middle of the night and stabbing himself to death in an open field. Good riddance, honestly.

 

Eve in Hollywood -- Amor Towles

A good series of short stories about what happened to Eve Ross after she left New York half way through Rules of Civility. Lucy said it was what a manic-pixie-dream-girl story would look like told from the girl's point of view; in every story she changes the life of someone who meets her by chance, except that looking at things through her eyes we can see that she's an intelligent, curious person with a healthy sense of humor, not a spirit whose only function is to act as the motivator in someone else's story.

 

Catullus; Tibullus; Pervigilium Veneris -- G.P. Goold, ed.

The bitter but extraordinarily vivid disappointed-love poetry of the first-century BC poet Catullus, mostly addressed to a hard-hearted woman of mystery he called Lesbia (it was generally believed in his time that "Lesbia" was really Clodia Pulcher, the sister of the Clodius who was the enemy of Titus Milo.) Mulier cupido quod dicit amanti in vento et rapida scribere oportet aqua -- "The words of a woman to her lover are written on the wind and in running water." I picked the book up for Catullus, but it also included the lesser-known but similarly self-pitying poet Tibullus, who wrote odes to a pair of high-class hookers he called "Delia" and "Nemesis"; his poems are Catullus-and-water, really. To fill out the page count the editor included the anonymous Pervigilium Veneris, a poem in praise of Venus that was probably written for a spring festival, since the narrator calls our attention to bird songs as a sign of the reawakening of the earth, morosely contrasting their beautiful voices with his own poor imitation. What struck me most about it was the line Quando fiam uti chelidon ("When shall I be as the swallow?") which I recognized from The Waste Land; so now I have some context for that line and I can see why Eliot included it.

 

Point B -- Drew Magary

I wanted to like this but didn't. It's a teenage love story, set in a near-future world where everybody's cell phones have the capacity to teleport. The heroine is seventeen and attending an expensive private school where teleportation isn't allowed -- she's not rich but her mother worked herself half to death to manage it, because the heroine needs the isolation after her older sister was driven to suicide by a teleporting stalker. She falls violently, obsessively in love with her roommate and makes friends with the dorm's resident weird kids; they're all massively wealthy, which naturally causes some culture shock. The schoolmasters are smug abusive pricks who are also using students as guinea pigs for teleportation experiments run by the teleport-phone company, which of course is run by evil scumbags. The book's main focus is trying to get across the kind of all-consuming infatuation that only a teenager in love can feel, which didn't hold my interest, and the resolution of the plot required the main characters to be immensely more mature, resourceful, and results-driven than I believe seventeen-year-olds can really be. I never connected with it.

 

Matayoshi Kobudo at the Beginning -- Kimo Wall with Michael Clayton

An as-told-to memoir of training Okinawan weapons with Matayoshi Shinpo in the sixties. I knew most of it already, having heard Kimo-sensei talk about it over the last thirty years. I've never met Michael Clayton, but the book is serviceable. I'm probably not judging it fairly since I'm comparing my memories of Kimo-sensei's stories with the same material written down by someone else.

 

The Second Biggest Nothing -- Colin Cotterill

The fourteenth Siri Paiboun book. The thirteenth book was bad enough that I wouldn't have read this one except I'd already bought it so what the hell. Somehow all our usual cast have Dark Secrets From Their Past Coming Back To Haunt Them all at the same time, and I imagine they all got resolved in a thematic way but I lost interest and didn't finish it.

 

Isokrates, vol. 3 -- LaRue Van Hook, translator

The third volume of the Loeb Isokrates in Greek with a facing-page translation. This one contains his surviving letters, as well as shorter polemic essays against individual Athenians and the political causes they championed. It also has a couple apologia that he wrote in his late nineties, recapitulating his career and reemphasizing that moderation and virtue are good in themselves, whereas other qualities the Greeks admired, such as courage and cleverness, are only as good as the ends they serve.

 

Beirut Hellfire Society -- Rawi Hage

A novel set in the seventies during the Lebanese civil war. The hero, Pavlov, is the son and apprentice of an undertaker; after his father dies, he's approached by men who tell him they belong to a secret society that provides funerals for people who have been denied the Islamic rites because they were homosexual, or atheists, or defied custom in some other way. Pavlov's father was a member, and Pavlov agrees to take his father's place, maintaining a secret crematorium where his society's outcasts can properly be laid to rest. Pavlov is a student of Greek mythology, and his whole story is something of an adaptation of the story of Antigone, who defied the law in order to bury her brother. The writing is good; the story is kind of surreal -- there's a talking dog, for example -- and also kind of nihilistic: Pavlov, who lives next to a Christian cemetery, stands at his window and watches the endless processions of mourners for the war dead pass by, wondering more and more if anything he does means anything at all. I never really connected with it, but I appreciated that it was skillfully done. 

 

Breath -- James Nestor

About half of this was interesting information about recent research into breathing, and about half of it was garbage nonsense about Ancient Masters. The interesting part covered stuff like how our brain's demands for real estate inside the head forced our nasal cavities to get smaller, leading to chronic modern-human breathing difficulties like sinusitis, bronchitis, and snoring (though the author wrongly claims that humans are the only animals that snore), and how the consequent shrinking of our mouths made our teeth cramp together, which is why so many people need braces and tooth extractions. Most of the rest is the usual science-is-only-now-discovering-what-our-wise-ancestors-understood-thousands-of-years-ago bullshit, not worth discussing.

 

*Vermeer -- Lawrence Gowing

A book of art criticism, reprinting all of Vermeer's surviving paintings, with an essay on each one, going into a lot of detail about all aspects of the painting -- where Vermeer got the materials for the paint, what the various background objects were (in the practical sense) and also what they symbolized, who the models probably were. It was really interesting.

 

Woman at Point Zero -- Nawal el Saadawi

A novella based on the story of a woman Saadawi knew in prison, a prostitute awaiting execution for killing a pimp. The main character's name is Firdaus, which is irony because it means "Paradise" and is also the female form of Firdausi, the greatest Persian poet. The narrator of the novella is an educated, upper-class Egyptian woman, much like Saadawi, who interviews Firdaus and hears her life story, appalling but unusual only in the degree of dignity and control over her own body and life that Firdaus has managed to maintain: she has stood up to abusers her whole life, defying or escaping them, and finally had to kill one. In response to the narrator's asking if she can help somehow, Firdaus matter-of-factly says that of course she has to die, because her life is proof that the only way to liberate yourself from oppressors is to kill them, and if women -- or downtrodden people generally -- saw her succeed, then abusive men -- or abusive governments -- could never sleep easy again. It's a short book -- I read the whole thing while sitting in the hospital waiting for a doctor to look at my swollen eye -- but it packs a punch.  

 

The Remarkable Life of the Skin -- Monty Lyman

Just my kind of book, an engaging, well-written "natural history of X". I learned all kinds of things I hadn't known -- tattoos don't disappear when your skin replaces itself because the needle pierces the dermis and your immune cells identify the metals in the inks as threats, so they engulf them and get trapped in place; head lice and body lice are different species, and body lice live in clothes (historically cultures that have rules about frequent ritual washing -- and therefore changing your clothes -- don't generally have lice), so we can do genetic studies of lice to figure out about when the two species separated, which tells us about when humans started wearing clothes (170,000 years ago or so); Lord Kelvin amused himself a hundred years ago by working out the mathematical structure of the ideal foam, and it turns out his formula is a perfect description of skin cells. I enjoyed it.

 

Inferior -- Angela Saini

Essentially a meta-case-study, going over various published research that has claimed to demonstrate an essential difference between male and female brain structure (in favor of the men 100% of the time) and what was wrong with each one. A lot of it was of course due to institutional biases, which led to no one considering the effects of poorly performed experiments; a widely cited experiment from twenty years ago showed that when very young infants were shown a geometric image and a human face, male and female infants had a significant difference, with more boys going for the geometry and more girls going for the face, leading everyone to conclude that just as we thought, men are naturally engineers and women are naturally homemakers -- but the person who actually showed the images to the babies knew which babies were boys and which were girls, which invalidates the whole thing. All these studies also ignore the most repeatable result of neurological studies: the brain has a degree of plasticity, meaning your brain structure can change fundamentally over the course of your life, so it makes no sense to speak of a "male brain" or a "female brain". Good book.

 

Greek Epic Fragments -- Martin L. West, editor

A Loeb Classical Library edition collecting what remains of the lost works of Greek epic poets such as Stesichoros, Eumelos, and the anonymous authors of the Cypria and the Thebaid. A lot of details about the Trojan War come from these fragments: the Aithiopis tells the story of the fight over Achilles's armor, while the Little Iliad and the Sack of Ilion together tell the story of the wooden horse; the Telegoni tells the stories of the returns of the heroes to Greece. There's less complete fragments as well, like the Epigoni (about the sons of the Seven Against Thebes) and several Heraklia, of course telling the stories of the twelve labors. It's all very good reading; I can only wish there were more of it.

 

Hesiod, vol.1 -- Glenn W. Most, editor

Hesiod was an early Greek poet, probably not much later than Homer. He's generally considered the authoritative voice on Greek ideas about the gods and the cosmos. This is the Loeb Classical edition in Greek, with a facing-page translation. The first volume contains his two most important works: Theogony, which tells the story of the creation of the universe and the births and relations of all the gods -- it's the first known source for nearly all Greek myths -- and Works and Days, a celebration of labor and warning against idleness, composed as a didactic lesson about how best to maintain a farm and how to conduct yourself as a citizen and a lover of justice. It also contains various testimonia about his life from various sources, including his own statement that he was self-taught and that "a god has plated my mind"; apparently meaning that he believed his work was divinely inspired. I liked Works and Days better. Theogony can get tiresome -- there are a lot of lists -- but it was still interesting.

 

Hesiod, vol.2 -- Glenn W. Most, editor

The second volume contains his only other intact poem, The Shield, which is an extended description of the scenes embossed on the shield of Herakles; it's obviously inspired by Homer's extended description of the shield of Achilles -- it even uses some of the same lines. The rest of the book contains fragments of other poems that may or may not be by Hesiod but were attributed to him at one time or another. In general, not as interesting as the first volume.

 

Library -- Matthew Battles 

A wide-ranging history of libraries, which of course is right up my alley. His main thesis is that the same thing that makes libraries useful is also what makes them a target: the collection of lots of knowledge all in one place. Libraries have burned throughout history, sometimes out of simple ignorant resentment of learning, sometimes as part of a deliberate campaign of eradicating a colonized culture, sometimes just because you can't really conquer a city without some fires starting. He does note that the story of the sultan Mehmed ordering the library of Constantinople destroyed because "if the books agree with the Koran, they are unnecessary; if they disagree, they are blasphemous" is an apocryphal piece of propaganda that has been told about any number of generals.

 

*In a German Pension -- Katherine Mansfield

A short story collection set at a spa in Bavaria, based on one Mansfield stayed at "for her health" (she was pregnant and her family sent her there to have the baby away from their English neighbors, though she ended up miscarrying.) The stories generally skewer the English patients as silly, arrogant twits, and the Germans as self-righteous, belligerent boors. She later found the book embarrassing and refused to have it republished, feeling that it contributed to unthinking British jingoism, but it's still funny watching her narrator silently judge the Germans while they loudly judge the English. I liked it.

 

*The Marriage of Heaven and Hell -- William Blake

A facsimile of one of Blake's hand-lettered and hand-illustrated copies. It's a volume of complex and difficult mystical poetry, written deliberately to echo the style of Biblical prophecies, and intended to argue against the metaphysics of the then-popular Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, in particular his heavy emphasis on the polar separation of good and evil (and therefore the unbridgeable separation between the saved and the damned.) Swedenborg's ideas didn't sit well with Blake's theology of a unified cosmos and a God who created everything, including Hell. "Without Contraries is no progression....Love and Hate are necessary to human existence." The heart of the book is the section called "Proverbs of Hell", a deliberate mirror-image to the Book of Proverbs, which contains probably his most-quoted line: "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom." It's a fascinating book that requires close reading.

 

Twentieth-Century Interpretations of Euripides' Alcestis -- John R. Wilson, ed.

A collection of fairly dry academic essays about Alkestis, on such topics as whether we're meant to take Herakles's praise of Admetus for valuing hospitality above telling the truth or mourning his wife at face value, and whether the style of the play really fits the tradition that it's the earliest surviving work of Euripides, and of course why Alkestis does not speak after Herakles returns her from the dead: whether it's a dramatic necessity (meeting some philosophical point Euripides wanted to make) or a logistical one (all the speaking-part actors are already on stage in other roles.) There's no reason to read it unless you're really interested in Greek tragedy.

 

The Bridegroom -- Ha Jin

A collection of short stories set in the city of Muji in far northwestern China in the seventies and eighties. Muji is part of a semi-autonomous district heavily inhabited by the oppressed Uighur minority; I'm not sure if he set the stories there for that reason, or just because the city is so rural and isolated from coastal China. The stories generally deal with culture clashes (between China and the west, and between different regions within China), government intervention, paranoia, and the general frustration of an in-between society that has started to shake off Maoism but hasn't decided what it wants instead. The stories are mostly bitter: a gay man is outed when he joins an intellectual book club, which turns out to be a police trap; a group of angry workers plan sabotage when their chicken restaurant gets driven out of business by an American-owned Kentucky Fried Chicken that's bribed the local officials; a volunteer working to help earthquake relief victims has trauma-related amnesia, and when he recovers and returns home he finds he's caused everyone a lot of trouble by not being dead as was reported. The title piece tells the story of a man named Chiu, on his honeymoon in Muji; unprovoked, a policeman throws hot tea on him and his wife, probably just because he can. When he confronts the policeman, Chiu is arrested, and spends some time in jail, where his untreated hepatitis gets worse; after the friend who comes to get him released is beaten and tortured, Chiu signs a form where he confesses to imaginary crimes and promises not to do it again. Before he leaves the city, in revenge Chiu visits as many restaurants as he can, ordering a small bowl of soup or the like before going on to the next; by doing this he succeeds in starting a hepatitis epidemic. It was pretty gripping.

 

Turbulence -- David Szalay 

A novel constructed of twelve short stories, all following a pattern: the main character is on an airplane, and in the course of the story has a minor interaction with another character, who then connects to another flight and becomes the main character of the next story. In this way the novel moves from London to Madrid to Dakar and so around the world until it arrives in London again, with the main character from the first story making a minor appearance in the last. Generally the travelers are on their way to meet someone -- dying parents, new grandchildren, estranged brothers -- and spending the in-between time of the plane flight thinking about passion, prejudice, fear, infidelity, and death. I liked it a lot.

 

Turing and the Universal Machine -- Jon Agar

A short book on the history of computing, starting with background on early computers and the math that made Turing's work possible, with chapters on Charles Babbage and Konrad Zuse. Then, after a brief biography of Turing, Agar spends the rest of the book showing how Turing relied on the mathematical work of Georg Cantor and David Hilbert, and how the design of Turing's computer differed from Babbage's in ways shaped by their experiences: Babbage's mill, he argues, was essentially a recreation of a manufacturing center, while Turing's distributed processing model more closely resembled a university. Agar may have bitten off a bit more than he could chew by tackling such a complex subject in such a short book, but it wasn't bad.

 

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead -- Olga Tokarczuk

I actually picked this up because the title is one of Blake's Proverbs of Hell, which I'd just been reading. It's a mystery of sorts; the narrator, Janina, is a somewhat unbalanced older woman who lives alone in remote Poland, writing to foreign correspondents about her project of translating Blake into Polish, in between her studies of astrology and her campaigns to rail at the townspeople for being murderers for eating meat. Several men around the town die mysteriously; all of them belonged to a hunting club, and Janina tells the police they aren't investigating thoroughly, but they ignore her, pretty reasonably actually since her theory is that the local animals have grown tired of being hunted and have tracked the hunters down and killed them. I thought Janina was just cracked, and she is, but she's also the murderer; we find out near the end that she'd discovered that one of the hunting club had shot her two dogs, so she decided to kill them all. The police figure it out and come for her but she's already escaped across the Czech border. I don't know if the author meant Janina's vegan arguments to carry weight, but if she did she failed, since Janina is clearly not all there. I didn't like it that much.

 

*Tilman Riemenschneider im Taubertal -- Insel-Verlag art series

This is in German so I didn't get much from the text, but the illustrations of Riemenschneider's wood carvings are excellent. If he wasn't the best wood carver of all time, I don't know who could be.

 

*Roman History From Coins -- Michael Grant

An interesting book on how the Romans used coins as propaganda. Grant argues that the wide variety of coin designs, along with the fact that they changed frequently, indicates that the government, aware that every Roman looked at coins every day, used them to influence public opinion. The coins promote the state gods of Rome over foreign cults; play up Roman victories in battles that weren't really as one-sided as the emperors wanted the people to think; and emphasize the legitimacy of the emperor as the issuing authority. The first act of every new emperor, regardless of how violent his accession or how tenuous his grasp on power, was to recall the coinage and issue new coins with his face on them. It had a lot more depth to it than the title led me to expect.

 

H is for Hawk -- Helen Macdonald

A book about hunting with hawks, moving back and forth between the author's account of training her own hunting hawk and the story of her favorite childhood bird writer, a somewhat neurotic man, and his anxiety-ridden training of a somewhat neurotic hawk. Everybody liked this but me; I didn't like the writer or the writing and I found it dull.

 

Season of Migration to the North -- Tayeb Salih

A dark novel, written in Arabic in the sixties, about the damage done to the Sudanese people by British colonialism. The framing device has a narrator telling a story to some people he knows in Khartoum, about his return from university in London to his home village, where he met a newcomer named Mustafa. Newcomers are unusual in the village, and although Mustafa is a useful and well-liked man, the narrator wonders about him until one night, while drunk, Mustafa quotes an English poet and the narrator realizes that he can speak English. After this the narrator becomes determined to find out where Mustafa came from. Asking around among government friends in Khartoum -- and later going through Mustafa's papers after Mustafa accidentally drowns in the Nile -- he finds that Mustafa was once a child prodigy whose relations sent him to study in London; while there he carried on affairs with various London women, deliberately playing up an air of foreign mystery in order to appeal to their guilty fascination with exotic Africa. He ended up marrying the only one who didn't fall for his act; several of the other women killed themselves when he ended things with them, and he ended up murdering his wife, returning to live anonymously in a quiet village after his prison sentence. It was a gripping story.

 

In the Shadow of the Dam -- Elizabeth M. Sharpe

A book about the Mill River flood of 1874, where an industrial earthen dam in the Mill River valley (in Hampshire County in Massachusetts) failed and inundated most of Williamsburg, along with parts of Easthampton and Northampton. It's in four sections: the growth of industry in western Massachusetts and the old-boy network that built the towns and the dams; the building of the Mill River dam, with its several different contractors who succeeded one another unsupervised by the absentee committee members, who ignored reports of bad design and poor workmanship; the day of the collapse, with about 150 people dead, a number that would have been higher had it not been for the heroism of several townspeople who raced ahead of the wave to give warning; and the aftermath, with once-fertile fields irrecoverably scoured to bedrock and outraged legislators investigating charges that factory owners had ordered workers to remain at their machines as the water roared towards them. No one important lost any money or status, of course. It was perhaps journeyman-level prose, but I liked it.

 

The Horse, the Wheel, and Language -- David W. Anthony

An ambitious overview of the Kurgan hypothesis, which I'm sorry to say has nothing to do with decapitating people among bolts of blue lightning while Queen blasts in the background, but is rather the most widely accepted of several competing ideas as to who were the first speakers of Proto-Indo-European, the root of nearly every language spoken in Europe and India. They were probably people from a Kurgan culture from the steppes north of the Black Sea (kurgan is a Russian word for a burial mound.) The "Aryan" peoples were among their descendants. It's clear, by the way, that as far as they themselves were concerned, what made someone "Aryan" was that they worshipped the correct gods according to the correct rituals, which were conducted in the correct language; ethnicity had nothing to do with it. The book has a wide scope, spending large sections explaining the details of how we can deduce the syntax and vocabulary of Proto-Indo-European from studying its descendant languages; how the language was tied to the Kurgan culture, whose social organization involved patron-client and host-guest relationships; how we can study their behavior by tracing the words for wool and herd; when horses were domesticated, when wheeled wagons came into use, and how the two of them helped spread the Kurgan culture and language. It's an impressive piece of scholarship, going in all kinds of unexpected directions -- the author had long interviews with zoologists who bought colts in order to spend years riding them with different bits (rope, wood, bone, metal) in order to measure the effects the bits had on the horses' teeth over time, for example. I thought the whole thing was fascinating, but the writing is pretty dry, and if I hadn't already been interested in Proto-Indo-European, thanks to an excellent college professor of mine, I don't think the book would have succeeded in engaging me with it. As it was, I was sometimes confused -- archaeologists from different countries use different names for the same cultures and dig sites, many of which sound like rejected alien races from Star Wars, and I often got lost in the welter of "evidence from the Yamna III / Dniestr II / Bug-Dnieper IV complex". I still liked it, though. 

 

Vesper Flights -- Helen Macdonald

A collection of essays, mostly on the topic of disappearing wilderness; something about her writing just bugs me irrationally, because of course I'm in favor of preserving wilderness but her writing kind of makes me want to defend the developers. The other essay I remember is the one about dealing with her lifelong migraines, which was affecting.

 

Friday Black -- Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

A collection of dark short stories; the most memorable was "Zimmer Land", about a black actor who works at a theme amusement park where customers pay to have scripted experiences, like muggings or terrorist attacks, where they get to be the action hero and "kill" all the bad guys. The narrator grows ever more disgusted as he walks through the "mugging" scenario, noticing that his customer feedback from the (always white) customers gets better the more he acts like a dumb black thug from the movies. Some customers come back over and over again, always going for the scenario where they have a white girlfriend to protect from the vicious black attacker. Another was "The Finkelstein 5", about a black man named Emmanuel who's going to a job interview; at home looking at the mirror, on the bus, on the street, and at the interview, he's constantly checking an imaginary dial in his head that measures how much "blackness" he's presenting, dialling it as far down as he can during the interview. In the background all through the story is the ongoing coverage of the trial of a white man who decapitated five small black children with a chain saw, claiming self-defense because seeing them made him feel threatened. He's acquitted, of course, and the parts of the trial we see aren't any more insane than real-life trials of white police who kill black people.

 

The Memory Police -- Yoko Ogawa

A bizarre horror story in the form of the journal of a woman who lives in an unnamed island town where everyone's memories are gradually disappearing -- like, one day everyone forgets what flowers are, and by the next day a brutal group of enforcers called the Memory Police have dug up and destroyed all the flowers so no one can be reminded of them. No one knows who the Memory Police work for, but their power is unlimited and terrifying. The narrator, a novelist, is the daughter of a sculptor who was taken away in the night because she could still remember things other people had forgotten; as the story goes on the narrator discovers that her editor, whom she calls "R", is another one who can remember, and with the help of a sympathetic neighbor she hides R in her house. Soon afterwards people forget about novels, and the narrator finds other work, but R has saved her most recent draft and insists she continue working on it. We get alternating chapters of the narrator's novel and accounts of more things being forgotten -- eventually things like the changing of the seasons and the fact that people have legs -- and the narrator manages to finish her last novel just before people forget that they exist at all. It really held my attention.

 

The Lost Writings -- Franz Kafka (Reiner Stach and Michael Hoffman, eds.)

Kind of a misleading title. It's a collection of unpublished, undated notebook fragments, things Kafka wrote down probably with the intention of eventually developing them into stories. Mostly they're only a few sentences, but there are some longer fragments. They were interesting reading.

 

Sabrina and Corina -- Kali Fajardo-Anstine

Her first book, a collection of short stories set in Denver, all about Latin and indigenous mothers and daughters and their problems of abandonment, by family members and by society. The best, I think, was "Tomi", the story of an eight-year-old boy whose ex-con aunt takes him in after his mother leaves, and the efforts each one makes to fix their own lives by helping the other one. Some of them are pretty hopeless -- "Julian Plaza" is a story about two teenage girls who have to leave school to work in order to support themselves and their mother, because their mother is dying of cancer. The stories are well written and very sad; best not to read it if you're feeling depressed already.

 

Just Like You -- Nick Hornby

I really like Hornby but this book left me flat. It's the story of two Londoners, a white woman in her forties and a black man about twenty years younger. Despite their age, race, and class differences they start a relationship and have predictable arguments and difficulties, none of them very interesting, all set against the run-up to the Brexit vote. Hornby makes what I thought was a good point that Britain was really just looking for something divisive that everyone could feel justified in hating each other over, and it could have been any number of other things -- Brexit was just what came up. Unfortunately the way Hornby chooses to show that the political arguments about Brexit were uninformed, dull, and pointless is by showing us lots of scenes of people having uninformed, dull, and pointless arguments, which doesn't make good reading. Also I didn't like or sympathize with either of the main characters; among many other things, I feel like someone needs to tell both of them that if you constantly have to keep telling people "That was a joke," it's not because everyone but you is an unimaginative clod, it's because you're not funny. I didn't like it. 

 

A Journey Through the Milky Way Galaxy -- Ole Craig and Sabine Craig

Ole and Sabine wrote and illustrated this for me as a Christmas present. It's a story about an astronaut named Ole whose rocket arrives at a distant planet, where he helps a fairy named Sabine turn stardust into fairy dust with the heat from his rocket exhaust. In gratitude Sabine turns Ole into a space mermaid so he can travel back and forth between Earth and the fairy planet without a rocket. Best book of the year, obviously. 

 

How Carrots Won the Trojan War -- Rebecca Rupp

Very enjoyable natural history of a few dozen common garden vegetables, explaining where they originated, how they were first cultivated, and what sort of nutritional value they each have, along with lively vegetable-related anecdotes, such as Emily Post's opinion of corn on the cob (she thought it was disgustingly messy and ought never to be served), General Grant's testy demands to the War Department for more onions (Civil War surgeons used onion juice to treat gunshot wounds), and how Thomas Jefferson introduced "French" fried potatoes to America when he returned from his ambassadorship to France. The title comes from the tradition that Odysseus and his men ate a lot of carrots before holing up inside the Trojan Horse, to stop themselves from farting. I really liked it.

 

The Girl Who Reads on the Métro -- Christine Féret-Fleury

A pleasant novel about a Paris woman in her twenties named Juliette, who rides the train to work every day and people-watches, trying to work out what sort of people the passengers are from what books they're reading. She's frustrated with her unsatisfying job in a real-estate office, and her daily escape is to go for walks around Paris on her lunch break. One day she happens on a used book store on a street she hasn't been on before, and going in she finds that its eccentric proprietor is looking for an assistant to work as what he calls a passeur, a person who takes books from the shop and tries to match them up with readers. She leaves the real-estate office and rides the Métro all day, looking for the right people to read the books she's carrying. Naturally she also becomes deeply involved with taking care of the book shop owner's small daughter. I enjoyed it.

 

Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea -- Thomas Cahill

A readable overview of Greek culture, generally arguing that our society's intellectual and philosophical frameworks are inherited directly from the Greeks, both for good and bad -- so they gave us mathematics and democracy and humanism, but also male supremacy and militarism. It wasn't bad, although more of the text is made up of quotations than I really like to see.