Book reviews, 2021

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

The Ox-Bow Incident -- Walter Van Tilburg Clark

A lynching story, set in a Western town in the 1880s, narrated by a cowboy named Art. Art and his partner Gil, a violent, moody drunk, are relative newcomers to the town, and Art has just uneasily settled things down after Gil picked a fight over a poker game, when someone brings word that thieves have killed a local rancher and stolen his cattle. The general sense of the crowd is that they're willing to wait for the sheriff to arrive and see to things, but the town layabouts stir everyone up to start talking about a posse; the preacher and a couple leading citizens are against it, but their pompous self-importance does more harm than good. I thought it was telling that these macho men who consider themselves kings of creation don't have the confidence to stand up to drunken whores calling them cowards. The posse sets out and finds three men with some of the rancher's cattle, which one of them claims to have bought; again, no one is really against bringing them back to stand trial, but when one man angrily insists on killing them (because he wants his son to "be a man") the rest, with a few exceptions, aren't willing to resist. (The son is one of the few.) The posse hangs the men, and on their way back to town they find out that the rancher isn't dead and his cattle weren't stolen; the whole thing was an unfounded rumor. The sheriff looks the other way and everyone goes back to live with their consciences as best they can. I found the pacing of the story a little slow, but it was a good read. Some critic said it was a book about why men are in love with violence, and I think that's pretty accurate.


Banjo -- Claude McKay

A picaresque novel, sort of, following a year in the life of a tramp seaman called Banjo, a black American who got himself "repatriated" to Europe after mustering out of the Army after World War One by claiming to be French. Banjo jumps ship in Marseilles and spends the novel playing music, getting in fights, hooking up with working women, lending and borrowing among his fellow chancers (black men from Africa and the West Indies, generally), and arguing with communists and followers of Marcus Garvey. There's no real plot line; the main interest of the book is the arguments among black men looking at the white world they have to live in. If Banjo has a central philosophy it's that "I don’t think I loathe anything more than the morality of the Christians...false, treacherous, hypocritical...the world needs to get rid of false moralities and cultivate decent manners – not society manners, but man-to-man decency and tolerance." I liked it.


Will in the World -- Stephen Greenblatt

Not a whole lot is known about Shakespeare's life, so this is less a biography than a long exercise in groundless speculation, relying on eighth-hand rumors whose sources come from centuries after Shakespeare died -- so Greenblatt builds houses of cards out of things like, "assuming the Shakespeares were secret Catholics, and that Will did travel in the north of England before he went to London, and that he was a tutor in the household of this controversial nobleman for a couple years, then obviously....!" It's not very interesting. Lots of people like to build imaginary Shakespeares out of the few facts we know, but Greenblatt really breaks new ground when he insists that Shakespeare hated his wife so much that he wrote his epitaph ("Curst be he that moves my bones") just to make sure that his wife wouldn't be buried with him in his grave. I can only shake my head at the book's thesis that every line Shakespeare wrote has to be an important reflection of his own life; has no one ever explained to Greenblatt that people can just make things up?


Gingerbread -- Helen Oyeyemi

A magical-realism fairy tale, sort of; it's about a British schoolgirl named Perdita, whose mother and grandmother (Harriet and Margot) came to England before Perdita was born from a country that doesn't appear on any map and can't be reached by ordinary means. The home country is Druhastrana (Czech for "over there") and at some point it held a nationwide referendum on whether it wanted to be part of Europe (sound familiar?) When the vote was No, Druhastrana left not only Europe but the real world. Most of the novel is Harriet telling Perdita her life story, from leaving the farm and working in a factory that made Druhastrana's national product, a strong-tasting, life-altering gingerbread ("It tastes like revenge," one character says) to how she and Margot smuggled themselves into the real world and settled in England. Margot somehow still corresponds with her childhood best friend, which (like a lot of things) is never really explained. I liked the prose but the story is pretty convoluted and my attention wandered sometimes.


Eichmann in Jerusalem -- Hannah Arendt

Arendt's account of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, at which she was present. The book covers both the logistics of the trial -- Eichmann was charged with crimes against humanity, for example, which was why Israel could claim jurisdiction; the defense strangely didn't make a huge issue of the fact that the Israeli secret service abducted him from another country and brought him to Israel so he could be arrested -- and the character of Eichmann himself. I would have thought they'd have a hard time finding someone to act as counsel for the defense, but nope, one of the top lawyers in Europe willingly defended several of the highest-ranking Nazis. Arendt thought that Eichmann's ruling character trait was a desire to belong and to be important, and in her view he organized transport to the death camps in an almost colorless way, his personal dislike of the Jews being less important to him than showing off to his superiors how industrious he was. Eichmann took pretty much the same position: he was ordered to find all the Jews and send them to be killed, so he did, and that was that. He even boasted, pathetically, about how efficient he was at it. I had the same feeling that I had reading Galbraith's book about Nuremburg: you sort of expect the Nazi commanders to have been cunning masters of evil, like movie villains, but when you listen to them defend themselves they just seem like stupid failures, more toad than serpent.


Heads of the Colored People --- Nafissa Thompson-Spires

A collection of stories about people who all have problems arising from unexamined attitudes, their own and each other's. The title story involves two black men in their twenties, one who deliberately cultivates a kind of stereotypical "urban black male" appearance and the other a cosplayer who tries to reject all stereotypes. They see each other at a comic-book convention and make snap judgements about each other's character, which causes an argument that panics white bystanders and leads to both men getting shot and killed by the police. Another is about two high-achieving black women in the same field who feel threatened by each other, and who take out their insecurities by viciously criticizing each others' high-school-age daughters for their appearance, behavior, and choice of friends, all of it right in line with the attitudes of the white patriarchy. There's also a kind of diary-of-a-madman story about a black college professor who becomes convinced that his new Latina office mate is manipulating the office's heat settings and fluorescent lights in order to diminish him and his accomplishments; that story takes place entirely in his head so we can't be certain what's really going on. I thought the best was "The Body's Defenses Against Itself", which is about one of the daughters from the duelling-mothers story, now an adult; it's set in a yoga class, where she's having trouble because she has abdominal pains from endometriosis (only diagnosed after reluctant delay from white doctors) but she's unwilling to take it easy because of her one-sided competition with another yoga student, who reminds her of her rival, the other daughter from the first story. (They don't know each other to speak to and the rivalry exists only in her head.) She overdoes it and collapses, but the other student turns out to be a nurse who gently helps her, causing some cognitive dissonance. I really liked it.


Letters -- Pliny the Younger

Chatty and entertaining letters that Pliny wrote to his friends, many of whom were fellow writers, such as the poet Martial and the historian Tacitus. Most of them deal with the ordinary concerns of his daily life -- venting frustrations at working in a large bureaucracy, giving encouraging criticism to younger friends' poetry, sympathizing with other hard-working government officials, worrying about living up to the erudition and accomplishments of his uncle Pliny the Elder. At Tacitus's request he wrote two letters about the eruption of Vesuvius and the death there of his uncle; this is I think the only eyewitness account of the destruction of Pompeii. Pliny published most of the letters in his own lifetime, and most editors think he always intended to publish them and wrote them with that in mind. The exception is the last book, which consists of official letters to the emperor Trajan that Pliny wrote when he was governor of a Roman province. Someone must have put that one together from the city archives later on, because it includes Trajan's replies, making it the only record we have of a conversation between an emperor and a high official about matters of governance. A lot of it is Trajan somewhat testily telling Pliny to use his own judgement and not ask for instructions so often. Remember that Pliny lived nearly twenty years under the tyrant Domitian, who generally killed people for acting on their own initiative, so Pliny's hesitation is understandable; so too is Trajan's repeated command that Pliny is not to countenance any anonymous denunciations (a favorite ploy under Domitian for getting rid of people you didn't like) and he is to try no cases unless the accuser brings the charge openly in court. It was really interesting.


Panegyricus -- Pliny the Younger

A long speech in praise of the emperor Trajan that Pliny delivered in the Senate at the beginning of Trajan's reign. It seems even longer than it is because it's a tiresome load of fulsome flattery, but it does give us an eyewitness account of the reigns of Domitian and Nerva, whom Pliny uses as bad and good examples of ruling. In letters to his friends Pliny candidly admitted that the speech was sycophantic, but he thought that, to the extent that he could influence Trajan, he was more likely to push him to be a good ruler by proclaiming an ideal and hoping Trajan would desire to act so as to deserve the flattery, rather than trying to teach lessons to a man who was older than he was and who was already a successful general (and who could have him killed if he thought the speech was insolent; Trajan wouldn't have done that, but at this point in his reign no one could be sure of that yet.)


Minutes of Glory -- Ngugi wa Thiong'o

I was disappointed to find that this is just a reissue of his 1975 collection Secret Lives, with two additional stories written in the 2010s. The newer stories have recognizably the same voice but are quite different in tone.


A Midwife's Story -- Penny Armstrong and Sheryl Feldman

A memoir of being trained as a midwife in Scotland in the seventies, and then going to work in Lancaster County in Philadelphia, among the Amish. A lot of it, naturally, is about learning to get along in a strange culture and adapting her work to the needs of the Amish community. I liked it.


Mrs. Pollifax Unveiled -- Dorothy Gilman

The last Mrs. Pollifax book, not very good. Mrs. Pollifax and her old friend Farrell get sent to Syria to locate a woman who was all over the news for preventing a hijacking but then disappeared. There seem to be terrorist ties; was the woman abducted for revenge, or was the whole thing staged to set up the woman as an actor in a larger scheme? I didn't care that much, honestly.


The Last Assassin -- Peter Stothard

A pretty good book on the immediate and long-term aftermath of the killing of Caesar. More than sixty Senators knew about the conspiracy, but there were nineteen men who actually held the knives. This book is about what happened to them all after the assassination; the majority either died at Philippi or committed suicide afterwards, but several fled and were eventually hunted down by Octavian's death squads. In tune with the spirit of the times, basically everyone's first plan was just to go straight to murder; Antony seized the opportunity to get rid of Cicero, who wasn't involved, and a crowd of Caesar's street thugs ludicrously lynched the wrong Cinna. The last survivor was Cassius Parmensis (not the lean and hungry one, that was a different Cassius), a soldier and poet who survived the fighting at both Philippi and Actium, only for Octavian's men to finally corner him in Athens in 30 BC. It concentrates mostly on what all the players hoped to accomplish, and gives a good picture of Octavian's relentless man-hunt. I liked it.


Enemy of All Mankind -- Steven Johnson

A good book about the short but extraordinarily eventful career of the seventeenth-century pirate Henry Avery (or Every), better known in his day as Long Ben, whose piracy had surprisingly long-lasting knock-on effects. In 1695 Avery attacked and took the Ganj-i-Sawai, the treasure-ship of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, which was also carrying some of his servants and harem-women. After spending several days emptying the ship, with time out for quite a lot of murder and rape, Avery's crew got away with about six hundred thousand pounds in 1695 money, which would be something close to a billion pounds today. Aurangzeb hit the roof, as you may imagine, and he closed all Indian ports to English trade until Avery was caught and hanged. This made Avery the most wanted man in history, as the East India Company launched the first world-wide man-hunt; Avery was declared hostis humani generis, an enemy of all mankind, authorizing anyone anywhere to kill him. Avery was never found and the money was never recovered (disappointing the moralists, who invented stories about how Avery was robbed of his haul and died penniless). In order to stay in business, the East India Company had to repay Aurangzeb all the stolen money and then some. The main near-term consequence was that to protect themselves against future losses from piracy, and to get themselves back in the Mughals' good graces, the Company took on themselves the responsibility of policing the waters of the Arabian Sea off Mumbai -- for which purpose the Mughals gave the Company official status as a vassal of the empire; London was happy to go along with it if it meant they wouldn't have to deal with any more six-hundred-thousand-pound insurance claims. When the Mughal Empire declined several generations later, that left the Company in a position to make claims to legal authority in India based on their legitimate status as Mughal officials; they could back up those claims with money and guns, and eventually ended up controlling Mughal territory and conquering most of the rest of India. So Avery's coup indirectly led to the creation of the British Empire. It was a fun read.


The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead -- Chanelle Benz

Her first book, a strong short story collection. Unlike most collections the stories aren't thematically linked. Instead of using the stories to make a mosaic, it felt more as though Benz was showing me her special things, one by one. The opening story really grabbed me, a Western about a fifteen-year-old orphan girl, living with her dead father's relatives and their rapist son, whose older half-brother comes back (from where, they carefully don't ask) to take her away with him; even though she can sense at once that her brother is a bad man, she goes with him. They ride away but haven't gone far before her brother stops, tells her to stay put, and goes off into the night; she hears gunshots, he comes back, and they ride on. They knew, you understand? They knew about him. Now you know somethin' too.  None of the other stories are anything like the first one, or each other, but they were all well written and held my attention. The one I remember best is "James III", about a twelve-year-old kid whose mother's violent boyfriend threatens the whole family. I loved the opening scene, where James trudges barefoot into a train station and an older man, surveying James's busted-up face, says "They beat you good, huh? Oh man, they stole your shoes too? Damn, that's some Oliver Twist shit right there." I thought the whole book was very good.


Mozart in the Garden -- Tom Liggett

This was marketed as a memoir of the growth of San Jose and the San Jose Rose Garden, but in fact it was an extended essay about "let me tell you how crappily my mother treated me." I wasn't that interested. The Rose Garden gets about one paragraph, by the way.


The Underground Railroad -- Colson Whitehead

An alternate history imagining that the Underground Railroad was a literal railroad, a secret subterranean railway with hidden entrances throughout the South. Of course that would be a colossal amount of engineering and labor done somehow without the notice of the white people living above; I think that's meant to be an allegory for how white people refuse to see just how much of America was built by slave labor. The book follows the story of Cora, brought up on a Georgia plantation, who escapes by way of the Railroad. Constantly pursued by slave-catchers, Cora makes her way from one Railroad station to the next, stopping in various non-historical communities that allegorically reflect how America has treated black people: falsely benevolent patriarchy, segregation, forced sterilization, non-consensual medical experiments, angry mobs, uneasy black alliances held together by common peril from white hostility, burning of black towns by white raiders. In one place where all blacks have been officially banished, the whites turn on each other, lynching and burning white people suspected of associating with blacks, whom the whites see in every shadow. Cora finally gets caught by a slave-catcher, but shoves him down the stairs to a Railroad station where he breaks his neck; we last see her on a caravan heading West to an uncertain future. The writing is excellent. Of course there are scenes of sickening violence and brutality, and I had to put the book down and come back to it a few times.


Salt Fat Acid Heat -- Samin Nosrat

A pretty good book about cooking. I liked the kitchen parts, and particularly the argument that most food comes out better if you salt it pretty liberally before cooking it. The author got on my nerves a couple times. One was her fussy Alice-Waters-like insistence that everyone has the money to spend on expensive ingredients and people who buy the name-brand stuff are bad providers who hate food and their families. She gets so far into stuck-up foodie bullshit that she argues for ending the iodization of table salt ("Who cares that it's the most effective way to prevent mental retardation, I've convinced myself that I can taste the difference between food cooked with iodized salt and non-iodized salt, and my self-regard is more important than the health of babies all over the world!") The other was a strangely common bit of bad manners that all food writers seem to find acceptable: "My friend's family had me over for dinner and the food was so bland and boring, it was such an appalling struggle to get through the tasteless, under-spiced meal that they invited me to a warm gathering at their home to eat, how can they live with themselves? I'm sure they won't be offended if I use a national publication to insult them for their friendly invitation." Go fuck yourself, OK, Samin Nosrat? You're never getting invited to my place, that's for sure.


Pylon -- William Faulkner

A New Orleans story, taking place over a long weekend of airplane-racing (a fairly popular public event a hundred years ago, when small-plane pilots were daring heroes in the public imagination.) The main character is a nameless newspaper reporter; the description dwells so much on how tall, gaunt, and pale he is that I'm sure Faulkner means us to see him as the Grim Reaper. He's covering the air races and writes about a three-person team: a pilot, a daredevil parachute-jumper, and a female mechanic, who all openly live in a ménage à trois, incredibly shocking for the time. The reporter's fascination with the team leads him to get involved in their personal lives, ending in a drinking binge that ultimately causes the deaths of the pilot and the jumper, leaving the mechanic to make her own way. I wasn't really in sympathy with any of the characters but I liked the writing; Faulkner coined any number of neologisms in it, my favorite being when he describes a Mardi Gras float as a clatterfalque.


*The Space Child's Mother Goose -- Frederick Winsor and Marian Parry

Just what it says on the tin: a lot of Mother Goose rhymes re-written in a science context. Russell and Whitehead and Hegel and Kant! Maybe I shall and maybe I sha'n't. I read this when I was a kid and it's even funnier now. My favorite is "The Theory that Jack Built".


*The King of the Hummingbirds -- John Gardner

This was one of Dad's books and I first read it as a kid. It's collection of modern fairy tales that mostly look at traditional fairy-tale characters wondering about their assigned fairy-tale roles. The title story is about an ordinary boy who is kind to the dying king of the hummingbirds and receives his crown, later getting his bird friends to rescue a damsel in distress while the more traditional meathead-knight rescuer flails around self-importantly. I liked them all but my favorite was the one about the witch who resents that her story requires her to be wicked, so she uses a magic wishing well to put her into a different story where she can be a poor but honest girl selling paper flowers, which better suits her temperament.


The 99% Invisible City -- Roman Mars and Kurt Kohlstedt

A really interesting book on elements of urban design that most people don't see. I had no idea, for example, that there are a number of houses in New York City that are actually just false fronts hiding emergency subway-evacuation areas. The spray paint that city workers use to mark the streets and sidewalks is color-coded: blue for water, red for power, yellow for gas. Any building with a metal fire escape was built before the eighties; code now requires fireproof interior stairways, which are safer and not exposed to the elements. The wacky inflatable waving-arms tube men you see at car dealerships were first designed for the opening ceremonies of the 1996 Olympics and they're meant to be doing a Trinidadian folk dance. The black stripes on the sides of school buses are actually guard rails that line up with the bottom, middle, and top of the seats, which both reinforce the structure of the bus in case of a collision and show rescue workers where to cut into the side of the bus! I thought it was great.


Dragon, Dragon -- John Gardner

After I reread The King of the Hummingbirds, I found that Gardner had written a couple other books in the same vein; this is one of them, not really as engaging as the first, though of course that may just be because I read the first one when I was ten or so and I read this one in my fifties. Still, I don't plan on finding the third book.


Symphony for the City of the Dead -- M.T. Anderson

The story of the extraordinary "Leningrad" symphony, which Shostakovich composed in the city during the siege. There's a good description of his career, and how he and his music alternated between being celebrated and denounced in the Soviet press depending on which music critics were in and out of favor with the Party. I hadn't known that Shostakovich was such a good teacher and lecturer; he was so popular in the conservatory that his students, on their way home from their night's drinking, would gather outside Prokofiev's house and sing "Ser-gei Pro-ko-fi-ev!" to the tune of some of Shostakovich's music. The description of the siege and the terrible hunger is really vivid. The symphony premiered in Leningrad, played by those musicians who were still alive and had the strength to get to the theater; more than one musician literally dropped dead during the performance. It was of course hugely promoted in Soviet propaganda as an example of the unconquerable Russian spirit (with the same columnists dismissing it as bourgeois when Shostakovich fell out of favor again later on.) It was gripping.


The Great Halifax Explosion -- John U. Bacon

A very good book about the terrible shipping accident in 1917, where a cargo ship leaving Halifax harbor collided with a WWI munitions carrier entering it. The munitions ship caught fire, and the thousands of tons of high explosive in its hold all went off, levelling most of Halifax, killing about 2000 people and injuring 10,000 more. It was the biggest man-made explosion in history up to that time; it caused a tsunami that wiped out a Mi'kmaq community opposite Halifax that was older than Canada. The first half of the book gives an almost minute-by-minute account of how the accident happened. There were three ships involved in the collision, all of them to blame to some degree; it was one of those situations where a multitude of small carelessnesses and miscalculations all multiplied each other to produce the worst possible result. The second half deals with the immediate aftermath, the small acts of heroism in the face of disaster -- the telegraph operator who ran back to certain death at his post so he could warn incoming trains that the bridges were destroyed; the landing-party from one of the cargo ships that ran to save the Mi'kmaq children who were standing watching the munitions ship burn (they had no common language so the sailors just had to grab the kids and run with them over their shoulders; the kids later said they thought they were being kidnapped) -- and the longer-term aftermath, with thousands of lives being saved by relief columns from Massachusetts, who went by train as far as the tracks survived and then carried supplies the rest of the way; this is why Halifax sends Boston a Christmas tree for the Common every year. It was really gripping.


Commentaries on the Civil War -- Caius Julius Caesar

Caesar's self-justification for his rebellion against the Senate and seizure of power. It's the only source we have for a lot of that civil war, which is unfortunate because it's really transparent propaganda. Caesar portrays himself as a peace-loving innocent wrongly persecuted by the Senate and their tool Pompey, and asserts unblushingly that he overthrew all forms of government and illegally made himself perpetual dictator in a wholly selfless campaign to save the Republic. He shows some of the attitudes that make the ancient Romans seem so different to us: when tallying his grievances against the Senate, he lists the fact that the senate didn't grant him a triumphal parade as if that were a crime on the same level with their demand that he disband his army and return defenseless to Rome. Caesar was among the best writers of ancient Rome, and you would think he must have known that his self-aggrandizement would be blatantly obvious; but on the other hand he was unbelievably egotistical and he may have thought people would believe his propaganda just because it was him saying it. He ends his account with the death of Pompey, who was assassinated in Egypt after losing the battle of Pharsalus, although in fact the war went on for another three years after that, against the Republicans and their allies across Africa and Europe. Maybe Caesar preferred to draw the war as a conflict between the evil power-hungry Pompey and the heroic selfless Caesar, pushing the massive resistance to Caesar's power-grab under the rug.


Midnight in Chernobyl -- Adam Higginbotham

A terrifying account of the 1986 meltdown, which was caused by the worst possible combination of poor design, mechanical failure, and human error. The disaster was so great that the site director appears to have gone temporarily mad -- even after going over in person to see the hole in the ground where the reactor had been, he couldn't accept the truth and for the rest of the day he kept frantically pumping in water to cool the core that was no longer there. He wasn't alone, as he and several senior officials all reported to the Supreme Soviet that everything was under control and that the reactor would be back on line soon, even though, and I can't emphasize this enough, the reactor was completely gone. It was the first big test of Gorbachev's new glasnost policy, and it failed completely, as Moscow didn't warn western Europe about the massive radioactive clouds that were blowing towards them. Unlike the administrators, the workers behaved heroically -- imagine the poor firefighters, running to put out the burning radioactive graphite and having to walk unprotected right across scattered fragments of uranium! They mostly died horribly, although the bureaucracy classified them all as suffering from non-work-related heart failure. The scariest thing was that the meltdown produced corium, more vividly known as "nuclear lava", an oozing mass of uranium dioxide, melted control rods, melted concrete, melted graphite, and anything else that got in the way, along with staggeringly radioactive fission products, all burning at thousands of degrees. The terrified crew sprayed the ground with liquid nitrogen to stop the corium from contaminating the groundwater, or worse, evaporating it in a cloud of radioactive steam. (Later on they dug sub-tunnels and filled them with more concrete.) The book was written before the Russian invasion of 2022, which threatened but didn't wreck the containment project; though the Russian advance through the forest seems to have raised clouds of still-radioactive dust, and the consequences of that might not be known for some time. The book is well-written and fascinating; I couldn't put it down.


Shelf Life -- Alex Johnson (ed.)

A collection of famous writers' essays about books. I thought I'd like it, but in fact they were mostly about book-collecting, which doesn't interest me. Gladstone's essay on the best way to shelve your books was tedious, and other essays on ridding yourself of excess books (one suggested bagging them up and throwing them in the river "like unwanted kittens", which was horrifying) obviously don't appeal to me. The only ones I really liked were Teddy Roosevelt's essay on what books to read when (he advised using reading as an antidote to your troubles: when feeling confined in the city he read Owen Wister, but when actually on the range he read Swinburne) and Charles Lamb's wonderful Elia essay “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading", in which, among other things, he advises us to read Milton aloud but not the newspaper ("the effect is singularly vapid") and to remember that the five minutes before dinner is ready is not the time to begin a volume of sermons. That essay would be worth the whole book if I didn't already have Lamb's collected essays.


Aeschylus' Supplices: Play and Trilogy -- A.F. Garvie

This is a lengthy essay on The Suppliants, examining the existing text and trying to recreate the structure of the two other plays in the trilogy, which are no longer extant. I'm not sure why the book gives the Latin Supplices as the title: the play is called Hiketides in Greek, so if you're going to be pedantic why not go all the way? Anyway the story of the Danaides is well known from other sources, so we know the broad outlines of how the plot would have gone; Garvie is concerned with the trilogy's theme of resistance to foreign invasion and doing the right thing, reluctantly or not, when it's sure to bring bad consequences. It's partly an exercise in imagination, because we don't know when the play was put on stage, not even whether it was early or late in Aischylos's career. Garvie spends a lot of time on the scholarly debate on the dating of the play, relying on issues I have to take his word for, such as comparative Greek syntax and the fact that it's more a melodrama than a tragedy. The writing is very academic and I wouldn't recommend it unless you're really interested in Greek drama.


The Northern Dipper Scripture: The Perfected Scripture of the Upmost Profoundly Numinous Northern Dipper That Prolongs Life and Affects Fundamental Destiny -- Joshua Paynter and Jack Schaefer, trans.

A translation of an important work of Taoist scripture, all about the deification of the celestial bodies, particularly the stars that make up the Beidou, the Northern Dipper (what we call the Big Dipper.) It provides a cyclical list of Taoist prayers both in English and in a phonetic transliteration of the original (Taoists believe in the value of chanting to help you enter the proper state of mind and spirit, and the original is better suited than English is to that sort of chanting, because of the breathing patterns.) I know very little about Taoism; I read this because I know one of the translators, and while I found it interesting I can't make any educated comment.


Map of the Invisible World -- Tash Aw

I liked the other book of his I read, but this one hasn't stayed with me. It's about a mixed-race boy named Adam growing up in Indonesia in the sixties, and his efforts to find his officially-disappeared adoptive father, a white Dutchman who stayed in the country after independence. The only scene that really made an impression on me was Adam, in his early teens, hiding in the reeds as he watches the Communist soldiers take his father away, and his stunned helplessness as he stands in their empty house with no idea where to go or what to do. Eventually he goes to Jakarta to enlist the help of his father's old girlfriend, and we find out that Adam had a brother at the orphanage but hasn't seen him since they were five, and there's passages on the civil unrest under the Sukarno regime. I actually don't remember if Adam finds his father, but I do remember thinking that Aw was deliberately trying to avoid a western-novel idea of closure, so probably everything was left open-ended, a novel structure I don't usually like.


The World Doesn't Require You -- Rion Amilcar Scott

A collection of short stories set in the fictional town of Cross River, Maryland, which in the book's imagined history was the center of a successful slave uprising. Having won their freedom, the blacks of Cross River were able to keep it largely because they could move around the haunted woods that kept the whites out, avoiding the monstrous birds and the water spirits. The stories range across genres, including mystery, fable, science fiction, and outright horror. There's one about an inventor who built a black-man robot and programmed it to enjoy being a slave; a story about one of the spirits who came out of the water and married one of the townsmen; an academic satire about a Ph.D candidate who's writing a dissertation about the kids' game of ding-dong-ditch. They were all pretty good. I probably would have gotten into the book more easily if I had read his previous collection, which introduced the town and the background story, but I didn't know about it until I'd already read this one.


The Spectator -- Studs Terkel

A collection of radio interviews with mostly old-timey movie actors and makers, with supporting material about Terkel's love of movies. I actually thought the supporting material was dull, since Terkel often spends whole paragraphs just listing names of actors and the movies they were in; it's a device meant to evoke a collage of memories, but I find it unsuccessful. The interviews themselves, though, are interesting, as Terkel gets people to dive deep into the minutiae of just what makes a scene work and exactly why one take is better than another. Some of them were off the wall: Marlon Brando, clearly bored and not knowing much about the movie he was promoting, started interviewing Terkel about the radio business, while Arthur Miller wanted to talk about how he originally wanted to be a radio crooner like Russ Columbo. Overall I liked it.


American Nations -- Colin Woodard

An absolutely fascinating book, probably the book that changed my thinking the most this year. Woodard's argument (not original with him, as he makes clear; this is a synthesis and extrapolation of things several other people have said) is that America is not one nation, but eleven. He draws a distinction between a state, which is a political entity, and a nation, which is a cultural entity. Sometimes the nation and the state coincide, as in Japan; sometimes you have a nation without a state, like the Kurds; and sometimes you have a state that has no all-encompassing nation, like the United States. Woodard describes what he thinks of as the several nations that make up America, among them "Yankeedom" (New England, upstate new York, the northern parts of central states like Ohio and Illinois, and most of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland) which gave America its intellectual underpinnings and its sense of the duty of every citizen to participate in the government, along with self-righteousness and a restless tendency to mind other people's business; the Appalachians, who provide America's fighting spirit, along with a resistance to even good ideas that require any compromise of independence; New Amsterdam, mostly downstate New York, whose big contribution is a sense of open-minded toleration of all people; El Norte, made up of southern parts of Texas and California along with northern Mexico, regions that have more in common with each other than either does with its own government; the Deep South, which originated from slave states in the Caribbean rather than directly from Europe. Woodard argues, I think persuasively, that American history is best understood as a long battle for supremacy between Yankeedom and the Deep South, with the other nations making common cause with one or the other as circumstances demand. I found the book deeply engrossing and pestered everyone I know to talk about the ideas in it.


The Harafish -- Naguib Mahfouz

A roman-fleuve about a dozen generations of a family living in a long alley in Cairo. The founder of the family, a poor carter, fights his way into becoming the leader of the local gang of thugs; he uses his position to protect the alley-dwellers -- the harafish, Arabic for "rabble" -- and keep the rich in line. Succeeding generations grow up with a family mythology of living up to the founder, whose memory is beloved because he stood up for the harafish and because even after taking over the gang he kept working as a carter and always lived like a poor man. I liked the writing, but I didn't really like the way the stories developed: in every generation, the current man of the family takes over the gang and starts out by living up to the founder, working at a day job and keeping his foot on the rich people's necks, but then becomes obsessed with a woman and starts letting his duties slip. The women aren't just unconscious awakeners of irresponsibility in the men, either: in every generation, when one of the men marries one of the women, the woman starts nagging the man to stop working at manual labor and to live more luxuriously. It's not an optimistic portrait of marriage or a very flattering one of women generally.


*The Puritans' Farewell to England -- New England Society reprint

These were the Massachusetts Bay Puritans, not the Pilgrims, who had left England for the Netherlands and then Plymouth more than twenty years earlier. This group, led by a council of serious Puritan elders of whom the most senior was John Winthrop, disagreed with the Pilgrim Fathers in that they wanted to remain politically associated with the crown of England; but they were wary of their precarious position, so in 1630 they got a charter and headed out to found Boston, forty miles or so north of the Pilgrim settlement. Before they left they published this pamphlet. It prudently reminds everyone that all Englishmen remain brethren, and then -- more sincerely, I think -- asks all the English remaining at home, whether they wish the Puritan expedition well or ill, to remember them in their prayers. It's brief but eloquent.


Men of Mathematics -- E.T. Bell

A history of mathematics told in forty or so detailed biographies of European mathematicians from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. I found them pretty readable, although they're heavy on gossip and I bet a lot of it is just anecdotal.


Being Wrong -- Kathryn Schulz

A good book on the psychology of error and how people cling to obvious mistakes to an insane degree rather than admit to being wrong. People are so invested in their belief that they'll take evidence that they're wrong as proof that they're right. One man wrongly accused of a crime had sixteen co-workers who all agreed he was at his job at the time; the accuser said that so many people agreeing so exactly was proof that they'd made the story up. The court system massively overvalues eyewitness testimony so the guy went to prison for over ten years. (Unusually, when he was exonerated, the accuser met him and apologized; far more often, mistaken accusers never accept that they were mistaken. The book mentions a case where a wrongfully imprisoned man was released and his accuser threw herself in front of the prison van to try to stop him from being released.) Police are particularly bad: they tend to believe (wrongly) that their gut feelings are a good guide to who's guilty or innocent and will bare-facedly go into court and say that their years of experience let them just know that someone is guilty. They'll never, ever change their minds, either -- if their case is overturned because a witness was lying, or physical evidence shows that the cops' theory was impossible, they'll just invent a new theory for why the guy is guilty, and pursue it relentlessly until someone dies of old age. It was eye-opening.


All the Light We Cannot See -- Anthony Doerr

One of my favorite books of the year. Lucy read it and then gave it to me because she wanted to talk to someone about it. Most of it takes place during World War II, in the French town of St. Malo on the Channel coast. The main characters are Marie, a blind French girl living in St. Malo with her traumatized uncle, and Walter, a German boy conscripted underage into the German army, holed up in the basement of a St. Malo hotel with his radio unit as the gunners above fight an artillery duel with the Allies, who besiege the town after D-Day. The story moves around through time, mixing chapters set during the battle with chapters telling the stories of how Marie and Walter came to be there. I was deeply invested in both Marie and Walter and I was irked that I couldn't stay up to finish the book the day I started it because I had to get up for work the next day. I loved it.


The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata -- Gina Apostol

A novel purporting to be the memoir of an imaginary Filipino revolutionary and his relationship with the real-life 19th-century poet José Rizal. When I tell you that the novel is a Pale Fire sort of endeavor, with a fictional editor adding copious footnotes to the fictional memoir, with a running criticism of the fictional translator, and no fewer than seven introductions by fictional academics arguing about the fictional memoirist's life, you may understand why I gave up after a couple dozen pages and returned the book to the store.


The History of the Siege of Lisbon -- José Saramago

A novel about a proofreader named Silva, who is correcting the galley proofs of a scholarly new book about the twelfth-century siege of Lisbon during the Reconquista. The siege was successful and Lisbon fell to the Portuguese under King Alfonso because the soldiers of the Second Crusade detoured on their way to Jerusalem to aid the siege. In a moment of boredom or frustration, the usually reliable Silva adds the word "not" to the thesis sentence, changing history so that the Crusaders did not come to Alfonso's aid. The change isn't discovered until after the book goes to press, and it has to be recalled and Silva is called on the carpet. He's an old and faithful employee so he doesn't get canned, but he's put under a new boss, a woman named Maria who's been hired to oversee all the proofreaders. However, Maria finds Silva's subversive impulse interesting, and she encourages him to continue writing the history of the siege of Lisbon from his original changed paragraph. The rest of the book alternates between chapters of Silva's alternate history (where the Crusaders never turn up and Lisbon never falls, and on the one hand Christian Portugal never gets established but on the other hand the people of Lisbon never get starved and massacred) and chapters where Silva and Maria gradually fall in love. It was a weird, well-told story; I liked it.


The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth -- Thomas Morris

A collection of odd case histories from the 16th through the 19th centuries, like the man who held a candle with one hand so the doctor could see to amputate the other, or the poor chemistry student who, getting up in the night, didn't want to go outside in the cold so he pissed into a bottle, not realizing that the bottle had a residue of potassium in it, which exploded when he pissed on it and gave him some serious burns. The author notes that some of the oddest cases in the literature are really just cases of incompetent doctors or outright hoaxes, like the guy who claimed that he accidentally swallowed his false teeth and years later they chewed up his lungs. The title refers to a series of nineteenth-century cases of patients reporting noisily bursting teeth; the author concludes that it's at least possible -- primitive fillings, depending on what mix of metals they were made of, could act as a battery and cause spontaneous electrolysis, which might lead to a buildup of hydrogen that would eventually be enough to crack a tooth, and the hydrogen might even ignite if you were a smoker -- but it's a real stretch, and it seems more likely that patients reporting an actual explosion in their mouths were just exaggerating.


200 Kitchens -- Gawain Barker

A memoir of a restless kind of guy who moved from one cooking job to another and the funny things that happened along the way. It was mildly entertaining.


*Unforgettable Fire -- Japan Broadcasting Corporation

A disturbing collection of paintings by survivors of the Hiroshima bombing. Really affecting.


*Babel's Tower -- Francis Henry Taylor

A short book or long essay written at the end of the war by the curator of the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Its topic is the design of the modern museum. It starts with a review of museums throughout history and how at their best they've been used as repositories of knowledge but more often have been simple magpie-like collections of shiny objects. Taylor believed that a museum should ideally be an educational institution, a living public service rather than a quiet collection of masterpieces for wealthy aesthetes. He quotes the Met's founding charter, which says that the museum is meant for "the cultivation of pure taste in all matters connected with the arts", and argues that the Met has not lived up to that aim. He calls for American museums generally to be true to the principles of democracy and remember that the arts generally are "of vital concern to the community at large." I couldn't agree more.


Twenty-One Truths About Love -- Matthew Dicks

A novel made up entirely of a series of lists written in a notebook by a guy called Dan. Dan makes the lists to cope with his anxiety. He has a lot to be anxious about: his wife is about to have their first child, he quit his job a year ago to found an independent book store, which is losing all his money, and he's oppressed by knowing that his wife's now-dead first husband was basically perfect in every way, which is why he hasn't told his wife that the book store is failing. One entry is a list of hare-brained ideas to make money, one of which is "rob somebody"... and that list reappears a few times, with the ideas gradually crossed off, until "rob somebody" is the only one left. He comes up with a foolish plan, and does some stupid things, but he's essentially a good guy and the story ends pretty happily with no one getting hurt, which is why I liked it.


*The St Ives Problem -- Bridget Flanagan

An entertaining pamphlet on the old nursery rhyme about St Ives (As I was going to St Ives, I met a man with seven wives...) It goes over such things as, which St Ives is meant? When did the rhyme enter the English language? Why seven and not nine, which would be more thematically appropriate for a riddle involving cats? The rhyme is attested in English as far back as 1730, though oral versions almost certainly preceded the first written version; it seems to have come from an earlier Plattdeutsch rhyme, which does use nine. Seven is a mystical number, of course, but probably more important in English is that "seven" is a trochaic foot and so better suits English meter. The problem itself appears in Fibonacci's 13th-century Liber Abaci, and there's a version of it in an Egyptian papyrus from the 16th century BCE (which states that it's a copy of an even older papyrus from the 19th century BCE!) The actual answer depends on whether you read it as a problem or as a riddle. The Egyptians certainly used it as a math problem and not a riddle; the riddle part appears to be European in origin. The math answer is 2802: 2401 kittens + 343 cats + 49 sacks + 7 wives + the man + the narrator of the rhyme. The riddle answer is one, since only the narrator of the rhyme is going to St Ives; everyone else is coming from there. I really enjoyed it.


The Unlikely Spy -- Daniel Silva

His first novel, incredibly tedious. It's a WWII story set in London where various people chase each other around for unlikely reasons, all of them wearing invincible plot armor until they suddenly lose it because the end of the book is coming up. I thought it was terrible. I'm told he wrote much better books later on but this one was so bad I'm leery of trying them.


English Synodalia of the Thirteenth Century -- C.R. Cheney

Sometimes I run across a book in a used book store that I buy just because I feel sorry for it. This was one of those. Who's ever going to read it if I don't? It gathers together several collections of canon law issued by synods in England throughout the 1200s. It's a view of medieval English life I hadn't seen before, which was interesting, but overall it was about as gripping as you'd think. No kidding, though, it was more interesting than the Daniel Silva book.


*What's To Become of the Boy? -- Heinrich Böll

A memoir of what Böll considered the formative years of his life, the mid-to-late 1930s, when he was in his late teens. He came from a leftist family and wouldn't join the Hitler Youth, but he was somewhat sheltered from consequences because he attended a Catholic school -- in the early years of the Reich the Nazis had to conciliate the Church because of the international legitimacy they gained from the Concordat of 1933, and because the Catholic Center Party was the main voting bloc supporting the Enabling Act, which abolished local governments and gave all power to the Chancellor. So it's mostly a story of a privileged teenager growing up sheltered from the fascist state growing up around him, riding his bike and loving books. It was really striking how Böll realized that the Nazis had won, not from any loud proclamation, but from the quiet -- all the dissenters were silenced and suddenly Germany had only one voice. I felt like he structured the whole book just to make that realization hit the reader the same way it hit him.


The Complete Correspondence of Flaubert and Turgenev -- Barbara Beaumont, ed.

Years ago I read the correspondence of Flaubert and George Sand, which was excellent reading, so I expected this to be more of the same; however, Flaubert speaking to Turgenev was a very different person to Flaubert speaking to Sand. I think Flaubert and Sand deeply loved each other in a Platonic way and their correspondence, even during times when public events were going very badly in France, was positive and life-affirming. Quite to the contrary, Turgenev and Flaubert do nothing but complain to each other about how awful everything is, how Europe and the world are going to hell, and how no one but the two of them really know how to read or appreciate art. The way they moan and bitterly bid farewell to the good days of life makes them sound like they're in their nineties, although in fact neither was yet fifty. I didn't like it much.


The Autobiography of Charles Darwin -- Francis Darwin and Nora Barlow, editors

Darwin's literary executor was his son Francis. He not only edited his father's autobiography, he censored it, omitting whole sections and pruning others; partly this was to avoid any mention of Samuel Butler, who had an unfounded persecution complex towards Darwin that verged on madness, and partly it was to remove anything critical of Christianity. Luckily he didn't destroy the original, and a couple generations later Darwin's granddaughter Nora Barlow restored the original text. The excised text isn't anything earth-shaking -- Darwin was devout as a young man but he said that his faith was based on a strong inward conviction that faded away as he got older, and he eventually decided that "inward convictions and feelings" carry no weight as evidence -- but Victorian society would certainly have taken it as a declaration of atheism. For the rest of it, I found it a pleasant story; Darwin was a kind and friendly man who mostly lived quietly and devoted himself to study. He indignantly recalls that his school-master called him a pococurante (an idler who fiddles away his time on trivia) for spending his study time on physical science instead of getting on with his theology!  


Infinite Powers -- Steven Strogatz

A history of calculus, very readable and engaging. I enjoyed it, although in the process of providing interesting and illustrative explanations of calculus and its uses, Strogatz sometimes descends into a silly mysticism, saying absurd things such as that the universe has an operating system and calculus is its code, or that God used calculus to design the universe. Dumb overstatements like this actually take away from the amazing power of calculus to describe real-world events in ways that let us derive all sorts of useful results. The book reads like a sales pitch for calculus, and like all sales pitches it contains weasel words: Strogatz says that calculus "somehow" translates reality into symbols, which is not what calculus does, and also if your science explanation contains the word "somehow" you need to re-write it. That aside, it was a good book. I liked his basic explanation that calculus is a method for measuring things while they're in the process of changing.


Science and Cooking -- Michael Brenner, Pia Sörensen, and David Weitz

This was a good explanation of the actual chemistry of cooking. The head chef at the first restaurant I worked at held little seminars explaining the same sort of thing, though in a less systematic way; I remember her emphasizing that cooking food changes its pH, and the function of adding salt during the cooking process is to restore pH balance so the food tastes more like itself, which is the main reason under-salted food tastes bland. This whole book is full of useful information like that, although I was somewhat put off by the authors' over-praise of contemporary "molecular gastronomy" cooks, whom they universally praise as today's most creative artists, while I consider them more niche performers who make very expensive esoterica for a tiny audience of self-admiring rich foodies. I also rolled my eyes at their blithe assumption that everyone has a liquid nitrogen tank in the kitchen.


*Ex Libris -- Anne Fadiman

A book of essays about reading, none of which I liked. I particularly disliked the one about how to treat books, with its argument that people who like to preserve their books physically undamaged are less engaged with their reading than the *true* book lovers, who write in, dog-ear, bend, or otherwise beat up the book enough to show that it's been read. She approvingly tells the story of an acquaintance who actually tears out pages and eats them after reading them, which sounds like some serial-killer shit to me.


First Person Singular -- Haruki Murakami

A short story collection, knee-deep in Murakami's recurrent motifs: unnamed narrators, classical music, the Beatles, middle-aged men reflecting on events of their younger days that are only important in retrospect, people having life-changing conversations over the phone. (No cats, though, for some reason.) The story where the narrator, usually a casual dresser, wears a suit on a whim and then goes to a bar where he's disturbed by his reflection in the mirror, seeming like a stranger to himself, was kind of a Peak Murakami moment but also an unexpected shift in viewpoint that all of a sudden made me identify with his alienation. In one story the narrator says "Perhaps our lives are merely decorative, expendable items, a burst of fleeting color and nothing more." I think that Murakami doesn't believe that this is true but he can only explain why obliquely. My favorite was probably the autobiographical story about how Murakami has always rooted for the hapless Yakult Swallows baseball team, not so much out of a liking for the underdog as because he had a bad relationship with his father, who rooted for the Hanshin Tigers. The Swallows have generally been terrible, and Murakami often wrote poetry on his scorecard because actually keeping score was too depressing, but he said they at least taught him to "accept defeat with grace". In general I like Murakami's novels more than I like his short stories, but several of these appealed to me more than usual.


Station Eleven -- Emily St. John Mandel

A civilization-collapses story, but one that deals more with how the survivors cope than with the actual collapse, which I liked. It opens up with a famous actor collapsing and dying on stage during King Lear; that same night a pandemic passes the point of no return and everyone else starts dying. The rest of the book follows several people who were connected to the famous actor: a paramedic named Jeevan in the audience who tried to save him, a child actress in the play named Kirsten who he was nice to, a retiree named Clark who's a friend of his ex-wife. I thought Jeevan was going to be a major character, but after some powerful scenes with him taking care of his paraplegic brother, he travels south and ends up as a town doctor in Maryland and really drops out of the story, which is a thing Mandel has done in other books, I'm not sure why. The main characters turn out to be Kirsten, who spends her life as an actress in a traveling Shakespeare troupe, and Clark, who lives with a crowd of interrupted passengers at a fictional airport located somewhere in Michigan, where he curates a "Museum of Civilization". The plot brings Kirsten and her friends together with Clark and his friends, but the plot is perhaps less important than the overall sense that civilization is more than just being alive; the Shakespeare troupe's motto is "Survival is Insufficient". I liked it.


*Mystery -- Clark Dimond

A "No-Frills" book, one of a parody series from the eighties, when no-name brands were briefly popular -- you could get beer that came in a plain white can with just the word BEER in black. This is a paperback with a plain white cover that just says MYSTERY. It's a collection of hard-boiled noir tropes that somehow add up to a story that's entertaining in a ridiculous way. The McGuffin is a cassette tape with a hypnotic rhythm that's supposed to enthrall anyone who hears it, but of course that's just the excuse for chase scenes, fight scenes, and a denouement where the private eye stops the bad guy by dropping a TV set four stories onto his head. Dad must have bought it at an Annie's, because there's an Annie's bookmark in it; on the back of the bookmark Dad kept track of the book's body count, chapter by chapter, for a final total of 17 -- not bad for only 58 pages.   


Suparinpei -- Giles Hopkins

A book by my karate teacher about suparinpei, a kata from Goju-ryu karate, typically the last one you learn (I started training Goju in 1989 and I didn't learn suparinpei until 2003.) It's often called the "highest" kata, or words to that effect, and it's generally said to embody all the principles of the system. I myself think that all the Goju-ryu kata embody the principles of the system, and that we typically teach saifa first and suparinpei last not because one is superior to the other, but just because saifa is the shortest and suparinpei is the longest. Giles introduces the book by reiterating his philosophy of kata: that kata are not infinitely interpretable, but that each kata has a definite sequence of identifiable techniques whose purpose is to illustrate the principles of the art, and that trying to learn the principles first and the techniques afterwards is putting the cart before the horse. (I agree, but of course all my ideas about karate were largely shaped by thirty years of training with Giles.) The greater part of the book is an excellent and thorough exegesis of the bunkai (application) of the techniques of suparinpei. I found it fascinating -- Giles never stops thinking about karate and is always reexamining his technique -- but of course I know the kata; someone who didn't wouldn't get as much out of it as I did.


*Ambrose Bierce's Civil War -- William McCann, ed.

The majority of this was fiction, war stories that I'd mostly read before but are always worth reading again, like "The Affair at Coulter's Notch" and "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge." About a quarter of it, though, was non-fiction, first-hand accounts of  the battles he fought in: Chickamauga, Shiloh, Franklin, Pickett's Mill. Bierce was a keen and cynical observer and he clearly understood that bravery and heroism are different things. He describes the strange detachment that people often feel in battle: he saw a man who'd been shot in the head and whose brains were actually oozing down his neck, and all he thought at the time was that he wouldn't have thought a man could have that happen and stay on his feet. Bierce believed that the Union was definitively in the right, but at the same time recognized that the war was fought stupidly and high-level decisions were often made in order to profit corrupt wealthy men rather than to preserve the lives of the soldiers. His description of the pigs feeding on the bodies of the fallen at Shiloh is accurate both literally and metaphorically.  


*Collections of Nothing -- William Davies King

A book about the impulse to collect things. Poorly written and unmemorable.


Men Explain Things To Me -- Rebecca Solnit

An essay collection. The title piece is all about silencing of women and the way men assume that they always know more on any subject than the woman they're talking to. Although on a serious subject, that one was fairly light-hearted; the others were less so, including essays on violence against women, same-sex marriage (Solnit thinks the real issue is that a same-sex marriage is, by definition, between equal partners, while for many people a marriage must have a power structure with a superior and an inferior) and how women who speak out against sexual harassment have to face standards of proof more severe than for murder. It was well-written, persuasive, and depressing.


Project Hail Mary -- Andy Weir

I loved Weir's first book and I was unimpressed by his second, but he's gotten over the sophomore slump in a big way. This was excellent, one of my favorite books of the year. It's got a great opening, where the narrator wakes up from a deep coma with post-coma partial amnesia; as he slowly comes back to himself, he remembers that he's on a spaceship, and that he's on a desperately important mission, but he can't remember what it was! He's in the position of the Chaldean wise men: he has to figure out what he's been sent to do before he can do it. We get scenes of Grace (he eventually remembers his name) trying to work out what's happening in the present alternating with scenes of his returning memories of how he got there. It's a near-future story where the Sun has started slowly getting dimmer, and scientists figure out that some sort of stellar microorganism is eating it; Grace is a world-class microbiologist who left the field because he was tired of academic infighting, but he gets conscripted into the group attacking the problem by a woman called Stratt, a committee of one who's been given essentially unlimited authority to save the world. While Grace is figuring out the lifecycle of the star-eating microbe, the rest of the group notices that out of the whole local group, only Tau Ceti is not growing dimmer, so the group builds a starship for a desperate hail-Mary attempt to find out why Tau Ceti isn't infected. This is the mission Grace is on, as he eventually realizes; his crewmates didn't survive their induced comas, so he's all alone -- and not only that, in the time they had they could only make enough fuel for a one-way trip, so Grace has to solve the problem, launch some small return pods to deliver the solution to Earth, and then starve to death. He's hardly gotten started when he (and the reader!) is surprised to find an alien ship in the same system; this is another species having the same problem and trying the same last-chance gambit. There's a long section of the book where Grace and the alien (also the last survivor of its expedition) make contact, and learn to understand each other, which was fascinating, and then the two of them have to solve both their species' problems together. I loved it. Lucy and I read it at the same time and when we were done we both just read it again.


A Paradise Built in Hell -- Rebecca Solnit

This is an exploration of Aristotle's argument that people deal better with catastrophe than success, and even more so, why it is that the popular imagination holds the reverse to be true. Every disaster movie shows the populace immediately turning on each other, smashing and stealing and killing in wild abandon; this even though in real life the opposite happens -- people generally form impromptu communities and help each other as much as possible. Solnit calls this an example of "elite panic", meaning that people who own property are always ready to believe that someone is coming to take it away from them. After Hurricane Katrina, white property owners from the surrounding areas barricaded bridges and opened fire on refugees trying to flee the city; Solnit quotes reporters who spoke to some of these people who openly, unashamedly said on the record that they just shot at any black people they saw. Public officials pandered to the wealthy white voters by declaring martial law and ordering draconian shoot-first policies against imaginary hordes of looters. In the city, people did take food from grocery stores, which, considering the total failure of the municipal, state, or federal governments to provide relief, can only be regarded as absolutely necessary; notably, the people who took the food didn't hoard it, but set up open-air kitchens in order to help as many people as possible. The only real looting was done by the New Orleans police department, who stole right and left, including emptying car dealerships and taking the cars for themselves. Excellent book.


*Nobel Crimes -- Marie Smith, ed.

A collection of crime stories written by Nobel laureates. The problem with the concept is that very few Nobel-prize-winning authors have written anything that could be called a "crime" story, no matter how far you stretch the definition. Only one or two stories had a crime as the central element, and mostly the crime was something peripheral that didn't really involve the characters at all. The best story in it was Hemingway's "The Killers"; it also had one of Faulkner's very minor stories, "Smoke", as well as an unpleasant story by John Steinbeck where a man marries a woman who treats him disdainfully until he beats her almost to death, whereupon she respects him and is happy. It's also a reminder of how careless the committee has sometimes been. How the hell did Pearl S. Buck win the Nobel prize?


The Premonition -- Michael Lewis

A book about the US health system and the start of the pandemic. Michael Lewis is a hero-worshipper and a big believer in the Great Man school of history, so I knew going in that no matter what the facts were, Lewis would present them as the story of a heroic maverick opposed at every turn by a crowd of incompetent fools, which is exactly what we got. It rather poisoned the book for me, since I've started to think Lewis cares more about upholding his narrative than presenting things accurately. I was surprised to find that in California the head of the county board of health is the ultimate authority on all sorts of public issues and can override any other public official, even the governor.


*Cato and Varro on Agriculture -- H.B. Ash, ed.

The Loeb Classical edition of two Latin works both called De Re Rustica ("On Farming"), by Cato the Elder around 140 BCE and by Terentius Varro about a hundred years later. Cato's book had become a standard by then, and Varro spent some time recapping it; he got some comic mileage out of Cato's oddball belief that eating raw cabbage is a good cure for almost anything. They're both pretty broad-ranging, going over how to select a good site for a farm -- near a watercourse that's big enough that it won't run dry in the summer but not so big that it will flood every year; near enough to a town that you can cart excess produce there to sell it; placed near a hill so the wind and drainage will be predictable -- what kinds of trees to plant at which parts of the farm, what to feed the slaves, how many extra workers to hire at harvest time and how much to pay them, which tools can be repaired on the farm on rainy days and which ones need to be sent off the farm to an expert. Cato even goes into things like how many spare grape baskets you should have in the wine press. What struck me the most was Varro's offhand remark that you don't want slow-moving watercourses on the farm because they breed what he calls animalculae -- "animals too small to see" -- that get in your mouth and nose and cause disease!


The Perfect Comeback of Caroline Jacobs -- Matthew Dicks

A novel about pettiness, dealing with things like resentful infighting at the parent-teacher association and a grown woman who's still fuming about a mean thing someone did to her in high school. It's better than it sounds. The best part of it is the difficult relationship between the uncertain, insecure mother and her angry, acting-out teenage daughter.


Jasmine Toguchi, Super Sleuth -- Debbi Michiko Florence

Sabine got this from the library and I read it to her. It's a story about a pair of preteen girls who make a mess playing at detectives; when they get in trouble Jasmine panics and throws all the blame on her friend. The main part of the book is Jasmine trying to make things right and repair her relationship with her friend. It was all right.


Humble Pi -- Matt Parker

A good collection of odd math mistakes and problems caused by unforeseen system parameters. Some are funny, like the story of poor Steve Null, who could never get his paycheck because database software read his name as a data value. (Similar human-error problems happened to Jeff Sample and Brian Test.) Some have wider consequences, like the time the LA Times noticed that, according to the LAPD online crime map, almost five percent of all LA crimes happened right outside the front door of the Times. It turned out that whenever the map software couldn't determine the location from a crime report, it would just use its default location, which was LAPD headquarters -- which is right across the street from the Times offices. Some consequences are really serious, like the time an Air Canada flight used mismatching gauges, so the grounds crew loaded X pounds of fuel but the crew thought it was X kilograms of fuel, and the plane ran out of fuel mid-flight! I liked the chapter where the author wrote to whatever government department is in charge of street signs in England to ask them to update the standard soccer-ball design on street signs, because the image incorrectly shows the soccer ball as made up of all hexagons, whereas it's actually a pattern of alternating hexagons and pentagons. The government politely asked him to stop bothering them, but I sympathized.


*Hokusai's Mount Fuji -- Jocelyn Bouquillard

A collection of beautiful woodcuts from his various "Views of Mount Fuji" series, with useful notes and references.


Mighty Jack
Mighty Jack and the Goblin King
Mighty Jack and Zita the Spacegirl
-- Ben Hatke

Sabine lent me these. They're a very good series of YA graphic novels about a kid named Jack, who's fourteen or so, and his younger sister Maddy, who has some kind of emotional problem and doesn't talk. Their cash-strapped single mom takes them to a flea market looking for bargains; the kids meet an oddball huckster who offers to trade them a box full of magic seeds for their mom's car. Jack sensibly passes up the deal, but changes his mind when Maddy suddenly speaks up and tells him to take it. (You can imagine the scene when their mother finds out.) The kids plant the seeds in the fields near their house; they grow into a huge weird garden, where some of the plants grow things like berries that give you temporary super powers, while others grow into walking plant monsters. The monster plants eventually kidnap Maddy, and Jack and his neighbor friend have to follow the beanstalk to rescue her from the giants that are behind it all. I liked them a lot.


*The Loves of Franz Kafka -- Nahum N. Glatzer

A book about the women Kafka was involved with, of course mainly dealing with the most important three -- Felice Bauer, Milena Jesenská, and Dora Diamant -- but including five or six other women with whom he had briefer and less intense relationships. (Max Brod thought that Kafka had an affair with a woman named Grete Bloch, but he seems to have been mistaken, as people who knew her better insisted she was never involved with Kafka and the father of her son was another man.) There's not a lot I didn't know already from reading Kafka's letters, but Glatzer does a good job of showing Kafka's intense loneliness and the way he privately hoped that the women in his life could help him feel less alienated but also conscientiously avoided putting the burden of that expectation on them. I feel as though I would have liked Kafka even though he could be exasperating.


Miss Timmins' School for Girls -- Nayana Currimbhoy

A novel with murder-mystery elements set in the seventies in a girls' boarding school in rural India, very like the school the author attended. The main character is a new teacher in the school, a young woman named Charu who's running away from her family troubles. Most of the faculty are white, and they treat Charu like a poor relation, except for Moira, a teacher about her age who is clearly the bad sheep of the school but is tolerated by the strict headmistress for unknown reasons. Charu falls in with Moira's Bohemian crowd, smoking pot and reading banned books, and she starts a relationship with Moira, and everything is going pretty well until one day Moira's dead body is found at the foot of a cliff. The book splits up into several viewpoints, among them Charu, her town friends, and several schoolgirls who were out that night when they weren't supposed to be and saw several people out late for unexplained reasons. It was pretty obvious that Moira was the headmistress's illegitimate daughter, so that reveal fell flat, but I was undecided who the murderer was until fairly late in the story. It went on a little too long but it wasn't bad.


Sapiens -- Yuval Noah Harari

This starts out pretty well, looking at what human society might have been like fifteen thousand years ago, and speculating that what really separated humans from other animals was our ability to believe in things that aren't true. You could never get a million gorillas to go to war because gorillas can't form the idea that gorillas from our region are all brothers while gorillas from some other region are the enemy. Humans can, though, which is why even humans who have never met before can cooperate, based on an idea of community they both share. The book really went downhill from there, though, as the author spent the rest of his time describing his own unsupported ideas as if they had the weight of scientific consensus. (For a book with such a broad scope it's noticeable that there are hardly any footnotes.) He's mainly concerned with a form of biological determinism, in which humans evolved to be hunter-gatherers and we've all been miserable ever since we started farming; this is only a way of saying that all social ills are caused by the fact that people don't live the way the author thinks we should. The writing wasn't bad, but it's an opinion essay, not a popular-science book. The author comes across as a condescending prick, too.


*N.C. Wyeth: Precious Time -- Portland Museum of Art

A high-quality collection of prints made for an exhibit of Wyeth's paintings that Dad went to in 2000. About half of the exhibit was made up of the great book illustrations that made Wyeth famous, fantastic scenes from Treasure Island and Kidnapped; the other half was Wyeth's uncommissioned work, landscapes, seascapes, and still lifes, which he did mostly for himself, as there wasn't much market for them. I'd like to have seen that exhibit.


*Books In Libraries -- Vernon D. Tate and Ralph Walker

A pair of speeches delivered at a dinner meeting of Boston's Club of Odd Volumes in 1951, on the occasion of the completion of the new library at MIT. The speakers are the architect of the new library and its librarian, each arguing genially that his own specialty is better than the other's at designing a library. The librarian argues that architects are concerned more with making something new than something useful, that they forget that a library is not simply a storehouse but must also be a welcoming place to sit and read, and grouses that whatever the librarian wants is too expensive but whatever the architect wants somehow fits in the budget. The architect complains that librarians care about nothing but filing and would be happy with a dull cube provided they could easily find all their books, and argues that libraries would be much better managed if they didn't have so many books in them. (He approvingly mentions a library in Chicago that built an extra section for future expansion and never used it.) I was all for the librarian, myself.


*Eighteen Songs of a Nomad Flute -- Metropolitan Museum of Art

An illustrated account of the life of the great second-century calligrapher and poet Cai Weiji. When she was about twenty she was taken captive by steppe nomads during one of their raids, and she spent ten years or so as a concubine there until her family, with help from the emperor, managed to ransom her back. It became a popular story, and in the eighth century the poet Liu Shang wrote a long poem about her capture and delivery; later on, in the twelfth century, the emperor Gaozong commissioned a scroll with eighteen paintings, one for each verse, probably because he felt sympathy for Cai, having been held captive by steppe nomads himself as a young man. There's a fourteenth-century copy of the scroll at the Met, and this book is a reproduction of it. The name of the artist apparently hasn't survived, which is too bad, because the art is lovely and evocative.


*The Graphic Work -- M.C. Escher

A great collection of Escher's woodcuts, with explanatory text that included interesting information about how Escher worked; unlike most woodcut artists, for example, Escher carved on the side grain rather than the end grain. He also designed his own chisels. I liked it a lot.


The Circuit -- Francisco Jiménez

An affecting cycle of short stories following the life of a boy called Panchito, growing up in California in the forties and fifties as part of a family of undocumented migrant workers. They follow the growing seasons from one labor camp to the next, always hoping to find safe shelter and always having to move on before they're ready to. Panchito not only has to work the fields with his parents, he has to go to one school after another, never staying long enough to learn anything, frustrated because his English is always far behind his classmates'. In one story the family stays in a house for a few months, and Panchito gets a teacher who helps him with his reading and introduces him to playing music; Panchito happily comes home with a permission slip to join the school band, only to find his parents packing up because they're moving on that night. That was wrenching.


*Los Caprichos -- Francisco Goya

A book of etchings Goya made in the 1790s; he called them caprichos -- "caprices" -- because they were meant as satires on Spanish society and the failures in every area of life caused by the stupid incompetence of the ruling class. The book got him in trouble with the Inquisition, which thought it was anti-clerical (it was) and he had to withdraw it in a hurry. The etchings show donkey students learning from donkey teachers, jackasses braying in applause as a monkey plays the guitar, a succession of bawds, procurers, and pimps selling the helpless youth of the nation to old perverts. There's one that shows a courting couple while two religious figures, who appear to have arranged the match, look on; the caption is Tal para cual ("two of a kind!") which must have angered the Inquisitors. They would also have resented the Enlightenment picture that shows a man slumped over a writing-desk (dozed off, or murdered?) while owls, wolves, and bats crowd hungrily around; the caption is El sueño de la razón produce monstruos ("the sleep of Reason produces monsters".) They were all creepy and disturbing, which is just what he was aiming for, of course.


The Secret Life of Groceries -- Benjamin Lorr

This centers on grocery stores but it's really a book about the food chain. One thing he mentions is that food quality is like the seventh thing manufacturers consider; their first concern is gross margin, and then (far, far behind that) come things like shelf life, packaging, and assured steady availability of ingredients. One reason mass-market foods are all owned by the same few corporations is that supermarkets get a big chunk of their profit from direct fees to suppliers -- leasing shelf space, basically, and charging extra fees to make sure that, say, Pepsi products are on the shelves closest to the main entrance while Coke products are all the way at the back of the store. Poverty of wealth, poverty of time, and poverty of choice all multiply each other to block access to healthy food, and Lorr argues that the marginal improvement of the more expensive organic choices available at higher-end stores doesn't ease the food chain enough to make any real difference, and the higher prices there really just act as a kind of guilt tax: people who can afford to shop at Whole Foods can shift the emotional burden of hurting the planet to poor people. Speaking of poor people, they're treated worse and worse at every stage of the food chain: grocery clerks often have to work on just-in-time schedules, where their hours change every week and they don't find out when they'll be working until the beginning of the week, which means they both have variable income and can't get a second job. The truckers who move everything are mostly in debt to the trucking companies they work for; the industry has close to 100% turnover from burnout and bankruptcy. The majority of supermarket shrimp ultimately comes from Thai fishing operations whose crews are mostly Burmese slaves stuck on huge fishing trawlers that stay at sea for years. Lorr doesn't really have any solutions to offer, beyond buying your food straight from local farms if you can (most people can't) so it's a pretty depressing read. Excellent research though.


The Joy of X -- Steven Srogatz

A broad overview of the development of mathematics, with good explanations and some fun details. It's largely aimed at people who hate math so its tone is somewhat apologetic, which got on my nerves sometimes, but the prose is very good and it has the advantage of having been written by someone who both loves and understands his subject. There are some good daily-life examples of how our habitual pattern-recognition can cause us to unthinkingly take the wrong approach. For instance: the cold faucet can fill the tub in a half-hour, and the hot faucet can fill it in an hour, so how long will it take to fill the tub when they’re running together? Nearly everyone's first response is to split the difference and say 45 minutes, even though that would make it take longer to fill the tub with both faucets running than with the cold tap alone. You can also influence someone's answer by the way you phrase the question: a bat and a ball together cost $1.10; the bat costs a dollar more than the ball; how much does the ball cost? The correct answer is five cents (the ball is $0.05 and the bat is $1.05) but nearly everyone subconsciously interprets "the bat costs a dollar more than the ball" as "the bat costs a dollar" and automatically subtracts the dollar, and so gives the incorrect answer of ten cents. I enjoyed it.


The Capital -- Robert Menasse

A bureaucratic satire set in Brussels, centering around a plan to mark the 50th anniversary of the European Commission with a special memorial. The EU ministers start out fighting to be in charge of the plan, but soon everyone realizes it's going to be a disaster, so they all switch to fighting to get away from it. The game of hot-potato unfolds in the background of a few main plots: a Maigret-like inspector investigating a murder case, an assassin trying to escape his handlers, a pig rampaging around the streets of Brussels that no one seems able to catch. At one time or another all the characters pass through a war cemetery, a quiet reminder from the author of why the EU exists in the first place. It's a fairly long book but it went by fast. I liked it.


Working in the Shadows -- Gabriel Thompson

A participatory-journalism book by a guy who spent a couple years working several months at a time at shit jobs that are mostly done by immigrants: cutting lettuce in the Arizona sun, chopping up chickens on the midnight shift at a factory in Alabama, delivering for a restaurant by bicycle in Manhattan. The prose was good. Thompson is a white guy who speaks fluent Spanish; the Mexican workers in the fields assumed he was a spy working for Dole company management, while the factory workers assumed he was an Immigration agent, so it took a while for people to warm up to him, but since no spy or agent would keep at the back-breaking work for months on end, eventually his co-workers decided he was just crazy and loosened up. Unsurprisingly, even apart from doing terribly hard labor for low pay, the workers were badly treated, generally shorted on wages and having to work at jobs that were even more dangerous than they needed to be because the employers ignored all health and safety regulations and threatened anyone who complained. (The poultry factory found out that Thompson was a writer and fired him the same day.) It was an engrossing book.


The Universal Christ -- Richard Rohr

A late-in-life culmination of Rohr's ideas, centered on Paul's statement in Colossians that "There is only Christ. He is everything and he is in everything." Rohr's argument is that we need to keep in mind both Jesus-as-man, who lived for a short time two thousand years ago, and Jesus-as-Christ, who has existed for all time and permeates the universe. He thinks that the Western church, as it became part and parcel of a feudal society, got wrapped up in the idea of Jesus-as-man as a god-king, and for partly political reasons continued to emphasize that idea at the expense of the greater picture of Jesus-as-Christ as Pantocrator, not only ruler of all but partaker of all. He sees Jesus-as-man as the understandable incarnation of the unknowable God; Jesus-as-man can be loved and trusted, while Jesus-as-Christ can only be worshipped. A necessary consequence of this is that exclusionary behavior has to be antithetical to a universal, all-partaking Christ, and people who preach that gays, or Jews, or anyone else, are closed off from salvation, are not preaching true Christianity. He's not just talking off the top of his head, either; he strongly supports everything he says from scripture. The Pope (a fellow Franciscan) supports him, so the conservative American bishops haven't been able to make him keep quiet.


The Shell Collector -- Anthony Doerr

A collection of short stories generally about oddball outsiders, people separated from community in one way or another -- a boy with chronic illness, a girl with outsize athletic talent, an academic too interested in his field to pay attention to anything else. The title story is about a blind man who makes a quiet living finding rare shellfish by feel on the beach; he's actually alienated not so much by his blindness as by his fear of responsibility. The one I liked best was "For a Long Time This Was Griselda's Story", all about small-town gossip and the sister who stayed and the sister who ran away. Overall they haven't stayed with me the way his novels have.


The Music Shop -- Rachel Joyce

A book that didn't go the way I would have liked. When it starts, the main character is Frank, who runs a record shop in an industrial city in England, I forget which one. It's the late eighties and Frank is something of a music guru, somehow knowing just what music his customers need, finding his customers records to stop their babies crying at night, to make them feel better about themselves after being cheated on, to get them to relax and have sex on a weeknight. The first few chapters show us the low-rent shop and its low-paid but earnest employees, and the small-business owners of the run-down street all supporting each other, and Frank appreciating music and doling out wise advice, and if the whole book had been like that I would have thought it was great, but after the setup it turns into an ill-starred romance, with Frank developing an unrequited crush on a new customer, a German woman of mystery named Ilse who hires Frank to explain music to her. Eventually the street succumbs to anti-immigrant violence and most of the businesses sell out to a developer, and everything goes to hell and Ilse goes back to Germany. After that Ilse becomes the main character, and we move some decades ahead to where Ilse finally realizes that she was in love with Frank the whole time, and she goes back to England to find that the record store burned down and Frank vanished from the street; tracking down the store employees she finds out that Frank apparently shut down mentally after the store burned and now works at a factory, never speaking to anyone and never listening to music at all, and Ilse decides to try to shock Frank back into being himself, with a complex plan that I don't think would really have worked. Great opening, unsatisfying development, unconvincing ending.


Johnny Cash: the Last Interview -- Peter Guralnick, ed.

The first of these was a free-wheeling interview by Pete Seeger, with Cash obviously stoned, while June Carter covered for him by telling funny stories (like the time she swung a microphone around at a USO show in Korea and knocked out a couple of her own teeth!) Then there are a few from the seventies and eighties, with an apparently washed-up Cash talking about drug addiction and Jesus. Then there's a couple more from his late-in-life renaissance in the nineties, when he became an alt-music elder statesman, recording songs with Nirvana, Alice in Chains, and Trent Reznor; I remember Tania telling me in the nineties that all the punks were into Johnny Cash. One of the interviewers tells a funny story of watching Cash play for a solid middle-America crowd at a county fair in Kansas, getting happy cheers for "Folsom Prison Blues" and "I Walk the Line", and then playing Soundgarden's "Rusty Cage" to dead silence before going back to "Ring of Fire". The interviewer said that Cash knew he'd get that reaction but did it anyway, because that was the sort of person he was. In his last interview, on MTV just before he died, he remarked that his career had been filled with well-meaning people telling him not to sing about death and drugs and Hell, and he'd always believed that he was right and they were wrong. Most of the interviews are on Youtube but I actually prefer reading them, since Cash spoke slowly and seemed kind of spacey even when he wasn't on drugs.


Queenie -- Candice Carty-Williams

A novel about a black woman called Queenie in her mid-twenties, living in London and suffering through an emotional breakdown after a painful breakup with her long-term boyfriend. The breakdown takes the form of self-loathing and self-destructive behavior: she has reckless hate-sex with off-putting and sometimes violent men she meets in clubs; at the newspaper where she works, she seesaws between coasting on as little effort as possible and working overtime on serious race-relations journalism that her arts-and-entertainment editor has no interest in. She's supported by a group of female friends, with whom we see her interact both in person and through a long-running group text. I actually thought Queenie was going to get herself together through helping one of her friends, who's clearly being gaslighted and manipulated by her abusive boyfriend, whom none of the group has met; but that goes off the rails when everyone (including Queenie!) finds out that one of the creeps Queenie has been having violent, abusive car sex with is her friend's boyfriend. Everyone blames Queenie, of course, especially her friend, and the story actually turns out to be how Queenie finally gets professional help and repairs her relationships. I'm really too old for the target demographic, I think, but I liked the writing. I found Queenie really frustrating, but that was intentional.


*Cousin Henry -- Anthony Trollope

A short novel, one of his last, about a Welsh country squire who's vacillating about making his will. The squire has only two relations: his niece Isobel, who lives on the estate, serves him dutifully, and is well-liked by all the tenants; and his nephew Henry, a London clerk who has rarely been to the estate and who has always gotten on badly with his uncle. Obviously Isobel has the moral claim, but the squire -- an old fool, really -- has a quasi-religious belief in male primogeniture and pompously insists that only a man can inherit. The failing squire summons Henry to the estate and orders Henry and Isobel to marry, even though they're first cousins, but they can't stand each other and even Isobel's dutifulness won't stretch quite that far. The squire resentfully bawls out Isobel, publicly announces that he has made his will in favor of Henry, and then dies in his sleep, but not before telling Henry that he's changed his mind again and made yet another will. Henry is just as glad to be shot of it all, but then the will is read and it leaves everything to Henry; he realizes that his uncle didn't have time to give the last will to his lawyer, and realizes further that the last will is probably inside the book of sermons on his uncle's bedside table. He's neither honest enough to tell people to look in that book nor dishonest enough to destroy the will, so he does nothing, and the rest of the book shows the weight of his knowledge growing ever heavier on his conscience. It was a good setup -- on the one hand, I can't approve of Henry accepting an inheritance he knows wasn't meant for him, but on the other hand I sympathize with his feelings, since everyone on the estate treated him like dirt for no reason even before the question of the will arose and he certainly doesn't owe them any help. Also I detested Isobel, who struck me as a stuck-up mean-spirited self-righteous prig. The last will turns up in the end and Henry goes off back to his clerkship in London -- better off, I can't help but think -- and Isobel inherits the estate and marries her equally self-righteous sweetheart and the two of them can look forward to a life of competing with each other in virtuous self-denial, which is just what they deserve.


The Saga of the Volsungs -- Jackson Crawford, translator

A good translation of the Volsunga Saga, a 13th-century Norse poem telling the story of three generations of the fey Volsung clan: Volsung, whose son-in-law Siggeir killed him and most of his family; Sigmundr, who pulled Odin's sword from the Branstokk Oak and revenged the clan on Siggeir by burning him and his whole family alive; and Sigurdr, who uses the sword to kill the dragon Fafnir and take his accursed ring, dooming himself and the rest of the clan. It's all a big downer but really exciting and well-told. The author of the saga mainly draws on the Elder Edda, which is a few hundred years older, but the story of the Volsungs goes back further -- it's mentioned in Beowulf a couple hundred years before that. It's a gripping story.


Tales of Moonlight and Rain -- Ueda Akinari (translated by Anthony R. Chambers)

An eighteenth-century collection of ghost stories. The title in Japanese is Ugetsu Monogatari; ugetsu literally means "rain-moon", and it's a reference to symbolism from the Noh drama. The title would have let the audience know that the stories are about the supernatural. There's a great story where a wealthy man is visited by the spirit of his own hoarded gold, which tells him that the worth of a man's character is not what he has but what he does with it (a Buddhist idea, contradicting the Confucian teaching that wealth is a reward for good behavior in a past life.) There are others where ghosts of sages and past emperors appear to criticize artists and government ministers for being too swayed by Chinese influence. I liked all of them, but my favorite was "The Chrysanthemum Pledge", which tells the story of a samurai who, having promised to meet a benefactor on a certain day, returns home to find that his daimyo has been killed and replaced by his killer; refusing to serve the new daimyo, he is imprisoned. Rather than fail to keep his promise, he kills himself so that his ghost can meet his benefactor at the appointed time. I enjoyed it.


A Commentary on the Complete Greek Tragedies: Aeschylus -- James C. Hogan

A tremendously thorough examination of Aischylos, a line-by-line exegesis of all seven surviving plays. It's full of etymological explanations, alternate line readings, and discussions of word choice from the point of view of Greek syntax as well as dramatic necessity. I loved it, but you'd have to be really interested in Greek drama to want to read it.


Women Without Men -- Shahrnush Parsipur

An Iranian novel consisting of a half-dozen stories that all come together at the end; the stories are all about women living in modern Iran and the various ways their society only lets them live as adjuncts and servants of men, never as agents directing their own lives. The author was imprisoned for publishing it and she later had to flee the country. The fundamentalist obsession with sex and purity that pervades the men who rule the country affects them as well: one is so terrified when a man asks her out to a movie that she runs away from home; another, long used to abuse from her husband, is so shocked when he speaks to her mildly for the first time that she accidentally kills him; a prostitute in a whorehouse becomes so desensitized that she starts hallucinating that the customers are headless corpses. All of them flee their lives and end up, through one path or another, at a secluded house outside Tehran where they help each other create lives apart from the regime of prurience and rape they grew up in. One of them actually plants herself in the garden in the hopes that she'll turn into a tree (she may succeed, which is the kind of book this is.) I can't think of any really memorable lines, but the story was strong. I liked it.


Body and Soul -- Alondra Nelson

A history of the Black Panthers' medical outreach program and health activism. The Panthers founded People's Free Medical Clinics, where both paid professionals and volunteers provided basic preventive care. Black people were and are poorly served by the medical establishment, less likely than white people to have their complaints taken seriously and more likely to be denied treatment; the Free Clinics tried to counteract that, and also tested for things that poor people are overexposed to, such as lead poisoning and hypertension. A big chunk of the book deals with the Panthers' awareness campaign to expose racial bias in the American medical system, particularly around sickle-cell anemia, a debilitating genetic blood disorder that medical researchers largely ignored because nearly everyone who has it is of African descent. One thing that stood out for me was that poor black people were more likely to seek treatment in the first place because the Free Clinics gave them a place to go apart from the hostile, intimidating white hospitals. Nelson was very thorough, drawing both on contemporary records and interviews with surviving Panthers. A very good book.


*Shakespeare Without Words -- Alfred Harbage

An essay collection that Harbage called a "plea for sanity", generally a series of grouchy complaints about modern ("modern" here meaning the late sixties) productions of and classes about Shakespeare. I appreciate grouchy complaints when they agree with me, so I liked them. He thought that generally the directors of the time were putting on theater-of-the-absurd shows that followed the plays' actions but ignored Shakespeare's words. There's a nicely sarcastic essay on people who keep arguing that Marlowe wrote Shakespeare even though that theory makes no sense, and another very good one on what Shakespeare's opinion of the learned professions seems to have been, based on his portrayals of teachers and doctors and lawyers. Good reading.

My Art and Skill of Karate -- Motobu Choki (translated by Andreas Quast)

I'd hoped this would be more interesting than it was. It's a fairly pedestrian account of growing up in Okinawa in the later 19th century; it's really more of a list of people he learned karate from, rather than a description of what he learned from them. (Kimo-sensei, who knew people who knew Motobu, told me that he was a rough character and would do things like get drunk and go out on the town late at night, yelling that he challenged anyone in the neighborhood to fight, until people started throwing roof tiles at him from the rooftops and he had to run off. That wasn't mentioned in this book!)


How to Read the Air -- Dinaw Mengestu

A depressing novel about a man named Jonas, who grew up with a violent father. Now an adult, Jonas is realizing that his life and relationship are in a shambles because he internalized a lesson from his childhood that he always had to pretend that everything was fine; his first reaction to every problem with work or with his girlfriend is to make up lies and hope for the best. Obviously the best doesn't happen, and in the wake of his firing and breakup he decides to go on a road trip, following the path he knows his now-dead parents took on a trip thirty years before, when his mother was pregnant with him and his parents had only recently reunited after years of separation when the father went to work in America while the mother remained in Ethiopia. Jonas doesn't actually know what happened on his parents' road trip; he reconstructs it in his mind, reverse-engineering it from what he knows of his parents. So the book goes in parallel, showing us Jonas's real road trip with him reflecting on the life choices that have brought him to where he is, alongside his imagined version of what his parents' road trip might have been like. It was both ambitious and well-executed but I wasn't as engaged with it as I might have been because I didn't really like Jonas and I also didn't like his imagined versions of his parents, girlfriend, and colleagues.


*Dostoevsky -- Andre Gide

I'd never read anything by Gide and all I knew about him was that he won the Nobel Prize in the forties, so I expected this to be worth reading, but it wasn't. Gide praises Dostoevsky as a master psychologist, but his own psychological analyses are shallow and facile. He writes the whole thing with a sense of offended rightness that would be at home on any internet forum. I have since found out that Gide was a child rapist and proud of himself for it, and he wrote essays basically saying that raping children proved that he was superior to the cowering masses because he could rise above their timid morality, and like that. So the book's a pile of shit in two ways.


Popular Crimes -- Bill James

I think James was going for "interesting curmudgeon" but he comes across as more "insufferable asshole". He's always been a know-it-all, as I know from his baseball writing, but it turns out he's also a supercilious literary critic. The book seems to have been written across about twenty years, and consists of what are essentially book reviews of true-crime books from the last couple hundred years. His rating on whether a book is good or bad largely depends on how far the book agrees with his own theories of the crime, in which he seems to have unlimited confidence. The subtitle is "reflections on popular violence" but it's really more "reflections on the shortcomings of the American court system". The best part of the book, I thought, was his criticism of the prison system, and his proposal of replacing it with a system of more numerous smaller prisons that are graded for severity of offense and degree of recidivism, ranging from maximum security down through halfway houses to what would essentially be supervised release; the proposal is good in every way except that it would never work because you'd need to build many more prisons and no one wants a prison, however low-security, in their neighborhood. Also, for someone who criticizes other writers' research, I can't help but notice that this book has no footnotes, no end notes, and no bibliography. James has a good prose style and many of the stories are entertaining, and if you're interested both in crime cases and in being ordered what to think about them, this is the book for you.


The Voyage of the Argo -- Apollonius of Rhodes

The fullest source for the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece. Apollonius lived in the third century BC, and Euripides wrote about Jason two hundred years earlier -- Homer even mentions Jason in passing hundreds of years before that -- but this is an entire epic. The editor of my edition argues that the poem is a forerunner of the romance novel, since it concentrates on the love story between Jason and Medea more than on any of the cool fights or stratagems that would have been the main focus of most Greek poems. Jason, wrongfully disinherited from the throne of Iolkos, assembles a crew of heroes (including Herakles, Orpheus, Peleus the father of Achilles, Philoktetes the archer, and many others) and sets out in the god-blessed ship Argo to the land of Kolkhis to bring back the Golden Fleece. The fact that they're heroes doesn't stop them from robbing and pillaging the whole way. In fact the whole story is distinctly anti-heroic -- Jason meets all the impossible tasks that King Aeëtes sets for him by just getting Aeëtes's daughter, the sorceress Medea, to do them for him; and unlike in every other Greek epic, the heroes are constantly beset by self-doubt and even despair. When they accidentally run the Argo ashore on the African coast, they just give up and lie down to die, never even thinking about trying to portage the ship until Medea pushes them into it. It was a strange story but I liked it.


The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry -- Gabrielle Zevin

A feel-good book that didn't make me feel all that good. Fikry owns a small book store on an island, I can't remember where but you have to get there by ferry. He's a cranky jerk, and you want to cut him some slack because he's a widower and he has solid opinions on books and reading, but it's just not enough, I couldn't like him. The feel-good tropes are all there -- Fikry acts like a dick to the young book-company rep, and she inexplicably falls for him; someone abandons a baby in the store and Fikry adopts her and brings her up; Fikry gets a brain tumor, slowly loses his cognitive abilities, and dies -- but they're well handled and none of it feels forced. I liked the sales rep, and I liked the low-key local police chief and his crime-story reading group, but Fikry himself was so aggravating I never warmed up to the book.


Sleeping on Jupiter -- Anuradha Roy

A novel about sexism and hypocrisy in contemporary India, and the overwhelming shame victims of sexual violence feel that often keeps them silent. A seven-year-old girl named Nomita sees her father murdered in sectarian violence and soon becomes separated from her mother and brother; she ends up in an orphanage run by a spiritualist group, where she's regularly sexually abused by the group's guru until she gets adopted abroad. In her twenties she returns to India as part of a filmmaker's crew, intending to expose the guru and the orphanage, but the orphanage is abandoned and the guru has gone who knows where and the stone-faced locals deny knowing anything about it. Interleaved with Nomita's story are the stories of three old women she meets on a train, who have gone on vacation to get a break from their nagging, judgemental families (but who are all ready to nastily judge every stranger they see) and their tour guide, a gay man struggling with India's open hostility to gay men. Violence and threats of violence are everywhere in the novel: holy men who preach peace and also scream at women for being insufficiently covered up; husbands who are always ready to end any argument they're losing by hitting their wives; a general expectation that women should fast and undergo asceticism for the spiritual benefit of the men in their families. There's not a lot of hope in the novel: Nomita's only path to a life free of gender-based violence is to leave for Europe. It's a well-written book but very depressing.


The Logician and the Engineer -- Paul J. Nahin

A short but very detailed explanation of Boolean logic gates and how computers use them to perform integer arithmetic. The book starts out with biographies of George Boole (the logician, who created the algebra of binary variables) and Claude Shannon (the engineer, who showed how to implement Boole's algebra physically.) Boole's life was amazing -- he was the son of a shoemaker and never went beyond primary school, but he taught himself mathematics so successfully that he got a job as a school teacher at age sixteen. In order to progress he had to teach himself Latin and French, since there were no really good books on the calculus of variations in English! He started publishing papers in important journals at age 23 and was eventually made a fellow of the Royal Society and a professor at Queen's College, even though he had no degree. (Shannon's life was pretty quiet by comparison; he was an electrical engineer who got his Ph.D from MIT at 24 and almost right away went to work at Bell Labs, where he spent his life inventing cool and useful things.) After that the book discusses Shannon's implementations of Boolean algebra and how they work today, including sections on such famous information-theory problems as how to create persistent storage or how to use Bayesian probability to compensate for signal degradation due to poor equipment. I found that second one the most interesting part of the book: Shannon proved that it was possible to use unreliable components to get reliable results! The author gives a full explanation of the math behind Shannon's solution, and does it so well that I remember the explanation and could explain it to someone else even a year after I read the book. I liked it a lot. The only problem was that the author decided to close the book with a weak and forgettable short story, which served no purpose.


Transcendent Kingdom -- Yaa Gyasi

Gyasi's second novel. Her first was so good that it was inevitable that I would have unfair standards for this one, but there it is, I liked the first one better. That's not to say this one wasn't good. It tells the story of Gifty, a driven Ph.D candidate in neuroscience at Stanford. As she nears her degree, she gets a call from her family's pastor, who tells her that her mother has fallen into a suicidal depression (not for the first time) and needs help. Gifty gets the pastor to send her mother to California, where she lies in bed in Gifty's apartment and doesn't speak. As Gifty continues with her studies we learn her family's story and find out why she's so driven and also so withdrawn and secretive: Gifty had an older brother, Nana, who was an outstanding athlete. After their father, unhappy in America, returned to Ghana for a visit and never came back, Nana quit soccer and took up basketball, becoming one of the best high school players in America. When he injured his foot in a game, his coaches loaded him up on opioids, which eventually led to addiction and his death from a heroin overdose when Gifty was eleven. Their church sent Gifty to Ghana to live with her aunt, because her mother was incapacitated (and also to keep Gifty from realizing that her mother attempted suicide.) Gifty is now writing a thesis on her research into the neurochemical basis of addiction while also working to keep anyone at school from finding out about her brother; but, unable to take care of her mother and work on her dissertation alone, she has to open up to a friend and ask for help for the first time. The experience of needing and giving help reconciles her with her family's history and she starts going to church again. It was really well written.


The Trojan Women -- Euripides

A graphic-novel adaptation, drawn by Rosanna Bruno with text by the poet Anne Carson. It was a good use of the medium; on stage, for example, you can't have the god Poseidon played by a six-hundred-foot tidal wave, but in a comic book that's no problem. It's a very free rendition; in the opening scene, when Athena asks Poseidon for help punishing the Achaeans for their acts of impiety after the fall of Troy, Poseidon agrees almost indifferently, saying he may as well because immortality is boring and because "it's funny to hear them squeak when they die". No equivalent of that line exists in the original, but it's an excellent summing-up of how Euripides views the gods' attitudes. I thought it was a really good interpretation.


Fred Rogers: the Last Interview -- David Bianculli, ed.

A collection of six interviews, including the whole text of his testimony before Congress that resulted in the saving of PBS. In one of them Rogers tells a very moving story about a nursery school where one of the parents, a sculptor, came to sculpt clay for the children -- not to show them how to do it, but to show them someone working with clay and loving it. "After that the children used clay more imaginatively than ever before." That, Rogers said, was the genesis of one of his ideas about performing: "The best gift you can give anybody is the gift of your honest self." Rogers wrote every part of every show; he kept his weight the same for the entire run of the show because children feel safer with continuity; he was always "Mr. Rogers" rather than "Fred" because he wanted children to feel secure knowing that he was a responsible adult. I hadn't known that he was close friends with the guy who played Captain Kangaroo and relied on him more than anyone for good criticism of the show. He was a really interesting man. Great book.


Holy Women of Byzantium -- Alice-Mary Talbot, ed.

A collection of saints' lives from the Byzantine Empire, giving the vitae of ten female saints from as far back as the fifth century and as late as the thirteenth. Of course there's a certain pattern to them all: mortification of the flesh, the virtue of unquestioning obedience, repentance, miracles. As usual there's a lot of glorification of behavior that doesn't seem very saintly: I don't find it admirable, for instance, that St. Matrona of Perge left her small daughter with a relative for three years while she disguised herself as a man and lived an ascetic life in a monastery. I didn't like her any better when, after being found out and expelled from the monastery, she rejoiced to find that her daughter had died in the mean time, because she would now have that much more time to spend in prayer. A lot of the lives deal with ikonoclasm, either pro or anti depending on the writer's attitudes. They were dry and often dull but I'm glad to have read them.


Tales of the Spring Rain -- Ueda Akinari

Ueda's other book, a collection of ten stories from several genres. There are ghost stories, retellings of eventful reigns of past emperors, crime stories, an excellent revenge story. The most involved was a romance story involving lovers who are treacherously murdered and then find each other again after being reincarnated. The title is Nise no En, which my copy gives as "The Destiny That Spanned two Lifetimes", though it seems to me to mean "Circle of Deceit". Good book.


My Year of Meats -- Ruth Ozeki

A novel about a woman named Jane who's working as a TV producer for a Japanese show filmed in America. Jane has the job because she's got a lot of experience and is bilingual, but she's constantly undermined by executives at the production company who won't let a woman do anything without micromanaging. The show is basically a commercial meant to get Japanese housewives to buy more meat, so Jane is supposed to film solid middle-America everyman families happily showing off their meat recipes; but she's so irritated at the sponsors and at her management that she takes advantage of her incompetent supervisor's inability to speak English to subvert the show's intent, for example by making an episode about a lesbian couple living in Northampton. I thought at first that the book was going to go heavy on a don't-eat-meat message, but it turned out to be more factory-farming-is-bad, which is more up my alley. The part that struck me most was when Jane -- who's always thought she was infertile, due to prenatal exposure to the hormone DES, often illegally given to livestock on factory farms -- finds out she's pregnant. After the initial what-now shock, she's delighted, which makes it hit all the harder when she miscarries and the doctor doesn't give a sixteenth of a shit about her -- he answers her questions with one foot out the door, sighing heavily to show how much of his time she's wasting. There's a parallel incident where the other main character, the wife of one of the Japanese TV executives, lies in a hospital listening to a nurse and a doctor openly discussing right in front of her how they can list her injuries as something other than her husband hitting her. (Jane eventually helps her leave her husband and go live with the lesbian couple in Northampton.) I wouldn't have said I liked it, but on the other hand I remember it all very clearly.


Matilda -- Roald Dahl

I read this to the kids. It's the story of a young girl genius who becomes the best student at an elementary school run by an ogreish headmistress who hates good students. She uses her cleverness to pull humiliating pranks on the headmistress and on her nasty, neglectful parents; and then kind of out of the blue she temporarily develops telekinesis, which she uses to drive the headmistress mad and force her out of the school before returning to normal and getting adopted by the nice teacher. I thought the psychic-powers episode was out of place, but Sabine liked it so what do I know.


Living to Tell the Tale -- Gabriel García Márquez

The first volume of his autobiography, covering his life up to about 1950. He meant to write further volumes but never did. There's a lot of stuff about his schooling and the encouragement he got from his teachers, and his parents' disappointment at his putting off law school to become a writer, and elements of his life that informed his novels. I was most interested in the passages describing his life as a cash-strapped newspaper reporter in his early twenties, and the writers' lunches where everyone proudly claimed to have eaten a late breakfast (because they couldn't afford to buy lunch) and instead of eating would argue about literature. Márquez was an early champion of Faulkner's novels in Spanish translation, which I hadn't known. However, eventually Márquez wanders off into too much detail about all the women he slept with and all the love affairs he had, and I lost interest and stopped reading.


The Scavenger Door -- Suzanne Palmer

Her third book about the restless finder-of-things Fergus Ferguson. Fergus, at loose ends, is staying with his cousin and kid sister in rural Scotland and getting underfoot, so he takes a job rounding up a neighbor's lost sheep. In the process of recovering them (which he does) he comes across an odd artifact up in the mountains. Pretty soon some tough customers turn up looking for it; Fergus avoids them and, studying the thing, realizes it's a broken piece of a larger object. It turns out that there's a lot of these things scattered over the planet, and there are several groups trying to round them all up, mostly bad guys of course, and Fergus ends up racing to steal them all from all the bad actors in a mad race that takes him all across Earth, Mars, the moon, and a sort of hyperspace corridor between dimensions, juggling saving the world from the consequences of reassembling the object with sorting out his emotional baggage and relationships with his sister and his old girlfriend. It was a terrific story, both funny and exciting, but I had two problems with it, one structural and one philosophical. The structural one is that it's too much of a coincidence for Fergus to just walk over the lost alien technology, and there's no reason he should have an intuitive sense of how it works, and it's silly that his friend from the shipyard on Pluto should just happen to know all about the artifact but be unwilling to share what he knows until the plot says it's time for him to spill. That's just falling back on making Fergus some kind of weirdness magnet, a plot device that I thought was silly when I saw it in the Blue Devil comic book when I was thirteen. The philosophical one was more serious: every single one of Fergus's supposed friends and allies spends all their time relentlessly tearing him down and telling him what a shit and a loser he is, to the point that I almost stopped reading. It really damaged the book for me.


Braiding Sweetgrass -- Robin Wall Kimmerer

A book about connecting with nature and stewardship of the land. I'm all in favor of both of those, but I never really connected with this book. Kimmerer grew up in white suburbia in New York, and connected with her Potawatomi heritage as an adult, and like some adult religious converts she seems to feel the need to perform her belonging in a way that comes across as affected. No one who grew up in white suburbia, for example, will ever sound natural talking about "Grandmother Tree". I got halfway through and skimmed the rest.


*The Diary of a Country Priest -- Georges Bernanos

An unpleasant French novel from the thirties by a conservative Catholic Royalist. It's cast as the diary of an unnamed young priest who arrives in a parish in rural France for his first post as a pastor. The locals, who go to church (when they do) because it's customary rather than out of any real religious feeling, generally scorn the priest for his earnestness and his unconventional behavior: he doesn't eat meat because he has a painful, undiagnosed stomach problem, and he drinks sour wine because it's all he can afford, and the parishioners take this as a sign that he's starving himself in a vainglorious show of asceticism. In his diary he records his depression and his worry that the local Count's family think that he's trying to ingratiate himself with them, and how he's not comforted by the advice of a more senior priest in the next parish who tells him that his job is to maintain the social order rather than to worry about individual sinners. He's eventually driven out of town by unfounded malicious gossip, and goes to Lille to stay with a seminary classmate who has left the priesthood and now runs a drugstore. In Lille he learns that he has stomach cancer and soon dies. I suppose the priest is meant to represent what Bernanos saw as the spiritual exhaustion of France. I didn't enjoy reading it.


Brainspotting -- David Grand

A book on a form of trauma therapy by the therapist who came up with it. It's been increasingly accepted over the last twenty years that talk therapy and medication work better when combined with some form of physical movement (I read about that in Bessel van der Kolk's book.) This is one such form: Grand says that he found, in sessions with his patients, that people tended to look in the same direction when talking about a given event, and eventually worked out a method of slowly panning the eyes back and forth until you find a position associated with a certain trauma, and keeping them fixed there while you discuss it, which has produced surprisingly robust results. Grand does puff himself a little bit, which is probably unavoidable, but the book gives a good picture of his research and method. It was interesting.


*General Grant -- Matthew Arnold

A literary criticism of Grant's memoirs. I dislike Arnold, and I might not have read this even though it's about Grant, since I was sure it was going to be snobby, smug, and patronizing (it was) except that this edition includes Mark Twain's review of it, which was worth the price of admission. Twain was irritated by Arnold's petty carping about Grant's language being "all astray" (by which he meant that Grant used American English and not British English) and that both the book and the man were "without high breeding", which tells you everything you need to know about Arnold, really. The part I enjoyed was Twain's blistering response, in which he essentially said that Arnold's essay only showed that he himself was a small, petty man, only more pithily. It must have stung, because Arnold didn't include the Grant essay in his collected works.


The Midnight Library -- Matt Haig

I hated this. The main character attempts suicide, and finds herself in an afterlife halfway-house built like a library, where all the books are other versions of how her life could have gone, and she has to look through the books and live episodes of her alternate lives, and in the end the lesson is that everything in her life was fine and the only thing that needed changing was her attitude. What bullshit.


84, Charing Cross Road -- Helene Hanff

I loved this. It's a collection of letters, covering a twenty-year period from just after the war to the end of the sixties, between the author and a man named Frank Doel, the senior employee at a London book store called Marks and Co (there's no full stop because the "Co" was actually short for "Cohen"; Marks thought it would be better not to have a Jewish name on the storefront!) Hanff started writing to the store looking for affordable editions of books that were hard to find in 1940s New York, such as the anthologies of the great Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch; over the years a beautiful friendship developed between Hanff and Doel, and by extension the rest of the staff. They found each other eccentric in different ways: Hanff couldn't believe that the store would just send her books on credit and ask her to pay when she got around to it, while Doel was amazed that Hanff blithely sent cash through the mail. Hanff sent food packages to the store on holidays, much appreciated in those post-war rationing times, and the store recommended authors and just sent her books because they thought she might like them, introducing her to John Donne and Izaak Walton, among others. Hanff couldn't afford to travel to England so she never got to meet Frank Doel, who died in 1970. It was a lovely book.

Afterparties -- Anthony Veasa So

A collection of short stories about growing up in southern California as the children of Cambodian refugees. The characters have all the usual issues of second-generation immigrants -- language gaps with their families, who insisted they speak English at home in order to assimilate and now criticize them for not understanding Khmer; pressure to leave school and work unpaid jobs at the 24-hour family businesses; racism; poverty -- compounded by the fact that none of them can ever win any argument with their parents because the parents are all survivors of Pol Pot's genocide and aren't shy about bringing it up at any opportunity. They were good.


American Hippo -- Sarah Gailey

An adventure/caper story set in an imaginary version of the Old West filled with queer genderfluid cowboys who ride hippopotamuses. In real life there was a nineteenth-century proposal in Congress to import hippopotamuses into the Mississippi River, both for a source of meat and to improve water flow because the hippos would eat the invasive water plants that slowed the current. (They thought better of it, thank God.) In this alternate history -- where the cowboys ride around on hippos and feral hippos terrorize the Mississippi delta -- our hero, Houndstooth, is hired by a Congressman to conduct a deniable covert operation to break the power of a rich businessman-politician-gangster who controls a stretch of the river and feeds anyone who crosses him to the feral hippos. Houndstooth naturally pulls together a ragtag band of outlaws, gamblers, and gunpersons to complete the job and settle some scores along the way. I enjoyed it.


Good Talk -- Mira Jacob

A graphic novel about a South Asian woman who married into a New York Jewish family and the persecution she and her son went through after the attack on the World Trade Center, because even in New York people can't be bothered to know the difference between one kind of brown person and another. The second part is an account of the even worse -- because more immediately personal -- estrangement between her and her formerly warm in-laws after the in-laws embraced Donald Trump and his xenophobic campaign. Effective but depressing.


All Systems Red
Artificial Condition
Rogue Protocol
Exit Strategy
Fugitive Telemetry

        -- Martha Wells

An incredibly good series of novellas following the story of a machine/human construct, built to be a security drone basically, who's managed to hack the module that makes it obey orders and can now act as a free agent. The trouble is that it wasn't built to be a free agent and it doesn't really know what to do with itself, plus it's dealing with the sometimes crippling anxiety and depression that result from knowing that before it was independent, the company that made it used it to kill people, which is why it privately calls itself "Murderbot". It copes by half-assing its assignments and spending most of its time watching escapist adventure TV shows. As we pick up its story, Murderbot is providing security for a group of scientists, who are the first people it's ever encountered who come from outside the corporate sphere of influence that created it. Meeting the scientists opens up new avenues of possibility that it hadn't thought of before, and after saving the scientists from the mess they've gotten themselves into, Murderbot sets off alone to figure out what it wants to be and how it's going to manage on its own. Naturally it runs into a lot of problems, some of which it solves by being clever and some of which it solves with overwhelming violence. The books are really funny and exciting, full of great fight scenes and sarcastic internal monologues. I also genuinely sympathize with Murderbot's very believable social anxiety. I bought the books less than a year ago and I've already read all of them three times.


What's On the Menu? -- Chase Griffin

I bought this on the strength of reading the first few pages at the book store. It turned out to be a lot less interesting than I'd anticipated. The unnamed narrator, a loser who squats in the basement of an abandoned factory, accidentally discovers that his roommate/fellow-squatter is an outstanding gourmet cook, but only when he's drunk on tequila. He sets up an unlicensed restaurant, staffing it with the audiences from his roommate's stand-up gigs, also all drunk. That was the point where I bought the book and took it home, but after that the book turns into an extended drug trip (we eventually find out that the municipal water system has been spiked with psychotropics) and I just don't give a shit about some drug-addled moron's random hallucinations.


Network Effect -- Martha Wells

The first Murderbot book that's a novel rather than a novella. I particularly liked the first chapter, which opens in medias res with secUnit methodically trashing a crew of pirates who have attacked the research station it's guarding, all the while grousing to itself about stupid clients who never follow the security protocols, even going to extra trouble not to kill any of the pirates so it won't have to look at the sad faces its scientist friends would make if it did. Straight after the pirate attack, though, the whole expedition gets seized by a spaceship coming up out of nowhere. secUnit manages to break the expedition loose but it and a handful of its friends get stuck on board the ship and taken through a wormhole to another star system, where several different groups at cross purposes have all come to grief due to an unexpected hostile (possibly alien) presence there. One of those parties is secUnit's friend the research vessel ART, whose crew has been taken by the hostiles, and who manipulated them into abducting the expedition in order to bring secUnit to the system, since secUnit was the only one ART could think of who could and would rescue its crew. secUnit and its friends have to fight the hostiles, negotiate with the other groups (also hostile!), get ART's crew back, and generally figure out what's going on. It's funny, exciting, and well-told. If it didn't win the Hugo it should have. I loved it.


The Night Manager -- John le Carré

A one-last-job story about a former British agent who's brought out of retirement to infiltrate an arms dealer's inner circle; various elements inside British intelligence conspire to give the scheme away, both because of personal corruption and because the British and American governments use arms dealers like this one to covertly provide munitions to international actors on the banned list. The agent's cover is blown and he gets tortured, and the small bright spot is one maverick inside British intelligence selling a pack of lies to a bunch of people in order to create a big bluff that gets the agent out alive, stealing the arms dealer's girlfriend in the process. It was a depressing, cynical story, and I didn't think it was particularly well-told or exciting.


Zone One -- Colson Whitehead

A zombie story, following a guy called Mark, part of a military occupation of New York City on behalf of a post-apocalypse provisional government, which is slowly trying to establish zombie-free zones and push the borders out. You have to accept the usual hand-waving of any zombie story: a zombie can be trapped in a locked room for over a year with nothing to feed on, but still has the strength and speed to overpower an armed soldier, and the artillery and machine guns at the perimeter destroy scores of thousands of zombies every day but after over a year the hordes are still endless. Mark and his squad mates search the city building by building, bagging dead bodies for the burial crews and destroying any stray zombies they find. As they proceed we get brief descriptions of how the provisional government tries to manage things, interspersed with flashbacks to Mark's wanderings before he made it to New York and joined the new order. For a while Mark and several others were holed up in a farmhouse in western Massachusetts; they were reasonably safe because the zombies didn't know they were in the boarded-up house and just milled around stupidly, but finally one of the others went mad from the strain and ran out to attack the zombies; knowing that the zombies would now storm the house and they'd inevitably get in eventually, Mark fled in the opposite direction rather than try to defend the house. I realized that that was foreshadowing about what was going to have to happen in New York, with the failure of the walls, the collapse of Zone One, and Mark realizing the hopeless futility of the government's stand against the zombies and fleeing again. It was a real downer of a story but the writing was good.


*The Pretenders -- Henrik Ibsen

I hadn't even known that Ibsen wrote any plays in verse, but it turns out he wrote that way for the whole first part of his career. This is a play about the thirteenth-century civil war between Haakon, king of Norway, and his father-in-law, Earl Skule. Skule resents having anyone above him, and he wants the throne, but more than that he envies Haakon for his righteous self-confidence, admitting that Haakon has done more good uniting the country than Skule himself could have done, because Skule is too consumed by doubt. Skule's resentment is fed by the scheming bishop of Oslo, who is anxious to control events in Norway even after his own death; he tells Skule that he has proof that Haakon is illegitimate, though he never produces it. On the strength of this Skule goes to war, and even when he's beaten and his own daughter sides with her husband over him, he expects Haakon's resolve to collapse when he hears the bishop's accusation; but to his astonishment Haakon is completely unmoved, only remarking that even if it's true he was still chosen as king by the leading men of Norway anyway. Skule realizes that Haakon has the qualities that make a king and he doesn't, and so he's the one who ends up collapsing. I liked it.


The Last Duel -- Eric Jager

A history book about the last law case in Europe ever decided through trial by combat. This was distinct from a duel in that it was believed that because the king had ordered it, God would make sure that the righteous party won. A French squire accused a knight of raping his wife; the local count acquitted the knight, but the count had family ties to the knight and had grudges against the squire, so the squire appealed to the King of France and the king arranged the combat.  It was life and death not only for the combatants, but also for the squire's wife, who, if the squire lost, would be presumed guilty of perjury and burned at the stake. The combat took place in front of the king and his court in December 1386; the squire won, proving his case over the knight's dead body. The knight's friends later spread a false story that the wife had confessed to lying, which became a popular part of the legend and may have contributed to the end of judicial combat. It was a well-written book, and the story really held my attention.


*The Vikings at Helgeland -- Henrik Ibsen

This hasn't stayed in my mind as vividly as the other two verse plays have. It's set in what I think of as the time of the sagas; there's a reference to Erik Bloodaxe, which would put it in the tenth century. In far northern Norway, the jarl Ørnulf arrives in search of his two daughters, who were both abducted by the rover Sigurd some years before. The daughters are now married to Sigurd and his brother, and with surprising diplomacy Sigurd offers to pay Ørnulf a dowry to avoid a war. Ørnulf sensibly agrees, and you think to yourself "That was a quick play" but it turns out that one of the daughters (the fostered one) resents being married to the younger brother, and resents that their father always liked the other sister better and now the other sister is married to the chief rather than to the right-hand man, and she stirs everyone up to fight and everybody dies. I didn't like it, really.


The Perfectionist -- Rudolph Chelminski

A biography of Bernard Loiseau, a famous French chef and restaurateur who killed himself at age 52 about twenty years ago. Loiseau had suffered from clinical depression all his adult life, and he was deep in personal and professional problems, including heavy debts, declining attendance at his restaurant, and a general sense that his nouvelle-cuisine philosophy was increasingly old-fashioned and he no longer led the food trends in France. However, a French newspaper had recently printed a rumor that Michelin might be planning to take away one of Loiseau's three stars, and voices in the French press and food industry, resentful and frustrated at Michelin's secretive, opaque ratings process, loudly blamed Michelin for Loiseau's death. The book goes into detail, so much as is known, on how Michelin stars are awarded, and the odd history of how a rubber-tire company became the unappealable arbiter of French cuisine, which was really interesting. It also tells Loiseau's life story; the author bends over backwards to excuse Loiseau's abrasive personality and fits of anger as just an artistic temperament, so those parts weren't as good, but overall I still liked it.


*Love's Comedy -- Henrik Ibsen

A verse play, written in his thirties; the setting is contemporary Norway (1862), but the play is still very "elevated" and not at all like his later naturalistic plays. It revolves around two highly idealistic young men -- Falk, a poet, and Lind, who is soon to become a missionary -- and their love affairs. Lind proposes to Anna and is accepted, while Falk proposes to Svanhild and is rejected; but Anna's friends and family convince Lind to abandon his ideals and settle into a bourgeois life in order to look after Anna. Falk is outraged and publishes an essay denouncing the whole institution of marriage as a destroyer of ideals; Svanhild is enthralled by his courage and the two of them agree to live together outside of society. When the coterie of friends and family use the same arguments of security and respectability that worked on Lind, Falk contemptuously rejects them; but a cynical older businessman convinces Svanhild that after the first excitement the couple's love will not be able to endure the everyday hassle of a penniless life, and rather than watch their love die in squalor she decides to end it grandly, sending Falk away to write passionate poetry while she marries the businessman to live an unhappy life of respectable dullness. The play's argument that society's ritual observances tend to promote joyless security at the expense of passion and achievement was considered highly immoral; Ibsen's usual theater refused to put it on and it was banned in Norway for years. He had to stage it in Denmark. I thought it was good.


The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street -- Helene Hanff

This is the story of how Helene Hanff finally got to visit England, although too late to meet her pen pal Frank Doel. She had gotten the permission of the Doel family to print Frank's letters, and her publishing company paid her airfare to London for the book launch of the British edition. She stayed in Russell Square, which happens to be where I stayed the times I've been in London. She was really taken aback by the tremendous warmth and appreciation everyone showed her, particularly the staff of Marks and Co, of course. It's mainly a diary of five weeks of new friends treating her like a duchess, and I thought it was really pleasant.


Parable of the Sower -- Octavia Butler

A civilization-collapse story, following a teenage girl called Lauren who grows up in a gated community in southern California in the 2020s (the book came out in 1993.) Her situation is almost a caricature of right-wing immigration panic: a collection of working people live in precarious safety inside a guarded compound, constantly threatened by hordes of poor people whose only goal in life is to smash into the compound, kill everyone, and steal everything, because that's what poor people do. I couldn't decide if that was deliberate or Butler was just echoing the culture she grew up in. In any case the poor people do eventually fulfill the right-wing paranoid fantasy and destroy the compound; the 18-year-old Lauren and a few others escape and head northwards looking for relief from climate change, while Lauren starts proselytizing a new religion she's envisioned called Earthseed, which teaches that humanity needs to grow to adulthood by leaving the Earth behind and traveling into space.  She writes poetry that attracts adherents and eventually becomes scripture. Earthseed is incoherent and vague, and Lauren's poetry is terrible, and again I can't decide if that was a deliberate choice by the author. I didn't like Lauren at all and I didn't get the feeling the author meant me to. One thing that stayed with me is that one day Lauren writes in her diary "Today we converted our first believer," and I thought, that's the first step on a path that leads to "Today we burned our first heretic." The book ends with the Earthseed believers starting a new community in northern California. There's a sequel, which I expect will tell us what happened with Earthseed, and I own it but I haven't felt the urge to read it.


The Devil Finds Work -- James Baldwin

A long essay on cinema and how it reflects American attitudes, starting with remembering movies he watched as a child in New York and moving on to critical looks at contemporary (1970s) films. In his opinion the stereotype of black people in American movies has never changed since Birth of a Nation, which shows blacks as happy and productive members of society as long as they remain in the roles assigned to them by white people; when they step outside those roles -- which means, if they try to gain any power or self-respect -- they turn into miserable savages. I hadn't known that Baldwin once spent some time in Hollywood writing a screen adaptation of The Autobiography of Malcolm X; he quit because the studio wanted to change the story to make Malcolm an integrationist and to introduce made-up white characters who influenced Malcolm's thinking. He spends some time dissecting movies with black leads that were written by white men; pointing out, for instance, that no black man would ever get out alone at a train station in Virginia late at night, as Virgil Tibbs does in The Heat of the Night. I was most struck by his review of The Exorcist, in which he lambasts white America for needing to create an externalized special-effects devil: "I have seen the devil in you and me: in the eyes of the cop and the sheriff and the deputy and the landlord...in presidents, wardens, and in the eyes of my father, and in the mirror. The devil does not abuse little girls: we do."


Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood -- Rebecca Wells

A story about a woman who gets into a we're-not-speaking-anymore fight with her mother, and then goes off to sulk alone in a cabin in Washington state, reading through her mother's old scrapbook while she tries to decide if she wants to go through with her upcoming wedding. The scrapbook is all about her mother's childhood adventures in Louisiana with her group of friends (the Ya-Yas.) The Ya-Yas are so special and eccentric and gosh-we're-plucky that I wanted them all to get hit by a bus, and I didn't really give a shit whether the daughter made up with her mom or married her fiancé, so I didn't finish it.


Cloud Cuckoo Land -- Anthony Doerr

This would have been my favorite book of the year if it hadn't been for the Murderbot books. It's set in several different periods, the connecting element being a book called Cloud Cuckoo Land, written in the first century by Antonius Diogenes. (Antonius Diogenes was a real person, but the book is made up; the title is a reference to the Birds of Aristophanes.) In fifteenth-century Constantinople, a girl called Anna inside the walls and a besieger called Omeir outside them both play a part in recovering and selling old manuscripts from a ruined library, Cloud Cuckoo Land among them. In the twentieth century, a boy named Zeno finds a home in his town library, later on learns to appreciate Greek literature from a man he falls in love with while fighting in Korea, and later still spends his retirement translating Cloud Cuckoo Land, eventually enlisting some of the local kids to put on a performance of it at the library -- while in the mean time, an alienated young man named Seymour gets radicalized online and decides to blow up a development corporation downtown, getting access through the adjoining library while Zeno and the kids are upstairs rehearsing the play. Some time in the future, a teenager named Konstance is the only passenger on an interstellar generational spaceship, all the rest of the crew having died of a virus outbreak after her father locked her inside the computer core to protect her. Konstance spends her time exploring the ship's virtual library, where she finds various glitches all pointing to Zeno's translation of Cloud Cuckoo Land. Doerr bounces back and forth from one story to another, ending each chapter on a cliffhanger so you can't stop reading. I was on edge the whole way -- what happened to Anna and Omeir in the siege, are Zeno and the kids going to get through Seymour's bombing, what's Konstance going to do when her food runs out, who put the glitches in the ship's library and why? Lucy and I read it at the same time and we were constantly excitedly going back and forth about what was happening. It was a terrific time. Great book.


The Kingdoms -- Natasha Pulley

A time-travel story, one of my least favorite tropes; the time-travel mechanism isn't even internally consistent, since it involves a certain rock formation that can move people back and forth in time, and the actions they take in the past change the present, but no one remembers because it's always been that way now, except that for no reason some people do remember. The main part of the book is an across-time love story that's supposed to make you overlook the rickety story structure, but the book asks you to accept that when the hero realizes that he and the antagonist were lovers in a previous version of history, that's enough to make him stop caring that the antagonist deliberately murdered an innocent fourteen-year-old boy right in front of him. I didn't like it.


The Shack -- William P. Young

A novel about a guy called Mack living in the Pacific Northwest and haunted by his recent past: on a camping trip he ran into a river to save his son from drowning, and in the time he was gone his small daughter was abducted and presumably murdered; her bloody dress was later found in an abandoned shack in the woods. Unable to cope, Mack falls into a silent depression, until one day he finds a note from "Papa" in his mailbox, telling him to go to the shack. Not knowing what to think, he drives to the shack, where he finds God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit waiting for him, in the forms of a black matron, a Semitic carpenter, and an Asian woman of indeterminate age. The rest of the novel is the four of them talking about the problem of evil. The writing is about seventh-grade-level, but I don't hold that against it because the author wrote it just for his friends and hadn't originally intended to publish it. I found the theology trite, but others might not agree. My main problem was that the three Persons of the Trinity didn't strike me as very compassionate. They blame Mack for not working hard enough to understand them and just generally act all snotty and judgemental, and if I met them I wouldn't be comforted in any way. I didn't really like it.


*Orations -- Lysias

Lysias was a wealthy man living in Athens in Perikles's day; one of Plato's dialogues has Sokrates and his friends discussing a speech of his they've just heard. He was proscribed by the Thirty Tyrants but bribed his way out of the city. He returned after the overthrow of the Thirty, but was now poor, so from then on he made a living by writing speeches for Athenians pleading cases in the law-courts. The speeches are in the first person, and since Lysias was not actually a litigant he spoke in the voice of the plaintiff or the defendant. The exception is Against Eratosthenes, in which Lysias himself appeared as an accuser (he must have had a special dispensation because he wasn't an Athenian) charging Eratosthenes, one of the Thirty, with the murder of resident aliens (including Lysias's brother) by falsely accusing them in order to steal their property. This must have been at the hearing that decided whether Eratosthenes should be allowed to participate in the general amnesty after the civil war, which did not cover acts of individual corruption or murder. Unfortunately the outcome of the hearing isn't known, but I like to think that Lysias's powerful rhetoric carried the day. They were good reading.


The Battle of the Frogs and the Mice -- Pseudo-Homer (translated by A.E. Stallings)

A funny parody of the Iliad, probably written around 350 BC. It tells the story of how the Frog King, while giving the Mouse Prince a ride across a pond, is frightened by a water snake and dives, forgetting about the mouse on his back, who drowns. When the mice demand restitution, the puffed-up Frog King denies everything, and the mice declare war. The frogs and the mice fight an all-out day-long battle that cleverly mimics Homer, with scenes of massed armies alternating with individual exploits of frog and mouse heroes fighting their tiny aristeia, while the gods look on, cheering for one side or the other. The mice win, but Zeus sends an army of crabs to rescue the frogs, and the mice have to be content with a moral victory. I really enjoyed it.


The Night the Lights Went Out -- Drew Magary

The author's account of his brain injury, treatment, and aftermath. He finds it very frustrating -- I would too -- that he has no memory of the minutes around the incident. What seems to have happened is that he had a spontaneous cerebral hemorrhage and fell, cracking his head on a concrete floor; but one of his doctors said it looked to him more as though someone grabbed him from behind and slammed his head into the wall. Magary was in a restaurant hallway on his way to the bathroom when it happened so no one saw it. His friends heard him fall and saved his life twice (one of them stopped him from choking when he started vomiting, the other convinced the ER staff that he wasn't drunk and needed immediate attention.) He was in the hospital for a long time and rehab for longer, and dealt with a lot of permanent consequences: he lost his hearing in one ear, for example, and he lost most of his sense of smell and taste; he also suddenly had trouble controlling his temper, so much so that he had to get anger management therapy. The last part of the book is all about how he came to terms with everything and how he's getting on with his life. It was a good book.


Hannah Arendt: the Last Interview (no editor named)

Four interviews on politics and Naziism. Arendt considered herself a political theorist rather than a philosopher, and although she was pro-Israel she was against radical nationalism; she said that people who love their country so much that they cannot hear it criticized are not real patriots. She told the story of how she escaped Germany, which I hadn't known: having been denounced by a neighbor in 1933 for printing accounts of the treatment of Jews in Berlin, she was arrested; but the officer in charge of her case wasn't Gestapo, he was a police patrolman who had been involuntarily reassigned to political cases, and he released Arendt "to await trial", knowing she would probably flee to Geneva, which she did. She also said a thing I've read in other places: when she and her husband, in 1943, found out about the death camps, they didn't believe it at first, thinking the stories were just war propaganda. The "last interview" was actually just a reconstruction of things Arendt said in response to questions on TV shows, both edited and out of context, so it wasn't that useful, but the others were interesting.


The Aunt Who Wouldn't Die -- Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay

A Bengali novel about a teenager named Somlata, whose arranged marriage to an older man brings her to live in a house with several generations of a once-wealthy family in decline, all of whom treat her as a servant. The matriarch of the house is mean old Auntie Pishima, who resents the whole family for keeping her in purdah ever since the death of her husband. One day Somlata goes upstairs and finds that Pishima has died, but Pishima's voice angrily tells her to take the money box from under her bed and hide it so her detested relatives can't get their hands on it. Pishima continues to haunt Somlata, peevishly correcting her cooking technique and constantly telling her to take a lover in order to spite her lazy, inattentive husband. With admirable presence of mind Somlata manages to stand up to her in-laws living and dead and retrieves the family fortunes from bankruptcy by starting several small businesses; when the businesses do well she asks her male in-laws to come run them, letting them think that it was their business sense that led to success. While doing all this she's also bringing up her own daughter and teaching her that she can live and work for herself and not have to fit into someone else's hierarchy the way previous generations had to. It was a good story.


Harlem Shuffle -- Colson Whitehead

A novel about a guy named Ray who lives in Harlem in the sixties. He's ambitious, running a furniture store and joining business associations and supporting local candidates for public office, aiming at moving to the more expensive apartments that the Harlemites call Strivers' Row. Working against him is that people remember that his father was a gangster, and also that his cousin Freddie is a dumb fuck-up who keeps coming to Ray to get him out of trouble. The book is built around three episodes. In 1959, Freddie steals some stuff he shouldn't have, including a crime boss's engagement ring, which leads to all the Harlem fences (including Ray, who occasionally resells stolen radios) getting threatening visits from a couple leg-breakers; Ray has to find a way of returning the loot without anyone finding out he or Freddie are involved. Then in 1961 a Harlem business leader takes a payment to sponsor Ray into an important insiders' club, but doesn't follow through and gives Ray the bum's rush; furious, Ray enlists one of his father's old lieutenants to wreck the businessman and the club, which has the added benefit of taking down Ray's snooty in-laws as collateral damage. Then in 1964 goons turn up again, this time looking specifically for Freddie, who's in even bigger trouble, and Ray has to try to sort everything out again without losing his store and social position, or getting killed. It really kept me reading!


Address Unknown -- Kathrine Kressmann Taylor

An excellent revenge story, a short epistolary novella written in the late thirties. It's a series of letters between two Germans who run a California art business; one moves back to Germany with his family, the other (a Jew) stays in America. The letters are friendly at first, all about family and business; the German partner says things like "I don't know about this guy Hitler, his supporters all seem to be thugs," but soon he's asking the American partner to write to his house instead of his business address, since it wouldn't be good for people to see a Jewish name on his correspondence. The German partner gradually gets radicalized and eventually tells the American partner to stop contacting him; the American partner accepts this more in sorrow than in anger, until he finds out that a relative of his in Berlin went to the German partner for help escaping the country and the German partner betrayed her to the SS. Then the American partner begins writing to the German partner again, but in oddly phrased, nonsensical letters that a Party censor would pretty much have to believe were in a secret code. This continues until one of the American partner's letters is returned with the German stamp Adressat unbekannt -- "Addressee unknown". Terrific book.


Shirley Chisholm: the Last Interview -- Barbara Lee, ed.

Chisholm was the first black woman in Congress. She ran for President in 1972, mostly as a gesture, finishing a distant fourth at the convention. She spent seven terms in Congress, sponsoring legislation on civil rights and the minimum wage. She always said that she faced more discrimination for being a woman than for being black, since black men kept telling her to go home and cook for her husband. She was also critical of 1970s feminism, saying the feminists were all white women and only concerned with white-women issues. I was most interested in the interview about how she went to visit George Wallace in the hospital after he was shot, even though he was a bigot demagogue who repeatedly attacked her in his speeches; she said "I wouldn't want that to happen to anybody." She made a virtue of saying what she wanted to; when an interviewer asked her why she didn't support Bella Abzug in her campaign for the Democratic leadership against Daniel Patrick Moynihan, she said "Where was Abzug when I was running for President?" Some of the interviews were kind of thin and condescending, look-at-this-woman-who-wants-to-run-the-country sort of thing; the later ones took her more seriously. It wasn't bad.


*You Come Too -- Robert Frost

One of his last books, a selection for "readers of all ages", which generally means for children, but I think in this case it's saying that poems may mean one thing to a child and another to an adult. It includes "A Tuft of Flowers", the first Frost poem I really appreciated (it was in one of my middle school textbooks) and other favorites: "You Come Too", "Acquainted With the Night", "Mending Wall", "Death of a Hired Man"; I don't know if Frost himself selected the poems or an editor did, but whoever it was, they agree with me on the best ones.


*Blake's Job -- S. Foster Damon, ed.

A set of 22 engravings that Blake did in the 1820s; it was his last completed work. Unlike most of his illustrations, which were done in relief, these were done in intaglio, incised onto copper plates. It's generally believed that the unappreciated genius Blake strongly identified himself with Job, though the Job in the engravings doesn't resemble Blake. The art is weird and beautiful, hard to compare with anything else. The plate of God answering Job out of the whirlwind (Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?) is particularly striking, as is the the plate with Job acknowledging the ineffability of God (I have heard thee with the hearing of the Ear but now my Eye seeth -- God blesses Job while Job's comforters turn away and hide their faces.) The plates are accompanied by short essays by Blake explaining his idiosyncratic interpretation of the Job story, which I find more interesting than convincing.


*Quintessence of Ibsenism -- George Bernard Shaw

This book got on my nerves because I think Shaw is mostly right about Ibsen but he's such a smug prick about it that I just want to pop him one. He acknowledges that Ibsen has no definitive style, since he went through several distinct phases and even the plays within each phase are quite distinct from each other. However, he thinks that Ibsen had a thematic constant, which was that of realists against idealists. (Ibsen always said that his plays had neither heroes nor villains, but his idealists always either destroy themselves and everyone around them or else learn better and become realists.) So far so good, but Shaw now tries to illustrate it by constructing an imaginary society of a thousand people, consisting of 700 Philistines (who don't really care how society works and just follow tradition), 299 idealists (who are passionately attached to the conventions of society and seek to justify and enforce them), and one realist, who's concerned with what's good and makes sense rather than what's conventional. However, where Ibsen showed his characters arriving at realism as a lesson painfully learned, because it's the approach to life that causes the least pain and grief to themselves and everyone else, Shaw imagines the realist as a moral hero whose embrace of realism is just proof that he's naturally bolder, braver, smarter, and better than everyone else. He actually calls him a Superman, although he may as well just have called him a "George Bernard Shaw". My takeaway is that because Shaw was a brilliant writer and critic, he was well able to understand and explain Ibsen's dramatic intentions; but because Shaw was a self-satisfied egotist without any empathy, he never understood that Ibsen's plays are basically compassionate and he wrongly interpreted them as critical satires.


Notes on Grief -- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

A short book on the death of her father and how she came to terms with it. I was struck by the big cultural difference: although her father died naturally in his sleep at an advanced age, it still came as a thunderbolt to her -- when her family called with the news, she literally collapsed on the floor, and she cried unrelievedly for weeks afterwards, to the point of being incapacitated by hours-long storms of helpless weeping. That's so different to my reaction to the death of my own father that I'm not sure you could even call it the same emotion.


*Heroides -- Ovid (Harold C. Cannon, trans.)

A really overwhelming number of Greek and Roman heroes have an episode in their story where they heartlessly abandon a woman somewhere, either for reasons of state or because they've fallen for someone else. These are letters that Ovid wrote on those women's behalf, imagining what they might have had to say to the men who left them behind. As you might imagine, they're generally pretty pissed off, and lament the inconstancy of men and their empty promises. Even where the women expect the men to return, as Penelope expected Odysseus, they're pretty fed up -- A letter in return does me no good; come yourself! -- while those who have been definitively rejected, like Hypsipile and Medea, who were both abandoned by Jason when he saw a better deal, are practically written in letters of fire. How much of your heart was ever in your words? Good reading.


*Dr. Seuss Goes To War -- Richard H. Minear

A collection of Dr. Seuss's political cartoons from the 1930s and 40s, the early ones attacking Lindbergh and the isolationists and the later ones championing cooperation among the Allies and denouncing the cruelty and stupidity of the Axis regimes. They're really savage. The best one is a pre-war cartoon showing a smug, self-important mother wearing an AMERICA FIRST sweater, reading a bedtime story to some small children, and ending "...and then the wolf tore the children to pieces and ate them, but they were foreign children so it didn't matter."


*Mots d'Heures: Gousses, Rames -- Luis d'Antin van Rooten

A very funny book pretending to be a scholarly discussion of a medieval manuscript of Norman French poetry, which are actually nonsense phrases in French that, when read aloud with a French accent, sound phonetically like English nursery rhymes. My personal favorite is

    Reine, reine, gaux eveilles,
    Gomme a gaine, en horreur, taie.

("Queen, queen, arouse the rabble, who are using their girdles -- horrors! -- as pillow slips.")
The rhymes are very clever and the footnotes "explaining" the text are really funny. A genuinely original book. I loved it.


*N'Heures Souris Rames -- Ormonde de Kay

A later imitation of van Rooten's book, with different Mother Goose rhymes; not as good as the original.


*Mörder Guss Reims -- John Hulme

Another imitation of van Rooten, this time in German; again, not as clever as the original. It was really a one-time gag, I think.