Book reviews, 2022

My time has rather been taken up with family issues the last couple years, so these are the books from two years ago.

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

The Harder They Come -- Michael Thelwell

This is sort of a based-on-real-events story at more than one remove. The original inspiration was the career of Ivanhoe Martin, a Jamaican robber and gunman who was known as "Rhygin" (Jamaican patois for "raging") and who in 1948 went on a killing spree that ended with him dying in a shootout with the police at age 24. He became an anti-government folk hero, and in the seventies some Jamaican film-makers made a movie about him called The Harder They Come. The movie made him into a reggae singer who was cheated out of the rights to his recordings, which led him into a kind of Robin Hood revenge-on-the-rich life of crime. (The movie starred Jimmy Cliff, and he wrote both "The Harder They Come" and "Sitting in Limbo" for the soundtrack.) Ten years after that, Michael Thelwell wrote this novel, which isn't an adaptation of the movie, but does incorporate the invented elements of making Rhygin a reggae singer and making him a hero of the poor. I liked it. One thing about it is that Michael Thelwell was a professor at UMass when I was there; I never took his class but I did hear him give lectures. He has a very deep, stately speaking voice with a strong Jamaican accent, and reading the book I heard his voice narrating it in my head, which I think added a lot to it. I didn't have a whole lot of sympathy for Rhygin, but on the other hand I didn't grow up poor and black in a brutally racist society.


Tar Baby -- Toni Morrison

A novel about race identity, set on a Caribbean island, I forget which one. The main character is Jadine, a black woman in her twenties, who is spending Christmas and New Year's in the house of rich white retiree expat Valerian, who paid Jadine's way through college because of a work connection to her family. The house is a nexus of colliding tensions: Jadine worries that her career as a fashion model in France is just a well-paid way to avoid the struggle for civil rights in the States, and she's not sure if her white boyfriend there really likes her or just likes the idea of having a black girlfriend; she resents Valerian's wife Margaret, who hates the island and wants to move back to Philadelphia, and who feels free to disparage black people to Jadine's face because "Of course I don't mean you, dear"; and on top of that she's uncomfortable with the way the house's black servants treat her because she's light-skinned. Valerian is sliding into alcoholism and despair over his inattentive son, who never calls or visits. This boil of unspoken resentment bursts when they discover an intruder, a black sailor called Son who jumped ship recently and has been hiding in the pantry, stealing food. Instead of calling the police, Valerian has Son sit down to dinner at the family table, infuriating the servants, terrifying Margaret, and annoying Jadine. Resenting opposition, Valerian doubles down and invites Son to stay as a guest over the holiday. Son is left rather at loose ends, since Valerian goes off to the greenhouse to drink and no one else wants Son there. He's uneducated and pretty self-centered and crude, but he's shrewd enough to see Jadine's vulnerable point and he criticizes her for living in Europe, for taking money from white people, basically for not being black enough. Son has much darker skin than Jadine does and this makes his attack on her authenticity feel weightier. Eventually he pressures her into sex and she decides to go with him to the States, leaving Valerian to drown himself in booze. It was a striking and uncomfortable story. I thought it was pretty clear that Jadine and Son have no chance at all of a lasting relationship, but I don't know if that's what Morrison intended.


La Bête Humaine -- Émile Zola

A late-nineteenth-century novel about murder and trains. The title is hard to translate; it literally means "the human beast" but Zola meant something more like "the animal nature that lives within all of us". The plot follows a series of linked murders that take place on and around the Paris-Le Havre train; Zola takes the opportunity to describe the French train service in a lot of detail, which I actually liked more than the murder plot. There's a really vivid and compelling section about a train crash. The main character, Lantier, gets away with murder because the police arrest someone else; and the book ends, at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, with him driving his engine to take a troop-train to the front. Along the way he gets into a fight with his engine-stoker and both of them fall to their deaths, leaving the train full of drunken soldiers speeding driverless and out of control towards the front, with no one on board knowing what's happened, which is a good picture of how Zola saw France's conduct in the war.


*Odes and Epodes -- Horace

The Epodes are among Horace's earlier works; he published them in 30 BCE, when he was 35, but they were probably written somewhat earlier. They range from one subject to another; they take their title from the fact that they use the epodic iambic meter (rather than being traditional epodes, which is Greek for "answering back" and means a poem rebutting some charge against the poet.) Horace was the son of a freed slave; his father recognized his son's extraordinary talent and went to great lengths, more than he could easily afford, to get him educated in Rome and Athens. One of the epodes expresses Horace's gratitude to his father for being a good and caring man; another is a lengthy appreciation of farming life and an expression of gratitude to Maecenas, Augustus's banker and friend, who gave Horace the farm in the Sabine Hills that meant his independence and comfort. One of the most memorable is Epode 7, quo scelesti ruitis ("Where are you so wickedly rushing?") in which he chastises the citizens of Rome for not knowing when enough is enough, and demands they stop slaughtering one another in civil wars and instead turn their arms to defending Rome from foreign invasion. Horace was himself a Republican who had fought on the side of Brutus, but after Philippi he accepted that his side had lost and he took the amnesty, believing that further bloodshed would only weaken Rome to no purpose.
The Odes are more mature work, the first three books published in his forties and a fourth book published ten years later. They're not imitations of Greek so much as they are transpositions of Greek models into Latin forms, a massively difficult undertaking for which the editors of all six of my editions think that Horace never gets enough credit. Their breadth is wide, discussing religion, morality, patriotism, art, love, friendship, and the uncertainty of life. The first one I ever read was the fifth ode of the third book, which the class translates in Kipling's Stalky stories (qui perfidis se credidit hostibus? "Will he be brave who once to faithless foes has knelt?") but of course the most famous is the eleventh ode of the first book, with its message that we shouldn't worry about future problems we can't foresee or control; ut melius, quidquid erit, pati ("how much better, whatever befalls, to take it as it comes.") It may please the gods to end our lives tomorrow, but we can't know that and there's nothing we could do about it anyway, so let's drink our wine while we can and watch the waves wear themselves out on the pumice cliffs. Dum loquimur, fugerit invida aetas: carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero ("Even as we speak, miserly Time has run on; seize the day, and rely on tomorrow as little as you can.") I read all four books through in Latin, with the help of the excellent Loeb Classical edition and Cassell's Latin Dictionary and Dad's copy of Horace Fully Parsed. It was rewarding.


*Mathematics and the Search for Knowledge -- Morris Kline

A good book about how various studies such as electromagnetism and thermodynamics have grown so remote from ordinary experience and the evidence of the senses that direct experimentation is essentially useless, and our propositions can be verified mathematically but not empirically. There's no prospect of this process reversing itself, so Kline argues that the question of "how do we know what we know?" has become more important than ever. I liked it.


*Satires and Epistles -- Horace

The Satires are Horace's earliest work, and what brought him to public notice. They're written in dactyls, a Latin meter, but they promote tenets of Greek philosophy such as moderation and independence of thought. Juvenal later used Horace as a model, but where Juvenal generally stuck to the accusation/proposed solution/moral blame structure, Horace's satires are more willing to wander around (they're rather less aggressive, too, though no less pointed for it. I remember Mr. James in high school saying that Juvenal says "Look how foolish they are!" while Horace says "Look how foolish we are!") The messages are serious but the format is light-hearted, often employing made-up characters, like showing a poetry-contest between a true poet and a scurra, a hack poet who makes bad verses about women who turned him down (the poet ends up tossing the scurra off of the Tarpeian Rock.)
The Epistles are not actual letters, but poetic moral essays presented as if they were letters to friends. The addressees were real people; he used the names of real friends of his, in order to teach a lesson and flatter a friend at the same time. So, for example, an epistle about being a good friend is addressed to his patron Maecenas; one about generously treating your neighbors to dinner is addressed to his hospitable neighbor Torquatus; and so on. The last epistle is much longer than the others and consists of a long dissertation on the art of writing poetry. Horace seems to have been a sincerely friendly and generous man, a deeply educated observer whose eyes were open to people's faults but who didn't look down on them. I'm quite sure I would have liked Horace if we'd ever met.


Good Morning, Midnight -- Lily Brooks-Dalton

An end-of-the-world story, sort of; we only see things from the viewpoints of Augustine, an astronomer at an Arctic observatory, and Sully, an astronaut on a ship returning from having orbited Jupiter. The ship's crew only know that Earth has suddenly fallen silent; Augustine only knows that the observatory was suddenly evacuated for unexplained reasons. Augustine, who's almost eighty and a cross-grained bastard, refused to leave, and is now apparently the only person left alive. The plot moves from one setting to the other: the crew of the ship wondering what's happened and trying to decide whether they should make the one-way trip down to the surface to find out; Augustine reflecting on his abused childhood and his lifelong rejection of human contact, while taking care of a young girl named Iris who has inexplicably turned up at the observatory. Iris is a hallucination but it's a long time before Augustine realizes it. Eventually Augustine and Sully briefly speak over a fleeting radio connection. I liked it, though I found it depressing.


Shape -- Jordan Ellenberg

A really well-written and interesting book about the geometric patterns that appear in all areas of study, from research into the spread of disease to the fairest way to draw maps for voting districts. There's an entertaining digression on an odd geometric question: how many holes are there in a straw? My own position is that there's only one hole and it goes all the way through, because otherwise you have to define where one hole ends and the other begins. Some people make a case that there are two holes because there are separate openings. (There's even a camp that holds that, because you can make a straw by rolling a sheet of paper into a tube, and the resulting tube hasn't changed -- you didn't put a hole in it -- the straw has no holes!) I thought it was great.


Spark -- Timothy J. Jorgensen

A book about electricity in living organisms. Jorgensen has a pretty good prose style but I thought the book was kind of unorganized. I did find out that electric eels don't shock themselves partly because of a layer of insulating fat but mostly because their discharge only lasts two milliseconds, which is long enough to stun a small fish but not long enough to affect the much larger eel. The book was rather spoiled for me because the last chapter is a hagiography of Elon Musk, which predictably does not mention that Musk bought Tesla and forced the founders out, and contributed nothing to the company's technology.
 

The Rise of Kyoshi -- F.C. Yee with Michael Dante DiMartino

This is a YA book set in the world of the Avatar: the Last Airbender show from Nickelodeon. Sabine got it for their birthday and I read it to them. It's surprisingly good for a media tie-in novel! It tells the story of the childhood and adolescence of Kyoshi, the Avatar two generations before Aang from the TV show. According to the lore of the show, the Avatar reincarnates upon the death of the previous Avatar, like a Tibetan lama, and the interested parties (typically the friends and allies of the dead Avatar) have to seek out the new one. This time they made a mistake, and they've been raising an exceptionally intelligent and capable boy named Yun as the new Avatar, while the real new Avatar -- Kyoshi, the abandoned child of Earth Kingdom bandits -- grows up homeless and living by scavenging until she gets a job as a servant on the estate where Yun (who doesn't know he isn't really the Avatar) is being trained. So many people have so much invested that when the truth is revealed, everything blows up catastrophically: Yun's teachers fight among themselves, and the winner -- a self-righteous fanatic, it turns out -- callously abandons Yun to be consumed by an evil spirit in order to focus on forcing Kyoshi to do as he wants. Kyoshi goes on the run and enlists help from her dead parents' bandit associates, and spends the rest of the book first running from the teacher and then gearing up to confront him. Sabine loved it, and I was genuinely held.


The Factory Witches of Lowell -- C.S. Malerich

I expected to like this more than I did, given that it's about the unionization of the textile mills and class solidarity. The main characters are lesbian laborers who use actual witchcraft to hex the mill equipment, so, you know, even better. I thought it fell down when Malerich tried to hand-wave away a plot hole -- why don't enslaved workers hex the cotton gins? -- by deciding that witchcraft is all about ownership, and slaves don't own themselves so they can't use it. So the slaves aren't just treated as soulless animals by the people who enslaved them, they genuinely are soulless animals and recognized and treated as such by the laws of the universe! It's probably historically accurate that Northern working-class women in their twenties wouldn't care about that in the 1830s, but it made me less happy to be on their side.


The Lincoln Highway -- Amor Towles

I seem to be the only person who liked this. It's sort of a wrong-way Odyssey, as the hero winds up going everywhere except where he meant to. I suppose technically the protagonist is Emmett, just released from a juvenile work farm in 1954 after serving his sentence for accidentally killing another boy in a fight. But Emmett has done all his character growth before the novel starts. I might say "this is the story of how Emmett's friend Sarah escapes a life of unrewarded drudgery to live for herself". I suppose really it's a story about succeeding or failing at coming to terms with the past. When the juvenile warden drives Emmett home from the work farm, two other teenagers stow away: Duchess, who's clearly behind it, and the aptly-named Wooly, who came along because Duchess told him to. Duchess has the double plan of getting revenge on his no-good father, who framed Duchess for his own crime, and stealing a store of cash from the vacation house of Wooly's rich and abusive family. Emmett's all, well good luck with that, I'm taking my kid brother and we're starting over in California, but Duchess steals his car (which has all Emmett's money in the trunk) and Emmett has to borrow his friend Sarah's truck and pursue them to New York. Duchess is sort of a Falstaff character, in the sense Johnson described: "no man is more dangerous than he that, with a will to corrupt, hath the power to please." Duchess is friendly, funny, and energetic; he helps little old ladies with their bags and hits people who need hitting and pulls a great caper where he visits his old orphanage and maneuvers the nuns into a room and locks them in so he can break into the storeroom and give all the jam to the orphans. All this distracts you from the fact that Duchess is a liar and a thief and a manipulator, and generally a nasty person. He really reveals himself when he goes to a great deal of trouble just to try to disillusion an eight-year-old with his favorite author (which backfires when the author turns out to be everything the kid expected and more.) We get several sections told from Duchess's point of view, and everything he does involves tracking down his father; but after a while he stops mentioning it and we go on to robbing Wooly's family's house, and it's never brought up again. After I finished the book and thought "Wait, whatever happened with Duchess's dad?" it occurred to me that in between chapters Duchess had found his father and killed him, and didn't say so because it wouldn't suit the narrative voice he was putting on. I thought it was well-constructed and well-told.


The Shadow of Kyoshi -- F.C. Yee with Michael Dante DiMartino

The second tie-in novel about Avatar Kyoshi. The first one was good enough that I would have gotten this one even if Sabine hadn't asked me to read it to them. Kyoshi, now recognized as the Avatar, is getting used to negotiating her responsibilities -- she has plenty of raw power for things like suppressing bandits and pirates, but she never had any training for the diplomatic part of her job and she steps on a lot of toes. More importantly, she's spinning her wheels on her most serious task, serving as the liaison between humans and spirits, because she can't really get started without communing with the spirits of the former Avatars, and she has a mental block on communing with her immediate predecessor, Kuruk, since her teachers told her he was a drunk and a partier who neglected his duties. She's shaken to discover that this wasn't true, and downright shocked to find out that Kuruk died young from the strain of having to contend constantly against angry spirits, because he was trying to correct well-intentioned mistakes made by his predecessor, Yangchen, whom Kyoshi was raised to venerate as the perfect role model. While coping with all this spiritual stress, Kyoshi also has to stop the vendetta of her friend Yun, who, after their teacher abandoned him to be eaten by an evil spirit in the last book, turned the tables by consuming the spirit himself, and is now hunting down all his former teachers, blaming them for indoctrinating him with a lie and then discarding him. In a well-managed bit of symmetry, Kyoshi makes peace with Kuruk internally and defeats Yun externally, showing herself and the world that she's grown into the duties of the Avatar. It really kept me reading. Sabine loved it, too.


Spillover -- David Quammen

A well-researched and very readable book about zoonosis, the phenomenon where a disease crosses over from an animal population to a human population. It can take place over a surprisingly long time; researchers think that simian immunodeficiency virus crossed over to humans and became HIV as long ago as the 1920s, among people in Africa who hunted monkeys and chimpanzees for meat -- it would be very easy for someone cutting up a dead chimpanzee to get infected blood onto an open cut on his own skin. As humans expand their living territory, zoonosis becomes inevitable. Imagine an animal population living in a forest or wetland; when humans come cut down the forest or drain the wetland and build houses there, those animals don't just disappear. They have to find new places to live, and now those new places are going to be a lot closer to humans than they used to be, which means their parasites and microbes are a lot closer to humans than they used to be as well.


You Have Arrived At Your Destination -- Amor Towles

This was a short near-future novella about genetic manipulation, which I read because Amazon sent me the ebook for free. Sam and Annie are trying to conceive; Annie chooses a fertility clinic online and sends Sam there. The techs explain to him how they can "nudge" the embryo to give the child certain qualities, like assertiveness or artistic ability, which they're confident can predict its future, and he's surprised to find that Annie has already chosen the future she wants. The techs show him creepy virtual-reality movies of what his future child's life will be like as they breezily explain that everyone's life is highly predictable based on their genes. Sam finds this upsetting and goes to a nearby dive bar, where he's out of place to begin with and even more so when the locals find out he's there for the clinic. He gets drunk and one of the barflies beats him up, and then he goes back to the clinic in the rain and insists they return his sperm donation. The story ends with him sitting back in the dive bar, soaked and bruised, staring at the sample jar. I didn't think it said anything about genetic engineering that hasn't already been said, and I didn't really see the point of it.


Pashmina -- Nidhi Chanani

A YA graphic novel that Sabine got from the library and liked enough to want me to read it. It's the story of Priyanka, an aspiring artist, about sixteen and living in LA with her mother. The two of them have a hard time connecting, with her mother completely closed off on certain subjects -- why she left India, who (and where) Priyanka's father is, like that. One day Priyanka finds a beautiful old pashmina shawl in a closet, and when she puts it on the art goes from black-and-white to color and she's transported to India in the past, where she learns about her family history and her Indian heritage with the help of some talking animals. It wasn't bad.  


The Adventurers' Guild -- Zack Loran Clark and Nick Eliopulos

Sabine got this from the library and I read it to them. It's a Dungeons and Dragons story, clearly, though it must have been written under some sort of open-license agreement with Wizards of the Coast because it doesn't use any D&D-specific terminology. It's set in a walled city some generations after a worldwide disaster (a magic spell gone wrong) opened portals to other worlds and let in huge numbers of Abominations (classic D&D monsters, but without using their names.) Every year the current crop of teenagers gets selected to join the various city guilds; our heroes, Brock and Zed, hope to join the Merchants and the Mages, respectively (in D&D terms this means they'd be a thief/rogue and a magic-user.) However, along with their friends Liza (fighter) and Jett (cleric) they get drafted into the guild no one volunteers for, the Adventurers' Guild, whose responsibility is protecting the city from the Abominations and who are the only ones who ever go outside the magically-warded city walls -- and who have a pretty short life expectancy. It's a pretty good mixture of action/adventure with the monster fighting and suspense/thriller with the political infighting among the guilds, along with our heroes forging relationships with their guildmates and each other, learning to rely on each other while also keeping secrets (Brock is secretly recruited by his father, a member of the Merchants' Guild, to spy on the Adventurers; Zed unwittingly makes a deal with a non-guild magician who may be more than she seems) while trying to find out who in the city is dealing in magic contraband from outside the walls, and why the magic wards are losing their strength. It was entertaining.


Alia's Mission -- Mark Alan Stamaty

A graphic novel by Mark Alan Stamaty, whose wonderful MacDoodle Street fascinated me when I was in high school (Lisa gave it to me for Christmas one year.) This is a story, told in intricately drawn cartoons, about Alia Baqir, the chief librarian at the public library of Basra, who started smuggling books out of the library when US and British troops advanced on the city in 2003. After the city was occupied in April and the library was closed, Baqir assembled her friends and neighbors to pass the remaining books over the library wall and stack them in the restaurant next door; she then distributed them to people she knew across the city. The library was bombed and burned to the ground, but nearly all the books survived, thanks to Baqir. She was reinstated as the head of the library when it was rebuilt; she died of COVID after the book was written.


The Adventurers' Guild: Twilight of the Elves -- Zack Loran Clark and Nick Eliopulos

The second book, in which the city where our heroes live  takes in a host of refugees from one of the few other cities that survived the great disaster, an elf city that has fallen to an assault from terrifying armies of the undead. Brock and Zed and their friends, along with some senior Adventurers and some elf volunteers, head out to find out what's going on. Getting there across the monster-infested wilderness is hard enough, but they make it only to find the survivors unreasonably suspicious and resentful of them, with a healthy dose of not-at-all-allegorical racial tension among the elves and non-elves. The power behind the host of undead is an evil sorcerer lich; naturally one of the important elf counsellors is the one who woke it up as part of his political machinations that got out of hand. Our heroes manage to get all the elves and Adventurers on the same page and fight back the lich and its army, at least partly because Zed's magic is unexpectedly a whole lot more powerful than it should be. After the lich is defeated we find out that the mysterious magician who bargained with Zed in the first book has used the bargain to usurp Zed's magic, and in the kicker at the end the magician takes over Zed's body completely and heads home with the rest of the Adventurers toward some unknown but certainly bad end.


Working Stiff -- Judy Melinek and T.J. Mitchell

An excellent memoir of being a coroner in New York City. I lent it to Dan and he said "I would have been happy if it had been ten times longer." One thing I hadn't known is that there are almost no traffic deaths in Manhattan, because the congestion is so heavy that the average vehicle speed is only seven MPH. Melinek goes into detail on cases she's worked on, and the thought process that goes into her examinations -- these marks on the torso, are they consistent with the husband's story that his wife tripped on the stairs and he grabbed at her to save her, or do they look more like he pushed her? The cuts on this guy's hands, do they agree with his buddy's story that the guy broke a window and threw himself out of it in a drug-induced mania, or do they look more like the guy was trying to hang on while the buddy forced him out? I also would happily have read many more of those. Melinek was called in to work on September 11th, and tells of hours waiting by the river for rescue boats to bring survivors to the emergency tents, only to realize that no boats were coming because there were no survivors. It was gripping.


(The All New) Don't Think of an Elephant -- George Lakoff

A book about political messaging by a linguist. Lakoff argues that conservatives and progressives essentially tell competing stories using different metaphors, and one reason progressives have fallen behind conservatives in the last fifty years is that conservatives are more aware of the story they're trying to tell; progressives show their lack of nuance when they accept and use conservative terminology, such as "tax relief" (a phrasing that implies that taxes are a burden, which is a conservative position, not a progressive one.) He thinks that whichever side is better at framing the debate to fit the terms of their story is generally the side that will prevail. I found it really interesting.


The Hilarious World of Depression -- John Moe

A memoir of a life spent coping with chronic depression. The author is a well-known radio personality but I knew him from his writing on McSweeney's. He was an early hire at Amazon, working as a managing editor at a site that didn't know what it wanted to be and didn't really seem to need anything he was good at. He spent his time encouraging other employees, trying to explain to a European company why Americans weren't buying work from an artist who signed himself "OSAMA", and wanting to leave but not doing it because having a high-level job at Amazon was a visible sign that his life wasn't a failure. He wrote this book to argue against that mindset; depression is a disease, and you can't just think it away. "Depression can't be cured by positive life circumstances because depression is not a reaction to circumstances." It was occasionally heavy going, especially the chapters about suicide, but it was a good book.


The 1619 Project -- Nicole Hannah-Jones, editor

A collection of essays on American slave labor and its terrible legacy. (1619 was the year the first ship unloaded a cargo of enslaved Africans in what would become the United States.) The main thing that stays with me is that the willingness to enslave people for money is at the root of all American capitalism and also probably the source of the fundamental brutality of American culture. It was a depressing read but the essays are well-written and powerful.


The Adventurers' Guild: Night of Dangers -- Zack Loran Clark and Nick Eliopulos

The third book, where we find that the spirit possessing Zed was the one who caused the worldwide disaster in the first place, by possessing someone else in the same way; it was actually an attempt to destroy the world, but the original possessee's friends managed to stop it in time. Now it's using Zed for act two, where it intends to do the whole thing over again and finish the job this time, while the real Zed tries to slow it down or alert his friends, and his friends puzzle over Zed's strange behavior while also rooting out the plotter who was secretly the one causing all the trouble back in the first book. Our heroes win in the end, of course. It was pretty well managed, all in all, and I rather liked the series. Sabine did too.  


Dealers of Lightning -- Michael A. Hiltzik

A history of Xerox PARC and the flood of innovations it produced. It got a little bogged down in the personalities and infighting -- and I thought the author was taking sides a bit more than was really warranted -- but it was still a lot of information pretty well presented. I hadn't realized that the invention of the laser printer alone made Xerox a thousand times more money than it spent on PARC in its whole history.


Celine -- Peter Heller

I hated this. It's ostensibly a book about an elderly private eye looking into a cold missing-person case, but in fact it's a vehicle for the private eye and her husband and son to preen themselves on how superior they are to the common run of people. The last scene I really remember is the bit in a seedy bar where the 68-year-old heroine with emphysema confronts an angry outlaw biker, and he backs down in fear because he can sense her samurai contempt of death. (That's practically word for word, by the way.) I can't even remember whether I finished it.


*Shakspere -- George Lyman Kittredge

An address given at Harvard in 1916 by the leading Shakespeare expert of the day; his edition of Shakespeare was the standard American one until World War II. It's an overview of the history of Shakespearean criticism, whose overall theme is that the plays exist as a cooperation between the playwright and the reader, and everyone has their own Hamlet or Falstaff in their head, while it's the skill of the actor to be able to make the audience recognize their Hamlets in his Hamlet. A mistake many critics have made (not only with Shakespeare!) is to confuse the character in their head with the one in the text, as Schlegel did with Caliban, and pontificate as if their own idea of the character is the only possible one. It didn't really say anything I haven't heard before but it was pretty well presented.


The Mystery of Henri Pick -- David Foenkinos

In one of his books Richard Brautigan imagined a Library of Rejected Books, a collection of only unpublished manuscripts. This novel imagines that such a library exists in Bretagne in France; a junior editor at a publishing company visits the library and becomes enchanted by a book she finds there, by the (it turns out) recently deceased Henri Pick, a local pizza cook. Her firm publishes the book, and it becomes a sensation, which leads a freelance reporter named Rouche to investigate Henri Pick and wonder how a man whose family says he was uninterested in literature wrote such a good book. Rouche thinks that the book bears a resemblance to the writing of another author -- the ex-boyfriend of the junior editor who found the manuscript -- and cynically looks for proof that the editor planted it in the library. It turns into a good character study as Rouche (once a literary critic, who found he lost all his friends when he lost his job) wonders how much of his instinctive belief that the unknown Pick couldn't have written the book is fueled by his own failure as an author, and whether it's worth exposing the fraud (if it is a fraud) and spoiling the sense of connection that Pick's widow and daughter have felt with the reserved Pick after reading the novel. I liked it.


Wine Girl -- Victoria James

A memoir of working as a sommelier in American high-end restaurants, not a welcoming field for a woman. James talks about the sexism and sometimes assault she's faced -- in fact she gets kind of male-gazey, talking about how she'd attend stuffily expensive wine events while dressed for the beach, lovingly describing her own beautiful body and gorgeous hair in a way that was frankly creepy. That aside, there were good passages about learning to appreciate wine, and lessons from more experienced waiters about how to pair food with wine; there was a good example of a thick wine that practically oozed along the glass like Elmer's Glue, which the waiter served with little cubes of Parmesan, which no one would ordinarily eat as snack food, but which complemented the wine so perfectly that the customers drank three bottles of it. I don't think I'd enjoy James's company, but her story was fairly interesting.


Toni Morrison: the Last Interview -- (no editor named)

I think this must actually have been put together by a speech-to-text program capturing audio interviews, because it's full of bizarre phonetic misspellings of characters' names -- "palldy" for "Paul D.", for instance. There were interesting exchanges about her writing process -- she said, for example, that she generally started out with a question about something, and her first draft was her thinking aloud trying to answer it. She also talked about how she had to be able to step outside herself to look at her writing, looking for places where a black reader would understand what she was saying but a white reader would need context. The last interview, from when she was 87, was by an Italian journalist who didn't seem very self-confident and was mostly repeating questions from earlier interviews, but Morrison didn't repeat herself, she just went into more depth. I was surprised to find out that her favorite of her own books was Jazz.


My Year Abroad -- Chang-Rae Lee

The first few pages of this looked promising in the bookstore, but I didn't think it panned out. It's about a dropout called Tiller, about twenty, who is currently living in a dull city with an older girlfriend and her preteen son, who are both in witness protection. A lot of the story is told in flashback to Tiller's recent bizarre experience: Tiller, living a directionless life in a fictional college town in New Jersey, meets an eccentric businessman named Pong, who (for no reason I could see) takes a liking to Tiller and hires him as an assistant with no clear duties, in a business that has no clear description. At least part of Pong's business involves a plan for personalized energy drinks, which turns out to be part of a larger plan to bilk a gullible Chinese billionaire with a terminal illness, and everything goes horribly wrong when the billionaire figures it out and Pong and his partners are brutally killed while Tiller is kept at slave labor in China for a while until the billionaire lets him go, apparently on a whim. The first thing that happens on Tiller's return to the US is that he meets the older girlfriend, and takes up with her apparently also on a whim, since they have nothing in common; the other half of the novel is the story of coping with the girlfriend's suicidal ideations and her difficult son, who runs an unlicensed restaurant out of their kitchen. I didn't find anything that happened in the book particularly believable or interesting.


*Kemps Nine Daies Wonder -- Will Kemp

Kemp was an actor and clown in Shakespeare's company, first in Lord Strange's Men and then the Lord Chamberlain's Men; he seems to have left the troupe when they built the Globe Theatre. (That's why Falstaff has to die offstage in Henry V, because Kemp played Falstaff and no one could replace him.) It's not clear why he left, but money is always a good guess. Anyway he needed money, so in early 1600 he conducted a well-publicized performance where he Morris-danced the length of the King's Road from London to Norwich, about 110 miles, in nine days. (Nine days of actual travel, that is; he took days off in between, both to rest from what must have been exhausting effort and to get free meals and lodging from fans along the way, so the whole thing actually took five or six weeks.) This is an account of the trip he published soon afterward, to take advantage of the publicity. He was apparently attended by cheering crowds most of the way, which seems excessive from our point of view, but there wasn't a lot of public entertainment in those days and for many people this might have been the only chance they ever had to see a celebrity in person. The writing, well, it isn't Shakespeare, as they say, but it's cheerful and interesting.


New Teeth -- Simon Rich

A collection of comic short stories. I didn't find them as funny as I have other collections of his, so they haven't really stayed with me that much. There was one about a woman who was raised by wolves, who's now married and working at Verizon, and she only sees her wolf parents when they visit at Thanksgiving; that wasn't bad. The one I remember best was a noir parody called "The Big Nap", about a toddler detective trying to unravel the conspiracy of adult behavior and why the powers that be always make him take a nap just as he's about to figure it all out; but what I really remember about it is thinking "That could have been better."  


The Family That Happens to Things -- David Kershaw

This is the (I think) third draft of a novel in progress, which the author asked me to critique. It's the story of a family that (we are given to understand) will eventually be in charge of basically everything, and how it got to be that way. There's a sprawling cast of interesting characters and some great McGuffins. In fact I thought some of the best parts got in each others' way: one of the things I told the author was that if you're going to threaten our heroine with a fascinating cult of terrifying crocodile-worshippers, you shouldn't then go a hundred fifty pages without mentioning them again, even though you need to bring in the other branch of the family and their strangely un-aging patriarch. (I really liked the trap with the exploding glass crocodile!) I look forward to the next version.


Beyond the Mirror -- Henri J.M. Nouwen

In the winter of 1989, while walking to a pastoral visit on an icy road, Nouwen was hit by a passing car's side view mirror and thrown some distance, breaking his ribs and rupturing his spleen. This book talks about his reflections afterwards: how, when it looked like he was dying, he felt a sense of peace and resignation, only for it to fade to tiredness and anxiety when he woke up and was told he would live; how what kept the spark of life in him was not peace and resignation but rather his anger and resentment at the gas-station truck driver who wouldn't give him a ride to the home of the handicapped child he was visiting. It was deeply interesting.


John Lewis: the Last Interview -- (no editor named)

There are only four interviews in this one. About half the book is a transcript of Lewis's testimony in the lawsuit against Sheriff Clark for police brutality. (The lawsuit didn't succeed, but SNCC got enough black voters registered that they were able to vote Clark out of office the next year; he spent the rest of his life as a petty criminal, in and out of jail for fraud.) It's an excellent first-hand account of the march on Selma and what happened that day; the defense attorneys' arguments that the police are within the law in doing absolutely anything, and that their gut feeling is the only justification they need, would be a darkly funny indictment of the period if it weren't for the fact that all police behavior today is based on the same arguments. In the last interview, a week or so before he died, Lewis talked about the SCLC's commitment to nonviolence, and how their conscious strategy was to make it so that the white supremacists had to commit their brutalities out in the open where everyone was watching. That took a lot of courage.


Tell Me Everything -- Erika Krouse

An excellent memoir of her career as a private investigator, mostly interviewing witnesses for a Colorado attorney. There's a good setup and interesting details about the work, but the great majority of the book deals with one specific case, a terrible episode where football players from the University of Colorado in Boulder raped several women at recruitment parties arranged for high-school football players. It wasn't just that the team and the school knew about it and didn't do anything; the team had arranged the parties and essentially supplied the victims. Erika had to do the dirty work of interviewing witnesses, including one who told her, just as if he was talking about what's for dinner, that what was important was winning, and maybe in order to win you needed to rape people. He clearly thought his position was perfectly reasonable. It was really depressing when the attorney told Erika that he expected the university to use what he called the four-dog defense: One, that's not my dog. Two, if it is my dog, it didn't bite you. Three, if it did bite you, you weren't hurt. Four, if you were hurt, you provoked it. Everyone involved was absolutely unrepentant and the university brought out all four dogs in order, just as the attorney predicted. The victims won the lawsuit against the university, which had to pay damages and was sanctioned by the NCAA, but the head coach (Erika doesn't name him but it was a piece of shit called Gary Barnett) was only suspended for like five minutes during the summer when the team wasn't playing, and he kept his job until he had a losing season. He works as a broadcaster for the university now and is as arrogantly unrepentant as ever. The emotional weight of the whole thing eventually led Erika to give up private-eye work. It's a wrenching story but a great read.


The Verifiers -- Jane Pek

A pretty good mystery story about a woman named Claudia, who works at a detective agency called Veracity. People who have been chatting on dating web sites come to Veracity to find out if the people they've been chatting with are telling the truth about themselves. We follow several of Claudia's cases at Veracity, which are pretty interesting. Claudia can find the anonymous users pretty easily, since they've all clicked "Accept" on user agreements that allow the dating site to sell all their information to partner companies, who re-sell it in turn, until eventually Veracity buys it and Claudia can come sit across the street from your apartment and wait to see if you have a wife and kids you didn't mention on your dating profile. Poking around on behalf of a client, Claudia starts to suspect that the client's potential love interest hasn't just ghosted them, but has been murdered. She stretches the boundaries of her job looking into it and finds out some things she shouldn't have found out, and has to fight pressure from the interested parties and from her boss in order to bring everything out in the open. I liked it.


Black Nerd Problems -- William Evans and Omar Holmon

The authors run a podcast of the same name, which I hadn't heard of before I read the book. It's partly an appreciation of nerdy things and partly an exploration of being a subculture within a subculture. For one example, it's much more critical for a black-led movie to be good; if Gerard Butler's action blockbuster is a flop, he's still going to be offered another one, while the same is not true of a black lead. To get even nerdier, a white guy can go to a nerd convention and buy some terrifying-looking replica weapon and just walk home with it without getting arrested, but a black guy can't. Evans and Holmon are decades younger than I am and their nerd hobbies are pretty divergent from mine -- I never played Mario Kart or watched Dragon Ball Z, for instance -- but I still enjoyed it.


*An Experiment in Criticism -- C.S. Lewis

Lewis starts out by smugly explaining how people who read ordinary fiction don't "like" reading it in the same way that Lewis "likes" reading Dante. I got as far as page two, and then I couldn't bear to read any more of it and abandoned the book, leaving Lewis to recline eternally in the warm bath of his own self-admiration.


Billion Dollar Loser -- Reeves Wiedeman

Dan lent me this; it's a hate-giography of the WeWork guy, a massive douche bag who convinced a gullible Japanese gazillionaire to pump up the value of his stupid and unprofitable space-sharing business to insanely unrealistic evaluations, and then kind of forgot he was running a con game and started to think of himself as a genuine paradigm-breaker, some kind of spiritu-capitalist messiah. He became such an anchor around the neck of his company that his own board paid a billion dollars solely to get rid of him. It's a good picture of the consequences of unrestrained capitalism, but what's really memorable about the book is just how colossally self-worshipping the guy was -- he spent an interview with the author giving unsolicited advice on how to conduct interviews, and really seemed to expect the author to be grateful for his deeply spiritual teaching. The book fills you with rage, which probably isn't healthy.


Standard Deviations -- Gary Smith

Sort of a 21st-century update of Darrell Huff's 1954 book How To Lie With Statistics. Smith goes over methods of manipulating the way you present data in order to make it look as though it supports your thesis. Among the most common is to show a graph where the X and Y axes are not at the same scale, or to enlarge only one small section of a curve and show it as though it were the whole curve, to make it show the trend you want. It's not all outright lies; Smith also goes over self-deluding mistakes. A common mistake is to say something like "We analyzed these twelve highly successful companies and they all have these five strategies in common, that tells us that these five strategies are the keys to success!" In fact that doesn't tell us anything at all; what it does is provide us with a starting point where we could design an experiment where some companies use the five strategies and some don't, and then track their success over time. Without the second group of companies changing the variable, there is no useful data. The writing was good, too. It was a fun read.


Noise -- Daniel Kahneman, Oliver Sibony, and Cass R. Sunstein

A book about the decision-making process, arguing generally that random factors affect our judgement far more than we realize. They give examples from several fields: doctors shown the same results from the same patient differed widely in diagnoses and recommended treatment; judges shown the same trial records recommended wildly varying sentences; people on hiring committees or college acceptance committees showed for-or-against trends that strongly correlated with the weather. The writing is very dry. In general I found their description of the problem more convincing than their proposed solution of creating a "decision hygiene" process, which sounded a lot like drumming up business for their consultation services.


The Day the Leader Was Killed -- Naguib Mahfouz

A depressing novel about poverty and the sapping effect that quotidian life has on idealism. Cairo in the 1980s: Elwan and Randa, a couple in their twenties, have been engaged for years. They genuinely love each other, but Randa's father won't let them marry because Elwan doesn't have enough money to establish his own household, so they're both trapped in a mire of ennui and sexual frustration. The moral center of the story is Elwan's grandfather, Muhtashimi, a pious and gentle man, saddened by the failure of Egypt to live up to the hopes of his young days, when he and other revolutionaries overthrew the corrupt and brutal monarchy. Elwan and Randa's sterile relationship is a microcosm of what Mahfouz saw as the anomie of Egypt under the Sadat regime; eventually they give in to poverty and social pressure and end their engagement. Randa marries her boss at work, who ignores her when he isn't mistreating her; in the upheaval following the assassination of Sadat, Elwan unexpectedly meets the boss and uncharacteristically flies into a rage and kills him. He fatalistically shrugs off the boss's family's attempts to cover things up and goes to prison. Muhtashimi prepares himself for his approaching death, hoping that his grandson and his country can both regain their moral center through faith. It was well-written but I didn't enjoy it.


Boychiks in the Hood -- Robert Eisenberg

A sort of ethnography of Hasidic culture written by an American non-practicing Jew. The author travels around America and Europe visiting Hasidic enclaves and talking with the congregations (at least those who are willing to speak to him -- quite a lot of Hasidim wouldn't be willing to speak in depth about their culture and religion to a non-believing outsider, even one who spoke Yiddish.) It's a pretty respectful look at the culture, managing to talk about customs and disagreements among various Hasidic sects that are largely incomprehensible to an outsider without making them seem silly. Many Hasidim are pretty uncompromising, refusing to recognize the non-ultra-Orthodox as real Jews. Even among the ultra-Orthodox there are some apparently irreconcilable differences, not just about doctrinal subjects such as the identity of the Messiah, but about all aspects of daily ritual -- Satmar Hasidim don't consider meat butchered by Lubavitch Hasidim to be kosher, for example. It was interesting.


Shrill -- Lindy West

An feminist essay collection. A lot of it was about fatphobia and the freedom people feel to say hateful things about fat people (she doesn't like euphemisms such as heavy or overweight.) She gets really savage about men who cruelly mock fat women and at the same time expect them to be slavishly grateful for any male attention. A lot more of the book is about standup comedy, West's great love that gradually died under the weight of the consequence-free misogyny of the standup community in general. There was one guy who went to the trouble of finding a picture of West's dead father and created a Twitter account with it, posting vicious attacks on her that he portrayed as coming from her dead father, and then blamed her because she "couldn't take a joke". She would appear in televised interviews on the subject of hate speech using comedy as a cover, until she realized that the interviewers had invited her because she was fat and so they could defuse any point she made by making a fat joke. It was pretty crushing.


A Psalm For the Wild-Built -- Becky Chambers

I really liked this. It's an SF story, set on what appears to be a colony world, though that's not really gone into. A couple hundred years before the story begins, the factory robots that the humans had built unexpectedly achieved sentience, told the humans they didn't really feel like working in the factories any more, and left, wandering off into the wilderness. The human population, shocked that they had inadvertently created intelligent machines and used them for unpaid labor, reformed their industrial society to be more ecologically sound and unexploitative. As the story opens, our hero, Dex, a restless and unsatisfied villager in their mid-twenties, gives up their gardening work and sets out to become a wandering tea monk. A few years into their new career, now a respected tea master, Dex is on their way from one settlement to the next when they encounter a robot, the first one anyone's seen in centuries, who has come by to see how the humans are getting along. The robot accompanies the monk on the tea round and we get a look at what Dex's society is like and how it reacts to the appearance of the robot. It was a good book.


*Auguries of Innocence -- William Blake

A poem Blake wrote some time around 1803 but never published, most likely because he never finished the illustrations for it. (Blake engraved all of his own books with the text and the illustrations intertwined; I think modern editions that print only the text are essentially castrated.) An augury is a foretelling of the future; Blake is looking forward to a future time, or rather a future state of the human soul, when the human qualities of faith and reason and imagination have been restored to harmony and will thus be in a state of innocence, free from the "Contraries" (in the Blakeian sense) in the poem.
A dog starvd at his Masters Gate
Predicts the ruin of the State
A Horse misusd upon the Road
Calls to Heaven for Human Blood


*Cautionary Tales for Children -- Hilaire Belloc

A parody of the sort of Victorian children's books that warned of the dreadful perils of disobeying your mother or getting your clothes dirty. It's a series of rhyming couplets; my edition includes much later illustrations by Edward Gorey, which are singularly appropriate. They tell such stories as the boy who ran away from his nurse and was eaten by a lion, and the boy who died horribly because he wouldn't stop chewing on bits of string. I thought they were funny.


The Thursday Murder Club -- Richard Osman

I thought I would like this but I didn't. It's a murder mystery set in a retirement community in England; a new arrival is quickly recruited into a group of quirky retirees, including a retired police officer and someone who is clearly a retired secret agent but never actually says so, and every week they get together and go over cold case files to talk about what happened. Harmless, if gruesome; but of course someone in the town is soon murdered and our club, naturally, decide to investigate. It helps that the local police force consists of one bumbling cop and one inexperienced junior constable, and for some reason no one from the CID ever turns up or asks for any updates on the murder case. The solution wasn't that clever, and the way it dragged in a connected solution to a older cold case was clumsy; but what I really didn't like about it was the way the members of the club get everything they want by overwhelming people with the force of their quirky oldness. The most junior constable hired half an hour ago wouldn't let busybodies from the local nursing home rummage around a crime scene while standing helplessly by because they're just so old and quirky. I did rather like the cop and the constable, and I might read another story about them if it didn't involve the retirement brigade.


*Under Milk Wood -- Dylan Thomas

I read this in high school, and I remember liking it at the time, but the details had faded. It's a radio play -- the subtitle is "a play for voices" -- and we read it aloud in class, which was fun. It's a day-in-the-life play, sort of; as the play opens, the Welsh town of Llareggub is asleep, and we hear the townspeople voicing their dreams -- of lost friends, of dead husbands, of unreachable lovers. The town slowly wakes and gets on with its day, working, loving, gossiping, complaining, before slowing down towards nightfall and falling back asleep again. It's an engaging story, and there's a lot of unexpected nasty humor in it (Llareggub is Bugger all spelled backward) and it's a rewarding read. I'd like to hear it done by good voice actors.


*Letters To a Young Poet -- Rainier Maria Rilke

An aspiring poet named Kappus wrote to Rilke in the early 1900s asking for advice. Rilke wrote back, saying that he declined to critique Kappus's poems because "Nobody can advise you that way, nobody. You must go into yourself." Instead he wrote about how to be a poet generally: how to engage with art, how to take in the world around you, how to nourish the rich inner life that a poet must have. He had a lot to say about that; there were ten letters in all. (Kappus published them in the twenties, after Rilke died.) I thought they were really interesting, and I later sought out some of the writers whose works Rilke recommended Kappus read to help him form a sense of the poetic.


Recitatif -- Toni Morrison

This is the only short story Morrison wrote, recently published in a standalone edition. It's the story of a girl named Twyla, who in the fifties is taken away from her single mother and sent to an orphanage, where her only friend is another girl in the same case named Roberta.  Twyla runs across Roberta again in the sixties, seventies, and eighties, and though they were allies as children, their class and political differences make them enemies as adults. The gimmick of the story is that we know that one of them is white and the other is black, but not which is which, so when you're reading it you have to hold two mental pictures at the same time; the story looked different depending on which mental image I was holding, which is a good way of forcing me to consider how much of that difference is inherent in their situation and how much of it comes from my own prejudices. It was well told.


*How Are Verses Made? -- Vladimir Mayakovsky

An essay on the subject of the social responsibility of the poet. Mayakovsky was a committed Marxist-Leninist and he was convinced that the only true use of art is in the service of society. He speaks of an understanding of language, a sense of what words mean in general and what they mean to your audience specifically, as an essential tool of the poet, but not as essential as the existence of a social problem whose solution can only be conceived of in poetic terms; to him this was the only possible source of true poetry. He was generally in trouble: first for criticizing the moribund failures of the Tsarist government, later for criticizing the Soviets' bureaucratic resistance to anything experimental. He was driven off stage by the Tsarist police, but under the Soviets he avoided official persecution because Stalin thought he was Russia's greatest poet (this was because Mayakovsky was a fellow Georgian, not because Stalin really appreciated poetry.) He shot himself in 1930, apparently over a failed love affair, so we don't know if Stalin's tolerance would have gone on forever. A very interesting book, I thought.


Sea of Tranquility -- Emily St. John Mandel

The problem with all time-travel stories is that you could always add another sentence at the end that says "And then someone else used the time machine and undid it all, so none of that mattered." Some stories have other strengths that make you forgive the central problem; this one didn't.


*Iphigenia In Tauris -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Goethe's rewriting of the story of Orestes going to Taurica at Apollo's command in order to steal the statue of Artemis from the temple there, and unexpectedly finding his sister Iphigeneia, who has been serving as a priestess there ever since Artemis secretly rescued her from the sacrifice at Aulis. Goethe makes several changes to the play: the original was tragicomic, and Goethe wanted a more high-minded story. So he makes Orestes misinterpret Apollo's oracle that he needs to bring his sister back from Taurica as meaning Apollo's sister (rather than being sent on what Goethe would have considered a silly mission to steal a wooden idol.) He also adds another character, a wise older man who acts as advisor to the Taurians' king, Thoas, to make Thoas's courtship of Iphigeneia a more romantic and dignified story than Euripides's idea that a barbarian king would just naturally lust after a Hellene. Finally, instead of Euripides's farcical ending where the Greeks fool the Taurians into looking the other way while they escape, leaving Thoas raging helplessly, Goethe (who didn't want his heroine to triumph by lying) instead adds a revelation and reconciliation scene, where everyone reveals the truth about themselves to everyone else. Orestes and Thoas prepare to fight but Iphigeneia makes Thoas see the reason of her position and they part friends.


The Gift of Fear -- Gavin de Becker

A book about social-engineering methods that predators use to get close to victims before attacking. What they mostly have in common is that people generally are socialized to avoid conflict and are more worried about causing a scene than they are about being attacked. Women in particular are taught from a young age that nothing is more important than avoiding making men feel uncomfortable, and will do things like ride alone in an elevator with someone they find threatening rather than wait for the next one. His message is, basically, trust your instincts, and remember that your safety is more important than the imaginary hurt feelings of some stranger.


*Alvin Steadfast on Vernacular Island -- Frank Jacobs and Edward Gorey

A spoof of boys' adventure stories. The hero is a boy accompanying a famous explorer to a mysterious island, where figures of speech become literally true -- the Glowing Report shines brightly as it repeats only good news, while the Running Commentary trots alongside breathlessly giving its opinions. The explorer and the boy end up working to defeat the Bitter Grudge and its allies, the Purple Rage and the Ugly Rumour. I thought it was pretty good.


*Letters From Sunnyside and Spain -- Washington Irving (Stanley T. Williams, ed.)

Letters that Irving wrote to his nieces (they're addressed to Sarah Storrow, his oldest niece, but the letters are meant for all six of them.) The first group he wrote in 1840 and 1841, when he was living in "Sunnyside", his house in Tarrytown on the Hudson River. The second group he wrote in 1842-45, from Madrid, where he had been unwillingly sent as US Ambassador by President Tyler. The Sunnyside letters are gossipy and entertaining; Irving was almost sixty, famous, successful, and in good spirits. He did a lot of entertaining at his house -- Dickens stayed there during his American tour -- and the letters are full of news of family and friends, accounts of parties, remarks about books he'd been reading, and quotidian life generally. The Spain letters are less gossipy, naturally, but they provide an in-depth picture of the generals and royals of Spain, who spent all their energy competing over who got to run the regency during the minority of the teenaged Queen; the power struggle turned into something of a game of musical chairs, and Irving had to maintain good diplomatic relations with all participants. He was a capable and intelligent man, who was also naturally charming and spoke excellent Spanish, so he managed it all, but you can tell that he was tired and homesick. He knew how to write an entertaining letter, though. As I think I've said before, I'm sure I would have liked Irving if I'd known him.


The Great Thinking Machine -- Jacques Futrelle

When we were little, Dan and I had a slim book of three Thinking Machine stories, which included "The Problem of Cell 13", his most famous story (about a prison escape) along with a fake-ghost story and a story about industrial espionage where it turned out that the boss's typist was propping her phone off the hook and typing in Morse code. (That one was kind of a stretch.) That book was wrecked when rain came in an open window, so I bought a collection of a dozen Thinking Machine stories. Rereading "The Problem of Cell 13" I was surprised to realize that the edition Dan and I had was abridged, and the full story is rather longer. Honestly "The Problem of Cell 13" is the only really good story and the others are all forgettable.


*Staying Up Much Too Late -- Gordon Theisen

A decent book about Edward Hopper's painting Night Hawks, which I have always liked. I went to see it in Chicago when I was there. Theisen's opinions are pretty pessimistic; he notes that the customers in the diner, even the man and woman who appear to be together, aren't looking at anyone and instead kind of stare off into space. There's also no door visible in the painting, possibly giving a subconscious impression that there's no way out. He draws all kinds of connections with film noir, the jazz music that was contemporary when Hopper worked, the mechanization of society, and a bunch of other things, all generally arguing that the picture represents the failure of the American dream. I wouldn't go so far as that, myself. I do think it's a dark picture and the people in it seem lost and defeated, but it's long after midnight in the picture, and the way the world looks at three in the morning isn't the way it looks all the time.


Lawn Boy -- Gary Paulsen

I picked this up because it's obviously a middle-reader book and I wondered why it was in the "Banned Books" section at Barnes and Noble. It's a story about a twelve-year-old kid whose grandfather gives him a used riding mower, and who starts a lawn-care business that kind of gets away from him -- eventually he's overseeing a couple dozen sub-contracting undocumented Latin guys, getting all his profits hugely multiplied by a hippie day-trader, and eventually sponsoring a heavyweight boxer (which comes in handy when he needs some muscle to run off the thugs horning in on his territory.) I wondered if it was banned because it's too good a picture of amoral capitalism, but it turns out Barnes and Noble had just mistaken it for a different book of the same name that deals with adolescent sexuality. I did think it was pretty funny.


*My Brother's Book -- Maurice Sendak

His last book, published posthumously, and the only book of his I've read that wasn't a children's book. The art is nothing like the illustrations of the Wild Things or Pierre; it's watercolor paintings that look a lot like the work of William Blake. It's a story about two brothers who are torn apart by a fiery meteor, flung to opposite ends of the Earth, and who go through various perils until they enter the netherworld and are reunited, going contentedly to sleep together. Sendak wrote it when he knew he was dying, and it may be a valediction for his lifelong partner, who died shortly before he did, as well as to himself.


*The Waltz Invention -- Vladimir Nabokov

A dull play about a man named Waltz who goes to the Ministry of War in his country and tells him that he has developed a massively powerful and irresistible weapon. After several demonstrations of his power -- blowing up mountains, that sort of thing -- the government offers to buy the weapon, but Waltz refuses, declaring that he means to use his power to enforce world peace. The ministers give in and Waltz is made head of the government; he enforces peace, but over time grows bored, demanding ever greater luxury and subservience, and eventually announces he will blow up the world out of spite, at which point we return to the original meeting in the Ministry of War and we see that the whole story was a fantasy in the mind of Waltz, who is insane. When Nabokov translated the play into English in 1965, he felt it necessary to include a warning to the reader that it is not an anti-war play, and that the war in Vietnam is wholly right and justified and the people protesting it are selfish fools. I feel like this would be the proper place for an eye-roll emoji.


*Songs of Experience -- William Blake

The second part of Songs of Innocence and Experience. In Blake's allegorical cosmology, "Experience" is the third of the four worlds, the world of physical existence, to which humanity has fallen from the ultimate world of "Eternity" because the human qualities of reason, faith, and imagination are at war with each other instead of in harmony. Many of the poems in this part are dark mirrors of poems from the first part -- so where the first part contains "The Lamb" (Little Lamb who made thee? Little Lamb God bless thee) the second part contains "The Tyger" (Did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the Lamb make thee?) One has "Infant Joy", the other "Infant Sorrow"; one has "The Blossom", the other "Poison Tree". They're all lifted up by his strange and mystical engravings, which he hand-colored for every copy of the book (my edition is a facsimile of one he colored in 1794.)


*The Education of Richard Henry Dana, Jr. -- James David Hart

This is a 25-page essay that Hart wrote overnight in a hotel room in order to convince the editor of the Oxford University Press that he was the right man to write an Oxford Companion to American Literature. (He got the job.) He later published it in the New England Quarterly in 1936; my copy is a reprint that Dad bought used somewhere for fifty cents. It goes over the stages of Dana's education: first at home, taught by his highly educated father; then at Harvard, whose rote learning he found dull ("Lethargic and persistent dependence upon eighteenth-century traditions was not a characteristic peculiar to the president of Harvard; it was, on the contrary, typical of the Cambridge of that period.") Expelled in the spring of his first year for expressing support for the leaders of a student rebellion, he spent six months studying with a private tutor named Woods, of whom Dana later said that he was the first man he had met who showed him that it was possible to be devoutly religious without being a close-minded bigot. Private tutoring under an intelligent and inspiring teacher suited him much better than the repetitious routine of Harvard, and Woods seems to have brought out and nurtured his talents; he was sorry when his "exile" ended and he had to return to Cambridge. He finished another year at Harvard before he caught measles, after which his eyesight was so poor he could no longer read or study, so he set out on the most important (and best-known) stage of his education: serving before the mast on a sailing ship for two years until his eyes recovered. It was a comprehensive essay, and entertainingly written. Hart was definitely the right hire for the Oxford Press.


*Life of a Good-For-Nothing -- Joseph von Eichendorff

A picaresque story of a young German man who doesn't fit in in his home town and frets so much under his father's uncompromising authority that he leaves everything behind and takes to the road. He has a series of unlikely adventures wherein he meets, loses, regains, and marries the love of his life. It's a bit of pleasant escapism, but nothing that really sticks in my mind.  


How To Feed a Dictator -- Witold Szabłowski

A really interesting book on working for thugs. The author found and spoke to the men who were the personal chefs for utter bastards like Pol Pot and Enver Hoxha and got them to talk about what their jobs were like. In general, because the cook could potentially poison the boss, they were treated well, though when Idi Amin's son got a stomach ache, Amin came into the kitchen with a gun and told them that if his son didn't feel better soon he was going to kill everyone there.  One thing that really struck me was how defensive they all were -- like, they didn't only argue that they were powerless and that working in the dictator's kitchen meant that they (and their families) had access to food in times of near starvation, they also said things like "OK, so yeah he rounded up protesters and burned them in pits, but he only did that when he had to." I found it fascinating.


The Dramatic Festivals of Athens -- Sir Arthur Pickard-Cambridge

I picked this up at a used book store in Rotterdam. It's the standard work on everything we know about the Athenian theater, deeply researched and comprehensive. Play competitions were put on at two festivals (the Dionysia, in summer, and the Lenaia, in winter); there were performances at other festivals, but these were the ones that counted, where prizes were given. In general both tragedy and comedy appeared at both festivals, but the majority of comedies were put on at the Lenaia, probably because it was hard to travel in the winter and Athenians were more willing to hear the city criticized when there weren't a lot of strangers in the audience. The author brings together information from all the Greek sources about how the plays were staged, how the music and dancing were incorporated, what a day at the festival was like for a play-goer. The theater at Athens sat about 15,000 people, so the majority of citizens could be there. There seems to have been standing-room so that slaves hanging around waiting for their owners could watch the play. Which is considerate, I guess. Of course higher-status people sat towards the front; since the theater was sacred to Dionysos, the priest of Dionysos sat in the place of honor (which makes it all the funnier that in The Frogs, Aristophanes has Dionysos flee into the audience; he's actually running to beg for protection from his own high priest!) The author has a much better prose style than you usually find in academic books and I enjoyed the whole thing.


Upright Women Wanted -- Sarah Gailey

A near-future Western, set in the southwest of a crumbling authoritarian America. Our hero, Esther, watches the public hanging of her best friend (and secret lover) Beatriz for possession of "unapproved materials" (resistance literature). Although the hangman is Esther's father and we're left to wonder how much he knows about them. Esther decides to run away from her husband and her town; her plan is to join the Librarians, a select group of women, famous for being stern and morally upright, who maintain a travelling library in a sort of horse-and-wagon bookmobile. Esther's naive hope is that the Librarians will accept her and she'll be able to use their moral example to overcome her own deviance; but it turns out that on top of being gun-slinging book-lending badasses, the Librarians are all queer women who are secretly the backbone of the resistance. Now obviously I don't expect a lot of realism in a gay gunfighter dystopia, and I could have used somewhat more plot development, but the real story of the book is Esther learning a different lesson from the example of the Librarians than she expected: that being who she really is is not only good but worth fighting for.


Memory Wall -- Anthony Doerr

A collection of stories mostly about people dealing with failing memory. The title story is about an old woman who has downloaded many of her memories onto cartridges (a thing people do in the world of her story in order to fight dementia) and has lined a wall of her house with them; a pair of thieves sneak into her house every night to search through them, looking for a memory of the day her husband, right before dying unexpectedly, told her about an important find he'd made out in the desert. There's another about a very old woman, a Holocaust survivor, whose epileptic seizures bring on cascades of childhood memories of life before the camps. They were beautifully written.


*Letters to Dead Authors -- Andrew Lang

A couple dozen letters written to deceased authors such as Dickens, Burns, Poe, Omar Khayyam, Eusebius of Caesarea, and others, telling them what he liked and didn't like about their plots, character, prose, and work generally, in an imitation of their style (the letter to Pope is written in heroic couplets, for instance). He wrote them for a London magazine in the late 19th century. They're mostly positive; he was free to pick his subjects and he naturally picked ones he liked. He called Poe the greatest literary genius of America and thought that Americans didn't rate him as highly as he deserved ("With a commendable patriotism, they are not apt to rate native merit too low") because people then still living remembered the sting of his very harsh book reviews. I thought Lang took Dickens too much to task over his pathos scenes, and in some places he seemed merely to be repeating popular cant, going on about his indifference to the deathbed of Little Nell (Nell is never once called "little" in the book and she dies offstage so there is no deathbed scene.) Not bad overall, though.


Other Men's Daughters -- Richard Stern

Kind of the Platonic ideal of a mid-20th-century novel written by a middle-aged white guy: the story of a middle-aged Harvard professor, married with four kids, who rediscovers passion with a nineteen-year-old girl. It's not clear what draws the girl to the professor, since Stern probably didn't know what "daddy issues" are, and (unusually for this type of book) she isn't awed by his great intellect, since Stern goes to some pains to show us that she's both unintelligent and incurious. The professor wants an amicable divorce that leaves his relationship with his children intact, and seems heartbroken that he can't have that. I didn't feel a lot of sympathy for him.


Otherwise Fables -- Oscar Mandel

A book of short two- or three-page beast-fables, collected together with two novellas. The fables are modelled on Aesop but more cynical. For example, there's a conversation between a bulldozer and a mouse, where the bulldozer argues that destroying the field the mouse lives in is actually good because the mouse will be able to steal food from the human houses that are being put in its place. I don't really remember the novellas; probably the fables were pithier.


The War That Made the Roman Empire -- Barry Strauss

A book about the civil war between Octavian and Mark Antony, culminating in the decisive battle of Actium in 31 BCE. Strauss draws a thorough and entertaining picture of the Roman world in the fourth decade BCE, putting in high relief the conflicting family lines, marriages, power strategies, and personal histories that led to the war. Strauss is very much on the side of Antony and Cleopatra; he clearly finds them sympathetic, and he highlights their best qualities, their ingenuity, daring, and resourcefulness in the face of defeat; while conversely he emphasizes Octavian's cold ruthlessness and pragmatism. Antony of course was far more flamboyant, leading his army in person and generally behaving like the hero of a story, while Octavian quietly carried out a lengthy strategic plan that baffled his enemies and eventually forced them to fight at a heavy disadvantage at Actium -- a battle that he sent Agrippa to fight for him. Strauss imagines an interesting alternative world if the battle had gone the other way: the capital of the empire moving to Alexandria, the rulers of the empire having the title and show of king instead of cloaking kingly power under a false front of republicanism, as Octavian did. All in all it was really well-told and interesting. The main flaw in it was that Strauss, for what reason I don't understand, really hates Antony's fourth wife, Octavian's sister Octavia the Younger, and bizarrely blames the whole war on her. He baselessly imagines scenes of Octavia reveling in the carnage and pretty much calls her the worst person of the ancient world. None of that makes any sense, as all records are unanimous that she was wholly faithful to Antony, even after he very publicly dumped her to go bang the queen of Egypt; and after he divorced her she still tried to keep the peace and even kept Octavian from executing Antony's children by his earlier wives (well, all but one.) I'm surprised an editor didn't ask him if everything was all right at home.


The King Is Always Above the People -- Daniel Alarcon

A collection of short stories, mostly set in Peru, though some are set in California. They're mainly about moral dilemmas: what does it mean to be a good man, a good father, a good husband, and can you be all of them at the same time? How do you reconcile your personal honor with doing what's necessary to feed your hungry children? In one story the main character has had to take care of his younger brothers and sisters since he was ten years old, and the story develops to make it unsurprising and even natural that he eventually turns to robbing grocery stores. Most of the characters seem helpless, tossed this way and that by interacting power structures that they can't understand or control; but the title story obliquely shows us that that's not always true, since The King Is Always Above the People is the inscription on a post card that shows a crowd looking up at the hanged body of a military dictator. I liked it.


*Some Fruits of Solitude -- William Penn
 
A sort of commonplace-book that Penn wrote during his imprisonment for unorthodoxy, along with his treatises on politics and civil resistance. It's basically a Quaker version of Poor Richard, a collection of maxims and moral lessons, generally rebuking pride and recommending resignation to Providence.


City of Thieves -- David Benioff

An excellent novel about the siege of Leningrad. It has a sort of Conradian structure, with the narrator telling us the story as he heard it from his grandfather Lev. The opening is gripping: "You have never been so hungry. You have never been so cold." The teenaged Lev is arrested when he's caught going through the pockets of a dead Nazi paratrooper, looking for food; he and a Red Army soldier named Kolya (who's been charged with desertion because he got back to his unit late after sneaking off to a brothel) are brought before an NKVD colonel, who confiscates their ration cards -- essentially a death sentence -- and tells them that his daughter is soon to be married, and he wants to bake a cake for her, and if the two of them come back inside of a week with a dozen eggs, he'll give them their cards back and forget they were arrested, and he sends them off to search for eggs in the middle of the starving city. Kolya remembers a chicken farm about fifty kilometers outside the city, and they reason that Nazis like eggs too so maybe they haven't destroyed the farm; with no better options, they head across country, on the way getting lost, falling in with resistance guerillas, ambushing Nazis, hiding among a group of Russian prisoners, and plotting the revenge killing of a Nazi SS officer during a chess game, all the while trying to find the eggs. I thought it was great.


Lord Nelson -- C.S. Forester

A hagiography that's also a brief for the defense, angrily defending Nelson against the (wholly deserved) criticism he faced for hanging prisoners after they'd surrendered on terms, and simultaneously trying to justify Nelson for deserting his wife and flaunting a public affair while also insisting that no such affair ever took place, and Nelson's relationship to Emma Hamilton was purely chivalrous and only dirty swine could imagine otherwise. It's a terrible book and I'm mildly surprised it got published, even with Forester's name on it.


Banzai Babe Ruth -- Robert K. Fitts

An entertaining book about the Major League's barnstorming tour of Japan in late 1934. The American All-Stars, made up of greats like Babe Ruth, Jimmie Foxx, and Lou Gehrig, and coached by Connie Mack, played 18 exhibition games against a team of All-Nippon Stars, most of whom were signed right after the tour to the first professional Japanese team, the Yomiuri Giants. The Americans won all 18 games -- Ruth hit 13 home runs -- but they weren't walkovers, the games were fun to watch. The tour was a huge success; the Japanese loved baseball and Ruth was enormously popular there, vast crowds chanting "Banzai Babe Ruth!" every time he appeared in public. (Ruth later called the Japanese "a friendly people with a crackpot government".) A lot happened in the two months -- Ruth and Gehrig got into a fight that left them not speaking for the next ten years; the Red Sox catcher, Moe Berg, spent his off time disguising himself and illegally taking movies of military installations, whether off his own bat or on the orders of the US government has never really been settled; Connie Mack made speeches about his genuinely sincere hopes that baseball could ease international tensions (Mack probably didn't realize that the feelings of the people in general were of no importance to the military junta that was already preparing for all-out war.) There's a recap and box score for every game, too, which I appreciated. I liked it.


*Benchley Lost and Found -- Robert Benchley

Short comic pieces from the New Yorker a hundred years ago. It's basically complaint comedy, the 1920s equivalent of standups going on about airplane food and hotel rooms. None of it made much of an impression on me.


Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City -- K.J. Parker

An action-adventure book set in an imaginary medieval empire. The hero, a colonel of engineers named Orhan, belongs to one of the lower-caste peoples of the empire and has fought prejudice and favoritism to rise in the ranks through competent intelligence. While building a bridge out in the boonies, his unit is ambushed by unidentified attackers; fighting their way free they head for the nearest fortified town, only to find it abandoned. As they make their way back to the capital, Orhan works out what's happened from rumors and refugees: the subject peoples have rebelled, allied themselves with outside enemies, taken huge areas of land, and are now marching on the capital with a massive host. The unprepared empire has largely collapsed and the parts of the army that aren't stationed unreachably far away have commandeered the fleet and abandoned the city. Back in the capital, Orhan goes to the empty offices of the general staff and can find no one to give him orders; he goes further and further into the palace until he reaches the Imperial quarters, where he finds the last remaining member of the government, an elderly minister, sitting by the body of the Emperor, who it turns out has been in a coma for years and has just finally died. Well shouldn't we go get the princes? Both the princes died in a boating accident a few years ago and it was kept quiet for morale reasons. So who's in charge then? No one. There's no army, no fleet, no government, and the city is about to come under siege; clearly the only sensible thing to do is try to save himself; Orhan thinks about it, then takes the dead Emperor's signet and goes out to give orders "in the name of the Emperor" to get ready for the defense of the city. I really liked it.


A Bookshop in Berlin -- Françoise Frenkel

A world war II memoir. It was originally published in 1945 but apparently it wasn't promoted well and everyone forgot about it until someone came across a copy at a garage sale and republished it fifteen years ago. Frenkel was a Polish-born graduate of the Sorbonne who established Berlin's first French-language book shop in 1921; at first her customers were mainly refugees from the revolution in Russia, who all spoke and read French. Throughout the twenties her shop became something of an intellectual salon; Colette often visited there. After the Nazis came to power the shop was placed under an official boycott, since the owner was a triple threat -- an intellectual Polish Jew; but she bravely stayed open, resisting the censors and the Party thugs, until Kristallnacht, when she fled to France. (The Nazis seized her shop and burned all the books.) Arriving in Paris not long ahead of the Nazis, she had to flee again, to Avignon and then Nice (her estranged husband was arrested in Paris and died in Auschwitz.) In Nice, she happened to be in the basement when the Gestapo raided her hotel and took all the Jews away; some French friends took her in and hid her (even in 1945 she didn't want to reveal their names for fear that Vichy pro-Nazis would retaliate against them) and with their help she managed to cross the border into Switzerland, where she lived out the war. It was a gripping story.


A Handbook of Classical Drama -- Philip Whaley Harsh

This was one of the pile of books from his office that my college professor David Knauf gave me when he retired. I used it extensively as a resource in college and grad school, so I was already familiar with a lot of it, but I'd never just sat down and read straight through the whole thing. Harsh takes all the Greek playwrights and goes through their plays in order, discussing historical context, linguistic issues, and what the playwright may have been trying to accomplish with each one. It's very thorough and also better written and more engaging than the usual run of academic books, so I really enjoyed it.


Beyond Survival -- Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (editors)

A collection of essays about trying to steer the country towards restorative justice, rather than retributive justice. Some of them were better written than others. I see the morality of restorative justice, but I'm pessimistic that a nation as opposed to community effort as ours is right now would be willing to go to the effort that community involvement in reconciliation and rehabilitation requires.


How to Run an Empire and Get Away With It -- K.J. Parker

Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City didn't really need a sequel, but here we are. As the book opens the siege has been going on for seven years. Orhan was killed years ago, and to keep up morale his officers made his bodyguard Lysimachus the Emperor, pushing propaganda that it was city-bred Lysimachus who was the real hero and leaving low-born Orhan out of the story. The hero of this book, an actor and celebrity impersonator called Notker, is hauled out of bed by army officers who tell him that Emperor Lysimachus has been killed by a catapult stone and that he, Notker, is going to take the Emperor's place so the people won't know he's dead. But I don't know how to run a city! So what, Lysimachus didn't either, he just did what we told him, you can do the same. Soon afterwards the officers are killed in a coup, and when Notker tells the new cabal he's just an actor they think he's bullshitting them to try to escape. A counter-coup throws out the cabal and Notker finds himself in charge of the city, with no one who knows or will believe that he's not really Lysimachus. Kind of a repeat of the setup from the first book, really, only with a weaselly liar in charge instead of a conscientious soldier. Still, weaselly liars have their uses, and Notker does the best he can. It wasn't enough to make me read the third book, though.


The Strange Case of Doctor Couney -- Dawn Raffel

The amazing story of Martin Couney (probably not his real name) who in the first half of the 20th century saved the lives of many of America's premature babies by keeping them alive in chicken-egg incubators until they were able to survive on their own. The kicker is that he had no support of any kind for doing this -- premature babies were considered "monstrous births" and just left to die; no effort was made to help them. On top of that, Couney had no medical license in the US, and in fact he probably never qualified as a doctor at all, despite his claims of degrees from medical schools in Europe. (He probably really did attend lectures by Pierre Budin, the main proponent of incubation in France...unless he just saw the article in The Lancet. Nobody's sure.) So in a really impressive display of lateral thinking, he rounded up premature babies that were being discarded at hospitals and exhibited them as freaks in the freak show at Coney Island, using the ticket money to pay for their incubators! He kept literally tens of thousands of babies alive in his incubators for almost forty years, using his success as ammunition in a propaganda war against the eugenics movement, which he despised, and which argued for improving America by killing "defective" babies, which of course would include all premature births. People still study Couney's methods today: he kept a much higher standard of hygiene than most hospitals of the era, and he hired trained nurses, whom he instructed to pick the babies up and cuddle them often, which was also not the usual practice then. I found the whole book astonishing. I loved it.


Orwell's Roses -- Rebecca Solnit

An essay collection whose theme was suggested by an Orwell essay, one he wrote during the war, in which he argued that planting trees was probably a better use of one's time than most things, and mentioned that he had recently passed a cottage where he had once lived and where he had spent sixpence on rosebushes to grow on the fence, and saw that the roses were still there and healthy. (Solnit doesn't mention it, but Orwell said later that the only response his article got was a complaint from a Communist reader that roses were bourgeois.) Building on that, Solnit writes a discursive book on beauty, ephemera, climate change, Anglophilia, the exploitation of India by the British, totalitarianism, and all sorts of other things. I had not known that the roses Americans buy at florists are almost all grown in Central America, on flower plantations where the workers are paid poorly and treated worse, sucking up an enormous percentage of the region's drinking water before being flown to the US at a huge cost in airplane fuel, only to be discarded after a few days. That was depressing. Solnit spends some time wandering around Suffolk looking for the cottage, not finding it but doing a lot of interesting thinking about Orwell and his relationship to the power class of England. I really liked it. I thought of it again just recently, when I went to Rutland to look at my uncle George's house -- he died in 1978 -- and saw that the roses he planted in the front yard sixty years ago are still there.


Spy of the First Person -- Sam Shepard

Shepard's last book, an imagined memoir of an unnamed narrator whose worsening age-related illnesses are making him more and more dependent on his family, for which he is both grateful and resentful. Shepard was dying from Lou Gehrig's disease when he wrote it, which informs the book, but the story is fiction, not autobiography. The narrator is exhausted from illness and from life in general, and he meditates on watching himself dying, which occasionally wanders off into stream-of-consciousness irrelevance but mostly works. It was good but I didn't enjoy it.


Antigone -- Jean Anouilh

Not a translation of Sophokles; this is Anouilh's own retelling of the Antigone story. It was written (and performed!) under the Nazi occupation, which amazes me, but apparently the Nazi censor just couldn't recognize allegory and assumed the play was harmless escapism because it was set in ancient Greece. I was in a production of this in college, but I hadn't read it in the original French before. The tyrant Kreon transposes exceptionally well to a self-justifying Fascist dictator. Anouilh shows Antigone as initially concerned only with her own individual trouble -- she can't bear to leave her brother unburied -- only to be forced, in her angry debate with Kreon, to define for herself her larger belief that morality cannot be dictated by the state, and the orders of a tyrant cannot make a wrongful act right. (Unfortunately he kind of overdoes the innocent-adolescent part and Antigone comes across in her first scene as a kind of annoying manic pixie dream girl, but that doesn't last.) Unlike Kreon in Sophokles, who understandably reacts to the suicides of his niece, son, and wife by collapsing and wishing for death, Anouilh's Kreon stonily goes back to work. Actually I wonder if the censor was a secret anti-fascist.


*The Critics Debate: The Waste Land and Ash Wednesday -- Arnold P. Hinchliffe

A fairly short summary of critical response, both contemporary and subsequent, to Eliot's long poems. It's a good overview, broken down into subheadings -- does Eliot's cold impersonality help the poems or hurt them? Did Eliot really expect the reader to recognize so many obscure allusions, and if not, what was the value of including them? Do the poems actually have a narrative, or just an illusion of one? It's pretty thorough, but like a lot of surveys it gives more weight to the negative criticism. You can get more mileage out of that, I guess, but it tends to create the false idea that the poems were widely condemned, which isn't true. Always repeating that Amy Lowell called The Waste Land "utter tripe" makes her seem more representative of general criticism than she really was. (The original edition of Ash Wednesday had seven blank pages before the text began; one critic remarked that this "prodigality of paper" gave the line "Because I do not hope to turn again" an immediate meaning.)


*Who Betrays Elizabeth Bennett? -- John Sutherland

An entertaining book proposing possible solutions to plot points the author wondered about in classic novels. Who told Lady Catherine that Mr Darcy had proposed to Elizabeth? Sutherland suggests that it was Charlotte Lucas, out of jealousy, which seems unnecessarily catty to me -- I've always assumed that Mr Collins found out from Charlotte, and he told Lady Catherine because he was still mad at Elizabeth for rejecting him. (Lucy: "And because he was a douche.") How could Pip not know about Joe and Biddy's wedding? Possibly because Joe had spent all his money to get Pip out of debt and didn't want Pip to feel bad seeing the resulting pauper's wedding. Why does Jo the sweeper die of smallpox, when cholera would have been far more likely? Because Dickens needed Esther to catch smallpox from Jo, so that her face would be somewhat disfigured, thus explaining why no one noticed her resemblance to Lady Dedlock. I liked it all the more because Sutherland doesn't take himself too seriously. He refers to an earlier article he wrote suggesting that Fagin was essentially lynched: how could the crowd know, before the trial, that he would be hanged on Monday? What was he actually charged with? Couldn't he have argued that Sikes killed Nancy without his knowledge? Why was he executed immediately with no time to appeal? Couldn't his defense attorney have gotten the sentence commuted to transportation? In this book Sutherland prints a letter from a lawyer essentially telling him all his arguments are empty: Fagin would have been charged with incitement to murder (telling Sikes that Nancy had spoken to the police); the death penalty was fixed by statute and the judge had no other option; the trial was on Friday, and by law the execution would take place on the first weekday following the close of session, which the crowd would have known; in Fagin's time the defendant didn't get an attorney, and wasn't allowed to testify in his own defense, and didn't have the right to an appeal. "Which really holes my article below the waterline." I enjoyed it.


Wave -- Sonali Deraniyagala

A memoir of surviving the tsunami that hit Sri Lanka after an earthquake in the Indian Ocean in 2004. The earlier part of the book tells about the event: Deraniyagala was in a Jeep fleeing the coast when the water overtook them, killing her husband and both of her children -- she describes how the water tore her sons right out of her arms -- and after being tumbled underwater for a long time she eventually washed up pummeled but alive. Her parents' home was destroyed, killing both of them. The great majority of the memoir is about the aftermath and her coping with her grief, which by the time of writing she has come to believe she will never really come to terms with. I feel like the book did her more good to write than it will do anybody else to read.


All the Seas of the World -- Guy Gavriel Kay

A historical novel, set in his imaginary analogue of fifteenth-century Italy with all the names changed. (There are two moons, to remind us that this isn't the real world, and a very minor magical element, which I've always thought he includes so he can market his books as "fantasy".) This is set at a time between two other novels of his, and characters from those books reappear here, which I thought rather weakened them. The duke-turned-resistance-fighter has all the same beats he had in Children of Earth and Sky -- he repeats his line about "I am lord of nothing now, call me Skandir", and even tells the story over again about how life was so harsh where he grew up that the houses were all on stilts so no attacker could get in without exposing his head. It was impressive the first time but left me unmoved on repetition. Byzantium (I'm not going to bother with the made-up names) has recently fallen, and the European states are trying to cope with the new international power structure. Two sea traders (one a Jew expelled from Spain, one an Italian escapee from an Ottoman harem) have come to North Africa in order to assassinate the Caliph; they were hired by powerful Muslim pirates who would prefer the far-off authority of the new Sultan in Istanbul to the inconveniently nearby Caliph. In a properly Byzantine development, the accomplice they send to deliver the poison decides to give the Caliph only enough of the dose to knock him out, and steal a priceless diamond and an even more priceless antique manuscript instead; the traders immediately kill the accomplice for breaking their deal. The Caliph dies anyway, since the traders (just in case the accomplice lost his nerve) had lied about how strong the poison was. The vizier, finding the Caliph dead, decides that his only path to survival is to make himself the new Caliph, which leads to a bloodbath and all witnesses dead; since the vizier doesn't want to admit that the diamond was stolen (which would be a hole in his the-boss-was-murdered-by-disaffected-guards story) and he didn't even know about the manuscript, the traders get away with both treasures and no one looking for them. The rest of the book follows the ever-widening repercussions of the first part: the reactions of the Pope, the Italian states, the African corsair empires, and Istanbul to the regime change, and the traders maneuvering to get rid of the diamond and the manuscript without getting themselves killed. The opening and the middle were good, full of action and philosophical reflections, and Kay always does a very good job of showing the ripple effects that the actions of the main characters have on other characters we know nothing about -- there's an affecting few paragraphs about how the accomplice's father, a respected judge in a smallish town, who always hoped that his son might tire of wandering and return home, found out months afterwards that his son had been knifed in the big city, and lived heartbroken before dying prematurely a year or two later. Strictly speaking, I suppose that's not necessary to the plot, but it really helps give more weight to the action scenes. I did think the ending was kind of lackluster, but overall I enjoyed it.


Radical Prunings -- Bonnie Thomas Abbott

A funny novel told in the form of gardening columns written by a middle-aged woman, whose greatest peeve is people writing in with questions about lawn care, which she sees as an entirely unrelated subject. The columns, which must run in some small English village paper that doesn't have an editor, wander off into complaints about her ex-husband (now a celebrity gardener on the BBC), the romantic entanglements of her two assistants, the problems her feckless brother causes her, and her long-running feud with her neighbor, who constantly writes passive-aggressive letters to her column anonymously, although he must know that she can recognize his handwriting. I liked it.


The 34-Ton Bat -- Steve Rushin

A pretty entertaining book about where the various elements of baseball came from and how they developed into what we have now. The book goes over the history of gloves (Lou Gehrig's hand was X-rayed in 1938 and showed 17 old breaks), bats (the 34-ton bat is a 120-foot ash bat that leans against the Louisville Slugger museum; "The Louisville Slugger" was the nickname of Pete Browning, a heavy hitter for the Louisville Colonels of the old American Association in the 1880s, who often played drunk, and one time forgot where he was, wandered off first base, and stood staring into space until the pitcher walked over and tagged him out, the only unassisted pickoff play I know of), baseballs (the US military originally patterned hand grenades after the shape of a baseball, on the theory that American men were used to throwing them), batting helmets, uniforms, and a lot more. I had never known that the Yankees' "NY" design is actually a copy of a 19th-century police medal (the first owner of the Yankees was the New York City police chief.) I thought it was very good.


Unix: a History and a Memoir -- Brian Kernighan

Kernighan's memories of how and why he and Thompson and Ritchie created Unix back in the sixties. I hadn't previously realized that Unix came first and the C language came after, and most of Unix was re-written retroactively in C. Of course it necessarily includes a lot of detail about Bell  Labs and what it was like to work there, and the personalities of his colleagues. He was a good writer and the book is pretty entertaining.


Between the World and Me -- Ta-Nehisi Coates

Ostensibly a letter from Coates to his son about being black in America. The title comes from a Richard Wright poem abut a lynching; James Baldwin quotes it in The Fire Next Time, and Coates was trying deliberately to write like Baldwin, without optimism, generally rejecting the idea that the moral arc of the Universe has a tendency to bend anywhere in particular, and on the contrary it's entirely possible that white supremacy is ineradicable and there will never be any justice, especially since it's just too easy and appealing for white people to ignore or never even learn the terrible and violent origins of white privilege in America. It was a radical and sobering book.


All That Man Is -- David Szalay

A collection of nine short stories about men at the climacterics of their lives -- the first protagonist is seventeen, and each succeeding protagonist is seven years older. The stories are all about contemporary European men failing at various phases of life, trying to start relationships, start businesses, start new lives, repair family rifts, find happiness; none of them have the tools to accomplish anything they set out to do and they all wind up their stories in the same fog of anomie and helpless resentment where they began. The whole thing was depressing as hell, very unlike the only other of his books I've read. I didn't like it.


Medallion Status -- John Hodgman

An unexpectedly honest memoir about an actor and comedian whose career is fading, and the lengths he goes to in order to try to keep it alive, comforting himself with odd things such as the various preferred-traveler status ratings he gets from airlines where he has to fly so often to make obscure TV shows few people see. It wasn't very funny, really, but the truthfulness of it kept me reading.


The Secret Life of the Savoy -- Olivia Williams

A behind-the-scenes history of the famous Savoy Hotel, built in London in the 1880s on the site of the thirteenth-century Savoy Palace, which had burned down decades before and sat abandoned until the theater impresario Richard D'Oyly-Carte bought the property in order to build a theater dedicated to his cash cows Gilbert and Sullivan. Having visited New York, he decided that London needed a luxury hotel up to American standards, and he built one next to the theater. He was better at building it than running it, though, and it didn't start making money until he persuaded the Swiss hotelier Cesar Ritz to manage the place, bringing the great Parisian chef Auguste Escoffier with him. They made the hotel a huge success, the favorite resort of the Prince of Wales and all his circle, but overreached themselves, embezzling money from the restaurant, demanding bribes from suppliers, commandeering unreasonable amounts of food and drink for their own houses. They were both fired in 1897; it the reasons were kept quiet to make things easier on all parties, but the D'Oyly-Carte family kept all the evidence, just in case Ritz made trouble, so it all came out a hundred years later, after D'Oyly-Carte's granddaughter, the last of the family, died. After that the hotel got bounced around to various private equity firms; it's now owned by a Saudi billionaire, like everything else. The first part of the book, covering the history up to world war two, is better than the second. But it was interesting.


The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessey -- Rachel Joyce

A frankly unnecessary companion book to The Unexpected Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, telling Harold's life story from Queenie's point of view. I didn't think much of it.


*Army Life in a Black Regiment -- Thomas Wentworth Higginson

Higginson was a Unitarian abolitionist from Cambridge; he was one of the Secret Six. Before this I knew him primarily as the encourager and first editor of Emily Dickinson. After getting wounded in action in the Massachusetts Infantry, he was made an officer in a regiment made up of volunteer freed slaves; the Secretary of War ruled that black regiments had to have white officers. Higginson admired and respected the men, who, he said, "voluntarily faced more dangers in their escape from slavery than any of us had incurred in all our lives." He mentions many of his men by name and describes their individual achievements, not something most officers of his time did. They spent the war in hard and dirty fighting, raiding and defending against raids, mostly in Carolina swamps. He also makes what appears to be the first written-down record of black spirituals, transcribing the soldiers' "shouts", a medley of individual improvisation rising up against communal singing of old songs, which left him deeply moved. It was a very good book.


Wrong About Japan -- Peter Carey

A semi-fictional travel book. Carey, who lives in New York, is anxious to connect with his twelve-year-old son Charley; Charley is into manga and anime, so Carey takes him on a work trip to Japan, where he interviews Hiyako Miyazaki and other anime creators. Charley is delighted, especially because he's for once in an environment where he's more at home than his father is. I liked the Miyazaki parts; less so the parts where Charley makes friends with a manic-pixieish native guide, a boy his own age named Takashi, who is obviously a fictional addition to the story. Overall it was only okay.


*Mathematical Byways -- Hugh Ap Simon

A recreational-math book setting various problems encountered by the inhabitants of the imaginary towns of Ayling, Beeling, and Ceiling. A farmer in Ayling resents that a suitor from Beeling climbs a ladder by night to woo his daughter; the farmer finds the ladder hidden on his property and measures its height and angle; what are the dimensions of the shed he needs to build against the house to make sure the ladder can't reach his daughter's window? The councils want to connect the three towns using as little road material as possible; how can they do it? That sort of thing. I thought they were fun.


Ada Lace Sees Red -- Emily Candarelli with Tamson Weston

A kids' book that Sabine lent me, about a middle-school girl who's doing well at math but bombing at art class, where her (I thought) overly-critical teacher hasn't noticed that Ada is color blind. I found it dull, but it did have a good picture of adults going straight to punishment without stopping to wonder why the kid is having trouble.


The Liar's Dictionary -- Eley Williams

A debut novel about a dictionary, taking place in two time periods. It alternates between the third-person story of a lonely and mistreated lexicographer called Winceworth in the nineteenth century, who is part of the team that compiles the original dictionary and gets a mild revenge on the world by inserting all kinds of made-up words in it, and the first-person story of Mallory, a twenty-first-century office dogsbody who's almost the only employee of the company that owns the dictionary and is now trying to digitize it. During the digitization process the editor has noticed all the false entries for the first time and assigns Mallory to weed them out. (The false entries are kind of overly clever, and someone should have noticed them long before this, if not right away, but you have to overlook that.) Mallory is understandably not very invested in what is kind of a pointless task at a dying publishing company, and more of the drama of her story comes from her fear of being outed at work (a fear not shared by her girlfriend, who to the contrary has been pushing her to come out) and the daily threatening calls the office gets from an anonymous harasser, which Mallory has to answer because there's no one else to do it. I rather liked it.


Sweet Sweet Revenge Ltd. -- Jonas Jonasson

A farcical story about a young Swedish woman and man who team up to get revenge on a nasty creep named Victor: the woman because Victor is her ex who tricked her out of her inheritance and then dumped her; the man because he's Victor's son from a previous marriage, and when he was a small boy, Victor got rid of him by abandoning him on the Kenyan savannah to die (he was taken in by a Maasai shaman.) Jonasson gets some fish-out-of-water comedy with the eighteen-year-old raised as a Maasai warrior trying to navigate downtown Stockholm, which was heavy-handed and felt kind of racist. The actual revenge plot was convoluted but not in a funny enough way, I thought. I've loved other books by Jonasson but I was kind of repelled by all the characters in this one and I didn't really like it.


The Bookseller of Florence -- Ross King

An engaging biography of a very important literary figure that I'd never heard of, the 15th-century Italian librarian Vespasiano da Bisticci. He was a highly skilled bookbinder and illustrator, but gave up both of those occupations after the printing press more or less ended his business; he really left his mark as an expert classifier and builder of magnificent library collections for the Medici family and later for the Pope. He was instrumental in the recovery and preservation of authors of the ancient world who had been forgotten or even rejected by pre-Renaissance Europe; we have many of Cicero's works, and essentially all of Quintilian, in a nearly complete state now largely due to Bisticci's diligence in finding and copying them. It's possible that even some of Plato may have disappeared if Bisticci hadn't spent decades copying and having copied all the manuscripts he could find. I'm glad to know about him.


The Original Hitchhiker Radio Scripts -- Douglas Adams and Geoffrey Perkins

Lucy gave me this. I got the original radio broadcasts on Audible and listened to them while reading the scripts; the scripts show the parts that got cut from the broadcasts, set inside brackets, so I got to read those too, which was cool. There's also quite a lot of supplementary material from people involved with the show -- Douglas Adams himself, the voice actors, the producers -- telling funny stories about the writing, the casting, and the recording, about how they got the show on the air in the first place, and how they wrapped everything up pretty neatly at the end of the season only for the show to completely unexpectedly become a huge hit, which meant they had to think of a way to unwrap the loose ends and write a second season (which they confidently ended on a cliffhanger, only for BBC Radio to inexplicably cancel the show.) It was great.


The Little Paris Bookshop -- Nina George

Meh. This is the story of Jean, an unhappy and dissatisfied man who runs a book shop in a houseboat on the Seine; after brooding over his life for a long time, one day he abruptly unmoors and heads down the river to look for his lost love, a married woman named Manon who ended their affair and went back to her husband twenty years ago. Just as the gap widens from the pier, one of his customers (Max) jumps on board, a writer whose latest book has unexpectedly become a best seller and who is running away from all the attention. The two of them follow the river all the way to Marseilles, with Max talking poetically about the power of literature while Jean basically mopes the whole time, moaning about getting dumped by Manon twenty years ago. It was irritating that Manon has no function in the story other than to be the lost prize that the male hero mourns, and she gets no character exploration and no resolution, since she's only important insofar as she motivates Jean. I wouldn't recommend it.


The Stones of London -- Leo Hollis

A good history of London told through the individual histories of a dozen buildings, starting with a pre-Roman ruin and ending with the monstrosity at St. Mary Axe (the Gherkin). The history of the buildings really shows you how London had to be rebuilt again and again and again, the whole city layout changing radically with the needs of the times, streets torn up for royal vanity projects, then torn down for firebreaks, then burned, torn up to install sewers, rebuilt for horse traffic and then vehicle traffic, then bombed and redesigned again. I really enjoyed it.


Eight Detectives -- Alex Pavesi

A bunch of elements that, it feels like, could have been put together to make a good book but weren't. An editor from a publishing company arrives to talk to a reclusive retired mathematician, who decades ago wrote a collection of seven stories to illustrate what he thought were the mathematical rules of detective fiction; no one was interested then, but the editor says that her company wants to publish it now. The two of them read through the seven stories and then discuss the stories and detective fiction generally. There's a heavy-handed device of clues in the stories that may refer to an unsolved murder around the time they were written. We suddenly find out near the end that the editor isn't an editor at all, and she's known all along that the author died long ago and the man using his name is an impostor (which means her Byzantine device of trying to trap him by hiding inconsistencies in the galley proofs to see if he'd notice makes no sense, because she knew who he really was all along); the cherry-on-top reveal that she had only recently discovered that the real author was her biological father was just stupid. Then we get a coda in which it turns out that that unsolved-murder victim was the real real author of the stories and the dead "author" killed her in order to steal credit for them; we find this out in a suddenly-discovered letter, a textbook unsatisfying ending for a mystery story. Everyone was unpleasant and unlikeable, and neither the individual stories nor the book as a whole were any good, either as prose or as mysteries. Overall it was just poorly executed and dull.


Major Pettigrew's Last Stand -- Helen Simonson

A sort of comic Romeo and Juliet, about a retired English soldier in his sixties and a widowed Pakistani shopkeeper in her fifties. I might have liked it if the major weren't so bizarrely out of time -- it's a contemporary story, but the major's dress, dialogue, attitudes, and behavior all belong to a hundred years ago; he acts like someone who retired right after the Boer War. He's like an Englishman as pictured by someone whose only information about the English comes from BBC dramas from the 1950s. It was like watching a contemporary movie with one character who appears in grainy black and white for no reason. I'm only surprised he didn't say "What, what" all the time. I gave up on it fairly quickly so I don't know how the love story turns out, but that hasn't kept me up at night.


*Bears Are Where They Find You -- Asa Brooks

A pamphlet Dad brought back from a national park visit, about grizzly bears and their habits. The author, a park ranger with decades of experience, says that grizzlies have highly developed personalities, and if you happen across one, whether it will attack you pretty much depends on how grumpy the bear is feeling that day. Mom rang her bear-deterring bells religiously the whole time, of course.


*Agamemnon -- William Alfred

Not a translation but an inspired-by retelling of the original. I didn't think it was that great.


Mosquitoes -- William Faulkner

His second novel, a roman à clef about a crowd of useless and repellent people from the New Orleans arts community taking a four-day trip on Lake Pontchartrain on a yacht owned by a would-be Patron Of The Arts, a wealthy woman who clearly has no aesthetic sense but who wants to associate with creative people. The yacht is called the Nausikaa, which may reflect her desire to be a source of comfort and inspiration to artists, as Nausikaa was to Odysseus, but of course Nausikaa's love for Odysseus was unrequited. Also Nausikaa is Greek for "burner of ships", which becomes à propos when one of the passengers blithely removes part of the engine to make a sculpture with it and the yacht loses power and runs aground. Even before the ship gets becalmed the trip is tedious, with the artists arrogantly ignoring the hostess's determined cheerfulness and skipping her dances and card games to go sit in their cabins drinking the booze they smuggled aboard and sniping at her and at each other. One of the writers seems to be based on Sherwood Anderson, which makes me wonder what was going on with him -- all the young writers he mentored eventually turned against him and wrote biting satires of him or parodies of his work. I found the book monumentally dull and I eventually skimmed to the end.


*Nikolai Gogol -- Vladimir Nabokov

Gogol was one of the few Russian authors that Nabokov admired, and I was hoping that that would make this book interesting, but honestly the book is less about Gogol and more about how Europeans don't properly appreciate Gogol. Of course no one at all, other than Nabokov, really properly appreciates any Russian literature or in fact any literature at all, in his opinion, but somehow for Gogol it's more so. As usual he spends a lot of time raging about the impossible failures of the various English translations (at one point Constance Garnett confuses one species of tree with another, a mistake no one else would have noticed or bothered to mention, but for Nabokov that alters the meaning of the entire book and makes her a vulgar clown into the bargain.) I don't like Nabokov as a person, really, and I didn't like this book, in which he says that the proof that Gogol is a genius is that we find his books strange, since only second-rate writers appear to the reader as a provider of wisdom that really just confirms what the reader already believes; although in this book Nabokov only considers The Government Inspector, "The Overcoat", and Dead Souls -- the ones that support what he wants to believe about Gogol -- and ignores everything else he wrote.


The Collected Stories of Colette -- Robert Phelps, ed.

I loved these. The first part has juvenilia, including several stories about an early version of the main character from her later Cheri novels. Later on she had a really varied output -- long and short, love and malice, country and city. My favorites were several stories that were one side of a dialogue, such as a woman talking idly to her hairdresser, or a piano accompanist at a theater answering what must be questions from an actress being kept waiting for an audition. Colette had a lot of experience in the theater and many of the stories are set backstage, or in dressing rooms up flights of rickety stairs. They're beautifully written.


The Witches Are Coming -- Lindy West

A bit of a preaching-to-the-choir book about misogyny in America. Like most of its audience, I agreed with basically all of it; people who don't already agree wouldn't read it. It didn't say much that the other book I read of hers hadn't already said, but on the other hand it was well-written and funny. Maybe it's too much to ask of a book that it should contribute something new to a discussion when the national "discussion" is really just one side screaming loudly enough to drown out the other.


Soul On Ice -- Eldridge Cleaver

A memoir written in prison, where Cleaver was serving time for rape and attempted murder. He admits his guilt and says that after encountering black militants in prison and reading the works of Malcolm X, Frantz Fanon, and Karl Marx, he has come to believe that his crimes came from misdirected rage against the racist American power structure and that he was wrong to have committed them. After his release he joined the Black Panthers and was later imprisoned again for a shootout with the police, about which he changed his story several times, possibly in attempts to manipulate the justice system; which makes you remember that whatever else was in his mind when he wrote this book, he was also writing it with an eye to what the parole board would think of it, so you couldn't call it unvarnished self-revelation.


A Prayer For the Crown-Shy -- Becky Chambers

The second book about the tea monk and the robot. It's really kind of more of the same, with the robot following along as the monk goes on their round of settlements making tea, and the reactions of various factions among the humans to the robot. But I liked the first book, so that didn't bother me. I liked this one too.


*An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry -- Bertrand Russell

This was originally Russell's graduate thesis from Cambridge, written when he was 23; he published it a couple years later. It's exactly what the title leads you to expect: a history of the philosophical and logical underpinnings of Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry, informed by Russell's nascent idea that logic and mathematics are the same thing. It was quite technical and I had to stop to look things up pretty often, but I still found it interesting.


A Day In the Bleachers -- Arnold Hano

I thought I'd like this, since it's an account of attending the first game of the 1954 world series, the game where Willie Mays made his epic running catch of Vic Wertz's long bomb. Somehow, though, Hano wrote a story about the game that included one of the most exciting plays in the history of baseball, and made the whole thing about himself.


The Question of Hu -- Jonathan D. Spence

A fairly interesting short book about a minor historical episode: in 1722 a Jesuit missionary called Fouquet sailed home from China to France in order to argue his thesis that the Chinese Tao was in fact the Christian God and that what the Church called the "Chinese Rites" (including ancestor worship) were divinely inspired. (No one cared and he never published his thesis.) The point of this book is that in order to help him with the Chinese texts he brought home with him, he also brought a Chinese Catholic named Hu. The two didn't get along, and when Fouquet was summoned to Rome to explain his arguments he happily left Hu behind in France. Hu didn't speak French, and without Fouquet to translate for him he soon got into trouble and ended up spending two years in prison (for insanity!) before someone from the Jesuits came to get him out and send him home. The "question" of the title comes from the first thing Hu said to the Chinese-speaking Jesuit: "Why have I been locked up?" It's a question without a good answer. Hu left no written account that we know of, so all we have to go on is the accounts of the people who met him in France; from what they say his behavior seems to have been really strange and often anti-social. Was he really a self-righteous fanatic, angry at being brought to a Catholic country instead of a place where he could proselytize, and accosting random Parisians and shouting at them in Chinese out of frustration and general impatience? Or was that just the interpretation of untraveled, xenophobic, Eurocentric people who had no understanding of Chinese culture and assumed the worst of all foreigners? Or both? There's no way to know, and the book ends rather unsatisfyingly without an answer. It was well written, though.


The Mother of All Questions -- Rebecca Solnit

An essay collection from the mid-teens. The title came from a common occurrence at Solnit's literary lectures; when she gives talks about Virginia Woolf, for example, the question-and-answer period always starts with "Why didn't she have children?" and sometimes never goes outside of that. Solnit would at one time talk about Woolf's possibly heritable mental illness, or about the time and effort she needed to write, but eventually she just took the line "Any woman can have babies, only Virginia Woolf could have written To the Lighthouse. We're here to talk about her art, not her life choices." Solnit herself has had interviews where all her work was totally ignored and the interviewer would only talk about Solnit's choice not to have children, clearly considering it the only important thing about her, and absolutely refusing to speak about anything else. I liked her connected series of essays about voices and enforced silence, and how the effect of centuries of culture and education has been to make America's public voice male, leaving no room for women to speak and attacking them when they do. It's easy to notice that male criticism of women's publicly aired opinions so quickly turns into death threats, which she says is because "it's easiest to have the final say when no one else is any longer able to speak." It's very well-written and even funny, despite the depressingly horrible subject matter.


The Golden Thread -- Kassia St. Clair

A natural-history-of-a-substance book, one of my favorite genres; this one is about fabric. I almost always like this sort of book, but this one didn't really hold my interest. The organization was poor, the research was spotty (Eleanor of Aquitaine was Richard the Lion-Heart's mother, not his wife -- if you make a mistake that basic, how can I trust you on anything else?) and most importantly the prose was flat and dull. I remember a few "oh I didn't know that" moments, but now I don't remember what they were, which I would if the author were a better storyteller. Rather a disappointment, I thought.


Cinnamon and Gunpowder -- Eli Brown

A novel Kate gave me about a cook on a pirate ship, which for me could hardly go wrong. The main character, Owen, is the personal cook of an 18th-century financial baron, and when a group of pirates led by a disgruntled former employee turn up at his mansion during a formal dinner and kill everyone, the pirate captain decides she likes the look of the food and takes Owen along to cook Sunday dinners for her on her ship, with the promise that he'll stay alive as long as the meals are good. Owen is highly skilled and resourceful and also very motivated to not get tortured to death, so he starts out keeping a sourdough starter warm under his shirt and pretty soon he's making tea-smoked eel and banana-pineapple cider. Of course he also makes friends among the crew and teaches the ship's boy to read and like that. The pirate captain turns out to have a heart of gold, naturally. I really liked it.


Several People Are Typing -- Calvin Kasulke

A novel told entirely in Slack messages among the staff of a small company. One of the staff has somehow gotten his consciousness pulled into the Slack app, and tries to get help from the others, who all think he's doing a really dedicated comedy bit because he doesn't want to come in to the office. I loved it.


Belichick and Brady -- Michael Holley

This is a recap of the Patriots' last twenty years, and it was nice to relive that time, but it's also a shining example of the very worst tropes of Boston sports writing. The Belichick-Brady era was an unprecedented stretch of decades of colossal, unbelievable success, yet Holley writes as though the whole thing was twenty years of misery and failure. Does Dan Shaughnessy spike the water coolers at the Globe with his own diseased masochism?


*Common Courtesy -- Judith Martin

About half good advice on negotiating awkward social situations, and half grousing about how everything was better when she was young. The prose is good, though.


Women Poets of Japan -- Kenneth Rexroth and Ikuko Atsumi, trans.

A selection of poems by the very large number of important women poets throughout Japanese history; it includes eighty or so poets, ranging from tanka poets of the Classic period and waka poets of the Heian period on through haiku poets of the Edo period and free-verse poets of the 1970s. The selection is pretty good, but there are no footnotes, no end-notes, no explanatory text at all. I think some of the impact of a poem such as this haiku by Fukuda Chiyo-Ni:
    My hunter of dragonflies
    How far
    Has he wandered today?
is missed if you don't know that Chiyo-Ni's only child died as a young boy.
One thing that struck me is that many of the women seemed to be playing with the customary poems addressed to their husbands, extravagant declarations of loyalty and devotion -- I'm so lucky you deigned to notice me, I feel like dying if you're gone for five minutes, that sort of thing -- which to me felt as though the women were so sure that their husband's egos would prevent them from doing anything other than taking the words at face value that they felt safe being sarcastic.


Q's Legacy -- Helene Hanff

A sort of intellectual autobiography, in which Hanff talks about how when she was young she happened upon a literary anthology put together by the great scholar and critic Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, whose friends called him Q, and through reading his other anthologies fell in love with literature and with London. Too poor to go to college, she wrote sob-sister stories for magazines and then better scripts for first radio and then television. The success of 84, Charing Cross Road made it possible for her to visit London; she covered that trip in The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street. Later on, production companies brought her over to see first the stage play and then the BBC adaptation; for accuracy they asked to borrow the actual books from her apartment that she discussed in the letters, and with some anxiety she allowed it, only to arrive and find to her delight that the BBC had sent the worn books to a professional restorer. I liked it a lot, plus I'm always glad to see good old Q get the credit he deserves.
 

The Cognitive Behavioral Workbook for Anxiety -- William J. Knaus

Lucy gave me this. It's a collection of evidence-based therapeutic exercises and coping mechanisms, along with training yourself to recognize an anxiety attack and manage it when it happens. I worked through the whole thing, but I was pretty anxious at the time and now I can't find where I put it, so what I recall of it is mainly the techniques I still use: panic breathing, imagery exercises, like that. I found it pretty useful.


Shantaram -- Gregory David Roberts

A novel about a career bank robber and heroin addict who escapes from prison in Australia and goes to ground in Mumbai (still generally called Bombay then) in 1980, calling himself "Lindsay". Having no resources he lives in an officially-nonexistent slum (necessarily-temporary vast tent cities set up in and around empty blocks where buildings have been demolished for slum clearance but the developers are still raising money to put up the new buildings, a process that often takes years.) Lindsay can't just walk into the slum and claim a spot, he has to negotiate with the slum governor, a respected older man who oversees a communal mutual-aid society -- there are no city services in the slum, what with it officially not being there, so the governor keeps track of who has work and who needs help, who's sick and who might need to hide from an abusive boyfriend, and organizes slum residents as volunteer fire brigades and the like; there's even a sort of tent-city guard, patrollers who keep out robbers and gangs. As with everything in India, it works by connections -- Lindsay is introduced to the governor by the first friend he made in the city, a taxi driver, whose family calls Lindsay by the amazingly inappropriate name Shantaram, Marathi for "man of God's peace." Life in the slum is pretty orderly, actually, although incredibly poor. Lindsay gets along pretty well because he learns both Hindi and Marathi, and he contributes to the community by setting up a sort of health clinic, where he mainly provides first aid and prescribes medications that he gets from Bombay dealers who steal them from hospitals. This eventually turns into working for a local mob, where he deals drugs and later guns; this leads to a brutal stretch in the Bombay prison, from which he is eventually sprung by his mob boss, who puts him in less exposed jobs like illegal currency trading and passport forgery. Eventually he goes on a really dangerous mission, crossing the Pakistani and Afghan borders on horseback to sell arms to suspicious mujahideen. When the mission fails spectacularly and most of his companions are killed, he reevaluates his life and decides to leave India. The book is fiction, but it has real-life elements; Roberts was a bank robber who really did escape from prison and hide in Bombay (he was arrested trying to enter Germany, and he wrote most of this book back in prison in Australia.) Apparently he draws a really good picture of life in Bombay in the eighties. It's a very long book and I thought the Bombay parts were much better than the running-guns-in-Afghanistan parts, but the thing that makes the book for me is that Lindsay has some convincing character growth, coming to realize that his my-inner-self-rises-above-my-criminal-life philosophy is bullshit, and that people of real integrity, like the slum governor and his taxi-driver friend, are morally better people than he is, both externally and internally. I liked that. One scene that sticks with me really illustrates problems of income inequality: in his first weeks in Bombay, before he decides to remain in the city and moves to the slum, he stays at a hotel, where he showers several times a day because of the oppressive heat. He sees workmen carrying heavy barrels up the hotel stairs, and his taxi-driver friend tells him that they're taking water up to the cistern on the roof to feed the showers. Lindsay guiltily resolves to stop showering so much, but his friend earnestly tells him no, you should shower even more, because that means more work for the water-carriers and thus more food for their families. That's a real capitalism cleft stick right there. It took me a while to read but I liked it.


Funny You Should Ask -- Elissa Sussman

I picked this up in the store and I thought it was an epistolary novel, a format I like, but really it's told through a combination of first-person flashbacks and the narrator's in-story magazine articles. The narrator starts out writing for gossip sites and eventually graduates to higher-class gossip magazines. It actually turned out to be a romance novel, which I ordinarily don't care for, but I kept reading for the interesting story structure more than because I cared whether the narrator ever got together with the guy. It had two big stretches. One was that a movie star who's just been cast as James Bond, who's sitting down for an interview with a no-name gossip blogger, would have bothered to look up and read all her previous articles and be so impressed by her feminist writing that he's intellectually intimidated and has a crush on her; but that's the sort of wish-fulfillment fantasy that makes a romance story. The second one was more unbelievable: that everyone in her life is utterly convinced that the narrator got such a good interview by letting the actor screw her; as if a movie star handsome and charismatic enough to play James Bond would need to have sex with a reporter in order to get good press! The ending was, of course, unrealistic, but you have to expect that. Overall it wasn't bad.


Scriptores Historiae Augustae, I -- David Magie, ed.

This is the Loeb Classical edition of the most obscure and puzzling of the surviving works in Latin. It's a history of the emperors of Rome in the second and third centuries CE. On the face of it, it was begun in the early fourth century CE by a scribe in the court of Diocletian, whose stated purpose was to continue where the Twelve Caesars of Suetonius left off (which must mean two lives at the beginning are missing, since it starts with Hadrian) and (after the first scribe died) continued at various times by five other scribes, on and off, who picked it up for reasons of their own, ending with the co-emperors Carinus and Numerian, who were the immediate predecessors of Diocletian. But no one agrees on how true any of that is. What was the relation of the six scribes? Who edited all their work together, and when? Why is it that there's no mention of it in any other source until the late fifth century CE? There's actually a camp that holds that the entire thing is a forgery, written by one man who made up six imaginary authors and pretended that the work was two hundred years older than it was. Possibly he wanted to lend weight to some positions on fifth-century controversies by inventing centuries-old authorities arguing his point of view; possibly he had some risky things to say and wanted to avoid prosecution; possibly it was all a big joke that we don't see the point of. The Loeb editor accepts the authorship and timing as authentic, but warns that a lot of it is unreliable -- whoever wrote it, they only had good sources for some reigns and where they lacked information they made it up. The life of Hadrian -- which takes up the majority of this first volume -- is probably the most reliable of the bunch, since it refers to events, and quotes documents, that we know from other sources. That's not to say it should be taken uncritically, though; like Suetonius, the author was happy to include every piece of gossip and anonymous accusation available. He goes on through the last of the Five Good Emperors (Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius) before giving a pretty good account of the murder of Commodus and the ensuing Year of Five Emperors, a bloody civil war eventually won by Septimius Severus. Unreliable or not, it's the only Latin source we have for those times, so we have to take it seriously.
The quality of the Latin varies from one purported author to another (both the it's-genuine and the it's-fake camps take this as evidence for their side) and the Loeb editor says of it, Sunt bona, sunt quaedam mediocria, sunt mala plura quae legis hic -- "Here you will find some things that are good, some that are mediocre, and a lot that are bad."


*Famous Problems of Elementary Geometry -- Felix Klein

A good book about three problems that Euclid could not solve:
Given a circle of a known area, construct a square that has exactly the same area as the circle.
Given an angle, construct an angle that is exactly one-third of that angle. (This is trivial to do for some angles, such as a right angle, but Euclid wanted a general solution for any angle.)
Given a cube of a known volume, construct a cube with exactly double that cube's volume.
All of these can be solved mechanically, sometimes very easily, but Euclid didn't want just any solution. He wanted a solution that worked within the constraints of geometry, which is to say, you must be able to solve it in a finite time, using a finite number of steps, with only a compass and a straightedge. The compass and straightedge aren't weird arbitrary constraints. Euclid wanted to have as few assumptions as possible. So if you start with one assumption ("points can exist") then you can reason from the point to a straight line, and from the straight line to circles. Using points and lines and circles you can reason your way to all the other shapes. Euclid wanted to be able to solve these problems by pure application of geometric principles; if he couldn't, that might mean that the basic assumptions of geometry were insufficient. As it turned out he couldn't do it, and neither could anyone else for over two thousand years, until in the nineteenth century various mathematicians proved that solving any of these problems using only Euclid's constraints is impossible. (The circle because the length of the side of a square that equals the area of a given circle would be the square root of pi, and since pi is not an algebraic number -- it's not the solution to any polynomial equation -- its square root is not determinable by Euclidean methods. The cube because to get the answer you need to find the cube root of two, which cannot be done with Euclidean methods; the angle follows from this, because to solve it you also need to find the cube root of some number, and as long as there are some numbers (such as 2) whose cube roots are not determinable, then you cannot have a general solution.) Klein explains it all very clearly; I still get it over a year later.


*The Narrow Road to the Deep North -- Bashō

The most famous work of the great 17th-century haiku poet. It's a travel diary, the record of a journey he took on foot from Tokyo (called Edo then) up to the north of Honshu and back south again on the western coast, about 1500 miles all told. Travel anywhere was dangerous -- a traveler might meet rebel armies or unemployed mercenaries or bandits on any road, and the north was almost lawless; but Bashō was in his late forties and might reasonably expect to die soon anyway (in fact he died at fifty) and he was resolved to free himself from attachment to life as part of his Zen practice. He made his will and sold his house before he left because there was a very good chance he wouldn't come back. He spent most of 1689 and 1690 on the road, staying mostly with friends of his students but sometimes sleeping in the open. He wasn't in a big hurry and if he liked the landscape or the hosts were good conversationalists he would stay and rest for several days; sometimes his host would walk with him for the next day or two before returning home. He wrote poems every day, and when he got back to Edo he took the best of them and made a haibun, a combination of prose and verse, telling the story of his journey, praising the 12th-century poet Saigyo (whose epic journeys inspired him), writing endearing vignettes about his hosts, and discussing Zen and Chinese literature, illustrating all of it with poems. It's an excellent book.


Belabored -- Lyz Lenz

A memoir and examination of pregnancy in the United States, where maternal mortality (especially for non-white women, especially in the South) is among the worst in the world, even as infant mortality decreases, suggesting that the medical community considers babies' lives important but not mothers' lives. As Lenz shows with great depth of detail, this is true not only of the medical community but of the US in general, where mothers are not allowed to have any identity that isn't centered around the child, while non-mothers are condemned as selfish failures. She relates how during her two pregnancies "I was treated as a vessel or a goddess, but never as a woman." The Wollstonecraftian subtitle is "A vindication of the rights of pregnant women." An excellent book on a subject only becoming more urgent -- the Speaker of the House just said in public that "every able-bodied woman has a duty to give birth to an American worker." Asshole.


Wild Swans -- Jung Chang

The history of a hundred years in China, told through the biographies of three women: Chang herself, her mother, and her grandmother. The grandmother was one of the last women in China to have her feet bound; even her younger sisters didn't. She was a concubine to an Imperial officer, and after he died she married a doctor. The daughter she had with the officer was Chang's mother; she was an early adherent of Mao. Her parents arranged a marriage for her (they couldn't keep saying no to Kuomintang officers who wanted her as a concubine) but she refused, which took enormous courage in the thirties, and married another communist. Chang herself was born in 1952 and the majority of the book tells her life story, growing up under the Maoists and being sent to a "thought-reform" work camp after her father was tortured for criticizing the Cultural Revolution. The history of the times is harrowing; Mao constantly invented imaginary enemies and everyone suffered for it. At one point Mao announced that his estimate of "secret rightists" in the Party was five percent; the outcome was that everyone had to inform on the secret rightists who worked with them. Of course there weren't any secret rightists, but you had to inform on them all the same; so after all the people nobody liked got offered up, it got so that anyone who left a meeting to go to the bathroom was denounced just because they weren't in the room. They became known as "toilet rightists". While this was going on Mao was ordering all the forests in China cut down so people could use them as fuel for makeshift steel foundries, an exercise in futility since you can't make useful steel on a stovetop in a repurposed school kitchen. China is still so deforested that they have to import wooden chopsticks from the United States. Chang says the happiest moment in her life was when she heard that Mao was dead. It's a really depressing book but it's a gripping story.


The Fortnight in September -- R.C. Sherriff

A pleasant novel from the thirties about a lower-middle-class English family's annual two-week vacation to the seaside. The book treats the Stevens' preparations and travel as though they were the Odyssey, which for people in this family's economic circumstances they basically were. Everything that happens during the vacation -- the daughter's first "date", the older son's teenage dissatisfaction, the father's harmless flirting with the barmaid -- is in itself unimportant, but the importance it all has for the vacationing Stevenses really gets communicated to the reader. I was as sorry as they were when it was time to go home. (I was also sorry because it's very likely that at least one of the boys would later be killed in the war, but that's something I know that the author didn't.)


This Body's Not Big Enough For Both of Us -- Edgar Cantero

A disappointing novel about a private eye called A. Z., which stands for "Adrian and Zooey"; Adrian and Zooey are two people who share one body but insist that they're not a multiple personality. I'm sure the phrase "subverting the noir paradigm" came up somewhere in the writing process. It's meant to be a manic comic romp, but it tries too hard and I didn't find it that funny or that exciting.


Lights All Night Long -- Lydia Fitzpatrick

Sort of a coming-of-age story and sort of a mystery. The main character is Ilya, a teenaged Russian exchange student living in Louisiana with an overly-religious but kind host family. The story goes back and forth between his current life in Louisiana and his earlier life in a small, cold refinery town on the Arctic Circle called Berlizhniki, a place so polluted that you can mine the snow drifts for nickel. (This is really true, I looked it up.) Ilya is a studious boy, determined to escape Berlizhniki by learning English and studying in the US; his older brother Vladimir is only interested in partying and drugs, but the two of them are nonetheless close, and when Vladimir is arrested for the murder of three teenage girls, Ilya (with the help of his host family) comes up a plan to clear his name long-distance and expose the real murderer. I liked it a lot.


Good-bye to All That -- Robert Graves

Graves's memoir of World War One, which he fought in from ages 19 to 23, and which left him shell-shocked, alienated, and angry. A lot of the book is about what he considered the stupidity and incompetence of the British officers, particularly at the Battle of Loos, where he was badly wounded. He describes the trenches, the gas, the rats, his companionship with the poet Siegfried Sassoon, vividly and feelingly. He says that most of the atrocity-stories told about the war were in his opinion propaganda, but on the other hand he also says that -- on either side -- captured prisoners being brought to wherever they'd be held were as likely as not to be murdered by their escorts on the way, sometimes out of a feeling of revenge, sometimes out of envy at someone who was escaping the fighting, sometimes for no apparent reason at all. Apparently Sassoon disagreed with a lot of the book and heavily annotated his copy, which is in the New York Public Library, but has never been published, which is a shame.


The Man Who Died Twice -- Richard Osman

The sequel to The Thursday Murder Club, and the reason Osman made one of his characters a retired secret agent: having used up the characters' cold-case connections,  he needed shadowy figures from the past to show up and start killing people in order to give his characters something to do. The quirky old people are as quirky and old as ever. I didn't like it and I can't even remember whether I finished it.


*Shapes, Space, and Symmetry -- Alan Holden

An excellent book about the Platonic solids and their properties. The thing that most stayed with me was duality: picture a cube. Now imagine that there's a dot in the center of each face of that cube. If you connect those dots with straight lines, you get a regular octahedron. And if you place a dot in the center of each face of the octahedron, and connect those dots with straight lines, you get a cube! So we say that the cube and the octahedron are "dual" to each other. The dodecahedron and the icosahedron are also dual to each other. And if you place a dot in the center of each face of a tetrahedron, and then connect those dots with straight lines, you get another tetrahedron, oriented oppositely to the first one. So the tetrahedron is dual with itself! (I told all this to Lucy and she said "When you said you were reading a book about solid shapes, I was picturing you out playing at the sand table with Ole Tomas.") I also learned a cool word: if you construct 3D models of shapes, but don't completely close the faces (imagine a tetrahedron that meets at three vertices but stops just short along the other three) then you have a shape that isn't closed and so technically has no volume, so it's not solid. That's called a nolid. Finding that out was worth the book, but I found the whole thing engrossing.


Apple of My Eye - Helene Hanff

A love letter to New York City by a lifelong resident. It's full of memorable and entertaining descriptions of walking around the city, along with grousing about Robert Moses and the city planners who kept encroaching on the grounds of Central Park. I liked it.


The Cabinet -- Un-Su Kim

A workplace novel about a guy named Kong who gets hired, through a very competitive process, to work at a research center; but it turns out he has nothing to do outside of filling out the occasional form when a delivery arrives. He tries to get assigned more work but his boss just tells him not to rock the boat. Out of boredom he explores the building. On the 13th floor all the rooms are empty except for one room that has a single locked filing cabinet in it; with nothing else to do, Kong starts trying combinations until one works. The cabinet contains surreal case histories of people to whom inexplicable things have happened -- the man who has a ginkgo tree growing out of his hand, for instance, or the woman who seems to have come unstuck in time. The rest of the book alternates between stories from the case file and Kong's contrastingly pointless job. "As long as you don't ask yourself why you keep doing something, you can keep doing it until the day you die." I didn't think the stories were all that interesting, and Kong's life is just depressing. I didn't like it.


*A Preface to Paradise Lost -- C.S. Lewis

A critique less of the poem than of other critics. Lewis seems concerned to show that Milton was not in any way heretical but actually a solid Orthodox Anglican (he absolutely was not.) As I think I've said before, Lewis's own history as an atheist-turned-C of E stalwart seems to have left him with a bit of a blind spot towards any kind of mysticism -- I don't think he really understood Blake, either. He does have some criticism of his own to make: he's disturbed that Milton proposes that Adam and Eve had sex for pleasure in Eden, and he goes off on a long essay about what sex would be like for unfallen humans, which was kind of creepy and also ludicrous coming from a man in his forties who was almost certainly a virgin. He also draws a bizarre picture of what the world might be like now if the Fall had never happened: Adam and Eve would still be alive, of course, because death entered the world along with sin; and he imagines the peoples of the earth making pilgrimages to the Middle East in order to kneel in holy dread before our ancestral father. Really tells you a lot about Lewis's relationship with his own father that that's what he pictures. I'm sure I wouldn't have gotten along with him if we'd ever met.


Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven -- John Eliot Gardiner

A very good book about Bach's life and working process. I learned a lot about him. When Bach was twenty he bunked off work to go hear a performance by Dieterich Buxtehude, which meant walking over two hundred fifty miles! He was fired when he got back, but he probably thought it was worth it. No one sold lined music paper in those days, so Bach lined his paper himself with a five-pointed pen called a rastrum. Bach owned several rastra of different sizes and he used bigger ones when he wanted to emphasize the importance of a passage. There are many professional musicians who prefer to play from reproductions of Bach's handwritten score rather than a modern-made one, because the way Bach wrote provides so much information. Bach also loaded his scores with jokes and visual puns. There are places in his sacred music where he periodically puts in a series of four sharps. The German word for the sharp -- kreuz -- also means "cross"; Bach was using the score to make the sign of the cross! It's quite a long book but I was really absorbed in the whole thing.


Fluff -- Mimi Graney

An entertaining history of Marshmallow Fluff, and how a small company in Lynn that makes only one product has managed to thrive for over a hundred years. The guy who came up with the recipe wasn't part of the company that made it successful, which is common, but he was fairly paid and even decades later he was happy with the deal and had nothing to complain about, which isn't common at all. I was glad to find that out. I actually never really liked Fluffernutters but I still have a nostalgic attachment to them.


Rock, Paper, Scissors -- Maxim Osipov

A collection of short stories by a contemporary Muscovite doctor; they appeared in English in 2019 but were written (in Russian) during the ten years or so before that. The title story was massively depressing, about a post-Soviet restaurant owner who cheats and robs her Tajik immigrant workers, while fighting petty small-town political battles as ruthlessly as if she were in the Kremlin. My favorite was "The Gypsy", about a Moscow doctor who augments his salary by illegally escorting sick patients flying to the US for treatment, getting around entry requirements by never leaving the transit area and sleeping on the airport floor until the returning flight leaves. They were all pretty dark but I admired the craftsmanship.


*The Portland Vase -- Robin Brooks

An entertaining and detailed history of the Portland Vase, a gorgeous piece of ancient Roman cameo glass, blue-black with white figures on it. No one agrees on exactly who the figures are or what they mean, but one of them is probably Augustus, as the vase would have been made during his reign. It was originally an amphora -- a wine jar that came to a point on the bottom -- but at some point someone cut off the bottom with a grozier, most likely because it had cracked and the owner wanted to keep the crack from spreading. One of the Dukes of Portland bought it in Rome and later lent it to the British Museum, where it's been for the last two hundred years. It became famous when Josiah Wedgwood made a copy of it in the mid-1800s, and soon afterwards a man who was drunk or insane (probably both) went to the museum and smashed it with a nearby wooden case. (The Duke at that time declined to sue the man's family for damages, since he considered they couldn't be at fault for their relative's drunken madness, which I thought was pretty decent of him.) The vase has been restored twice since then; I've stood looking at it from less than a yard away and I couldn't see the breaks. Good book.


Free Food for Millionaires -- Min Jin Lee

I never connected with this. I found the prose slow going and I had no interest in the characters or what they wanted, plus honestly I've kind of had it lately with novels about fighting to establish your own desires in the face of anger from your demanding and controlling parents. I gave up on it pretty quickly.


Judge Bao and the Rule of Law -- Wilt L. Idema

Bao Zheng was a real-life government minister during the Song dynasty. He was famous for his upright character and wise deliberations, and after his death he was remembered as Bāo qīngtiān, "Justice" Bao. He's honored as a god in some parts of China, and for a thousand years he's been a folk hero, a sort of combination Sherlock Holmes and Sir Lancelot, champion of the peasants and enemy of corruption, in all kinds of stories, songs, novels, and plays. There are popular movies and TV shows about him these days. This book is a collection of eight stories from the Yuan and Ming dynasties that were recovered from a tomb in 2010. Idema, a Dutch scholar, translated them into both Dutch and English, which is pretty amazing. He calls them "ballad-stories", combinations of alternating prose and verse. In the stories, generally, someone commits some crime and then has some peasant blamed for it, and Bao investigates. The criminal first gets angry that Bao isn't just going through the motions and looking the other way, then threatens him, then tries to have him demoted or exiled or killed; Bao fearlessly exposes the truth and sees that the real criminal is punished, once even defying an order from the Emperor (apparently this really happened, and the fact that Bao survived the incident shows you how colossal his reputation must have been.) I enjoyed it.


Mindset -- Pat Whitaker

This was an SF novella that I read in the book store because I thought the cover was interesting. It's a colonize-Mars story, where a telepathic gene has spread through Earth's population and since the telepaths can't bear to be around non-telepaths, but also can't just kill them because they'd experience their pain, they rounded up all the non-telepaths and sent them off on one-way trips to Mars. I thought the book was a failure, because it tries to portray the human expedition to Mars as a collective undertaking, but what the book means by "collective" is "everyone recognizes that one particular guy is right about everything and voluntarily does whatever he says, except for the ones who arrogantly ignore his advice and consequently die horribly." I didn't like it.


*Hiroshige in Tokyo -- Julian Bicknell

A collection of Hiroshige's beautiful ukiyo-e paintings from the Edo period, with scholarly exegeses of the paintings and a biography. I really liked it.


The Last Cruise -- Kate Christensen

A shipboard novel, following passengers and crew on a luxury cruise where every imaginable thing goes wrong. I didn't like it, really, partly because there's no main character, partly because it felt ripped-from-the-headlines -- as though the author looked up every ship disaster of the last twenty years and decided to include them all. There were also some stretches. I don't believe that a ship's crew would decide that right after a power outage, a disease outbreak, a legal embargo, and a failure of the sewage system, is a good time to go on strike and have a party on the upper deck. And it was weird that our introduction to the sous-chef was his inner monologue contemptuously sneering at people in general for being disgusted at the idea of eating human flesh; it was a really out-of-nowhere scene that connected to nothing and had no relevance to the rest of the story, so why was it there? The ship eventually gets overwhelmed by a storm wave and sinks, and good riddance.


You Have A Friend In 10A -- Maggie Shipstead

A short story collection; the prose was very good but I found the stories unpleasant. They're mostly about people trying and failing to create relationships with other people; every attempt is doomed from the start and every story ends with the characters even more lonely and dejected than they were before. It wasn't an enjoyable book.


This Is Happiness -- Niall Williamson

A magic-realism novel set in rural Ireland in the fifties, as electric power is making its way to the imaginary village of Faha in the county Clare. Teenager Noel, called Noe, who has left the seminary after losing his faith (though there is a solid conviction among all his relations that he'll go back to the seminary any minute now after getting over his foolishness) is living in his grandparents' cottage not doing much of anything when a lodger named Christy arrives; his arrival coincides with the sudden end of Faha's permanent rain, starting a stretch of dry, sunny weather far longer than anyone can remember. Christy offers Noe a job with the electric utility, which he takes, although we eventually find out that Christy is a classic Irish bullshitter and Noe never gets paid. Christy's real business in Faha is to find the courage to apologize to an old flame that he abandoned at the altar decades ago, but he can't work himself up to it, so Noe decides to help him out. The prose is excellent, with a loving account of rural Irish peasantry in the last days before the modern age, but somehow the story didn't hold my interest. I kept putting the book down and not coming back to it for weeks.


Scriptores Historiae Augustae, II -- David Magie, ed.

The second volume. We're into the work of the purported second scribe now, who (in his own address to Diocletian) announces his intent to write the vitae not only of the canonical Emperors, but of everyone else who ever claimed the throne -- co-emperors, usurpers, rebels who gave themselves the title, everybody. This means he has to go back and add material to the first scribe's work, as do his successors, scribes three and four, so the confusion about who wrote which life and in what order gets to be a real hodgepodge. This volume starts with Severus's son Caracalla and goes on to the start of the Crisis of the Third Century, when there were thirty emperors in twenty years, many of whom reigned for only a few months or even weeks. As obscure as those emperors are, the scribes still spent a lot of time on even more obscure rebels and usurpers, some of whom seem never to have really existed. They appear to have run out of their most reliable source material after the reign of Elagabalus, but that didn't stop them. Most of the Senatorial speeches and official documents cited after Elagabalus are clearly made up. This cross-confusion of multiple scribes writing overlapping lives going back and forth across the Imperial succession, with a mixture of both real and invented source material for both real and invented people, is part of what makes one camp believe that it's all fake and the other camp believe that it can't be.


An Economist Walks Into a Brothel -- Allison Schrager

A very interesting book about risk management. One of her examples is that sex workers who work at brothels in states where that's legal have made a rational decision to pay a higher percentage of their take to the brothel in return for greater security in more than one sense, in that not only is the brothel physically safer (clients are much less likely to be violent, and there's no street-corner muggers nearby), it's also financially safer, because the workers can be sure of payment, and since their work is legal they can bank their money safely instead of keeping it where they live and risk robbery. In a complementary sense, a brothel's higher prices are worth it for a client, even taking travel costs into account, since at a regulated brothel a client is far less likely to be assaulted and robbed, and also doesn't have to worry about potential blackmail. I liked it a lot.


Dirtbag, Massachusetts -- Isaac Fitzgerald

A memoir in essays by a guy who grew up in a homeless shelter in Athol. I've only driven through Athol but my first college roommate was from there. (I had a professor that year who, while telling us about Alaska, said "Nome is a hole. It has no redeeming qualities at all...it's a lot like Athol." My roommate agreed.) His upbringing and the Church left him an angry alcoholic and the first half of the book is all about him falling in love with a dive bar in California, eventually getting hired there. As happens in a lot of addiction memoirs, his stories of wild nights and excess come across more like bragging than repentance. The second half moves on from the bar and into growing-up-for-real territory, which I liked better. I never warmed up to the author, though. As Kate said to me, "I liked the book but I didn't like him."


Good Citizens Need Not Fear -- Maria Reva

A collection of short stories about the residents of a crumbling apartment building in Ukraine under the Soviets. Through some bureaucratic error the building was listed as destroyed, and no one is ever going to take the trouble to correct the error, especially since that would mean having to do maintenance, so the building remains officially nonexistent, leaving the residents with the benefits and drawbacks of being overlooked. The stories were uneven; some were excellent pieces of dark humor, some were pretty flat. By far the best was "Bone Music", about a shut-in who copies illegal Western vinyl LPs onto old X-rays stolen from hospital trash bins. That one was worth the book.


Remains of Old Latin, I -- E.H. Warmington, ed.

The first volume in a Loeb Classical collection of what remains of the writings of early Latin authors; the great majority of pre-Empire Roman writings we have come from the last hundred years of the Republic, a time when the vivid prose styles of Cicero and Caesar revolutionized Latin composition. This volume contains the works of Ennius of Rudiae, or rather the fragments of them that survive. He lived in the third century BCE -- he fought in the Second Punic War -- and his use of the hexameter more or less set the tone for Roman poetry until Horace. (Greek and Latin poetry didn't use rhyme; the metrical rhythms were all-important, hardly surprising considering that it was all meant to be read aloud.) He wrote a long epic called Annales, of which six hundred lines or so survive -- mainly in the form of quotations in the works of later authors -- including what appears to be the earliest record of the legend of Romulus and Remus. Along with that are the surviving fragments of the plays of Ennius's contemporary Caecilius Statius, a freed Celtic slave according to tradition, who wrote very popular comedies. Comedy is often topical and I found the epic poetry more interesting, possibly because it tells a story I'm already familiar with. A lot of the text is commentary on the development of Latin from Ennius's time to the late Republic, which I found interesting even though most of it really exceeded my competence in Latin.


*The Sea Island Mathematical Manual -- Frank J. Swetz

A collection of geometry problems put together in China during the Three Kingdoms, about 1800 years ago. This edition is a translation from the 1980s. Each problem illustrates a method of measuring heights and distances using surveyor's poles and right angles. The title comes from problem 1, a surveying problem that works out the height of various points on an island seen from shore by using triangulation from poles of a known height. There are other problems such as measuring the depth of a pool of clear water, or determining the width of a river when seen from a distant hilltop. They were all pretty interesting.


Frida Kahlo: the Last Interview (no editor named)

This hasn't really stayed in my memory. I remember it as consisting more of profiles than actual interviews.


Memories of My Life -- Auguste Escoffier

A pretty interesting memoir, full of restaurant minutiae and egotism in about equal measure. I expected him to throw in some character assassination towards the D'Oyly-Carte family, in revenge for their firing him for embezzling, but he just quickly glides over the whole mess with one sentence about a "slight misunderstanding"; he knew the Savoy had kept the evidence and could still prosecute him, but it was in everyone's best interest for there to be no big scandal, so they all kept quiet. It really makes you aware that the memoir isn't an honest account, though.


*The Jones Library in Amherst -- Frank Prentice Rand

A short history published on the occasion of some anniversary of the library, which was and is outstanding. Samuel Jones, who endowed the library (his uncle was Dred Scott's defense attorney) came from a family that had owned several properties that burned, so his endowment specified that the library had to be in a new, purpose-built building made of stone. While the trustees were acquiring the land, the first Jones librarian temporarily set up on the second floor of the old Amherst House that stood across the street; when the Amherst House burned down in 1926, the books were saved because the students ran over from Amherst College and formed human chains to pass the books out, like a reverse bucket brigade. The cornerstone of the Jones Library is a half-ton granite slab salvaged from the ruins of the Amherst House.


Joyland -- Stephen King

I loved this. it's a story about a college kid who gets a summer job working at an amusement park in the seventies and ends up exorcising the haunted park ride by finding the ghost's killer. There's a life-or-death fight on a moving Ferris wheel! It was terrific.


*The New Architecture and the Bauhaus -- Walter Gropius

I was surprised to find that Gropius thought the future of architecture would be that all buildings would be premade and just adapted by size as needed; the idea of a building fitting in harmoniously with its surroundings seems to have been completely alien to him. I'm not seriously opposed to Gropius's ideas except in one irreconcilable area: concrete is ugly, and it can't ever be made to be not ugly, and I think that's important and Gropius didn't.


*Eclogues -- Virgil

The first of Virgil's long poems. Eclogue is a Latinization of the Greek word for "vignette". Like the Greek poems of Theokritos on which they were modelled, Virgil's eclogues are mainly dialogues between herdsmen, though unlike Theokritos's idyllic scenes, Virgil's dialogues include reports of politics and violence; the first eclogue is a discussion among small farmers who fear that their land will be confiscated and given out as rewards to the army. Another has two rural friends lamenting the punishment of an imaginary poet, who has had his farm taken away and been savagely beaten for verses that offended powerful people; the friends quote the imaginary poems, which allows Virgil to say dangerous things through someone else's mouth, although he's careful not to use any real person's name. They were all good.


King Lear -- William Shakespeare

I read this to Mom while she was going through cancer treatment. I've seen it on stage several times, but I hadn't actually sat down and read through it since college. Gloucester's gloomy warning that We have seen the best of our time really hit hard. It occurred to me this time through that Cordelia probably had a different mother than Regan and Goneril, which is why she's so much younger, and so different temperamentally, and why she's Lear's favorite. As it happened, just as I was reading the How sharper than a serpent's tooth scene, the Muzak at the doctor's office changed to Pat Benatar's "Love Is a Battlefield".  


River of the Gods -- Candice Millard

I felt like I already knew everything I was interested in knowing about Burton and Speke and their African explorations, but I've really liked every other book of Millard's that I've read, so I decided to read this one. I was disappointed. She really seems over-invested in Burton's career and in hyping him up, and I thought it hurt the story. Plus Burton and Speke were both wrong about the source of the Nile and they were basically a pair of egotistical I-know-what's-best assholes anyway, so who really gives a crap about their feuding. I didn't like it.


Garbology -- Edward Humes

"Garbology" really is the term for the study of trash, Humes didn't make it up. The generally accepted figure is that on average, each American produces about a hundred tons of trash in their lifetime. The best parts of the book are the ones studying how our consumer culture got started, and how so much of the garbage we make isn't necessary. For example, the US created a huge plastics industry to make things like plane canopies for World War II, and when the war was over they needed to find new things to make out of plastic, which is where plastic forks and spoons came from -- a new, disposable product that no one really needs but that was pushed so heavily by industry that it became ubiquitous. There's a lot of things like that. I was depressed but not surprised that plastics companies have whole departments dedicated to discrediting ecologists and preventing the government from being able to report annual waste accurately. Less interesting was a long section about some woman and the extraordinary measures she goes to in order to reduce waste around her house; that part of the book really read like an advertisement for her waste-consultant business. On the other hand there was a whole lot of information about various efforts around the world to turn garbage into fuel -- these days we can burn things much hotter (and therefore more cleanly) than we used to. There are landfills that are being emptied to burn for fuel, which has led to some discoveries: people ignore regulations about what's supposed to go into landfills, and they're full of old paints and solvents. That hasn't been as much of a problem as we thought it would be, because it turns out that the pressure and lack of oxygen inside landfills keeps the pollutants from seeping out; but that also means that things haven't decomposed in landfills the way we thought they would. Excavators have found grass clippings from thirty years ago that are still green. It's a really informative and interesting book, aside from the infomercial part.


What If? 2 -- Randall Munroe

A second book of Munroe's serious answers to ridiculous questions sent in by readers. Could you cool down the Earth by opening everyone's refrigerator door at the same time? What would happen if you tried to ride a helicopter blade? What if you made a lava lamp out of actual lava? If a T. Rex escaped from Jurassic Park, how many people would it need to eat every day? Can I use my arc welder as a defibrillator? I loved it.


*Georgics -- Virgil

Four books of poetry about agriculture (geōrgiká is Greek for "growing things"). Of course this was Dad's favorite of Virgil's works because it's all about how great it is to be a farmer. Book two contains the famous line O fortunatos nimium, sua si bona norint, agricolas! -- "How fortunate they are, if they are wise enough to know it, the farmers!" (Dad copied this out and added the marginal note "Come on, you farmers!") I notice that where Virgil talks about how to read the various signs indicating the approach of bad weather, he's careful to include a metaphor of Augustus as a welcome arrival of good weather after a protracted series of storms. One thing that really struck me was that in the third book -- all about livestock -- there's a bit where Virgil is placidly taking about how the best age for breeding cows is between their fourth and tenth years, and then out of nowhere he suddenly says
    optima quaeque dies miseris mortalibus aevi
    prima fugit; subeunt morbi tristisque senectus
    et labor, et durae rapit inclementia mortis.
"The best days of our miserable mortal lives are the swiftest to fly away; too soon comes illness, and laborious trouble, and sad old age, and then we are seized by pitiless death."
...and then he goes right back to talking about how to judge a cow's fitness by the shape of her head. To me that seems like a strange non sequitur, but maybe to Virgil fertility and death were so interconnected that an interjection about the misery of life in the middle of a passage about breeding cows didn't seem incongruous to him? Anyway it was all really interesting.


The Anomaly -- Hervé Le Tellier

A good novel about a flight from France that arrives in New York...and then arrives again six months later, with all the same people on it. The two flights are identical except that the later plane reports a hail storm on the approach and the earlier one doesn't. The passengers on the second flight are all isolated and examined, and they're indistinguishable from the passengers on the first flight. They're all the same people in every possible way. The novel proceeds on two fronts. Part of it is about the duplicates coming to terms with one another -- including passengers on the first plane who have divorced since the arrival, or the widow of one of the passengers on the first flight who has to tell the just-arrived identical copy of her husband that he has terminal cancer. The other follows scientists trying to figure out what's happened and why; the consensus is that the doubled plane is almost conclusive evidence of the simulation hypothesis, and the question then becomes, was the second plane's appearance a glitch, or is it some sort of parameter adjustment by whoever is running the simulation? Even more troubling: what do we do if the plane arrives again? I found it really engrossing.


The Narrow Road to the Deep North -- Richard Flanagan

I was at the Bookworm in Boulder with Sabine, looking around for something to read, and a random stranger handed me this off the shelf and said "Read this," so I did. It's a World War II novel, with the main action following a group of Australian POWs who are being used as slave labor on a colossally stupid imperial folly, a railroad that's supposed to link Burma and Thailand. The main character is their commander, Dorrigo Evans, the company doctor and senior surviving officer, who works desperately to sustain the men, who are all dropping from cholera, gangrene, and starvation. (Over a hundred thousand people died building the railway.) There are parts of the novel set decades later, when Dorrigo, in his seventies, is a national hero, pictured on stamps and the subject of a documentary called The Big Fella, which is what the POWs under his command called him. He finds the adulation silly, since as he recalls it the Big Fella was really a fictional character, a role he created because the men needed a hero and someone had to pretend to be one. There's a great scene where the company organizer manages to kill a farmer's cow and crudely butcher it in the jungle, then bribe the guards with the best cuts to bring the meat to camp. Someone brings Dorrigo a steak, and he looks at it and thinks "The Big Fella wouldn't eat that"; he has to fake a coughing fit to cover up that he's drooling, and orders the steak to be taken to the sick tent. He can see, as the orderly takes the steak away, that he's happy, not only because he might now get some of the steak, but because the Big Fella lived up to what he expected. Rather less successful, I thought, was the secondary plot where the work gang commander, Nakamura, gets himself through the war with methamphetamines and haiku, and then goes into hiding to escape being hanged as a war criminal, angrily insisting to himself that he's a good and kind man and the Americans are the real criminals, even while he's robbing and killing people in the poorest neighborhoods in Japan. That read too much like "a white man trying to think like a Japanese" to be convincing.


Remains of Old Latin, II -- E.H. Warmington, ed.

The second volume in the Loeb Classical collection of early Latin authors. This one contains very fragmentary works by unknown authors, along with four poets of the second and third centuries BCE, none of whom I'd ever heard of except Lucius Accius, a tragedian and particular favorite of Cicero, who quotes him often. He was widely read; Caligula's motto oderint dum metuant ("Let them hate me, so long as they fear me") is a line from Accius. The editorial commentary on his work is actually pretty funny, because he's known to have pushed for reform of Latin grammar and spelling, so when you find weird spellings or unusual grammar in his writing it's hard to tell whether they're odd local usages, or copyists' errors, or Accius's idiosyncratic opinions.


*Alas, Poor Darwin -- Hilary Rose and Stephen Rose

A collection of essays opposing the field of "evolutionary psychology". Most of the essays are really arguing against overbroad pop-science generalizations of the ideas, but the main criticism is fair: the evolutionary psychologists tend to run mad trying to assign an adaptive justification for every human trait, often assigning biological imperatives to what may actually be accidentally-arisen social traits. It seems to me that the evolutionary psychologists' essential trip-up is circular reasoning: they say that all our basic behaviors were codified on the savannah a million years ago, but in fact we have very little evidence about how our ancestors lived then, so what they're really doing is projecting their interpretation of modern humanity backwards onto the savannah, and then saying that our modern lives are a necessary consequence of those lives, which is why their picture of tribal life in Africa a million years ago just happens to mirror the gender relations of 1950s America.


The Dead Man's Brother -- Roger Zelazny

An unpublished noir thriller, found among his papers after he died. According to his son's introduction, the family's best guess is that it was written in the early 1970s and then abandoned for some reason. It reads as though Zelazny put it down after the third draft and never went any further; it needed another draft, but I'm glad they published it as is, rather than having it finished by someone else, which they did with several other books in less-complete states, generally with fairly uninteresting results. The opening is pure Zelazny, with a first-person narrator who has secrets to keep getting in trouble on the first page: Ovid, an art dealer with a history of working with thieves and smugglers that doesn't bear looking at too closely, comes downstairs one morning to find a murdered corpse in his art gallery; the corpse is a crook he knows, naturally, and to get away from the cops looking to pin the murder on him he goes along with a weird plan where the CIA sends him to the Vatican to track down a former priest who's run off with a lot of money (far-fetched, but to be fair the CIA has run a lot of weirder operations.) The dead guy's ex lives in Rome, so Ovid heads off to see what she knows, which ultimately leads to him escaping betrayal and attempted assassination only to wind up fighting for his life in the jungles of Brazil. It was pretty good, although I think in a final rewrite Zelazny would have thought better of the out-of-place stuff about Ovid's "good luck gene" and left the story as a straight thriller.


*The Gentle Art of Making Enemies -- James McNeill Whistler

In 1877, John Ruskin published a review of an exhibition that featured Whistler's brilliant painting Nocturne in Black and Gold. Calling Whistler a conceited and ill-educated coxcomb was normal for him, and calling the painting "flinging a pot of paint in the public's face", though stupid, was within the bounds of criticism; but Ruskin added that the painting was "willful imposture", which came under the definition of libel. Whistler sued, probably more for the publicity than hoping to gain anything (in the event the jury ruled for Whistler but only awarded him one farthing in damages.) This book is Whistler's account of the whole affair, including the original review and public replies to it, Whistler's letters to and from his friends (Oscar Wilde had a lot to say about it), an account of the trial, and Whistler's later essay where he denounced sentimentality and argued in favor of art for art's sake. It's not an honest account, as Whistler freely rewrote the trial record to make his testimony sound far more convincing and witty than it really was, while making the defense counsel and witnesses sound like dull fools. (Ruskin wasn't present at the trial, as he was going through one of his many mental breakdowns right then, so all Whistler's sarcasm would have been wasted anyway.) The controversial trial kept him in the news, and the book was very popular, so Whistler got pretty much what he wanted. I reflected after reading it that if you could somehow bring Ruskin to visit the 21st century, and tell him that we now consider Nocturne in Black and Gold an ahead-of-its-time masterpiece, and Whistler an underappreciated genius, it wouldn't even occur to him to reconsider the painting; he'd just think it was sad that we have such bad taste in art. I don't like Ruskin, honestly.


*On Love and Barley -- Bashō

A collection of haiku drawn from various of his works and translated by Lucien Stryk. He aims for literal accuracy, which works very well for an English rendering with some poems, not so well with others. The Japanese say that Bashō's great attribute was karumi, or "lightness of touch", which doesn't always come across here. Some of the translations are excellent, though.


*The Silent Traveller in Boston -- Chiang Yee

In 1958 and 1959 Yee had a fellowship at Harvard, and during that time he wrote one of his travelogues about Boston. (He's the only travel writer I know of that was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.) I liked the prose, and his accompanying watercolors and line drawings of Boston and environs are excellent. A friend took him to visit what he called the "artists' colony" at Rockport (astonishingly he didn't paint the red fishing shack that's such an overused subject that it's popularly known as "Motif #1"). Overall it's an interesting period piece, a picture of the last days of old Brahmin Boston; ten years later the picture was unrecognizable. I liked it.


Scriptores Historiae Augustae, III -- David Magie, ed.

The last volume, bringing the account down to the reign before Diocletian, during whose reign the authors were supposedly writing. We've met the last two scribes now, who have their own addresses to Diocletian, in which they state their purposes and also backbite against some of the earlier writers. A big chunk of the biographies from this period are lost, although that may have been a face-saving excuse for why they didn't cover so much of the Crisis of the Third Century, for which very few records existed; if the "lost" chapters never really existed, that's just more fuel on the what-the-hell's-going-on-here authenticity fire. These chapters are less organized and clumsier than the earlier ones, which means that the last two scribes weren't that skillful, or that the forger deliberately wrote poorly in order to lend verisimilitude, or that there's some other explanation that has nothing to do with either. I don't feel competent to have an opinion on the authorship controversy, but I will say that if the whole thing really is the work of one man deliberately creating a complex fake, then he had both unbelievable energy and a weird sense of humor.


The Oresteia of Aeschylus -- Robert Lowell

This came out in 1978, the year after he died. Apparently he translated the first two plays in the sixties, and attempted the third but abandoned it for years until going back to it in 1976, which makes it about the last thing he did. I didn't think it was all that good. The entire thing is in free verse, which I don't think really communicates Aischylos's careful distinctions of meter. And it seems to me that Lowell's version lacks some of the dramatic certainties of the original. When Orestes, daunted at the thought of killing his own mother, asks his friend Pylades for moral support, Lowell has Pylades give the somewhat dithering reply Will you be hateful to the gods, as well as to man? It's not a question in the Greek; Pylades sternly says Make all men your enemies, rather than the gods. I just didn't think it worked.


*The Croquet Player -- H.G. Wells

A novella from 1936, a psychological horror story. George, the croquet player of the title, goes on vacation in Normandy, where he meets an expatriate English doctor, who tells George his story: he's established a practice here, but can't rest because he's troubled by a sense of ancient evil in the surrounding marches. From a local vicar, George learns that the local area was once home to Neanderthals (whom Wells imagined as snarling brutes) and the doctor's trouble comes from the emergence of the monstrosity of the past into the frame of the present. The vicar recommends that the doctor consult a famous psychiatrist; after inexplicable acts of violence in the neighborhood (and after the vicar has gone mad and attempted murder) the doctor decides to see the psychiatrist. Soon afterwards George meets the psychiatrist, and realizes that the psychiatrist is himself mad, ranting that the cave man in our hearts is still the master and civilization is an illusion. Wells, like everyone else, knew that another war was coming, and he may have been imagining the doctor and vicar as civilized Europe with the inner "cave man" of war and violence re-emerging. It's a little wooden but not bad.


Concealed -- Christina Diaz Gonzalez

Sabine lent me this. It's a YA identity thriller, about a twelve-year-old girl whose whole life is led on the run; her parents are constantly moving and changing their names (our hero doesn't even know her own name; every time they move she gets a new name beginning with K). She's currently Katrina and living in an anonymous trailer park. The story her parents have given her is that they're scientists in witness protection after running afoul of a drug cartel, and their contact in the witness protection program is someone they only contact by phone, who they call "X". Katrina is just getting to be old enough to realize that that's not how witness protection works when her parents don't come home one day, leading to Katrina and her new trailer-park friend going on the run and trying to make contact with "X", which of course leads into Katrina finding out the real story of her life and having to come up with something to do about it. It kept me reading.


Endurance -- F.A. Worsley

Worsley was the captain of the Endurance, the ship that set out on the 1914 Antarctic Expedition under Ernest Shackleton. The Endurance got frozen into the ice in the Weddell Sea and remained stuck for ten months until the weight of the ice finally stove in its side and sank it, after which the crew sledged across the ice to the remote Elephant Island, where most of them made camp while Shackleton and Worsley and a few others took a lifeboat 800 miles across terrible seas to the almost equally Godforsaken South Georgia Island in the far South Atlantic. They landed on the southern coast, while the only port was on the north coast, so Shackleton and Worsley left the rest to make camp and hiked for several days across the island's unexplored interior mountains to get there (along the way experiencing the hallucination mentioned by T.S. Eliot, where they were sure that there was a third man with them just out of their peripheral vision). They managed to get to the port and then get a ship around to pick up their friends at the camp, then rig up a ship to go back and get everyone at Elephant Island, which took months but they did manage to round everyone up at last. It was a feat of unbelievable persistence and determination and I'm glad I wasn't there. Worsley was a good writer and he draws a vivid and exciting picture. I thought it was great.


The Uncommon Reader -- Alan Bennett

A short piece of whimsy where Queen Elizabeth follows one of her corgis out of the palace and happens upon a bookmobile; feeling obligated to Relate To The People, she takes out a book, and is surprised to find herself enjoying it. She starts habitually returning to the bookmobile; at first she takes out books based on whether the authors were good company when she met them, but with the guidance of the teenage librarian she develops her own interests. It turns out that the palace staff is irritated by the monarch taking up any new habits, let alone intellectual ones, and the second half of the book shows Elizabeth determinedly keeping up her new hobby in the face of defiant interference from her own aides. I liked it.


The Vanishing Messiah -- David N. Wetzel

An account of the ministry of Francis Schlatter, a faith healer who laid on hands for thousands of believers in Albuquerque and Denver in 1895, before going on a solitary retreat in the Sierra Madre, from which he never returned, probably dying of exposure some time in 1896. The first half of the book is the really interesting part; born in France, Schlatter emigrated to the United States at eighteen and settled in as a shoemaker in Denver until he was in his mid-thirties, when he reported that one day he was sitting at his workbench when he heard the voice of God telling him to go forth and heal people. He seems to have been a genuinely devout man: he lived simply, charged no fees, taught no doctrine; all he ever said was that he was obeying the will of the Father. If all holy men were like him the world would be a better place. The second half of the book was less interesting, as the author tediously exults over his pet theory that Schlatter faked his death and lived on into the twenties. Mostly this is based on a 1903 "autobiography" in the Library of Congress, which is attributed to "Francis Schlatter the Alsacian"; the author assumes that the book is genuine and its account cannot be doubted, for what reason other than "I really want it to be true" never appears. The first half was good though.


She's Nice Though -- Mia Mercado

A book of essays, although really "collection of inattentively-edited blog posts" might be a better description. It's meant generally to be about the inner critic, the culturally-imposed warning voice that reminds women to keep their real thoughts behind a mask of inoffensive niceness. But the writing is poor, and the humor doesn't land. I didn't think much of it.


Antimatter -- Frank Close

A good book about antimatter, starting with Paul Dirac's postulating its existence in the thirties and explaining our gradual understanding of it since then. It turns out that antiparticles have a very, very slightly different rate of decay than their matter counterparts, which may have something to do with why the universe has so much more matter than antimatter in it. No one's ever been able to think of a reason why the Big Bang should have produced more of one than the other, and it seems intuitive that the universe should be a neutral system with all charges balanced, and yet we don't observe it to be so. Did all the antimatter vanish? If so, how? Is there something wrong with our method of observation? If so, what? No one has yet found an explanation. Close also devotes some time to practical problems: the Tunguska meteorite was almost certainly not an antimatter impact, for one. For another, about a gram of antimatter -- the mass of a paper clip -- could theoretically provide enough energy to power the world for a year, assuming we could harness the energy from it; but all the antimatter we've ever produced in labs doesn't add up to a nanogram, and even if we could make it at a larger scale, doing so would be so expensive that it would be cheaper to try almost anything else. So matter/antimatter engines are not in any foreseeable future.


Remains of Old Latin, III -- E.H. Warmington, ed.

The third volume in the Loeb Classical collection of early Latin authors. This one contains the surviving fragments of the second-century BCE writer Caius Lucilius, who created the genre of Roman satire (from the Latin satura, meaning a medley or mixture of things; we pronounce it the way we do because of a confusion with the Greek word satyr). Roman satire wasn't necessarily comic; it was concerned with condemning moral failures of the state and society and recommending remedies for them, and where they used comedy it was to ridicule the existing state of things. (Swift's satires are Roman both in intent and in formal structure.) Lucilius was part of the aristocracy -- his sister was Pompey's grandmother -- which is probably why he felt safe attacking Roman institutions in print, often pretty savagely. Consilis vultus item ut facies, mors, icterus morbus, venenum -- "The Consul's character is like his face -- death, jaundice, poison!" The volume also contains the remnants of the Twelve Tables of Roman law, which were written down and codified in the fifth century BCE, so even if the text was later edited to make it more understandable as the language changed, it's still the oldest example of Latin we have. It's kind of surprising that we don't have the whole text, but because the Tables were publicly displayed in the Forum, where anyone could go look at them, it seems no one felt the need to write them in a book. Also Cicero remarks that he knew all the Twelve Tables by heart, so that may have been part of a Roman school education. In any case the Tables were destroyed in the sack of Rome and after that no one seems to have thought about them very much. So we only have quotes from later court cases where lawyers were arguing about precedent. It's still interesting though.


White Jacket Required -- Jenna Weber

A memoir of a woman who went to culinary school not to become a cook but because she wanted to be a food writer. As has never yet failed to be the case when someone turns a series of blog posts into a book, it's poorly written and badly organized. There's an attempt at a through-line with a story about overcoming her self-doubt, but that really felt as though she made it up because someone told her it would be relatable. Most of the book has faded from my memory, and it's no big loss.


The Vietri Project -- Nicola DeRobertis-Theye

A novel about a woman named Gabriele, in her early twenties, still working at her college job at the local bookstore. She's kind of directionless, but not in an American-angst kind of way; her mother is schizophrenic, and schizophrenia is heritable, and Gabriele is coming up on the age when schizophrenia manifests itself if it's going to, and she feels unable to move forward with anything because she's so afraid of her potential illness. To keep herself occupied while she waits to find out if she'll have a normal life or not, she adopts a project: all the time she's been at the bookstore, a man called Vietri has been making mail orders for rare and esoteric scholarly material to be mailed to him in Rome. But his orders have stopped, and Gabriele decides to go to Rome to find out what happened to him and what all his orders were for; more easily done than it sounds because her mother is from Rome and Gabriele speaks Italian and has relatives she can lean on. I liked it up to there, but the actual scenes in Italy kind of dragged, as Gabriele takes her friends and relatives for granted and ignores them to go have self-destructive mechanical one-night stands with two-dimensional guys she meets at parties, and pursues the story of Vietri in a half-hearted and inefficient way full of run-on sentences with lots and lots of commas. The ending wasn't very satisfying.


Dickens and Prince -- Nick Hornby

I'm not really sure what the point of this was. It's a lengthy essay comparing the careers of Dickens and Prince, who really have nothing in common beyond being prolific creators and being strongly associated with each other in Hornby's mind, for some personal reason that isn't easily communicated to the reader.


Life Without Children -- Roddy Doyle

A collection of short stories set in England and Ireland during the pandemic; many of them are about Irish people who are in England for one reason or another when the lockdown starts. One man, prompted by his father's funeral, has come to England looking for his own estranged son, with no real idea of how to go about it, and he wanders empty streets pretending to be on essential errands. Another has come to be with his dying father in hospice, and because of the lockdown he has to live on a couch in his father's room. There's a sad story about a man pretending that his wife hasn't left him, and a nasty one about a man meeting an old friend from his teens and twenties and coming to understand that the guy was never really his friend and has always looked down on him. They were all good.


*The Aeneid -- Virgil

Dryden called this "the greatest poem by the greatest poet." As poetry it's superb; the Latin is unsurpassably graceful and elegant, even witty; the imagery is memorable; the epigrams are striking (quid non mortalia pectora cogis, auri sacra fames! -- "Accursed hunger for gold! To what crimes will you not lead the hearts of men?") It's not much of a story, though, since it's just a less-interesting warmed-over imitation of Homer, but in the opposite order (the wanderings come first and then the big battle scenes.) It tells the story of Aeneas, a Trojan warrior who escapes the sack of Troy and wanders around for some years until ending up in Italy, fighting the locals, and establishing a family that will eventually produce Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome. Virgil is a bit handcuffed by the necessity of building up Aeneas as the heroic ancestor of mighty Rome, and he has to do a lot of work to downplay the fact that Aeneas was on the losing side in most of his battles and ran away from several of them. I also feel like the story is somewhat damaged by the fact that Virgil really had an audience of one, the emperor Augustus, and the demands of Augustan propaganda always outweighed the demands of art. It's still good, though.


City of Dragons: the Awakening Storm -- Jaimal Yogis and Vivian Truong

A YA graphic novel that Sabine lent to me, about a tween girl named Grace who moves to Hong Kong for school and finds out that she's descended, on her father's side, from the Yellow Emperor, which means she has dragon blood, and she gets caught up in a campaign to save the newly-reborn dragons from exploitative evil creeps. In a metaphor that I understood but Sabine didn't (thank God) one of the exploitative evil creeps is her stepfather, who (we find out) only married Grace's mother so he'd have access to Grace -- he's been waiting for her to reach puberty so her dragon nature would manifest and he could experiment on her in the lab (ew.) Grace and her friends manage to foil the creeps' plans, but there's still a lot of work to be done, which will be left for the sequels. It wasn't bad.