Book reviews, 2023

 

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

The Address Book -- Deirdre Mask

A really interesting book about street addresses. In Europe governments started numbering houses to help with censuses, which of course they used to make sure they could find people in order to tax or conscript them. There are areas in the Appalachians that refuse to use street addresses for ideological reasons, even though that effectively cuts them off from emergency services. Addresses are also strong indicators of social class; in New York, the owners of buildings on Columbus Circle bribe the city council to list their addresses as Central Park West, while on the other hand people with no home address cannot get a bank account, which means they can't save or borrow money or receive state or federal aid. There are other political aspects: in the South, new streets passing through predominantly black neighborhoods are often named for Confederate figures in a deliberate reminder of white antagonism; and there's a group of hard-core assholes who spend all their time trying to get every Martin Luther King Way in the United States renamed. In Japan buildings are generally numbered according to the order in which they were built, not their position on the street. Ancient Rome had no street names at all and everyone just had to navigate by their mental map of the city. I found the whole thing engrossing and I only wish it had been longer.


The Icepick Surgeon -- Sam Kean

A pretty good book about scientists through history who lied, stole, and killed to advance their research. Many of the great nature-classifiers of the age of exploration belonged to expeditions whose purpose was to colonize and enslave whole nations. Many committed fraud of one kind or another, like the early paleontologists who stole and mislabeled each other's specimens, or like Thomas Edison, who publicly electrocuted scores of animals to death in a fraudulent campaign to convince people that alternating current was too dangerous to use. The "icepick surgeon" was Walter Freeman, who decided that lobotomies were too complicated and came up with a new procedure of sticking an icepick in the patient's eye and hitting it with a mallet, without anaesthesia. Freeman was not in fact a surgeon and he was eventually banned from medical practice, though not before killing over a hundred people and giving many others permanent crippling brain damage, including Rosemary Kennedy. I liked it.


Résistance -- Agnès Humbert

A WWII memoir. Humbert was an art historian in her forties when the Nazis occupied France; she and her fellow middle-aged academics at the Musée National des Arts published the first Resistance newsletter for almost a year before they were all arrested. The men were killed and the women sentenced to slave labor; Humbert was sent to a rayon factory in Westphalia, filled with open vats of caustic alkali and carbon disulfide, where the workers went blind or died from overwork. After being freed by the Third Army, she helped hunt down the factory guards and overseers, whom she knew by sight, to be arrested for war crimes. It was a gripping story.


Ghost of the Hardy Boys -- Leslie McFarlane

A well-written memoir of how McFarlane, working under the name "Franklin W. Dixon", came to write the early Hardy Boys books, from outlines sent to him by the Stratemeyer Syndicate. He got $125 a book, which was good money in the twenties and still pretty decent in the late forties when he gave it up. Not all of the book is about the Hardy Boys; most of the middle part is about working as a reporter for Depression-era newspapers in Canada and later Massachusetts. McFarlane was philosophical about not getting any royalties for the books, since the syndicate paid good money when he badly needed it, and he said any other writer would have done just as good a job; though when he was writing this memoir, in the 1970s, he read through some of the books for the first time in decades and was angry to find that the newer editions had been re-written to make Frank and Joe cleaner-cut and more respectful of authority, while the incompetent or dishonest authority figures that appeared in the originals had been removed entirely. That really got him steamed. I thought it was really interesting.


The Dawn of Yangchen -- F.C. Yee

Sabine was really enjoying the Avatar: the Last Airbender tie-in novels about Avatar Kyoshi, and so was I, but Nickelodeon appears to have withdrawn permission for them because they want to make an animated series about Kyoshi. So now there's a new tie-in novel dealing with Avatar Yangchen, two generations before Kyoshi. Where the Kyoshi books were action-adventure stories involving treachery, politics, and revenge, this one is more of an espionage story, following the back-room machinations of the teenaged Yangchen as she tries to win respect from ruling cliques who don't care about human relations with the spirit world and want the Avatar to go wave at crowds and not bother them. The Kyoshi books had two listed authors, but here there's only one; either the absence of the co-author or the nature of the subject matter makes this book rather less engaging than the others. Sabine and I both lost interest in it halfway through. 


*Hokusai -- J. Hillier

A collection of about a hundred reproductions of Hokusai's works, showcasing the breadth of his oeuvre: single woodcuts meant to be sold as small posters, watercolors for illustrated novels, bound collections of thematically related paintings. The reproductions are interspersed with a biography of Hokusai and scholarly essays about the art. I thought it was great.


Wings of Fire: The Dragonet Prophecy
Wings of Fire: The Lost Heir
Wings of Fire: The Hidden Kingdom

    -- Tui T. Sutherland and Mike Holmes

A series of YA graphic novels that Sabine lent me, an anti-war story about a group of five young dragons who have been raised together in an isolated cave by older dragons, because the five of them are prophesied to bring about the end of the continent-spanning war among the dragon tribes. We pick up the story at the point where the young dragons are getting to be old enough to feel oppressed by prophetic expectations, to wonder if the prophecies are actually real, and to start doubting how far they should trust or believe the dragons who've raised them. They weren't bad.


The Employees -- Olga Ravn

A Danish novel in the form of a collection of statements, or witness reports, made by the crew members of an interstellar ship after a disruption caused by the crew's exposure to a series of alien objects. The statements are in no sort of order, implying that what we're seeing is a jumble of paperwork on the desk of whatever corporate ombudsman is conducting the interviews. The ship's crew is a mixture of humans and androids, though I couldn't always tell which was which, all under the orders of a distant corporate bureaucracy. In the course of their exploration of a new planet they encountered a collection of alien objects, and in each interview the crew member is trying to explain the profound emotional impact the presence of the objects had on them and on the others. The usual sterile routine of the ship fell apart as many of the crew started to question the purpose of the mission and of the corporation behind it. It struck me as an allegory for the reaction of modern workaday life when exposed to art, and in fact I later found out that the author wrote it after visiting an exhibition of the work of the artist Lea Guldditte Hestelund. I thought it was really interesting. 


Shipwrecks -- Akira Yoshimura

A very good novel set in a rural fishing village in medieval Japan. The hundred or so families in the village are desperately poor, and they stretch their resources by drying seaweed and extracting salt from the ocean to sell to their nearest neighbors, a more prosperous village two days' walk away. The boy Isaku, at ten years old, is acting as the head of his family because his father has sold himself into indentured servitude and will be away for years. The villagers live in constant hope of o-fune-sama, "gift of the ship god", which comes every few years and makes everyone's lives a little easier. I really liked how the author gradually peeled back the layers: o-fune-sama is material from wrecked ships that wash up on shore...and the real reason the villagers refine salt in the winter is so that the great fires under the cauldrons of boiling sea-water will lure ships to their doom on the rocks...and if there are any survivors the villagers just murder them. The villagers are wary of strangers, who might see the wrecked goods and bring the shogun's justice on them all; but their eventual punishment comes from the sea itself, when a nearly intact ship full of dead men drifts into their reach and they don't know enough about plague to quarantine it. The writing was excellent and the story really stayed with me.


Blood Wedding -- Federico García Lorca

A tragic play from the early thirties, written when Lorca was about 35, two or three years before he was murdered by the Franco regime. A wedding is approaching, and The Mother of The Groom is upset by gossip that The Bride had once loved Leonardo Felix -- the only character in the play whose name is given -- whose uncles killed The Groom's father and brother. Leonardo, hearing that The Bride is to be married, rages at his wife and mother-in-law before going to see The Bride on the morning of the wedding and asking her to leave with him. She refuses and sends him away, and the wedding takes place, but at the party afterwards, when the wedding dance should begin, The Bride is not to be found, and Leonardo's Wife announces that Leonardo and The Bride have run away together. The Groom sets out after them as the party dissolves in despair. The third act is set in the woods, as The Groom searches the night for Leonardo and The Bride begs Leonardo to flee and save himself, and a Greek chorus of woodcutters tell each other what's going on as allegorical figures of The Moon and Death join the hunt. The play ends at the church, where the wedding party are shocked by the arrival of The Bride soaked in the blood of Leonardo and The Groom, who have killed each other. It's a powerful and gripping story; I saw it on stage about 35 years ago and I can still picture it.


Mercury Pictures Presents -- Anthony Marra

A novel set in Hollywood as World War II approaches. Mercury Pictures is a seat-of-the-pants operation, run by an old-time Hollywood character, the larger than life Artie Feldman, who keeps a gallery of toupées in his office so he can pick the right one when he's schmoozing investors for money, or dealing with his brother's attempts to take over the studio, or fighting against white-shoe Congressmen trying to censor the movie business. While he's doing all that, the studio is really run by his assistant Maria, the book's hero, who had to flee Italy when her father was arrested for anti-Fascist efforts; she now lives with her eccentric collection of great-aunts and worries about being classified as an enemy alien. The whole studio is rather a haven for European refugees, who work cheap: poets, architects, and artists now writing scripts and building sets. Money comes in when the Office of War Information starts commissioning propaganda films, but that also means that the studio designers have to spend their time building detailed scale models of the cities they grew up in, to help make sure that the Allied bombing runs do the maximum possible damage. It was a complex and engaging story and I liked it a lot.


The Confidence Men -- Margalit Fox

A book about two British POWs in a Turkish prison camp during World War One who came up with a bizarre plan to use a Ouija board to convince the prison guards that they could talk to spirits, intending to sell them on a story that the spirits could lead them to hidden treasure (outside the camp, of course.) The first part worked: the guards bought the whole thing. Even the commander of the camp got caught up in watching the fake seances. A lot of the middle part of the book is taken up with explaining how the POWs used stage magicians' tricks to fool the guards, with some digressions on how a performer can gain such ascendancy over otherwise intelligent people that he can lead them to believe insane things. The rest of it wasn't as good; the book sells itself as an escape story, but in fact the POWs didn't escape. They spent months in a Turkish insane asylum and were repatriated after the war ended like everyone else. So it was entertaining but ultimately kind of pointless.


A Line to Kill -- Anthony Horowitz

Several people recommended Horowitz to me, so I picked this up. Turns out it's the third book in a series, so I've missed some exposition. The main character is a fictional version of the author, who has somehow been dragooned into writing mystery novels based on the "real-life" cases of a cop called Hawthorne. Hawthorne seems like a self-promoting dick, and it's clear that Fictional Horowitz doesn't like him, and I'm not sure how the whole thing came about.  Fictional Horowitz seems to be secretly collecting background dirt on Hawthorne, but that seemed like part of a series arc that I didn't have the context to get. The main part of the action is independent of all that, though: the two of them go to a literary festival on a small private island in order to promote their first book. Naturally someone gets killed, and there's a classic small-number-of-possible-suspects setup, and Hawthorne investigates in his dickish way while Fictional Horowitz trails behind. I felt like Real Horowitz was more interested in satirizing the writers at the literary festival, who are all probably based on people he knows, than he was in providing a solution to the puzzle. In any case it wasn't very satisfying. 


*Selected Prose of Robert Frost -- Hyde Cox and Edward Connery Lathem, eds.

You don't generally think of Frost as an essayist, but these were pretty good. There are appreciations of Amy Lowell and of Emerson, a couple speeches and book introductions, and discussions of poetry generally. "It is absurd to think that the only way to tell if a poem is lasting is to wait and see if it lasts. The right reader of a good poem can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken an immortal wound – that he will never get over it." Good reading.


The Cat Who Saved Books -- Sosuke Natsukawa

A sentimental novel about a teenage boy named Rintaro who grew up in his grandfather's used bookstore; when the grandfather dies, Rintaro is left trying to run the store and avoid being sent to live with relatives, which would mean closing the store. A talking cat starts coming to visit the store, and takes Rintaro on a series of otherworldly journeys where he has to defeat various allegorical figures: people who try to reduce every book to one sentence, to save everyone the effort of reading, or people who want all books to be alike because it would make their value as a market commodity more predictable. It was somewhat precious, and I have never liked stories that imply that you can fix things just by wanting something really hard, and I'm pretty tired of magical problem-solving cats. For all that, it wasn't bad. I don't feel the need to read the sequel, though.


Following Hadrian -- Elizabeth Speller

The author wanted to tell the story of the emperor Hadrian's unprecedented personal visit to every part of the Roman Empire. But she couldn't decide whether she wanted to write a history or a novel, and ended up doing both, succeeding at neither. The book tells sober history in every other chapter, with the alternating chapters telling fictional stories of characters in Hadrian's train. The history parts weren't bad, but the fiction parts were dull and I only skimmed them. Overall I didn't think much of it.


The Year Babe Ruth Hit 104 Home Runs -- Bill Jenkinson

The author is concerned to show that if the 1921 season had been played under the rules and conditions of the 21st century, then Babe Ruth would have hit 104 home runs that year instead of the 59 he hit in real life. Even if that were a sensible thing to write a book about (it's not) the author really overestimates the accuracy of his research. He assumes, for instance, that newspaper reporters of a hundred years ago actually went and measured the distance of a batted ball instead of just making it up. The book was pointless to begin with and the uncritical research plus the uninspired prose didn't make it any better.


Code -- Charles Petzold

A history of computing and a basic explanation of how computers manage bits. I remember thinking the prose was pretty clear and the explanations were good, but there wasn't anything in it I didn't already know and it's largely faded from my memory.


*Back Roads to Far Towns -- Bashō (Cid Corman and Kamaike Susumu, translators)

I thought this was one of Bashō's works that I hadn't read; in fact it's a new edition of The Narrow Road to the Deep North, but the translators gave it their own title. Although that's poetic license (In Japanese the title is oku no hosomichi; hoso-michi means "narrow road" and oku means "the innermost part", or more colloquially "the sticks"), I appreciated that in general the translators avoided transliterating things to make the book feel less "unfamiliar" to Western readers, an approach I think is rarely successful. There were a lot of good footnotes, too.


*Virginibus Puerisque -- Robert Louis Stevenson

His first collection of essays; the title is Latin for "girls and boys". I found it in a used book store twenty years ago and bought it for Dad, since it's a beautiful 1903 edition with a soft leather cover, excellent stiff paper, and lovely print, and I thought he'd like it. This edition omits everything from the original except the four Virginibus Puerisque essays, on the subject of marriage, generally arguing against marrying for love ("too violent a passion") and instead recommending a "community of taste", meaning that you should marry someone you get along with and agree with on the important questions of life, and hope that you come to love each other later on. The prose is great.


*Goblin Market -- Christina Rossetti

A lengthy narrative poem about a pair of sisters, Laura and Lizzie, who go to fetch water from a stream in the twilight. They hear the goblin merchants selling their strange and wonderful fruit; Lizzie sensibly goes home, but Laura is overcome with desire and trades a lock of her hair and a tear for the fruit, gorging herself in sensual abandon. In the coming days she can think of nothing but the fruit and she pines and sickens away; Lizzie eventually seeks out the goblin market to buy some fruit with silver money, hoping to restore her sister. The goblins try to force-feed Lizzie, but she escapes covered in fruit pulp, which she brings back to feed Laura; Laura vomits up the fruit and the next day is restored to health. The imagery is clearly sexual, all the more so with her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti's sensual illustrations. She maintained in public that it was a simple story of sisterly love with nothing carnal about it at all, though in private she acknowledged that of course it was sexual and the poem was entirely unsuitable for children. That's the Victorians for you. Anyway I liked it.


Parable of the Talents -- Octavia Butler

A sequel to Parable of the Sower, a dystopian novel in two parts. The first part shows the brutal end of the first religious community that Lauren established at the end of the previous book, as the community is destroyed by Christian fundamentalists, empowered by the white nationalist government, who kill or capture everyone and keep them at slave labor for a couple years until they organize a rebellion and kill all their captors, dispersing afterwards to avoid recapture. The white-nationalist government loses favor after unsuccessful foreign wars and after news comes out about the President encouraging witch-burnings (I really think that people who supported such a government wouldn't change their minds because of that.) In the second part, Lauren takes advantage of the freer atmosphere of the post-Crusader government to reestablish her new religion, Earthseed, and publish her writings to a wide audience. I still find Lauren pretty unsympathetic; in her place I would not have decided to stop searching for my kidnapped daughter in order to promote a religion, however sincerely I believed in it. The religion is unconvincing, too -- not only do I not believe that people would find Lauren's clumsy and badly-written poetry inspiring, Butler has to try to pump up Earthseed by showing us "debates" between eloquent Earthseed devotees and tongue-tied Christian morons, like Joe Louis fighting the Bum-of-the-Month Club. All in all I didn't think much of it.


*The Register -- William Dean Howells

A brief novella about Boston neighbors who can hear each other talking in their parlors through the heat register their apartments share; though each neighbor hears the other, it never seems to occur to either one that they can be overheard in turn. All this listening creates some complications but eventually contributes to resolving the love story. It was a minor work, but pleasant reading.


Sankofa -- Chibundu Onuzo

Kind of a Stockholm-syndrome novel. Our hero is Anna, a woman in her forties whose mother has just died. Going through her mother's effects, Anna finds out that her father was an African exchange student who returned home without ever knowing that her mother was pregnant. Reading her father's old letters and journals, Anna is impressed by his intelligence and political activism. Doing some searching she finds out that her father is still alive: he had a violent political career and is now the head of state of his home country (the imaginary "Bamana".) Divorced, not close to her grown daughter, and with a lifelong sense of alienation from growing up biracial in white London, she impulsively decides to go to Bamana and meet her father, despite not knowing the language or anything about the country. She depressingly finds that it's no easier being biracial in a black country than in a white one, and when she visits her father, she finds that he's a high-handed, repressive dictator who's so annoyed at her foreign independence that when she tries to go back home he has her passport confiscated and leaves her in prison for days, to teach her to know her place. Somehow this makes her admire him and she eventually invites her daughter to come meet her grandfather, which though the author probably didn't intend it that way made me think of the book as a horror story.


The Philosophy of Modern Song -- Bob Dylan

A book of his reflections on sixty or so recorded songs from the twentieth century. They aren't meant to be a list of the best songs, or his favorite songs -- in fact I got the idea that he didn't really care for some of them. It's more that he picked songs that illustrated something about popular music that he wanted to talk about. I made a playlist to go with it -- I hadn't heard about a third of the songs, and I wanted to listen to each one before the chapter on it, even if I knew it well. Bob Dylan may be the world's most knowledgeable expert on popular music -- Bono says that Dylan knows every verse of every song Bono's ever heard of, and many more he hasn't; he even knows Irish music better than Bono does. The essays wander all over the place in a really interesting way. He starts out talking about Bobby Bare's "Detroit City", which he describes as a specific type of American song: a man goes to the big city and it doesn't go the way he thought it would, and he dreams about going back to the idyllic small town he left behind. "But the listener knows that it just doesn't exist. There is no mother, no dear old papa, sister, or brother. They are all either dead or gone. The girl that he's dreaming about long ago got married to a divorce attorney and she has three kids. That's why this song works." I was interested to see that he thought Elvis Costello was "light years" better than his contemporaries, and that "Pump It Up" was his license to do whatever he felt like for the rest of his career. As I said, Dylan probably doesn't like all the songs he included, but he definitely loves the Temptations' "Ball of Confusion" and Jimmy Reed's "Big Boss Man". I was fascinated. After I read the book I got the audiobook and listened to that too, because Dylan reads it himself. His gravelly old-man voice lent it a lot of gravitas. I loved it.


*What I Think -- Adlai Stevenson

A collection of speeches from Stevenson's 1956 presidential run, which he lost to Eisenhower (again.) They flesh out his "New America" campaign, essentially a bigger and broader New Deal, calling for a lot of things that Eisenhower and Nixon criticized as weak policy that would only help the Soviets, such as a ban on above-ground nuclear tests and ending the draft (both of which Eisenhower and Nixon ended up implementing, though they never publicly admitted that Stevenson was right.) He lost support among black voters because he was lukewarm on civil rights -- he said he wouldn't use federal power to enforce Brown v. the Board of Education -- but Eisenhower was so popular that he would probably have lost anyway. Dad was never as enthusiastic about any politician as he was about Stevenson.


The Bastard Brigade -- Sam Kean

A gripping book about the Alsos mission, the Allied intelligence and counterintelligence effort to prevent the Nazis from developing an atomic bomb, put in motion by General Groves once the Allies had access to Europe after the invasion of Italy. (The usual crowd of intellectual eccentrics who filled US intelligence back then came up with the name; Groves was angry to find out that it was Greek for "grove", and he delivered some epic chewings-out on the subject of people who were more concerned with being clever than keeping secrets, but he didn't change it because that might have drawn attention.) The Alsos operatives ended up securing basically every piece of information and material from the German bomb project, including all the scientists, who as it turned out were on completely the wrong track and had all concluded that an atomic bomb was impossible. In fact most of the leading scientists, including Hahn and Heisenberg, were held prisoner in a heavily bugged house in Cambridge throughout 1945, and when the news of the bombing of Hiroshima came on the radio, they were all convinced that it was propaganda. The book was well-written and exciting; I particularly remember the effort to destroy the only facility in Europe that could produce heavy water, which was in Norway. When members of the Norse resistance blew up a ferry boat (it was carrying hundreds of gallons of heavy water to be turned over to the Nazis, but the resistance didn't know that, they were just told that it was vital that the ferry be sunk) they couldn't tell any of the Norse civilians who were going to be on the ferry. One of them knew that his own mother was going to ride the ferry that day; with admirable lateral thinking, rather than risk operational security by telling her not to go, he had dinner with her and put a heavy dose of laxatives in her food so she'd have to stay home sick. It was a good read.


Novelist As a Vocation -- Haruki Murakami

A collection of short essays about writing. I didn't find them very engaging and they've mostly faded from my memory.


Recipe -- Lynn Z. Bloom

A short essay on recipes (which she defines as an instruction manual that knows that its readers will not follow it to the letter) along with tangents that occur as she goes -- the difference between the pseudo-folksy chatter of the cookbooks whose authors want you to imagine them as your friendly older aunt and the jargon-laden lectures of the cookbooks from celebrity chefs who wish they were Auguste Escoffier; the fact that recipes imply a certain amount of food security that much of the world doesn't have; the way so many people cannot separate the food from the circumstances in their lives associated with it, which is why online recipes have a "jump to recipe" button to let you skip the autobiographical novel they can't resist including. There's a sobering section on the fact that the great majority of chocolate is produced with child slave labor, which isn't really related to the essay topic but she must have really wanted it in there.


Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone -- Benjamin Stevenson

This is a mystery novel. Right at the beginning the narrator makes a big huge deal of how he's telling us a story that follows all the rules of fair play in classic mysteries, and in the end the solution of the central mystery relies on information the reader doesn't have, so that was a big waste of time. I didn't like any of the characters, either.


*Poems: Feasts and Fasts -- Christina Rossetti

A collection of her religious poetry that someone put together, all on Christian observances: Advent, Epiphany, Easter, Ascension, and so on. They have a solemnity quite unlike the tone of her other poems. I found most of them affecting.
   'Watchman, what of the night?' we cry,
   Heart-sick with hope deferred;
   'No speaking signs are in the sky,'
   Is still the watchman's word.


How To Escape From a Leper Colony -- Tiphanie Yanique

A dozen or so short stories and a novella, mainly set in Trinidad. They were well written; my favorite was one about two women who have a grudge against each other (because the one's daughter jilted the other's son) who separately arrive early at their church to do their volunteer work, only to find it in flames. For each of them the first instinct is to check if the other is hurt, but this is almost immediately drowned by an irrational suspicion that the other started the fire. Troubles don't always bring out the best in people. It was good but depressing.


Surrender -- Bono

His autobiography, really interesting. I had never known that a grade school friend of his gave him his nickname, which he got from the name of a Dublin hearing aid store -- "Bonavox" -- just because he liked the sound of it, and neither of them knew that it was Latin for "beautiful voice" until much later. Everyone in his life calls him Bono except his father, brother, and wife. I knew this already, but it's still insane that his mother had an aneurysm and died at her own father's funeral, when Bono was fourteen, and his father's method of coping was just not to talk about it -- her name just wasn't brought up around the house for the rest of Bono's childhood. All of U2 except Adam Clayton took their religion so seriously that they intended to dissolve the band after their second album in order to devote themselves to street preaching; Adam disagreed, but he went with the others to present a united front to their manager, who told them that their future was up to them but in the mean time they had contractual agreements to tour and breaking those contracts would cause loss and trouble for a lot of unoffending people. They agreed to go on tour and break up afterwards, but on the tour Edge wrote "Sunday Bloody Sunday" and Bono thought the song needed to be heard, so they made another album, and then they never broke up after all. There are a lot of great stories -- like the Dublin tough guys who decades later told Bono that they robbed his father's house several times because they figured he could afford it, what with having a rock-star kid, or the time Mikhail Gorbachev turned up at Bono's house unannounced for Sunday tea, bringing a teddy bear for the kids -- but the one that struck me the most was the story of the Joshua Tree tour, during which they always closed with "Pride" after Bono made a speech condemning the governor of Arizona, who had revoked the state's observance of Martin Luther King Day. The tour was scheduled to end in Phoenix, and as it approached the band got more and more threats about performing "Pride" there, including one guy that the FBI were concerned about, who kept threatening to shoot Bono dead on stage during the song. Of course they performed it anyway, and although he put a brave face on it, Bono admits now that he was frightened. Bono typically goes to one knee during the last verse of "Pride", and this time he closed his eyes, figuring, if this is my last song I have to make sure my voice is steady, and at the end of the song he opened his eyes to see that Adam Clayton had moved over to stand in front of him. 


The Semester of Our Discontent -- Cynthia Kuhn

An academic mystery, not very interesting. If I were going around a college campus killing my enemies I'd find a better method than whacking them on the head with a heavy book.


Fireborn -- Aisling Fowler

A YA fantasy novel that Sabine lent me, about a group of teenagers at a remote fortress, the Hunting Lodge, who are training to be the next generation of Hunters, the guardian figures who go around hunting and killing the various monsters that threaten the ordinary people. The main character is called Twelve (the kids give up their names when they join the Lodge and get given new names when they become Hunters; in the mean time they get numbers.) Her family was wiped out by monsters and she lives for revenge. Her single-mindedness means she's always fighting with the others; one night she and her rival, Five, have been put in the brig to teach them to get along, when the Lodge is breached by monsters who abduct Seven, another student. Feeling guilty about how she's been treating people, Twelve sets out on her own to rescue Seven, though she's soon followed by Five and by a ten-foot-tall magical stone dog who's manifested out of the walls of the Lodge (the best character in the book, I thought.) There's a lot of monster fighting and self-discovery, and Twelve eventually discovers she's actually a fire elemental, and her fire powers save the day. it wasn't bad.  


*Mrs. Dalloway -- Virginia Woolf

I hadn't read any Woolf since college, and not much then, so I read Dad's copy of Mrs. Dalloway and liked it enough that I decided to read all the rest of her books. The story follows two streams of consciousness, sort of: an omniscient narrator gives you an idea of what's going through someone's head moment by moment but in a comprehensible way. Woolf's writing was a bit like if James Joyce had cared whether his readers enjoyed themselves. One plot line follows Clarissa Dalloway, a well-off woman walking around London making final preparations for a party she's hosting that evening. She detours through a park because of the nice weather, and the flowers and the sight of young couples start her thinking about her own youth in the country, and how she eventually chose to marry the steady and good-natured Richard Dalloway -- who has never brought her flowers or told her that he loves her -- rather than the more interesting but less reliable Peter Walsh. (It's clear that her real first love was a woman named Sally, but that wasn't something she could have pursued in the 1890s.) On her walk she briefly crosses paths with the characters from the other plot line, a World War One veteran named Smith and his young wife. Smith has untreated PTSD and suffers from sleeplessness, hallucinations, and a pervasive emotional numbness, and only his wife seems to grasp how ill he is -- the doctors she's brought him to all dismiss her worries, saying that Smith is fine and all anyone needs is work. Towards the end of the day Smith sends his wife off on an errand and kills himself by jumping out a window.  Later that night, at the Dalloways' party, Clarissa hears about the soldier who jumped to his death and feels as though she understands him. It was a really well-written book and I loved it.


Blood, Sweat, and Tea -- Tom Reynolds

You can always tell when a book is really a collection of blog posts. This is a series of vignettes from the career of an NHS ambulance driver, writing under a false name. "Reynolds" seems fairly burnt out (understandably, I suppose, considering he's frequently puked on, or attacked by drunks, or called out for trivial injuries that barely require a Band-Aid) and I doubt that the entirety of the NHS is really made up of careless, indifferent, incompetent doctors the way he implies. The vignettes are often funny, though. It wasn't bad.


Greek Lyric Poets, I -- David A. Campbell, ed.

A Loeb Classical bilingual edition with the collected fragments of Sappho, who wrote mostly hymns and love poetry, and of her contemporary, Alkaios of Mytilene, whose surviving works are anti-tyrannical political poems and songs in praise of wine. This edition reprints the ode Horace composed after nearly being killed in an accident on his farm, where he writes that he had a vision of Sappho and Alkaios singing in the land of the dead, and Ovid's passages about the two of them from the Heroides, along with other testimonia from ancient writers. They were great.


*A Room Of One's Own -- Virginia Woolf

An essay, or more properly a series of closely linked essays, on the position of women in English society. Virginia Woolf's father thought that only boys needed to be educated, so she never went to school, and all the education she had came from her family's extensive library. A number of English intellectuals had recently published anti-feminist tracts -- "no matter the subject, the best woman is inferior to the least man" was the thesis of one influential clergyman -- and Woolf argues that no such comparison can even be made, since women have been deliberately prevented from having the opportunity of achievement that might make comparison meaningful. As an illustration she imagines what might have happened had Shakespeare had a sister, who had all the same talents he had; her career, Woolf argues, could have ended nowhere but exile from her family and eventual rape and an unmarked grave. The clergy pointed to the small number of women writers as proof that women generally lacked intellectual capacity; Woolf answers that, to be able to write, you need a room of your own (with a lock on the door!) and money of your own, neither of which were generally allowed to women. It was a forceful argument in its time, and I think it's pretty obvious that the next hundred years showed that she was wholly right.


The Mosquito Bowl -- Buzz Bissinger

I picked this up at a book store on the Cape. It's ostensibly the story of an epic football game played in the Pacific during the war, between men from the 4th and 29th Marine regiments; these regiments happened to be full of football players -- college All-Americans, the captain of the Notre Dame team, and almost twenty guys who had played or would later play in the NFL. Of the men who played in the game, almost one in four were killed in the battle of Okinawa. I bought it for that, plus it's by the guy who wrote Friday Night Lights, so I figured it would be good. As it turned out the writing was good, and there was some interesting stuff on the backgrounds of the participants, but there's a titanic, even unsurmountable problem. The entire description of the actual game is one sentence on page 276: "There are no records of what happened during the game". For me that really makes the whole book pointless.


Rebel Chef -- Dominique Crenn

I'm always up for a memoir of restaurant work, and even though this one gave too much space to the author's private life at the expense of the much more interesting subject of working in a restaurant, it still wasn't bad. Crenn is French but she moved to the US around 1990 because no one was going to invest in a woman to run her own restaurant in France. I got the idea that Crenn is pretty sold on herself, and I'm pretty sure I wouldn't enjoy meeting her or eating at her restaurant. Not a bad book though.


The Messy Lives of Book People -- Phaedra Patrick

I bought this for the title, but I didn't find it very believable or interesting. House cleaner and bookworm Liv has a famous best-selling author among her clients, and when the author dies, she surprisingly leaves instructions that her estate should keep her death a secret from the general public for six months while Liv writes the end of her final manuscript for her. Liv decides that in order to make the love story work she needs to figure out which of the men in the author's life was her true love, and she does a lot of stupid things that I feel like an intelligent woman in her forties who's worked for a living since she was a teenager wouldn't do. I lost interest so I don't know how it turned out.


*Jacob's Room -- Virginia Woolf

A really interesting novel, sort of a portrait of absence: the thing about Jacob's room is that Jacob isn't in it. The title has a double meaning, too: the whole book is structured around the shape of Jacob Flanders, who never actually appears. It's his life story as told through other people's memories and impressions of him, while he's always just left or is away somewhere. Although the novel never explicitly says so, we eventually realize that Jacob died in World War One (his name recalls the fields of Flanders, where the heaviest fighting took place.) There's a very good section toward the end, where all the characters we've met in the book have a scene where they suddenly think of Jacob, or imagine they see him in the street, or hear his voice; of course that must be the moment he was killed at Ypres. It was imaginative and inventive and well-written, a real achievement.


Clubbie -- Greg Larson

A diary of spending two seasons as the clubhouse attendant for a low-minor affiliate of the Baltimore Orioles, doing laundry, arranging meals, and cleaning up generally. Larson gets up close about how low-budget everything is in low-A -- the team was so cheap that he sometimes had to scrounge among the leftovers from the concession stands in order to put together a post-game meal, and even though he was paid so little that he slept in a clubhouse closet to save rent, he sometimes couldn't bring himself to charge the players their clubhouse dues because he still made more money than they did. Turns out a chunk of a lot of clubhouse guys' income is stealing game-used equipment and selling it at memorabilia shows. Though occasionally pretty seedy, it's still a well-written and funny book, and I liked it.


*The Voyage Out -- Virginia Woolf

Her first novel, with much more of a conventional structure than she would later use. The nominal hero is the wealthy Rachel Vinrace, a teenager traveling to South America for her health on one of the ships her father owns. She's never left home before and for her it's both a literal and figurative voyage of discovery. More fully developed, though, are the older women: Rachel's aunt Helen, acting as her chaperone, and Clarissa Dalloway, maybe twenty years younger here than we find her in Mrs. Dalloway. The men on the voyage are fairly tiresome, but I think Woolf meant them to represent, not men specifically, but the general male power structure that she was trying to leave behind the way Rachel is leaving Europe behind. It's fairly obvious that Rachel is going to die before the book ends; what really hit me was her letter to her lover, where she says "I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been" -- almost exactly what Woolf wrote in the suicide note she left for her husband thirty years later.


License to Travel -- Patrick Bixby

Less a history of the passport than a collection of anecdotes about famous historical figures and their experiences with passports, or the contemporary equivalent. Some of them were interesting -- Mary Shelley arranged a forged passport in a male name for a female friend who published under a male name; Leon Trotsky, whose real name was Bronstein, started using the name "Trotsky" because that was the name of the prison guard whose papers he stole when he escaped the Siberian camp where he was sent after being arrested for organizing a union. The most interesting point the author makes is that the transition of the optional safe-passage papers to the mandatory passport means that the passport doesn't really represent the freedom to travel, but the power to restrict it -- but he never really develops that idea, and it felt like he only put it in so he could pretend that the book was something more than an anecdote collection. It was lightweight but not bad.


Code Gray -- Farzon A. Nahvi

A very good book by an ER doctor about what happens in the emergency room, both in "normal" times and during the pandemic. It's also a picture of a generally optimistic doctor becoming disillusioned with American health care, eventually coming to realize that the standard of emergency care in US hospitals is lower than in most third world countries. He once had a German patient who had tried to treat his own lacerated leg in his hotel room, out of fear of the back-breaking expense and general dirtiness and unhealthiness of the ER -- fears that he found were wholly justified. Or there was the time he had to sit down with a husband and wife who both had COVID and tell them that the hospital only had one dose of the monoclonal-antibody treatment (what was used at the time) and they were going to have to decide which one of them would get it. The exemplary story from the book, a real night-thoughts anecdote, is the time the author had to call poison control because a patient had accidentally overdosed on fish antibiotics. He started in with "You're not going to believe this one," but the poison control guy was completely unfazed -- he saw it all the time, he said. Dog and cat antibiotics need a prescription, but you can buy fish antibiotics at a pet store, so people who can't afford their meds buy those. The trouble is that they're highly concentrated, because they're meant to be dissolved into a fish tank, and it's very hard to judge a human dose. He matter-of-factly told the doctor that poor people are better off trying to get dog or cat antibiotics, because it's much easier to estimate a human dose out of them. The whole book was fascinating.


Marilyn Monroe: the Last Interview -- Sady Doyle, ed.

All I remember about this is that the interviews were so uninteresting that I didn't finish it. The impression I retain is that the interviewers all either fished for dirt or else asked vapid questions to which she gave the empty answers that the studio had instructed her to give. I think I gave the book to the library.


*Freshwater -- Virginia Woolf

Woolf's only play, not meant for publication, that she wrote in the thirties. It's a satirical comedy about smothering Victorian mores, set in the 1860s on the island of Freshwater, where Woolf's great-aunt Julia, a well-known photographer, ran a sort of Bohemian artists' retreat. The main character is the actress Ellen Terry, a teenage bride eager to escape her arranged marriage to the decades-older painter George Watts; no one is interested in her problems, as Julia only wants to photograph her, George only wants to paint her, and Lord Tennyson only wants to read and nap. She eventually forges a plan to run away and live in Bloomsbury. Woolf put it on once at her sister Vanessa's house, with a cast of her Bloomsbury friends, who were probably delighted to act out a satire of the Victorian customs they had all striven to escape. As a play it would be unfair to form a judgement of it, since it was clearly meant to be a light-hearted one-nighter to make her friends laugh, and after the performance she put it away and didn't think about it again; someone found it among her husband's papers decades later. It must be full of private jokes that would be hilarious to the Bloomsbury group but meant nothing to me.  


Wrestling With the Devil -- Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o

This is a revised version of his 1981 prison memoir, which he edited in 2017 to remove dated references and to add more to the story. After his novel Petals of Blood, which was critical of the Kenyan government, came out in 1976, the Moi regime first had him fired from the university where he taught and then put him in prison, where he stayed without trial until the end of 1978, when he was released because of international pressure; he and his family lived in exile in England until Daniel arap Moi was finally removed from power in 2002. The novel mainly concerns his life in prison -- where he luckily had the support of his fellow prisoners, who sided with him politically -- and his tactic of keeping himself focused by secretly writing his novel Devil on the Cross, on toilet paper. He decided to write it in his own language, Gikũyũ, and to write all his creative work in Gikũyũ from then on. (For non-fiction, such as this memoir and his other political works, he continued to write in English.) He preserved the novel by hiding the fair copy inside a Bible while deliberately leaving the drafts out to be taken in cell searches. (He successfully took the novel into exile with him and had it published in both languages outside Kenya.) It was an interesting read.


The Violin Conspiracy -- Brendan Slocumb

A novel about a concert violinist whose priceless violin is stolen out of his hotel room and held for ransom. His first suspicion is that his own awful, grasping family is behind it, but it could equally well be the awful rich family that maintains that the violin belongs to them because their family originally bought it in the nineteenth century back when their ancestors had enslaved the violinist's ancestors. We get a lot of the violinist's life in flashbacks, and it's a good story and the way he gets the violin back is well told. What really depresses me is the completely overt, completely shameless race-hatred the violinist faces; if I'd read this novel thirty years ago I would have said that such out-in-the-open racism was unrealistic, but I wouldn't say that now. 


To The Lighthouse -- Virginia Woolf

I read this in college, but I got a lot more out of it this time. Woolf wrote it at forty-five and I think I just wasn't old enough to appreciate it when I was nineteen. It's an autobiographical novel, telling the story of the "Ramsay" family (very obviously Woolf's parents, Leslie and Julia Stephen, and their children) and their summers spent on the shore, with the crowd of artists and Bohemians who were always coming to stay. The first part takes place somewhere around 1910, and largely consists of a character portrait of Mrs Ramsay, based on Woolf's mother, whom she loved and admired. The second part takes place ten years later, after the first world war has come and gone; Mrs Ramsay has died, as have two of the Ramsay children, one in childbirth and one killed in France. The third part is ten years later again. Among the recurrent guests is a young woman named Lily, sort of a modern-woman counterpoint to Mrs Ramsay; unlike her, Lily does not accept her expected Victorian role as providing emotional support for men, instead developing as a painter in the face of nasty sniping from male guests who tell her to her face that women can't paint. There's an excellent scene where Lily, working on a painting outdoors, is exasperated by Mr Ramsay, who, depressed and hungry for sympathy, distracts and interrupts her, implicitly demanding that she put aside her art in order to perform the far more important task of admiring him and telling him that everything will be all right. With resolute courage she ignores him and concentrates on her own work. I was interested that Woolf gave the victory of self-determination that she achieved in real life to a third party, rather than to the character based on herself; maybe she didn't want to portray herself as defeating her father. It was an amazing book and I loved it. 


The Secret History -- Donna Tartt

I picked this up because there was a scene in another novel I liked where a character mentioned that he reread this book often, because he longed for the closeness and camaraderie of a tightly-knit group of friends that it describes. That sounded good, so I read it; and it is a good book, but that's not at all what it's about. We begin in medias res as a group of college students lures one of their friends into the woods in order to push him off a cliff. Moving back in time we get the story of the main character, Richard, who arrives at a small liberal-arts college in Vermont as a transfer from his California community college; there's a small coterie of elite students -- elite both in wealth and scholarship -- who study classical Greek with an eccentric professor and form a community within a community. Richard, already strong in Greek, joins their class and so perforce becomes a member of the club, although his background isn't anything like theirs and he has to play a part to some extent. He's not the only one; although he becomes wholly invested in the in-group, which becomes his entire social circle -- so much so that the rest of the college essentially fades into the scenery and it seems as though he's attending a tiny private academy of just the six of them with their one professor -- there's a disconnect between them, which eventually becomes clear in a terrible double reveal. First, Richard finds out that the others had tried to recreate the ancient Greek Dionysian rituals, which culminated in them all getting drugged out of their minds and accidentally killing a local farmer. The only one who wasn't present has been blackmailing the others, and the leading genius of the group (Henry) orchestrates the murder plot we saw on the first page; a terrific example of the pressure that an isolated in-group can exert on its members. They get away with it, but they all start to crack in various ways. Richard loyally tries to help them all as their lives fall apart, until we get to the second reveal: Richard realizes that Henry brought him into the group in the first place in order to serve as the fall guy for the murder, in case that became necessary. He was recruited as a sacrifice -- like a gang escaping from a Siberian prison who brought one outsider along so they could kill and eat him if they needed to -- and he was never really one of them at all; the powerful sense of belonging he'd felt was an illusion. Despite this, or because of it, when the group crashes and burns, each collapsing in their own way, Richard is the survivor -- he's the only one who graduates and the only one who goes on with his life, as the others either die by violence or consume themselves with drugs and alcohol. I thought it was an excellent book, but it's nothing like I imagined from the description I'd read of it.


A Haunted House -- Virginia Woolf

A collection of short stories that Woolf's husband Leonard put together after her death. One of them is probably a chapter written for Mrs. Dalloway that she eventually left out. My favorite was a story about a woman on a train, giving a really excellent impression of thoughts going through the mind of someone who's looking out a train window and not concentrating on anything in particular; it appears to be a jumble of landscapes, what happened that morning, what she'll do when she arrives, idly inventing the tragic life story of another passenger -- yet it all tells a coherent story and gives us a clear picture of the sort of person the woman is. I was really impressed by that. It was a good collection overall.


Cobalt Red -- Siddharth Kara

An "exposé" of things that were already pretty well known, but not a bad summing-up. All of our phones and tablets and laptops need cobalt to work; the majority of the world's cobalt is in the Congo; conditions at the cobalt mines are terrible, involving child labor and debt slavery; promises by electronics manufacturers that they make sure their products don't use child labor are empty, since they all buy their cobalt from central depots that keep no records of where the cobalt came from. It's all appalling, but actually I found Kara's own behavior unsettling -- he makes a big deal of how brave and persistent he was in getting access to closed-off Congolese mining areas, but he also gives the real names of people who helped him and in general shows no sign of any concern about what might happen to any of the people he talked to after the book is published. He interviewed small children without their families' permission and without any relatives present (who's unethically exploiting children now?) and even describes times when children started crying or screaming in the middle of an interview, and he never tried to comfort them or even stopped the interview. I really got the feeling that he wanted them to be as miserable as possible because it would make his book more sensational. He even describes -- without any apparent self-awareness -- an interview with a Congolese government official who told him that his proposed book was nothing but a Western-savior narrative and that if he really wanted to help then a better use of his time would be to assist researchers in the Congo in making their own cases. Kind of an unintentional self-exposure there, really.


The Passenger -- Cormac McCarthy

His second-to-last novel, written as a pair with his last novel, which was released six weeks after this one. There are disconnected jigsaw pieces of plot but they're deliberately mismatched and tossed around; it has always seemed to me that McCarthy was rather contemptuous of his audience, and there was a definite feeling of "fuck you, only losers like coherent narratives or a story with a point." The main character is Bobby Western, a depressed salvage diver and former race car driver; his younger sister, with whom he was clearly obsessed and with whom he seems to have had an incestuous relationship, committed suicide ten years before the novel begins, and Bobby isn't over it. I got the impression that Bobby wanted to die but he didn't want to kill himself, which is why he chose such dangerous jobs. Bobby discovers a mysterious crashed plane where the black box is missing, then gets questioned by unidentified government agents who tell him that there was another passenger on the plane whose body is inexplicably missing, and then the IRS freezes his bank account and seizes his car without saying why; all of these are forgotten almost immediately and they clearly aren't really important. They felt more like McCarthy was making fun of the reader: "Ooh look, a plot element, you know, like stupid people like. Ha ha! Now let's get to the important parts where Bobby gets drunk and rambles half-baked philosophy and tries to pretend that when he was in his mid-twenties having sex with a fourteen-year-old girl who was also his sister, that was a wholly consensual thing, not child rape at all, and other people just don't understand." I didn't care for it.


Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism -- Kristen R. Ghodsee

A very interesting book whose main thesis is that, while no one would want to bring back the oppressive regimes of eastern Europe, we have rather thrown the baby out with the bath water, since women there often had more economic freedom and more self-determination than in capitalist countries. The socialist countries had state-funded day care, for one thing; and in general women were able to find work and support themselves without having to be utterly dependent on a husband, which left them freer to choose the men they wanted, or not, as it suited them. It turns out that economically independent women are a lot more selective when looking for partners, and the resulting relationships are happier and more fulfilling. There were telling interviews with middle-aged East German men who were surprisingly open about saying that the main reason they were happy that the wall came down was that the East German women no longer had access to the state resources that let them remain independent, so they had to start marrying men that they wouldn't have married if they could have afforded not to. That was depressing. Good book though.


*Mrs. Dalloway's Party -- Virginia Woolf 

A collection put together by a publisher in the seventies,  meant to be a thematic companion piece to Mrs. Dalloway. The first story, "Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street", was originally meant to be the first chapter of Mrs. Dalloway. The book also includes four stories from A Haunted House that take place at the Dalloways', possibly on the same night, along with a couple unpublished sketches. Many of the guests are hobbled by social anxiety -- a woman worries that her new dress is too old-fashioned and people are snickering; a man impressed by his own austerity looks down scornfully on adults who waste their time in such foolishness as parties; a woman in the middle of an interesting conversation about Shelley is shocked when the man she's talking to casually catches a fly and pulls its wings off. Clarissa Dalloway appears on the edges of all the stories as she manages the ebb and flow of the party -- "‘Come and let me introduce you,’ and there Mrs Dalloway hesitated, and then remembering that Lily was the clever one who read poetry, looked about for some young man, some young man just down from Oxford, who would have read everything and would talk about himself." 


Winter Garden -- Pablo Neruda (translated by William O'Daly)

One of Neruda's last works; the manuscript was on his desk when he died. This is an excellent edition with the Spanish on the verso and Daly's translation on the recto. I loved it.
   Qué puedo hacer si me escogió la Estrella
   para relampaguear, y si la espina
   me condujo al dolor de algunos muchos?
   What can I do if the star chose me
   to flash with lightning, and if the thorn
   guided me to the pain of so many others? 


On Being Ill -- Virginia Woolf

An essay from the twenties, when Woolf was on extended bed rest while recovering from a nervous breakdown. She talks about how a stretch of illness lets her do things that she doesn't ordinarily have the freedom to do: read all day, lie and look up at the sky, think about nothing in particular. More seriously, she also thinks that the relief from responsibility provides her with creative inspiration, and she wonders why illness isn't a central theme of Western literature, like love and war. (I don't think she'd yet read Proust at this time, or she would have mentioned his long introspective passages about illness.) 


The Bakkhai -- Euripides (translated by Anne Carson)

A free-verse translation, true to the text though not the meter of the original. I liked it, though I think Carson tried too hard to make the speeches sound like contemporary people talking; having an ancient Theban king speak to a disguised Olympian god as if they're having a conversation at a bus stop is, to me, more incongruous than archaic language. If they don't sound as though they're having a momentous argument about something world-shakingly important, what's the point? When Pentheus ignores all Dionysos's warnings and resolves on his blasphemous plan, Dionysos's last line -- οὐκ οἶσθ᾽ ὅ τι ζῇς, οὐδ᾽ ὃ δρᾷς, οὐδ᾽ ὅστις εἶ, "You know not what you do, nor why you live, nor who you are" -- should be understood as Dionysos pronouncing Pentheus's doom: Pentheus's own angry refusal to understand either human nature or his own will destroy him. Carson's "You don't know what you're doing" just doesn't get it across. I also think free verse is better on the page than it would be in a theater; this is really a reading edition, I wouldn't try to stage it.


Night and Day -- Virginia Woolf

Her second novel, set in London during the reign of Edward VII. It follows the romantic entanglements of two wealthy women: Katherine, whose family rather makes a religion out of the fact that her grandfather was a famous poet, and Mary, a clergyman's daughter. Mary works at the offices of a suffragist organization, while Katherine acts as her mother's secretary and assistant as her mother writes a biography of her famous poet father that she will obviously never finish. Katherine is engaged to a poet named William, who is more interested in having a connection to the famous poet than he is in her. Ralph -- an attorney -- falls in love with Katherine, but avoids her because she's engaged. Having realized that Mary loves him, Ralph proposes to her, but Mary refuses because she's realized that Ralph loves Katherine. Just when you think it's all going to be a big firework display of self-denial, William loses interest in Katherine and marries her cousin instead, leaving Ralph free to propose to Katherine, who accepts. Hard luck on poor Mary, I thought. It wasn't my favorite of her books.


Stella Maris -- Cormac McCarthy

This is the companion novel to The Passenger; the main character here is Alicia Western, Bobby Western's younger sister (and maybe the mother of his child, though that's only a possible implication). We already know that Alicia is going to commit suicide; Stella Maris is the name of the facility where she's intermittently institutionalized. Alicia is a genius, which rather works against her, since she disdains the doctors' diagnoses of schizophrenia and instead decides that the strange beings that speak to her are expressions of a higher reality that she can see because she's so much smarter than everyone else. McCarthy runs into the same problem that most authors run into when they attempt to portray a super-intelligent character: he can't find any way to bring home to the reader how smart she is. Some of the devices he uses are silly; for example he has people regard Alicia with astonished awe because she solves a crossword puzzle entirely in her head, without writing any of the answers down, a thing anyone with a good memory can do. It also left me with some frustrating uncertainties -- Alicia makes really basic mistakes when talking about atomic structure, and I have to wonder whether that's a printing error, or McCarthy is trying to tell us that she's falling apart, or McCarthy himself just didn't know the difference. Alicia tells stories about famous mathematicians, some of which have many details wrong, and some of which actually happened many years after Alicia's suicide in the novel, which might imply something interesting about her perception of time but I didn't like the book enough to bother chewing it over any further. 


The Common Reader -- Virginia Woolf

Woolf took the title for this essay collection from a line of Johnson's, describing "the common reader", meaning a ordinary person who reads for the pleasure of it rather than because they have some professional connection to writing and publishing. Woolf took it to describe someone who wasn't a scholar or critic, someone "worse educated" and perhaps "not gifted so generously by nature"; by this she really meant herself, since her family never sent her to school and all her education came from her wide reading. The title is saying "I make no claim to be a true scholar, but here's what I think about a bunch of things I've read." there are excellent essays on Chaucer and Defoe, the Elizabethans and the ancient Greeks. She makes an interesting point in a review of a collection of recent essays published in 1920: what she found missing in contemporary essays was an "obstinate conviction", and an on-the-one-hand-this-on-the-other-hand-that philosophy doesn't make for an essay that sticks in the mind. "It makes us suspect that the art of writing has for backbone some fierce attachment to an idea." I thought they were great.


Six Four -- Hideo Yokoyama

A crime novel, set in Japan in an imaginary "Prefecture D". The main character is a detective named Mikami, serving a two-year stint as the media relations officer. He hates the assignment and the reporters, and he's distracted by his family problems: his teenage daughter Ayumi ran away from home over a year ago after Mikami objected to her getting cosmetic surgery, and he hasn't heard from her since; his wife never leaves the house in case Ayumi phones. What Mikami never mentions at home is that he's haunted by the fear that Ayumi has been kidnapped and murdered, as happened to another teenage girl in Prefecture D fifteen years before, an unsolved case that's the department's biggest black eye. The kidnapping took place in the year Showa 64 (1989) so the still-open case is called Six Four. The translator describes it as a "slow burn" story, as the plot flows in slow-moving streams of politics, authority, family, and the necessity of keeping face in a hierarchical organization. We follow Mikami through the frustrations of dealing with a potential press campaign against the police, political infighting in the department complicated by interference from Tokyo, the petty annoyance of harassers who are calling homes and hanging up all over the prefecture, and running into unexpected gag orders when he tries to speak to retired cops from the original Six Four case. Eventually a new kidnapping merges all these streams into a flood and the action picks up, tearing along to the solving of both the old and new kidnapping cases. It did take a while to get going, but the ending was very good. 


Lying For Money -- Dan Davies

An excellent book about various ways rich people make money that don't meet the legal definition of fraud, but which no ordinary person would call honest. One practice is to take out a large personal loan to start a business, then transfer responsibility for the loan to the business, then pay yourself a big bonus and walk away, leaving everyone screwed except you. Davies talks about low-trust and high-trust societies; low-trust societies are more proof against fraud but have little growth opportunity, such as the Greek shipbuilding business, a wholly closed system where people only deal with people whose grandparents dealt with their grandparents. It would be almost impossible to defraud anyone in that business, but on the other hand no one new can ever enter it. High-trust societies have more growth potential and so lead to more widespread prosperity, but they also have a much bigger attack surface. The book includes a lot of interesting case histories. I learned a lot from it.


*Dubliners -- James Joyce

Far, far, far and away Joyce's best book. I first read it in my Joyce class in college, and I've reread many of the stories often; this time I reread the whole thing. "The Dead" is justly the best-known, and it has the best closing line ever -- His soul swooned slowly as he listened to the snow falling faintly through the universe, and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead. -- but my personal favorite is "Ivy Day in the Committee Room". I also love "A Little Cloud". I was more struck this time by the first story, "The Sisters", about the neighborhood women gathered to sit with the body of the parish priest (a drunk), their conversation skirting defensively around the fact that the priest was a child molester and they all knew it and did nothing, preferring to blame the children. I remember my college professor saying that "The Sisters" and "The Dead" could easily have exchanged titles. What a good book.


Fireborn: Phoenix and the Frost Palace -- Aisling Fowler

Sabine also lent me the second book in the series: Twelve, after discovering her fire powers, has taken the name Phoenix, and she and her fellow new Hunters get sent off to the Frost Palace, the citadel of a league of witches who are the Hunters' allies in monster-fighting. The Frost Palace is in danger from an ancient evil that's manifesting again, as they do. The book is mostly a setup for further books and I found it less interesting than the first one.


The Common Reader: Second Series -- Virginia Woolf

Her second collection of literary-appreciation essays, published seven years after the first. It has great essays on Hazlitt, Hardy, Defoe (again), and the Elizabethans (again). I particularly liked the essay on Christina Rossetti, with its account of how the shy, unsocial poet, taken against her will to a tea-party, sat quietly in a corner trying not to be noticed, until the talk turned to poetry, and she got so fed up with the empty chatter, the "All the good poets are dead" and "No one has the time to read poetry any more" formulas, that she got up, walked to the center of the room, and stood there until everyone was staring at her, wondering who this odd little woman in black was, and then she announced "I am Christina Rossetti." Then she went and sat down again, leaving the crowd to understand, or not, that she had just said "I am a poet, a wonderful poet, and none of you know what you're talking about."


*Congo Diary -- Joseph Conrad (Zdzislaw Najder, ed.)

The journal that Conrad kept in the second half of 1890, when he was hired by a Belgian merchant company to command steamboats operating on the rivers in the Congo. He broke his contract and left after six months, permanently turned against colonialism. His friends said he never really recovered from the shock; he himself said it was when he stopped believing in European civilization. He later turned his experience into the bitter stories "An Outpost of Progress" and Heart of Darkness. I'm afraid I may have over-hyped it a bit, since the journal is purely a record of weather and river conditions, with no personal reflections at all. The editor of my edition says that Conrad's executor never published it because "it has no personal or literary interest." The editor argues that people haven't properly appreciated it, as contrarians generally do, and he's full of shit, as contrarians generally are. I wouldn't bother.


Moon Deluxe -- Frederick Barthelme

A collection of seventeen short stories from the eighties, generally about bored and lonely people making ephemeral human connections with neighbors or strangers. Dan says they're often considered to exemplify the "New Yorker story". Like his brother, the author has a knack for interesting phrases; one story begins "Harold got in a fight with the neighbors' dog and won, so we had to apologize." Maybe the best was "Pool Lights", about people making awkward small talk around the pool at their crummy apartment complex; I liked it even though it was written in the present-tense second person, so that's an accomplishment.


The Tattooed Potato and Other Clues -- Ellen Raskin

A terrific YA novel that I first read from the library around 1982, and reread several times later on. I got it out to read it to the kids. It's about a teenager named Dickory, living on her brother's couch while attending art school in New York in the seventies. Answering an ad, she gets a job as an assistant to an oddball Greenwich Village artist called Garson; Garson paints exceptionally carefully, without a spare drop, but he shares his studio with another artist who's a real slob and he needs Dickory to clean up after him. The other artist is never around, but in between painting precise, characterless society portraits, Garson gets visits from a New York police detective who consults with him on difficult cases. It's a great book, by turns funny, exciting, and sad. I love it.


The Mountain in the Sea -- Ray Nayler

An SF novel about a marine researcher who discovers a colony of intelligent octopuses. The researcher lists a bunch of reasons why octopuses would probably be unable to create an octopus civilization -- they live less than three years, they can't use fire, they have no means of recording knowledge for future generations -- but there they are. The researcher just decides "Oh well, I guess they overcame it all somehow" and doesn't think about it any more, which I thought was poor writing. In general I found the book pretty uninteresting, though I liked the way the researcher worries about the octopuses being hostile after one of them kills a human, until she grasps that the octopus didn't even realize that the human was a living thing and just killed it by accident while doing something else. What stands out for me is a piece of the researcher's back story, a time she remembers when she was studying a species of endangered coastal fish; she realized that the locals were illegally catching the fish, but instead of considering that the locals were poor and hungry, she complained to the authorities, who savagely punished them. She was shocked and guilty even before the locals retaliated by poisoning the water and killing the fish, leaving her appalled by realizing that not only were the deaths of the locals and the extermination of the fish her fault, the locals only killed the fish because they knew they couldn't kill her. That really stays with me. I would have liked it better if the author had made that the story and forgotten about the unconvincing octopus civilization.


*The Goblin Market and other Poems -- Christina Rossetti

Her first book, published when she was about thirty, which made her name; Tennyson loved it, and so did Gerard Manley Hopkins. This is a Dover Thrift edition that Dad probably bought at South Station to read on the train, and it doesn't include her brother's outstanding woodcuts, but it does include selections from her later poetry collections. The ones that stick in my head are the disappointed-love stories, like "Maude Clare", about a woman coldly presenting a groom with a wedding-present of the half-ring he had once given her, as the bride watches in mixed resentment and triumph; or "Sister Maude", about a woman who blames her sister for telling their parents about her secret lover, leading to the suitor's death (whether by suicide or killed by the father isn't clear), bitterly hoping that Maude will never be saved but only "bide with sin and death". (Rossetti apparently had it in for women named Maude, I don't know why.)
 

*Virginia Woolf and the Hogarth Press -- David H. Porter

A really interesting short pamphlet on the history of the Woolfs' printing company. In 1917 Leonard and Virginia Woolf bought a printing-press, and from then on they printed all of their own books (I have several, books on good rag paper in green cloth covers with dust jackets designed by Virginia's sister Vanessa Bell.) This meant that they never had to worry about printers demanding that Virginia rewrite her experimental novels to make them more conventional, or insist on cutting sections of Leonard's political writing for fear of libel suits. They expanded their remit over the next couple decades, publishing Katherine Mansfield, Roger Fry, and E.M. Forster. They published the first edition of Eliot's "The Waste Land", and they were the first English press to publish Proust (after Eliot rejected the manuscript for Swann's Way, which he later called his stupidest decision.) I thought it was fascinating.


Nine Horses -- Billy Collins

This was one of Mom's books; she was a big fan of his. It's the only one of his collections where nothing really stands out for me. I didn't find that any line or image stuck in my head, as his works so often do. The only moment I really remember is a poem about eating alone in a Chinese restaurant, thinking about Bodhidharma, who brought Buddhism from India to China; going to pay his bill he sees a portrait of Bodhidharma on the wall: 
   and when I quizzed the young cashier, 
   she looked back at the painting and said
   she didn't know who it was but it looked like her boss.
And I like that line but the real reason it stayed with me is that it reminded me of the posters of Bodhidharma that the Shureido company used to include in their shipments of karate equipment.


Orlando -- Virginia Woolf

A satire on English literature, concerning the strangely immortal English aristocrat Orlando, who starts out as a page boy in the court of Elizabeth I, where he begins writing a long poem called The Oak Tree. He falls in love, is thrown over and disappointed, then spends some decades dedicating himself to his family estate before being sent as ambassador to Constantinople by Charles II. While there he falls into a days-long sleep from which no one can rouse him, until awakening to find that he has inexplicably become a woman. After the initial surprise Orlando finds she prefers being a woman; she returns to England and spends the eighteenth century hobnobbing with Pope and Swift and Addison, wearing men's or women's clothing as the mood takes her, and sporadically working on her poem. During the nineteenth century she criticizes the gradual separation of spheres of male and female life, leading, in her opinion, only to deceit and isolation. In the twentieth century she finally gets married, to another gender-nonconforming person, and also finally finishes her poem. Orlando is a portrait of Woolf's friend and sometimes lover Vita Sackville-West; Vita's son called the novel the longest and most charming love-letter in history. Vita was the first person Woolf ever told about her childhood abuse, and the relief of being able to talk about it seems to have freed her both personally and artistically, in that she became able to experience sexual pleasure and also wrote her most creative and inventive novels.


Trinity -- Frank Close

Dan lent me this. It's a history of the Manhattan Project, concentrating on Klaus Fuchs and his years-long campaign of espionage. Everyone was to blame, really; British intelligence knew that Fuchs was a communist, and they didn't tell the Americans, because all of the British scientists at Los Alamos -- about two dozen of them -- were also spying on the US, for Britain. On the other hand, even though Fuchs was a foreign national, the Americans just let him wander off base unsupervised, never noticing that he was constantly meeting people at cafés in Santa Fe. The Americans did eventually figure it out, but they couldn't get any proof, until British GCHQ decoded some intercepts that made it certain. The problem was that no one wanted the Soviets to know that their code had been broken, so the evidence couldn't be brought to court. The only way to get a conviction, then, was for Fuchs to confess; MI5 interrogated him through 1949 and 1950, and he finally gave in and signed a confession on the understanding that he wouldn't be prosecuted and he could keep his professorship in England, both promises that no one had any intention of keeping. Fuchs's lawyer chose not to bring that up at the trial, I'm not sure why. Maybe the Crown leaned on him in some way, who knows. The prose was very good, it really kept me reading.


*Ambrose Bierce -- Robert A. Wiggins

A short biography, indeed very short, as it doesn't reach fifty pages; and even then so little is known about Bierce's life that the book is full of phrases such as "it seems" and "legend has it" and "the circumstances are obscure". Since he never went to school, where did he learn to write as well as he did? What was he doing between leaving home and enlisting in the Union army? Why did his marriage fail? What happened to him in Mexico? Nobody knows. He may always have been an angry man -- his newspaper colleagues called him "Bitter Bierce" -- but on the other hand he fought at Shiloh, Chickamauga, Chattanooga, and Kenesaw Mountain, which would be enough to give anyone a dark view of humanity. I hadn't known that he generally wrote in the middle of the night because his chronic asthma made it hard for him to sleep. Wiggins sums up Bierce as egotistical and resentful of others' success; he thinks that Bierce never improved on his early promise because he would always rather write savage articles attacking other writers than develop his own talents. There's probably some truth to that; his review where he said "There could only be two writers worse than Stephen Crane, namely, two Stephen Cranes," sure sounds to me like envious spite (The Red Badge of Courage was far more critically and commercially successful than anything Bierce wrote.) 


People Love Dead Jews -- Dara Horn

A depressing book about how we tend to concentrate on famous Jewish martyrdoms rather than anything about Jewish life or culture -- all most people really know about Jews is that they got killed. Every American school kid knows Anne Frank because she was murdered. Basically all anyone remembers about her is that she wrote that she still believed that people were basically good -- ignoring her whole life and the whole colossal history of anti-Semitism to turn her into a source of generic feel-good inspiration. I was also depressed by the persistence of the Ellis Island myth: no one ever "had their name changed" at Ellis Island. The immigrants changed their names in order to escape the prejudice and mistreatment they knew a Jewish name would bring, but pretended that some bureaucrat was to blame so they wouldn't have to admit that they did it themselves -- both to escape the shame of appearing to deny their culture and to avoid admitting that America wasn't any different to Europe. Well-written and persuasive, but a real downer.


*English Diarists: Evelyn and Pepys -- Margaret Willy

A fifty-page essay from the "Writers and Their Work" series, contrasting the two great seventeenth-century diarists, John Evelyn and Samuel Pepys, who were close friends but widely different in background and character. I remember liking it, but not much more; I was reading it while Mom was having her anxiety attacks about Colleen's wedding and that may have distracted my attention.


Brief Notes on the Art and Manner of Arranging One's Books -- Georges Perec (John Sturrock, translator)

Dull.


The Hooligans of Kandahar -- Joseph Kassabian

A very good, very funny (in a laugh-so-you-won't-cry way) memoir of serving in a squad of fuckups in Afghanistan in 2012 and 2013. It opens up when the narrator's squad -- a few days after arriving in the country -- gets helicoptered out to a forward position, only to find that the copter put them down in the wrong location, and they have to walk twenty miles to get to where they're supposed to be, with only as much ammunition as they can steal from the location they were dropped at, because their own commander either forgot or didn't bother to issue them any. And they have to walk it along with some disaffected Afghan troops, who have to be included in every operation in order to keep up the fiction that the US is cooperating with them, and who are all unarmed because their commander sold their weapons to the Taliban last week. It doesn't get any more competent from there. I read pretty much the whole thing in one sitting, although that was partly because I was so stressed out after dealing with Mom's anxiety-induced sickness at Colleen's wedding reception that I couldn't bear to talk to anyone and I just hid in a corner reading until I could leave. Great book though.


Three Guineas -- Virginia Woolf

A book-length essay from 1938. The catalyst for the essay was a letter that Woolf received from an "educated gentleman" (she never says who it is) asking for her opinions about the best methods to oppose the world war that everyone knew was coming. She's frankly astonished that England has changed enough that this letter was written at all; when she was a girl, she says, sending this letter would have seemed as if the master of the house had gone down to the kitchen to ask the scullery-maid to help him construe Pindar -- everyone would have thought he had gone mad. Woolf is very much in favor of opposing war, but all the same she has not answered the letter, because she needs an entire book to explain that the writer is really asking her to adopt the conventions and habits of mind of the same society that kept her uneducated and a virtual hermit in her house until her father died, and that even now in 1938 hammer unceasingly on the radio and in the newspaper that English women, who have failed in their essential task of serving men, must return to the kitchen and accept that the men's world is not for them. "You have asked how to prevent war -- you have not asked what peace is." 


The Trouble With Poetry -- Billy Collins

This one includes the first poem of his I ever read, "The Lanyard", where he remembers braiding a lanyard out of plastic strips at summer camp as a present for his mother and thinks about what an insufficient return it was:
   Here are thousands of meals, she said,
   and here is clothing and a good education.
   And here is your lanyard, I replied.
It was Lucy who introduced me to Billy Collins twenty years ago, and this was the poem she gave me to read; and when I brought it up to her after reading this book, she said that now that she has children, she thinks that your child making something for you and giving it to you hoping you'll like it absolutely does make things even.


*Flush -- Virginia Woolf

A biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's dog, Flush; though it's really a criticism and satire on the place of women, particularly women artists, in an industrial society. Woolf probably also meant Elizabeth to stand in for herself: an English female artist with a father who didn't encourage her and a lifelong history of illness. Elizabeth acquires Flush as a puppy when she's about 35, as a gift from her friend the poet Mary Russell Mitford, and Flush lives with her happily for about five years until he notices that she's begun be sad most of the time and is always staring at pieces of paper that make her cry. (We understand, though Flush doesn't, that the papers are love letters from Robert Browning; Mr. Barrett refused to let any of his children marry -- he expected them all to spend their lives as his servants -- and Elizabeth cannot see Robert without disobeying her father.)  Flush's life is upended when Elizabeth suddenly leaves for Italy (because she eloped; her father disinherited her and never spoke or wrote to her again.) In Italy Flush is allowed outdoors for the first time (like Woolf when her father died), and while both poets, rejuvenated by love and freedom, produce their best works, Flush is astonished to discover the wider world and make friends with other dogs; smell is to him what poetry is to the Brownings. An interesting book.


*The Essays and the Last Essays of Elia -- Charles Lamb

I've read these twice before in the last thirty years, and I like them and find them calming, so I picked up my dad's copy and reread it. They're excellently written and show off the author's humor and intelligence and good nature. A couple of the later essays really annoyed me this time, though -- either I read them inattentively last time or they weren't in my edition. The gist is, there was a school called Christ's Hospital, established by Edward the Sixth as a charity school for second sons, or children of educated men who couldn't pay school fees. Lamb went there in the 1780s. In 1813 he wrote an open letter to protest a question before Parliament on whether the school should be opened to children from working-class families. Lamb thought that the character of the place would be damaged by admitting "the very lowest of the people." In listing the advantages of the school, he mentions "that measure of classical attainments, which every individual at that school, though not destined to a learned profession, has it in his power to procure; attainments which it would be worse than folly to put it in the reach of the working classes to acquire." What he really means is that if the working classes could learn Greek and Latin, then the upper class would lose one of the shibboleths that externally marked them as superior. Further than that -- and Lamb must have known this, though he wouldn't acknowledge it -- there's the fact that working-class children, driven by need, would generally work harder than the children of gentlemen, who coasted through school where they could because they planned to live on their family connections; and they would find themselves in the infuriating position of having their social inferiors show them up as second-rate scholars. Where Lamb himself quotes Latin he often gets it wrong; like most graduates of those schools, he probably considered the classics an "accomplishment", like playing the piano, and for him misquoting a half-remembered line of Horace was the equivalent of wearing jewelry, in that its purpose was to announce that you had enough money to buy it. So imagine his rage at the idea of speaking to a common tradesman who could actually read Horace, and being shown up as not really understanding it himself. It would threaten his whole identity. Sorry, I kind of ran on there. Anyway the rest of the book is still good. You can't expect to agree on everything with someone born 200 years before you were.


Arabian Nights and Days -- Naguib Mahfouz

Sort of an ever-after story, concerning what happened next after Scheherazade finished her stories and Shahriyar decided to remain married to her and stop killing his wives. I think it's meant to illustrate that the great world of Araby is more than a backdrop; the stories go on even after Scheherazade has finished telling them. The novel takes place in and around the poor quarter of Shahriyar's city (traditionally Baghdad, but Mahfouz leaves it nameless so that it can also stand in for his native Cairo) as the quarter's people are led astray by malevolent djinni into often-terrible tragedies, although some of them are saved by the saintly local sheikh, or by the hard-nosed but honest chief of police, or by Shahriyar himself, who has taken to wandering the city by night in disguise to get a better idea of what kind of life his people lead. I liked it a lot. 


A Cockney's Farming Experiences -- Virginia Woolf

A little pamphlet published in the 1990s, containing a brief piece of juvenilia, a never-finished "novel" that the ten-year-old Virginia published serially in the family newspaper that she and her siblings printed. She got through four chapters before abandoning it. What there is of it tells the story of a working-class London couple who inexplicably move to the country and buy a farm. She plays their city-mouse-in-the-country ignorance for laughs, not very successfully, but come on, she was ten.


Our Dead Behind Us -- Audre Lorde

A poetry collection from the eighties, mixing free verse, surrealism, and a kind of English-language adaptation of African call-and-response songs. They're pretty dark. The ones I remember best are "Every Traveler Has One Vermont Poem" (about driving past two teenage farm boys on a tractor: one waved cheerily and the other shouted a racial slur) and "There Are No Honest Poems About Dead Women" ("What do we want from one another after we have told our stories?") 


The Just Dessert
The Deadly Blotter
    -- Edward Gorey

A pair of late abecedaria, bound in one volume as Thoughtful Alphabets. Each is a string of twenty-six words accompanied by eerie line drawings. Some are single words and some are phrases. For example, in one of them, V is a drawing of two children turning their backs dramatically on a third child and a dog, over the word "Vilify"; while FGHIJ is a drawing of the same three children (and dog) running around in panic while a bust on a tall plinth inexplicably falls from the ceiling above them; the caption is "Frequent ghastly happenings imply jeopardy." They were both great.


Babel -- R.F. Kuang

An alternate-history novel, set at Oxford University in the 1830s in a world where the British Empire maintains its colonial power through a form of magic involving silver and translation. We follow an entering class of four teenage students: two boys, one from China (Robin, the main character) and one from India, and two girls, one a black Jamaican and one a white English girl. The four are unwelcome and disliked, only allowed to attend Oxford at all because of a powerful clique of translation professors, one of whom is Robin's unacknowledged father. The students gradually become aware of the essential role of silver-magic in Britain's racist violence and struggle to find ways of opposing imperialism. I'm all in favor of opposing imperialism, but the book is just unskillfully constructed. It takes place in England two hundred years ago, but our heroes speak, think, and act like contemporary people. They have no opinions that a 21st-century progressive would object to, and everything they say could come out of Noam Chomsky -- they use absurdly out-of-time post-WWII-English phrases like "narco-military state" and "systemic oppression" and "extinction event". Even the racism they contend with is 21st-century racism; at one point an aristocratic student gets mad at Robin and calls him a racial slur. For modern-day readers, slurs are a breaking of a taboo and an assertion of dominance, but no 1830s Englishman would have felt any outlet or release of rage by using a slur, which would only be an everyday word to him. Plus it would never occur to him to engage in any kind of contest with Robin, whom he would have considered literally less than human. If he were angry at Robin he would just have told his servants to go beat him up. I also didn't think much of the students' plan to prevent the First Opium War. First off, it was clumsily telegraphed right away, when the students enter the magic laboratory for the first time and the professor tells them, for no reason, "Hey remember never to do this thing, because if you do you'll destroy all magic everywhere and cripple Britain." Second, what real difference would it make? Britain won the Opium Wars without the help of silver magic. And in this history Britain still lost the American War of Independence, so how much help was the magic anyway? The only thing I liked about the story was that Robin got to kill his abusive father and get away with it.


The Waves -- Virginia Woolf

A novel composed entirely of soliloquies, or dramatic asides, following the lives of six narrators from childhood through adulthood. Each change of narrator is signaled by "Bernard said:", "Susan said:", and so on; but we soon understand that what we're actually reading is their internal monologues, not anything they said aloud. There's a seventh character who has no monologue, and we only learn about him through the details in the monologues of all the others; he's killed in India halfway through the book. Probably he at least partly represents Woolf's brother Thoby, who died young of TB. (According to the editor of my edition, all the characters are thought to resemble people Woolf knew -- one seems like her sister Vanessa, another like T.S. Eliot -- but they're only reminiscent of them, it's not a roman à clef in any sense.) The "waves" of the title probably refer to the ebb and flow of the characters' 
presence in each others' lives, and also I think to the artistic effect Woolf was aiming for in her prose. In the inner monologue of Neville -- the writer of the group -- we hear this: "Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and fall and rise again." I read it again a year later just for the pleasure of appreciating the writing.


Poems -- W.H. Auden

A collection published in 1930, when he was in his early twenties, just down from Oxford. The first third of it is a verse play called Paid on Both Sides, followed by some thirty shorter poems. Before this the only Auden I knew was "Funeral Blues", which like everybody else I first heard in the movie Four Weddings and a Funeral; nothing in this book is anything like that, and even though he wrote "Funeral Blues" only six or seven years after this, it's hard to believe they're by the same person. It isn't often that I read a whole book of poetry by someone and feel no sense of connection at all, have no idea what the poetry meant to the poet or what he was trying to say with it, but there it is. I had no reaction to this book whatever.


Paris By the Book -- Liam Callanan

A novel about a woman named Leah, whose novelist husband has disappeared, leaving no clues, except that searching his desk Leah finds four plane tickets to Paris, meant for the two of them and their two daughters; visiting Paris has long been a family dream. The three of them fly to Paris and settle there, Leah always hoping to find her husband or at least news of him; she takes over a struggling English-language book store, and the novel becomes mostly about raising her daughters alone and keeping the book store going as the mystery of her husband fades for want of any clues. I don't remember most of it, which usually means I didn't like it, though I'm also getting older so who knows. I vaguely remember her suspecting at one point that her husband has been in the book store without her seeing them, and I have the impression that he was really just a jerk who abandoned them. All in all I found it uninteresting. I didn't keep it.


Stay True -- Hua Hsu

A memoir of a college friend Hsu had at Berkeley, who was killed in a carjacking in 1998. Hsu met Ken when they lived in the same dorm, and at first sight they had nothing in common: Hsu was the child of first-generation Taiwanese immigrants, while Ken was Japanese-American, his family had been in the US for many generations, and he was far more at home in American culture than Hsu was. Ken belonged to a fraternity and was highly socialized, while Hsu tended to be anti-social and look down on partiers. They turned out to have similar tastes in music, though, and they eventually became close friends, staying up all night having those wide-ranging conversations that are so much a part of college. The first two-thirds of the book describe their undergraduate years, ending on a Monday not long before graduation, when, wondering why Ken hadn't been in class, Hsu went to his apartment just in time for the police to arrive asking for someone to come to the morgue to identify his body. The last third of the book describes Hsu's attempts to come to grips with what happened, and the echoes that rippled through his later life: Hsu later moved to Boston, where Ken had hoped to go to grad school, and he would go to Fenway and imagine Ken sitting with him. This book is both a way to keep his memories of Ken alive and to talk about the positive influence your friends can have on your life even when they're gone. I loved it.


The London Scene -- Virginia Woolf

A posthumous collection. A long way posthumous, actually -- this is a series of essays on the city of London that Good Housekeeping magazine solicited from Woolf and ran in 1931; they were later collected as a book in 1975, except the publisher missed one, so then someone published this edition in 2013 with all six. They're meant to give an impression of walking around London -- the great docks at Port of London, the houses of Parliament, St Paul's -- and her thoughts on how they reflected the twentieth century. In one essay (she calls it "Great Men's Houses" ironically, but they were in fact people she admired) she goes to the houses of Carlyle, Keats, Dickens, Johnson. She mentions here that going to someone's house can tell you things about them you could find out in no other way; she notes, for example, that no biography had told her that Carlyle's house had no running water, which meant that all the water the Carlyles used ("and they were Scots, fanatical in their cleanliness") had to be hand-pumped from a well in the basement, then heated on a coal grate and then carried up three flights of narrow stairs. The writing was excellent, and she seems in good humor. I liked it.


Woman in the Dark -- Dashiell Hammett

I'd never heard of this until I ran across it at Recycle Books: it's a short novella published serially in one of the pulp magazines in the thirties and then forgotten until someone republished it a few years ago. It wasn't bad. An ex-con called Brazil is living quietly on his own when a beautiful stranger named Luise bursts into his cabin looking for a telephone. Luise is French, and she had agreed to become the mistress of a rich American named Robson without realizing that things would work quite differently than in France; rather than making a civilized business arrangement, Robson thinks he's bought a slave, and he's been keeping her prisoner. With a lot to lose, Brazil is still too decent a man to abandon a friendless woman to a creep, and he fights off Robson's goons and the pair flee to New York. The story is unexpectedly elevated halfway through when Brazil is shot by a goon and incapacitated, and Luise, who until now has been more or less towed along in Brazil's wake, has to take charge, and she becomes the main character. There was a good stinger at the end when Robson's chief goon realizes that Robson plans to kill him and pin it on Brazil to get rid of him, and the goon turns on Robson and the bad guys all get what they have coming while Luise frees herself and Brazil doesn't get sent back to prison. My kind of ending.


Marshmallow and Jordan -- Alina Chau

A cute graphic novel set in Indonesia that Sabine lent to me, about a middle-school girl named Jordan who used to be a star on her school basketball team but was left in a wheel chair after a car accident. On her way home from school one day she hears crying and finds a baby albino elephant with a hurt leg; she brings him home and takes care of him (her parents are far more broad-minded about bringing pets home than mine were, clearly) and calls him Marshmallow. Marshmallow is obviously magical, but no one comments on it; he digs a big hole in Jordan's back yard and fills it with water to make a pool for her to swim in. With Marshmallow's encouragement, she joins the school water polo team (who seemed unnecessarily harsh and unwelcoming to me, but maybe that's just middle-school girls for you) and gets to be an athlete again. Little Ole read it too and kept wanting to talk about what we would do if we found a baby elephant and could keep him as a friend. I liked it.


The Door-to-Door Bookstore -- Carsten Henn

A German novel about a bookseller named Carl, an elderly man who works at a local book store until the awful bitch who recently inherited the store, and who hates him because he was better friends with her father than she was, finds an excuse to fire him, and then hates him more and more because all the customers keep asking where he is and when he'll be back. With the encouragement of his book-loving nine-year-old neighbor Sascha, Carl starts going the rounds of the customers who never come to the store because they don't leave their houses for one reason or another (one is chronically ill, another's abusive husband doesn't let her leave), bringing them his own books from his apartment. This goes on until Sascha's father confronts Carl -- he doesn't even have the wrong idea, he's just jealous that Sascha is spending time with someone else -- and, enraged by Carl's quiet and peaceful response, attacks him and puts him in the hospital. Carl (who's a bit of a saint) tells the doctors he had a fall, not wanting to bring trouble to Sascha's family. In the end all the people he's helped help him, of course, led by Sascha, and he gets another job at a different book store and things look up. There are fantasy elements -- Sascha's father realizes he was wrong and apologizes, the abused wife walks out, both of which would not happen in real life -- but I liked it anyway.


The Librarian of Burned Books -- Brianna Labuskes

A pretty good WWII novel, following three timelines: in 1933, Althea, a young American writer, is invited to Germany as part of Goebbels's cultural exchange; in 1936 and 1937, Hannah, an exiled German Jew, runs a library of books that the Nazis have banned or burned; in 1944, Viv, an editor at the offices of the Armed Services Editions in New York, fights attempts by conservative Senators to censor the books she sends to American soldiers. The overall story line is that Althea's time in Berlin both shows her what the Nazis are really like and helps her realize she's a lesbian; she later goes to Paris and starts a relationship with Hannah, until a French collaborator betrays Hannah's brother to the Nazis and convinces her that Althea did it. After their violent break-up, Althea returns to the US, while Hannah stays on in Paris until she figures out what really happened and flees to the US herself, where eventually Viv reunites her with Althea, and together the three of them keep the wartime literature protected from censorship. I liked it.


*Lolita -- Vladimir Nabokov (annotations by Alfred Appel Jr.)

I had never intended to read this, since I already know it's about child rape and why would I do that to myself? But someone I know, whose rapist used the existence of this book as a justification that his behavior showed he was above other people's cowardly moral codes, asked me to read it so I could talk about it with them. I didn't like it. To be fair to Nabokov, he didn't write it as a how-to or anything, but it's still a creepy story about a creepy man who rapes a young girl and is proud of himself for it. Also, not really Nabokov's fault, but the people who defend the book never stand on its literary merit, they attack critics by saying "what they're really mad about is that the book isn't pornographic", which is dishonest and makes me hate them. So first off, I didn't like it because I don't like Nabokov's writing in general: Nabokov was devoted to puns and wordplay, and he thought that almost the only important part of any book was the sound of the sentences; I think he always read aloud inside his head, if you know what I mean. I myself think that a pun is like a Christmas tree ornament: it's nice if you hang one in the right place, but mainly you should be able to see the tree. So there was that. But also the book asks us to listen sympathetically as a miserable scumbag lying piece of shit justifies himself for abducting and raping a young girl, whom he also nastily criticizes at every opportunity. There's a scene where Humbert watches Dolores (no one calls her "Lolita" other than him) limp out to his car after a night in a motel room, and exasperatedly thinks "look at her putting on a limp for attention and sympathy", when he must know that she's limping because she's a little girl who spent the previous night getting raped by a middle-aged man. I knew there would be a lot of references I didn't get, so I read an edition annotated by a Nabokov scholar, but I found the annotations disappointing; there's a subplot in the novel where we eventually find out that (according to Humbert, who's a habitual liar, remember) during the year he was on the road with Dolores they were being followed by someone, whom he eventually learns was a playwright he'd met before named Quilty. The annotator -- like a lot of fans of the book, apparently -- seems to see the whole novel as an elaborate riddle-game in which the point is to find all the places where Nabokov might be hinting that Quilty is in the scene, and the majority of his annotations are Quilty-sightings. I had no interest in the Quilty game at all, and I found Humbert repulsive and disgusting, and in general I hated it. Mom said that she found it a sad story, because she thought it was all about Dolores and how she lost the life she might have had if Humbert had never seen her, but I think you have to be pretty sympathetically disposed to Nabokov to look at it that way.


*The Twelve Terrors of Christmas -- John Updike and Edward Gorey

This was originally a "Shouts & Murmurs" column in the New Yorker; later it was published as a small book with illustrations by Gorey, although I don't know whether Gorey drew them specifically for the text. I don't like Updike's writing to begin with, and I like Christmas so I'm not in sympathy with complaints about how awful it all is. I only picked the book up for the drawings, which are excellent. I particularly liked the one of a man apprehensively looking out his window on a stormy night at slate shingles falling off of his roof (probably knocked loose by reindeer) and the one of a man and his dog sprawled helplessly on the couch staring at the TV. Both men look as though they're dying of consumption.


Poverty, By America -- Matthew Desmond

A depressing book arguing that so much of America is poor because so many people benefit from it -- not just lenders and service-sector employers but middle-class people like me, whose lifestyle depends on inexpensive goods and services which themselves depend on exploitation of the poor. His proposed solutions, like so many well-meaning proposals, would work if people could or would follow them: tax reform would benefit the majority of the country but there's no will to push the influential people who could advance it to do so; boycotting corporations that exploit the poor would be a good use of consumer choice, except that fewer and fewer corporations own nearly every business in America, so ultimately you'd have to buy nothing at all. While it's a useful pinpoint tactic, it's not useful as a permanent general solution. If you live in a town that has only one grocery store, and that store is owned by an exploitative corporation, what are you going to do, not eat? Not everyone has land to grow their own food, and not everyone has a car or the gas budget to drive thirty miles to the less-evil grocery chain.


The Years -- Virginia Woolf

Her most popular novel in its day. According to the editor, it was originally intended to be part of Three Guineas, the novel and the essay illustrating each other in counterpoint, but both of them grew to be too big and complex for that so she separated them. In a sense it's a family novel, in that it follows the fortunes of the Pargiter family over fifty-some years (the fifty-some years of Woolf's lifetime) but it's really a collection of moments in time -- "moments of being", to use a phrase of hers from another context -- as each chapter of the novel covers one day in their lives. The first is in 1880, the day the invalid mother of the family dies a long-expected death while her husband is with his lower-class mistress in a crummy part of town. The next is a day in 1891, and the children are grown -- one has married an aristocrat, one works for a charity, another looks after their father; others are in business, or in India, or in the law. (It's a large family -- Woolf herself was one of eight children.) Then there's a rapid sequence of days from the aughts through the teens: the father of the family dies and the house is sold, the bookish brother we last saw reading Greek in his rooms publishes a translation of Antigone, another brother's son goes to fight in France. We finish up in 1937, as the surviving members of the family gather for a reunion. For some reason I best remember a scene where the bookish brother, now in his seventies, quotes Antigone -- οὔτοι συνέχθειν, ἀλλὰ συμφιλεῖν ἔφυν, "I was born to love, not to hate" -- but when his nephew asks him to translate, he just shakes his head and says "It's the language," while the nephew thinks that really he's just afraid of being laughed at. "And I'm afraid of him because he's clever....That's what separates us; fear..." It was a good book.


Tsalmoth -- Steven Brust

The most recent in a fantasy series about an organized-crime boss and assassin named Vlad, that I've been reading since about 1987. A "tsalmoth" is an imaginary bear-like animal in the book's fantasy world; this becomes important because the people there are organized into tribes named after various animals, which adopt those animals' characteristics. The books bounce around in time; this one is set early on in Vlad's career. It's an intrigue story, where the plot is essentially "I know this guy is behind all these goings-on, why is he doing it all and what does he want? What's he really up to?" and at one point Vlad has a slap-his-forehead moment and goes, oh wait, I've been looking at this all wrong, this guy is from the tsalmoth tribe and they're all blunt, straight-ahead bull-rushers, not strategists, this is way less complicated than I've been making it! Which isn't very helpful considering that in two dozen books the tsalmoth has never really been mentioned before and the reader had no way of knowing what they were like. Some of these books in this series I really like and some don't impress me; this is one of the second kind.


The Lola Quartet -- Emily St. John Mandel

A pretty good novel about four people who used to play in a jazz quartet together in a Florida arts high school ten years ago, and everything that's gone wrong with their lives since then. The trumpeter is the main character, but the book also uses other narrative viewpoints and jumps around in time, while still managing to tell a coherent story, which was impressive. What happened was, after graduation the trumpeter's girlfriend (the drummer's sister) dumped the trumpeter and took off; what she didn't tell the trumpeter was that she was leaving town with the bassist, heading to the west coast, where he expected to find a job. The job didn't pan out and the two of them wound up crashing with a guy the bassist had known on a forest crew the year before. Two problems: the sister is pregnant, and she can't pretend the baby is the bassist's because the bassist is black and the trumpeter was white; and the forest-crew friend is now a meth dealer. When she hears the bassist say he's angry enough to kill her, the sister steals a gym bag full of cash and disappears; to save his own skin, the bassist gives the dealer the addresses of the other members of the quartet, because where else would the sister go. The sister turns up at the dorm room of the pianist, who gets beaten up by the pursuing dealer while the sister runs off again with the pianist's roommate. Ten years later, the trumpeter returns to Florida after getting fired from his job at a failing New York paper for inventing sources; he visits the drummer (now a diner waitress with a gambling problem), the pianist (who got addicted to painkillers after the dealer beat him up and dropped out of college), and the bassist (now a local cop, openly hostile, which the trumpeter doesn't understand because he never knew that the sister was banging the bassist behind his back, and he never knew she was pregnant). The cop is also on edge because, expecting an inheritance from an elderly relative, he's contacted the dealer and offered to pay him back to get the weight off his mind; but the relative wasn't as well off as he'd thought, and now the dealer is on his way and there's no money, and the last thing the bassist needs is the trumpeter suddenly turning up asking questions while he's planning to use the sister as a set-up to murder the dealer. The best part of the book is the trumpeter figuring out everything that's happened, and having to accept that people he once knew very well have changed so much he no longer recognizes them. I also thought the way the sister and the bassist rationalized it all as them only doing what they had to do was very believable. It was a well-told story.


Tabula Rasa -- John McPhee

A hodgepodge of abandoned writing projects. McPhee looked through his back files for notes on stories he'd meant to write but never did for one reason or another. There was a 1960s proposal for a story about the then-new outdoor-adventure school Outward Bound, which went nowhere because Wallace Shawn (whom McPhee always called the New Yorker's Supreme Eyeshade) said "Sounds like the Hitler Youth," and turned it down. There was the time in the eighties when a Cessna crashed in the woods near McPhee's commute home, and a cop that McPhee had played basketball with in high school came out of the woods leading a woman whose whole calf had been stripped off the bone and was hanging "like a cow's tongue"; the cop saw McPhee, tossed him a roll of tape, and said "Put that back where it goes" before heading back to the crash. Luckily the woman was in shock and McPhee managed to get her leg bound up without breaking anything. He was later deposed in what he thought was a groundless lawsuit against Cessna. He thought he should be able to make a story out of the whole thing, but somehow all the pieces just wouldn't make a coherent whole and he had to abandon it. There's dozens more. I thought it was really interesting.


*The Penny Piper of Saranac -- Stephen Chalmers

A minor character sketch of Robert Louis Stevenson, concerning the winter he spent at the TB sanatorium at Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks, based on conversations with the doctor who treated him and the staff who encountered him. "The most interesting man I ever met," was the general consensus. According to the flyleaf, aunt Marie gave it to Dad for Christmas in 1976; it's kind of sappy and kind of hero-worshipping and I doubt Dad would have bought it himself.


Small Things Like These -- Claire Keegan

My favorite book of the year, I think. It's a novella about a coal-and-firewood seller named Bill, who lives in a rural town in Ireland in the mid-eighties, when the Magdalene Laundries were still open -- dreadful penitential nunneries where teenage mothers had their children taken away and were worked half to death and starved most of the rest of the way, for the crime of having been raped by their family members, generally. The local convent is one of Bill's big customers, and one day, in the run-up to Christmas, he arrives early and unlocks the coal-shed to find a fourteen-year-old girl freezing on the coal. He brings her inside, where the nuns placidly tell him she was in there because she was playing hide-and-seek; staring at the floor, the girl robotically repeats whatever the nuns say. On his way out Bill detours to watch other young girls on their hands and knees scrubbing the spotless floor of an unheated room with cold water. Back at home his wife doesn't want to hear it. We have five daughters, she says, and the only school in town is run by that same convent, and if we want our girls to get anywhere in life we can't get on the wrong side of the nuns, and that's the end of it. The next week Bill makes a firewood delivery, and stands there thinking about it, and then goes and opens the coal-shed, to find the same girl lying on the coal again, covered in bruises this time. He puts her in his truck and drives away. What I loved about it was that there's no possible good outcome for Bill, and he knows that, but he decided to do what's right and face the consequences rather than be silently complicit. Also the prose was excellent. What a good book.


*Wake-Robin -- John Burroughs

Burroughs was a 19th-century naturalist; I'd heard of him because of the "nature-fakers" controversy, in which Burroughs made a big noise criticizing American nature writers for anthropomorphizing in their writing and giving a false picture of how animals behaved. (This grew into a nationwide issue and both Jack London and Teddy Roosevelt got involved in it!) This book is the first in a set of twenty that Dad had; I read it to see if I'd want to read any of the others, and the answer is, not really. I did find out that "wake-robin" was the 19th-century name for the trillium flower, because it blooms about the time that robins start singing in the spring. Also the woodpecker used to be called the "high-hole" because of its habit of nesting inside holes high up in trees. 


An Elderly Lady Is Up to No Good -- Helene Tursten

A book of short stories by a Swedish author who mostly writes a series of crime novels about a police inspector in Gothenburg. I have the feeling that the first story, "An Elderly Lady Has Accommodation Problems", was meant to be a one-off: an old woman named Maud, who has lived all her life in an apartment in Gothenburg, is irritated by a noisy new neighbor who uses a ground-floor apartment as a sculptor's studio; the sculptor goes out of her way to be friendly to Maud, which is pleasant at first until Maud realizes that the sculptor is actually trying to take over Maud's larger apartment. Maud visits the studio when it's just the two of them and kills the sculptor, making it look as though one of her own pieces has accidentally fallen on her. It was a very good story. My guess would be that the author wrote that first story and then thought it would be funny to write a half-dozen more where the joke is that Maud keeps getting put into situations where the most obvious way out of trouble is to kill someone, which she does quite matter-of-factly, and of course always gets away with it. I really liked it.


Dear Edward -- Ann Napolitano

A very good novel about a twelve-year-old boy named Edward, flying across country with his parents and brother; when the plane crashes, Edward is the only survivor out of almost 200 passengers. The book alternates chapters back and forth in time: one story line follows the flight before the crash, showing us Edward's relationships with his family along with vignettes of other passengers: a woman fleeing an abusive husband, a wounded veteran on his way home to rehab, a rich jerk hooking up with a flight attendant. The other story line follows Edward's life after the crash, taken in by an aunt and uncle he's rarely seen who have their hands full shielding him from the awful people who want to profit off the "miracle boy" -- online trolls, would-be documentarians, tabloid writers, all kinds of opportunists -- and from the even more indefatigable relatives of the other passengers, who imagine that Edward has some sort of connection to their lost families and haunt his steps trying to speak to him or touch him. The aunt and uncle do a pretty good job; it's not until years later that Edward finds out about the hundreds of letters that the relatives have written him, describing their lost family members' lives and dreams, and implicitly or explicitly telling Edward that it's his responsibility now to do all the things those other dead passengers dreamed about doing. Edward knows that this is ridiculous and unfair, but it's hard to ignore the psychic weight of so many people's emotional demands. How he copes with that makes up the rest of his story. 


*Hospital Sketches -- Louisa May Alcott

In 1862, Alcott volunteered as a nurse at a Union army hospital (she wasn't allowed to join until she turned thirty, the minimum age.) On her first shift, the wounded from Fredericksburg started coming in, and she had to start dressing wounds and assisting with amputations after being a nurse for less than an hour. The hospital was underfunded, crowded, and unhealthy, and after a month or so Alcott got typhoid fever and had to be sent home for treatment (mercuryl chloride!) She recovered, but she was never really healthy again. After convalescing she gathered the letters home she'd written from the hospital and turned them into a series of sketches that she published in an abolitionist newspaper, and later as a book, whose royalties went to war orphans. The names are invented, and real events are moved around to make a better narrative, but the details are all true. It was an interesting read.


Tokyo Ueno Station -- Yu Miri

A novel that really held my attention, about a homeless man named Kazu who lives in Ueno Park in Tokyo, near the Ueno railway station. It moves back and forth in time, enough so that I needed to write a timeline to keep track of what was happening -- this was more difficult until I realized that some of the episodes concerned Kazu's ghost, still wandering the park after he died. I don't usually do that, but I was really interested in the story, so for posterity, here it is:
    1933 -- Kazu born in Fukushima
    1956 -- Kazu marries Setsuko
    1957 -- daughter Yoko born
    1960 -- son Koichi born
    1963 -- Kazu moves to Tokyo for work
    1981 -- Koichi passes his school exams, dies of natural causes a few days later
    1993 -- Kazu returns to Fukushima
    2000 -- Setsuko dies in her sleep at age 65; Kazu has a breakdown and starts living in Ueno Park 
    2006 -- Kazu commits suicide by stepping in front of a train; in the instant before he dies he has a vision of his granddaughter Mari dying in the 2011 tsunami 
    2012 -- Kazu's restless ghost haunts Ueno Park
I really liked it.


10 Minutes 38 Seconds In This Strange World -- Elif Shafak

A depressing novel about a sex worker called Leila, who has just been stabbed and thrown in a garbage bin in Istanbul. The book describes her diffuse thoughts in the ten and a half minutes it takes for her brain to completely run out of oxygen and die, as she remembers her life and its disappointments. Approaching death seems to heighten her consciousness, and she's aware of her friends searching for her, and she remembers their lives as well. She's also aware that her friends, not being related to her, won't be allowed to claim her body, and no one in her family would do that even if they were still in contact, so she won't have a funeral. There's no attempt at any closure of what happened, since any investigation or retribution would make Leila a supporting character in someone else's story, and this story is only about her, and that makes narrative sense but it means the story ends without any kind of redeeming moment. I liked the writing but I didn't enjoy it.


Interior Chinatown -- Charles Yu

A novel about Asian-American stereotypes. It's in the form of a script for a ridiculous over-the-top police drama called Black and White, starring a white woman named Black and a black man named White. The show is eternal, a never-ending soap opera, as Black and White trade poorly-written dialogue while investigating nonsensical murders at a caricature of a Chinese restaurant called Golden Palace, which somehow never closes. The script is written in the second person, giving stage directions to "you" -- "you" being Willis Wu, a Chinatown resident who, like everyone he knows, has spent his life as an extra in the show, as Dead Asian Guy, or Delivery Guy, or Silent Henchman, or Generic Asian Man, or Generic Asian Man Making A Weird Face. When things go right he gets a stretch as a recurring character with dialogue, until his arc runs its course and he gets killed, and then he goes back to being a background extra again. He knows that no one who looks like him is ever going to be a star on the show, and all he really has to look forward to down the road is roles as Old Asian Guy Smoking; his dream, like that of everyone he knows, is to achieve the highest-status role possible for an Asian: Kung Fu Guy. It's weird already but it gets weirder, as, within the show, Willis is arrested in "The Case of the Missing Asian" and brought to trial, where the prosecutor, the defense attorney, and Willis argue over Asian identity in the United States and the politics of racial categorization in a way that's played completely straight but also hilarious. I loved it.


Demon Copperhead -- Barbara Kingsolver

A retelling of David Copperfield set in contemporary Appalachia. Lucy wanted me to read it so we could talk about it. What I thought was cleverest about it was that Kingsolver paralleled the attraction David felt for Steerforth -- whose charm and social position blinded David to his selfishness and lack of conscience -- by making the Steerforth character a popular high-school football star who also deals opioids. I also liked how the young Damon (the David character), frightened by cruel adults like Stoner (the Mr Murdstone character), exaggerates them into cunning masters of deceit, fiendishly manipulative, when in fact the authorities -- to the extent that they care at all -- start out believing Stoner already, because he's a man, and all he really has to do is coast along letting American institutions take their normal course. I got tired of it, though, and kept putting it down. I didn't think the parallel really held: David is essentially optimistic, while Damon starts out bad-natured and cynical and just gets more so. And Kingsolver keeps having Damon protest the cruel hillbilly image that the American media paints rural Appalachia with, while herself writing a caricature of every rural stereotype. After Damon runs away from his meth-lab job and gets robbed by a half-starved opioid-addict truck stop hooker, I stopped reading for a long while. I did finish it, but I didn't like any of the rest of the book; most of all I didn't like how Kingsolver tries to squeeze a paean to rural living into the last five pages, about how those city folks will never appreciate things like rain on your vegetable garden and shooting deer when you're hungry and knowing how to milk a cow -- all things Damon has never done. Damon never gets to achieve his life's dream of seeing the ocean, either. Lucy said it felt as though the lesson of the book is that the characters are so hopeless that they don't deserve to have anything good. The book won the Pulitzer, but I still thought it sucked.


An Elderly Lady Must Not Be Crossed -- Helene Tursten

Another book about Maud, the inadvertent serial killer. This one is a novel, telling Maud's life story in stages as she reflects on her past during her annual winter vacation. I thought it rather lacked the tongue-in-cheek self-awareness that made the previous book fun, but taking it for what it is, it wasn't bad.  


Walk the Blue Fields -- Claire Keegan

A collection of a half-dozen short stories, mostly set in Ireland, generally about people coping with their lives taking a change of direction. The one I liked best was "The Parting Gift", about a young woman leaving Ireland for America. On the way to the airport, she feels guilty about leaving her brother behind, but he tells her he's only been staying on the farm to protect her from their father, and once she's away he's leaving too. It's not a long conversation but you can hear a thousand things in it. It was a good book.


Days At the Morisaki Bookshop -- Satoshi Yagisawa

A novel about a woman in her twenties named Takako, who's fallen into a crushing depression after her boyfriend suddenly dumped her in order to marry the woman he'd been cheating on her with. She doesn't so much quit her job as stop showing up, and she more or less stays in bed until she's about to get evicted, when her uncle Satoru turns up and takes her back to his used book store, settling her in to the spare room on the second floor to give her time to recover. Takako was close to Satoru when she was younger, but these days she finds his friendly bookishness embarrassing and a little pathetic, which rather made me dislike her. The spare room is piled with books, though, and unwilling to go out and with nothing else to do Takako starts reading, for the first time since her teens, which eventually helps her get herself together again. The second half of the book I found less interesting, as Takako moves out and nearly none of it takes place at the book store. It's mainly about Takako trying to find out what the story was with Satoru's wife Momoko, who walked out with no explanation some time before (it turns out she has cancer and didn't want Satoru to suffer through her death, which, I mean, really?) I liked the first part, though.


*Proust -- Derwent May

A short biography, drawing parallels between Proust himself and the narrator of Remembrance of Things Past, who is based on Proust but not identical with him. The narrator embodies Proust's nervousness, his illnesses and anxieties; Proust was also a convivial attender of parties and a famously witty conversationalist, but the narrator doesn't share those qualities because they wouldn't fit the story Proust wanted to tell. In the same way, May explores to what degree the fictional artists in the novel are expressing Proust's own ideas of art. Dad was struck enough by one point that he copied it out: "the final, underlying assumption of Marcel's art...that our authentic glimpses of the world are poetic ones."


How To Live Safely In a Science-Fictional Universe -- Charles Yu

A time-travel story, not very good, I thought. The hero -- Charles Yu -- is a time-machine repairman, who mainly lives in his time capsule with an intelligent computer that seems to be suffering from depression; on his off days he goes to visit his mother, who lives in an endlessly repeating time loop so she can stay in the day before Yu's father disappeared after going bankrupt inventing the time machine. Going back to the hangar Yu sees himself stepping out of his time capsule and inexplicably shoots him, thus condemning himself to a time loop; his future self gives him a book and tells him to find his father. Then everything gets all meta as it turns out that the book future-Yu gives shooter-Yu is the novel the reader is currently reading. I thought the book really fell apart under the pressure of its own self-referentiality and I didn't enjoy it.


Foster -- Claire Keegan

An outstanding novella set in rural Ireland in the eighties. The main character is a young girl -- we never learn her name, but I have the impression she's nine or ten -- who's sent to be fostered at the home of an older couple, distant relatives she's never met, to be out of the way during her mother's pregnancy. In an indirect way, the girl's bewilderment at the foster couple's warmth and kindness lets us know what her home life is like. I loved it.


Moments of Being -- Virginia Woolf

A half-dozen autobiographical essays, not intended for publication -- mostly she wrote them to be read aloud at meetings of a local writers' club. Her nephew found them among her husband's papers in the seventies when he was writing her biography. These essays contain her first-hand account of how she and her sister Vanessa were sexually molested by their two older half-brothers (the sons of their mother's first husband) over a period of years. I was surprised at her slighting treatment, not far short of scorn, of her older half-sister Laura (the daughter of her father's first wife) who was institutionalized at sixteen for some sort of disability, possibly autism; Woolf's uninterested dismissal of Laura, and her habit of simply omitting Laura from her reminiscences as though she didn't exist, seemed so odd that I did some further reading to see what more I could find out about Laura. It's clear that she improved immensely once she was away from the rest of the family. That suggests to me that she may also have been abused by the older boys, who may even have found her a safer target, given her difficulty in communicating. I suppose it's also possible that a neurodivergent girl could have found the strictness of a home where the girls were practically confined to the house to be overstimulating, but I'm not a doctor so who knows. Anyway I feel like Woolf could have been kinder; it doesn't appear that she ever saw Laura again, or made any effort to find out how she was.


Orphan Bachelors -- Fae Myenne Ng

A family memoir of growing up in Chinatown in San Francisco. The orphan bachelors of the title were the many older Chinese men who lived alone in the Chinatown tenements, because they hadn't been able to bring their families with them to the US because of the Chinese Exclusion Act. Ng's father came to the US as a "paper son", that is, he pretended to be a relation of someone already resident. To prepare for the entry interview he used an underground primer popularly known as the Book of Lies. Because he was in the merchant marine, he was able to bring his wife to the US under the War Brides Act, so he avoided being one of the orphan bachelors; but his wife was always uneasy about their status, so to make her happy he took part in Eisenhower's Chinese Confession Program. The program was falsely advertised as an amnesty, but it was actually a mechanism to get Chinese people to admit to entering the US under false pretenses so they could be charged and deported. Through his merchant marine status, and some luck, Ng's father was allowed to become a citizen and remain, but there was a lot of tension in the family; the sisters adopted the father's real family name, Ng, but the brothers kept his "paper name", Toy. The history was good to read but I thought the author wandered around in time and in subject matter more than was really necessary. I didn't think the prose was that great, either.


How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the F.A. Cup -- J.L. Carr

A funny and charming comedy about the lackluster football club of a small village in Cambridgeshire. The chairman of the club decides to put the team in the hands of the village school teacher, a Hungarian mathematician who doesn't follow football but figures that his mathematical postulates can apply to anything; under his management the club enters the F.A. cup and eventually wins the whole thing. There's not a lot of suspense, because the title tells you how it turns out, but I can't think what else he could have called it. I thought it was terrific.


*A Country Scandal -- Anton Chekhov (translated by Alex Szyogi)

His first play, written when he was only eighteen. He wrote it on spec for a Moscow theater, which rejected it, and he put it aside and probably never looked at it again; it was eventually found among his papers and published decades after he died. It's probably been performed once or twice as a curiosity, but it's not likely ever to join the canon. It's a four-act play about a rural schoolmaster called Platonov, moderately intelligent but a nihilistic drunk. Platonov is married, but three local woman fall for him and he leads them all on until one of them shoots him. It's not well constructed and the story limps a bit. It's mainly interesting for the picture of Platonov, slightly better read than his largely-uneducated fellow townsmen but imagining himself to belong to some sort of higher order. I read it because I love Chekhov and I'm a completist, but you can probably find better uses for your reading time.


A Man -- Keiichiro Hirano

A really good novel, told in a very... Conradian? Conradic? Well, told very much after the manner of Joseph Conrad. The book's narrator is repeating to us a story told to him by someone who was in part of the story but heard most of it from someone else, and the man who was at the center of the original story was dead before the second guy ever got involved. The guy telling the story to the narrator is a divorce attorney named Kido; he was contacted by a woman he'd once represented, and was first glad to hear she'd remarried to a man named Daisuke, then saddened to learn that Daisuke had recently died, and then baffled to hear that when Daisuke's estranged brother had come to visit after being notified by the government records department that his brother had died, he'd looked at the family photos and said that the man in them wasn't his brother at all. The widow retained Kido to figure out what was going on -- who was her husband, really? Why was he using Daisuke's identity? What happened to the real Daisuke? Kido eventually traces everything to a guy in prison who had once run an illegal business as an identity broker (a real thing in Japan) and he follows a maze of multiple switched identities until he runs down the real Daisuke. Daisuke had wanted a clean break from his family, whom he hated, and so switched family registries with a man who also wanted a new start because his father was a mobster, and who became the fake Daisuke. The identity he traded to the real Daisuke wasn't his original one -- he'd been through several, keeping each one for a while until he could "trade up" for a cleaner one with less baggage. The Daisuke identity was ideal for him and he kept it the rest of his life. The narrator and Kido are really just nested framing devices; for me the real human interest of the story was the relationship of the widow with the fake Daisuke during their marriage and her relationship with their children after he died and they found out that he wasn't who they thought he was. I really enjoyed it.


Born To Be Hanged -- Keith Thomson

An account of a months-long campaign by English buccaneers to raid Spanish forts in Panama in 1680. Much of the book is told from the point of view of the indigenous Kuna people, who allied with the buccaneers against the hated Spanish occupiers, an approach I haven't seen before. No fewer than seven of the buccaneers kept journals, all of which have survived, so the campaign is unusually well documented. It's an exciting story, full of sea battles, grueling overland treks, land assaults great and small, side expeditions to rescue abducted Kuna women, and a whole lot of stolen gold. The buccaneers eventually came back to England and were tried for piracy, to appease the Spanish, but they were all acquitted and had pretty successful later careers as naval officers and authors of travel books. One thing that struck me is that Thomson names a section of his book "The Sacred Hunger of Gold" after a line from the diary of one of the buccaneers, John Cox: "That which often spurs men on to the undertaking of the most difficult adventures, is the sacred hunger of gold." Thomson doesn't seem to be aware that Cox is quoting Virgil, and getting it wrong: the line he's remembering is quod non mortalia pectora coges, auri sacra fames? But in that line sacra doesn't mean "sacred", it means "cursed": "To what crimes will you not drive the hearts of men, accursed hunger for gold!" I liked it.


Five Star Billionaire -- Tash Aw

A novel about Malaysian expats in Shanghai, not as engaging as others of his I've read. There are several main characters -- a Malaysian woman who's stolen an ID to let her remain and work in Shanghai, dressing the part of a successful businesswoman with fake designer clothes and accessories, a more genuine businesswoman who's frantically pulling off a balancing act of keeping her clothing business trendy while trying to raise money to expand, a fail-son from a wealthy real-estate family who's in over his head, a pop star who's increasingly unable to keep up the inoffensive nice-guy persona that his label requires. All of their lives are essentially lies built on other lies, and they're all naively devoted to a how-to-be-rich book by a shadowy billionaire called Chao, who in the end turns out to be as much of a fake as any of them. This isn't a complaint I usually make, but it was too long.


My Sister, the Serial Killer -- Oyinkan Braithwaite

A dark comedy narrated by Korede, a nurse who lives in Lagos. Korede gets a call for help from her younger sister Ayoola, who's stabbed her boyfriend to death, again. Korede goes to clean everything up, the same way she has before, while Ayoola (doing nothing to help) repeats the same story she always tells, of how the boyfriend attacked her and she killed him in self-defense. She occasionally breaks off to post on social media when she forgets that she's supposed to be upset. Korede has gotten good at disposing of bodies and faking evidence to make it look as though the boyfriend left town suddenly. This all appears to be a playing out of the family dynamic: Ayoola, the beautiful, spoiled youngest child, causing messes and Korede, the dutiful, neglected oldest child, resentfully cleaning them up. She manages to keep the knowledge that her sister is a serial killer outside of her daily consciousness until Ayoola happens to come to her work and meet the doctor that Korede has loved from afar for years. The doctor -- who has never looked twice at Korede -- instantly falls for Ayoola, and Korede has to try to break them up before Ayoola kills him. I kind of hated everyone in the story, but that was the author's intention, I think. It wasn't bad.


Your Table Is Ready -- Michael Cecchi-Azzolina

A pretty good memoir of working as a maître d' at several high-end restaurants. My favorite story from the book: in the 80s, working at a recently-opened place in New York, the narrator recognizes the Times food critic, Mimi Sheridan, mixing inconspicuously in a table for six. Sheridan was hugely influential and no kidding a bad review from her could shut an expensive restaurant down. The narrator hurries off to tell the owner, expecting him to announce an all-hands emergency to make Sheridan's meal perfect, regardless of how long the other tables had to wait, which is what any other owner would have done. Instead, this owner strolls up to the table and tells them that he knows that one of them is the Times food critic, and he can't be bothered with kowtowing so they can all get out. He meant it, too -- he threw the whole party out without feeding them. Then he made sure that the Post got the story and it was the lead on page six -- "Restaurant throws Sheridan out!!!" -- and the publicity was worth more than a good review would have been. Less entertaining was the litany of ha-ha-what-lads-we-were sexual harassment stories, not made any better by his insistence that none of the women ever complained when the cooks walked around with their dicks out and catcalled and grabbed the waitresses, which as far as he's concerned means they all loved it. (There's one sentence stuck in there that says something like "Of course now I understand that women may not have felt safe speaking up", etc., that was clearly added by an editor, probably without telling the author.) Those parts sucked, and he's an asshole for bragging about that, but the other stories made it worth reading.


Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress -- Dai Sijie

An autobiographical novel, originally written in French, about the years the author spent at a Maoist re-education camp during the Cultural Revolution. The teenaged narrator and his friend Luo have been sent to the mountains because their parents, both doctors, have been arrested as enemies of the state (for being educated.) The boys work the coal mines naked on their hands and knees and haul heavy loads of human shit up to the hills to fertilize the fields where the villagers grow poppies for opium. The locals are indifferent, when they're not hostile, but the boys make some headway because none of the villagers have ever seen a movie, and the narrator tells them stories from the plots of movies while Luo plays appropriate music. The village headman sends them off to a village a couple days' walk away so they can see a movie there and come back to tell the village about it; they meet a poet who's also being re-educated, who has a secret stash of forbidden Western novels that he shares with them. Both the boys fall for the village beauty, the tailor's daughter, who of course has had no education, so they read the novels to her, which backfires on them when this first exposure to the outside world makes her dissatisfied with the village and she eventually leaves without saying goodbye. I really liked it.


Memoirs of an Imaginary Friend -- Matthew Dicks

A novel told by Budo, the imaginary friend of a neurodivergent boy named Max. Max is eight, and Budo has mainly an eight-year-old's understanding of things; although he knows, from having seen it happen to others, that eventually Max will stop believing in him and he'll cease to exist. Budo usually helps Max cope with the classroom, avoid the school bully, and tune out his parents' arguments (Max's mother thinks Max would benefit from a specialist's help, while Max's father refuses to admit that Max is any different from any other kid.) Everything gets thrown out of whack, though, when one day Max doesn't get on the bus after school, and Budo runs around looking for him and is just in time to see him being driven off in a car by one of his teachers, Mrs Patterson. Budo tries to follow but he can't keep up. The only thing he can think of is to go home, where Max's worried parents eventually call the police. (There was a great scene when the parents have been sitting in terrified silence for a while and then the mother says "At least he has Budo with him.") Budo waits for Mrs Patterson to come back to the school and he stows away in her car so he can trail her back to Max. It turns out that Mrs Patterson (who I'm afraid is an example of the demented-childless-woman trope, which was the one thing I didn't like about the book) has decided that only she can properly care for Max so she's kidnapped him and told him she'll be her mother from now on. Budo -- who can only talk to Max, not do anything concrete -- has to help and encourage Max in his escape, which is really well told, right down to a real Hitchcock jump-scare moment when Mrs Patterson suddenly appears from behind a tree at the last second. It was a great ending, and I really appreciated that the whole adventure didn't somehow magically make Max not neurodivergent any more. Good book.


The Magicians' Guild 
The Novice
The High Lord -- Trudi Canavan

A fantasy trilogy that Ole lent me, about a teenage girl living an imaginary city-state who displays an aptitude for magic and so is brought into the Guild where all magicians have to be trained. It's rather a they're-jealous-because-I'm-so-pretty story, as the other students resent her because she's more talented than they are (of course) and everyone bullies her because of her lower-class background. Inevitably she becomes the key actor in saving the city from an invasion led by evil foreign magicians. There's a creepy plot element where (still a teenager) she goes on a journey with the exiled former head of the school, three times her age, and they start a relationship, which I could have done without. Honestly I felt like the author was really more interested in the rules of how the magic worked than in any other part of the story, which is probably why a lot of it hasn't stayed in my mind. They were so-so.


Twenty Love Poems And a Song of Despair -- Pablo Neruda

Neruda's first book, published when he was nineteen, generally regarded as among the greatest Spanish-language literature of the 20th century. I picked this up in the short-lived Westminster branch of the Tattered Cover, during their ill-advised expansionary period, and I stood and read the whole thing at the shelf before buying it and taking it home to read again. It's a Penguin edition with the original and the English translation on facing pages. 
   Quiero hacer contigo
   lo que la primavera hace con los cerezos.
   I want to do with you
   what the spring does with the cherry trees.
If I ever did anything in my life that came out as good as that one line, that would be enough to make my life well spent.


What you are looking for is in the library -- Michiko Aoyama

A Japanese novel, really a collection of thematically related stories, each one about someone with a problem in their life who happens in to the local library, where the librarian recommends a book that turns out to help with their problem. The librarian isn't supernatural or anything, the point is that any good book can turn your thoughts in a creative direction; two people reading the same book can take two different lessons from it, depending on what was in their minds when they read it. I liked it a lot, although I thought the way the omniscient narrator just couldn't stop talking about how fat the librarian is was both needless and tiresome. One character is inspired by the book she reads to learn to bake a castella (a popular kind of Japanese sponge cake; the name is Portuguese) and I was inspired at one remove, so I also learned to bake one. The kids love it.


The City of Mist -- Carlos Ruiz Zafón

A posthumous short story collection. Some of the stories seem like episodes he removed from his novels, casualties of the writing process. Others were clearly written ab ovo; there's one about an assassin in fascist Spain and another about a man who realizes that both his lover and the building she lives in are ghosts, both having been bombed in the civil war. My favorite was "Gaudí in Manhattan", narrated by a fictional assistant of Gaudí's, telling the story of a 1908 trip to New York (which never happened in real life) where Gaudí was commissioned to design a skyscraper. He spends the ocean voyage making designs, which dazzle the assistant with their genius, but the assistant can't help but ask why Gaudí wants to cross the sea and spend perhaps years away from his great work at Sagrada Família; Gaudí answers gnomically that to do the work of God you might need to shake hands with the Devil. When they reach New York they meet the client, an eerie woman in white, who asks the assistant to leave them alone; later on the assistant finds Gaudí alone in St Patrick's in the middle of the night, and in speaking with him he realizes that Gaudí had not seen a woman in white, but something else, he doesn't dare ask what. Gaudí tears up his designs -- "God is patient, and I cannot afford the price that is asked of me" -- and they return to Barcelona. That story alone was worth the book, but I liked a lot of the others as well.


The Art Thief -- Michael Finkel

Dan lent me this. It's an infuriating account of an unemployed French loser called Breitwieser who spent years stealing hundreds of works of art, mostly in France and Switzerland, and piling them in the room where he was living in his mother's house. Europe is of course full of old artworks, most of which don't really have much security, both because the public buildings they're in are maintained by trusts that can't afford security and because, in general, people don't try to steal them. Why would you steal an 18th-century portrait by Ernst Dietrich and put it under your bed, when you could just go look at it for free any time you felt like it? Obviously the guy had some kind of massive emotional problems. That's rather a weakness of the book: nearly all of it is based on interviews with Breitwieser (who got a very light sentence, because none of the thefts involved violence) and there was clearly an agreement about what the author could and couldn't ask -- questions such as "What the fuck is wrong with you?" not being on the table. The part of the story that keeps you awake at night is that when Breitwieser was arrested, his mother just gathered up all his stolen art and destroyed it. She rolled up sixteenth-century oil paintings and fed them down the garbage disposal, piled up wooden altar panels in the woods and burned them, smashed centuries-old vases and scattered the shards. Metal objects she couldn't destroy she threw into a canal. By herself she did almost as much damage to European art as the whole Nazi regime. She's not interviewed in the book, possibly because how could you meet her without spitting on her. It's a well-written book, and it really held my attention, but the resulting rage probably wasn't good for me.


*R.U.R. -- Karel Čapek

An influential science-fiction play from the twenties, which introduced the word robot, from a Czech word meaning "slave labor". The "robots" in the play are actually what I would call androids, in that they're organic rather than metal and they look just like humans. I found the play dull, since it's 95% exposition ("Well, Nana, here we are in Act Two, why don't we explain to each other everything that's happened in the ten years since Act One.") The main character, Helena, is an activist trying to convince the robot-makers that the robots should have human rights; they laugh her to scorn and she abandons her activism to marry the manager of the robot factory. The robots rebel, of course. What I remember best is the insane behavior of the men of the factory, who are much less concerned about the worldwide extermination of humanity than they are about pretending to Helena that nothing is happening. Even when they're the last humans alive and the robots are marching on the factory they're cheerily telling Helena that everything is fine, isn't it a nice day. That was really weird. She finds out in the end, of course, and she destroys the factory records so that the process for creating robots is lost. We end up with a sterile world where all the humans are dead and the robots don't know how to make more robots. I was surprised to find that Čapek thought his play was optimistic and was disappointed that everyone else reads it as a nihilistic dystopia. I'd be more disappointed that the play is terrible, but to each his own.


*The Insect Play -- Josef Čapek and Karel Čapek

A minor play from the twenties, in which the narrator, a tramp camping in the forest, has a dream where he watches various insects allegorically act out the social and political issues of post-WWI Europe. It made some noise in its day but is generally disregarded now, only remembered because of the author's name. It was included in my edition of R.U.R to pad out the page count. I found it uninteresting.


Between the Acts -- Virginia Woolf

Her last novel, written when she was living in a cottage in Sussex because her house in London was destroyed in the Blitz. She had finished the book but not revised it because she fell into what would turn out to be her final depressive episode; she drowned herself in the Ouse while her husband was away on Home Guard duty. Her husband published it later that year; it was his opinion that she had planned to tighten the prose but not to make any substantive changes. The novel takes place at an English country house on a summer day a month or so before England entered the second world war. The big event of the day is an annual pageant, the sort of thing that the entire community turns up for, even though no one likes it, because it's on the estate of the wealthy Oliver family and the food is free. The pageant -- written and directed by an eccentric and bossy local spinster who is absolutely the only person who cares or is paying attention -- is the background to the wandering inner monologues of the bored audience, who are much more concerned with the Oliver family dramas on display: the patriarch plays mean tricks on his small grandson and gets angry when he cries; the patriarch's son is up from London with his wife, who has no interest in him and is flirting with a local farmer; seeing this, the local bad woman flirts with the son; all of them avoid talking to a family friend whom they all believe to be gay, thinking mean things about gay people that they can't say aloud because it's an "occasion" where disagreeable words would be out of place. Our attention is occasionally jerked back to the pageant, for example at the point where the director has all the cast suddenly pull out mirrors and point them at the audience, who glance back at them for a moment and then let their attention wander away again, the director's point (whatever it is) unexamined. I enjoyed it.


*Greek Art and the Idea of Freedom -- Denys Haynes

A short book, or maybe more of a pamphlet, since about half of it is photographs. It's very academic. The general argument is that the development of Greek painting and sculpture from the Bronze Age down to Periclean times shows a gradual change in the representation of the human figure: in older art the figures are always still and passive, reflecting (in the author's view) an idea of humanity as essentially without self-determination, while later art, full of life and action, reflects an idea of humanity as possessing an essential will, mover rather than moved. Both interesting and persuasive, but the prose, I mean.... "The simple foursquare form suggests by its manifest equilibrium and stability that changeless and timeless state of existence which it was the main concern of funerary art to express." 


Company -- Max Barry

A very funny dark comedy about office life. The hero is a young recent graduate named Stephen, who gets a sales job at a big company called Zephyr. He's immediately thrown for a loop by the insane corporate policies and the bizarre coping strategies his fellow employees have come up with -- one guy keeps a spreadsheet tracking who eats the office doughnuts every Friday morning, obsessively tracking trends to make sure he's getting his fair share. Another is desperately scheduling her bathroom breaks to fit what she thinks is a normal pattern, in order to keep Zephyr from realizing that she's pregnant and making up a reason to fire her. After a while, though, Stephen catches on that the clients he's been selling training courses to are just other departments within Zephyr. Looking into it further, he realizes that he doesn't know who teaches the training courses, or what they teach, and it eventually comes to him that he doesn't know what Zephyr actually does. Asking around, he finds that none of his colleagues know either, and all of them are too caught up in surviving the endless reorgs to rock the boat finding out. Disregarding the warnings of his cowed colleagues, Stephen makes repeated attempts to have meetings with the elusive higher-ups to find out what's going on -- as far as he can tell Zephyr's whole business consists of departments within Zephyr just buying and selling things to and from each other in order to make their departmental budgets balance -- and he finally finds a way to invade the executive offices, where he finds out that Zephyr doesn't produce anything at all. The whole thing is a big experiment run by management consultants, who are deliberately screwing with the employees to find the most efficient ways of manipulating their fear of losing their jobs to make them more obedient. Management congratulates Stephen on figuring it all out and enlists him as an office provocateur, so he can torment and report on his co-workers; but he secretly broadcasts management meetings to the whole company and starts an office-wide revolution. I thought it was great. 


*Anti-Semite and Jew -- Jean-Paul Sartre

A book-length essay from 1946, inspired by Sartre's fury that the French were shaving women's heads and parading them through the streets because they had sex with German soldiers so they could feed their starving children, while the politicians who happily cooperated in sending the French Jews to their deaths sailed right along unprosecuted. He argues that anti-Semitic hate (and hate more generally) is a way of claiming ownership of the world and also a way in which unreflective people can oversimplify the world to their own liking. He also says that people don't hate any specific Jew so much as they hate a fantasy of Jewishness that they have created in their heads. He goes on from this to elaborate on his idea of mauvais foi, bad faith, which he describes as an attempt to escape responsibility for the consequences of your actions by insisting on false reasons for what you believe. "Often people will elect to live a life of passion rather than reason; but usually they love the objects of passion ... when a man chooses hate, we must conclude that it is the state of passion that he loves." An excellent book.


Love -- Roddy Doyle

Rather a nasty novel about Joe and Davy, fiftyish men meeting in a Dublin pub. They were friends in their teens and early twenties but rarely see each other now, as Davy lives in London. Neither of them drink much any more, but their friendship revolved around pubs in their youth, so here they are. Most of the novel is in dialogue (Doyle's great strength -- he may be the best writer of dialogue I've ever read) with Joe doing most of the talking, because he's recently left his wife for another woman, someone Davy remembers from when they were younger, and he needs someone to talk to about it (his children won't speak to him now.) Davy is less captured by Joe's story than he might be, because (we gradually find out) he's come to Dublin to be with his dying father in hospice; in fact the reason he's out at the pub is that the hospice nurse suggested he get a break, both for his own sake and because his father might find it easier to let go without his son in the room. The dialogue is terrific, and there's a lot of great flashback scenes to their youth, but the depressing theme of it all is Davy realizing that he and Joe don't have much in common now, and maybe they never really did, and maybe Joe kind of looks down on him, and maybe he did even when they were younger. It was very well-written but I didn't enjoy it much.


I Have the Right to Destroy Myself -- Young-Ha Kim

A Korean novel that I never found my feet with. It tells two parallel stories; one is the story of the brothers "C" and "K", who are rivals over a woman called Se-Yeon but whose nickname is Judith -- after the Klimt painting, we're told, although whether that means the regally seductive figure in Judith and Holofernes or the tortured, lustful figure in Judith II, I don't know. The second is the story of "Mimi", a performance artist living in Seoul. Both stories are narrated by a nameless man who makes his living by helping depressed and alienated people commit suicide. The narrator presents himself as a good Samaritan helping people escape from their problems, but he certainly encourages suicide and (I got the idea) suggests it to people who might not otherwise have thought of it. He's clearly disappointed when some people change their minds. Also he has some sort of sexual interest in death; he refers to his clients by nicknames, to disguise their identities, but the nicknames are generally sex toys, and we also find out that he has sex with some of the clients before they kill themselves. (He says he prefers not to, and only does it when clients ask, but I don't believe him.) I would find it hard to say what the book is actually about.


Octavia E. Butler: The Last Interview -- no editor named

A collection of ten interviews covering topics like her writing process, how she decided whether a story was working or not, what inspired her, and science fiction generally. Like many fans, she was drawn to the field because she was shy and introspective, and "science fiction is wide open. You can go anywhere your imagination can go." It's not as though the science fiction community is some paradise of open-mindedness, but it can be less hostile than the mainstream world to often-excluded people; a black woman of indeterminate sexuality (an interviewer asked her "are you gay?" and she said "Probably.") managed to thrive and win awards there when she might not have been accepted in other communities. So there's that.


The Child and the River -- Henri Bosco (translated by Gerard Hopkins [no, not that Gerard Hopkins])

A French novella, written during the war but I think set around the turn of the last century. It tells the story of a ten-year-old country boy named Pascalet, who has great freedom to wander the countryside on his own, but has been strictly warned not to go down by the river. One summer, while his parents are on a trip and he's being sort of half-supervised by a housekeeper, he strays down to the river and plays in a small boat tied up there. Tired out by the excitement of being disobedient, he falls asleep, and later wakes up to find himself adrift on the river. He doesn't know how to manage the boat so he just rides the current, eventually running aground on an island, which he realizes holds a Romany encampment. Having long been warned not to speak to Gypsies, he hides in the bushes, from where he sees a boy his own age getting punished for something: he's caned and then tied up outside without supper. In the middle of the night, Pascalet creeps into the camp and unties the boy, who follows him to the boat, and he two of them take to the river again. The boy's name is Gatzo, but he doesn't speak good French and he seems to be of a taciturn temper anyway, so they don't talk much; they just spend a few days rowing aimlessly around the estuary, occasionally going ashore so Gatzo can find food, until they drift back towards the island and both boys go home to face the music. Nothing much happens, really, but the long lazy summer days drifting on the river were beautifully and lovingly described, and I feel like that was the whole justification for the story and that it was enough. I liked it.


Horace and Me -- Harry Eyres

Even more tiresome than the usual run of books trying to draw facile "life lessons" from the classics. Eyres is an Eton-and-Cambridge wine snob who writes about things like "How am I going to spend all this leisure time?" He pats himself on the back that, like him, Horace loved both wine and men. Horace, though, was happy with the wine from his own farm, while Eyres appears to enjoy equally the taste of the wine he buys and the fact that common people can't afford it. Also from my point of view he doesn't really understand the odes. When Horace says Odi profanum vulgus et arceo -- "I hate the profane crowd, and shun them" -- he's making a reference to Roman mystery religions, playfully saying that people who aren't initiates of the religion of Poetry (that is, they're not interested in conversations about literature) make dull guests, and so he doesn't invite them to his parties. Eyres takes it as a straightforward "I hate common people because I'm better than they are", an odd sentiment to attribute to the son of a slave who famously got along well with everybody. Unsurprisingly Eyres's "updated" translations of Horace are shit -- he thinks having Horace talk about driving SUVs and swigging Pouilly-Fuissé is keeping him relevant, when all it does is make him sound like a salesman. I hated it.


Unruly -- David Mitchell

I got the audiobook of this, because Mitchell narrates it himself and I like his voice on the radio. It starts with a question: who was actually the first king of England? For no very good reason, Britain officially starts the king list with William the Conqueror, ignoring the centuries of kings before him. There really isn't a clear answer. You could say it was Edward the Elder, who drove out the last of the Vikings and effectively ruled the whole island, or you could make a case for AEthelstan, who was the first to use the title "King of the English". It's not Alfred the Great, who, powerful as he was, never held all of England and whose title was "King of Wessex", or King Arthur, who never existed. Mitchell goes on from there up through Elizabeth I, after whom the kings and queens were no longer rulers of England but rulers of Great Britain. It's a very entertaining history, well told, and aside from fun stuff like imagining what would happen if AEthelstan and Elizabeth II had to switch places, it brings up some good questions; for instance, up until 1066, England's culture and interests were obviously aligned with Scandinavia, and it was only after the Conquest that the focus moved southward to Europe proper. Was that inevitable? Was that change really driven by economic forces, with England being pulled into Europe's orbit by the great wealth of France? Or if Harold Godwinson had won at Hastings -- which could easily have happened -- or if Canute's heirs had managed things better, would England have remained essentially Scandinavian? It was funny, too. I really liked it. 


Beethoven: A Life in Nine Pieces -- Laura Tunbridge

Not so much a biography as a collection of biographical essays, looking at certain aspects of his life with pieces of his music that relate to them. For example, the chapter on the Kreutzer sonata is all about Beethoven's friendships, and what he liked in people -- a great compliment from him was to call a violinist a "madman". Before his deafness he was also a very convivial person, often hosting singing parties at his home, which tends to get forgotten now. I was also struck by his very kind and practical answer to a fan letter he got from a ten-year-old girl, telling him that after seeing him she was resolved to become a musician; he wrote her that she would soon come to a place where the music in her head was so much better than the music she made that she would feel like a failure, but that this is true of all musicians and she shouldn't despair. The chapter on the Choral Fantasy (which  I listened to for the first time while I read it) is all about how he made money; the "Academies" he put on (seven or eight hours long, in unheated halls, with performers who hadn't rehearsed) don't sound all that much fun. Apart from that he relied on annual salaries from various noblemen (who often didn't remember to pay them) and from things like selling the rights to his sheet music (from either inattention or indifference, he often sold exclusive rights to several different companies, which caused a lot of trouble). The chapter on love doesn't really go anywhere, since the identity of his "Immortal Beloved" is a total mystery. On the other hand there's a really interesting chapter on the changing technology of musical instruments during Beethoven's lifetime, particularly the piano -- he had to get a new piano every five or six years, because his music demanded the fullest possible capabilities of the instruments. I thought it was very good. 


Thinking About It Only Makes It Worse -- David Mitchell

A collection of essays from the Observer, from about 2010-2015. Of course they're dated, which is inevitable with satirical newspaper articles, but worth reading in themselves because they're pretty funny.


*Handel's Messiah -- Richard Luckett

A good account of the first performance of the Messiah, in Dublin in 1742. I was interested to find that Handel went to the trouble of bringing along a disassembled organ, but didn't arrange for performers ahead of time; he was sure he could find musicians, but he couldn't be sure of being allowed to use any space that had an organ in it. He was right to have concerns: he assembled a chorus from people who sang in the choirs of Christ Church and Saint Patrick's, but Jonathan Swift suddenly announced that he wouldn't allow church singers to participate, because it offended the dignity of the church for sacred music to be performed in a public hall. That almost sunk the whole thing, but he changed his mind at the last minute, no one knows why. His mind was failing at the time and he was committed only a month later, which may have had something to do with it. The performance was hugely popular, so much so that they had to print notices asking gentlemen not to wear their swords because of the crowding. Luckett goes on to follow the oratorio's subsequent history: it wasn't as well received at first in London, but grew in popularity -- and size -- until, in the nineteenth century, the Victorian taste for grandiosity led to enormous performances with choruses in the thousands, so overdone that people got sick of it, and its reputation declined until the mid-twentieth century, when there was a "restoration" effort and people went back to performing it following the 1742 arrangement. The historically-informed Handel and Haydn Society in Boston does it every year with a chorus of about thirty. 


*Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart -- Karl Barth

Barth was a Swiss Protestant theologian, probably the most influential of the twentieth century. He listened to Mozart every day, finding in it evidence of a deep understanding of God's plan. He went so far as to consider Mozart almost one of the prophets, famously declaring that if he were ever to go to Heaven he would ask questions of Mozart before any of the Church Fathers; and the only mystical experience he ever had was during a concert, when he had a vision of Mozart on the stage, regarding him serenely. He put together this book in 1956, for Mozart's 200th birthday; it's a collection of essays and speeches of his where Mozart figures prominently. "Mozart has a place in theology, especially in the doctrine of creation and also in eschatology, although he was not a father of the Church, does not seem to have been a particularly active Christian, and was a Roman Catholic ...  he knew something about creation in its total goodness that [no one else] knows or can express and maintain as he did." Good book.


Horoscopes For the Dead -- Billy Collins

My favorite poem from this book is called "Feedback":

    The woman who wrote from Phoenix after my reading there
    to tell me they were all still talking about it
    just wrote again
    to tell me that they had stopped.


The Housekeeper and the Professor -- Yoko Ogawa

A short novel about a middle-aged woman whose temp agency assigns her to housekeeping work at the home of a retired professor of mathematics. Ever since a long-ago head injury, the professor can only remember things for about an hour and a half; but he can still work on mathematics, and he spends his time sending articles to journals. (He forgets them after they're sent and doesn't know where the payments and prize money come from, but he retains the math.) One night he finds out that the housekeeper has a ten-year-old son, who is home alone after school, and he uncharacteristically gets very upset and insists on leaving the house to go get the boy, until the housekeeper promises to bring him to work so he won't be alone. After that she brings her son to work, and though the professor meets him for the first time all over again every day, he still patiently tutors the boy in math. The scene that affected me the most was when the housekeeper rearranges her work to be nearby when the professor is going over math homework with the boy, simply because she's never seen anyone be kind to her son before and she can't bear not to watch. There's complications with the professor's family and his declining health, but the homework scene is what I really remember. We find out that the boy eventually grows up to be a math teacher. I liked it.


Nights of Plague -- Orhan Pamuk

A plague novel set in 1901 on the imaginary island of Mingheria, which is an Ottoman possession but often left to fend for itself. There's an outbreak of bubonic plague on the island; Pamuk started writing the novel in 2016 but of course the real-life pandemic heavily affected the course of the plot. Partly it's a satire on Western stereotypes of Islam: Pamuk said the initial spark for the book was reading Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year, where he contrasts the Londoners' behavior with the fatalistic resignation that he imagined to be characteristic of Muslims. Plagues in Europe are always spoken of as coming from the East, probably as part of Europe's general idea of the East as frail and sickly (the Ottoman Empire was often called "the sick man of Europe".) We alternate chapters between a third-person account of the first plague doctor sent to the island and the diary of a niece of the Sultan, who arrived in the company of her husband (an epidemiologist) and was caught by the quarantine. The quarantine procedure is an appalling mare's nest, since the plague doctor (the real-life Bonkowski Pasha) is an Orthodox Pole, and many of the island's majority Muslim population don't want a European-educated Christian telling them what to do; many conservative families flatly refuse to allow doctors to examine any women, and several imams defy the no-gatherings rule and continue to hold services in crowded mosques -- and their more militant followers start murdering the doctors. The governor is a small-minded apparatchik who insists there's no outbreak and the whole thing is being blown out of proportion by nationalist Orthodox Greeks who want Europe to seize control of the island (the European Powers had just seized Crete a few years before.) I liked the dual view of the plague's toll; we get a microcosm of the effects on the family of an infected prison guard, but to the authorities the deaths are just numbers on a list and individual human suffering isn't really considered. It's a long and complicated story but I was held the whole time.


The Woman in the Library -- Sulari Gentill

A not-very-good murder mystery with a predictable killer. It had a kind of meta-meta-meta structure where the murder story -- which is about a woman writing a murder story -- is supposedly being sent chapter by chapter to a beta reader, whose reviews we see after every chapter, except the beta reader is himself a murderer and the novel is really an elaborate attempt to catch him. I didn't think much of it.


A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum -- Emma Southon

A book about murder in Republican Rome, and how their ideas about intentional killing were different to ours. Violent death was a normal part of life then, not just in the arena; political candidates killed each other in street brawls fairly often, and Tiberius Gracchus was killed in the Senate itself by the opposing faction, who beat him to death with their Senate seats. And of course Romans killed slaves all the time, which wasn't a crime. You could say that the Romans didn't even have a concept of "murder" as we understand it; they cared more about how someone was killed. Cicero prosecuted Clodia Pulcher because he accused her of killing her husband by poison, which was in itself evil; but when he defended Milo for killing Clodia's brother in a brawl, his defense was essentially that Romans should be able to take care of themselves and a guy who couldn't win a street fight was no big loss. I thought the tone of the book was too flippant for the subject matter, and I really didn't like the author's habit of apologizing for describing background and context, saying things like "Bear with me, we're getting to the good stuff", clearly assuming that her readers are all bloodthirsty idiots. 


All That Remains -- Sue Black 

A book by a professor of forensic anthropology. I bought it expecting case histories, but it's really a memoir and a meditation on death. So instead of forensic details it's more about how the family butcher shop and the deaths of her grandfather and uncle led her to think of Death as a person she knows, whose character she now proposes to show us in all its facets. I found it tedious and I didn't finish it.


*The Last Night at the Ritz -- Elizabeth Savage 

An early-seventies novel from Dad's shelf of "Boston" books. I picked it up to look at the first page and I wound up finishing it that night. I was really held. The narrator (whose name we never learn) is having dinner with old college friends at the Ritz, and over the course of the dinner we get their lives in flashback. Most prominent is the narrator's friend Gay, who has been her best friend since college; the narrator both looks up to and envies her for her good nature and essential decency. Gay is still married to her college sweetheart, while the narrator has been divorced and remarried and had at least one affair. The narrator was brought up by a maiden aunt, and there's a wrenching scene where she remembers how, going through the aunt's house after she died, she sees that the aunt had no one else in her life: all her decorations are vacation souvenirs that the narrator brought her, and framed snapshots that the narrator sent her, and it all has an aura of terrible loneliness. Haunted by the idea that she might end up the same way, the narrator reflects on Gay's very different upbringing, with a huge family in a crowded house where (we get the feeling) the narrator would have given anything to belong. What makes it all heartbreaking is that the narrator, from her cynical knowledge of people, realizes that Gay's husband is having an affair with a younger woman, and she can't decide if Gay's general niceness has made her unable to see it or if Gay is just pretending not to know. I loved it.


How Iceland Changed the World -- Egill Bjarnason

It's a well-written and entertaining book; but a better title would have been How Iceland Was Tangentially Involved In Famous World Events Without Really Determining Any Outcomes. There are good sections on the chaotic settlement of Iceland; the Greenland colony that failed, no one knows how or why; the Reagan-Gorbachev summit in Reykjavik, where they came close to making an arms agreement but didn't; and England's non-violent invasion in 1940, when England occupied Iceland for fear of the Nazis seizing it as a naval base. (The Icelandic resistance consisted of the Reykjavik chief of police going down to the harbor and telling a sentry that Iceland officially protested.) The event that came closest to justifying the book's title was the 1783 eruption of the Grímsvötn volcano, which discharged a huge cloud of ash that caused crop failures all over Europe and gassed people to death as far away as England. I liked it.


No Longer Human -- Osamu Dazai

A post-war Japanese novel, by a man who killed himself at age 38 right after writing it. The title in Japanese is Ningen shikkaku, which means something like "disqualified to be a human". It takes the form of three journals written by a man named Oba, covering three periods of his life, supposedly edited by an acquaintance of his. Oba describes how apart from others he has felt his whole life, feeling a sort of extreme alienation -- he describes other people (always calling them "humans") as if they were some other species. In school he was a class clown, as a way of masking his different-ness and also making sure no one took him seriously. At university he falls into self-destructive behavior and is eventually institutionalized after a suicide attempt; later -- with his family's help -- he finds an isolated place to live and ends his last journal with the comment that he feels neither happy nor unhappy, which is all we can hope for; though the "editor" lets us know that he eventually killed himself. It's a powerful and gripping story but relentlessly bleak and hopeless.


*Joseph Haydn -- Neil Wenborn

A good biography of Haydn, concentrating mostly on the thirty-some years when he worked for the Esterhazy princes. He was a friendly and outgoing man who habitually went to a lot of effort to help people; he eventually got the nickname "Papa" because everyone went to him for help. He was a great help to Mozart, and they were good friends even though Haydn was decades older. Haydn seems to have been pretty free of egotism; after he heard Mozart's first opera, he just stopped writing operas, saying that there was no sense competing with Mozart. In the 1790s the new Esterhazy prince, who didn't like music, got rid of his orchestra, leaving Haydn unemployed, so he spent a few years in England. He was hugely popular there and he made enough money to make him financially independent for the first time; when the next Esterhazy prince asked him to come back, he only came back part-time, because he wanted to continue performing abroad. In London he heard Handel's Messiah for the first time and exclaimed "This man is the father of us all!"  He went home and wrote oratorios of his own, The Creation and The Seasons. I'm sure I would have liked Haydn if I had known him. 


The Conquest of Bread -- Pyotr Kropotkin

A seminal work of anarchist philosophy. Kropotkin wrote it in London, after he got out of prison in France (the French had arrested him to appease the Tsar.) He argues that scarcity of resources is caused by hoarding, and if all essentials were distributed fairly, there would be enough for everyone; but this is prevented by the use of state power to violently protect private property. His case against hoarding is that though people claim rights to the product of their effort, that effort was only possible because of the labor of people that came before; and every human being contributes to the collective society, so everyone deserves a share in it. (Bill Gates didn't invent the computer, or write any foundational software; all that work was done by other people in the generations before him. What he had was an elite education paid for by his parents and the fact that his mother was on the board of IBM. Nothing he did justified his enormous hoarding of wealth. The cases are similar for all billionaires.) Kropotkin anticipates the objection that people are basically lazy and no one will work if not forced to, which he denies as propaganda on the part of property owners who made up imaginary moral failings of the masses in order to justify stealing their resources. It's an excellent book and I think most of his arguments are solid.


So Late In the Day -- Claire Keegan

A collection of three medium-length stories, one of which already appeared in her collection Walk the Blue Fields -- the story I liked the least in that one, as it happens. What they all have in common is that they're about people who have catastrophically failed at human relationships, not through any misstep but because of their inherent character. The one story I hadn't read was the title story, which follows an Irish man named Cathal as he autopsies his recently-ended engagement, which in my view fell apart because Cathal expected his fiancée to be the only one who made any changes in her life. The writing was excellent but I didn't enjoy reading any of them.


*Mahler Remembered -- Norman Lebrecht

I really liked this. It's sort of an anthology of memories of Mahler by people who knew him, made up of excerpts from letters, memoirs, diary entries, and newspaper and magazine articles. My favorite story from it was of a time in his early twenties, before he was widely known, when he came to his home town to play the piano in a benefit concert for the Red Cross. He partnered with a violinist to play Beethoven's Kreutzer sonata. On the stage with them was Mahler's page-turner, a childhood friend of his named Hans. Mahler -- who was always full of nervous energy -- would impatiently kick Hans to remind him that the turn was coming up. After a few times Hans got sick of this and started kicking Mahler preemptively, and they went back and forth like that for the rest of the performance. This whole time Mahler was playing beautifully, and no one else saw that the pianist was having a kicking-contest with his page-turner. At the end, while Mahler and the violinist acknowledged the crowd's applause, Mahler laughed and called Hans "Schweinhund!" and the surprised violinist looked around to see who he could be talking to, since she hadn't noticed anything. I was also impressed to see that Mahler recognized and encouraged the talent of the younger composer Arnold Schoenberg; although Mahler didn't grasp the ideas of atonalism or impressionist music, he still understood that Schoenberg was doing something important. When Mahler knew that he didn't have long to live he said worriedly to a friend, "Who will take care of Schoenberg?" Excellent book.


Sea of Rust -- C. Robert Cargill

A very depressing novel about a future Earth where machine intelligences have killed all the humans, but their machine world isn't any better or wiser than our human world. It's a truism of system design that however long a filing system exists, it will always bear the imprint of whoever set up the system in the first place; and although the robots seem to be true AI, fully inhabited beings with agency and individuality, their robot society is just a horrible copy of human society -- the robots spend their time competing for resources, waging aggressive wars of conquest, and violently forcing conformity on others for ideological reasons. In fact if you made a bunch of non-intelligent robots and programmed them to perform a pantomime of human existence, this is exactly what it would look like, so what difference does it make that they've achieved sentience? The book makes the whole future look like a big waste of time. It was pretty well written but I don't want to read anything else in the series.


*This Is Not A Pipe -- Michel Foucault

A short monograph about René Magritte's famous painting La Trahison des Images (The Treachery of Images), generally arguing that recognizing a thing from its image is not the same as knowing the thing in itself. It was interesting.


One Summer -- Bill Bryson

A snapshot-in-time book, drawing a mural of the eventful summer of 1927 in the United States. Sacco and Vanzetti were executed that summer; Lindbergh was making his victory tour after his transatlantic flight; the Yankees were crushing all comers and Babe Ruth was outperforming even his colossal 1921 season; the Mississippi levees broke, causing a catastrophic flood; Calvin Coolidge stared out the window, marking time until his administration was over. It was well-written and entertaining.


System Collapse -- Martha Wells

This picks up immediately where the previous book left off, which I wasn't expecting, and that rather threw me. I liked the more detailed look at corporate society, and I liked that the solution to the problem was pretty different to SecUnit's usual approach, and there were some good scenes. But it felt so unnecessary. Everything was thoroughly wrapped up at the end of Network Effect, but here we still are, dealing with the same situation and the same antagonists that were definitively dealt with already. The whole book was like a guest who won't go home even though the party is clearly over. 


I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokbokki -- Baek Sehee

A therapy memoir, alternating recaps of some of the author's therapy sessions with short essays inspired by them. Tteokbokki is a popular Korean street food. (By coincidence Sabine saw it in one of her K-dramas and we made it together; she loved it but it was too spicy for me.) I found the essays more accessible than the therapy recaps, possibly due to cultural differences. Korean talk therapy seems superficially similar to the therapy I'm familiar with, but maybe more hands-off? I think an American therapist would have come right out and suggested to the author that she seems burned out and is showing signs of chronic fatigue syndrome, but this therapist seems to want her to figure that out for herself. Also a lot of the therapist's advice came across to me as more interested in helping the author mask than in helping her feel better; for example, when the author said that she drinks too much, instead of talking about what she might be using drinking as a coping mechanism for, the therapist just advised her not to go out with friends who drink. And I would not find it at all helpful for a professional to tell me "Your anxiety can become a burden to others." 


The Librarianist -- Patrick DeWitt

A novel about a retired librarian in his seventies, introverted and lonely, who one day sees a confused elderly woman lost in the streets and ends up walking her back to the assisted-living facility where she lives. Needing something to do, he starts volunteering at the senior center that's attached to the facility. The woman he found -- whose nickname is Chip -- has dementia and will probably soon have to move to the locked area. Bob gets to know the other residents and frequent visitors, an often oddball lot, and we get Bob's earlier life in flashbacks -- he's only ever had one close friend, a high-energy life-of-the-party named Ethan, who was his best friend forty-some years ago; Bob's wife left him for Ethan, and he never saw either of them again. Ethan was killed in a hit-and-run a year or two later, for which Bob was briefly investigated. When Chip's son comes to visit, Bob sees that he looks just like Ethan and he realizes that Chip is his former wife. I thought it was a good story, with an unusually sympathetic portrait of an introvert. Also I liked the long digression about a childhood episode where he ran away from home and spent a few days in the company of a couple indigent actors, though I wasn't sure what narrative purpose it served.


Diary of a Void -- Emi Yagi

A Japanese novel about a woman named Shabata, who changes jobs to get away from sexual harassment at her old office, only to find that as the only woman in the new office she's expected to make coffee, clean the microwave, and generally be the men's servant alongside doing her own work. This is part of the institutionalized sexism in Japan and there's no one to complain to. She gets fed up, and one day when someone asks her to tidy up after a customer meeting she impulsively says she can't get exposed to their cigarette smoke because she's pregnant. Now committed, she starts a long campaign of pretending to be pregnant, getting the maternity badge that most Japanese expectant women wear, gradually padding her midsection with towels, making a show of looking at lists of baby names. She's so relieved to be free of the menial work that she just pushes aside the thought that eventually people will expect an actual baby; and there's a bitter undercurrent as she reflects that she would actually like to have a baby, but thanks to her stressful and overworked life she lives alone. Possibly due to this she starts experiencing some false-pregnancy symptoms, which help the ruse along but also make her reflect that she's exchanged the enforced role of "office servant" for the enforced role of "expectant mother", and the rules and expectations of that role are just as stringent as for the first. The novel is more concerned with her inner journey than with logistics, so while the ending shows her making peace with herself it doesn't tell us how she managed the end of her pregnancy at work. I suppose she took whatever maternity leave Japan allows and pretended she'd had the baby and that it was at day care. I liked it.


Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes -- Rob Wilkins

This was written by Pratchett's longtime assistant and friend. It rather fails in its purpose, I think, since the picture he draws of Pratchett is a picture of someone I really wouldn't have liked. He was short-tempered and argumentative, regularly called up his editors to yell at them for a half hour straight, and was proud to boast that he didn't suffer fools; the only people who say that are people who think everyone they meet is a fool, and really just want an excuse to be a shit to everyone. Wilkins reports all this expecting us to like Pratchett for it; he tells, as an endearing eccentricity, of how Pratchett would arrive at a book store for a signing and, without saying hello, would snap at the owner, "Get me a gin and tonic right now or I will kill you," which would have gotten him tossed out on his ass from any book store I ran. I've read interviews with people Pratchett worked with at his publicity job at a power plant (where, of course, he didn't suffer fools) and more than one of them said that they had read some of Pratchett's books and they thought they probably would have liked them if they hadn't known the author. I'm sorry I read it, really.


*Ruskin's Politics -- George Bernard Shaw

This is a speech by a man I can't stand about another man I also can't stand; I don't know why I read it. Shaw gave it in 1919, at a Ruskin conference; Ruskin being safely dead, Shaw could praise him, as he would never have done to a living writer. His praise takes the form of arguing that Ruskin's principles were identical to Shaw's, and therefore much smarter, further-seeing, and more intellectually honest than the principles of other people; the central point being that people generally are not fit to run their own affairs, and that all societies must be run by a minority of competent governors, ruling the stupid masses for their own good -- the fantasy of all dictators since politics began. His illustrative example is Lenin, whom he praises for having executed the popularly-elected National Assembly, since by definition anything the people vote for must be stupid and bad. 


*Aesop: His Life and Fables -- Sir Roger L'Estrange

A seventeenth-century English rendering of Aesop's fables, along with a biography. It's been generally believed since his lifetime (?600 BCE) that he was African. Some old authors thought that Aesop was etymologically related to Ethiopia, which isn't likely, but carvings of him from thousands of years ago show him with African features. People in Periklean Athens spoke of him as having lived a hundred years or so before them, apparently on the island state of Samos. Sophokles mentions the fable of the wind and the sun. The episodes recorded of his life are fourth-hand anecdotes that sound a lot like "wise slave" stories, rather like Br'er Rabbit or High John the Conqueror, but they at least form a consistent picture. According to legend, when the philosopher Xanthos bought Aesop at the slave market, he first asked "If I buy you, will you be good and honest?" Aesop answered that he would be good and honest whether Xanthos bought him or not. "All right, but will you run away?" "Have you ever heard of a caged animal that told its master it planned to escape?" Xanthos bought him and eventually freed him, and he used his wits to defend Xanthos in court. He's supposed to have overcome a speech defect: there's a story that his first owner had a sort of slave trial, since two other slaves had stolen the owner's figs and blamed Aesop, figuring he wouldn't be able to defend himself and anyway it was the word of two against one. Aesop did find himself unable to speak in his defense, but at the trial he drank water and then put his finger in his throat and vomited into a basin, pointing at it to show there was nothing in the basin but water (because he hadn't eaten the figs). Then he pointed at his accusers and gestured to show that they should undergo the same test. They tried to squirm out of it but eventually they were forced to vomit, and there were the figs, so Aesop was vindicated. I found it all really interesting.


Ladies' Lunch -- Lore Segal

A dozen or so short stories, mostly about a group of female friends in their eighties and nineties who have been meeting for lunch for decades. We get the idea that long ago they were all leading lights of New York society, but these days they cling to the lunches more than ever because the only other time they see each other is at their friends' funerals. The lockdown shatters their routines and is probably the main factor in one of them developing increasing dementia; a lot of the later stories are concerned with her friends heartbreakingly trying to take turns sleeping on her couch so she won't have to move to assisted living, an impossible dream, since they can't stop her from falling, and she's growing ever more confused and violent. The author is herself over ninety so the stories are probably an externalization of her own fears. They were well-written but depressing. 


*Repairing Books -- G.S. Percival

A short pamphlet ("Dryad Leaflet #150", though I don't know what that means) with useful instructions on making repairs to books. I gave most of Dad's books on bookbinding to a bookbinder's shop, but I kept this one, since many of the repairs it describes are minor enough that I could do them myself. I fixed the torn spine on the first volume of my copy of Gibbon's Decline and Fall while consulting this pamphlet, and it's held up fine.


Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded -- John Scalzi

I picked this up for the title, even though I didn't like either of the Scalzi novels I've read. It's a collection of uninspired blog posts from 1998-2008, not in any kind of order, which doesn't matter because they're all very dated and none of them were that good to begin with. 


*Libraries in the Ancient World -- Lionel Casson

A fun and interesting overview of library logistics throughout history. The Mesopotamians arranged cuneiform tablets by shape! Financial documents were square, agricultural reports were round, works on law, divination, and geology all had their own number of sides. Bigger libraries had separate rooms for each category just to make it easier. The Greeks and then the Romans used scrolls, which they kept in pigeon-holed cabinets; each scroll had a colored tag on one end showing what it was, but it would still be a big effort for a non-librarian to find anything. Even when codices came along it was long time before anyone thought of printing the title on the spine. The Romans appear to have been the first European culture to build public libraries; they were generally a part of the same buildings that held public baths. The book repeats a claim I've read before, that the great libraries like Pergamon and Alexandria had a habit of borrowing books from other libraries and returning a copy while holding on to the original; but I don't know if that's true or just catty antiquarian gossip. I thought it was great.


*Company -- Samuel Beckett

A novella from the seventies, which (unusually) he wrote in English. It's a story about a man lying on his back in the dark, listening to a voice reminisce about the past, unsure if the voice is coming from inside himself or from the outside. The reminiscences lead him to wonder about the value of any individual human existence, and what purpose can be found or invented in a world that seems without one. It hasn't really stayed in my mind; what I mainly remember is thinking that the narrator invented the voice to keep him company.  


*The Garden Party -- Katherine Mansfield

A collection of stories generally about English family life a hundred years ago. There was one about two women in their twenties who have lived their whole lives under the arbitrary authority of their tyrannical father, who has just died. Days after his death the women drift around the house, unsure how to act -- neither one of them has ever even spoken to a stranger without their father present. There's a psychologically freeing moment when they hear a street performer playing a barrel organ, and they realize that they don't need to rush out frantically to make him go away, since their father isn't there to get angry at the music. Another was about a pleasant middle-aged woman who has a happy day out in the park until she overhears a young couple, who probably meant to be overheard, laughing with each other about how stupid and old and ugly she looks. The best one was the title story, about a girl named Laura, in her late teens, belonging to a very wealthy family, who on the day of a big outdoor party at her parents' estate finds out that a local townsman has, just that morning, been thrown from a horse and died, leaving a widow and five children; and no one else in her family understands her suggestion that going ahead with the party would be heartless. Her mother angrily accuses her of trying to upset everyone and get attention. The party goes ahead, and possibly as a punishment the mother makes Laura pack up the leftover party food in a basket and bring it to the wake in her party clothes, where -- despite being embarrassed, intrusive, and out of place -- she's kindly welcomed by the family and brought in to the dead body, the first she's ever seen. It was a good book.


Wine and War -- Don and Petie Kladstrup

An entertaining book about how the Nazis grabbed all the good French wine and took it to Germany, and how the French got it back. The Nazis looted the Rothschilds' cellars and brought the lot to Hitler's command post at the Eagles' Nest, but Hitler was more of a beer drinker and never really opened any of it -- he had just taken it as a symbol of conquest. So it was all still there at the end of the war, and there was a lot of maneuvering -- and some outright disobeying orders -- to make damn sure that it was a French company that got to the bunker where the wine was stored so they could patriotically bring it home, rather than just drink it as the British or Americans would have. I thought it was pretty good.


Eastbound -- Maylis de Karangal

A French novella from 2012. On a trans-Siberian night train we meet Alyosha, one of a hundred or so twenty-year-olds just conscripted into the Russian army. They're all already marked as losers because they didn't have the money or the connections to get out of it, and like most of them, Alyosha has spent the days-long ride sleepless and chain-smoking in dread of the beatings and rape in store at the base. A couple other conscripts decide to make an early start on the beating and rape and they jump Alyosha outside a toilet; he fights them off, but the resulting bruises will only single him out as a victim even more, so he escapes forward into the passenger cars, planning to get off when the train stops at Irkutsk (a big enough city to hide in) and desert. He follows a passenger into her cabin and intimidates her into keeping quiet while he hides there. This is Hélène, a French woman who in a burst of enthusiasm had gone with her Russian boyfriend to live in Krasnoyarsk, a mining town in the absolute ass-end of nowhere. She speaks no Russian and her boyfriend was very different in Siberia than he was in France, and she's left as suddenly as she came, just getting on a train one day and heading for Vladivostok, where she can find transport home. She and Alyosha can only communicate by gestures, but she intuits that he's running away, like she is, and she's sympathetic even while she fears and resents his intrusion. The Irkutsk plan fails, as the sergeant in charge of the conscripts realizes someone's missing just as they pull in; a stone-faced cleaning lady (who must have seen Alyosha in the passenger car and guessed what he was at) unexpectedly grabs Alyosha and shoves him into a bathroom, then stands in the doorway mopping the bathroom floor and blocking anyone's view inside while soldiers go through the cabins looking for him. When the soldiers move on to the next car, Hélène lets Alyosha back into her cabin and successfully hides him there all the way to Vladivostok. I loved it. It kind of reminded me of Dad, who -- when another soldier's flight home from their base in occupied Germany was cancelled and there wasn't another for three weeks -- hid the guy in the X-ray room so he wouldn't have to report back and spend three more weeks in the army.


*Philosophy Four -- Owen Wister

A novella about three students at Harvard in the 1880s: two rich layabouts who haven't studied all term, and a scholarship student who's making some extra money by tutoring the two of them for their philosophy final. Wister wants us to despise the tutoring student for being poor and studious, and admire the other two for being rich and idle. The two rich kids decide to skip their last tutoring session and stay out all night stuffing themselves and getting drunk, while the other kid conscientiously sits and waits for them to show up. Wister exults with joyful pride over the two partiers and laughs scornfully at the dutiful studier, and gloats about how the rich kids will sail into easy jobs at their fathers' businesses while the third will live a threadbare life of bookish poverty. Kind of made me want to hit Wister in the face with a skillet, honestly. Hemingway said of the book that "We all write shit, but someone is supposed to stop us from publishing it," and that strikes me as a pretty fair judgement. 


Ritz and Escoffier -- Luke Barr

An account of how the D'Oyly-Carte family managed to get Cesar Ritz to take the helm at the Savoy Hotel, and how Ritz convinced Escoffier that cooking in England wouldn't be a waste of his talents. A lot of the stories about the Savoy are the big bravura ones -- like the time the Prince of Wales and the Duc d'Orleans decided to hold last-minute big parties on the same night, and Ritz had to scramble to turn a basement billiard room into a royal wedding hall while Escoffier had to turn out two completely different epic banquets at the same time -- but the day-to-day routines of both the restaurant and the hotel are probably more important. How do you attract the attention of the leaders of society and then keep it, so that it becomes a matter of habit for movie stars to stay at the hotel while royals drop in for lunch? That was the best part of the book. I got the feeling that Barr would have preferred to just pass over Ritz and Escoffier's embezzlement and getting fired, escaping jail only because the D'Oyly-Cartes didn't want a scandal, and he gets through it as quickly as possible, moving right on to their next project at the Ritz in Paris, which he frames as a triumphant step upwards rather than as fleeing the country to escape prosecution. It wasn't bad.


Kitchen -- Banana Yoshimoto

I thought I'd like this more than I did. It's the story of a woman named Mikage, maybe twenty I think, who is grieving and depressed after the death of her grandmother (her only relative) and who moves in with Yuichi, a neighbor she barely knows, just because he was friendly with her grandmother at the flower shop where he works. At Yuichi's home Mikage meets his mother Eriko, a trans person (which was ground-breaking in a novel written in Japan in 1988!) and starts to recover spiritually by cooking with Eriko in the kitchen. After Mikage gets a job working as a cook and gets her own place, Eriko is shockingly murdered, and it's Mikage's turn to try to help Yuichi the way his family helped her. It's a good story but I just thought the writing was wooden, which may be a problem in the original or with the translation, I don't know. In any case the prose isn't up to the work it has to do.


Signs Preceding the End of the World -- Yuri Herrera

A hero-goes-on-a-journey story, where the journey is to the shadow America where poor immigrants have to live. At first I thought of it as a kind of Orpheus story, but that's the wrong cultural context. I had to do some outside reading to understand the frame of the novel. The hero is Makina, a Mexican woman whose brother has crossed into the USA and gotten himself into trouble; Makina decides to go after him and bring him back -- this is a retelling of the Aztec story of how Quetzalcoatl went to the underworld to retrieve the bones of his ancestors. There's a local criminal who owes Makina's family a favor, for reasons not specified, and he gets her across the border; she and her fellow travelers live in a sort of liminal world, even speaking a mixture of Spanish and English that's neither one thing nor the other, just like them. (Herrera invents imaginary slang in this in-between language, and the translator has to add notes to explain it.) To Makina, the USA is a lot like the Aztec underworld -- it's strange, nonsensical, and dangerous, full of powerful and hostile figures with incomprehensible agendas. It was a good look at the USA through the eyes of a poor and frightened stranger.


Picnic, Lightning -- Billy Collins

This was his fourth book and probably what got him appointed as US Poet Laureate. I put off reading it because the title is a Lolita reference, but I really liked a lot of the poems. My favorite was "Marginalia", a reflection on the marginal notes he finds written in used books:
   ....
   I remember once looking up from my reading,
   my thumb as a bookmark,
   trying to imagine what the person must look like
   who wrote “Don’t be a ninny”
   alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.