What have you been reading recently?

[ladyonthemoon]

I've started learning Japanese; learning lists of words is so boring to me that I decided to read "real" books in Japanese. I read slowly, learn the vocabulary and the grammar on the way and it feels really better. 😀

The book I chose is マインドクロン (Mindclone) by David T. Wolf.

[googoogjoob]

Books. Oh no.

 

The Zealot and the Emancipator: John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, and the Struggle for American Freedom, by H. W. Brands. Pretty good. Relatively breezy; not really a parallel bio so much as the story of the end of slavery in America as related through the acts of two pivotal figures. Not enough detail on Lincoln and colonization, perhaps inevitably.

Tolstoy: Selected Stories, by Leo Tolstoy. Alright. Too often straightforwardly moral/allegorical, intermittently brilliant (cf "The Death of Ivan Ilych"). Tolstoy is a guy who I can respect even when I disagree with his particular moral positions, which is not infrequent.

The Underdogs, by Mariano Azuela. The Novel of the Mexican Revolution; I found it only intermittently effective; its fragmentary structure and deliberate emotional distance from the characters and events in it were kind of wearying.

If Death Ever Slept, by Rex Stout. Another Nero Wolfe novel. This one was pretty haphazard. It feels like Stout himself didn't know "whodunnit" till the last chapter.

What Have I Done?: The Stories of Mark Clifton, by Mark Clifton. Post-Golden Age, pre-New Wave science fiction with thematic preoccupations of paradox, psychology, hypocrisy, etc. Some of it fluff, some of it quite good (Clifton won the Cordwainer Smith Award for Unjust Obscurity some years ago). It's sad that Clifton died before being able to develop further as an author, as the later stories are much stronger than the earlier ones.

The Great Thinking Machine: "The Problem of Cell 13" and Other Stories, by Jacques Futrelle. Futrelle is famous for the title story here, and for dying on the Titanic. These are fairly barebones puzzle-story-type detective stories. They were entertaining, but Futrelle is remembered for that one story for a reason.

The Best Martin Hewitt Detective Stories, by Arthur Morrison. Quite good; appearing during the Great Hiatus, Hewitt is kind of a deliberate anti-Holmes, being a brilliant detective who happens to be an extremely normal guy.

The Best Dr. Thorndyke Detective Stories, by R. Austin Freeman. The inverted detective stories- a form Freeman invented- are good, especially the first, "The Case of Oscar Brodski." The more-conventional stories here are inconsistent and can feel kinda padded.

The Best Max Carrados Detective Stories, by Ernest Bramah. Notable as the first blind detective of fiction; these stories incorporate popular melodrama into detective fiction in a way that has been retrospectively seen as foreshadowing Golden Age detective stories (the first batch of Carrados stories appeared in 1913). Charming, but not all-timers.

 

I am currently soldiering my way through the thorough and very dense "Passage through Armageddon: The Russians in War and Revolution, 1914-1918" by W. Bruce Lincoln. I am at last to 1917. They just offed Rasputin. The end is in sight.

[googoogjoob]

More books.

 

Passage Through Armageddon: The Russians in War and Revolution, 1914-1918, by W. Bruce Lincoln. A solid, thorough account of the period named; while I've read about the Russian Revolution(s) before, what struck me in reading this was how Nicholas's ineptitude and intransigence torpedoed not just the monarchy, but also the chances of basically anyone but the Bolsheviks. His refusal to grant a responsible government in 1915 or 1916 made anyone to the right of the SRs or Mensheviks untenable (the Kadets still wanted to push for Istanbul in 1917!), and this in turn put most of the socialist parties on the wrong foot; only the Bolsheviks ended up having any sense of the moment, or any ability to seize it, in 1917. Anyway, I'm going to read Lincoln's books on the years leading up to WWI in Russia, and on the Russian Civil War, next.

The Necklace and Other Stories, by Guy de Maupassant. Maupassant was a master of the short story form- but his stories also regularly come across as shallow and facile to me. Ball-of-Fat is excellent, though.

The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt, by Toby Wilkinson. Something like three millennia of history; Wilkinson goes for a straightforward political history over the more-typical focus on the ancient Egyptians' religious beliefs and material culture, and succeeds spectacularly. He synthesizes a tremendous amount of (often very fragmentary) material into a strong, coherent narrative.

Five Great Short Stories, by Anton Chekhov. Very good; Chekhov could condense a novel's worth of themes and events into a tiny space.

The Metamorphosis and Other Stories, by Franz Kafka. Also very good. It's striking how, a century later, Kafka still feels extremely contemporary.

Nemesis, by Agatha Christie. I started reading this and then gave up maybe a fourth of the way through. Misery.

The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco. Not really bad, but I felt like this book tried to do several things at once (detective novel, historical novel, novel of ideas, etc) and didn't really 100% succeed at any of them. It's a likeable book, but not really a great work of art.

 

Currently reading: a history of the Bonus Army, and anthologies of WWI fiction and poetry.

[Masked Man of Inscrutability]

18 hours ago, googoogjoob said:

The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco. Not really bad, but I felt like this book tried to do several things at once (detective novel, historical novel, novel of ideas, etc) and didn't really 100% succeed at any of them. It's a likeable book, but not really a great work of art.

 

I loved Name of the Rose.  I thought it was one of Eco's most enjoyable books.  I can understand your criticism that it isn't a great work of art because it's more of a pulpy/fun read.  But I still recommend it to anyone who wants to read something by Eco for the first time.

Edited April 7, 2023 by Masked Man of Inscrutability
typo

[googoogjoob]

Books I have read in the past month:

 

The Bonus Army: An American Epic, by Paul Dickson and Thomas B. Allen. The current standard work on the Bonus Army, a protest march of unemployed WWI veterans who, at the height of the Great Depression, demanded that the federal government pay out early a bonus that was promised to them. The government responded by sending in the military. The vets did eventually get their bonus, four years later, but nine years before it was promised, and the struggle fed into the passage of the GI Bill of WWII. The book itself was good and thorough, though noticeably written by journalists rather than historians- lots of focus on picturesque detail, not so much analysis of trends or mass forces.

World War One British Poets, Candace Ward, ed. My response to poetry is extremely variable. Some of this stuff (eg Owen, Sassoon) was great, some (eg Brooke, Gurney) I thought was pretty bad, and a lot (eg Graves, Hardy) just did nothing for me.

World War One Short Stories, Bob Blaisdell, ed. Probably inevitably this is heavily slanted towards British authors. Equally inevitably, it's a mixed bag. Some pieces are excellent- the excerpt from Barbusse's Under Fire; C. E. Montague's "A Trade Report Only"; Somerset Maugham's "The Traitor"; Mary Borden's harrowing, moving "Blind"; Katherine Mansfield's "The Fly." But then there's the maudlin and the facile beside these; and the uncomfortably bloodthirsty "Mary Postgate," by Rudyard Kipling.

The BOZZ Chronicles, by David Michelinie and Bret Blevins. This compiles the entire run (six issues) of the short-lived mid-80s comic of the same name. The premise is that the titular character, a thickset, eight-foot-tall pale green alien, is stranded on Earth in the 19th century after his spaceship crashes in England. He is consumed by boredom and ennui on this backward planet. To distract him from killing himself, his self-appointed sidekick, a Cockney prostitute named Mandy arranges for him to solve mysteries. (His other sidekick is an American cowboy, Hawkshaw.) This was very goofy and very fun. It's not really high-caliber as either detective fiction or science fiction, but it's consistently very entertaining.

How the States Got Their Shapes, by Mark Stein. A book about how the US's states assumed their modern borders. This ended up being pretty dull. Since it's ordered state-by-state, lots of material is repeated (sometimes three or four times). Since it's about a settler colonialist state, the explanations for borders tend to be "Congress tried to make states roughly the same size" or "a perfectly rectangular shape would've included hard-to-govern land on the other side of a river" or the like. Grim.

Great Speeches, by Abraham Lincoln. It's crazy to think that there was a time when the president of the USA gave speeches that were consistently worth paying attention to.

Last of the Dragons, by Carl Potts & co. The compiled run of a brief low fantasy comic (evil monks sail to Northern California with their tamed dragons, opposed by an old samurai and a young ninja). It was enjoyable enough, but its brevity means it was too short for niceties like character development or much atmosphere.

Civil War Adventure: Books One and Two, by Chuck Dixon and Gary Kwapisz. An odd revival of the war comics format (initially published in 2009 and 2011), and an atypical application of the format to the American Civil War. These were fun, but they inevitably take, basically, the "Civil War enthusiast dad/uncle" perspective- lots of interest in the ground-level experiences of soldiers, little if any interest in the ideological or economic aspects of the war. They veer close to Southern apologia not so much out of actual ideological commitment so much as out of unabashed sentimentality, and typically American fondness for the underdog- these are comics that will show poor white Virginians fighting to "protect their homes," but then also feature a long, almost maudlin story about the Battle of Milliken's Bend, the first substantial action in which Black Union soldiers saw action and proved their worth. So, okay, I guess.

 

Presently reading The Bully Pulpit, by Doris Kearns Goodwin (which is kind of overstuffed), and Arrowsmith, by Sinclair Lewis (which has, I think, an odd mismatch between its subject matter and Lewis's typical form).

[Edgwyn]

I am currently reading the Ring of Fire series.  That should keep me occupied for a long time

[Arch-Mage Solberg]

I'm currently taking a class on the Gospels. So my textbooks are currently what I'm reading. Post# 744 

 

Powell, Mark Allan. Introducing the New Testament: A Historical, Literary, and Theological Survey. 2^nd ed. Grand Rapids, MI. Baker Academic. 2018. Print.

Strauss, Mark. Four Portraits, One Jesus: A Survey of Jesus and The Gospels. 2^nd ed. Grand Rapids, MI. Zondervan. 2020. Print.

Stein, Robert H. Studying the Synoptic Gospels: Origin and Interpretation. 2^nd ed. Grand Rapids, MI. Baker Academic. 2004. Print.

[ladyonthemoon]

I'm currently reading Monster, Naoki Urasawa's manga, in Japanese. I read slowly because I have to learn the vocabulary at the same time but I enjoy it a lot! 🤗 

I'm also reading Tommy & Tuppence Mysteries #1 - The Secret Adversary, by Agatha Christie and The Lord of the Rings, The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two. I noticed lots of differences between the book and the film, especially in the way the film depicts the characters. On the other hand, I find myself disturbed when I find passages in the book that remind me too much of the film... I also find disturbing the master/servant relationship Frodo and Sam are having, which is present in both the book and the film. 🤔

[Dintiradan]

On 5/12/2023 at 12:47 AM, ladyonthemoon said:

I also find disturbing the master/servant relationship Frodo and Sam are having, which is present in both the book and the film. 🤔

i can't imagine what issues you could possibly have with the film's depiction of sam

 

(that was the film you were referring to, right?)

[Slawbug]

To me it reads less like "master/servant" and more like a pretty positive version of "knight/squire" or -- to take a reference more relevant to Tolkien -- "corporal/private."  There's a layer of very unequal decision making, but it seems pretty separate from the way they treat each other as persons.  The age difference (50 vs 38, with coming-of-age at 33) also seems relevant -- easy to imagine an organic power dynamic just from differences in real-world experience.  Imagine a 21yo and a 28yo.

 

You can read it as Sam being unfairly submissive -- but Sam seems to have pretty sharp instincts about who it is and isn't wise to defer to; Frodo never treats him poorly; and he has no problem acting on his own when forced to.  The level of humility isn't for everyone, I guess, but in Tolkien's world at least the positive practical impact is clear -- both on those Sam helps, and on what he ultimately receives (less Ring-temptation than literally anyone else who encounters it in its whole history; and set of personal relationships back in the Shire that is both extensive and deep).

[Randomizer]

Master/servant makes sense in that before the adventure, Bilbo and later Frodo employ Sam as gardener for their property, Bag's End. It's a British class distinction with Merry and Pippin also being ones that are considered owner class and not ones that work. That they all treat each other as friends still has Sam considered as the worker through out the journey.

[ladyonthemoon]

On 5/13/2023 at 10:10 AM, Dintiradan said:

i can't imagine what issues you could possibly have with the film's depiction of sam

 

(that was the film you were referring to, right?)

No, not that one. 😉

[Edgwyn]

On 5/13/2023 at 11:33 AM, Randomizer said:

Master/servant makes sense in that before the adventure, Bilbo and later Frodo employ Sam as gardener for their property, Bag's End. It's a British class distinction with Merry and Pippin also being ones that are considered owner class and not ones that work. That they all treat each other as friends still has Sam considered as the worker through out the journey.

Arguably Sam is the only character that we spend much time with from the lower class.  The rest of the companions are all some kind of nobility/upper class (Gimli, Legolas, Boromir, Aragon, etc).  Sam's characterization is probably not all that far from the reality of the England of Tolkien's youth.

[Slawbug]

Well, turns out Tolkien gave us an actual answer:

https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Samwise_Gamgee

 

Tolkienists regard Sam as Frodo's batman. In the British Army, a batman was an orderly who acted as the personal servant of an officer. It was a role with which Tolkien (who served as an Army officer in the First World War) would have been extremely familiar. Sam undertakes all of the typical roles of a batman — he runs errands for Frodo, cooks, transports him (or at least carries him), and carries his luggage. Tolkien confirmed this interpretation when he wrote in a private letter that:

My Sam Gamgee is indeed a reflection of the English soldier, of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war, and recognized as so far superior to myself
—The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien

[Masked Man of Inscrutability]

On 5/13/2023 at 8:05 AM, Phthonic Duck said:

To me it reads less like "master/servant" and more like a pretty positive version of "knight/squire" or -- to take a reference more relevant to Tolkien -- "corporal/private." 

 

This is how I read it too.  

 

I also roll my eyes at that genre of literary criticism which uses current practices and standards of ethical conduct to complain about an old work being "problematic."  Social norms change over time.  It seems silly and a bit narcissistic to assume that our current norms are the the objectively correct ones.  This attitude, if taken to the extreme, leads to a really ugly culture like the one afflicting YA fiction twitter.

Edited May 19, 2023 by Masked Man of Inscrutability

[Edgwyn]

Peter Ustinov posed as David Niven's Batman during World War 2 to make it socially acceptable for the two actors to socialize more openly then their ranks in the British Army would otherwise have allowed.  

[ladyonthemoon]

18 hours ago, Masked Man of Inscrutability said:

literary criticism which uses current practices and standards of ethical conduct to complain about an old work being "problematic."

That's not what I am doing. I've never needed excuses to feel that hierarchy between people is wrong. Especially if it's not based on true respect.

[Masked Man of Inscrutability]

3 hours ago, ladyonthemoon said:

That's not what I am doing. I've never needed excuses to feel that hierarchy between people is wrong. Especially if it's not based on true respect.

 

I did not mean my comment as a barbed one against you.  It was instead a more general statement of the of a trend mostly seen in academic circles.  For example, when Stephen Railton complains about Huckleberry Finn's treatment of race using his own standards.  It seems asinine for Dr. Railton to ignore the cultural context in which the novel was written.

[Slawbug]

I think there's a fine line here.

 

Ignoring cultural context wholesale is, indeed, ridiculous.  But art can (and, many creators would say, should) be viewed from perspectives different from that of the author.

 

Sometimes new perspectives make us appreciate the work on new levels and in new ways.  Other times, they don't -- or they might expose gaps in its applicability, or make its insights feel shallower, or etc.

 

When something like that happens, it doesn't ruin or delete other perspectives on the work at all.  But at the same time, it is a data point.  Because there are amazing works of art where you just end up with more and more connections, more and more meaning, every time you look at it differently.  And then there are works of art that might be beautiful from one perspective, but don't have that expansive, transcendent aspect -- or have less of it.

[googoogjoob]

I guess I have read some more books.

 

Arrowsmith, by Sinclair Lewis. It was alright. As I noted in my previous post, there's sort of a clash between Lewis's MO (an obsessive, materialist documentation of American mediocrity) and the story here (scientific ideals vs the pressures of "real life"). Martin Arrowsmith is a genuine hero, who saves thousands or millions of lives, but most of whose problems are extremely petty and of his own making. The ending of the novel (Martin and his friend bug out to a cabin in Vermont to do Pure Uncontaminated Research forever) aside from being unrealistic, feels like a cop-out from the actual scientific conflicts the novel documents.

Border Worlds, by Don Simpson. A weird arty science fiction comic that went through a few fitful incarnations before sputtering out, and then was revived 25-odd years later as a nice hardback collected edition with new material that draws it to a (tentative) close. (This is fine, because it's pretty clear that it was always an aimless experimental sort of thing, and it was never going to have anything like a coherent overall arc or a satisfying ending.) I enjoyed it.

The Old Man in the Corner: Twelve Classic Detective Stories, by Baroness Orczy. The first proper "armchair detective"; it takes a superlative storyteller to get away with stories like this, where the sleuth is a passive observer who constructs the course of events from his seat in a cafe, but Orczy was such a storyteller. Something that struck me reading these stories is Orczy's fixation on disguise. Fully eight of the twelve stories here involve disguise and/or imposture, with culprits using these tools to confuse the timeline of their crime, or to lay false trails; two of the other stories also involve issues of identity, though not deliberate disguises. This is of course a theme eminently evident in Orczy's most famous creation, the Scarlet Pimpernel, though it was interesting to see how prevalent it was here as well.

The Last Days of New Paris, by China Miéville. Kind of a dud. "Nazis and the French Resistance fight a never-ending war in a warped Paris populated by living Surrealist art pieces and demons" sounds cool, but in practice the book is unmanned by Miéville's shift away from conventional SFF worldbuilding to an "artier," more amorphous "anything goes" approach- it's hard to have stakes when it's not even roughly clear what can or cannot happen. Fanservice is also a problem- almost all of the book's imagery is poached from real-world Surrealist art, to the extent that this novella needs endnotes explaining which works Miéville lifted the stuff from. The result is a book with some intermittently striking imagery, but which is slack and almost absolutely devoid of heft.

 

The Bully Pulpit turned out to be so overstuffed and unfocussed that I've left it on the back burner. I'm currently reading W. Bruce Lincoln's Red Victory: A History of the Russian Civil War, and a book of stories by Robert Louis Stevenson, and The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce.

Edited June 6, 2023 by googoogjoob

[fantasytier]

some dark fantasy, the unstar aprochyan books 1 ^ 2, dream of death city, fairy tale - stephfen king, and comedy, goblin mischief.

 

 

also some mangas/comic books

[googoogjoob]

More books.

 

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde & Other Tales, by Robert Louis Stevenson. Stevenson was a deft storyteller, but honestly not that good at spinning out ideas in the way one would want from speculative fiction, I think.

Translation State, by Ann Leckie. It's the new Ann Leckie book. Cozy small-scale space opera drama. I liked it. Good ideas, and central conflicts which have obvious real-world parallels and resonance, but resist reduction to 1:1 allegorizing- excellent, exactly what I think speculative fiction should be. Something that struck me, though, is that though the book has three viewpoint characters/protagonists, from wildly differing backgrounds, they're all very Ann Leckie Protagonist Characters: practical, humble, reserved, a wry sense of humor, no shades of malice to any of their actions. They're likeable, of course, but perhaps not differentiated enough.

Van der Graaf Generator: Every Album, Every Song, by Dan Coffey; and Peter Hammill: Every Album, Every Song, by Richard Rees Jones. Track-by-track overviews of the discographies of the named artists.

Hocus Pocus Focus: The Strife & Times of Rock's Dutch Masters, by Peet Johnson. An impressively thorough and definitive (up to 2015) work on the band Focus, buttressed by extensive interviews with essentially all of the principals. Really good.

Red Victory: A History of the Russian Civil War, by W. Bruce Lincoln. This completes the trilogy started with In War's Dark Shadow: The Russians Before the Great War (which I read in April, but seem to have neglected mentioning here) and continued in Passage Through Armageddon: The Russians in War and Revolution. A solid work, minimally dated (written in the 80s). I am glad to have read it.

 

Presently reading Happy Forever, Mark Volman's collage-memoir which recently came out; and then The Secret Life of Algernon Pendleton, by Russell H. Greenan.

[Goldengirl]

Currently reading Intimate Direct Democracy by Modibo Kadalie, which is a comparative study of two maroon communities in what is now Florida and Georgia.

 

Previously read Conflict is not Abuse by Sarah Schulman. I remember the book making quite the splash and ruffling feathers (duck feathers from the splash, I suppose) when it came out. Reading it a few years later, a lot of the points seem to have been absorbed to some extent by the queer communities I’m in. Also, Schulman is very self-assured of her skill and achievement, which gets grating at times. “As a novelist” gets used a lot for situations where that expertise is not even particularly relevant. (“As a novelist, I know people do things for reasons.” Thanks Sarah!)