Paging All Bookworms! discussion
PAGE COUNT TRACKING 2016
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JamesF's 2016 Challenge
July 2157. Gregory Vlastos, Studies in Greek Philosophy, volume 1: The Presocratics [1993] 389 pages
Seventeen articles dating from between 1945 and 1975. Vlastos was an analytic philosopher as well as an expert on Greek philosophy, and he used his skills in linguistic analysis to interpret the arguments of the Greek philosophers. Every one of these articles cast new light on the development of the early philosophical tradition. Five are general articles on Greek democracy, which he considered to have been an important influence on the cosmological doctrines of the first Presocratics; the sixth is on Heraclitus, and the last three are on Anaxagoras and Democritus. The remainder are concerned with Parmenides and Zeno of Eleas, and the paradoxes.
July 2558. Stendhal, Chroniques Italiennes [1831-1842] 341 pages [in French, Kindle]
Seven stories, set in Italy, mostly in the Renaissance. These are stories of passion, love and vengeance, but Stendhal is also as in his novels trying to paint the mores of a historical time and place. The stories emphasize the corruption and violence of the Papal government and the church; the last three are specifically concerned with the abuse of convents to imprison women who are in the way of male heirs. Five stories were published in theRevue des deux mondes at the time they were written; the last two were unfinished and first published with the others in the twentieth century. The collective title is traditional, but not Stendhal's.
July 3159. Thomas Heath, A History of Greek Mathematics, volume 1: From Thales to Euclid [1921] 446 pages
A comprehensive history of Greek mathematics, divided by topics -- after a couple of introductory chapters on terminology, numerals and notation, it deals with Pythagorean arithmetic, the beginnings of geometry, Pythagorean geometry, the elements of geometry before Plato, math in Plato, the elements between Plato and Euclid, more advanced problems, and ends up with Euclid. Much of Greek geometry is just algebra in disguise. This first book covers the theory of incommensurables (irrationals) and the discovery of conic sections. It seems the Greeks were more advanced in some areas than I was aware of. The second volume is on my list in a few months if I can find it in the garage -- the library only has volume 1. (I should be getting my shelves built this month!)
August 460. Franz Cumont, The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism [1909] 243 pages
We all learned in school or Sunday school the official story of the rise of Christianity: there were two very different religions, paganism, based on the classical Greek and Roman myths familiar from Ovid and Bullfinch, polytheistic and amoral, and Christianity, monotheistic and moral. By some unknown and probably miraculous process, the latter overcame the former in the popular consciousness.
This has nothing to do with reality. In fact, the classical religion was dead long before the rise of Christianity, persisting only in a few formal state observances, in literature and in art. Here, the "high" literary culture is misleading; being conservative, it uses the names of the traditional gods and goddesses for very different gods.
Cumont's book is an attempt to reconstruct this later pagaism of the first three centuries AD. It is not a treatise, but a series of popular lectures, revised and with added notes. After an introductory chapter on the social and economic conditions, which shows that apart from military power the eastern cultures were more developed in every respect than Rome, and gives a general explanation of the introduction of the eastern cults, it discusses the components of later paganism by the regions of origins -- Asia Minor (Cybele and Attis), Egypt (Isis and Serapis), Syria (Baal), Persia (Mithraism) and Babylonia (astrology and magic.)
The later paganism was a blending of these components. It was largely monotheistic, had an omnipotent, incorporeal god, and usually a devil, angels and demons. It was cosmopolitan, individual, and incorporated strict moral teachings. It generally promised its believers immortality, and some cults had gods who were killed and resurrected, with the believers participating in the god's resurrection. The rites included baptism and communion. Many of the cults were already combined with Judaism (the old Testament history) and Greek philosophy (Platonism/Neoplatonism). Unlike Judaism and the classical religions, they had professional, hierarchical priesthoods.
One shortcoming of the book is that Cumont still talks about Christianity as if it is something different from the pagan cults. Of course the Christians opposed Christianity to an undifferentiated "paganism", just as Catholics today divide religion into Catholicism and non-Catholics, or the Mormons into Mormons and gentiles. Undoubtedly each of the cults did the same. But the conclusion to be drawn from Cumont's description in my opinion is that Christianity was just one of many very similar competing cults, others of which at one time or another came close to becoming dominant and then lost out to political factors. There was nothing miraculous; the Christians just happened to back the right politicians.
Of course, in the hundred years since this influential book was written, we have undoubtedly gotten a fuller and more refined idea of later paganism; but this is one of the most interesting books on religion I can remember having read.
August 661. Stendhal, Memoire d'une touriste [1837] 80 pages [in French, Kindle]
A short account of a visit to Nantes and the surrounding region. It comments on the museums and monuments, but also the people he spoke to. It is full of interesting observations and digressions on art and other topics.
August 962. Milan Kundera, Jacques and his Master: An homage to Diderot in three acts [written ca.1968, French orig. pub 1981 tr. 1985] 90 pages
Written shortly after the Soviet invasion put an end to the Prague Spring, (and before the novels the author is best known for in the West) this was not published until more than twenty years later. It is a "variation", in Kundera's words, on the novel Jacques le fataliste by the French Encyclopaedist Denis Diderot. According to Kundera's preface, the play (and Diderot's novel, which I read more than a decade ago) are intended to satirize emotionalism and seriousness in literature. (His explanation reminded me of the origins of Dada during the first world war.)What this is, is a very funny play about the love lives of a servant and his master. I intend to read more by Kundera.
August 1263. Salma Khadra Jayyusi, ed., Tales of Juha: Classic Arab Folk Humor translated by Matthew Sorenson, Faisal Khadra and Christopher Tingley [2007] 144 pages
A collection of mediaeval Arabic humorous folk anecdotes attached to the name of Juha, a sort of Arab Till Eulenspiegal. Some are funny, some not so funny, some old chestnuts we have all heard a thousand times attached to other characters, few that anyone would find offensive. There is a certain amount of satire of wealth and political corruption. A quick, fun read.
August 1564. Frederick Copleston, S.J., A History of Philosophy, volume 7: Fichte to Nietzsche [1963] 496 pages
This is the first volume of Copleston's History that I hadn't previously read when I was studying philosophy in college. The volume covers German philosophy of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. More than half the book is devoted to the three major post-Kantian Idealists, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, and their more important disciples. Trying to understand Idealist philosophy for me is nearly impossible -- it makes my brain hurt, and I would gladly skip over this entire tendency if it weren't for the influence of Hegel on Marx and thereby on much of twentieth century philosophy. Copleston has the advantage over me here that to him as a Catholic philosopher the idea of Absolute Spirit means something, even if not what it does to Hegel. He explains these philosophies about as clearly as I think they could be explained.
The book then turns to the critics and opponents of Hegel. The neo-Kantians, and some thinkers who continued non-Kantian traditions, get one chapter; Schopenhauer gets two, there is one on the "Young Hegelians", and one on Marx (not surprisingly, this is the weakest chapter in the entire series so far; about all I can say is that he is as fair to Marx as a Catholic priest before the era of "Liberation theology" could be). Then he turns to the more existential tradition, with a chapter on Kierkegaard, one on "non-dialectical materialism" (also weak), and two on Nietzsche. The book ends up with a brief discussion of some twentieth century German philosophers who to some extent continued the traditions discussed in the book (the neo-Kantian Cassirer, the phenomenologists Husserl and Heidegger).
If I had reviewed this in the Image edition which broke it up into two parts, I would have given the first half a much higher rating than the second; Copleston understands the idealists better than he does the materialists, perhaps because that's where his sympathies lie. Not the best book in the series.
August 1965. Stanislaw Lem, Mortal Engines [tr. Michael Kandel, 1977] 239 pages
Fourteen stories about robots, translated from Polish. The first eleven are from a collection called Fables for robots; like the stories of The Cyberiad they are short satirical parables or fairy tales set in a world inhabited by robots and are just fun to read. The twelfth story features Ijon Tichy, and the thirteenth is a story of Pilot Pirx, two characters who appear frequently in Lem's writings. The last and best story is a stand-alone, "The Hunt", which is more serious and recalls themes from Solaris.
August 2366. John Steinbeck, Tortilla Flat [1935] 207 pages
Steinbeck's first successful novel. This is the story of Danny, who after returning from World War I inherits two houses in Tortilla Flat, a poverty-stricken neighborhood of Monterrey, California. The houses soon become a group home for several of Danny's friends. Unlike The Grapes of Wrath, which describes the conditions of farmers and workers (or farmers who become workers) during the Depression, this novel describes what in German is called the lumpenproletariat, the permanently unemployed, alcohol-obsessed underclass which lives by scavenging and petty crime. Though often called a "left" writer on the basis of The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck is essentially a Christian author who tends to idealize poverty as such; one of his most frequent allusions is to St. Francis of Assisi. The book is well-written, often funny and the characters for all their eccentricities seem real, but the content didn't really appeal to me that much.
August 2467. John Steinbeck, Cannery Row [1945] 196 pages
I read this for a Goodreads' discussion group. Written ten years after Tortilla Flat, it is a very similar novel; it's also set in Monterrey, and deals largely with the unemployed all-male inhabitants of a sort of group home which is very reminiscent of Danny's friends in the earlier novel. Most of my review of that could be repeated here. The slight plot deals with the relations of the friends to "Doc", a collector of biological samples for the research market. There is also a greedy but ultimately good-hearted Chinese storekeeper and an idealized brothel called the Bear Flag Restaurant. As in the earlier book, poverty is idealized; the feel is somewhat like the drop-out counterculture of the sixties except with actual poor people instead of middle-class teenagers. Funny and well-written but not his best book; although if I had been assigned these two in school rather than The Red Pony and The Moon is Down it might not have taken my forty years to decide to read The Grapes of Wrath.
August 2768. Robert Murray Davis, ed., Steinbeck: A Collection of Critical Essays [1972] 183 pages
Having read two of Steinbeck's shorter novels this week, I borrowed this collection of criticism from the library. It's in the Twentieth Century Views series; the saays from the forties, fifties, and sixties are rather dated. I seldom read criticism of modern fiction, and for good reason -- they almost never give me any additional insight to the books (film criticism is occasionally more worthwhile.) This collection contains an Introduction and twelve other essays.
It begins and ends with general assessments of his work, which are very patronizing; essentially they ask the question why "middlebrow" readers still consider Steinbeck serious literature after academic critics have ruled that he's out of favor. They explain that he was so naive that he thought America had economic classes, when everyone knows that Americans are all middle-class (one author grants that California, exceptionally, may have had classes up to the time he was writing); that he didn't understand that humans are inherently evil due to original sin; and most damning of all, that he was not obscure enough to be worth academic criticism.
in between, there are ten essays on individual works; these are of uneven quality. The essay on Arthurian elements in Tortilla Flat was worthwhile. The most interesting of the essays was a comparison of The Grapes of Wrath with the movie version directed by John Ford and approved by Steinbeck. In the book, the episode of the Federal camp comes near the middle, and the Joads are forced out by the local vigilantes, thus showing the ineffectiveness of the New Deal measures; in the movie, this is moved to the end to give a "happy ending" and suggest that Roosevelt actually solved the problems of the migrant workers. The movie also made changes to exclude all criticism of organized religion or the police, and as much of the politics as possible, focusing on the theme of family solidarity.
Fortunately, these essays are too old to have post-modernist jargon, but a couple of the essays do try to shoehorn the novels into the literary theories of the time they were written.
August 3069. David Cairns, Berlioz, volume one: The Making of an Artist, 1803-1832 [2nd ed., 1999] 647 pages
The first volume of Cairns' two volume biography of Hector Berlioz, this covers his childhood at La Cote Andres, his student days in Paris, the composition of his early works through the Symphonie fantastique, and his stay in Italy as winner of the Prix de Rome. It ends on the eve of his first concert after his return to Paris.
Although I have read Berlioz' own Memoires, this goes into far more detail and gives comprehensible reasons for actions that in the Memoires just seemed bizarre Romantic postures. Cairns was also interesting in that he emphasized the classical influences on Berlioz' music rather than just the Romanticism.
I am simultaneously reading a biography of Berlioz' somewhat older contemporary and fellow Dauphinois Henri Beyle (Stendhal) and the comparison is interesting (the Stendhal biography by Josephson does not mention Berlioz, but this book mentions Stendhal frequently.) Both men were born in the vicinity of Grenoble and "escaped" to Paris; both were materialists and atheists at odds with their more conservative families; both were strongly influenced by the Revolution and the Napoleonic era (although Berlioz was of course too young to have experienced the one directly or participated in the other, unlike Stendhal); both spent periods of "exile" in the Papal States (Stendhal was an Italophile, while Berlioz' impressions were mostly negative); both had a love-hate relationship with Pars; both were hampered in their artistic careers by the bureaucracies of the Restoration and the bourgeois monarchy; and both spent most of their lives "in love", mostly unsuccessfully.
I hope to read the second volume in the next few months.
Sept. 170. John Steinbeck, Sweet Thursday [1954] 203 pages
After reading Cannery Row for an online discussion group, from which I learned about this sequel, I decided to read it. It was written and set ten years after that novel; it deals with Doc and the boys from the Palace Flophouse after World War II. There have been changes, including some new characters. Lee Chong has been replaced by a Mexican, Joseph and Mary (one person), and a new girl Suzy at the Bear Flag becomes with Doc the major character. The novel is more traditionally structured than Cannery Row, with essentially a single narrative plot-- a sentimental love story. It's not as good as the earlier novel, but is well-written and entertaining.
Sept. 971. Kenneth Sylvan Guthrie, compiler & tr., The Pythagorean Sourcebook and Library [1988] 361 pages
A collection of source materials on Pythagoras and Pythagoreanism in English translation. The translations are rather old; this is an augmented reprint of a book first published in 1920. It includes the Lives of Pythagoras written by Iamblicus, Porphyry, and Diogenes Laertius,and various fragments and testimonia from later Pythagoreans and neo-Pythagoreans, Plato and Aristotle, and the Church Fathers. There is some material on his mathematical and physical discoveries, but most of the material is on his religious and ethical ideas. Today, these seem like platitudes, but since Pythagoreanism was the main influence on Platonism and neo-platonism, and that was the major influence on Christian theology, the ideas may have been more original in their context. Much of what is attributed to Pythagoras is obscure and probably symbolic; the interpretations here are interesting but not necessarily what he had in mind. For example, he put a major emphasis on not eating or even coming in contact with beans. The interpretations here range from "don't eat anything which causes flatulence", which seems rather trivial for a major religious taboo, to "don't vote for Democrats", which is certainly good advice but probably not what he meant either.
Sept. 1272. Edward Conze, Buddhism: It's Essence and Development [1951] 212 pages
My experience of Buddhism is limited to having had for a few weeks a roommate who prayed to a gohonzon for money . . . but I don't think Leroy was a good example of any religion. I am always a bit discouraged when I see people only reading books which they know in advance will reinforce their existing opinions, and often say that the point of reading is to challenge your own beliefs. The past few months, I have been following my own advice, reading about some systems which are uncongenial to my basic worldview -- the Pythagoreans, Parmenides, Karl Jasper, nineteenth century German Idealism . . . and this book on Buddhism. Since I have never understood how people can believe in Christianity, which is the religion I was brought up in, I assumed I woud find Buddhism even more incomprehensible, but perhaps due to having read these other books first, this made a certain amount of sense, if you accept the idealist premises. I don't, so I'm not likey to be converted any time soon, but the book was worthwhile for understanding a major belief system.
Conze, described as a major Buddhist scholar in the blurb, has given a good summary account of the doctrines, in a historical context, explaining the differences and developments of the major schools; at least I now know what is meant when a see a reference to Theravadins, Mahayani, or Zen and how they differ. I assume the author is himself Buddhist, or at least sympathetic, but his descriptions seem fairly objective and do not favor one version over another (except for an obvious dislike of Leroy's sect, the Nichiren, which he calls "militaristic" and considers more a variety of Shintoism than Buddhism.) In fact, Buddhism is not an exclusive religion, but a type of doctrine which can be superimposed on other religions, so that many of the Buddhist schools include much of Hinduism, Daoism, or other religions. This explains why Buddhism can be seen as having no God, or as having entire pantheons.
Conze is also objective in admitting some faults of Buddhism; while he emphasizes its tolerance and writes that "It goes without saying that there would be little room in Buddhism for religious persecution -- for Crusades, or Inquisitions. If the Buddha were insulted, a Buddhist would see little reason to torture or kill the person who 'insulted' him. . . . It would appear incongruous to a Buddhist to convince someone of the superior quality of his great benevolence by burning him alive," he admits a couple of pages later, "In their desire to express disapproval of Christianity, many authors have painted the record of Buddhism too white, and it will be necessary to admit that on occasion the Buddhists were capable of behaviour which we usually regard as Christian." As an example, he points out that ". . . the success of the [Yellow Church in Tibet] was due to the military support of the Mongols, who, during the 17th century, frequently devastated the monasteries of the rival Red sects, and who throughout supported the Dalai Lama, the head of the Yellow Church." He gives other examples, but most of them seem to me rather creditable to the Buddhists since they involved resistance to the colonial powers.
Eventually, I will want to read some of the primary sources or "scriptures" but for now this book gave me some idea of what Buddhism is about.
Sept. 1773. Chigozie Obioma, The Fishermen [2015] 297 pages
I read this for a Goodreads discussion group (The Constant Reader) so I will just give an edited version of what I wrote for that discussion. It is the story of an Igbo family with six children in the mostly Yoruba city of Akure and the conflicts resulting from an encounter with a "prophet"/"madman" named Abula.
I think that African, and particularly Nigerian, literature is among the most interesting in the world today. In addition to Chinua Achebe and Chimamanda Adichie, realistic Igbo authors, there is also the more symbolic Yoruba poet and playwright Wole Soyinka, who won the Nobel Prize. His childhood autobiography Ake, and his essay The Open Sore of a Continent about the fraudulent election which was actually won by Abiola and the subsequent Abacha dictatorship both came to mind as I was reading this.
I loved the book. Much like Naguib Mahfouz' The Cairo Trilogy, one of my favorite books, this novel uses a realistic family history as an allegory of their country's history. I picked up from the beginning that Abula was intended on one level as a representation of British colonial rule, as was made explicit later in the book by Obemba in reference to Achebe's Things Fall Apart. The fear and consequent violence between Ikenne and Boja is a good analogy to the violence between the Hausa and the Yoruba and Igbo. Britain's divide and rule policy set these ethnic and religious groups against each other very deliberately, and the fraudulent census that gave power to the conservative, rural Northern Moslems rather than the Yoruba , the largest grouping and the one that had been most active in the anticolonial struggle, set the stage for the subsequent struggles.
One thing mentioned in the discussion group was that the destruction of the traditional religion and its replacement by a veneer of superficial Christianity led to the destruction of morality and the prevalence of a magical and superstitious outlook; this is the theme of one of Chinua Achebe's other novels, No Longer at Ease about Okonkwe's grandson at the time of independence. This may be one reason why Nigeria is known for its corruption at all levels.
Turning to the literal level, I think that the prophecies were self fulfilling. The belief in prophets is one of the most evil things I can imagine -- Soyinka satirizes it in the hilarious Brother Jero plays -- but hardly peculiar to Nigeria.
A novel definitely worth reading; it's the author's first novel so he may be worth watching in the future.
Sept. 2174. Robert M. Sapolsky, A Primate's Memoir: A Neuroscientist's Unconventional Life Among the Baboons [2001] 304 pages
The memoir of a primatologist and neurobiologist who spent over twenty years studying baboons in a game park in Kenya. I was expecting something more along the lines of Jane Goodall's books about the chimps of the Gombe Reserve, mostly about the animals and only a little about the author outside his involvement with the baboons. In Fact it is mostly about his experiences, often hitchhiking around East Africa and the various African cultures he interacted with. This is not to deny that it was a very interesting book, just not what I thought it would be. Coming after a year and a half of reading African literature, it was interesting seing these cultures described from an outsider and comparing his American impressions to the descriptions of the writers from those cultures, although little of my reading has been on East Africa. The book does debunk some of the "sociobiological" stereotypes of baboon behavior and show a wider variety of behavioral strategies. The last chapter in particular shows the difficulty of protecting animals against human corruption, especially in the case of a relatively non-endangered species without the emotional appeal of he great apes.
Sept. 2175. J.K. Rowling, John Tiffany and Jack Thorne, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child [2016] 327 pages
I don't suppose there is really much point in reviewing a book which already has 34,500 reviews after being out for about a month. Of course it wasn't as good as the original series, but it was an entertaining read and there were none of the continuity errors that one often finds when a series is resumed after a long time. Any fan of the series will have to read it. It is a little oversentimental and probably has less crossover appeal to older readers than the original series. There is one scary glimpse of a world under Voldemor, which is timely today. As I've always said, Harry Potter is fiction, but the Death Eaters are real.
Sept. 2376. Lawrence M. Krauss, A Universe from Nothing: Why there is Something Rather than Nothing [2012] 202 pages
This is a short summary of modern cosmology, with (yawn) a bit of polemic against religion. The book is based solidly on accepted observationally confirmed science, with barely a mention of more speculative ideas (one critical page on string theory, a few references to the multiverse.) Not much that will be new to anyone who reads much popular science writing, but a good starting book that is relatively up to date.
Sept. 2477. Josh Malerman, Bird Box [2014] 262 pages
I read this for my library's book discussion for October, and for this month's challenge in PABW (bird on cover). It is a horror story, which is not one of my usual genres. It takes place in Michigan, near the present time; people start going crazy because of something they apparently see, so they begin to stay in their houses with the windows covered, only go out with blindfolds, keep their eyes shut as much as possible . . . and of course, society collapses, so it fits into the "post-apocalyptic" trend of so much YA literature -- which is what it struck me as, although the characters are all in their twenties or thirties; partly because of the simple writing style, and partly because it avoided any sexual dynamics, even though there were unrelated people of both sexes living in such close contact.
I have to admit I did not find this book especially scary; much of the horror was more gross than frightening -- rotting corpses and so forth. The plot and the descriptions were not all that realistic; I never really believed in it. In fact, my first impulse was to consider it as some sort of allegory: people thinking that they will be safer if they refuse to look or see, that what they don't perceive or acknowledge can't hurt them, fearing especially those who try to make them look at reality; isn't that a description of our world today (global warning, people being shot in the streets, NSA spying, wars all around the globe, and people in denial refusing to see any of it)? Sometimes I feel that I've spent most of my life trying to make people see, and been disliked for it. But in the end, and especially in the ending, this wasn't borne out by the plot, so I had to consider it basically as a failed effort at a standard horror novel. Perhaps those who are more into the genre would be more impressed -- or perhaps not.
Sept. 2978. Alexander von Humboldt, Kosmos: Entwurf einer physischen Weltbeschreibung. Volume 1 [1844] 507 pages [in German; Kindle]
I've always been an avid reader of science popularizations, and I've read many especially in the past two years; so eventually I had to go back to one of the first, the most comprehensive, and certainly the most successful popularizations of all time -- Alexander von Humboldt's Kosmos. This book is a summary of early nineteenth century science. After an introductory section giving von Humboldt's conception of science and explaining what he intends to cover and what he wants to accomplish -- not an encyclopedic collection of facts or theories but a view of the interconnections of phenomena, the first volume (the general "Weltgemalde" or "world picture") is divided into an astronomic part and a "telluric" part. The first part begins with nebulas and the galaxy, and narrows down to the stars, the solar system, the planets, comets and meteors, and then describes the Earth in its general form as a planet. The second part deals with the structure of the Earth, earthquakes, volcanoes, mountains, rocks, the oceans, the atmosphere and weather, organic life, and physical anthropology. The most extensive sections are the geological ones; the biological and especially the human sections are short. I believe the second, third, and fourth volumes are more detailed accounts of astronomy and geology; he never got to the detailed views of biology and anthropology, which however are covered in many of his more specialized books. Kosmos was one of the major "best-sellers" of its time, despite its length and difficulty; it represents what the educated non-scientist could be expected to know about the sciences for most of the nineteenth century, and for that reason alone is worth reading for anyone interested in the thought of the period.
Although science was and is always changing, and any science popularization is somewhat outdated by the time it is even published (the later volumes make an effort to keep up with the latest developments, and a posthumously published fifth volume is made up entirely of such corrections and additions, along with the index to all five), von Humboldt seems curiously modern compared to many other figures of the time. The general view of astronomy here didn't change much until the time of Hubble in the 1920's; the geology was essentially (except for the Ice Ages, which had only recently been suggested about this time and might be in the later volumes) the same paradigm as what I learned in grade school -- the new view of plate tectonics didn't come until I was in high school. The biology on the other hand was superceded the year Humboldt died, with the publication of The Origin of Species, which relies on von Humboldt's discoveries in plant and animal geography for its most convincing arguments. The anthropological section, though only a few pages at the end (and censored out of the early American translations) was especially modern, as he emphasizes his belief in the unity of the human species and makes the case against racial theories with ideas that were only recovered in the 1940s and 1950s, after a century of racist anthropology: the facts that traits such as dark skin, "wooly" hair, and so forth do not vary together but separately in different groups, that various traits are a result of adaptation to the climate and other factors, that language groups and ethnic groups are not the same, and so forth. He ends up with a sharp attack on slavery, and unambiguously states that all races have the same rights to freedom.
If von Humboldt's work is worth reading, the same however cannot be said for the Kindle version. While, unlike many free or low-cost e-books, it is adequately proofread, the formatting is terrible; the original endnotes are inserted in the text without any indication of where they begin or end, so that a sentence will break off in the middle, and resume a page or two later without warning. This makes the book very confusing to read -- there are long notes on every page -- and is especially damaging in German, where verbs and separable prefixes come at the end of sentences. My view is that printed books should never have endnotes, and e-books should always have endnotes with links from the text. Given that von Humboldt was a pioneer in scientific illustrations, inventing isotherms, isoclines, etc. as well as geological sections, it is surprising that the book had no illustrations (although just as well in the Kindle version, since e-books don't generally do well with illustrations -- the one chart included here was cut off at the end.) Apparently there was an atlas published by someone else at the same time which contained illustrative material for the book.
I will add my reviews for the subsequent volumes as I finish them.
Oct. 179. Katarina Bivald The Reader's of Broken Wheel Recommend [2013, tr. 2015] 394 pages
This is the selection for the Utah State Library book discussion group for November. I admit that I am a sucker for books about bookstores (see my review of Mr. Penumbra's 24-hour Bookstore for details) and this book was sold to the group as containing discussions of books, which would be the major interest for us. Alas, not true. The basic premise is similar to Penelope Fitzgerald's The Bookshop: a stranger opens a bookstore in a small town whose population is not interested in reading. Instead of the English coast, which Fitzgerald knew, it is set in Broken Wheel, Iowa, which Bivald, a Swede who has never visited America, obviously based on American novels and news reports. Some of the author's misunderstandings of Americans are more comic than the deliberate humor of the novel. (I've never seen an American bring a shotgun to church.) But the development is not nearly as good as Fitzgerald's; in fact, a short way in it morphs into a standard Harlequinesque romance with all the clichés of that style. The book references are sparse and mostly to popular genre novels (largely "chick-lit), and are just that: references, not actual discussions. I don't deny that this would be an entertaining reading for a (women's) book group, but it was not really my kind of novel.
Oct. 280. Priyamvada Natarajan, Mapping the Heavens: The Radical Scientific Ideas that Reveal the Cosmos [2016] 267 pages
I tend to read in "projects", and once in a while I actually finish one. I've been reading our library's popular and semi-popular books on cosmology for about two years now, in chronological order starting with Steven Weinberg's 1977 "classic", The First Three Minutes. I finally reached the last book the library has, from 2016.
Mapping the Heavens is a historically oriented book about "maps" of the universe; the first chapter is about literal star maps and charts from antiquity and the middle ages, but after that the book turns to the different mental pictures we have of the universe, from Copernicus, through the expanding universe, black holes, the accelerating expansion and dark matter and energy, to the cosmic background radiation, with a final chapter on more speculative views (the multiverse and the search for extraterrestrial life.)
The book is a low-level popularization (I don't mean this in any pejorative sense, just that it is aimed at an audience that doesn't already know a lot about the subject, with little technical detail -- it focuses mainly on what has been learned and how, without going into the exact evidence or disputes.) As such, it didn't really have a lot that was new to me, beyond reporting on some of the latest projects and discoveries of the last two or three years.
One theme that permeates the book, and is a research interest of the author, is looking at the factors that affect the earlier or later acceptance of "radical" new ideas. I would like to see her take this on in a longer and more detailed book than this one.
The book is solidly based, with almost no "gosh wow" and very little that is speculative except for the very last chapter, so it would be good for someone just starting out and looking for a book on the latest accepted views on the subject.
Oct. 781. Peter Matthiessen, In Paradise [2014] 246 pages
Matthiessen's last novel. A Polish-American professor who specializes in literature about the Holocaust attends a "spiritual retreat" organized by an ecumenical group, at the site of Auschwitz. There is much discussion of different views toward the Holocaust (though not the ones I find the most relevant), and the main character discovers things about himself and his family history. This is the only fiction I've read by Matthiessen; it's a worthwhile novel, but from reading his nonfiction I expected something more in depth.
Oct. 982. Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Ambiguous Adventure [1962] 166 pages
A classic of Sénégalese literature, translated from the French. This is a philosophical "novel"; the plot can be summarized in four sentences: a child attends a Moslem school; a little bit older, he attends a "foreign" school; he goes to study philosophy in Paris; he returns to Sénégal. What the book is, is a series of conversations and monologues about the relations of traditional and Western culture. Essentially, it's a manifesto of "négritude", the prose equivalent of Leopold Sénghor's poetry. The difference is that the "négritude" of Kane is strongly permeated with Islam. The viewpoint here is anything but "ambiguous": Western culture is evil, materialistic and atheistic, and the Africans should resist it in the name of traditionalism, religion and spiritualism.
This is a disturbing novel, just because this ideology is so prevalent; in different forms, it is the central idea of radical Islamism, and even in the "spiritual" tendencies in for example the Native American movement. It is hard for a progressive person in America to both oppose the imperialist enterprise and neo-colonialism, and at the same time to realize that the movements opposing Western domination are often based on traditional religious ideas which are anything but progressive -- witness the Taliban and ISIS today. The West has destroyed or weakened the cultural integrity of the colonized peoples, without providing any adequate substitute; the Western ideologies of Christianity and democracy are basically hypocritical when applied to the colonial world, and entwined with economic exploitation and political domination. Of course, these theories ignore the fact that the West has often reinforced the most backward traditional elements when it was in its interests to do so, as when the Islamicists were used against the nationalist regimes in the Middle East or to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan.
Not an enjoyable novel to read, but one which casts light on important aspects of contemporary politics. The author was a cabinet minister and planning commissioner for the Sénégalese government after independence.
83. José Eduardo Agualusa, The Book of Chameleons [2004; tr. 2006] 180 pagesAnother great novel of African literature, from Angola. The original title was O vendedor de passados, (literally, the seller of pasts) which is more descriptive of what it is about: Felix Ventura sells new “pasts”, respectable genealogies, to the nouveaux riches who want to become part of the Portuguese-speaking elite of the country. The novel is in short chapters narrated by a gecko (the lizard -- according to the author, he is meant to be a reincarnation of Jorge Luis Borges, although this is not really clear in the book itself, unless you know enough about his life to recognize it from a few “memories”.) About every third or fourth chapter is a dream.
The book begins with the coming of a new customer, a foreigner and photojournalist, who refuses to give his real name, for whom Ventura creates a new past as José Buchmann. The novel explores the way his new past becomes “real”, imposing itself even on those who know it is a fiction. What gives the novel its significance is that it makes a parallel between the individuals seeking new pasts and the construction of a new past for the country itself, denying the period of (so-called) socialism after independence. The real past, of both the main protagonist and the country, breaks in at the end in an unexpected ending.
Oddly, the description on the back cover calls the book a murder mystery, which is just wrong. Someone is killed near the end, but there is no mystery about why or by whom, as we see it happen. The real mysteries in the book are the identities of the different characters.
Oct. 1084. Cyprian Ekwensi, People of the City [1954] 156 pages
One of the earliest major works of Nigerian literature. This novel is the story of a crime reporter and Jazz musician in an unnamed city in Western Africa (probably Lagos). It is a description of urban life just before independence. The plot isn't all that strong, but the picture of society at the time is worth reading.
Oct. 1285. The Dhammapada, translated by Juan Mascaró [3rd cent. BCE?; tr. 1973] 93 pages
The ethical teachings of early monastic Buddhism. The emphasis is on self-control and asceticism. This is not a worldview I find especially appealing, but I can understand how some people find it attractive.
Oct. 1386. José Eduardo Agualusa, A General Theory of Oblivion [2013; tr. 2015] 244 pages
This is I think Agualusa's most recent novel. An agoraphobic young woman bricks herself into her apartment about the beginning of Angolan independence. Her story alternates with connected stories of what's happening outside, which amount to a sketch of Angolan history up to the present. Well-written, although the style is not as good as The Book of Chameleons; the political analysis is somewhat weak, but better than most contemporary historical fiction. A good novel, but just short of a really great one.
Oct. 2787. Andy Gill, Bob Dylan: The stories behind the songs 1962-1969 [2011] 207 pages
Usually about this time of the year I begin reading the new Nobel Prize winner in Literature. This year's winner, of course, is Bob Dylan, and his works are basically song lyrics. (I think he did write one book, called Tarantula, but I've never run across it and it obviously wasn't the basis for the award.) This is fine with me; songs are the original poetry, and nearly all poetry before the last four hundred years was intended to be sung; and Dylan's lyrics are certainly among the most influential poetry of the late twentieth century. The library ordered the big book of all his lyrics, which I have on hold, but it can't be released until November 1, so in the meantime I read this little book. It's pretty lightweight, no in depth analysis or original research, just the biographical and factual background behind the songs, ranging from a couple paragraphs to a couple pages for each. I probably have had the words to most of these early songs memorized since I was a teenager; my sister can testify that whenever she turns on her karaoke machine, I download Dylan. But I'm not a "fan" type person, and I knew little about him as a person, so some of this was interesting to me (less so trying to guess which girlfriend was the basis for which "breakup" song, many of which were probably addressed as much to his "fans" as to actual women.) One thing that came across very clearly was that he was a poet and songwriter, and not, like his model Woody Guthrie, also a political activist; I don't doubt that he had strong and sincere convictions on racism and war which he expressed in his earlier work, despite his later cynical statements, but he resented the attempt to pigeon-hole him as a "folksinger" or a "protest singer" or involve him in supporting particular groups. It's a tragedy that some people tried to make him into something he wasn't and in the process turned him off from that type of content, which I would like to have had more of. I wonder whether his delay in accepting the Nobel, which is already being commented on, isn't based on a similar worry about being defined by others, in this case as "literature." Or perhaps he still remembers the Tom Paine award banquet (mentioned in the book as an example of his reaction to being turned into a political spokesman which he never intended to be.)
Oct. 2888. Peter Matthiessen, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse [1983; new epilogue and afterword, 1991] 646 pages
One of the most important events happening in the country today, though eclipsed in the media by the Clinton-Trump circus, is the resistance by Native Americans and their allies to the Dakota Access Pipeline. This book is important background to the Standing Rock struggle. Despite the mention of Crazy Horse in the title, this is not a book about the nineteenth century genocide against the Indians, which is covered in a first chapter only as background. What it is, is an account of the resurgence of traditional Indian beliefs and the defense of Indian lands against the energy companies and the government beginning in the 1960s, largely though not entirely through the influence of the American Indian Movement (AIM), and the government's attempt to destroy that movement, culminating in the trial and imprisonment of Leonard Peltier.
This is not an impartial account, but an indictment of the United States government's disregard of law, due process, and elementary decency in their campaign against a movement that threatened the profits of the energy companies. The book does not gloss over the faults of AIM, which are admitted by many of the AIM leaders themselves; they had a confrontational strategy and an unrealistic view of the possibilities of armed struggle against the government, and did not seek the sort of alliances that might have aided their cause -- the Black Hills Alliance and other attempts to unite with the general environmental movement, which led up to the current movement at Standing Rock, all came later. However, the book also documents that most of the important confrontations were forced on the activists by the government, the corrupt and violent tribal government on the Pine Ridge Reservation, and the right-wing vigilante groups, and that there was an element of paranoia on the part of the FBI (remember this was the era of COINTELPRO) which resulted in a virtual state of war, with murders, rapes, assaults, and home invasions on the part of the FBI and the BIA and their supporters. The judicial process was constantly subverted in all the trials of AIM activists, not just in the case of Leonard Peltier.
The book is divided into three parts; the first part is background on AIM and the Wounded Knee occupation, the second part deals with the shoot-out for which Peltier was arrested and the trials, and the final part deals with the struggle to get the conviction overturned. I remember that the first significant political meeting I ever attended, was to hear an AIM spokesman, Lee Brightman, talk about Wounded Knee at the Upper West Side Militant Forum in New York, when I was a college student. This is a book that is difficult to read, simply because it made me so angry I had to stop reading every few minutes to cool off. I hope it has the same effect on other readers. After being published in 1983, it was suppressed due to lawsuits by Governor Janklow of South Dakota, and an FBI agent mentioned in the book; it was not republished until 1991. Leonard Peltier remains in prison; every President from Bush through Obama has refused to pardon him or commute his sentence, despite the documentation of government misconduct, falsified evidence and lack of due process at the trial.
Although Matthiessen was a good writer, this is not a particularly well-written book. Perhaps because of the mass of information he had to deal with, it is poorly organized and much of the information is presented out of order, skipping backwards and forwards in a confusing way; and often it was hard to remember who some of the minor characters were when they reappear later on. The information about the role of the energy companies in the Black Hills, which makes sense out of the whole government policy, is introduced at the beginning of Part III. But for all its faults, this is an important book for anyone who wants to know what lengths the US government will go to to crush dissent when it threatens the interests of the energy companies, as we are seeing today at Standing Rock and elsewhere.
As I was reading this, and also following Standing Rock on the Internet (it's not being adequately covered in the media) I saw two other things: the largest land grab of Indian lands since the nineteenth century is being considered now in Congress; and one of my Facebook friends was just arrested tonight for protesting another pipeline in New York.
Oct. 3189. Lily King, Euphoria [2014] 273 pages [Kindle]
I read this for a group on Goodreads. I was rather unsatisfied with the book. It started out for about the first three quarters of the book as a very close biographical novel about Margaret Mead ("Nell Stone"), Gregory Bateson ("Andrew Bankson") and Reo Fortune ("Fen"). While the names of the tribes they studied were slightly changed and the names of her book and Ruth Benedict's book (the Helen Benjamin of the novel) were also slightly changed, it was so close to the actual reality (apart from blackening the character of "Fen") that I wondered why she had bothered to change the names at all, and was just annoyed by the small deviations from the actual events. Then, three quarters of the way through, the book suddenly takes off in another, melodramatic direction. I wondered if the author had perhaps intended to write a biographical novel and then changed her mind? In any case, I don't think that the ending added to the book. Maybe I would have liked it better if I hadn't known that it was based on Mead's life; but that was the only reason I decided to read it. (I only participate in about half the discussions in that group, usually either the contemporary or the classic but not both). But even the first part, I had a problem with, because it reminded my so much of The Aviator's Wife, the novel about Anne Morrow Lindbergh (although this was better written): both took strong, feminist women and defined them entirely by their relationships to their husbands or lovers. Just as that book never describes Lindbergh's feats as an aviator in her own right, this book doesn't really get into the theories and insights that made Margaret Mead the towering figure she was in the history of cultural anthropology. To have shown her working out those ideas to me would have made this a much more interesting book (they're not too technical for a novel). Bottom line: if you haven't read Blackberry Winter, forget this book and read that instead; it's much more interesting and better written, and then follow up with her books on Samoa and New Guinea. If you have, this book may be more annoying to you. It did, however, make me want to read some of Bateson's books which I have had on my shelves for decades and never gotten around to.
Nov. 390. David Grant Noble, Ancient Ruins and Rock Art of the Southwest: An Archaeological Guide [4th ed., 2015] 280 pages
A guidebook to the ruins of the early Indian cultures, primarily architecture with a few examples of rock art. It is organized by sites, grouped more or less by different cultures; but since more than one culture may have inhabited a particular site, often there is mention of a culture before it has been dealt with in the introduction to a section. The book really needs a general introduction to explain the history of the various cultures before the specific sites are dealt with; there are many maps, but a general map with the areas of all the cultures would have been helpful, as would a timeline. Despite these shortcomings, the book does provide information about the earliest known cultures (Clovis and Archaic), the Mogollon, the Hohokam, the Salado, the inhabitants of the Mesa Verde region, Chaco Canyon, the Kayenta, the Sinagua, the Fremont, and the region around the Rio Grande, and something of their history. It is well illustrated. The author has intentionally limited coverage to well-known publicly accessible sites to avoid encouraging the vandalism which is destroying many of the ancient sites; he is more optimistic about preservation than the second book which I am reading now.
Nov. 5
91. Jonathan Bailey, Rock Art: A Vision of a Vanishing Cultural Landscape [2016] 187 pages
This is a large format (27 cm) book, mainly consisting of full-page color photographs of rock art from Utah. There are also one or two page essays by Lawrence Baca, Greg Child, Andrew Gulliford, James Keyser, William Lipe, Lawrence Loendorf, Lorran Meares, Scott Thybony, Paul Tosa, and the author, which are of uneven interest; some deal with interpretation of the art, some are about vandalism and destruction of the art, and some are “spiritual”, which others may appreciate more than I did.
Nov. 792. Bob Dylan, The Lyrics: 1961-2012 [2016] 679 pages
This is the most recent edition of Dylan’s official version of all of his lyrics. The book is my year’s main reading for my Nobel Prize Winners in Literature project; perhaps over the next eleven months I will actually be able to go back and finish the rest of Mario Vargas Llosa and maybe even go back before 2007 as I originally intended (I started the project then with the intention of working my way backwards but somehow almost each winner took me more than a year to cover.)
It is somewhat unjust to critique a book of written lyrics when they were intended to be sung, and I’m sure some of the poems that didn’t say anything much to me as poetry were justified by the musical interest. Having said that, my impression was that the first two thirds of the book were mostly very good, and the last third was of less interest. Prejudice, maybe; I listened to (and virtually memorized) his earlier albums when they came out, and I was more into folk and “folk-rock” than any other style, and of course the music we listened to in high school will always have a special resonance. But at that time, he was breaking new ground with almost every album; first the political themes of The Freewheeling Bob Dylan and The Times They Are A-Changin’, and the surrealistic lyrics of songs like “A Hard Rain’s A-gonna Fall”; then the introduction of folk song themes into rock, which defined the music of the later sixties; then the crossover between country and rock in John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline which created a whole new genre; and finally the inspired nonsense of The Basement Tapes (and interspersed through all the albums). His inspiration flags a little in some of the later albums, but Blood on the Tracks is one of his best and all of them up through Street Legal have some interesting words, not even considering the music.
The dividing line was of course his conversion to Christianity, although there are Christian references in his earlier work as well (e.g. the next to last verse of “With God on Our Side” which no one except Dylan ever includes). The problem with his two totally Christian albums (Slow Train Coming and Saved) isn’t really that they are Christian, but that the lyrics alternate between standard Christian platitudes without any originality and self-righteous condemnation of non-Christians. After the immediate fervor wore off, he returns to his earlier themes, with only occasional Christian references, but there is somewhat less originality in my opinion; the lyrics become more repetitive, the same themes of love and breaking-up (and the love songs almost seem like set-ups for the break-up songs) and much less inspired, almost forced-sounding nonsense, with even the same phrases repeated song after song (walking down the road, etc.) This is not to deny that there are some interesting lyrics in most of the albums.
Still, all in all an impressive body of poetry.
November 1293. Stendhal, La Chartreuse de Parme [1838] 700 pages [in French]
One of the great classics of European literature, La Chartreuse de Parme delineates Italy in the post-Napoleonic period the way Le Rouge et le Noir (and the unfinished Lucien Leeuwen) did France. The later novel is much longer, and begins rather slowly with a lot of background material, but once it gets started it reads like a modern political "thriller", except of course much better written. Like the earlier novels, this looks forward to the Realist novel, although some of the characters are still treated in a Romantic way; unlike Romantics such as Scott and Hugo, the Stendhalien hero doesn't fall for the fainting, useless women and ignore the strong female characters (the duchesse is one of the strongest female characters in any nineteenth century novel not written by a female author.) It took me a while to get through this, but it was worth the time. The edition I read (Gallimard "folio" paperback) has some background material on Pope Paul III (much of the plot is based on his early life, but moved 300 years later) and the famous and very perceptive review of the novel by Balzac.
Nov. 1494. Bob Dylan, Tarantula [1966, pub. 1971] 149 pages
Okay, I lied. In a review last week I said I had never come across Tarantula and then I found it in a box in my garage. Dylan's only "novel", this is a surrealistic prose poem that resembles his most far-out lyrics, but even more uninhibited, and like a tarantula, with a vicious bite. Wish I could write like this.
Nov. 1795. Clinton Heylin, Still On the Road: The Songs of Bob Dylan, 1974-2006 [2010] 535 pages
Having read Dylan's lyrics, his one novel, and a commentary on the earlier songs, I was hoping when I found this at the library that it would give me a better appreciation of the later songs. Unfortunately, the book is rather heavier on the kind of minutiae about recording sessions, takes, order of tracks, performances and so forth that would be of interest only to a hard core fan. As much as I like much of Dylan, I've never been a "fannish" kind of person. Even more of a problem, though, is that the author is a total egotistical jerk, which almost caused me to abandon this book several times before I finally slogged my way through it. Oddly, for someone who devotes so much effort to Dylan trivia, he doesn't actually seem to like Dylan very much; or to be exact, he perversely likes only the born-again religious Dylan, while having a supercilious contempt for the more socially conscious Dylan (unlike the gullible Dylan, he knows that George Jackson, Hurricane Carter and the Rosenbergs were all guilty.) What kept me reading it were the explanations of many of Dylan's references, especially to earlier music. There must be better commentaries around, but for now I think I am finished with this subject.
Nov. 1996. Stendhal, Lamiel [unfinished, ca. 1842; first pub. 1889] 223 pages [in French]
Stendhal's unfinished last novel, set in France about 1830; a Bildungsroman about the life education of a young woman. Not only Stendhal's only novel (and one of the few good novels of the early nineteenth century) to be written with a female main character (and one who defies all the conventions), but written in a much more "modern" style than any other novel of the period, stripped down to the essentials without circumlocutions and euphemisms. The novel breaks off at the next-to-last chapter, and the final chapter is essentially just his notes for how it would have been continued; this is much more extravant in its plot than the completed part and he would undoubtedly have changed it. Had he finished the novel, it would have probably been his best book.
Nov. 20
97. Mathew Josephson, Stendhal: or, The Pursuit of Happiness [1946] 489 pages
I read this biography alongside the major works, so I've been working on it for almost a year. Stendhal is one of the few writers whose life and personality is as interesting as his books. There are also a lot of good insights here into the works themselves.
Nov. 2298. Leonard Cohen, The Spice-Box of Earth [1961] 83 pages
Nov. 23
99. Leonard Cohen, Selected Poems 1956-1968 [1968] 245 pages
Leonard Cohen died earlier this month; which reminded me that he had, like Bob Dylan whom I've been reading since he won the Nobel Prize, been one of my favorite singers when I was in high school back in the 1960's. I can still remember fifty years later the night I first heard "Suzanne" on the album station from Hartford and was totally blown away. By good luck, I discovered these two books while unpacking my book boxes in my garage this week (I'm still looking for his novel Beautiful Losers which I know is in one of the yet to be unpacked boxes).
Like Dylan, Cohen is best known for his surrealistic song lyrics, but unlike Dylan, he was an accomplished poet before taking up music and much of his poetry was not intended to be sung. The Selected Poems contains selections from his first four books of poetry, Let Us Compare Mythologies (1956), The Spice-Box of Earth (1961), Flowers for Hitler (1964), and Parasites of Heaven (1966), as well as a few previously uncollected poems from the years 1966-1968. Since I read the whole of The Spice-Box of Earth, there was a certain amount of overlap. There is a good deal of religious imagery (mainly Jewish at this point -- he later passed through Christianity and Scientology, and became a Buddhist monk), and some political poems, but the majority of the poetry is love and relationship poetry (again much like Dylan, except that the religion is less dogmatic and the break-ups less vicious.) I'd say the two middle collections are the best; the final book is mostly "prose poems" and more obscure.
Nov. 25100. John Steinbeck, Cup of Gold [1929] 198 pages
This was Steinbeck's first novel. It is a historical adventure romance about the pirate Henry Morgan. It's the kind of novel that becomes a best-seller (although this one didn't) and then is forgotten and goes out of print after fifteen or twenty years (as I'm sure this would have if it weren't by Steinbeck). There is a certain style in the writing, but the book is nothing out of the ordinary; the dialogue, whether spoken by Welsh peasants, pirates or whatever other character it may be all sounds like a somewhat mystically inclined modern novelist, i.e. like Steinbeck. The characters were not particularly convincing, and he is obviously trying to make something profound out of the story, which isn't convincing either.
I read this because I read some Steinbeck novels for a Goodreads group last month and his last book is the reading for a live book discussion in January, so I am making a project out of reading his shorter works chronologically. This one wasn't very good, and doesn't even hint that he might later become an important writer.
Nov. 26101. John Steinbeck, The Pastures of Heaven [1932] 182 pages
Steinbeck's second book, this is more realistic than Cup of Gold because he is writing (as in nearly all his later novels) about his own place and time, Salinas County, California; although he still seems to think that to be interesting, the characters all have to be unusual in some way, insane or obsessed. It's not really a novel so much as a group of short stories with interacting characters, perhaps a "novel in stories. An interesting and entertaining book, but not really anything more.
Nov. 29102. John Steinbeck, To a God Unknown [1933] 181 pages
Steinbeck's fourth work, To a God Unknown comes chronologically between The Red Pony (which I read in school and remember I didn't like -- maybe just because it was required reading) and Tortilla Flat (which I read earlier this year). It is the story of a young man named Joseph Wayne, who settles in California with his three brothers to farm. The novel is somewhat too mystical for my taste; I said in my review of another work that Steinbeck was a Christian author, but that's not exactly true: although there are Christian elements in nearly all his writings, it's more a Christian-influenced pantheism, which is in evidence in this short novel. According to one critical article I read, he wrote this book under the influence of Joseph Campbell. There are considerable parallels between the protagonist and the patriarch Joseph from the Old Testament, although it's not a Biblical allegory by any means. I enjoyed the writing more than the plot.
Dec. 6103. John Steinbeck, In Dubious Battle [1936] 250 pages
Steinbeck's most significant novel. When I reviewed Grapes of Wrath I noted that while it was a good description of the treatment of the workers by the growers, Steinbeck says that there would have been a revolution if there had been proper leadership and he never explains why there wasn't. This book doesn't answer this exactly, but he does deal with a strike movement and its leaders. If by the Party he meant the CP, as I assume he did, he obviously has no idea of their overall policies -- not many people did in the thirties -- but it's probably a good description of their rank-and-file activists, subjectively revolutionary but with a tendency to manipulate rather than lead. The novel contains a lot of ideas which have still not been worked out yet.
Dec. 14104. James B. Pritchard, ed., Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament [Third edition with Supplement, 1969] 711 pages
This is a huge book -- 8 1/2 x 11 inch pages and small type for the text, smaller for the introductions to the selections and almost at the limit of readability for the notes. If it were printed in normal type and in a normal size book, it would run to two or three thousand pages. Needless to say, it's taken me a while to read. Ancient Near Eastern Texts, usually cited as ANET, was long the standard reference in translation for those of us who don't read Middle Egyptian, Sumerian, Akkadian, Aramaic and Hittite. Although the title mentions the Old Testament, the editor takes "relating to" in a very broad sense; the book contains excerpts from most of the important texts which were available and translated at the time it was written, from the Enuma elish and the Epic of Gilgamesh to the Macedonian conquest (other than the Bible itself). It is arranged by topics, such as "Creation Myths", "Legal Documents", "Historical Inscriptions", "Didactic and Wisdom Literature", "Proverbs", "Prayers", etc.; within each topic, it begins with the Egyptian, then the Sumerian and Akkadian, then the Hittite, and then the Aramaic texts (and a small number of South Arabian texts); and within each language it is roughly chronological.
The translations are by leading scholars of the time, among others John A. Wilson for Egyptian, S.N. Kramer for Sumerian, William Albright, Albrecht Goetze for Hittite, etc., and were very reliable for the period. The third edition reprints the material from the first two editions (1950 and 1955) together, then adds a supplement (arranged the same way) of materials found or translated between 1955 and 1969.
I read the two volume paperback abridged edition of ANET in the 1970's, but never had access to the full book until I found it at a library booksale a few years ago, and I've been meaning to find time to read it since. The main problems with the book are that it is divided into so many sections that there is no real feeling for development over time (it was really intended more as a reference than for reading through) and that some of the excerpts are too short; and of course the translations (and more importantly, the interpretations) are now over fifty years old. I've read the Egyptian material in more complete editions (some more recent, some even less) and have recent anthologies of the Sumerian and Akkadian texts on my reading list for early next year, and the Hittite materials for later on; but ANET still gives the most complete general overview of the whole region over the longest time span that I know of.
Dec. 16105. John Steinbeck, The Wayward Bus [1947] 227 pages
Not one of Steinbeck's better novels, this dark comedy takes a miscellaneous group of people on a bus trip under difficult conditions during a storm and describes their interactions. The characters are the Mexican bus driver, Juan, his wife Alice, his apprentice Kit (otherwise known as Pimples), a businessman and his wife, their college student daughter, a stripper who claims to be a dental assistant, a travelling salesman, a star-struck waitress, and a dying old man. The whole setup reminded me of Gilligan's Island only with more "adult" situations, and it was clearly written with an eye to the movie rights. Most of the short book is taken up with establishing the back-stories of the various characters. One or two are treated with some degree of psychological realism, but the others tend toward caricature, especially Pimples with his fixation on cake, pie and candy. All the characters are "trapped" in various ways, and there are a lot of crises, self-revelations and resolutions made, but at the end one suspects that nothing has changed for any of them.
Dec. 17106. John Steinbeck, Burning Bright [1950] 68 pages
Like several of Steinbeck's works around this time, this originated as a play and then was adapted into a novelette. The structure is somewhat interesting; the three "acts", though the action is continuous, have the same characters in different lifestyles, as though they were in parallel worlds. The content is somewhat trite and too obviously moralized; I suppose one really can't object to people wanting children, but in 1950, whether or not Steinbeck was conscious of it, that had an ideological purpose: it was part of the effort to remove women from the workforce after the war (the result was the "baby boom").
Dec. 18107. John Steinbeck, The Short Reign of Pippin IV [1957] 151 pages
I'm not quite sure what to make of this short novel. The premise is that the French government is deadlocked between parties, and decides to re-establish monarchy. They choose an ordinary person who happens to be descended from Pepin (or Pippin as he spells it) to be king. (Actually not so ordinary; he doesn't work and lives in a mansion off the rent of some vineyards somewhere.) He's intended to be a figurehead, but wants to accomplish something. His program is frightfully radical (actually it's pretty tame liberalism.) The blurbs call the book a satirical comedy, but it doesn't have enough "bite" to be satire; more like a farce. There is some mild humor; he points out (in 1957) that Americans are obsessed with royalty and all the little American girls want to be princesses. There's some nonsense about how American corporations are "socialist" because they give the workers health insurance. After Grapes of Wrath and In Dubious Battle, or even his more comic works like Cannery Row, this is a real decline; and most unlike Steinbeck, the characters are not well-drawn.
James wrote: "Dec. 18107. John Steinbeck, The Short Reign of Pippin IV [1957] 151 pages
I'm not quite sure what to make of this short novel. The premise is that the French government is deadlocked between par..."
I picked this one up at a garage sale for a quarter! I meant to read it right away since it's so short but haven't read it yet. Glad to hear what you thought about it so I'll know kind of what to expect :)
56. Stanislaw Lem, The Cyberiad [1967, tr. 1974] 236 pages
Fifteen humorous science fiction stories about the mad robot "constructors" Trurl and Klapaucius and their adventures in a galaxy populated by robots, after organic life has apparently become extinct. Despite the humor, these stories all have a point, some rather obvious but others which provoke thought.