JamesF's 2017 Challenge

[James]

Goals basically the same as last year, 120 books, 20 not in English, but since I went way over on pages in 2016 I'll up that to 35,000. I'll be working on the same projects, and maybe joining one or two more groups.

[James]

Jan. 1

1. The Tibetan Book of the Dead or The After-Death Experiences on the Bardo Plane, according to Lāma Kazi Dawa-Samdup's English Rendering, compiled and edited by W.Y. Evans-Wentz [1927; 3rd ed. 1957] 333 pages

This book was the first English translation of the Tibetan Bardo Thödol; Evans-Wentz, an American Theosophist who studied both Egyptian religion and Buddhism, gave it the title "Book of the Dead" based on the similarity in function to the Egyptian Book of the Dead (actually not the title of either book; the Egyptian book is called "The Book of Coming Forth by Day", and the Tibetan title means "Liberation by Hearing in the Intermediate State".) The book is intended to be recited in the presence of the deceased, or an effigy of the deceased, for forty-nine days after death, as a guide to achieving Nirvana, or failing that, to achieving the best possible reincarnation. Despite superficial resemblances to the Egyptian book, the Bardo Thödol is based on a very different view of the afterlife; where the Egyptian book presumes that the demons and so forth are real and offers spells and advice for dealing with them, the Buddhist work emphasizes that the visions seen after death are illusions steming from the person's own consciousness and the purpose is to allow him to recognize them as such and thus escape from the world of illusion. Traditionally, the Bardo Thödol is ascribed to Padma Sambhava, who established the first Buddhist community in Tibet in 749; Evans-Wentz considered that it was compiled by his disciples shortly after that time; many scholars consider that it was actually written in the fourteenth century. This is a very different form of Buddhism than the Dhammapada, which is the only other Buddhist work I've read so far; while that represented the ethical, philosophical Buddhism, this represents the Mahayana, Tantric Buddhism of Tibet with its many deities and spiritual beings and intricate beliefs about the cosmos and the afterlife.

In addition to the translation itself, which takes up 128 pages in this edition, or less than half the book, there are four Prefaces, a Psychological Commentary by Carl Jung (which was interesting as showing the connections between his theory of the collective unconscious and the ideas of reincarnation and collective consciousness), an Introductory Foreword, a Foreword, a lengthy Introduction, and several Addenda (essentially long notes) at the end. There are a number of more recent translations, more complete and based on better texts (one with an introduction by the Dalai Lama) and in more idiomatic and understandable English, so for someone interested in the Bardo Thödol for its own sake, this probably wouldn't be the best version to read; but since I read it for its influence on other books I'm planning to read on the philosophy and history of religion, most of which were written in the 1930s and 1940s, this edition and its secondary matter is the one that they were based on.

[James]

Jan. 6

2. Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Volume One [2004] 293 pages

I found another Dylan book in my garage. This is the first volume of his memoirs -- I'm not taking bets on whether there will be a second one. It's not a complete autobiography, and not really in chronological order; just tableaux of various important times in his life. It begins (and ends) with him signing his first contracts, jumps ahead to his trying to avoid the results of his fame and the demands of his fans during the early days of his marriage (the period of his greatest success is absent entirely), talks about making an album in the 1980s, then goes back to his early encounters with folk music in Minnesota. It may not be all that reliable or as accurate as some of the biographies, but it is certainly a lot more interesting.

[James]

Jan. 8

3. Alexander von Humboldt, Kosmos: Entwurf einer physischen Weltbeschreibung, Volume 2 [1847] 521 pages [in German, Kindle]

The second volume of Humboldt's Kosmos, this was not what I expected it to be (a more detailed version of the general sketch in the first volume); it was actually a history of the development of overall views of the physical world, from the time of the early Greeks to the beginning of the eighteenth century. The first few chapters deal with the view of the world as expressed in art and literature (and emphasize the Indian over the European works); the rest deals with the major events which changed humanity's view of the Cosmos: the discovery of the Black Sea, the discovery of the Indian Ocean, the expeditions of Alexander, the Roman Empire, the development of Arab science, the discovery of America, and the scientific revolution from Copernicus to Newton. This is one of the most interesting histories of science I have read, despite its age; especially impressive in its relative freedom from Eurocentrism -- he considers the modern scientific worldview to be essentially a product of the Arab world. As with the first volume, this was very hard to read due to the poor formatting of the Kindle edition; and despite my enjoyment of the book I think I will skip the third and fourth volumes until either Amazon fixes the Kindle version or I manage to find a print edition.

[James]

Jan. 13

4. Ernest Hemingway, The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigía Edition [1987] 650 pages
This edition contains the stories that were published in The First Forty-nine (which included the three earlier books, In Our Time, Men Without Women, and Winner Take Nothing, and four other stories including “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”) and another 21 stories that were published elsewhere or unpublished. (Since this came out, there have been more complete editions but the additional materials are not very important except for Hemingway specialists.)
The stories are what one would expect from Hemingway, largely concerned with “masculine” activities such as war, smuggling, bullfighting, hunting and fishing. There are a number of “Nick Adams” stories set in Michigan, stories set during World War I and the Spanish Civil War, and others set in Spain and Cuba. Despite having been vaccinated against Hemingway in high school, I enjoyed many of these stories; I like Hemingway’s style when it’s by Hemingway, although I dislike most of the writers who imitate it.

[James]

Jan. 19

5. David Mitchell, Black Swan Green [2006] 294 pages

I read this for an online discussion group. David Mitchell is better known for such literary fiction as Cloud Atlas, which has been on my reading list (though not a high priority) for quite a while. I had never read any of his books. This one is in a more ordinary realist style. The protagonist is a thirteen year old boy in a small town in Worcestershire, England, in 1982 (there are mentions of Thatcher and the Malvinas War). I had difficulty getting into the book at first, because it seemed to me to be a standard Young Adult novel, about bullying, the difficulties of high school life, a dysfunctional family -- the usual themes of YA fiction when it's not fantasy. Of course, not all books about teenagers being bullied are YA -- I can think of La Ciudad y los Perros and A Tale for the Time Being which are certainly not -- but this novel seemed to be addressed to the potential victims rather than to adults, with lessons about "good and bad secrets", honesty, and tolerance. In addition, it seemed to me to be somewhat anachronistic -- I was surprised to find that the author grew up during that period, because it seemed to me that he was describing the times I grew up in, the fifties and sixties: the young protagonist is worried about the Russians (after Vietnam and ten years of detente), the teachers are utterly indifferent to bullying and consider stammering a form of bad behavior rather than a disability, and so forth. But maybe Britain is different than the US in these regards, or was more affected by Thatcher than we were by Reagan. I began to enjoy it more after the chapter with Madame Crommelynck; it seemed to become more adult and more literary. By the end, I liked the book and thought it was very well written -- but still rather YA.

[James]

Jan. 26

6. Claude McKay, Complete Poems [2004] 410 pages

In December I read the Dover Selected Poems, and decided to buy the complete poetry. McKay was a poet of Jamaican origin who emigrated to the United States, spent many years in exile in Europe and north Africa and then returned to the United States. He was one of the first Black intellectuals to adopt a Marxist outlook and support the Soviet Revolution, and one of the first to recognize the Stalinist betrayal of the revolution; unfortunately, his experiences with the Communist Party ultimately led him to become an embittered anti-Communist and to turn to the Catholic Church in his later years, where he was part of the left wing trend around the Catholic Worker movement of Dorothy Day. He was a major influence not only on Jamaican literature and on the Harlem Renaissance and later Afro-American literature, but through his contacts with Aimé Césaire and Leopold Senghor (both of whom I read recently) on the literature of Africa and the African diaspora in general.

This collection is made up of 323 poems, including his three published books, Songs of Jamaica (1912), Constab Ballads (1912), and Harlem Shadows (1922), and the three books he wrote later but could not get published in his lifetime, The Clinic (ca. 1923), Cities (ca. 1934) and The Cycle (ca. 1943), as well as other poems published in magazines or unpublished, together with an introduction by the editor, William Maxwell. The first two books are in Jamaican dialect, and represent the first use of the language of Jamaica in real literature; the third book is in a very traditional English style, mainly sonnets; the later books and especially the unpublished Catholic poetry are not as good, but taken as a whole the poetry is very much worth reading.

[James]

Jan. 28

7. Carlo Rovelli, Reality is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity [2014, tr. 2017] 280 pages

I had come across references to Carlo Rovelli previously, probably in the books I read by Lee Smolin, so when I saw this come into the library I was interested in checking it out. Rovelli is a leader in research into the "Loop Quantum Gravity" approach to fundamental physics, and this book describes that perspective in fairly simple non-mathematical terms, rather than in depth. The book is aimed at the layperson with little knowledge of physics, so it takes the historical approach starting with Democritus and explaining the differences between Newton, relativity and quantum mechanics before getting into the new story. (I hadn't known that LQG was actually first proposed in the early thirties by a Soviet physicist Matvei Bronstejn, who was murdered by Stalin in 1938.) Rovelli represents LQG as the most conservative of the approaches to qauntum gravity, being based only on synthesizing general relativity, Standard Model quantum theory and thermodynamics rather than postulating new extra dimensions and totally unknown entities such as strings and branes as string theorists do. Nevertheless it is very radical in what it proposes: that rather than the world existing in space and time, space and time are constructed from the interactions of atomic quantum events. (Atomic in the sense of "indivisible", not as in the modern sense of nucleus and electrons; these "atomic" quanta of space are millions of time smaller than an atom.) His description of the theory was more understandable than the description by Smolin in the earlier Three Roads to Quantum Gravity, I think partly because the theory has become more developed in the meantime. (This book was published in 2014 in Italian, but since the text mentions the discovery of gravity waves last year it was obviously revised for the English translation.) Of course, without the mathematics I couldn't really understand it (and with the mathematics I certainly couldn't have understood it) but it did give an idea of what the theory is about. Judging by Smolin and Rovelli, LQG theorists are better philosophers than string theorists are; I'm not sure whether that's good or bad for a physicist's reputation.

[James]

Jan. 29

8. Kei Miller, The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion [2014] 72 pages

A century after McKay's Songs of Jamaica first used Jamaican dialect in serious poetry, Kei Miller's short book of poetry alternates dialect and "standard" English in a dialogue between a "cartographer" and a "rastaman". The poems in the book form a single argument, contrasting two ways of knowing, one by abstract concepts and words, the other by the small details that escape conceptual expression; two ways of reaching "Zion", here not a place but an ideal of liberation and retributive justice. A very interesting book.

[James]

Jan. 31

9. Kei Miller, The Last Warner Woman [2012] 272 pages

I read the two books by Miller for a Goodreads group that is doing Jamaican literature this year. The novel is quite good, but at first I found it rather strange; it wasn't until I got almost to the end that I suddenly realized one of the keys to understanding it. I won't explain that because it might be a spoiler; just say that it's a very postmodernist technique.

[James]

Feb.5

10. Alphonse de Lamartine, Meditations poetiques [1820, 1823] 667 pages [in French; Kindle]

The next author (after Stendhal) in my French literature reading project, Alphonse de Lamartine was the first important Romantic poet in France, the equivalent of Novalis some twenty years earlier in Germany. The two are similar in their religious themes, their conservative opposition to the first French Revolution (although Lamartine became more or less the Kerensky of the 1848 Revolution), and their to me almost unreadable poetry. They have an importance in literary history, but I don't enjoy either one; they represent most of what I dislike in Romantic literature.

The book I read was an inexpensive Pilgrim Classics Kindle edition containing both the original Méditations poétiques of 1820, later called the Premières Méditations poétiques, together with a later commentary by Lamartine on many of the poems, and the Nouvelles Méditations poétiques of 1823, as well as two shorter works, the prose essay Des destinées de la poésie and the verse La Mort de Socrate. It also includes as an appendix the rather poor (English) Wikipedia stub on Lamartine. Although that article, and the other internet references I checked, say that the first collection was published in 1820 and contained 24 poems, this edition contained 41, some of which had dates in the 1840s; presumably he continued adding to it in later editions and this is the latest version, although I couldn't find any confirmation of that. The second collection (in this edition at least) contained 26 poems, again many of which were dated long after 1823.

The occasion for the first collection was the death of his love, referred to as Julie or Elvire; some online sources identify her as Julie Charles, the wife of the famous scientist (remember Charles' Law from high school physics?). This is another similarity to Novalis, and many of the earliest Romantics. (It reminds me of the children's book series, You wouldn't want to be a ... -- you wouldn't want to be a Romantic poet's girlfriend, they all die). All three of the works in this book are praises of death; the love poetry is basically, "I love you, and we're going to die." Lamartine is credited with being a great nature poet, but I don't agree; his nature is very generic, all peaks, abysses, shadows, waves, and stars, everything is a symbol for something otherwordly and religious -- although he was Catholic, the religion is also pretty generic, more Platonic than Christian except for one or two passages. The second collection is supposed to be more upbeat after his marriage to an Englishwoman who is merely described in all the sources as "rich", but I didn't see much difference; it's all angels and dying. The poem about Socrates is obviously more of the same, a version of Plato's Phaedo corrected to be more Christian.

I had some other poetry of Lamartine's on my list to read, but after reading this I think I'll pass; I may still try one or two of his prose works.

[James]

Feb 7

11. Lorna Goodison, Supplying Salt and Light [2013] 121 pages

The third Jamaican poet I have read this year, after Claude McKay and Kei Miller, and the first contemporary woman poet I have read in a long time; compared to the McKay and Miller poetry, hers at least in this collection is much more personal and less objective, less explicitly political. It's still excellent and I'm glad to have read it.

[James]

Feb 13

12. Claude McKay, A Long Way from Home: An Autobiography [1937] 354 pages

This is the autobiography of the Jamaican-born poet and novelist Claude McKay, whose Collected Poetry I read and very much enjoyed last month. If anything, this autobiography was even better. It begins a couple years after he arrived in the United States; there is nothing beyond a few isolated recollections about his earlier life in Jamaica. He has left college and is working as a waiter on a railway car, and has just received an invitation to visit the editor Frank Harris to discuss publication of his poetry. The second part discusses his visit to England, where he is introduced to radical labor and Marxist literature and works for a time at Sylvia Pankhurst's publication, The Worker's Dreadnought; the third part deals with his return to Harlem and his collaboration on Max Eastman's The Liberator.

The fourth and most interesting part deals with his visit in 1922-23 to the new Soviet Union. He attends the Fourth Congress of the Communist International -- he is there as a poet, not a delegate, and never joined the Communist Party. McKay clearly has no use for either the British or American CP delegates; it's very clear that the only American CP leader he has any respect for is James P. Cannon. After the Congress, he travels in the USSR speaking but mostly observing. The descriptions of the Soviet Union under Lenin are extremely interesting, from the viewpoint of a person who is sympathetic to the Revolution but also not uncritical; there is neither the uncritical enthusiasm of the Communist visitors nor the denunciations of the bourgeois visitors, but a very profound observation of what was actually happening. He meets three of what he calls the "Big Four", Trotsky, Radek and Zinoviev -- Lenin was already ill and unavailable to visitors. It is interesting that after the Congress and having been in Russia for several months, someone points Stalin out to him, and he admits he's never heard of him (so much for his "leading role" at the time). He contrasts Trotsky's intelligent estimation of the American Blacks with the ignorance, sometimes bordering on racism, of many of the other leaders; Trotsky sends him on a several month tour of the Red Army and Navy.

From the USSR, he goes to Berlin, then to France, Spain, and Morocco; altogether he spends twelve years writing and traveling abroad before returning to the United States. The autobiography ends just before his return. There is a brief last chapter in which he indicates his opinions on the way forward for the American Black movement, emphasizing a Black nationalist perspective (though rejecting as nonsense the idea of a Black state in the South) with Blacks organizing independently of white "friends", and distinguishes between forced segregation of society and all-Black organizations in the communities (this was an unheard of position in the 30s, although it later became an accepted view in the Black movement of the 60's).

Considering that he praises Trotsky and Cannon in a book written about 1934 and published in 1937, it is no surprise that he became anathema to the Stalinists, and the bitterness of his relations with them would later lead him to a more anticommunist position, although unlike many anticommunists of the time he never turned to supporting capitalism, or abandoned his support for the Black and workers movements -- even after converting to Catholicism at the end of his life, his association was with the Catholic Workers Movement of Dorothy Day. But this was all later than the time of the autobiography.

[James]

Feb. 19

13. Elnathan John, Born on a Tuesday [2015] 264 pages

To the best of my understanding (and I know it's quite a bit oversimplified), there are three major tribal/religious divisions in Nigeria; the mostly Moslem Hausa in the North, the mostly Christian Igbo in the East, and the partly Christian, partly traditional Yoruba in the West. I have been reading quite a bit of Nigerian literature in the past two years, but all of it has been Yoruba (Wole Soyinka) or Igbo (everyone else.) Elnathan John is the first Northern writer I have read, and this novel deals with the religious and political conflicts in that part of the country. It was quite interesting to see this perspective; while others (especially Soyinka) see the problems of Nigeria as stemming from the British decision to give power to the more conservative North at independence, the Northerners apparently see themselves as being oppressed by the southern groups. Also, the other writers emphasize the mutual massacres of Christians and Moslems, while this book focuses on conflicts between rival versions of Islam. Of course, this may be partially because this is a much more recent novel; I don't follow Nigerian politics, so perhaps the South is now running the government, and certainly Boko Haram has focused interest on the conflicts in the North.

The novel is the story of a boy who become a member and later a leader of a "moderate" Islamist political movement, which is attacked by a more extreme group similar to Boko Haram. The leader of the extreme group is supported by Saudi Arabia. This fits into the dynamic throughout the Islamic regions, where the Wahhabi rulers of Arabia, a formerly unimportant sect put in power by the British oil interests, use their oil money to promote extremist religious movements. The leadership of al-Qaeda for instance comes from Arabia, as did the 9/11 terrorists; yet the US government is very favorable to the Saudis, and did all that it could to suppress secular opposition groups throughout the Islamic world and promote religious extremists as part of their jihad against the USSR in Afghanistan and left-wing movements in general, creating the situation which these same politicians are exploiting today under the pretext of "the War against Terrorism". The novel shows how the extremists take the legitimate struggle against the Western powers and distort it -- the extremist leader, Malam Abdul-Nur (perhaps significantly a Yoruba convert from Christianity) begins a speech by attacking the World Bank and the IMF, but then identifies them with "the Jews", much as Hitler took legitimate distrust of the bankers in Germany and turned it into hatred for "Jewish bankers". (I can't help but remember Marx's description of antisemitism as "the socialism of fools.") The description of the corruption of the government and especially the police is of course similar to what is described by all the Nigerian authors I have read, no matter what group they belong to; Nigeria has alternated between corrupt military regimes and even more corrupt civilian "democracy" throughout the period since Independence. At one point the United Nations identified Nigeria as the most corrupt government in the world, with Pakistan second; which prompted one Pakistani journalist to complain, "Even in what we're best at we can't come in first."

The novel is worth reading for its viewpoint on Nigeria, but even more for the light it sheds on the divisions within the Islamic world and even within the Islamacist "movement", with characters who are Sunni, Shiite, and (presumably) Wahhabi. It's also an exciting read at times, though one can tell it's a first novel.

[James]

Feb. 22

14. Karl Kautsky, Communism in Central Europe in the Time of the Reformation [1897] 315 pages [Kindle]

This book is a translation of Part 3, chapters 6-9 of Vorlaufer des neuen Socializmus, (i.e. Forerunners of Modern Socialism), a multiple-author history of socialist ideas from Plato to the nineteenth century which was edited by Kautsky; the part translated here is written by him. The first chapter, from what I can tell, was a new introduction to the selection included here, summarizing some of the material from the earlier chapters. Kautsky describes the Christian communist sects of the Reformation period beginning with the Taborites in Bohemia and similar sects in Germany, going through the movement of Thomas Münzer, and ending with the Anabaptists and the insurrection in Münster. (I was raised Baptist and this account of the beginnings of the Baptist religion is very different from what I was taught!) I read this after it was recommended by a friend on Facebook; I was not previously at all familiar with this period of history, nor had I ever read anything by Kautsky. There are many differences, as well as a few similarities, between these movements and modern socialist movements; in addition to the obvious difference that these groups considered themselves as religious rather than economic movements, the sects described here advocated communism in consumption rather than production.

Even more interesting than the ideas of these particular groups is the overall economic interpretation of the Reformation. While it is obvious today that the modern fundamentalists, for example, are more political than religious, when we think about the Reformation we are sometimes inclined to think that it really was about religious questions; Kautsky shows the economic basis for the rise of Protestantism (much more convincingly than Weber, whom I had to read in college) and explains the various divisions within the Protestant movement, for example between Lutherans, Zwinglians, and Anabaptists as reflections of the differing class interests which opposed each other at the same time as all opposed the power of the Catholic Church and the Papacy. He explains as well why Protestantism arose and was successful in Central Europe rather than in say France.

Kautsky is a political writer and (even aside from the fact that it is 120 years old) this book paints with too broad a brush to be completely satisfying as a historical account; but his overall materialist explanations made the events and ideas of this period of history much clearer to me.

Unfortunately, the Kindle edition simply confirmed that "digitized by Google" is another way of saying "garbage"; scanned without any proofreading, with footnotes mingled with the text, it was an effort to decode what was actually written.

[James]

Feb. 22

Feb. 22

15. Kei Miller, There Is an Anger That Moves [2007] 81 pages [Kindle]

A short and somewhat uneven collection of poems by Kei Miller, less focused on one idea than The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion. Most of these poems I liked, some didn't say much to me.

[James]

Feb. 27

16. Hope Jahren, Lab Girl [2016] 290 pages

This book, which is the February reading for the Lehi Library book discussion group, is the autobiography of a "biogeologist", who studies plants, and especially trees. She is interesting, possibly brilliant, but definitely weird. Much of the book is about her relationship with her lab assistant, Bill, who is also weird. The factual outline: Jahren grew up in northern Minnesota, the daughter of a scientist, and graduated from the University of Minnesota; got her PhD at Berkeley; was a professor at Georgia Tech, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Hawaii; and currently lives with her husband Cliff and son in Oslo, Norway. The book alternates chapters about plant biology with chapters about her research and personal life. The weirdness: at times, she seems as if she thinks she's a tree. She and Bill practically live in her labs -- in his case, literally -- and have all sorts of strange adventures. We find out midway through the book that she is actually manic-depressive, which explains some of her behavior. Her research and the sections on biology are interesting and I learned some new things about plants, although she tends to anthropomorphize trees a bit, and frustratingly, she never tells us the results of the various experiments they carry out.

[James]

Mar. 3

17. Claude McKay, Amiable with Big Teeth: A Novel of the Love Affair Between the Communists and the Poor Black Sheep of Harlem [written ca. 1941, pub. 2017] 302 pages

After all the hoopla about Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman, an uncorrected first draft which was rejected and never worked on again, it is amazing that the rediscovery of this completed and edited novel by a leading Black writer, which had been accepted for publication by Dutton in 1941 and then mysteriously was never published, has not made any splash at all. If I had not been specifically looking for books by McKay, I would never have even known it existed.

The novel is a satire, dealing in an exaggerated way with the movement in Harlem in support of Ethiopia against Mussolini's invasion in the mid-thirties, which was one of the first important Black political movements since the betrayal of Reconstruction. As the subtitle suggests, it is especially concerned with the activities of the Stalinists in subverting the independent movement and trying to subordinate it to the politics of the "Popular Front". The book is fiction; events do not exactly correspond to history, and the characters seem to have been constructed out of various different historical persons. For an author who is not himself a communist, it can be difficult to criticize Stalinism without falling into anti-communism, and McKay sometimes crosses the boundary. However, unlike the usual anti-communist author, he does not present the Stalinists as fanatical revolutionists, but more accurately as bureaucrats who are seeking to subordinate independent movements to alliances with liberals.

The novel opens with a mass meeting to greet the arrival of an Ethiopian envoy, Lij Alamaya, in which we are introduced to most of the major characters. The second chapter moves to a meeting of the executive committee of Hands for Ethiopia, an independent Black organization which organized the meeting, at the home of its chairman, Pablo Peixote. The meeting devolves into a debate over the role of the Soviet Union in the struggle against Fascism, with the Secretary, Newton Castle, insisting that Russia is the only hope of the world against Fascism, while another member, Dorsey Flagg, is critical of Stalin's policies. Castle then denounces Flagg as a Trotskyite Fascist agent and demands that he be expelled from the movement, which the rest of the committee refuses to do. Later we find out about another group, the White Friends of Ethiopia, controlled (unofficially) by Maxim Tasan, a representative apparently of the Comintern. Castle is in with this group, and favors uniting the two organizations under the umbrella of the Popular Front, while Peixote and the others feel that if they merge with the white group the whites will take over the leadership as usually happened in "integrated" groups at that time. The novel then follows the machinations of the various characters, some consciously, others being maneuvered without understanding what is going on. There are also some other subplots, a couple of love stories, etc. but they are all connected in some way to the political theme.

In addition to the material on the movement for Ethiopia, and the politics of the Popular Front, there is a lot of discussion of race and class relations in general and the way forward for the Blacks. Everything is in character, but it is fairly obvious which positions McKay takes, and most of his ideas have been borne out by later experience. At the very least, the questions are taken up and discussed seriously, despite the comic attributes of some of the plot.

[James]

Mar. 7

18. Alphonse de Lamartine, Graziella [1849] 119 pages [in French]

I got a little bit further in my French literature project. Lamartine's Meditations of 1820, which I read earlier, and his Graziella and Raphael of 1849, bracket the Romantic period in French literature. The later two (I will be reading Raphael next) were originally published as parts of his "autobiography", Les Confidances, although it is questionable how closely they follow his actual experiences -- while he did know a Graziella (not a fisherman's daughter, but a worker in a cigar factory) who later died young, it is not clear how much he actually had to do with her or whether they were ever in love with each other. The fact is, the novella is pure Romanticism, modelled after other books such as Paul et Virginie (which he reads to Graziella here) and so many others of the same type; the pure, innocent, "natural" first love who died young is a trope of that sort of literature. I can't say that I particularly enjoy this kind of novel, or the Romantic ideology that underlies it -- the ideal of the naive, uneducated, piously religious girl who falls totally in love with the more sophisticated young man and just dies when they are separated; basically just a male ego trip, whether it happened or he just made it up for the sake of "poetry".

[James]

Mar. 9

[abandoned] Kelli Estes, The Girl Who Wrote in Silk [2015] finished 174 of 390 pages

This novel, which was the book for the Utah State Library book discussion this month, is a historical novel about the forced evacuation and massacre of the Chinese population of Seattle, Washington in 1886. There is only one small problem -- it never happened. One of the blurbs on the back cover says the book was "inspired by true events", and in fact a mob did attempt to force out the Chinese, but as the "Author's note" admits, the Territorial Governor -- in what must have been an unusual act of courage for that time and place -- suppressed the riots and protected the rights of the Chinese to remain in the city. There was no massacre, and only one Chinese person was killed. The entire story (pun intended) was fabricated out of whole cloth. Certainly the anti-immigrant hysteria of the time, and the Chinese Exclusion Act (like the present exclusion of Moslem immigration, except that back then laws were made by Congress and not Executive Order) would be an important subject for a good historical novel, but the last thing I want to read now is "fake history." Once I read the "Author's note", I lost interest in the book.

The structure of the novel is similar to Sarah's Key, which the USL discussion read a couple years ago; the "historical" chapters alternate with the story of a modern-day woman who is investigating the events because of a family connection. As in that book, the present day chapters are designed to relieve the tension, and are much less interesting. The story begins to flag in the middle, about the point at which I abandoned the book. Everything has been revealed (in this book, the "facts" are presented before the investigator finds them out, which lessens the interest of that part of the story even more.) About all that's left for the second half of the novel is apparently the question whether the spoiled rich Daddy's girl will get to build her "boutique hotel" and whether her romance will work out. The author of this first novel is a member of the Romance Writers of America, which indicates the style of the book.

[James]

Mar. 19

19. Margaret Cezair-Thompson, The True History of Paradise [1999] 345 pages

On the surface this novel takes place during two or three days in 1981; it is the story of a woman, Jean Landing, who leaves Kingston for the North Coast in order to fly to the United States and escape the political violence as the opposition party and the CIA try to topple the Manley government. However, most of the book is in the form of flashbacks, which narrate Jean's whole life (and Jamaica's history) from the time of Independence on, in a mostly chronological order (third person, but from the perspective of Jean's memory); and within these flashbacks are other shorter flashbacks (in first person) to her ancestors from the earliest days of British rule. (The book has a family tree at the beginning to keep all the characters straight.) I generally like this sort of complex structure, but in this case the book is rather slow at the beginning, and seems to present a lot of background material where nothing much happens; as it moves closer to the time of the frame story it picks up interest and also becomes more violent. Much of the novel's focus is on the relationship of Jean to her parents, especially her mother Monica, and her sister Lana. (It originated as a short story about these four characters, and then was expanded into the present novel about Jamaican history.) Perhaps because I was busy this week with other things, it took me ten days to read, and this may have contributed to my having a hard time getting involved with the action until the middle of the book. Once I got interested in the characters, it was a good well-written historical novel, although I would have liked a more detailed analysis of the political events. (I was surprised and a little embarrassed to realize how little I knew about Manley and his government, given how interested I was at that time in politics and especially in the Caribbean and Central America.) It was the author's first novel, and I may eventually pick up her second and better known novel about Errol Flynn (The Pirate's Daughter).

[James]

Mar. 22

20. Alphonse de Lamartine, Raphaël: pages de la vingtième année [1849] 132 pages [in French]

Written at the same time as Graziella -- I'm not actually certain whether this was also part of Les Confidences or not -- this short episode was loosely based on Lamartine's relationship with Julie Charles. The book is probably the purest example of early Romanticism in its most obnoxious form (even worse than Graziella and his poetry), and has all the stereotypes that make me dislike that style of literature. A young man visits a friend, who conveniently dies the next day after giving him the manuscript of his relationship with Julie. Naturally, we know from the beginning that she is going to die; of course they fall in love and spend the next hundred or so pages in passionately obsessed conversations about love, death, and God. We are reassured from the beginning that nothing interesting will happen, as they vow not to profane their ethereal love with anything coarse or material (read: no sex), and in fact they never even kiss, just occasionally hold hands. And she faints every once in a while. She is also married, but not to worry: her elderly scientist husband (the real Julie was married to the Charles of Charles' law in physics) considers himself her surrogate father -- naturally, she was raised in an orphanage -- and also does not have marital relations with her. He's also dying throughout the book, and the young man has a friend whose wife has just died young, and a boy's dog dies, and a couple of birds die, and the whole thing is full of pathos. Meanwhile, the young man's mother is selling off her land and personal possessions to support him, because he would never actually work at anything except writing poems which he burns when they're turned down by a publisher. The climax of the book comes just before they are separated for the last time, when she suddenly rejects the "rational" deistic religion of her teachers and husband and exclaims "Yes, there is a God" which she knows because she's in love; and they then conclude that they aren't in love with each other but in love with God through each other.


Mar. 24

21. Alphonse de Lamartine, Jeanne d'Arc [1852] 135 pages [in French]

My last book by Lamartine, this is a short biography which appeared first in a collection of edifying biographies call La Civilisateur in 1852 and was published separately in 1863. It's about what you would expect from Lamartine, a romanticized, patriotic piece which casts no actual light on Jeanne or the period. He rationalizes her visions as psychological phenomena caused by patriotism, but fudges on whether they are also actually "inspired" by God; he suggests that her inspiration ended when her mission was accomplished with the coronation at Rheims, and that after that she was just mistakenly thinking that she was still inspired, which suggests that her earlier visions and voices were in fact of supernatural origin. I just have a biography of Lamartine on my list, and then I will move on to the hopefully more interesting figures of de Vigny and Balzac.
[Decided to skip the biography after the first five pages said that in 1788 his father was 36, 26, and 38 years old.]

[James]

April 5

22. Alfred de Vigny, Cinq-Mars: une conjuration sous Louis XIII [1826] 516 pages [in French]

The first historical novel, and one of the first Romantic novels, in French literature, obviously imitating the style of Sir Walther Scott, this is the story of the (actual) conspiracy of the Marquis de Cinq-Mars against Cardinal Richelieu. Like the other earlier Romantics (other than Stendhal) such as Novalis and Lamartine, de Vigny is a Royalist who idealizes the feudalism of the Middle Ages, and thus sees the conspiracies of the suppressed feudal nobles as a good thing, and the centralizing tendencies of Richelieu as totally wrong and evil, as leading to the undermining of the monarchy itself and eventually the French Revolution. Which they did, and of course that was progressive, despite the many admittedly evil things that Richelieu did -- like any politician of the time. De Vigny's version of the politics of the period influenced the less serious but much more popular novels of Alexandre Dumas, such as Les trois mousquetaires and its sequels (although in his last, unfinished novel, Le Sphinx rouge, Dumas reverses this and treats Richelieu as the hero and the Queen and the duc d'Orleans as the villains, probably a more historically accurate version.) De Vigny changes some of the facts and of course makes a love story the basic motivation for the conspiracy; but the novel is well-written and more worth reading than Novalis or Lamartine.

The version I read, the eleventh edition printed in 1855 (during de Vigny's lifetime) contains his "Reflexions sur la verite de l'art" as a preface and his reception discourse when he was elected to the Academie as an appendix; it also has his notes to the book. There is no preface or introduction or other material by anyone else.

[James]

April 7

23. Alfred de Vigny, Chatterton: drame [1835] 100 pages [in French]

De Vigny's best known play, this is based very loosely on the life of the minor English poet Thomas Chatterton, who committed suicide in 1770 at the age of seventeen. The thesis of the play is that (Romantic) poets are of great importance to the world and should be subsidized because their poetic talent makes it impossible for them to make a living at any other occupation. He also confuses the issue by combining it with a love story. The play was controversial at the time because of its apparent defense of suicide. While too declamatory for modern tastes, it is much more restrained than his contemporaries such as Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas, and concentrates on the psychology of the characters rather than on melodramatic events and spectacular effects. His satire of the industrialist husband is somewhat humorous, although vitiated by a few anti-Semitic lines (oddly, since Vigny's circle of friends at that time were mostly Jewish; but they were Christian converts, so perhaps he is only intending the religion and not the ethnic group.) The situation is not really self-consistent or convincing, but after all it is Romanticism and not Realism. This was the work that represented Vigny in the survey course I took in college, so it is a re-read after about 45 years. The edition I read was in the Classiques Larousse series, so it had all the notes and so forth that one expects from that series.


April 9

24. Alfred de Vigny, Les destinées [1837-1863, publ. posth. 1864] 161 pages [in French]

Written over a period of a quarter of a century, de Vigny's final collection of poetry was published the year after his death, but probably in the order he intended. It is primarily concerned with poetry and metaphysics, with some political satire thrown in. Considered just as poetry, it is far better than Lamartine, if not quite up to the level of the best of Victor Hugo. In regards to the content, I wasn't too impressed. The political satire of the bourgeois politicians was accurate if from the wrong direction (de Vigny went beyond Royalism and even Legitimism, preferring the long dead feudal monarchy of the Middle Ages) -- it reminds me of a conservative Republican (or in view of its unreality, a Libertarian) satirizing the corruption of a Hillary Clinton, you have to agree with what he says but not with where he's coming from. The metaphysical poems, especially "Le Mont des Oliviers", made it clear that he was the kind of agnostic that Christians love -- the kind that takes religion seriously, despairs that he can't believe, and converts on his deathbed. The attitudes toward colonialism and women are as backwards as one could imagine. The poetry about poetry is better, but entirely Romantic. (In case you haven't guessed, I have a prejudice against Romanticism.) Now on to Balzac . . .

[James]

April 10

25. Honoré de Balzac, L’avant-propos de la Comédie humaine [1842] 24 pages [in French, Kindle]

This is the general introduction to Balzac’s Comédie humaine, a group of about 75 interconnected novels and novellas, and it is also a sort of manifesto of the Realist movement in literature which arose in reaction to Romanticism. Balzac begins by comparing the evolution of animal species, as proposed by Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, and the evolution of human societies, and explains that his intention is to describe the “species” or conditions of people in modern society. Thus, unlike the Romantics who wrote about extraordinary individuals in extraordinary situations, he proposes to write about typical individuals in their usual social roles. He then defends his realist program against those critics who insisted that literature should describe “moral” characters and situations rather than the way people and society actually are. He also honestly admits his own standpoint as a Catholic and monarchist.

I have never particularly liked Romanticism, and having just finished reading some representative writings of Lamartine and de Vigny, it is with a certain feeling of relief that I am beginning to read Balzac. My intention is to read the whole of the first division of the Comédie humaine, the “Scenes de la vie privée”, and a few of the more important works of the other divisions; this may change if I decide that it is too much and abridge it, or really get into it and decide to read more. I have read a few books of Balzac back when I was in college and may or may not re-read those in their proper order; I am also going to start with Le Père Goriot out of order because it is this month’s read for the Constant Reader group on Goodreads. Then I will go back to the beginning and start reading them in the order Balzac intended (which is not the order they were written in; actually he modified them all in different editions to unify the whole collection). Since this is only one among many reading projects, I expect it will be a couple years before I get through what I want to read. I will post my reviews as I go along.

[James]

April 18

26. Lorna Goodison, From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her Island [2007] 306 pages [Kindle]

The current read for the World Literature Group on Goodreads, Lorna Goodison represents the "middle generation" between Claude McKay (whom she read in school as a "classic") and the more recent Jamaican writers we have been reading for the group (such as Kei Miller and Margaret Cezair-Thompson); she is a poet and story writer who now teaches in Ann-Arbor (unless she has retired or died in the last ten years). To make a more personal connection, she was born about midway between my parents and myself, and her mother was almost exactly contemporary with my maternal grandmother. I read one of her poetry collections earlier, and will be reading a collection of her short stories next. The subtitle is somewhat misleading, as the book deals with her entire family, and is almost more about her grandmother Margaret and her many aunts and uncles than about her own parents (her mother was one of eight children, and the author has eight siblings of her own). This is a Jamaica which is poor but less violent than the Jamaica of Cezair-Thompson and Marlon James, perhaps because much of the book takes place in Harvey River, a rural area where the Harveys (her mother's family) are the original founders, although the later chapters move to Kingston; perhaps because she moved to the continent (New York, Michigan and Toronto) about a decade before the violent period described by those authors. As with her poetry, it is less political and more personal than the other Jamaican writers I have read. The book is largely about people, and she brings them to life, not only the family members but even those neighbors and others who only feature in one or two paragraphs; the style is more like fiction than I expected in a memoir (and she admits to have adjusted some details, especially of chronology, for the sake of the narrative.)

[James]

April 22

27. Honoré de Balzac, Le Père Goriot [1835] 479 pages

Enfin Balzac . . . One of Balzac's best known novels, Le Père Goriot, set in 1819 (though originally intended to be set in 1824, which causes some anachronisms in the text) is considered the keystone of the "Scenes de la vie privée", the first and largest division of the Comédie humaine.

Considered in itself, this is the novel of Père Goriot, a nineteenth century version of King Lear, who impoverishes himself for the sake of his two ungrateful daughters and their husbands, who despise him once he has deprived himself of his fortune for their benefit. It is a Lear without a Cordelia, unless we can consider Victorine as the Cordelia to her father, who has disinherited her -- granted she defends his actions, but she never has the opportunity to serve him like Shakespeare's heroine. The novel throughout is a somewhat bitter satire of the social structure and mores of the higher stratum under the Restoration monarchy -- like de Vigny, Balzac is a royalist who by implication idealizes a much earlier period of the monarchy, although he is rather cynical about human nature in general (hence the overall title of the human comedy).

Considered from the point of view of the cycle as a whole, however, it is much more the novel of the young Rastignac, detailing the corruption step-by-step of a figure who is apparently important in many of the later novels. Many characters are returned from earlier novels, or were added to the earlier novels after this was written, and many reappear in later books. (Admittedly, I haven't read many of these yet, and the ones I have read were decades ago, so I'm going by the notes in the Classiques Garnier edition.)

The style is obviously more realistic than the Romantics, and has much less "purple prose" than Lamartine or de Vigny, although there is a certain holdover of Romanticism in the way the author orients the reader about how to judge the characters and events -- we are still closer to Stendhal than to Flaubert. The reading is somewhat difficult because of the amount of slang he uses, much of it already outdated at the time it was written, but most of it is explained in the notes to the edition I read. I read this for the Constant Reader classics discussion, and it is definitely one of the classics of French literature.

[James]

April 24

28. Lorna Goodison, By Love Possessed: Stories [2011] 275 pages [Kindle]

This is a collection of mostly previously published stories by the author of Supplying Salt and Light and From Harvey River. The tone is similar; the stories are focused on characters in their personal relationships with husbands, wives, lovers, parents and other relatives, without emphasizing larger social issues, although they are present in the background. Goodison somewhat reminds me of Alice Munro in her choice of subjects, although the treatment is different. Some of the stories have a tragic outcome, while others are rather upbeat or even humorous. It was an enjoyable read but probably not a book I will remember as much as the books by Miller, Cezaire-Thompson, and James that we are reading in the same group.

[James]

April 28

29. Alexandre Dumas, La tulipe noire [1850] 312 pages [in French, Kindle]

As are all of the older Dumas's novels, La tulipe noire is a historical thriller, and although considered a classic today it was essentially popular rather than literary fiction. Dumas is a good writer in that mode, and this novel is still a page turner after well over a century and a half, despite all changes of taste and style. It is in the Romantic tradition (which continues to be the style for most genre fiction even today), with improbable coincidences (though less than in Dickens or Hugo) and a focus on unique individuals and dramatic events without much depth of social or political background. The context of the history is the overthrow of the Dutch Republican government of the de Witt brothers in 1672 and the return to power of the hereditary Stathouder William of Orange (also known to history as William the Silent), the ancestor of the present day British royal house. (This is not a part of history that I am very familiar with, although I did read one history many years ago.) The novel begins with the murder of Jean and Corneille de Witt, and then turns to the arrest and imprisonment of the protagonist, Cornelius van Baërle, who is a godson of Corneille de Witt (and as far as I know not a historical character), for allegedly participating in a conspiracy against William. The protagonist is a tulip fancier, who has just succeeded in creating a new variant of tulip, the black tulip, which is the object of a prize of one hundred thousand florins from the Harlem Horticultural Society. The basic plot is taken quite obviously from Stendhal's La Chartreuse de Parme: the love story of the prisoner and the jailer's daughter (but without any of the historical detail or subtlety of Stendhal's novel, which is a real classic in every sense.) To avoid spoilers, I will not go any further in the description, except to say that the plot develops about as one would expect. A good book to read if you like thrillers, but not an essential reading.


April 29

30. Chen Guancheng, The Barefoot Lawyer: A Blind Man's Fight for Justice and Freedom in China [2015] 330 pages

A memoir by Chen Guancheng, a blind man who became a democracy activist in China. He began by working for the rights of the blind and other disabled persons in China, insisting on the enforcement of laws which were already on the books, and throughout the book the emphasis is on the struggle for legality against the indifference and even hostility of the Chinese Communist Party bureaucracy, which controls the courts and legal structure of the country. As he became known as an activist, and acquired a basic command of law ("barefoot lawyer" is a Chinese expression, by analogy to the "barefoot doctors", for a person who has no academic training or official status, but aids the peasants in local struggles), he was contacted by others who were being oppressed by the government, and ultimately became involved in the struggle against forced abortions and sterilization as part of the Chinese "Family Planning Campaign", also known as the "One Child" campaign. This brought him into direct conflict with the bureaucracy, and he was imprisoned for four years and then subjected to an extremely brutal "house arrest" for another three years, before escaping to the U.S. Embassy and ultimately to the United States.

The book is very interesting, not only for his personal experiences but for the light it casts on the Chinese government in the last forty years and the opposition movements which exist in China. Often, people in the West believe the propaganda that the Chinese government has become less oppressive because it has abandonned many of the socialist economic ideas it embraced in the earlier years under Mao for a more "market economy" and increased ties with the capitalist West, but the reality is quite different -- like Russia, it has thrown out the baby and kept the bathwater, being less than ever in the interests of the peasants and workers. Parts of the book are really painful to read. To keep the interest of the less political reader, the book begins with his dramatic escape from a heavily guarded community, making his way by sound (remember he's blind) out of the village and to the next village where there are other activists who can help.

For an American, once of the most important aspects of the book is his description of how the Obama-Clinton administration tried to sell him out after he reached the Embassy, but were forced by public pressure in the U.S. to negotiate his leaving the country for the U.S. One of the best quotations from the book:

"Apparently, at a meeting on April 27 of the National Security Council with President Obama in the White House, the "policy had changed." The new directive was that from then on, no one was to help me go online, which given my disability, made it impossible for me to know what was happening beyond the confines of the embassy. Moreover, it was agreed that my case shouldn't damage the relationship between the United Stes and China, and thus my situation shoulb be resolved immediately--language I took to indicate that the White House no longer supported me and that I was to leave the embassy in short order. Most disturbingly, I learned, some officials at the meeting had suggested that democracy and human rights in china were not in America's best interests. Apparently, not a single person at the NS meeting had spoken up toargue that America should protect human rigghts or to insist the the U.S. government should stand up for its founding doctines and essential values."

-- Welcome to the real world. He talks about how (like many dissidents in foreign countries, especially in the present and former Stalinist "Communist" countries) he had previously idealized the U.S. government as supportive of democracy and human rights; after this experience, he concludes that the only real supporters of human rights anywhere are the people, not the governments. A good lesson for all of us -- and just to reiterate, this was Obama and Hillary, not Donald Trump. He ends the book by emphasizing that the support of everyday Americans and others around the world is the most important thing for any movement for human rights -- the struggle is international. He may not draw all the right conclusions or go far enough, and he gives no analysis of why things are the way they are, but it was a good and inspiring book which I would recommend to anyone interested in China or human rights in general.

This was the reading for the Utah State Library/Library for the Blind discussion group for next month.

[James]

April 30

31. Honoré de Balzac, La maison du Chat-qui-pelote [1830] 61 pages [in French, Kindle]

First published in 1830 as Gloire et Malheur and modified throughout the author's lifetime, this is the first novella of the "Scenes de la vie privée", the first division of the Comédie humaine, and hence the real beginning of my Balzac project. It deals with the marriage of a daughter of a rich but very traditionalist merchant with an artist, and besides describing the lives and outlooks of different social strata it also deals with the problems of marriages between people of differing cultural levels and education.

[James]

May 3

32. Marlon James, John Crow's Devil [2005] 206 pages

Another author for the (Goodreads) World Literature group project on Jamaica; Marlon James is one of the newest and most powerful Jamaican writers (this was his first novel). The book is set in a small village called "Gibbeah", in 1951 (although the back cover says 1957). The date doesn't really matter as the story doesn't take place in any definite historical reality. The style is "magical realism", and the basic idea reminded me somewhat of Satanic Verses, with the conflict of two main protagonists, one of whom is "Christlike" and one who is "Satanic", but at least at the beginning it is ambiguous which is really which. Unlike that novel, however, the political point, if there is one (the New York Times Book Review in the blurb on the back cover talks about the "anguish of a postcolonial society struggling for its own identity") is not especially clear. The novel is well-written. The major themes seem to be the potential of a seemingly "normal", inoffensive church to become a violent cult in a short period of time given a charismatic (but insane) leader, the tendency of victims of abuse to become abusers in turn and the guilt of society turning a blind eye to abuses on the part of the rich and powerful (which may be the allegory of Jamaica the NY Times review is referring to). The content is heavily sexual and not for all readers.

[James]

May 6

33. Marlon James, The Book of Night Women [2009] 427 pages

Last year for our library's book club I began reading Kitchen House, a novel by a white Canadian woman about slavery in Virginia; it was so unbelievable and poorly written I couldn't finish it. This is the book we should have been reading instead. The basic plot is similar; a young girl who works in the kitchen of a plantation, and the evils of slavery, in this case in Jamaica. Both books are set in the first decade of the nineteenth century. This novel, however, is much more credible and well-written, perhaps because James is a Black Jamaican, and certainly because he is a good writer.

The protagonist, Lilith, is a relatively privileged slave, the illegitimate daughter of the overseer and a young slave girl he raped. The novel avoids the usual cliché (going back all the way to Uncle Tom's Cabin) of the good master/evil overseer; both the slaveowners and the overseers are presented neither as good nor intrinsically evil but as ordinary men who are permitted, and even forced, to do evil by an evil economic system, a perspective which was lacking in the other book. The characters are well-drawn and the psychology makes sense, while being put in historical and social context. The focus is not simply on the sufferings of the slaves, but on their resistance; Lilith is part, although ambivalently, of a rebellion lead by the "night women" of the title. The book's only real fault is that it gives too much credence to the reality of (as opposed to the belief in) the supernatural, i.e. "Obeah" and the African gods and spirits; but this is a feature of much Caribbean literature and perhaps also of the author's previous use of "magical realism", although I wouldn't describe this book as being in that style.

[James]

May 7

34. Honoré de Balzac, Le bal de Sceaux [1830] 65 pages

The second novella in the Comédie humaine, this also deals with love and marriage; where La maison du Chat-qui-pelote the couple come to grief by following their love and ignoring the differences in culture and class, in this book the young spoiled protagonist Emilie de Fontaine risks her chance at happiness by putting too much emphasis on nobility in her suitors. In terms of the Comédie humaine as a whole, the subject is the nobility of the early Restoration period; the father, the Count de Fontaine, is one of the favorites of King Louis XVIII.

[James]

May 10

35. Honoré de Balzac, La bourse [1830] 52 pages [in French, Kindle]

Another story (too short to even call a novella) in the Comédie humaine, a love story of a young artist and his neighbor. One of the minor characters from Le bal de Sceaux reappears here; I'm starting to see how the series connects. It was a good story but the plot wasn't all that interesting; the social description of the girl's family was probably the real point.

[James]

May 12

36. Honoré de Balzac, La vendetta [1830] 118 pages [in French, Kindle]

Another early story of Balzac, this is a tragic love story about two Corsicans in Paris in 1819; if Le Père Goriot was somewhat based on King Lear, the story here is based on Romeo and Juliet. The background is the miseries of ex-Bonapartists under the Restoration; it's strange, considering that Balzac described himself as a Royalist, that the Royalist characters in the novels I have read so far are all superficial or corrupt, and the heroes and heroines are all either Republicans or Bonapartists.

[James]

May 14

37. Honoré de Balzac, Madame Firmiani [1832] 37 pages [in French, Kindle]

A short story, which took a bit of padding to get to 37 pages. The title character is the perfect woman, and Balzac adds so many charms and virtues to her that one can't help suspect he's satirizing here; the male character is also way more perfect than any real person. Perhaps he's satirizing in reverse here, presenting perfection to contrast with the reality he describes in his other stories. A good short story nonetheless.

[James]

May 18

38. David Moskowitz, The Words and Music of Bob Marley [2007] 176 pages

I've gotten about halfway through Marlon James' A Brief History of Seven Killings, the novel about the assassination attempt on Bob Marley, and I was curious about what was based on fact and what was made up; so I decided to stop and read a biography of Marley first. The library had two, both by the same author, David Moskowitz, a musicology professor in the US; the other book was a YA biography, very short, so I decided to read this one, which focuses more on his music but also has a basic biography. I was surprised that some of the things I thought Marlon James had invented were actually based on fact, or at least on actual rumors (such as the horserace allegedly fixed by Marley's friend Alan "Skills" Cole, which rumors suggested as a reason for the attempt). I was less surprised that Papa_Lo and Shotta Sherriff were based on actual people. But this is a review of the Moskowitz book, not the James book, so . . .

The book is quite short, but it manages to cover all of Marley's albums; it explains simply the differences between ska, rocksteady and reggae, how they evolved, and how they differ from American rock music, and the political and religious background to the lyrics. The level of political analysis is less than in the novel, but the author explains the events in a straightforward way which I found helpful. I can figure out the analysis myself. I also got some good direction as to what to look for (and request at the library, which only had one Marley album) -- Marley and reggae were not something I was into in the sixties and seventies, so I'm discovering his music a few decades late, but it's incredible. Plus I'm learning a lot of new synonyms for marijuana.

[James]

May 19

39. Honoré de Balzac, Une double famille [1830] 114 pages [in French, Kindle]

This novella starts out as a love story and then becomes a very interesting analysis of domestic religious extremism -- one of the characters is a "devot", a word I remembered from Moliere's plays. I didn't particularly like the ending, which was rushed and in Balzac's most cynical vein. There were whole passages I was tempted to quote here, but read the book.

[James]

May 21

40. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, El coronel no tiene quien le escriba [1961] 99 pages [in Spanish]

His second novel, written after La hojarasca, describes the life of an old man who has been cheated all his life, yet continues to have illusions in everything -- his pension which has not come in 56 years will finally come, the cock which he is raising can never lose, all the people around him are honest. The book shows the corruption, violence and poverty of the country, without offering much hope of any change. Good writing, but still written in a purely realist style, with even less trace of "magical" elements than the first book, so not the style he's known for yet.

[James]

May 23

41. Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings [2014] 688 pages

Anything but brief, and more like the biblical "seven times seventy" killings. The style reminded me of Vargas Llosa's La Fiesta del chivo, short chapters from various viewpoints, none of whom can be singled out as the major character, and filled with violence leading up to an assassination attempt. It also reminded me of that book in another way: the novel reaches the climax at midpoint and then becomes anticlimactic. In this case, however, the anticlimax just becomes the setup for what is in effect a second novel. The first half is a five-star novel about Jamaican politics and the assassination attempt on Bob Marley (for some reason just referred to as "the Singer", although the back cover names him, and the identification is obvious); the second half is a three-star novel about the American drug trade, with some of the same characters. Much of the writing is in Jamaican dialect, and I can imagine people posting "warnings" about sex, violence, language ... basically, if you're sensitive about anything, don't attempt this. If you're interested in how the U.S. goes about ruling the Caribbean, on the other hand, this is a powerful work of political fiction.

May 24

42. Honoré de Balzac, La paix du ménage [1830] 64 pages [in French, Kindle]

Set a bit earlier than the other Balzac novellas I have read so far, in the design of the Comédie humaine this is concerned with painting the moeurs of the Napoleonic upper classes. As far as the plot, set at a ball, it seemed like a YA novel taking place at a high school dance, with all the stereotypes of the "popular girl", "mean girl", "new girl", "jocks trying to score" and so forth; rather disconcerting when the characters are supposed to be in their mid-twenties or older and the "jocks" are high ranking officers of "La grande armée". (In case you think this is anachronistic, at one point Balzac actually compares one of the characters to a high school student.) I guess when someone writes as many works as Balzac, he's bound to have an occasional "miss", and this is one.

[James]

May 27

43. Honoré de Balzac, La fausse maîtresse [1842] 61 pages [in French, Kindle]

Later than the previous novellas, set in the Orleanist period. The style is more Romantic than Realist, with an almost Dickensian unusual character; the plot is a love triangle with two Polish refugees and the wife of one.

43a. Honoré de Balzac, Étude de femme [1831] 15 pages [in French, Kindle]

Too short to list as a separate book. This is an anecdote about a woman and a misaddressed letter; the main interest is that the male protagonist is Eugene Rastignac from Père Goriot.

[James]

May 28

44. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, La mala hora [1962] 207 pages

Garcia Marquez's third novel (the reviews say his first, probably because the first two, La hojarasca and El coronel no tiene quien le escriba are too short to meet a formal definition of "novel"), this is written in the same general style as the first two, which is to say realist in its depictions of the characters and situations, modernist in its technique (no single protagonist, shifts from viewpoint to viewpoint frequently, leaves events ambiguous.) There's no "magical realism", so I guess that his next novel, Cien años de Solitudo, which I read (in translation) in college and am re-reading for the first time in Spanish next month, was the first as well as the best-known novel in that style. The story takes place, as most of his novels do, in a typical but fictional small town in a country which could be his native Colombia, or any other country in Latin America -- a country where the "liberal", more or less bourgeois democratic government was replaced by a conservative dictatorship many years earlier, and the regime, though still officially in a "state of seige", has for some time entered into the phase of relaxing restrictions and trying to appear more legitimate, in order to replace rule by direct force by the more economical rule by illusion, without risking the return of the Liberal party to power.

Reading these "Macondo" novels at the same time as I'm working my way through Balzac's Comédie humaine is hard on my memory, because in both cases one has to remember the minor characters who return from one novel to another. Here the cast of characters includes the alcalde, who represents the government, thoroughly corrupt yet at bottom not an evil person, who truly wants to convince the people he's on their side but is forced by his position to commit political crimes (one of the things that sets Garcia Marquez above the "liberal" authors like Vargas Llosa is that he understands that political evils do not stem from "bad people" but from a bad system); the Judge, who is basically apolitical and used by the alcalde; Padre Ángel, the resident priest, who tries to ignore the political evils and coexist with the government, while focusing on individual -- mainly sexual -- "morality"; the doctor, a good-hearted but rather cynical representative of modern thought; Don Sabas (who played an important role in the previous novel), the most corrupt person in a corrupt town, a former leader of the opposition who changed sides and turned informer, becoming rich by buying up their property; the dentist, the other former leader of the opposition who managed to survive the purges; the barber, who supports the opposition, and is a source of information; two widows, with very different personalities, who are politically important in some way; and the wives, mothers, children of the above and many other minor characters.

The action begins when someone begins posting pasquines (satirical notices) on people's doors during the night, mainly exposing irregular sexual relations, all of which were already commonly known. For some reason, which the more "rational" characters try unsuccessfully to understand, having these "confirmed" by the lampoons gives them greater weight, there is a murder, some people leave town, and a few people are very concerned; which sets in motion a response which ultimately undoes all the efforts of the alcalde to seem legitimate and returns the town to its previous condition of rule by direct force. At one level, this is a mystery novel -- who is posting the pasquines? But unlike a traditional mystery, it is never revealed -- although perhaps there are clues, and many of the reviews I have read agree on one character; I think that the more likely solution is what some of the characters suggest, that after the first night it is a case of copy-cat activity by many citizens with personal and political scores to settle. In the end, this really become a side issue, and the book, like the community of Macondo, drops the interest in the pasquines for the more important questions of politics and ethics.

If this is an early, minor novel, I can't wait to re-read Cien años de Solitudo and move on to some of his later works.

[James]

June 2

45. William Gray, Coral Reefs & Islands: The Natural History of a Threatened Paradise [2015] 131 pages

A short description by a travel writer (but one who has obviously done some research) of coral reefs and islands. I was looking for a book about the Great Barrier Reef for a summer reading challenge at the library where I work; this was the best thing I could find on Amazon at a reasonable price (free, on Kindle Unlimited) and it was actually much better than I would have expected. It was originally published in 1993, and it's not clear whether there was any revision for the e-book edition, although it has a 2015 copyright. (The print edition undoubtedly had more spectacular illustrations, but since I read this on a black and white device I probably didn't miss them.) The book begins with explaining the formation of coral reefs and coral islands, distinguishing the various types and the ways they come about (this chapter has a subsection devoted to the Great Barrier Reef); it then describes the succession of plants and animals on each type, then describes in separate chapters the ecology of the reef itself, the beach rock, beach, and adjacent area of the island or mainland, and the islands; it ends with an explanation of the importance of coral reefs and islands to the world environment, and a description of how they are now being destroyed by human activities and what could be done about it. Of course there is no liklihood of anything at all being preserved given the present political situation. A very balanced and scientific presentation which doesn't shy away from evolutionary explanations; I learned much I didn't know.

[James]

June 4

46. Richard G. Moulton, Shakespeare As A Dramatic Thinker: A Popular Illustration of Fiction As the Experimental Side of Philosophy [1921] 381 pages

Originally published in 1903 under the somewhat misleading title, Shakespeare's Moral System, this was retitled to emphasize its intention to be a companion to the same author's earlier Shakespeare As Dramatic Artist, which I read about a year ago. The older book, which dealt with Shakespeare's technique as a dramatist, is considered one of the first books in modern academic literary criticism. The present work, which deals with the plays from the viewpoint of content, is less important and less successful; although it attempts to use the same method of inductive analysis of the plays, it (like most books that deal with the content of literary works) does not always avoid writing the author's theories into the works it is commenting on. This is particularly noticeable in the analysis of the Roman plays, which Moulton interprets as essentially anthropological illustrations of Roman thought; a completely anachronistic idea which was certainly foreign to Shakespeare's intentions. There are, however, a number of good analyses of other plays, and the book was a worthwhile addition to my chronological reading project in Shakespeare criticism, which I tend to take up every June before I go to the Utah Shakespeare Festival on my vacation and then gets shelved for most the year behind other projects.

[James]

June 8

47. Alan Bradley, The Weed that Strings the Hangman's Bag: A Flavia de Luce Mystery [2010] 364 pages

I should say at the outset that I am not a reader of mysteries. I did read the first Flavia de Luce mystery, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, because it was the reading for my library's book discussion a couple of years back, and I enjoyed the character of Flavia de Luce -- it's refreshing to read a book where a young person is openly smart and not presented as a nerd -- so when I needed another murder mystery for another challenge, I decided to read the next book. This was not quite as good as the first one, in my opinion; although the character of Flavia is still great, there was too much that didn't make sense to me, even allowing for the conventions of the genre.

[James]

June 9

48. Honoré de Balzac, Albert Savarus [1842] 177 pages

A Romantic story of a tragic love affair is the pretext for a study of the moeurs and politics of Besançon under Louis-Philippe ; the first novel in the Comédie humaine which is not set in Paris or involving Parisians. It is very hard to get into as the first quarter of the book is all set-up, jumping from character to character without anything actually happening, and then it goes into a story within the story, a novella written by the main character. As with most of the novellas, this is of more interest for the painting of customs than for the plot.

[James]

June 12

49. Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad [2016] 306 pages

Recently, books about slavery have become almost an industry; it seems that I am cataloging one or two every week at the library. Many have some sort of stupid gimmick, like the white slave girl in Kitchen House. At first sight, this seemed like the same thing: a slavery novel with a bizarre gimmick (the Underground Railroad as a literal underground railroad, I mean, really. . .). But as I read further, I realized that it was actually something else: not a historical novel at all, in the traditional sense, but an experimental novel about the treatment of Blacks in America.

My first take on it was that it was an alternative history, in a South where the Civil War had never happened, exploring the possible ways that slavery might have evolved if the South had been left to its own devices, with the various states showing different possible outcomes -- Georgia, where slavery continued more or less as it was (and by the way, the account of the plantation seems much more accurate than in most of the novels of this sort; Whitehead based it on the actual slave narratives rather than on white historians); South Carolina, where there is a pretense of being progressive with an underside of sophisticated racism; North Carolina, where the Blacks were essentially exterminated; Tennessee, on the border, where there is fighting between the slaveowners and raiders from the North; Indiana, where Blacks try to exist independently on their own and are opposed by the white racists and so forth. I would have set it about 1870 or so. I still think it could be read that way. But then I read an interview with the author, who said it was intended to be set before the Civil War, in about 1850.

As I thought more about it -- and this is a book which provokes thinking -- I saw that it in effect abolishes chronology altogether; the South Carolina episode in particular not only anachronistically introduces elements from the 1930s (the Tuskeegee experiment) but also satirizes the liberal, patronizing racism of much of the actual North in the twentieth century, and could also be read as a description of neo-liberal regimes in much of the neo-colonial world; the violence of North Carolina has its echoes in many places and times as well. Essentially all of America's racial history is brought into the novel in one form or another (including the Native Americans, especially in the Tennessee episode), and the railroad functions as well in a symbolic way.

The novel has been compared to "magical realism" and while the fantasy elements are not really magical, but more like science fiction, the technique functions in the same way. It's very well done; I can understand why the book has been so well received by the critics and won so many awards (including the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.) The ultimate impression is that Blacks are not and have never been safe in America, that racist violence is always just under the surface waiting to explode -- and this was, prophetically, written under a Black president, before the Trumpzi election victory.

[James]

June 14

50. William Shakespeare, As You Like It [ca. 1600] 181 pages

Re-reading the plays that will be presented at the Utah Shakespeare Festival next month. This is one of the plays I'm less familiar with, only having read it once or twice and never having seen it performed. The edition I read was in the Cambridge University series The New Shakespeare; the editor suggests that the play was heavily rewritten, and that the masque-like ending is not Shakespeare's but a later adaptation for use at a wedding.

[James]

June 21

51. William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream: A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare edited by Horace Howard Furness [ca. 1595/this ed. 1895/Dover repr. 1963] 357 pages

June 22

52. William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream Signet Classic ed., edited by Wolfgang Clemen [ca. 1595/this ed. 1963] 186 pages

The second play I will be seeing at the Utah Shakespeare Festival next month. This was one of the plays I read in high school, and I have read it four or five times since. I won't review the play itself, since I'm sure nearly everyone in the English speaking world has read it or seen it performed at some time or other.

The New Variorum editions are my favorite editions of Shakespeare; in this case, the text is an exact transcription of the First Folio (down to obvious typos), with the Quarto and later Folio readings, along with all important emendations, at the bottom of the text, and then under those notes (often a page or two long) explaining the different readings and discussing various difficulties that different editors and scholars have found in the play (some interesting, some worthy of Nick Bottom). There is an appendix of about 100 pages containing excerpts from all the major critics from Theobald down to the 1890s, organized into themes such as the sources, the date of composition, the characters, etc.

The Signet classic edition is one of the most popular texts; it is more of a student than a scholarly edition, following the text of the First Quarto in modernized spellings, with notes limited to defining unfamiliar words. There is a good if somewhat basic introduction by Clemen, and a selection of mostly later criticisms.

[James]

June 24

53. William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliette [ca. 1595] about 100 pages [Kindle]

The third play which I will be seeing next month at the Utah Shakespeare Festival; another play I read in high school and many times since. This one was a Kindle edition, I don't know which version it was based on and there were no notes or critical material, just the play itself. The pages weren't numbered but I'm guessing at about 100 since most editions come to about that for just the play itself.

June 28

54. Honoré de Balzac, Mémoires de deux jeunes mariées [1841/42] 247 pages [in French, Kindle]

One of the longer novels of the Comédie humaine, written in the form of letters between two friends, Louise and Renée, who were educated in a convent but leave at the same time: Louise is a romantic who seeks passionate love, while René is more practical, marries an older man and devotes herself to having children. The plot is less important than the discussions on the nature of love and marriage, as they were understood by different types of character in the nineteenth century (the novel takes place in the 1820's and 1830's). The novel was first published in serial form (and expurgated) in 1841, then complete in book form in 1842.