JamesFoster 2018 Challenge

[James]

June 13

57. Herman Vanstiphout, Epics of Sumerian Kings: The Matter of Aratta [2003] 176 pages

The ancient Sumerian epics divide into two groups: those which make up what we call the Epic of Gilgamesh, and those which make up the "matter of Aratta". These four epics, known today as Enmerkar and Ensuhgirana, Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta, Lugalbanda in the Wilderness and The Return of Lugalbanda (in Sumerian library catalogs they were just listed by their first words), were according to Vanstiphout's introduction probably originally composed under the Third Dynasty of Ur (2112-2004 BCE), about a thousand years after the invention of writing, and our present texts were probably finalized and copied in the scribal schools of the Isin-Larsa period (2017-1763); they are thus among the earliest works of literature, more than a thousand years older than the Homeric epics and the earliest books of the Old Testament.

Like the Epic of Gilgamesh, they deal not with the kings of Ur but with the earlier kings of Unug (Akkadian Uruk, Biblical Erech, modern Warka), just as the Greek epics dealt with an earlier Mycenaean era and much mediaeval literature looked back to the Roman Empire. They recount the conquest of the (otherwise unknown) city of Aratta, probably somewhere in central Iran but here more of a symbolic opponent, by Enmerkar, a legendary king and possibly considered the builder of Unug. The three narratives (Vanstiphout considers the two Lugalbanda epics to be parts of the same poem, although that is disputed by other scholars) are three different accounts of the conquest, although we cannot be sure whether it was thought to represent three variant accounts of the same event or three successive events, and if they are successive what order they should be read in.

In Enmerkar and Ensuhgirana, the conflict is begun by Ensuhgirana, the king of Aratta, who sends a message to Enmerkar demanding that Unug surrender and become a tributary of Aratta; he refuses, and a sorcerer living in Aratta puts a spell on a city belonging to the territory of Unug, which causes a famine; a "wise woman" from Unug then engages the sorcerer in a magic contest and defeats him, whereupon Aratta surrenders to Unug.

Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta is the longest and most interesting; here Enmerkar takes the initiative, threatening to invade Aratta, and the Lord of Aratta (unnamed in this poem) proposes three challenges, which Enmerkar solves by superior technology (including the invention of writing, which is believed to have actually been invented in Unug). In the end, the two cities agree to trade the grain of Unug for the gold and precious stones of Aratta; the epic is essentially a myth of the invention of trade.

Lugalbanda in the Wilderness begins with a military expedition against Aratta; Lugalbanda is an officer in Enmerkar's army, one of eight brothers, who becomes suddenly very ill during the march and is left behind with a supply of food, but is expected to die; he prays to various gods, is healed, has a dream in accordance with which he captures some animals and makes a banquet for the gods. In a somewhat obscure final section there appears to be some sort of battle in heaven between various spirits (stars?) and there is a suggestion that Lugalbanda becomes himself something more than human. (Lugalbanda like Enmerkar is a legendary and perhaps deified early king of Unug; in some accounts he is the father of Gilgamesh.) In the second part/epic, The Return of Lugalbanda, he wanders in the wilderness looking for the army of Enmerkar, finds the nest of the Thunderbird, feeds and honors the chick of the Thunderbird and is rewarded by the gift of supernatural strength. The Thunderbird then leads him to the camp of Enmerkar, where he appears to the surprise of his brothers. The seige of Aratta is unsuccessful; Enmerkar asks for volunteers to return to Unug and carry a message to the goddess Inanna in her temple there, but everyone else refuses. Lugalbanda then volunteers to go back alone, and uses his magic speed to make the trip in one afternoon. Inanna gives him instructions on how to defeat Aratta (by catching and eating a magic fish which is apparently a kind of horcrux for the king of Aratta.) Unexpectedly, the epic ends here with a praise song for the goddess without describing his return to the camp or the defeat of Aratta. (Vanstiphout compares this somewhat remotely to Christian saints' legends, but surprisingly doesn't mention what seems to me the obvious parallel, the story of Philoctetes in the Greek Trojan Cycle.)

I am currently reading Thorkild Jacobsen's The Harps That Once. . . : Sumerian Poetry in Translation, an anthology published in 1987, which also contains two of these epics, Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta and The Return of Lugalbanda (Jacobsen considers the two Lugalbanda poems to be separate compositions) and while the basic story is the same in both versions the details are quite different; partially this may be do to a different selection of texts (the epics are found in many copies which are slightly different), but it also shows that we still do not understand the language perfectly. In particular, the "spell of Nudimmud" in Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta is translated in a totally opposed way; for Jacobsen it is a version of the "Tower of Babel" myth where the gods cause an original unified language to become many different languages, while for Vanstiphout it is a prophecy that the originally multilingual civilized world will all come to understand Sumerian (which in fact was a scholarly lingua franca for the entire Near East for centuries).

I should note that this is a bilingual edition, for those who happen to read Sumerian (that is, a transcription of the cuneiform in the latin alphabet). Text and translation are on facing pages.

[James]

June 16

58. Thorkild Jacobsen, The Harps That Once. . . : Sumerian Poetry in Translation [1987] 498 pages

This is an anthology of poetry from Sumerian, the first language to be written, and the earliest extant literature. It contains most of the more important poetic texts, divided into eight categories: the texts concerning Dumuzi (the dying and resurrected shepherd god, similar to the later Adonis), including variations of his courtship and marriage to Inanna and his death; lovesongs, ostensibly about kings and queens, and very sexually explicit, as is much of the Sumerian poetry; three hymns addressed to Enlil, Inanna, and Nanshe respectively; myths, including the famous "Descent of Inanna" into the underworld; two Aratta epics and "Gilgamesh and Aka"; the "Cursing of Akkade"; three hymns to temples; and three laments for cities and temples destroyed in the barbarian conquest of Ur.

Not knowing Sumerian, I can't speak to the accuracy of the translations, but Jacobsen was considered a major expert. Not everything is understood, and there is room for much disagreement. The translations are fairly understandable, although the translator has a penchent for using the most archaic and obscure English vocabulary possible. He says in the introduction that he was planning a companion volume to include the prose works, but I haven't found any indication that it was ever published; Jacobsen died in 1993.

[James]

June 18

59. Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem [2007, tr. 2014] 400 pages [Kindle]

The first book in a science fiction trilogy originally published in China, dealing with "first contact" with an alien civilization, the Trisolarians. The novel is both similar and different from most American science fiction; the "action" plot is not all that unusual, but the author expects the reader to have more knowledge of math and science than is expected in most American science fiction, even of the "hard" science fiction genre (though it is not absolutely essential to understanding the action). Having been written in 2007, the science is more up to date than most of the science fiction novels I have read lately, which gave it a certain realism.

The book opens with a chapter called "The Age of Madness" set during the height of the "Cultural Revolution", and Chinese history, both ancient and recent, form the background of the action; the pessimism of many of the characters with regards to human civilization and the possibility of rational reform, which is central to the plotline, is very understandable in the context of the goals and hopes of the Chinese Revolution and its degeneration into irrational violence and tyranny under Mao (although recent American politics don't exactly give much reason for optimism either.) I was reminded of Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, one of the best recent science fiction novels I have read, in that both trilogies combine reasonably accurate "hard" science with an interest in politics, which are usually separated in different subgenres. In addition, Liu Cixin's book has a very modernist literary structure, with several subplots that at first seem totally unconnected. I will be interested in seeing whether the quality of this first novel is kept up in the sequels.

[James]

June 20

60. [Critical articles on Othello [1970-2000] 334 pages [Kindle]

Twenty articles on Othello downloaded from Academic Search Premier, which I am counting as one book for my goals. (Another twenty from 2000 to the present will be counted as another book, if I finish it before the Festival.) The one generalization I can make is that while the earlier secondary works (including all from the Signet edition and the Casebook which I read in the last couple weeks) focus on the characters of Othello and Iago, the articles from the 1970s on, undoubtedly due to the rise of third wave feminism and feminist criticism, focus largely on the character of Desdemona, with some attention paid to Emilia and even Bianca. From the 1980s on the articles tend to be more postmodernist and psychoanalytic, less intelligible, and less in touch with the actual play. [See my challenge thread for the individual articles.]

M.D. Faber, "The Summoning of Desdemona: Othello V.ii.1-82" (American Notes & Queries, 9, 3, Nov. 1970) 3 pages -- Argues that the death scene of Desdemona is modelled on the scenes with personified Death in the morality plays, for example in Everyman. Makes the interesting point that Death is depicted as a Black African man in some 15th century statues.

E.K. Weedin, Jr., "Love's Reason in Othello (Studies in English Literature, 15, 2, 1975) 16 pages -- Discusses the relationship of Reason and Will in the play in terms of Elizabethan theological and philosophical writings; discusses the trial scene in Act I in contrast with Othello's judgement of Desdemona in terms of procedure and consideration of evidence.

S.N. Garner, "Shakespeare's Desdemona" (Shakespeare Studies, 9, 1976) 20 pages -- A very interesting discussion of the character of Desdemona. The article also emphasizes the importance of Othello's race in the play.

Carol Thomas Neely, "Women and Men in Othello: "What should such a fool/Do with so good a woman?"" (Shakespeare Studies, 10, 1977) 26 pages -- A feminist interpretation of the play contrasting the women with the men; it goes somewhat too far but has a good discussion of the three women, Desdemona, Emilia and Bianca, their characters and interaction. It puts the play in the context of the source story and how it fits into the plan of Cinthio's Hecatomithi; it also points out how the structure of the play is actually more similar to Shakespeare's comedies than to his other tragedies.

Arthur Kirsch, "The Polarization of Erotic Love in 'Othello'" (Modern Language Review, 73, 4, Oct 1978) 20 pages -- Uses a combination of Christian theology and Freudian psychoanalysis to explain the characters of Desdemona and Othello and their relationship in the play. Odd, but interesting.

Joan Ozark Holmer, "Othello's threnos: "Arabian Trees" and "Indian" versus "Judean"" (Shakespeare Studies 13, 1980) 23 pages -- Argues that in Othello's death speech, the Arabian trees are myrrh, and for the Folio reading "Judean" referring to Judas Iscariot against the Quarto reading "Indian". It demonstrates a whole web of allusions to the Near East and the Bible.

Catherine M. Shaw, "'Dangerous Conceits Are in Their Natures Poisons': The Language of Othello" (University of Toronto Quarterly 49, 4, Summer 1980) 16 pages -- Points out that the verbal descriptions of the characters do not correspond to their actual behaviors. Well, duh!

W.D. Adamson, "Unpinned or Undone?: Desdemona's Critics and the Problem of Sexual Innocence" (Shakespeare Studies 13, 1980) 18 pages -- As the subtitle implies, this article is very concerned with answering other critics; in particular it tries to respond to some exaggerations in the Garner article to arrive at a more nuanced view of the character of Desdemona.

Ann Jennalie Cook, "The Design of Desdemona: Doubt Raised and Resolved" (Shakespeare Studies 13, 1980) 10 pages -- Another article on the character of Desdemona, in basic agreement with Adamson and Neely; it puts an emphasis on the scandal of the elopement.

Madelon Gohlke, ""All that is spoke is marred:" Language and consciousness in Othello" (Women's Studies, 9, 2, Jan 1982) 20 pages -- A feminist psychoanalytic approach to the characters of Othello and Iago through the ambiguity of their language. What I could understand did not seem useful to understanding the play.

Stanford S. Apseloff, "Othello: The Cod and the Salmon II i 154-165" (American Notes & Queries, 23 1/2, Sept/Oct 1984) 3 pages -- Tries to explain an obscure allusion in Iago's speech.

Janet C. Stavropoulos, "Love and Age in Othello" (Shakespeare Studies 19, 1989) 17 pages -- Discusses the age difference between Othello and Desdemona. Finds parallels between Othello and Brabantio and interprets the marriage relation between Othello and Desdemona as one between father and daughter figures.

James L. Calderwood, "Apalling Property in Othello" (University of Toronto Quarterly, 57, 3, Spr 1988) 23 pages -- Discusses metaphors of property and ownership in the play from a Lacanian perspective, in impenetrable prose. Apparently he has written a whole book on the play from this perspective, which I am in no hurry to read.

Edward Berry, "Othello's Alienation" (Studies in English Literature, 30, 2, Spr 1990) 19 pages -- Sees Othello's character and action as due to his racial insecurities, resulting from internalizing the negative image of Blacks in Venetian sociaety and later projecting his own self-hatred onto Desdemona.

Haim Omer and Marcello Da Verona, "Doctor Iago's Treatment of Othello" (American Journal of Psychotherapy, 45, 1, Jan 1991) 14 pages -- Shows how Iago's strategy for persuading Othello resembles techniques of modern psychotherapy. Interesting in that it concentrates on how Iago accomplishes his goals rather than trying to understand his motivations. At least this article has an excuse for being psychoanalytic.

Joel B. Altman, ""Prophetic fury": Othello and the Economy of Shakespearian Reception" (Studies in the Literary Imagination, 26, 1, 1993) 29 pages -- A lot of verbiage that ultimately doesn't say much. Shakespeare wrote words that he expected the audience to construct a plot from -- i.e. he wrote plays. The article does have some interesting ideas about the sources of the handkerchief story (Boiardo and Ariosto), and an ingenious but unconvincing theory that Iago is based on the Cumaean sibyl in the Aeneid.

Derek Cohen, "Othello's Suicide" (University of Toronto Quarterly, 62, 3, Spr 1993) 11 pages -- An anachronistic interpretation of the play as "entirely about race", designed to justify the "white power structure". Why would a play like that be written in all-white England before it had non-white colonies?

Ruth Vanita, ""Proper" Men and "Fallen" Women: The Unprotectedness of Wives in Othello (Studies in English Literature, 34, 2, Spr 1994) 16 pages -- Discusses the failure of the bystanders -- in particular Ludovico and Gratiano -- to intervene in the mistreatment of Desdemona and the murder of Emilia in the light of Elizabethan attitudes to "domestic" violence. Makes allusions to similar ideas in India -- presumably where the author is from. Highlights the cowardice of Ludovico and Gratiano, their failure also to intervene in the murder of Rodrigo. Interprets Desdemona's remark that Ludovico was a "proper man" as sarcastic.

Karl F. Zender, "The Humiliation of Iago" (Studies in English Literature, 34, 2, Spr 1994) 16 pages -- Sees the origins of Iago's hatred of Desdemona in the scene where she challenges him to praise women.

Derek Cohen, "Tragedy and the Nation: Othello (University of Toronto Quarterly, 66, 3, Summer 1997) 13 pages -- Another anachronistic article by Cohen, this one interpreting the play as designed to contrast "civic" and "ethnic" theories of nationalism.

[James]

June 23

61. Stanislaw Lem, Hospital of the Transfiguration [1956, tr. 2006, this ed. 2017] 224 pages [Kindle]

Hospital of the Transfiguration was Lem's first novel, written in 1948 but not allowed to be published until 1956. The main character is Stefan, a young man from a once noble family who has recently been licensed as a physician; the book opens with him attending the funeral of an uncle. As he is about to return to the city, he meets a friend from medical school who invites him to apply for a position at a nearby lunatic asylum, the Hospital of the Transfiguration. The remainder of the novel, with the exception of a visit to his dying father, takes place at the asylum. The novel is set in 1939-1940, at the beginning of the German occupation of Poland, which is always present in the background although it only comes to the foreground in the last chapter.

Unlike Lem's later work, this is not science fiction; it seems in some ways like a historical novel, but since it was written less than a decade after the events, it probably should be considered a psychological realist novel. Through most of the novel, there is not really any connected plot; rather it is a series of vignettes or character studies of family members, doctors, patients, and others with whom Stefan comes in contact, which gives it a rather fragmented style. Much space is given to conversations on philosophy and literature between Stefan and a famous, cynical or nihilistic poet who is not exactly a patient but has obvious psychological issues. The novel considers many of the same philosophical questions that permeate his later science fiction works. It differs from them in being the only work as far as I know which is actually set in Poland and with Polish characters; his science fiction generally has either Western or cosmopolitan future characters.

Even in this first novel, one can appreciate Lem's ability as a writer, although I wasn't totally satisfied with the occasionally awkward translation.

[James]

June 27

62. [Critical articles on Othello [2000-2017] 406 pages [Kindle]

The rest of the articles (another twenty) on Othello from Academic Search Premier. To read some of these articles, it would seem that Shakespeare had been reading alot of deconstructionist epistemology, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and postcolonial theory and decided to write a play exemplifying those ideas. Again, see my challenge thread for the individual articles (they're not all like that).

Millicent Bell, "Shakespeare's Moor" (Raritan 21, 4, Spring 2002) 14 pages -- The tragedy is about Othello's race, or "otherness", and his failure to be assimilated into the dominant society.

Maurice Hunt, "Shakespeare's Venetian Paradigm: Stereotyping and Sadism in The Merchant of Venice and Othello" (Papers on Language and Literature, 39, 2, Spring 2003) 28 pages -- Compares the two plays which Shakespeare set in Venice, to suggest that this was not simply a coincidence but that Shakespeare sees Venice particularly as a city in which natives and ethnic minorities uneasily coexist and where ethnic and religious stereotyping leads to persecution. The author suggests that Othello and Shylock react to the prejudice against them by transferring their hatred onto scapegoats, Antonio and Desdemona.

Joan Ozark Holmer, "Desdemona, Woman Warrior: "O, these men, these men" (4.3.59)" (Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 17, 2005) 33 pages -- Presents a very interesting parallel between the play and the story of Una and the Redcrosse Knight in Spenser's The Faerie Queen. Also discusses the idea of the Christian warrior as described in Erasmus' Enchiridion.

Shawn Smith, "Love, Pity, and Deception in Othello" (Papers in Language and Literature, 44, 1, Winter 2008) 49 pages -- Applies the rhetorical theory of pity to the play. Discusses uses of pity from Aristotle, Cicero and Quintilian through the mediaeval courtly love tradition and the Petrachan tradition of love poetry to Shakespeare's contemporaries. Also contains a full discussion of the handkerchief and other symbolic images in the play.

Meredith Anne Skura, "Reading Othello's skin: Contexts and Pretexts" (Philological Quarterly, 87 3/4, Sum/Fall 2008) 36 pages -- Begins by refuting modern critics who try to interpret Othello as a "racist" play by discussing what the Elizabethans actually thought about Africans and "Moors"; then turns to the whole question of intertextuality and pre-texts (as opposed to "sources") and discusses some possible pre-texts (Greene's Orlando Furioso, Plutarch's Life of Cato of Utica, etc.) A very intelligent and useful article.

Jessica Tvordi, ""In Quarter and in Terms like Bride and Groom": Reconfiguring Marriage, Friendship, and Alliance in Othello" (Journal of the Wooden O Symposium, 8, 2008) 17 pages -- Contrasts dynastic and hierarchical expectations in marriage and the military with the Protestant idea of companionate marriage and the preferment of the friend Cassio over the more senior Iago.

Unhae Langis, "Marriage: the Vilent Traverse from Two to One in The Taming of the Shrew and Othello" (Journal of the Wooden O Symposium, 8, 2008) 19 pages -- Compares the marriages in the two plays. Essentially just subjective readings, perhaps better on the first play than on Othello.

Chikako D. Kumamoto, ""Some Wonder in the Handkerchief": Magic, Early Modern Good Medicine, and Othello's Strange Difference" (Journal of the Wooden O Symposium, 8, 2008) 16 pages -- Argues that "the core of the tragedy" is Othello's "magical Christian epistemology" and that he "anchors his soul in the handkerchief". Brings much information about Renaissance magic and medicine to the (over-)interpretation of the handkerchief motif. I think the author read a different play than I did.

Ken Jacobsen, "Iago's Art of War: The "Machiavellian Moment" in Othello" (Modern Philology, 106, 3, Feb. 2009) 33 pages -- Interprets Iago's strategy in terms of both rhetorical theory (e.g. Quintillian) and Machiavelli's Art of War. The influence of rhetorical theory is certainly there, and the author does a good job of showing it; since Machiavelli's book is largely parallel to the rhetorical theory, I'm not sure it was a direct influence, but it is possible. The article is interesting in any case.

Daniel Roux, "Hybridity, Othello and the Postcolonial Critics" (Shakespeare in Southern Africa, 21, 2009) 7 pages -- Othello's alienation from Venetian culture is not (only) due to race and otherness, as postcolonial critics suppose, but symbolizes more generally the rise of the subjective subject of Renaissance humanism. The article makes some good points but has too many references to fashionable writers like Foucault and Lacan (and refers three times to Ernst Cassirer as "Cassiner").

Solomon Iyasere, "The Liberation of Emilia" (Shakespeare in Southern Africa, 21, 2009) 4 pages -- A good short discussion of the self-liberating heroism of Emilia at the end of the play. Sticks to the play itself without any theorizing.

Sandra Young, "Imagining Alterity and Belonging on the English Stage in an Age of Expansion: A reading of Othello" (Shakespeare in Southern Africa, 21, 2009) 9 pages -- The play is about "alterity" and the relations of East and West in global exchange. Unclear and focuses on critics rather than the play itself.

Adam Phillips, "Othello on Satisfaction" (Raritan, 31, 1, Sum 2011) 20 pages -- The play is basically just a pretext for the author to discuss psychoanalytic theories of satisfaction, especially Lacan and some of his followers.

Joshua Avery, "Protestant Epistemology and Othello's Consciousness" (Renascence, 65, 4, Sum 2013) 19 pages -- Sees the play as about Protestant versus Catholic epistemology.

Benjamin V. Beier, "The Art of Persuasion and Shakespeare's Two Iagos" (Studies in Philology 111, 1, Winter 2014) 31 pages -- Compares the rhetorical strategies of Iago and Iachimo in Cymbeline in reference to Quintillian and Augustine.

Alpasian Toker, "Othello: Alien in Venice" (Akademik Arastirmalar Dergisi [Journal of Academic Studies], 15, 60, 2014) 23 pages -- A foreign (Bulgarian?) professor of English literature, who unfortunately is not comfortable in writing in English, outlines the play in terms of modern criticism (mainly the postcolonial interpretation of Othello as the "other" trying to assimilate). The article is made up almost entirely of quotations and paraphrases of various critical books and articles.

Laura Kolb, "Jewel, Purse, Trash: Reckoning and Reputation in Othello" (Shakespeare Studies, 44, 2016) 33 pages -- Discusses commercial/economic language and images in the play. Good discussion of the speech "Who steals my purse steals trash" -- how often did I have to discuss that in high school and it was never mentioned that it was spoken by a villain? Very interesting, and adds to appreciation of some of the language, but unfortunately goes to far and sees this as what the play is about. If only critics would have the modesty to realize that Shakespeare talks about many things besides what the play is mainly about.

Jaecheo Kim, "The Plague and Immunity in Othello" (Comparative Drama, 51, 1, 2017) 20 pages -- Points out that the first performance of Othello coincided with a major outbreak of plague in England, and with the death of Queen Elizabeth; King James delayed coming to England because of the danger of the epidemic. Discusses the play in terms of its imagery of plague and pestilence, and gives a biopolitical reading of it in terms of "immunity". Again, interesting ideas about some of the language which are turned into the "meaning" of the play.

[James]

June 30

63. Anne Ridler, ed., Shakespeare Criticism: 1919-1935 [1936] 388 pages

Ridler's anthology, published in 1936, contains fifteen lectures, articles, or chapters of books written in the first part of the twentieth century, which make up a representative selection of British Shakespeare criticism, of varying qualities. The principle of arrangement seems to be from the oldest to youngest authors, rather than the dates of the selections themselves.

The earliest author is J.M. Robertson, with an excerpt from a book on Hamlet comparing the play with its source and with the First Quarto. Next is the 1930 Shakespeare Association Lecture by Spurgeon on imagery in the tragedies; probably this week I will be reading her book on the same topic, which is presumably an expansion of this. Then a book excerpt from E.E. Stoll on the relationship between tragedy and comedy; a lecture on emending Shakespeare's texts, by W.W. Greg; Granville-Barker's preface to King Lear, revised from his book, which I will probably read before next year's vacation (I reread the Shakespeare plays that will be presented and some Shakespeare criticism each year before I go to the Utah Shakespeare Festival on my vacation); L.L. Schücking on soliloquies, arguing that they are a convention for giving the audience information and should not be used to infer that the character actually is boastful or consciously villainous or introspective; and three rather subjective analyses of Henry V, Troilus and Cressida and Hamlet by Charles Williams.

T.S. Eliot's Shakespeare Association Lecture "Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca" is humorous; the first half is consciously humorous, making fun of various scholars for making Shakespeare think just like they do, while the second half is funny because Eliot procedes to give us an objective account of what Shakepeare really does, which is write like T.S. Eliot. Then there is an interesting piece on metaphor by J. Middleton Murry; an interpretation of Two Gentlemen of Verona by H.B. Charlton, which was one of the best things in the book; a piece on allusions to current events in several plays, by G.B. Harrison; one by J. Isaacs on Shakespeare as a practical man of the theater and what we know about the conditions of theater in his time; Edmund Blunden on the allusions hidden in the seemingly crazy dialogue in the storm scene in King Lear; G. Wilson Knight's essay on Othello from The Wheel of Fire (which is the next book on my list); and the last is George Rylands comparing the early and later plays.

Some worthwhile, some not, just like the modern criticism I read on The Merry Wives of Windsor and Othello last month. I thought it was interesting that at least four of these articles from the 1920s and early 1930s mentioned Charlie Chaplin.

[James]

July 1

64. Allardyce Nicoll, Studies in Shakespeare [1927] 164 pages

Chapters on each of the four major tragedies; has something interesting to say about the relationship between Hamlet and Horatio, but otherwise totally misreads the plays. He misunderstands Othello because he considers that women are "largely unimportant" in the major tragedies, and hence totally misreads Desdemona; he considers King Lear a "failure" on the road of decline from Macbeth to Cymbeline and A Winter's Tale.

[James]

July 5

65. G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire: interpretations of Shakespearean tragedy [orig. 1930; 5th rev. ed., 1957] 343 pages

Together with Bradley's Shakespearian Tragedy, this is probably one of the most cited books on Shakespeare's plays. Knight has a more modern seeming approach; as he himself describes it, "We have not understood Shakespeare. And our error has been this: a concentration on 'character' and realistic appearances generally, things which do not constitute Shakespeare's primary glory; and a corresponding and dangerous, indeed a devastating, neglect of Shakespeare's poetic symbolism." In other words, he recognizes that Shakespeare was not, as nineteenth century criticism presented him, the great natural genius of realistic description, but a playwright who dealt in symbols and conventions to present his ideas.

The book consisted originally (1930) of 13 essays; two more essays and an appendix were added later, as well as some additional footnotes. The first essay gives his critical "theory" of how to interpret Shakespeare and is the most important; the second essay presents his view of Hamlet as essentially the villain rather than the hero of Hamlet; there are other essays on Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, and Timon of Athens, and two essays on Shakespeare and Tolstoy, including an answer to Tolstoy's attack on King Lear. Not all I would agree with, but all very interesting and giving a coherent approach to the works as a whole.

[James]

July 7

66. Liu Cixin, The Dark Forest [2008; tr. 2015] 513 pages

The second book in the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy. The Trisolarans are approaching Earth, the sophons have shut down basic research and monitor everything that happens on Earth, and the Earth government sets up the "Wallfacer" project, where four individuals are given vast powers and resources to think up and carry out strategies on their own without explanations to confuse the sophons. The idea was carried out a little contradictorily; the Wallfacers (except the major character of the book, Luo Ji) give reports on their strategies to the UN and they are discussed and argued about, in front of the sophons. Of course, the strategies they discuss are not their real strategies, but the sophons must know that, and it seems to be a contradiction to the nature of the project. On the other hand, it does give the necessary information to the reader. . .

The book struck me for most of the way as being a fast-paced science fiction adventure, with somewhat less serious content than the first book, although the bureaucractic infighting relates to the dilemma of the first book between the need for strong leadership and discipline to counteract the bureaucracy and the need for democracy and individualism to advance scientific and social progress. (Actually I think real democracy is the best antidote to bureaucracy, and perhaps ultimately that is what Liu is saying.) The mob mentality and the way it is manipulated by the bureaucrats, especially the Americans, is accurate and chilling. There is much ethical and political reflection in the novel, and some of the scientific/technological ideas were interesting.

The book I think only reached the level of the first book toward the end, with the revelation of the "dark forest" hypothesis as an explanation of the Fermi Paradox. Very frightening idea, which may not be wrong. I thought from the beginning Luo Ji's strategy would involve the sort of reasoning about other civilizations beyond Earth and Trisolaris that it did, but the details and the "dark forest" idea were a surprise.

One small point I liked: when the author uses some idea from previous science fiction classics, he actually has a character mention them (e.g. Isaac Asimov) as a sort of in the text "footnote"; I've noticed similar things in some postmodernist literary novels. I didn't notice any references to Stanislaw Lem, however, and I did see similarities in the ideas to some of his books; I haven't seen him mentioned in connection with Chinese science fiction but I can't help but think he was an influence.

[James]

July 12

67. T.S. Eliot, Essays on Elizabethan Drama [1956] 178 pages

This is a collection of essays written between 1919 and 1932, originally published in 1932, republished in 1956 minus the essays on Shakespeare and with the addition of one essay written in 1934. I was not impressed by his essay on Shakespeare in the Ridler anthology, so when he said he had left out his Shakespeare essays because of the same reasons I didn't like that one, I decided to give this a try. It has essays on Seneca in Elizabethan translation, Marlowe, Jonson, Middleton, Heywood, Tourneur, Ford, Massinger, and Marston. In some ways it reminded me of Swinburne's 1908 book, The Age of Shakespeare, which is also a poet's account of the "minor" Elizabethans (five of the same authors are dealt with in both books), but Eliot is a bit less subjective and gives more evidence for his views. It's been fifteen or twenty years since I read any of these dramatists, and I think most of them except Marlowe and Jonson I've only read one or two plays by, so I may try to read a few more, to see whether I agree with Eliot's assessments. I'm sure I will never see any of them performed; one problem with the Shakespeare Festivals (Utah and elsewhere) is that they perform Shakespeare and "balance" him with modern plays, so the one thing you will never see is anything by his contemporaries -- which is really the context he needs to be put into.

[James]

July 15

68. Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time [2018] 240 pages

Carlo Rovelli, like his friend, colleague and occasional opponent Lee Smolin, is one of the few well-known physicists who takes philosophy seriously. This analysis of the nature of time, written very simply (I would say even more simply than his book from last year, Reality is Not What it Seems), combines physics and philosophy to try to explain both what time is (or may be) in itself and what it is for us. The first part is a history of the concept of time, from the relational view of Aristotle to the absolute view of Newton and back with Einstein's special and general theories of relativity, as time loses first its unity (there are different times in different places and at different speeds), it's direction (the elementary equations of physics are reversible in time), the concept of the "present", and finally becomes discrete in quantum gravity theories. The second and third parts attempt to reconstruct our experience of time, assuming that the increase of entropy (which he considers as a question of perspective -- entropy relative to an observer, an interesting idea which is the main new thing for me in the book) and the non-commutative aspects of quantum interacttions impose the "arrow of time" and that our experience of it is due to the traces of the past in memory.

[James]

July 18

69. Liu Cixin, Death's End [2010, tr. 2016] 603 pages [Kindle]

The last book in the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy. The protagonist is a woman named Chen Xin, who succeeds Luo Ji as the "Swordholder", maintaining the balance of deterrence. Like the second book, this is for most of its length a great faced-paced science fiction adventure with much technological and social speculation, ethical questions, as well as suspense, excitement, and problems to be solved. I was very disappointed at the end, however. Through most of the book, we are given clues, especially the fairy tales, and try to imagine how the problems facing humanity will be solved; as one possible solution after another fails or is ruled out, the reader's curiosity increases to a peak. At the end, as we expect to find the author's solutions, the whole plot is just left as loose ends and the ending is one which does not actually solve any of the problems (or tell us they cannot be solved); rather it suddenly jumps ahead to an ending that could with appropriate changes be added on to any science fiction novel ever written, as if the author simply couldn't figure out the answers so he just abandoned the storyline altogether. I felt I had wasted my time trying to work things out; it's as if you're reading an Agatha Christie mystery and just before the detective is going to reveal the murderer the world is hit by an asteroid destroying all life. The last chapter might be a good ending for another book, but for this trilogy it just leaves everything unresolved.

[James]

July 20

70. Carlo Rovelli, Anaximander [2007, tr 2011] 209 pages

Rovelli, a contemporary physicist, uses the accomplishments of Anaximander of Miletus, the pre-Socratic thinker who is credited with writing the first prose work and whom Rovelli describes as the first scientist, as a springboard for meditations on the nature of science and its history. The book is well-written, and although Rovelli is not a historian or philosopher of science I didn't find anything which was obviously wrong, as I often do with books about ancient philosophy. The final chapter where he takes on religion is the only really weak part of the book, as anti-religious polemic usually is -- I think it's necessary, but so little is understood about the origins of religion that there is much speculation, as Rovelli admits. His choice of writers to discuss on the subject is obviously subjective and not the writers I would probably choose myself. As a whole, however, if the book doesn't break any new ground it is certainly an inspirational account of someone who played a fundamental and too little acknowledged role in the history of humanity.

[James]

July 22

71. Marvin W. Meyer and Richard Smith, edd., Ancient Christian Magic: Coptic Texts of Ritual Power [1994] 409 pages

A few years back now I read translations of the pagan magical texts written in Demotic and in Greek -- I don't even remember now for what project; this book contains the later Coptic texts from the Christian period. They're not all strictly Christian; there's a lot of syncretism in any magical texts, the selections begin largely pagan and Jewish and gradually the pagan elements drop out and the Christian and Christian-Gnostic elements become more dominant.

There is also a continuum in the selections going from texts which are essentially just prayers to those which are full of "magic names of power" and involve potions and rituals -- the editors quote Malinowski's phrase, "the coefficient of weirdness". Perhaps the prayers only seem less weird because we're more familiar with "we ask these things in the name of Jesus Christ" than with "in the name of Abba Abba Abba Ablanatha Nafla Akrama Chamari Ely Temach Achoocha" and so forth, but the underlying mindset is the same, things happen not by natural processes but by supernatural interventions which can be influenced by words and holy names. The general introduction argues that the distinction of "religion" and "magic" is basically just a Eurocentric distinction between "our" Christian culture and "primitive" cultures, and that the existence of these Christian texts undermines the distinction -- hence the editors' preference for the term "ritual power" rather than "magic".

Reading this book after Rovelli's Anaximander I could really see what he means when he says that there is an eternal conflict between two worldviews, the scientific and the magical/religious, and that the latter is always the majority while the former only becomes an important minority for short periods in particular places, as in fifth century Ionia or eighteenth century Europe.

The selections begin with some older texts in Old Coptic, then are divided into groups such as Healing spells, Protective spells, Sexual spells, and Curses ("make his male member like an ant that is frozen in winter, tiny and frozen"); they end up with a few collections that were the property of individual magicians or groups. The introductions to the various selections point out what is distinctive in each, so the book seemed less repetitious than the collections I read previously.

[James]

uly 27

72. Bronislaw Malinowski, Sex and Repression in Savage Society [1927] 251 pages

This is a classic text in anthropological theory. At the time it was written, modern anthropology was just beginning and Freudian psychoanalysis was at the height of its popularity. Malinowski in the first two sections uses his research in the Trobriand Islands as the basis for suggesting that the hypothesis of the Oedipus complex is based on the conditions of patriarchal society and needs to be modified to account for matrilineal societies where biological paternity is not known and the role of the father is very different, with the disciplining functions of the patriarchal father excercised by the maternal uncle; he further notes that early sexuality is not supressed in Trobriand society and that the hypothesis of the latency period also needs to be limited to societies with certain moral codes. In these two chapters he compares the European and Melanesian families in detail and describes Melanesian myths concerning the family and sexuality. The description of the Trobriand family is the most interesting part of the book. His description of the authoritarian, patriarchal European family on the other hand seems almost like a caricature; he admits that in England and America the patriarchal organization is breaking down somewhat, but he considers the ultimate result of that will be weak, hen-pecked fathers to be pitied. He aparently cannot imagine a family where the husband and wife are equal partners. However, he mentions these "modern" tendencies only to exclude them from his description.

Malinowski not only suggests that Freud's theories need to be considered in the light of anthropological study of "savage" cultures, but also that there are differences of class even within Europe, and that psychoanalysis has concentrated overly much on the upper classes (Freud's wealthy neurotic patients, as he sarcastically remarks) ignoring the peasantry and proletariat -- a good point, but his view of the peasant and proletarian family is entirely stereotypes about the brutal, drunken lower-class father who (unlike the cultured bourgeois father) beats his wife and children. It seems that even an anthropologist as perceptive as Malinowski finds it easier to escape Eurocentrism with regard to foreign cultures than to escape the class prejudices of his own. He considered himself in all this to be making a contribution both to anthropology and to psychoanalytic theory. He shows a misunderstanding of Freud when he says at the beginning that psychoanalysis is a study of the influence of the family organization on the mind; in fact for the Freudians the theory of the Oedipus complex is a dogma about the mind which purports to explain the family organization. The Freudians of course responded to his ideas as an attack on their dogma; Ernest Jones wrote a reply in which he asserts that the ignorance of paternity in Trobriand society and the entire matrilineal system are just results of repressing the knowledge of paternity and displacing the hatred of the father onto the uncle to avoid the consequences of the Oedipus complex which exists everywhere and is the basis of human civilization, taking seriously Freud's hypothetical "primal crime".

In the remainder of the book Malinowski replies, criticizing Totem and Taboo and moving further away from the Freudian ideas of the first two parts, and trying to give an alternative account of the beginnings of civilization. Clearly, Malinowski throughout the book takes Freudianism more seriously than I can, but he does explain that if psychoanalysis is to be a scientific theory it must be based on empirical study of actual societies and not a priori universal metaphysical theories of human nature. While his criticisms of Freud are well-taken, his own positive theory has major problems. Between his and Freud's accounts of pre-cultural humanity, there is not much to choose: both are pontificating about primate societies in complete ignorance, since the first studies of apes and monkeys in the field were far in the future at that time. His absolute distinction of animal "instinct" and human "culture", his claim that there are no differences between groups or individuals of the same species among the primates, and so forth are obviously contradicted by the books I have read on chimpanzees and baboons. On the other side of the divide, there was also little known at the time about human evolution. His claim that human marriage is created by ceremonies and that all societies punish couples who cohabit without them seems also to be based on upper-class Europeans; judging from literature "common law marriages" are the rule, and formal marriages the exception, among peasants and workers in much of the world outside Europe. (This doesn't affect his claim that human marriages are dependent on social sanctions, which I think is a valid point.) There are many other claims about human culture that I found very strange; but perhaps this is because there has been much change in the norms of marriage and the family in the past hundred years.

I don't want to give a completely negative account; Malinowski is an intelligent thinker and for a first attempt at integrating depth psychology and anthropology the book is quite interesting. Its interest, however, today is primarily in the history of ideas.

[James]

July 28

73. Stanislaw Lem, Fiasco [1986, tr. 1988] 336 pages [Kindle]

Fiasco is one of Lem's most important novels. It deals with the theme of first contact with an alien civilization, and as with nearly all Lem's novels on that subject the emphasis is on the impossibility of ever understanding the truly alien. An expedition from Earth attempts, with the best of motives (at least apparently), to make contact with a nearby civilization and the result is -- fiasco. In the process, Lem sheds light on the dynamic of the cold war, and the results it might well have had in the sixties and seventies if things had turned out just a little differently. Reading this right after Cixin Liu's trilogy, I couldn't help but relate this to his "dark forest" hypothesis, but where in Cixin all advanced civilizations know a priori that hostility is inevitable and avoid contact or strike first, in Lem the Earth expedition intends to make peaceful contact and behaves rationally in theory -- but each step necessarily leads in the wrong direction. Events have their own dynamic, and the result is not what any of the parties involved would expect or desire. A very disturbing and sobering book, and unlike Cixin Lem knew how to end it effectively.

[James]

Aug. 4

74. Leonard Susskind and Art Friedman, Special Relativity and Classical Field Theory: The Theoretical Minimum [2017] 425 pages

I like the idea of the theoretical minimum books; they are something more than popularizations, something less than textbooks, and promise to teach the math necessary for a real understanding of the science as it is needed. This is the third book; it follows directly on what was presented in the first book on classical physics, and I'm not sure why Susskind (the principal author) decided to separate the two by the book on quantum theory, which is based on different ideas and different math. Unfortunately, I read the first book more than a year ago, and the wait for this to come out and be purchased at the library meant that my memory was somewhat vague on what I had learned in that, especially since my physics courses in college were not only long ago but didn't even mention Lagrangians and least action which are the basis of Susskind's approach. I would suggest that the reader who, like me, has never learned this material in school or had courses in vector and tensor calculus should read volumes one and three right after one another and then go back to volume two (or perhaps wait for volume four on general relativity which probably also follows on one and three rather than on the second volume).

The present book is in two parts. The first part, on special relativity, seemed rather simple, perhaps because the ideas were familiar to me from many more popular accounts. The second part, on classical field theory (centering on Maxwell's equations) was much more difficult; this is where the Lagrangians and vector calculus kicked in. Some of the difficulty undoubtedly was due to the shortcomings of my mathematical background, although I did minor in math in college back in the dark ages, but some I would have to put on the authors, who made it more confusing than necessary. The most annoying feature of the book was that literally almost every chapter introduced a new system of notation -- not for new concepts, but for the same equations. The authors use at least six different ways of writing the same vectors, and at least four different notations for partial derivatives. It was very frustrating to have to learn the substance of the equations simultaneously with new formal ways of writing them, and especially to spend ten minutes puzzling over what an unfamiliar-looking equation was actually saying only to realize that it was the same equation that was explained in a previous chapter using a different notation. I think just from a paedagogical standpoint it would have made more sense if the authors had chosen one (fairly expansive) notation and stuck with it, explaining the more condensed notations at the end in an appendix after I had learned what the equations actually meant. I know pencils are expensive when you're saving up for a new supercollider, but still. . .

Despite this, I was surprised at how much of the book I understood; essentially almost everything except the last chapter, which (as in most math books based on courses or lectures) sped up to squeeze in everything the authors wanted to cover before the class ended. This was what happened with my college calculus course, which covered Gauss's theorem and Stokes theorem on the last day -- perhaps the best thing I got out of this book was finally understanding what those two theorems were about. I'm not sure that the book would really be totally understandable to someone with just a high school calculus background, as the authors suggest, but it certainly comes closer than say Penrose's Road to Reality which made the same claim and in fact assumed a knowledge of complex analysis. This series may not be the absolute beginner's choice, but it comes as close as any I've found so far.

[James]

Aug. 5

75. Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go [2005] 288 pages

Never Let Me Go seems to be Ishiguro's best known novel, to judge by various lists on the Internet. It is a good but somewhat disturbing book. Perhaps I should start with a spoiler alert here; but the real spoiler may be that it doesn't really matter -- nothing happens. Not only are there no "plot twists", but the plot that could be expected to never develops, and that's in a way the whole point. If I were to give a synopsis of the novel to someone who has never heard of it or of the author, describing it as the story of three adolescent friends from a boarding school, two girls and a boy in a romantic triangle, set against a dystopian science fiction background -- or just quote the description from the jacket flap, about the "discord and misunderstanding that hint at a dark secret behind Hailsham's nurturing facade" -- anyone would say it sounds like a typical dystopian fantasy for Young Adult readers, but that's not at all what the novel is. That's the genre expectation which Ishiguro in postmodern fashion plays against. A novel following that formula would develop like this: the friends slowly discover the hidden truth about Hailsham and the dystopian society they live in; they secretly organize a resistance movement and so forth. That's not this book.

All Ishiguro's novels I have read -- which is all except The Unconsoled -- despite their varied plots, settings and styles, have a theme in common: memory and the suppression of memories, especially of guilt about political activities (World War II in three books, colonialism in one, and symbolic in The Buried Giant). The first four novels are in a realistic, psychological style, the final one is a fantasy with a more or less magical realist feel; this one is in between, in a realist style but with a science fiction element that is not totally plausible (or I think intended to be; if it were fleshed out in more detail, made more believable in itself, it would be harder to see it as a symbol or analogy for so many aspects of real life). Instead of denial about the past and their own guilt, what the characters in this book exhibit is denial about their own current reality, what has been and is being done to them. Unlike the formula novel I imagined above (and contrary to what the jacket flap claims), they do not "discover" a hidden secret; as one character puts it, they are "told and not told" from the beginning, but never face the consequences; they simply fantasize about exceptions, deferrals, and so forth, while living their everyday life as if it were all normal. The "revelation" at the end reveals nothing they did not already know; it simply stripped away the fantasies they relied upon to deny the consequences. (Actually, it indirectly reveals something to the characters about themselves and their relationships to one another, but that is part of the other plot, the relationship theme.) There is never any questioning (with the exception of one minor character, Miss Lucy) that everything is the way it has to be, never any thought of resistance or even real complaint. Ishiguro, I think, in this book steps up his critique of modern society, moving away from the question of denying past evils and guilt to the question of denying what is being done at the present, beyond the denial by the guilty parties to the denial by the victims themselves, the total triumph of false consciousness. This is what makes the novel so disturbing.

[James]

Aug. 9

76. Terry Pratchett, The Color of Magic [1983] 293 pages [Kindle]

Probably everyone who reads a lot of popular science books, with their inevitable, futile attempts at using reason and evidence to refute "Intelligent Design", has at one time or another wondered what the universe would look like if it did in fact have an intelligent designer. Terry Pratchett asked a different question: what would the universe look like if it had had an Imaginative Designer, with an unearthly sense of humor? One possibility is a flat disc carried through space on the back of a giant turtle. The Color of Magic is the first of about forty books in the Discworld series. Of course, it is fantasy, and I haven't read much fantasy in a long time -- I wouldn't be reading these if my library's book club hadn't chosen the twentieth book, Hogfather, as our read for December. While I don't believe that this is the kind of series that has to be read in order without missing a book, I felt that reading at least the first few books would give me an idea of the sort of world they are set in.

Pratchett has a very original sense of humor, and this novel seemed quite fresh in comparison with the usual crop of Middle Earth and Hogwarts clones; but it does have similarities with the last fantasy author I read extensively, at a much younger age: Piers Anthony. There were definitely resemblances to his Incarnations of Immortality series -- particularly in that both series have anthropomorphic characters of Death, Fate, and so forth. The two series both began in 1983. Discworld also resembles Anthony's magical world of Xanth (which I believe began before 1970), allowing for the different target ages of the two series, and the fact that Pratchett's humor is a bit more sophisticated. I did a Google search on the two names together, from which I conclude that Anthony's fans generally like Pratchett, while Pratchett's fans generally are offended by the comparison. One seemingly more objective critic claimed that Anthony started out better but quickly ran out of steam because his world was too detached from the real world and the plots became repetitious while Pratchett kept getting better because he was basing the books on subjects in the real world (or the world of literature); this is the only book I've read by Pratchett so I will reserve judgment on him, but it's true that Anthony got boring and I gave up on the series about halfway through (though I may have just outgrown them). If Pratchett really did get better, than I may read more of the series beyond the first few, because this one was well-written with lots of allusions to literature and the real world.

[James]

Aug. 11

77. Liu Cixin, Wandering Earth [2013] 484 pages [Kindle]

Wandering Earth is a collection of eleven science fiction stories by Liu Cixin, the author of the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy. I would say that all the stories in this collection are well worth reading; they offer a representative sample of his science fiction ranging from "hard" technology-based stories to more humorous and allegorical writing.

Two of the stories, the first, title story "The Wandering Earth" and the seventh, "The Micro-Age", deal with humanity's attempts to survive a cosmic disaster, the explosion of the sun. The first is hard science fiction, though with a human angle, while the second is less realistic.

The second story, "Mountain", was perhaps my favorite; it starts from the simple idea of a "hollow earth", not as the cranks who think the Earth is hollow with people living on the inner surface conceive it but (as we all proved in first year physics) with no gravity in the interior, and proceeds to ask how physics would have developed in such a world. This is combined with a frame story set on Earth.

The third story, "Of Ants and Dinosaurs", is an obvious allegory of "Mutual Assured Destruction" and at first seemed somewhat too blatently didactic, until I realized that it was also an homage to Isaac Asimov who wrote a similar story about dinosaurs back in the "golden age". The eighth story, "Devourer" is a sort of sequel to this; the basic premise was reminiscent of a certain Doctor Who episode but that may be coincidence. It also fits in with the "dark forest" hypothesis of the trilogy but with a difference.

The fourth story, "Sun of China", has a technological device in common with one episode in the trilogy, and is also somewhat outdated, having an appearance by a hundred-year-old Stephen Hawking; one slight problem with Liu Cixin's science fiction in general is that many of his stories, and the first book of the trilogy, take place or at least begin in the present or recent past with events which have obviously not occurred and technology which doesn't yet exist. I liked the way he points out that space exploration will not be real until the working class goes into space. Number five, "The Wages of Humanity" (apparently in a different edition this is titled "For the Benefit of Mankind"), is a social satire, which reminded me of a story by Stanislaw Lem (of course) but this might also be coincidence. These two stories seemed the most specifically "Chinese".

Number six, "Curse 5.0" is obviously related to an incident in the second book of his trilogy, the virus which targets specific individuals (and perhaps the danger of viruses taking control of internet-linked appliances should be given more thought in the real world), but is also a sort of self-parody of his fascination with disasters, with Liu Cixin himself as one of the characters.

Number nine, "Taking Care of Gods" was included in the anthology edited by Ken Liu that I read a couple months back.

The last two stories, "With Her Eyes", and "The Longest Fall" are also related to one another, with the first story referred to in the second, although I'm not sure they are entirely compatible. They also go back to the ideas of first year physics.

[James]

Aug. 13

78. Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic: A Novel of Discworld [1986] 293 pages [Kindle]

The second novel in the series, this completes the story begun in the first novel.

[James]

Aug. 19

79. Frederick Copleston, S.J., A History of Philosophy, v. 9: Maine de Biran to Sartre [1975] 480 pages

Finally finished after three and a half years! (Or forty three, if you count the first time I started it in college.) This was the ninth and last volume. He mentions a projected tenth volume in the preface, but apparently never wrote it; the tenth volume included in one reprint edition is an unrelated collection of his essays. Like the eighth volume, this one is a real falling off from the level of the first seven; as he explains himself in the preface, faced with the large number of nineteenth and early twentieth century philosophers, and with administrative responsibilities taking up much of his time, he decided to concentrate on the thinkers he was already familiar with, which obviously meant a concentration on Catholic or religious philosophers and writers who are not the authors I would consider to be representative of the British (v. 8) or French (v. 9) philosophy of the time. I hadn't even heard of many of the authors he treats of in these two volumes, despite having been a philosophy major in college. Moreover, many of the writers he discusses are not generally considered as "philosophers" at all, but as literary, religious, scientific or political figures; and where the earlier volumes concentrate on a few major figures, with more general chapters in between, in this one, apart from Comte, Bergson and Sartre no one gets their own chapter and there are many figures who are treated in a few paragraphs.

The book begins well in the first part, "From the Revolution to Auguste Comte", with the aftermath of the French revolution, the "Traditionalists" and the "Ideologues", and then moves on to Maine de Biran; there is a chapter on the "Eclectics" (Royer-Collard, Cousins, and Jouffroy), one on "Social Philosopy" (i.e. the "utopian socialists", Fourier, Proudhon, and the most space given to St. Simon, who however, is still not covered adequately) and a chapter on Comte. The second part, "From Auguste Comte to Henri Bergson", and the beginning of the third part, "From Bergson to Sartre", or more than a third of the book, however, is given mainly to the "spiritualist" tradition, "Philosophy and Christian Apologetics" and "Thomism in France"; apart from Bergson and Maritain these chapters were all about writers I hadn't heard of and despite Copleston (in his element here) trying to differentiate their minute differences about God and theology and determine how close they are to Catholic orthodoxy, they all seemed pretty much to be saying the same things, trying to use Maine de Biran and/or German Idealism to reconcile God and Christian metaphysics with a positivist conception of science. There is then a fairly interesting chapter on "Philosophy of Science" including Poincaré, Duhem, Meyerson and Bachelard, followed by two more chapters on basically Catholic writers (including Teilhard de Chardin and Gabriel Marcel); he ends up with two chapters on Sartre and a last chapter on Camus and Merleau-Ponty, with a few concluding paragraphs on Levi-Strauss and structuralism.

In addition to the question of his choice of subjects, this book also was less objective than the others in its treatment. Although Copleston never pretended to be "objective" in the sense of hiding his Catholic perspective, and I preferred that, in that a known and admitted bias is easier to correct for than a hidden one, which is what is found with most "objective" accounts in a subject as controversial as philosophy, he did try to understand everyone he discussed and present them fairly, and then criticize them in a respectful way. In this book he lets his opinions overrule this, especially with Sartre whom he obviously has a great dislike for. To begin with, Sartre here seems out of place, to come from out of nowhere, because Copleston has excluded most secular philosophers after the classical positivists and the Marxist tradition entirely (he considers Marxism to be a nineteenth century philosophy which would be forgotten if it hadn't been articially adopted by the Communist parties as an official "line" -- rather ironic for a Thomist, who supports a thirteenth century philosophy artifically kept alive by having been adopted as the official "line" of the Catholic Church. I would guess there are far more Marxists outside the Communist parties than Thomists outside the Catholic Church). He refers to Sartre's dialectical arguments frequently with expressions such as "tiresome jargon" -- I might use the same expression for the jargon of "the Transcendental Absolute" and so forth in the writers he discusses earlier.

Now that I have finished, to sum up the whole history -- the first volume was fairly weak, and I would recommend another history for Greek philosophy (e.g. Guthrie's); the second through seventh volumes, and especially those on the Middle Ages, are probably the best general history in English, if you correct for the Catholic bias (not extremely apparent, except in the choice of whom to focus on) and the fact that they are roughly a half-century old; the eighth and ninth volumes are as described in this review, and I would recommend other books for the twentieth century (actually I'm not sure a general history is the best way to approach contemporary thought anyway.)


80. Patrick Modiano, La Place de l'étoile [1968] 206 pages [in French; Kindle]

When Modiano won the Nobel Prize in Literature three years back I read a single-volume collection of ten of his novels (all his novels are short, barely meeting the definition of a novel as opposed to a novella). This month I got around to going back and starting his first books, which made his reputation in France. This was his first book and the first of his Occupation Trilogy. Actually, this first book is not exactly set during the Occupation, but (as with many of his later novels as well) has a protagonist with a major obsession with (and false memories of) the Occupation. It was published at a time when a younger and radicalizing generation of French students was beginning to see through the official World War II mythology about the Occupation and the Resistance and ask questions about Vichy and the collaboration of the French bourgeoisie with the Nazis.

La Place de l'étoile -- the title refers ironically both to the location in Paris of the Arc de Triomphe, that is to say the symbolic center of French patriotism, and to the place on the clothing where French Jews were required to wear the yellow Star of David during the Occupation -- is not only his first novel, but his most difficult in style, and his most "angry" as many reviews describe it. Like all his books, there is an element of autobiography -- the protagonist, Raphaël Schlemilovich (the Yiddish word "Schlemiel", meaning a "chump or bungler", with a Russian patronymic suffix, i.e. "Son of a chump") is, like Modiano himself, a Jewish intellectual adolescent born during or just after the end of the war. Modiano's father, with whom he had a rather distant emotional relationship, was a black-marketeer during the Occupation, with a dubious relationship to the Germans; the same is (or rather may be) true for Schlemilovich (and the protagonists of many of Modiano's later books). Schlemilovich senior, having abandoned his wife and son after the war, is supposedly living in New York manufacturing kaleidoscopes; in one episode of the novel the protagonist's girlfriend lives in an apartment full of kaleidoscopes, and the one she shows him is based on a human face. Of course this is symbolic; his novels, each one in itself and even more all of them taken as a whole, form a kaleidoscopic autobiography in which identity and memory are constantly shifting and we are never sure who anybody really is -- to be sure, the protagonists themselves (often named "Patrick Modiano") seldom know who they really are.

So, the protagonist here (who is also the first person narrator, although he sometimes shifts abruptly to third or even second person) is obviously both obsessed with the Occupation period and out of touch with reality; the narration is composed mainly of fantasies or hallucinations, and we are never certain what (if anything at all) is "real" and what is "fantasy". At the beginning, he has just graduated and moves with his aristocratic French friend Des Essarts (an actual aristocratic family and specifically the name of a conservative author in the nineteenth/early twentieth century) to Geneva, where they live on his friend's money and make the acquaintance of Maurice Sachs, a famous (and historical) "Juif-Collabo" (Jewish collaborator.) (Actually the historical Sachs did not live through the war, but Modiano is not concerned with facts here, and the meeting with him is possibly the first of the protagonist's fantasies.) Slightly later on, he inherits a large amount of money from a relative on his mother's side and uses it to bring his father back to Europe. He makes his father's fortune and the two live a life together for a while pretending to be conservative provincials from rural France coming to the city to make their fortunes (he compares himself to Rastignac, the character in Balzac). Of course, his father's history is similar to that of Sachs and of Modiano's father, as a black-marketeer under the Occupation. Presumably Schlemilovich doesn't actually know who or where his father is and this whole episode is just a fantasy; it ends with him sending his father back to New York, abandoning him as he was abandoned by him. Raphaël then goes back to graduate school, where he distinguishes himself by his anti-Semitism and support for the French far right (references to Maurras and Action Française, etc).

I am tempted to follow along with all the episodes of fantasy, but that would mean marking the whole review as spoilers. It is enough to say that they become progressively less realistic, and he often becomes his father as a collaborator during the Occupation (and at one point he even seems to remember being Dreyfus in the nineteenth century.) At the same time, figures from the Occupation period appear in his present day fantasies and figures from the present day appear in his "past". He also throws out references to his close friendships with various intellectuals of the interwar period, such as Sartre, Celine, Aragon, etc. who would of course have belonged to his father's generation. None of Modiano's later books are this bizarre, but the themes of all of them are derived from this beginning.

[James]

Aug. 23

81. Patrick Modiano, La ronde de nuit [1969] 153 pages [in French]

The second book of the Occupation Trilogy; this is not a trilogy in the sense of a single narrative divided into three parts, like Mahfouz' Cairo Trilogy for example, but rather like Achebe's African Trilogy, three separate novels which simply have a common theme, in this case collaboration during the Occupation (and the name is somewhat misleading in that many, if not most, of Modiano's over forty novels are somehow concerned with the Occupation period). Unlike the first book, this one is actually set during the time of the Occupation, in Paris. The novel begins with a party, introducing more than a dozen characters in the first two pages, through snippets of dialogue; we don't initially know which of these will be important to the book (and they don't include some of the most important characters), and we don't even realize for several pages that the book is a first person, "stream of consciousness" narration by an unnamed character (later identified by his pseudonyms, "Swing Troubador" and "Princess de Lamballe".) The style, as in all of Modiano's novels, is very experimental and modernist, although at least in this book the narrator's consciousness seems to be largely relating real events, even if it does skip around in time and place, rather than fantasies as in the first book.

We realize early on that the narrator is reluctantly (although not under torture or threats) betraying a group of his associates to another group, but the situation and the reasons which lead up to it are only gradually revealed over the course of the novel. Various phrases are repeated throughout the book in a sort of leitmotif technique. This is really all I can say about it without spoilers.

[James]

Aug. 25

82. Patrick Modiano, Les boulevards de ceinture [1972] 184 pages [in French]

The third book of the Occupation Trilogy; written in the same style as the first two. The book begins with the narrator apparently looking at a photograph of his father and two other men in a bar; then we are suddenly in the photograph, and the narrator (in his late twenties) is in the bar, trying to make contact with his father, whom he hasn't seen in ten years. The time seems to be during the Occupation. After a while, there is a long flashback in which he remembers the last time he saw his father, ten years earlier; at that time as well he was trying unsuccessfully to find out something about him, since he hadn't seen him since early childhood. As in the first two books (and most of Modiano's novels) we aren't really sure whether the narrative is reality, memory, or fantasy. The characters are all from the underworld, and the tone is that of a noir detective story, but without the closure.

[James]

83. Stanislaw Lem, Peace on Earth [1987] 240 pages [Kindle]

As far as I can tell, Peace on Earth is Lem's last novel; in any case, it is the last which has been translated into English. The subject is the arms race: Earth, taking the first step toward the sort of world which is described in Fiasco, has moved the arms race to the Moon, where the arsenals of the various nations are undergoing a self-evolution of which the Earth is (intentionally) ignorant, but there is suspicion that the robot weapons may have combined and plan an invasion of the Earth; and of course Ijon Tichy is in the midst of things. The book alternates between his experiences on Earth after his return from a reconaissance mission to the Moon, and flashbacks to before and during his mission. An interesting book, although not quite as good as Fiasco.


Aug. 26

84. Honoré de Balzac, L'illustre Gaudissart [1833] 50 pages [in French]

Generally, no matter how bad a book is, the introduction tells us that it is a masterpiece; so when I read in the introduction to this that it was Balzac's worst book, I wasn't expecting much. Actually, it wasn't that bad; not one of his greatest works, to be sure, but an interesting book which is one of his better satires. Like many of his minor works, the plot is fairly minimal and seems to be an excuse for the description (or in this case, satire) of the customs of some particular group or time. L'illustre Gaudissart begins with a half-serious, half-satirical description of the "commis-voyageur" or travelling salesman; then it introduces l'illustre Gaudissart as a particular specimen of the type; it then takes on the journalistic transformation of ideas into commodities, and has Gaudissart abandon his trade in hats and other aparrel for life insurance and magazine subscriptions. There is some political satire here, of the Republicans and St. Simoniens, but it is very light. The book then follows Gaudissart into Touraine, where the slight plot concerns a trick played on him by the Tourangiens.

[James]

Aug. 28

85. Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites [1987] 277 pages [Kindle]

This was the third book in the Discworld fantasy series. A nine-year old girl decides to go to the "Unseen University" to become a wizard, but girls aren't allowed. A fun, humorous book with a good if somewhat obvious message, this would be a good book for children if it weren't so definitely written for adults -- but after three books I'm still not sure why this series generates such enthusiasm. I understand that the series is supposed to get progressively better, so I will read at least a few more. (Book 20 is the reading for the library book club in December, but I'm not sure I will read all the intervening books. Especially the ones I would have to buy myself.)

[James]

Aug. 31

86. Terry Pratchett, Mort [1987] 309 pages [Kindle]

The fourth book in the Discworld fantasy series, and the first in the subseries about the "anthropomorphic personification" of Death, which I particularly want to read as background to Hogfather, the December read for my library's book club. Mort (short for Mortimer) is the human apprentice to Death, who causes problems because of his human emotions and human demand that the cosmos correspond to human conceptions of fairness and justice. In addition to this "metaphysical" theme, the book is a comic parody of the fairy-tale motif of the hero rescuing a princess (alluded to also in the earlier books) and perhaps of the "male rescue fantasy" in general. This was the best of the books so far in my opinion.

[James]

Sept. 2

87. Karl Popper, The World of Parmenides: Essays on the Presocratic Enlightenment [1998] 328 pages

This book is a posthumously published collection of Popper's writings on the Presocratics (mostly; there is some discussion of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle). The essays were written over a nearly forty year period (the earliest was from 1958, and some were still being worked on when he died.) As one would expect, given Popper's own philosophy of science, he constantly modified his views as a result of criticism and self-criticism, but there is a constant thread through all of them.

The first essay, and the earliest, is his 1958 Presidential Address before the Aristotelian Society, "Back to the Presocratics", in which he outlines his viewpoint on the Presocratics as essentially the first thinkers in history to form a critical tradition, one in which hypotheses could be improved by criticism rather than simply accepted or rejected as dogmas. I've long held the same view of the Presocratics, and I largely agree with Popper's viewpoint (although he sometimes interprets them as coming a bit too close to his own philosophy of science, which he calls "critical rationalism"). Like most writers on the Presocratics, he is in my opinion unfair to Anaximenes; if he had applied his own view that the Presocratic philosophies were all based on criticism of their predecessors, rather than taking Anaximenes as a sort of exception who didn't really understand Anaximander's ideas, I think he might have seen that Anaximenes represented a step forward rather than a step backwards. I know I'm in a minority here and I might not be understanding him correctly -- after all we don't have anything but a few fragments and testimonia to go on, but the ancients themselves considered him as the culmination of the Milesian philosophy and they knew more about both Anaximander and Anaximenes than we do. This is just a minor point, however.

The second essay is one of the best things I have ever read on Xenophanes -- actually the only thing I have read that takes him seriously as a thinker.

Most of the book, however, is devoted to Parmenides, and contains four versions of Popper's argument as he developed it over time. I agree with Popper's views that Parmenides was one of the most important figures in the history of philosophy, and has been long misinterpreted; and that the Way of Seeming is intended seriously and is also a step forward, especially in astronomy, although it was soon to be superseded by the Atomists, who came to their view through criticism of Parmenides. (Popper totally ignores Anaxagoras, who I think was also reacting to Parmenides.) He has two very interesting if unprovable (and unrefutable!) ideas about the origins of the Way of Truth -- that it may have been suggested by Parmenides' discovery that the phases of the Moon are illusions caused by reflected light from the Sun; and that he may have been color blind (or had a blind relative) -- to understand this argument you need to read the book.

The longest essay is his Opening Remarks to a 1965 Conference on Philosophy of Science, "Beyond the Search for Invariants", in which he argues that Parmenides' ideas have been one of the major tendencies in the history of science right down to the present, and discusses Parmenidean and anti-Parmenidean hypotheses in science, inter alia in Newton, Einstein, and thermodynamics.

The later essays are "work in progress", many fragmentary, but of interest.

[James]

Sept. 4

88. Terry Pratchett, Sourcery: A Novel of Discworld [1988] 253 pages

Book five of the Discworld series, this belongs to the same subseries about Rincewind the Wizard as the first two books, which is generally not the best writing in the series in my opinion (the character of Rincewind, the inept and cowardly wizard, becomes rather tiresome at times, although he sometimes rises to a higher level against his usual desires). If this hadn't been written nine years before the beginning of the Harry Potter series, I would have dismissed it as a Harry Potter clone; but since it came first, it has a certain interest as a possible source: it is about a school for wizards (although at the university rather than boarding school level), there is a "sourcerer" or powerful but evil wizard who wishes the wizards to rule the world (under his rule, of course) similar to Voldemort, a magical talking wizard's hat that decides destinies and reminded me of the "sorting hat", and a group of three, two male and one female, who form the opposition and try to save the world. Of course, there is going to be a certain similarity in any fantasy about magic and wizards, and Discworld is all about parodying the usual tropes of the genre, but at times these books read like children's or YA novels with adult protagonists and some sexual allusions thrown in. It's still better than the formula fantasies, and I like some of the humor although it seemed a little bit forced in places.


89. Kim Man-Choong, The Cloud Dream of the Nine: A Korean Novel; A Story of the Times of the Tangs of China About 840 A.D. (translated by James S. Gale) [ca. 1689; tr. 1922] 307 pages

I read this for a World Literature discussion group on Goodreads (the same group for which I read the Jamaican literature last year and the Chinese science fiction for the first half of this year, and which will be spending a year or so on Korean writing; it's expanding my horizons in literature.) Kim Man-Choong (or Man-jung, to use the more modern transliteration) was a seventeenth-century (1637-1692) Korean author, and this is apparently considered a classic of Korean literature. It is the first Korean work I have read, so I don't really have much background for appreciating or discussing it. The version I read is an old translation by a Christian missionary; there is a more recent translation which is currently well beyond my budget, but which will be issued in paperback sometime next year.

The story is set in China under the Tang dynasty; there is a frame story about a Buddhist monk named Song-jin, who is punished for his momentary failure in ascetic attitude in talking to eight beautiful fairies by being reincarnated as So-Yoo, a poor young scholar. The novel then follows the life of So-Yoo and his marriages to eight beautiful women, who are actually the eight fairies also being punished by reincarnation; he becomes a rich and powerful official of the Emperor. I wouldn't mind being punished like this. The eight wives are far more interesting and active characters than I would have expected in a novel about polygamy; two dancing girls, a rich daughter and her maid, a sword wielding assasin, a mermaid princess, and the only daughter of the Emperor, all of whom are poets and scholars in their own right. At the very end (if this is a spoiler, the introduction already tells you everything about the plot), he suddenly realizes without any preparation that human happiness is transient, the old monk collects him, and he finds himself in his old cell, the whole live of So-Yoo having been a "cloud dream". The eight wives show up as the eight fairies and they all devote themselves to Buddhist asceticism.

The story of So-Yoo is an interesting love-story; I'm sure I would have appreciated the book much more if I were familiar with the conventions of this type of literature (and knew Korean). I found it difficult to take the frame story seriously; it seemed like the old porno stories that tacked a moral on the end to try to claim to the censors that they were promoting virtue. Perhaps a Buddhist would find it more convincing.

[James]

Sept. 9

90. Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters: A Novel of Discworld [1988] 373 pages [Kindle]

The sixth book in the Discworld series, and the second in the "Witches" subseries, this is full of allusions to literature, especially Shakespeare (and particularly MacBeth). Probably the best of the six I've read so far.

[James]

Sept. 11

91. W.K.C. Guthrie, The Sophists [[1971] 345 pages

Originally published as part one of his History of Greek Philosophy, v.3: The Fifth-Century Enlightenment; part two has also been published separately as Socrates, which I will be reading in a month or so. I read the first two volumes of the History, on the Presocratic natural philosophers, almost fifty years ago; they are still the best books I have read on the Presocratics. Like the Presocratics, the Sophists are known only through fragments and generally hostile references in Plato and Aristotle, and even more than in the first two books this is a speculative attempt (though based on what evidence we have) to reconstruct their thought.

As the subtitle of the original version indicates, the Sophistic movement had many similarities in themes and spirit with the Enlightenment of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and Guthrie points them out. He makes the point that there was no real "school" of Sophists, and they differed on most points among themselves; what makes them an identifiable group is not the answers they gave but the questions they were concerned with, many of which were first raised in the fifth century BCE and are still being debated today. These thinkers are far more interesting to me than the more conservative Plato, and it is really unfortunate that their works have been lost; Guthrie suggests that it was because they were more topical than systematic writers and that Plato and Aristotle more or less superseded them, but I think it is also due to the fact that all ancient writers had to pass through the bottleneck of copying by the Christians and Moslems in late antiquity and the Middle Ages, and these writers were simply not as congenial as Plato and Aristotle to the religious-minded. Guthrie unavoidably has to discuss the Sophists largely on the basis of the use of them as characters in Plato's dialogues, which probably gives a fair idea of what the movement as a whole was like but is very unreliable when it comes to the specific positions of particular figures.

Most of the book is organized by themes, such as the Nomos-Physis (Convention vs. Nature) opposition, the idea of the "Social Compact", Ethical Relativism, Rationalizing of Religion and Skepticism, etc. At the end he briefly discusses the ten individuals we know the most about, Protagoras, Gorgias, Prodicus, Hippias, Antiphon, Thrasymachus, Critias, Antisthenes, Alcidamas, and Lycophron, and tries to reconstruct their positions as coherent approaches. Not surprisingly nearly all of these figure as characters in Plato's dialogues.

[James]

Sept. 15

92. Mia Couto, Every Man is a Race [1990, tr. 1994] 118 pages

Mia Couto is one of the best-known writers of Mozambique; he won the 2016 Neustadt Prize, at which time I read his 1992 novel The Sleepwalking Land (translation of Terra Son âmbula) which is probably his best-known work. The little I know about him is from the front matter of the book; he was born in 1955 in Beira, Mozambique, and, although white, he was involved in the independence struggle and became an official under the post-independence government. The present collection of short stories combines some of his 1989 stories from his newspaper column "Cronicando" with a collection of stories from a book published with the same title (in Portuguese, Cada homem é uma raça) in 1990.

This is his third book, after a volume of poetry and an earlier short story collection. It contains eighteen stories. The stories range from straight realism to "magical realism"; his style in some of the stories is the closest to Gabriel Garcia Marquez of anyone I have read. Many of them, like the novel I read before, are concerned with the problems of colonialism, the independence war and the subsequent civil war. All are extremely good and thought-provoking. I will be reading many of his later books.

[James]

Sept. 18

93. Khalid Hosseini, Sea Prayer [2018] 48 pages

Hosseini, the author of such best-selling novels as The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, wrote this short book in reaction to the deaths of the refugees, many of them children, fleeing Syria for Europe in 2015. I'm not certain how to describe it; it has the form of a children's picture book, with full page water color illustrations by the British artist Dan Williams, and Amazon lists it as "Age Level 7 and up" and "Grade 2 and up", but the Library of Congress catalog record goes out of its way to code it as "adult" (usually they only include an "audience" code if it's not for adults.) The book is in the form of a letter to a young boy, and would probably be understandable to someone in the middle grades, but I think it was probably intended for adults. The Library of Congress also classified it as prose fiction, but most of the early reviews I have seen (it was only released today) call it "poetic" and it seems to me to be in free verse. Whatever it is, it makes a strong statement about those who haved been forced to flee the political and religious violence in their country.


94. Terry Pratchett, Pyramids [1989] 321 pages

The seventh book in the Discworld series (I'm planning to read one more in order and then begin skipping), this is a "stand-alone" in the sense of not being part of any of the subseries (all but the first and second novels are "stand-alone" in the sense that they don't have to be read in order and don't depend on earlier books). It begins with a short section on the "Assassins' Guild" but the major portion of the book takes place in Djelibeybi, the Discworld equivalent of ancient Egypt, and is full of clever allusions to Egypt and classical Greece, obviously intended as satire of wossname. Probably the main point is about religion, with the gods becoming real and how that terrifies their priests (imagine the terror our televangelists and Christian rightists would feel if Jesus turned out to be real and showed up to hold them accountable.) The situation is too removed from modern times to be really powerful as satire, though, and the novel is really more comic than satirical. It was worth reading, though not particularly outstanding.

[James]

Sept. 27

95. Benjamin R. Foster, tr., Before the Muses: An Anthology of Akkadian Literature [2005] 1044 pages

Earlier this summer, I read two anthologies of Sumerian literature in translation, probably the oldest literature written (or at least which survives). This month I followed up with this anthology of Akkadian literature, translated from Old Akkadian, Babylonian, and Assyrian. The book, after a general introduction, is divided into four chapters, the Archaic Period 2300-1850 BCE, the Classical Period 1850-1500, the Mature Period 1500-1000, and the Late Period 1000-100. The assignment of particular selections to periods is often uncertain. Within each period, the selections are organized by topics, as Kings of Babylonia, Kings of Assyria, Mythology and Epics, Hymns and Prayers, Love Lyrics, Folktales and Humor, Incantations, and so forth. Most of the selections are poetry, although there are a few prose works as well. All are newly translated, and this supersedes the much earlier anthologies I have read (e.g Heidel's Babylonian Genesis and the relevant sections of Pritchard's Ancient Near Eastern Texts, although the latter contains some, mainly non-literary texts such as the Law Codes which are not included here.) Most of the selections are complete, although there are a few excerpts from longer works. Among the selections are such major texts as Atrahasis, the Epic of Creation (the Enuma Elish), The Descent of Ishtar, and Erra and Ishtum -- basically everything that one would expect, and all the works that are most often quoted or referred to in books about ancient Mesopotamia. It seems to be a fairly representative view of all the major genres of literature that have survived. Unlike Heidel and Pritchard, the literature is considered for its own sake without a lot of comparisons to the Bible, although it is obvious from the texts that we are in the same world that produced the Old Testament.

[James]

Sept. 28

96. Jane Hawking, Travelling to Infinity: The True Story behind The Theory of Everything [2007] 487 pages

This book is not what I thought it would be. Given the subtitle and the fact that the library record classifies it as Physics Biography, I assumed it would be a biography of Stephen Hawking by his first wife; actually it is her own autobiography. Of course, much of it is about her relationship with Stephen and the battle against his illness, but there is very little about his life except in terms of his relationship to her and their domestic problems. In particular, there is nothing about his scientific work and how he reached his theories (which is what I was looking for in a biography of a scientist), apart from the honors he received from it and the conferences she resented being dragged to, and she admits that she doesn't understand anything about it. (After twenty-five years of marriage!) Actually, this was what bothered me in reading this; I never really understood why they were married in the first place. He was a physicist, an atheist whose major concern in life was trying to understand the origins of the universe in terms of physical laws; she was a Christian who already knew all she wanted to know -- God created it. It's not just that they had different interests, but that she knew nothing about what was most important to him (and at bottom disagreed with his whole endeavor) while for his part he was openly contemptuous of mediaeval studies, which was her main intellectual interest. She says she wanted to be an equal partner, but how could there be any real partnership?

She tells us that she hoped he would somehow come to have faith, and that when he answered journalists' questions by saying that he wasn't a believer and that God had no part in his view of the universe, she felt attacked in her beliefs -- it never occurs to her that he might feel the same way about her religion, which implicitly attacks his whole view of life. (Christians never seem to realize that their views can offend other people; only disagreement with them is offensive.) The more the difficulties in their marriage, the more she turned to the Church for support. She constantly harps on the fact that they never really communicated -- not just after he lost his speech, but from the beginning of their relationship. Wouldn't that be a warning flag? This is certainly an honest book, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's the truth -- it's what she felt, at least in retrospect, but not necessarily the way an outside observer would interpret things, and certainly not the way that Stephen and his family saw it (she was shocked that his family did not approve of the marriage.)

Stephen's short autobiography, very much unlike this book, scrupulously refrains from any criticism of her, and gives a very different view of her relationship with Jonathan and the reasons for the break-up. Even from her own book, I was shaking my head. I have no doubt that she was loyal, devoted, and suffered a great deal in caring for him -- but despite her constant refrain about how much she loved him, I got the impression that she was acting out of duty and a feeling of guilt if she abandoned the burden of his care. I'm sure that if he had been healthy, their marriage would have been much shorter. In the end, they broke up (the book is very bitter in its description of his second wife, whether or not that is justified) and she ended up marrying her religious friend Jonathan, who shared her religious views and with whom she had a real partnership based on a common interest in music -- the sort of person she obviously should have married in the first place.

According to the publisher's description, this is "an extensively revised version (with new material) of Music to Move the Stars, first published by Macmillan in 1999"; while it does have nine pages at the end bringing it up to 2007 (and four short paragraphs from 2014), she describes it in the acknowledgements as an abridgment of the earlier book.

Summary: if you're interested in the dynamics of a failed marriage, or in the problems of being a caregiver to a severely disabled spouse, you may find this worth reading; but if you are interested in Stephen Hawking as a physicist, this is not relevant.

[James]

Sept. 29

97. Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!: A Novel of Discworld [1989] 355 pages

The eighth Discworld novel and the first in the City Watch subseries. A satire on government corruption and the willingness of people to accept authority, the book deals with a plot to overthrow the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork and its consequences. The protagonist, an honest and idealistic but very naive young man from the mining country (where he was raised by dwarves), becomes a member of the City Watch, the corrupt and discredited police force of the city. Along the way are many jokes and allusions based on cop shows. At times, it was difficult to understand because of the amount of British slang. As with most of the books in the series, there was also much play with fairytale and fantasy motifs, here especially concerning dragons. Some great lines about libraries. A light, enjoyable but not especially profound novel.

[James]

Oct. 2

98. Richard Rutt, Virtuous Women: Three Classic Korean Novels [1974] 445 pages [e-book]

This is Richard Rutt's translation of three seventeenth century works from Korea, Kim Man-Jung's A Nine Cloud Dream, and the anonymous Queen Inhyun and Chun-hyang. After I read the Nine Cloud Dream in the 1922 Gale translation in August for a Goodreads group, I mentioned in my review that there was a newer version which would be available next year. One of the other members pointed out that there was a third version translated by by Rutt which was available as an e-book on Google play, and that is this book (I had seen a mention of it on Amazon but there it was out of print). I won't repeat my review of A Nine Cloud Dream since I read it so recently, except to say that whether it was a better translation, the more complete introduction, or the fact that I was reading it for the second time, I got more out of it this time, especially with respect to the conflict of the three religions, Confucianism, Buddhism and Daoism. I also learned from the introduction that the original was probably written in Chinese, or at any rate all the existing Korean versions seem to be translations of the Chinese version. The Gale translation was in fact based on a Chinese not a Korean version (that isn't mentioned in the introduction to that as far as I can remember) and this was based partly on an older (but more recently discovered) Chinese version with some input from the Korean versions.

The second and shortest of the three works here, Queen Inhyun, is a historical novel, the most literary of several versions of a story that is based on a real queen of the early seventeenth century who was deposed in favor of a favorite concubine but later recalled to the throne. The introduction explains that this was based on a factional struggle between two parties of the aristocracy from different areas of the country, but in the novel it is all personal.

The third work, called Chun-hyang (Spring Fragrance) after the name of the main character (and also known as "the constant wife"), exists in many different versions as well, seemingly all based on an oral tradition; it has also been adapted for operas, films, and many other formats. It is a folklore-type story about a newly married wife who is left alone, tortured by a lust-filled governor, and eventually rescued by the return of her husband. It is also set in the early seventeenth century.

All three novels taken together give a good sample of classic Korean literature and some insight into the mores of the period.





Oct. 3

99. Scott Bembenek, The Cosmic Machine [2017] 360 pages [Kindle]

I read a lot of science popularizations, and this book was quite different from most. While most of the popular books I have read, even the better ones, skim quickly over classical physics and atoms (if they cover this territory at all) to get to the "trendier" subjects of elementary particles, the big bang, and speculations about string theory and multiverses, Bembenek takes just the opposite approach. He is a chemist, and while most of the book could be loosely categorized as "physics", it is physics the way a chemist thinks of it -- most of the book is taken up with classical thermodynamics, the structure of the atom, and the beginnings of quantum theory. Einstein is important here -- for the photoelectric effect, his comparison of light to an ideal gas, and his other contributions to quantum theory; relativity, special or general, is hardly mentioned, and there is no cosmology, no quarks, and no strings. This is not by any means a criticism; the book is a good complement to the others and I learned more than I have from most. The treatment is largely historical.

The one real fault is that the book shifts gears; the first few chapters on basic physics are very simple and I was already composing a review in my head recommending the book as a low-level popularization for beginners and middle-school to high-school students, but once he gets to thermodynamics it becomes a mid- to high-level popularization, which would I think be difficult for anyone without at least a high-school course in physics or chemistry to follow, especially the footnotes. As someone whose major interest in college was the Presocratics, I found his treatment of Greek science a little too traditional; judging from the bibliography, that part of the book was researched mainly in encyclopedias of philosophy. The book could also have benefited from some rigorous copy-editing as the author is occasionally rather loose with formal grammar; at times it almost gives the impression of having been based on a course or oral lecture. Nevertheless, I would highly recommend the book and although I read it on my Kindle for free I will be buying the print edition for the library where I work.

[James]

Oct. 5

100. Cho Se-hui, The Dwarf [1978, tr. 2015] 248 pages

A best-selling novel and virtually a classic of modern Korean literature, The Dwarf was originally published as twelve separate stories which were later combined into a novel. It concerns the period of Korean history under President Park Chung Hee, when the country was being transformed from a largely agricultural economy to the industrial, technological country it is now. The forced modernization of the country created extreme class differentiation and class struggles, similar to those in the West during the Industrial Revolution (the parallel is discussed in the novel) as well as those in Jamaica during the fifties and sixties, and Egypt and India at about the same time: I was reminded of Mahfouz's Midaq Alley and Mistry's A Fine Balance. The book is largely about labor struggles, but as in those two novels the advanced style keeps it from being a simplistic "worker's novel" in the sense of "socialist realism." (It's suggested in some reviews of the book that the style was partly to disguise the political criticism in stories written under the repression, but I can't really believe that it wouldn't have been quite apparent to any half-competent censor.)

The first and last stories feature a math teacher talking about Mobius strips and Klein bottles, which establish a sort of symbolic theme of the interior and exterior becoming one, and two disabled persons, Squatlegs and Hunchback. The second story introduces the character of a poor house wife Shin-ae, who hires a dwarf to fix her outdoor faucet so she can get water. We next meet Yun-ho, the adolescent son of a well-off lawyer who is trying to get into the University. This story also introduces the character of his tutor, Chi-sop, who plays a role later in the novel. Through Chi-sop, Yun-ho meets the Dwarf Kim Pul-i (of course a symbol for the "little people", but also developed realistically as a character) and his wife and three children, the Eldest Son Yong-su, the younger brother Yong-ho, and the sister Yong-hui. The incident which begins the plot of the novel is when the slum neighborhood in which the Dwarf lives (ironically named Felicity Precinct of Eden District) is torn down as part of an Urban Renewal Project. Of course, there is much corruption involved and the compensation which the residents receive is not enough to get the apartments they are supposedly entitled to. As a result, the family moves to Ungang, an industrial area of toxic pollution, where the Dwarf dies (unclear whether by accident or suicide, but the latter is strongly suggested) and his three children get jobs in the factories of the Ungang group. This forms the longest story in the novel, "The Dwarf Launches a Ball", which is frequently published separately. (The Wikipedia article on the novel appears to confuse the two.) While the novel shifts among all the characters (it is sometimes difficult to follow who is doing what) the main focus is on the conditions in Ungang and the struggle against management and the complicit company-union, and the story of Yun-ho gets lost. Near the end, one story is about the leader of the Ungang group and his family.


Oct. 7

101. Frits Noske, French Song from Berlioz to Duparc [second ed., 1970] 454 pages

This book is an account of the evolution of the French mélodie from the romance in the eighteen-forties under the influence of Schubert and the German Lied, its gradual emancipation from German models, up to its high point in the songs of Fauré and Duparc. After a general introduction and chapters on the poetry and theories of prosody, it considers eighteen specific composers from Berlioz to Duparc. Some were so minor I didn't see why they were included, while others were less fully treated than it seemed they should have been. The longest section was on Gounod. The academic style, the emphasis on definitions and classifications, and the many unnecessary details make obvious its origin as a doctoral dissertation, but much of the information was interesting.

[James]

Oct. 9 - Oct. 10

102. Patrick Moore, ed., 2007 Yearbook of Astronomy [2006] 309 pages
103. Patrick Moore and John Mason, edd., Patrick Moore's 2010 Yearbook of Astronomy [2009] 376 pages

The late Patrick Moore (Sir Patrick Alfred Caldwell-Moore), astronomer, television personality, and right-wing eccentric (according to Wikipedia) was the host of the BBC astronomy show The Sky at Night for over fifty years, from its beginning in 1957 to his death in 2012, and the British equivalent (and forerunner) of such television science-popularizers as Carl Sagan and Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Among the spin-offs of the show was this series of yearbooks of astronomy. Designed for amateur astronomers, most of the books are given over to star charts and descriptions of the positions of the planets and other features of interest to people with small telescopes; these aspects are of course obsolete after the year for which they are intended, which is why these books are now in my garage rather than the library's collection. They also contain other items of interest though; the descriptions of the planets and constellations often contain interesting facts, and there is a section of general articles on astronomy, both recent discoveries and the history of astronomy (with an accent on telescopes and equipment), which are the reason I read them. Not the most important books around, but fun to read and quick to get through, and more up to date than most of the books I have on astronomy.

[James]

Oct. 12

104. Patrick Moore, The Sky at Night: Stories about astronomy based on recent episodes of the longest-running TV show in history [#13, 2010] 169 pages

Another series based on the BBC program The Sky at Night; from the Introduction it appears this is the 13th edition, although that is not stated anywhere else in the book, and this is the only one the library has. It seems that the series is published about every three years, and contains short (3-4 page) chapters based on each of the monthly shows; there are 37 chapters, and they provide a snapshot of the state of astronomy during the period 2006-2008 (I'm not sure why there is such a delay in publishing them.)

While the content is interesting, there is a major problem with the book, which is why I won't be asking the library to buy the latest edition as I had thought I might. There are at least three or four major sense-affecting typos on every page of this book: wrong words, words and parts of sentences omitted, or duplicated, words out of order, "unimportant" words like "no" and "not" omitted reversing the meaning, and so forth, not counting the minor errors such as sentences broken into fragments, omission of virtually all commas, etc. Astronomers study "comic phenomena". Space probes fire their "retro-pockets" (some kind of fashion statement?) In some cases it was difficult to follow what was being said, although there were only three or four sentences I couldn't manage to decipher at all. Perhaps the worst problem was with the numbers, which might escape notice: the distance to a distant galaxy is 16 million miles (less than a fifth of the distance to the sun!) -- probably the correct figure is 16 million trillion; the Keck telescopes are "100 meters"(!) while the larger Very Large Telescope in the Atacama Desert is "8 meters" (correct figures are 10 meters and 18 meters) and Neil Armstrong walked on the moon in July, 1959! This is the sort of thing I would expect from a free e-book on the Internet, not an overpriced print book from Springer.

[James]

Oct. 14

105. Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye [1970] 224 pages [Kindle]

The Bluest Eye is a realistic depiction of the life of Black women (probably soon after World War II) in a small city (Lorraine, Ohio.) The novel is ostensibly an autobiography of the narrator, Claudia, and her sister Frieda, over the period of a year (the book is divided into four chapters titled with the four seasons) but in fact is actually focused on her slightly older friend Pecola Breedlove. What Morrison is showing is the how forces of racial and sex discrimination act to destroy the self-esteem of these young women. Although racism certainly plays a role, the book is actually at least as concerned with feminist issues; the main problem is that Pecola is, or at least is convinced she is, "ugly". The first time she is introduced into the narrative, we see her and Frieda admiring a picture of the beautiful little white girl, Shirley Temple, and discussing other white symbols of beauty. The narrator is disgusted with this; she hates her white dolls, and there is a fairly long interior monologue about the fact that she has nothing in common with them. She feels no attraction to the idea of taking care of a white baby. Later, there is an episode where her mother disregards her and her sister while tenderly comforting a whiny white girl, the daughter of her employer. The title of the novel comes from Pecola's prayer to have blue eyes, so she would be beautiful like the white girls.

This is Morrison's first novel, I believe, and it has some faults which I attribute to that. The book is narrated by Claudia, but has third person omniscient sections, including flashbacks to the history of Pecola's parents; I don't think this is a deliberate technique of disorientation, as it was in the last novel I reviewed (Cho Se-hui's The Dwarf) but rather due to a lack of experience in writing. While the book is very literary and poetic, Morrison sometimes seems to be trying too hard, as at the beginning of the chapters. Nevertheless, the effect is really powerful and I am looking forward to reading several of her other novels this year (the goal is The Beloved which is the book for the Lehi Library Book Club in February.)

[James]

Oct. 15

106. Justin Chew Forsyth, Reading Surrealism in Cho Se-Hui's The Dwarf and Other Works of Modern Korean Fiction [MA thesis, 2013] 85 pages [pdf from Internet]
Joseph Robert Voigts, "Spatial Metaphor in Cho Se-hui's The Dwarf [2013] 22 pages [pdf from Internet]

After reading Cho Se-hui's The Dwarf last week, I searched for some other opinions of the book; on the first twelve pages of hits in Google, I ran across these two, and after that there were too many irrelevant hits to keep up. The first is a Master's thesis from the University of British Columbia at Vancouver; the second is a paper apparently published in a Korean journal, whose name (in Korean) I couldn't read -- the author is probably a graduate student or faculty member at Kyungsung University.

Academic writing about literature is a language unto itself, filled with jargon terms and very concerned with labels and distinctions; Master's theses are usually even worse than PhD dissertations, since the whole point of an MA thesis is to prove that you have a sufficient knowledge of terminology and classifications to go on to your doctoral research. As they go, Forsyth's was not particularly bad, or hard to read. His thesis was somewhat contradictory; he generally claims that The Dwarf is a surrealist novel, but at other places he denies he is calling it a surrealist novel but is only saying it was influenced by surrealism. I would agree with the second, but not the first. He begins with a chapter defining surrealism and discussing the surrealist movement in Europe, then has a chapter on The Dwarf, and then one on other Korean literature he considers to be surrealist (or influenced by surrealism). One problem is that he divides surrealism into "political surrealism" and "literary surrealism", and makes the elementary logical error of considering that because surrealist literature is politically left-wing and subversive, showing that a work is politically left-wing and subversive proves that it is surrealist. Dogs have four legs so whatever has four legs must be a dog. He also considers that any right-wing dictatorship -- such as the regime of Park Chung Hee -- is "fascist", more or less by the same reasoning. With regard to the literary style, he does show that there are surrealist elements present in the novel, such as dreams, "objective chance", and absurd or illogical events; but these are exactly the elements of surrealism which have become part of the general vocabulary of modern literature. I think that they would have to be dominant rather than as here just a part of a generally realistic narrative to call something a surrealist novel. The best arguments for his position with regard to The Dwarf are probably the references to the Mobius strip and the Klein bottle which begin and end the novel.

These are the starting point for the paper by Voigts. He makes some good points about the role they play in the structure, coming at the beginning and ending and attaching the two twisted together like -- a Mobius strip. However, while Forsyth sees the subjective psychological aspects as subversive in the surrealist sense, Voigts considers them as an attempt to refute Marxist materialism by Hegelian idealism. This of course undermines in his opinion everything in between, which he recognizes as a materialist, more or less Marxist view of class struggle. The way he manages this is by identifying what he calls "dialectical materialism" and attributes to Marx with a vulgar materialism that essentially denies that there is any subjectivity at all, while what Marx actually meant by dialectical materialism he calls idealism. If he is someone who actually grew up in Korea, his idea of Marxism may owe something to the self-described Marxists in the North; if he is an American or Englishman studying in Korea, it is simply a reflection of the sketchy ideas most Anglo-Americans have of Marxism, which doesn't keep them from "refuting" it. In any case, the fact that the only Marxist item in his bibliography is a one-volume book of "Basic Selections" may be significant.

Despite my disagreements with their basic theses, both of these secondary works cast some light on the techniques and structure of the novel, which is more difficult than the actual content.

The third chapter of the Forsyth thesis also discusses other Korean works in the context of a "surrealist tradition" in Korea. The first work he discusses is the novella "The Wings" by Yi Sang, which is an older work by an author who actually had ties to the European surrealists in the thirties. I have found this free on the Internet and added it to my reading list. The other works he discusses sound as if they may be to some degree surrealist or more heavily influenced than the Cho novel, but I can't be sure since his description of that makes it sound more surrealist than I found it in my own reading. None of them so far are on the reading list for the World Literature (Korea) group I am in on Goodreads, so I probably won't be reading those soon.

[James]

Oct. 17

107. Terry Pratchett, Small Gods [1992] 272 pages

The thirteenth book in the Discworld series -- I skipped 9-12 -- and a stand-alone. It is the best of the series so far. It is a satire on religion, featuring the Great God Om in the form of a tortoise and his conflict with the Church he allegedly founded through a series of prophets, who actually (surprise!) made up their prophecies. He teams up with a novice brother named Brutha, who turns out to be the only person in Omnia who actually believes in him as opposed to believing in the Church (and this is the most accurate part of the satire) to combat the "Quisition" led by the evil Deacon Vorbis. The problem with the novel is that it is based too much on the mediaeval/early modern Catholic Church, which has little relevance today; Protestants and modern Catholics have much more sophisticated means of propaganda and control than actual force and torture, which would be a better (because less easy) target for satire. There are some interesting reversals -- the Church insists on the superstitious idea that the world is a sphere rotating around the Sun, while the scientific opposition finds increasing evidence that it is a flat disc carried on the back of four elephants on the back of a giant turtle. (This is Discworld, after all.) The parody of the Ephebean (i.e. Greek) philosophers certainly misses its mark and seems rather juvenile, which is a minus for the book. After reading this, I can somewhat understand why the series has such a following, which was a mystery to me after the first eight. I have one more available from the library (#18, Soul Music) before I get to #20, Hogfather which is the library book club reading for December. I may read others if I run into them by chance, but I won't be seeking them out as a series.


Oct. 18

108. Yi Sang, The Wings [tr 2001] 85 pages

The MA thesis on surrealism in The Dwarf by Forsyth which I read last week mentioned this as one of the first important modern works of Korean literature and an example of Korean surrealism; it is certainly both. The free pdf version I read, in the Portable Library of Korean Literature, actually contained two other short stories by Yi Sang as well as this novella, "Encounters and Departures" and "Deathly Child." All three works, written in the 1930's, are much more closely related to the surrealist tradition than the novel by Cho. They all deal with a narrator (probably based on Yi Sang himself) and his relationship with his wife; traditional Korean gender roles are reversed in that the wife works and supports the idle husband (and in the novella "Wings" he is essentially enclosed in the "inner room" which is where the wife is kept secluded in the traditional home). The distinction between the outside "real" world and the imaginary world in the mind of the narrator is blurred as it is in European surrealist works, and the language is filled with absurd metaphors and comparisons. Yi Sang died at the age of 27 of tuberculosis after a period of imprisonment for "thought crimes" against the Japanese colonial government; a major Korean literary prize is named for him.

[James]

Oct. 25

109. Frederick Copleston, Contemporary Philosophy: Studies of Logical Positivism and Existentialism [1956; rev. ed. 1972] 230 pages

I'm not sure whether these are the essays which were republished by one reprint house as the tenth volume of his History of Philosophy, but it would be understandable if they were; they begin about where the seventh, eighth and ninth volumes end and discuss many of the major figures up to the date it was written (the revision only affected the first chapter, and it doesn't so much add any new figures as look at the philosophers he treats with a bit more hindsight.) The restriction to the logical positivists (with a good deal of discussion of the analytic tradition, if only to distinguish them) and the existentialists (in a broad sense of the term) doesn't matter so much; he wouldn't have covered the Marxist tradition anyway, and I'm not really interested in the neo-Thomists -- who else really was around in the 1950s?

However, it is a very different kind of book. Where the History was primarily descriptive, and very scholarly with two and three footnotes per page and a dozen pages of bibliography (this book has no bibliography, and the few footnotes are mainly in the rewritten first chapter), these studies -- the ones of existentialism were a course of lectures -- are basically polemical, trying to show what is wrong with those tendencies from Father Copleston's Catholic perspective. Of course there is nothing wrong with that, and he does try to approach them honestly on their own terms without presupposing Catholic theology; he succeeds in showing many of the weaknesses of those traditions, and if he isn't convincing in his defense of the traditional metaphysics and belief in God, it's because he's defending a view that isn't really defensible -- his arguments are probably the most intelligent framing of the case for religion I've read for a long while. He does have an annoying habit of disclaiming responsibility for his own criticisms -- it's almost comic the way he attributes many of them to "some Marxists"! -- and as in volume 9 of the history he has a particular animus against Sartre.

The chapters on logical positivism are general and treat the movement as a whole, without referring to any specific philosophers except (occasionally) Carnap and the early Wittgenstein, while the chapters on existentialism are focused on individuals -- Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Jaspers, Marcel, Sartre and Camus.

[James]

Oct. 31

110. Montague Summers, The Werewolf in Lore and Legend [1933] 307 pages

The Werewolf, retitled by Dover for the reprint, follows on from the author's two works on vampires which I read a few Halloweens ago, also both retitled by Dover to emphasize "lore and legend", which is misleading -- Summers believed in the reality of both vampires and werewolves, as well as witchcraft and all the more arcane aspects of mediaeval Catholic theology (he claimed to be a Catholic priest, which has been disputed, especially by the Catholic Church). This book contains everything you would ever want (or not want) to know about werewolves and related shape-shifters in Europe from antiquity to the early twentieth century; the literary tradition of werewolves which is the subject of the final chapter is of course outdated since vampires and werewolves have taken over Young Adult and other novels and films in recent years (the Lehi Library has 260 books on werewolves and almost 1200 on vampires.)

I occasionally look up a word in a foreign language, but it has been a long time since an English word has sent me to the dictionary -- probably since the last time I read Montague Summers. I had to look up five words by page two of this book -- mournival, prolusions, zetetic, goetic, and veaking (which wasn't in any dictionary I could find). That, plus the untranslated quotations in Greek (ancient and modern), Latin, German and French, give an idea of his style; he compensates for the unusual subject matter with all the weight of apparent scholarship. Apparent -- of course he's a crank, with no critical faculty whatever, who believes every hearsay report he finds, twists quotations, and the book wanders about with digressions such as a long discussion of whether it is a sin to destroy the witches' equipment (which implies that the equipment is effective in itself, rather than through the intervention of demons), lamenting that witches and werewolves are no longer burned at the stake, and similar ideas. This would be a dangerous book if anyone believed it, but it does give a wealth of material on occult beliefs.


Oct. 31

111. Terry Pratchett, Soul Music: A Novel of Discworld [1995] 373 pages

Rock music -- er, Music with Rocks In -- comes to the Discworld, and Death's granddaughter Susan has to do something about it, in this novel in the subseries about Death, the last I will be reading before Hogsfather in the same subseries. Not, as some of the blurbs imply, a satire, but rather a comic parody, this is a very funny book, full of allusions to the history of popular music and popular culture.

Oct. 31

112. George Johnson, Miss Leavitt's Stars: The Untold Story of the Woman Who Discovered How to Measure the Universe [2005] 162 pages

Not exactly a biography, because very little is known about her, but a good nontechnical account of the discovery of Cepheid variables and their use as "standard candles" to measure the size of the Universe. Interesting as history, although the science is already very outdated after fourteen years. I will be reading a new book on the same subject in November.

[James]

Nov. 3

113. Honoré de Balzac, La Muse du Départment [1843] 291 pages [in French, Kindle]

Published together with L'illustre Gaudissart under the collective title Les Parisiens en province, this novel is not one of Balzac's better books in my opinion. It is the story of a George-Sands-wannabee, Dinah de La Baudraye, who lives in the provincial town of Sancerre, and her affair with an unscrupulous Parisian journalist, Étienne Lousteau, who appears in others of Balzac's novels. Any importance it may have is due to its discussion of literary style. The work contains hommages, or at any rate significant references, to Sands, Stendhal, and Benjamin Constant, and a long and somewhat clever section in which the main characters attempt to reconstruct a formula romance novel from a handful of random pages used as packing material for the proofs of one of Lousteau's own works. The novel, as part of the Comédie humaine, delineates a particular type of character, the female intellectual in the provinces, and the nature of provincial intellectual life in general.

Though first published in relatively finished form in 1843, La Muse du Départment was begun early in Balzac's career, in 1832, and has many of the faults of his earlier novels; it starts slowly, nothing really happens for almost two-thirds of the book, and then the real plot is condensed into the final third. The plot itself is a fairly conventional story, apart from the characterization, and none of the characters, including Mme. de La Baudraye, is really sympathetic or even all that interesting. The problem in reading the Comédie humaine in the order Balzac arranged it, as I am doing (though from this point I will be skipping a lot) is that one reads some of these earlier efforts after his later and much better books.


Nov. 4

114. Manhae (Han Yon-gun), Everything Yearned For: Manhae's Poems of Love and Longing [1925; tr. 2005] 194 pages

Han Yon-gun, better known under the pseudonym Manhae, was a Buddhist monk (and reformer of Buddhism), and apparently an important figure in the early Independence movement before World War II; he wrote these poems at the height of his political activity, shortly after completing a prison sentence for his agitation against the Japanese colonial government. This edition, the fourth translation of the book into English, contains a short biography and critical article and some notes, as well as the ninety poems. The Korean title is literally "the silence of the nim", a word which he explains in the first poem means not just "love" or "the lover" in the romantic sense but "love of country", "love of God", and generally "everything yearned for." Not surprisingly, many scholars interpret the poems as being allegories of the Independence movement, or less often as allegories of Buddhist enlightenment; since I don't read Korean and know almost nothing about Korean literature except for the few books I have read in the past two months, I won't try to take a position, except to say that like the translator I think they work as straightforward love poetry -- which doesn't exclude their having other layers of significance, of course. The book begins with the poet's lover leaving him for unexplained reasons; most of the poems express his longing for her (or hers for him; many of the poems are apparently from a female perspective, which is not always apparent in English) and the last poem suggests that they are about to be reunited. There are some quite interesting ideas about the nature of love and desire (which could also be applied to the other forms of desire mentioned before.) He is credited with being one of the first "modern" Korean poets, but the translator suggests that his real importance is in "fusing" the modern with the traditional; again I don't have the background to judge, but the work is quite worth reading.


Nov. 6

115. Terry Pratchett, Hogfather: A Novel of Discworld [1996] 402 pages

The twentieth book in the Discworld series and the fourth in the Death subseries, this is the book we are reading next month for the library's book club and the reason I have been sampling Pratchett. It is one of the best, although a bit long and somewhat too preoccupied with scatological jokes for my taste. The premise is that "the Auditors", a sort of cosmic anti-life bureaucracy, have taken out a contract with the Assassins Guild to "remove" the Hogfather -- the Discworld's equivalent of Santa Claus. Death (like the Hogfather, an "Anthropomorphic Personification") takes over his job on Christmas -- er, Hogwatch -- Eve, to comic effect. The real plot, however, is in the efforts of Death's granddaughter Susan to figure out what is happening and try to save the Hogfather. Throughout, there is a vein of satire of Christmas, the "real meaning" of Christmas, and so forth, as well as a satire of childhood and nostalgia for childhood -- this is what I liked about the book, of course, since I'm somewhat of a "bah, humbug" type and have no nostalgia whatsoever for my childhood.

As I pointed out to the organizer of our book club, this book might be rather difficult to follow without having read Soul Music, an earlier book in the series where the character of Susan is introduced and developped, as well as some of the minor characters. Many of the characters from earlier books make appearances here, although thankfully not Rincewind or his luggage, my least favorite. And we find out the secret of the Tooth Fairy.

[James]

Nov. 10

116. Stanislaw Lem, Nacht und Schimmel: Erzählungen [1969; tr. 1971] 291 pages [in German]

I have by now read most of Lem's books available in English translation; this collection, originally published in Polish as Opowiadania, does not appear to have been translated into English, but I was fortunate enough to find a used copy of the German translation. To be sure, science fiction, with its technical and even made-up terms, is somewhat difficult to read in another language than ones own, and especially in German, in which unlike many languages the technical terms are generally not English loan words; but it was worth the effort. This is a collection of ten of Lem's best stories, which is to say of ten of the best science fiction stories by anyone.

As with many of Lem's books and stories, these stories challenge our definitions of life and consciousness : theyare mostly about alien lifeforms (and intelligent computers, which for Lem are alien) and he keeps them credibly alien, in contrast to many science fiction writers who anthropomorphize them. In other words, his aliens exist and think in an alien way -- and often reveal unexpected limitations in our own thought patterns. In reading these stories, I was struck by how much of the content reminded me of things I have read in later works, not just by Lem but by many other authors -- not that they plagiarized the language, or even copied the plot, but that Lem's ideas were the inspiration for the themes.

[James]

Nov. 11

117. Toni Morrison, Sula [1973] 174 pages

Despite a few elements suggestive of magical realism (the plague of robins, the three deweys who never grow up) Sula is basically a realist, psychological novel about two childhood friends, Sula and Nell, who develop in different directions. The novel does three things: most importantly, it is a feminist novel about female solidarity and competition, and the role of sexuality; secondly, it is a description of the historical conditions of Black women in America during the period between the two World Wars; and thirdly, in the end I think it is an existentialist novel contrasting the person who accepts the responsibility of inventing her own existence (Sula) with the person who allows herself to be defined by social categories (Nell). A very dense and complex work but also one which appeals to the emotions as well as the intellect.

[James]

Nov. 13

118. Maryse Condé, La Civilisation du Bossale: Réflexions sur la littérature orale de la Guadeloupe et de la Martinique [1978] 70 pages [in French, e-book from Open Library]
____ Maryse Condé, Cahier d'un retour au pays natale: Césaire: analyse critique [1978] 79 pages [in French, e-book from Open Library]

Maryse Condé is a francophone novelist (primarily a writer of historical novels) from the Antillean island of Guadeloupe (although she left the island at age 16 and has since lived in France and several West African nations, and currently is a professor in the United States). She won the "alternative Nobel" prize which was given this year by a group of intellectuals calling themselves the "New Academy" as a response to the decision not to award a Nobel prize in literature for 2018, due to the scandals of the Swedish Academy which awards the prizes. Although the credentials of the New Academy group have been called into question (one writer refers to them as the "Instagram celebrities") and Condé may not have been their first choice (Haruki Murakami removed his name from consideration, probably because he has a good chance of winning a normal Nobel Prize in the future), she seems to me to be a reasonably good choice, and I'm looking forward to reading a representative selection of her works, most of which are available to borrow free from Open Library (Internet Archive).

These two short works (I'm putting them together as one "book" for purposes of my Goodreads goal) were written in 1978 while she was a Professor in Paris, and precede most of her fictional output. The first book is a study of the slave literature of Guadaloupe and Martinique. ("Bossale" means slaves imported from Africa, as opposed to those born in captivity, but Condé uses it as essentially synonymous with "slave".) She begins with a short description of slavery in the islands, and a discussion of the way the slaves were regarded by their owners and other whites at the time. She then discusses the oral literature of the slaves, the transition from oral to written literature, and three or four Black writers from the period after abolition, including "precursors" of the negritude movement. It was a very interesting work.

The second book is a critical analysis of Aimé Césaire's long poem "Cahier d'un retour au pays natal", a classic of Caribbean literature which I read two or three years back. It begins with a biography of Césaire, a discussion of his politics, and an overview of his writings, followed by an analysis of the poem in terms of its political and other content and its language, its relationship to negritude and to the poetry of Léopold Senghor (which I also read about the same time), and ends up with some miscellaneous appendices. I wish I had read it closer in time to my reading of the poem.