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What Are You Reading / Reviews - January thru June 2024
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Push – Sapphire – 5*****
Precious Jones is a young pregnant black teenager, who is functionally illiterate and the product of an abusive home. But Precious has a fierce determination to care for the baby growing inside her and to better her life. The issues raised are horrific and difficult to read about and process. Brava to Sapphire for highlighting the plight of young people such as her protagonist. The writing is raw and brutal; the story is gripping and inspiring. My heart broke for Precious, even as I cheered her on.
LINK to my full review
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Ursula Under – Ingrid Hill – 3***
I don’t remember why I put this on my TBR list, though I suspect it was a recommendation from my local indie bookseller back in 2004. Having finally read it, I wonder why I kept it on the list for so long. Hill does have some strikingly original and beautifully written passages in the book. And those fed my love of literary fiction and kept me turning pages, hoping for more of this. But it was a slog to get through. It took me over a month to finish it, because I kept putting it aside for other books that required less brain power to enjoy.
LINK to my full review
Govert Schilling,
Ripples in Spacetime: Einstein, Gravitational Waves, and the Future of Astronomy
[2017] 339 pagesThis is a popular account of gravitational waves written about two years after they were first discovered. It is aimed at an audience with little if any previous knowledge of science, at a very elemental level. Refreshingly for a book written at that level, there was not too much gosh-wow, although there was a lot of gossip about people's private lives and personalities.
The first third of the book is the usual inaccurate summary of the history of astronomy (I have never found a book by a nonspecialist which gets Greek science right, and Galileo seldom fares much better, and doesn't here) and a superficial account of general relativity and Einstein's love interests. However, when he finally gets to the history of the search for gravitational waves the book is reasonably good, though I would still recommend Bartusiak's Einstein's Unfinished Symphony or Kennefic's Travelling at the Speed of Thought over this for anyone who is not a complete beginner.
Schilling does go farther chronologically than those, so his last few chapters are more interesting. As with any science book written more than two or three years ago, I was left wondering about what has been discovered since it was written
Xosé Neira Vilas,
Memoirs of a Peasant Boy
[1961, Eng. tr. 2004] 118 pages [Kindle]This novel in the form of a memoir by a young peasant boy is one of the major fictional works of contemporary Galicia. While I managed to read Rosalia de Castro's Cantares gallegos last month in Galician, with much use of a dictionary, I decided to read this prose work in the English translation. It was not frankly a very good translation, with many grammatical faults and unidiomatic expressions, and the fact that it was a cheap Kindle book with many typos didn't help, but the content was very much worthwhile. It only took a couple hours to read.
Ostensibly the book is the notebook of a boy named Balbino, over several years until he runs away from home in his early teens after fighting back against bullying by his landlord's son. It is about the struggle for dignity in the face of an oppressive social and economic order as seen by an intelligent child from a repressive religious and economically precarious family situation.
I enjoyed reading it and would recommend it despite the poor translation.
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Lessons In Chemistry – Bonnie Garmus – 4.5**** (rounded up)
Elizabeth Zott is a chemist, but in 1960s America her intellect is not valued, which is how she winds up hosting a TV cooking show. This is basically a fairytale, with many improbable coincidences and a strong heroine. I loved it. Now, excuse me while I sharpen my pencils.
LINK to my full review
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Feelings: A Story in Seasons – Manjit Thapp – 4****
What a lovely and remarkable graphic novel! Thapp explores one young woman’s feelings over the course of a year, from the highs of a sunny summer day to the doldrums of a gray winter. The artwork is beautiful and evocative. The text is spare and poetic.
LINK to my full review
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Classified As Murder – Miranda James – 3***
Book two in the series featuring librarian Charlie Harris and his Maine coon cat, Diesel. When an eccentric millionaire with a rare-book collection dies under mysterious circumstances, Charlie Harris gets involved in the investigation. I figured out the culprit fairly early, but it was still fun to watch the characters put the clues together.
LINK to my full review
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How Moon Fuentez Fell In Love With the Universe – Raquel Vasquez Gilliland – 3***
This is a pretty typical enemies-to-friends-to-lovers scenario. It’s also a YA coming-of-age book that deals with bullying, body-image, and self-confidence. The up-and-down, on-and-off romance drove me a little crazy, but it’s part of the package for this genre. At least Gilliland had the couple get to know each other over several months before they acted on their attraction.
LINK to my full review
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Ripley Under Ground – Patricia Highsmith – 3***
This is book two in the series, featuring psychopath Tom Ripley. Highsmith was a talented writer, and she could craft a chilling psychological thriller. In the first Ripley book we met a charming, somewhat socially inept, closeted gay young man with ambition. But THIS Ripley is a drudge. Still, lies and killing come naturally to him. As the bodies pile up and investigators get closer to the truth, Ripley’s ability to charm his way out of things is taxed to the max. By the end, he seems to be completely unraveling, The ending is a bit of a cliffhanger. But I suspect Highsmith just ran out of steam and decided to stop.
LINK to my full review
Thomas Dekker,
The Best Plays of the Old Dramatists: Thomas Dekker
(ed. by Ernest Rhys) [1887] 473 pagesThomas Dekker, The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker. . .in Four Volumes v.2 [1873] 392 pages
wo very old and falling-apart books from my garage, these were the next in my reading project of the seventeenth century. The Rhys edition contained the three plays I had previously read by Dekker (though decades ago, and I didn't remember them), The Shoemaker's Holiday, undoubtedly his best (which is in every Renaissance Drama anthology I have), and the two parts of The Honest Whore, also a good if somewhat uneven play and written in collaboration with Thomas Middleton. The two parts of The Honest Whore were also in the works volume two. In addition, each book had two other plays which I had never read; the Rhys edition contained one of his earliest plays, Old Fortunatus, and The Witch of Edmonton, a play about a witch and a murder written in collaboration with John Webster, while the second volume of his works contained what is probably his worst play, The Whore of Babylon, and Westward Hoe!, a collaboration with John Ford. The Rhys edition also had a forty-page biography of Dekker (there was undoubtedly an even longer biography in the works, but it would have been in the first volume).
I have read different accounts of whether his earliest surviving play is The Shoemaker's Holiday or Old Fortunatus; both were written about 1599. The Shoemaker's Holiday has two plots, a romance and a comedy, both concerning the Cordwainers Guild (the Shoemakers). Old Fortunatus is based on an old legend similar to the Faust story in which the goddess Fortune gives a poor man unlimited wealth which he and his sons misuse to their own damnation. It would probably have been another really good play, if it hadn't been chosen as a play to be presented at court; he ruined it in order to pay absurdly exaggerated compliments to Queen Elizabeth.
The Honest Whore was performed in two parts; the Rhys biography makes a big deal of there being written thirty years apart, and of how much more mature the writing of the second part is, but other things I have read say that part two was written the next year but just not published for thirty years. Each play has two interwoven plots, one about Hippolito and Rose (he is trying to marry her despite her father's opposition in the first part, trying to cheat on her in the second part) and one about his friend's mistress, Bellafront, whom Hipppolito converts to be "honest". In both parts, Hippolito is a rather unsympathetic prig, but he is not a hypocrite in the first part.
The Witch of Edmonton is probably his last play. It begins as another love against the father's opposition, but soon develops into a play of crime with a comic witchcraft plot (apparently inspired by a true event). The Whore of Babylon is a tedious allegory of Queen Elizabeth (Titania the Fairy Queen) and the Catholic Church (the Whore of Babylon); it might have been barely readable as a poem, but there is nothing dramatic in it. Westward Ho! is a play about jealous, miserly and unfaithful husbands and there flirting but ultimately chaste wives; it reminded me of a less humorous imitation of The Merry Wives of Windsor, but with much more scurrilous language and a bawd as a major protagonist. It managed to scandalize even the Renaissance audiences.
The next readings in this project will be by Ben Jonson, probably next month.
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The Good Guy – Dean Koontz – 4****
Tim is an average guy having a beer when he’s mistaken for a hit man, and given an envelope with cash, a photo and an address. Minutes later the real hit man shows up and mistakes Tim for the man who is hiring him to commit the murder. Then things get really complicated. This thriller just grabbed me. I could not figure out why this woman was targeted, and why the killer was so relentless in his pursuit. Several of the close calls stretch credulity, but Koontz kept me turning pages to see what would happen next.
LINK to my full review
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A Natural History of Dragons – Marie Brennan – 4****
Subtitle: A Memoir by Lady Trent. This was a wonderful romp of an adventure. Isabella is a wonderful heroine. She’s intelligent, tenacious, curious, and determined. I was completely engaged from beginning to end. I’ll definitely continue with the series.
LINK to my full review
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No Exit – Taylor Adams – 3.5***
A taut psychological thriller featuring a college art student, a kidnapped child, and four strangers all trapped at a rest stop during a blizzard in the Colorado Rockies. Darby is a courageous, if naïve, young woman. She never stops thinking of ways to save herself, the child, and the innocent people in the shelter. She certainly got one thing right – the criminal is NOT really smart, just determined and callous. The question is whether Darby can last the night, and that kept me turning pages long past my bedtime.
LINK to my full review
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The Song of Achilles – Madeline Miller – 4****
Miller turns her remarkable talent to Greek mythology in this retelling of events leading up to and including the Trojan War. The novel is narrated by Petroclus, a young prince who has been exiled to the court of King Peleus, where he meets Achilles. Of course, I knew the basic storyline of the Trojan War going into the book, but Miller makes this such an intimate tale that I felt I was first hearing this story. There are two young men learning about life, honor, duty, and love. I was initially taken aback by Miller’s choice to have Petroclus narrate the tale, but I quickly came to love his point of view.
LINK to my full review
Claude Lévi Strauss,
Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture
[1977] 58 pagesI set aside the very long book I have been reading to pick up the last of my readings in Lévi-Strauss, Myth and Meaning. This was a series of five lectures in English which was broadcast on CBC Radio in December of 1977. They constitute a very simple popular introduction to his work and clear up some of the misconceptions which some people had about what structuralism was about. I found it very interesting having read nine of his books over the past two years. I'm following up with five secondary sources on structuralism, not only in anthropology but also in literature and other fields, before I go back to finish reading my long book (Randall's 997-page The Career of Philosophy.)
Edward Sapir,
Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech
[1921] 200 pagesI said in my previous review of Lévi-Strauss' Myth and Meaning that I was going to read five secondary works on Structuralism next; I had hardly begun reading the introduction to the first book before I realized that I needed to read a few other books on structural linguistics, philosophy, psychology and literary theory first, as background. By a few, I mean about twenty. This is the kind of regress that keeps me from ever getting through my planned reading lists. To be sure, most of them were already on my extended TBR list; some, like Derrida and Lacan, were authors I have deliberately procrastinated on reading, others like Sapir were authors I actually wanted to read.
Sapir was one of the early pioneers of structural linguistics; Language, published in 1921, is one step beyond de Saussure, the founder, whom I read a few years ago, but well before my college linguistics textbook from the late sixties. Naturally, being just over a hundred years old, it is in some respects outdated, especially in the more technical parts, but the linguistic scientists who have superceded him all built on his foundations; that's how science works. For the most part, however, the book is fairly non-technical and is still a good general introduction to language for the general reader, and of course a must-read for any student of linguistics who is interested in the historical development of the discipline.
Sapir disclaims any attempt at dealing with the neurological bases of language; he goes a bit too far when he says that language merely uses abilities developed for other purposes in the same way as we use our brains to do math or our fingers for playing the piano — we certainly know today that areas of the brain as well as the vocal apparatus have evolved specifically to use language. However, what he was getting at is that languages need to be studied as abstract structures, which is true. In his discussion of phonetics (chapter 3), he approaches the idea of the phoneme, without using the term or defining it as clearly as contemporary linguistics books do. His discussion of the basic processes and concepts of grammar and how they are implemented in such diverse ways by different languages (chapters 4 and 5) is the heart of the book. The chapter on types of languages (chapter 6) is the most difficult, because he is trying to work out a new basis of classifying languages; the general reader may want to skip or skim through this section, although I found his discussion of agglutination vs. fusion very interesting.
Chapters 7 through 9 deal with diachronic linguistics (language change) and are the best thing I have ever read on the general principles involved, even though much has been learned since in detail. His example of the (lingering) disappearance of the "who"/"whom" distinction in English, and his other examples of the direction in which English is changing (e.g., "It's me" vs. "It is I") are very insightful and written in a lively, almost humorous style, and the history of the language over the last century has borne out many of his predictions. One phenomenon he did not predict, of course, was the contemporary usage of "they" and "their" as gender-indeterminate singulars in sentences such as "If someone has a toothache, they should see their dentist" — okay, I'm not great at thinking up examples — which I do not think is just an "incorrect" failure of agreement between singular antecedent and plural consequent as prescriptive English teachers claim, but an actual use of a former plural as a singular, completely analagous to the sixteenth-century use of the formerly plural "you" and "your" in place of the singular "thou", "thee" and "thy". Nevertheless, I think it fits well into his overall argument.
The blurb on the back of my edition (a Dover reprint) mentions the controversial "Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis", which claimed that at least some concepts are so tied to specific languages that they cannot be understood by speakers of other languages. There is nothing resembling this in the current book; he and Whorf developed that idea later, and in fact Sapir seems to say just the opposite in discussing the relationship of language to culture in chapter 10: "Nor can I believe that culture and language are in any true sense causally related. Culture may be defined as what a society does and thinks. Language is a particular how of thought. it is difficult to see what particular causal relations may be expected to subsist between a selected inventory of experience . . . and the particular manner in which the society expresses all experience." The final chapter does however make the much less questionable point that the structure of a particular language (e.g., whether it has a fixed word order or a more variable one, whether it has inflectional endings, whether it can freely form compounds, etc.) may determine what sort of literary styles can be successfully developed in that language.
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Britt-Marie Was Here – Fredrick Backman – 3.5***
I thought this was a lovely little fairy tale. The scenarios were somewhat improbable, and Britt-Marie didn’t always behave the way I would have expected her to, but just as the residents of Borg grew on her, Britt-Marie grew on me. I found her insistence on structure exasperating at times, but I also loved how determined she was. While she kept her emotions in check, she still showed tenderness and genuine caring.
LINK to my full review
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Trunk Music – Michael Connelly – 3***
Book number 5 in the Harry Bosch series finds the detective back on the job after a previous suspension. This is a typical Harry Bosch detective mystery. Lots of twists and turns. Lots of Harry battling against the police force bureaucrats that are the bane of his existence. It’s fast-paced and kept me guessing until pretty close to the end.
LINK to my full review
Vladimir Propp,
Morphology of the Folktale
[1928, rev. tr. 1968] 158 pages I'm continuing my study of structuralism. Propp attempts in this book to find the basic structures common to all (or at least Russian) fairy tales. I decided to read this after reading Lévi-Strauss' critique; both came independently to somewhat different kinds of structural analysis. Propp begins by identifying a small number of basic functions, such as an act of villainy or a perceived lack, leaving home, acquiring a magical object, fighting with the villain, pursuit and rescue, the return home, and the reward (usually a wedding) from which the tales are constructed, and the types of character such as the victim, the villain, the hero, the donor (of magical objects), the helper and so forth which occur in each function, then tries to show the way they are ordered to form the complete tales. The great diversity in fairy tales is not in the structures which are fairly universal but in the details by which the persons are described or the specific ways in which the structures are instantiated. In reading this, I found myself applying the analysis to the Thousand Nights and a Night, which I recently finished reading (not all the stories are fairy tales but a fair number are) and other things I have read. Propp's analysis seems to fit much of fantasy literature as well as the fairy tale as such.
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Strange Brew – Kathy Hogan Trochek – 3***
This is book six in the Callahan Garrity Mystery series, featuring former cop Callaghan and her mother, Edna, who run “House Mouse” maid service in Atlanta. I like this series. I like Callahan, who does have some reason to investigate and is at least skilled at it. She’s frequently helped by the House Mouse crew of eccentric ladies. There are plenty of twists and turns to keep even the best amateur sleuth guessing, and I didn’t figure out the perpetrator much before Callahan did. I’ll keep reading this series.
LINK to my full review
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The Daughters of Yalta – Catherine Grace Katz – 4****
Subtitle: The Churchills, Roosevelts, and Harrimans: A Story of Love and War. I found this “behind-the-scenes” history fascinating. I had heard of Sarah and Anna, but knew nothing of Kathleen. These young women – beautiful, wealthy and vivacious – were treated by the press as “society” stories. But they were far more than just photo opportunities. Each was highly intelligent and quite accomplished. They not only witnessed history but helped to craft the world’s future.
LINK to my full review
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The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood – Howard Pyle – 3***
A friend loaned me her copy of the “Great Illustrated Classics” edition, adapted by Deborah Kestel. It’s a fast, fun adventure with lots of fighting, competition, disguises, and more than a few near misses. Most of the characters I remember are here, including Friar Tuck, Little John and the Sheriff of Nottingham. But Maid Marion is mentioned only once. I imagine the middle-school audience would enjoy this legend of adventure and derring-do. I wanted more depth to the story, though I doubt I’ll try to go back and read the original.
LINK to my full review
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A Corner Of the Universe – Ann M Martin – 4****
This is a wonderful book written for middle-school-aged children. Set in about 1960, it focuses on Hattie Owens and her family, and the summer her Uncle Adam came home. There are some serious issues dealt with in this novel, but Martin handles them deftly, honestly and with compassion. Hattie is a bright girl, curious and resourceful. As Hattie pieces together the truth about her uncle she comes to understand that it is better to “lift the corners” and peek at what is hidden rather than try to forget about what is unpleasant or uncomfortable. She learns, too, that being different does not make you a lesser person.
LINK to my full review
Leonard Bloomfield,
Language
[1933] 566 pagesBloomfield's Language is a classic of structural linguistics. It is a comprehensive study of language in all of its various aspects, both descriptive and historical, from first principles. To the extent I can remember my linguistics text from about 1972, there seems to be very little difference; the book is very modern-seeming in most respects. I did have a couple of reservations. Firstly, he makes his explanations somewhat too complex by trying to phrase them in accordance with a rather crude form of stimulus-response behaviorism, which dates the book somewhat. Secondly, and more importantly, is that in describing the ideas of lexical and grammatical forms in his early chapters, he takes nearly all his examples from English. Most modern textbooks of linguistics try to avoid too many English examples, to counteract the tendency of new students to take English as "normal" and other languages as "exceptions".
The book begins with a history of the development of linguistic science up to his own time, discusses the idea of a speech community (and shows that it is not as simple as it would seem), and gives a survey of the different languages of the world divided into families. He then turns to the various sounds which can be made by our vocal organs and classifies them (phonetics). Next, he discusses the patterns of sounds which are actually significant for different languages (phonology), introducing the concept of a phoneme. However, it differs from the way I learned it in that he doesn't discuss allophones or complementary distribution and he uses square brackets for both phonetic and phonemic transcription rather than slashes for phonemes. Then he introduces in a very abstract way the ideas of morphemes, lexemes, taxemes and tagmemes (as well as many other -emes that I never heard of and that he never mentions again). He then goes on to describe grammatical forms, syntax and morphology, form-classes and lexicon, and other elements of structure; the book is very complete.
The second half of the book deals with the history of language, with chapters on the comparative method, dialect geography, phonetic change, analogic levelling, semantic change, and borrowing. This half (chapters 17-27) has been published as a separate book called Language History, which I read a long time ago.
Anyone with an interest in language, and especially change in language, needs to read this to begin with, and then perhaps supplement it with more contemporary works.
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Black Powder War – Naomi Novik – 4****
Book number three in the marvelous series featuring Captain Will Laurence and his dragon, Temeraire. Following their exploits in China (book two), they’ve received special orders to escort three precious dragon eggs purchased from the Ottoman Empire from Istanbul back to England. I love this series and this episode has more of the aerial “dog fights” that first entranced me in book one. Temeraire is a marvel; intelligent, fluent in multiple languages, an astute observer and a skilled warrior. He is also devoted to Will and their relationship is an important part of the series.
LINK to my full review
Dulce Maria Cardoso,
The Return
[2011, tr. 2016] 272 pagesThe Return is the stream-of-consciousness narration of a teenage boy, Rui, a white colonial Angolan who "returns" with his mother and sister to The Motherland (Portugal), where in fact he has never been, in the period leading up to the independence of the Portuguese colonies in Africa in 1975 (following a decade of guerilla war and the Portuguese coup of April 1974 which brought down the Salazarist dictatorship). Superficially, the novel seems fairly simple, but in reality the themes are very complex.
If we take Rui's views as the expression of the author, it appears to be a very conservative, even racist novel: for Rui, the whites are the innocent victims of ungrateful and savage Blacks, who were unwilling to live in peace in a multi-racial Angola, the idealistic dream of Rui's father who believed in that illusion and refused to leave until after nearly all his white neighbors had already gone; the victims as well of Portuguese "commies" and "traitors" who betrayed the settlers and "gave away" territories which were "part of Portugal". He constantly emphasizes that his father treated the Blacks well, got along with them, wasn't an exploiter, worked hard for everything he had. He does occasionally admit that there were other whites who mistreated and abused Blacks, but insists that his family at least were innocent victims, that as one of the returnees says "the innocent suffer for the sins of the guilty" and he refuses to accept that as just. A significant element of the plot is the arbitrary arrest of Rui's father; there are other examples given of whites who were killed or "disappeared" during the transition to independence. On the other hand, there is little or no mention of the Portuguese brutality against the Angolan Black population in combating the nationalist movements, which as many reviewers who take the novel at face value as racist propaganda point out was far beyond anything the whites suffered. (This is the jist of most of the serious negative reviews on Goodreads(as opposed to those who simply don't understand modern literary style) — there are almost no reviews at all on Amazon.) The war is only alluded to occasionally, mainly in references to the Portuguese soldiers (including Rui's Uncle Zé, who nevertheless believes Portugal was right to end the "shame of 500 years of exploitation".) To listen only to Rui, one would believe that the problems only began with the coup, rather than with the beginning of the War of Liberation a decade earlier.
However, Rui's viewpoint is continually being undercut in the novel itself. Rui's own memories show that his father could be best described as a "paternalist" racist, "helping" his Black workers but also treating them essentially as children, less intelligent and lazier than the whites, lacking in discipline and ambition. (Rui never asks what would happen to a Black who was sufficiently disciplined and ambitious to come into competition with the whites.) Rui and his friends sexually exploit the Black girls, but have a certain respect for the white girls, although there is certainly an element of sexism throughout his internal monologue (but again this is often undercut if you read between the lines.) The elements which are missing in Rui's own rationalizations are supplied to a certain extent by the reported dialogue of other characters such as Uncle Zé. If we consider, as we ought to, Rui as an "unreliable" narrator whose understanding of the world is very limited and whose views are very much determined by his environment and what has happened to him and his family, the novel (insofar as it is about Angola) takes on a very different aspect: it is about how Rui and the others have come to their views, rather than endorsing those views.
In the last analysis, however, the novel isn't primarily about the role of the whites in Angola at all, but about the treatment of the "returnees" in The Motherland, and this is what makes it an important work. Despite the decade-long "handwriting on the wall", Portugal was completely unprepared for the influx of "returnees." They became in part the scapegoats for the failure of Portuguese colonialism, or for the colonialism itself, even though many of them were born in the colonies, often after several generations, and those like Rui's parents who were first generation colonists were essentially part of an "economic draft", unable to find sufficient work or living wages in The Motherland. There was an attitude of "you deserved it", you were the exploiters, etc. when in fact it was Portugal itself that was responsible for (and primarily benefited from) the colonies. (Somewhat like those who blamed returning soldiers for the war in Vietnam, rather than the people at home who sent them.) Of course, the fact that most of the "returnees" themselves justified colonialism and opposed the Revolution (such as it was) in Portugal made it easy to hold them responsible. Another and possibly even more important reason for the hostility of people in The Motherland to the "returnees" was the same reason that applies to all immigrants: the fact that a large influx of immigrants into a capitalist country with major unemployment and underemployment and where wages are based on supply and demand for labor power creates a not-entirely-unfounded fear that the natives of the host country will be displaced from their jobs or reduced to lower wages. In any case, whatever the reasons, the treatment of the returnees was abominable and this is the major theme of the novel.
Naturally, all decent people support justice for oppressed nationalities and ethnic groups, but it is necessary to understand that even the most just restitution in the best case will inevitably create new injustices towards members of the former oppressor groups who are not personally responsible, especially in the case of children, and that is even more true when the oppressed group has a leadership that is based on a demagogic nationalist or ethnic or religious (or Stalinist) platform rather than on a genuine class-conscious revolutionary program. While that should not cause us to cease supporting the struggles of oppressed groups for justice and self-determination, we should also give thought to mitigating these inevitable results. While reading this I thought for example of the similar case in Abdulrazak Gurnah's novels where the Moslem population of Tanzania suddenly went from being partly an elite of former slaveowners (although most weren't) to being victims of the Black majority's revenge after independence, and ended up as victims of the usual racism in England. I also thought (given that I read this book in March of 2024) about whether the United States or any country in the "West" would be prepared for the influx of Jewish Israelis if Hamas, Hezbollah, or even a moderate Palestinian group like the original al-Fatah were to win a major victory in Palestine. This is a novel that has many resonances.
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Dial A for Aunties – Jesse Q Sutanto – 3***
This was really ridiculously implausible, but still quite fun to read! The aunties steal the show at every opportunity, but I mostly liked the relationship between Meddy and her Ma. I’m glad I finally got to this book which so many of my book-loving friends have enjoyed. It was the perfect escapist light read during this time in my life.
LINK to my full review
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You, Again – Kate Goldbeck – 2.5**
This is a retelling of the very popular (and brilliant) film, When Harry Met Sally. Ari is a wannabe stand-up comic, making do while she waits for her big break. Josh is a chef from a wealthy family who definitely does NOT want to follow in his father’s footsteps and take over the famous deli he runs. I really disliked these two characters. Ari, in particular, is a hot mess, while Josh is kinda full of himself. Well, you’ve seen the movie, so you know what’s coming. Do yourself a favor. Skip the book and re-watch the movie.
LINK to my full review
Italo Calvino,
The Cloven Viscount
[1952] 106 pagesThis is a rare re-read, from February of 2015. It is the first book of the Our Ancestors trilogy; I read it again because I am reading the second and third books this time around.
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Ramón and Julieta – Alana Quintana Albertson – 3***
This is a retelling of Shakespeare’s most famous couple, set in San Diego’s thriving Mexican-American community. Ramón Montez is the scion of a family fast-food empire. Julieta Campos is a celebrity chef who is determined to save her sea-to-table taqueria from closing. Of course, these star-crossed lovers will find a way to join forces despite the bad blood between their families. It was a fast, fun read that made me hungry for Mexican food.
LINK to my full review
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Tiger Honor – Yoon Ha Lee – 3***
This is a fast-paced space opera adventure tale. Lee has built a fantasy world that includes various shape-shifters, interplanetary travel, military jargon, and various magical elements. It’s the kind of book my nephew would have loved when he was about 10-12 years old. I haven’t read the first book in the series, so was a little lost in terms of the world-building. Still, it held my attention and I was intrigued enough that I’ll probably read more from this author.
LINK to my full review
Italo Calvino,
The Baron in the Trees
[1957, tr. 1959] 217 pagesThe Baron in the Trees is the second book in the Our Ancestors trilogy, although the three books can be read separately or in any order since they are only a series in the sense that they have a similar style; all three are "fables" set in the past but with nonrealistic premises. The basic plot of The Baron in the Trees is that Cosimo, the twelve-year-old son of the old-fashioned, genealogy-obsessed Baron Arminio Piovasco di Rondò, rebels at what he considers the unfair treatment he receives from his family and climbs up a tree, refusing to come down. He spends the rest of his life living in the treetops, having forbidden himself ever to touch the ground. He has many adventures traveling about in the trees, fighting pirates and foreign soldiers, meeting brigands, putting out forest fires, quarrelling with Jesuit spies, and falling in love with the equally eccentric Viola, who appears and disappears at various points in the story; at times he seems like an adult version of Peter Pan, although he definitely ages.
What is the point of the fable (because all Calvino's fables have a point)? One important theme at least is the necessity of perspective, of having a certain distance from society to be able to judge it correctly; the young baron in the trees sees things differently both literally and metaphorically from others. His readings in the Enlightenment authors (the book begins in 1767 and continues through the post-Napoleonic era) give him a different view of society than his Catholic relatives and neighbors, which would not have been possible for him living as a normal baron and participating in the social roles required by his aristocratic status. He meets with and learns from people of all classes and social groups, whom he would never have interacted with as a baron, while not being a part of any of these groups. The contrast with his younger brother, Biagio, who takes on the role Cosimo has rejected (and is the narrator of the fable) shows this clearly. The Wikipedia article on Calvino quotes him as saying that the book is about the role and obligations of the intellectual in society, who ideally should have a similar distance (though we know that is not necessarily the case).
This is one of Calvino's most famous books, and it is definitely one worth reading, especially since it can be read in a few hours.
Italo Calvino,
The Nonexistent Knight
[1959, tr. 1962] 136 pages [Kindle]The third book of the Our Ancestors trilogy, this parody of the romances of chivalry opens with Charlemagne reviewing the Paladins of France, Roland, Oliver and so forth as we know them from the chansons de geste. Finally he comes to Agilulf Emo Bertrandin of the Guildivern and of the the Others of Cobentraz and Sura, Knight of Selimpia Citeriore and Fez, who is the perfect embodiment of chivalry, apart from one slight defect: he doesn't exist. There is no body in that shining white suit of armor. Shortly afterwards, we meet the strange character of Gurduloo (and many other names) who variously imagines himself as a sheep, a frog, a fish, a butterfly and whatever else is around him, in speaking to the king isn't sure whether he is Gurduloo talking to the king, or the king talking to Gurduloo, later is confused as to whether he is supposed to eat the soup or the soup is supposed to eat him . . . As a joke, Charlemagne assigns him to be Agilulf's squire.
In a parody of Existentialist philosophy, Agilulf is essence without existence, Gurduloo is existence without essence. Both are contrasted with the ineffective, inauthentic and rule-bound life of the other aging paladins. As one might expect, there are characters who mediate between the two extremes: Raimbaut de Rousillon and the female knight Bradamante. Over the course of the tale, we observe battles, quests, damsels in distress, the Knights of the Holy Grail, and other clichés of mediaeval romance. The story constantly confronts us with surprising turns, so that it is impossible to summarize the plot without spoilers.
As with the other two books, and as we would expect from one of the founders of postmodernist fiction, the fable can be read either as an amusing story or as a serious allegory; it is both.
Italo Calvino,
Marcovaldo or The seasons in the city
[1963, tr. 1983] 121 pagesIn reading this collection of twenty short stories, most between four and eight pages, I felt as though I were watching an evening of Charlie Chaplin one-reelers. The protagonist of all the stories, Marcovaldo, is a poorly-paid unskilled factory worker, who is trying to provide for his large family in the basically hostile world of a North Italian industrial city. Like Chaplin's Tramp, he is good-hearted, naive and sort of clueless, and all his efforts end in comic misadventures. We laugh, but at the same time feel a certain compassion. The earlier stories are written, like Calvino's first novels, in a style reminiscent of neo-realist films, although with the exaggerations that come with comedy. In the last few stories (written a decade and a half after the earlier ones) the tone becomes less comic and more obviously satirical, and I didn't enjoy them as much.
Mod
Off Season – Anne Rivers Siddons – 3***
Lilly Constable, reeling from the sudden death of her husband, decides to go to her family’s Maine cottage to regroup and reflect on her marriage to the love of her life, Cam McCall. I thought this would be a book about her marriage, but at least half of it was about Lily’s first love, at the tender age of eleven. Siddons kept me turning pages, but it was far from memorable.
LINK to my full review
Mod
The Letter Writer – Dan Fesperman – 4****
When a body is found floating in the Hudson, newly arrive detective sergeant Woodrow Cain accepts the help of an odd duck - Danzinger looks like a “crackpot” but he is clearly educated and has means. The question is whether he is helping Cain solve a murder, or ensnaring him in a clever espionage plot. A great historical thriller!
LINK to my full review
Italo Calvino,
Cosmicomics
[1965, tr. 1968] 169 pages [Kindle]Italo Calvino, t zero also tr. as Time and the Hunter [1967, tr. 1969] 152 pages
Italo Calvino, New stories from World Memory and Other Cosmicomic Stories [1968] and Cosmicomics New and Old [1984] [tr. 2002] 101 pages [Kindle]
This is somewhat complex. I read these stories in The Complete Cosmicomics which contains all thirty one stories reprinted in the 1984 collection Cosmicomics New and Old, in addition to two stories from World Memory and Other Cosmicomic Stories which were not included in that collection and the revised version of one story published separately, for a total of thirty four. The original Cosmicomics contained twelve stories, and t zerocontained eleven; the remaining stories are not available in English except in this collection (or in periodicals.)
The Cosmicomics are a unique genre to themselves. Experimental fiction, certainly, speculative fiction in a sense, "fables" in a sense that applies only to Calvino, but no more specific genre. They are sometimes called science fiction, but although they are "inspired" by scientific theories the treatment has little resemblance to what is called science fiction; at most there is a very remote similarity to Lem's Cyberiad, which itself stretches the definition of science fiction. A few, especially the "moon" stories which start each of the three books, are "tall tales" which could be considered to fall under the label of fantasy, but these are not in my opinion the best stories in the collection.
The most imaginative stories are those which are told from the perspective of elementary particles, one-celled animals, and other beings we do not generally consider as having consciousness. All, however, are forms of the first-person protagonist Qfwfq. Who or what is Qfwfq, who appears to be all these different forms of being? The closest I could come to understanding his nature was to consider him (he is always definitely male) as a kind of chief organizing monad in each body, not in the "windowless" sense of Leibniz but perhaps more like Whitehead's "prehensions". My favorite story of this kind was the first of the "Priscilla" trilogy in t zero, "Mitosis", which is a love-story of a one-celled asexual animal with . . . what? t zero also has some very experimental stories where the simple plot is just the opportunity for an interior monologue about physics or metaphysics; my favorite of these was the title story "t zero", also titled "Time and the Hunter", where the entire interior monologue takes place between the time the hunter shoots his arrow at the lion and the time when it hits or misses the lion.
Hard to describe or review, these are definitely a great read.
Mod
The Garden of Evening Mists – Tan Twan Eng – 5*****
What a marvelous book! Poetic writing. Complex characters. Atmospheric descriptions. Eng brought right into this world. I felt the peace and serenity of the garden, and the terror of guerilla attacks. I could smell the jungle, feel the humid heat, hear the rain.
LINK to my full review
Mod
Dash & Lily’s Book of Dares – Rachel Cohn and David Levithan – 4****
This is a delightful young adult meet-cute rom-com featuring an implausible quest and two extraordinarily bright teenagers, set in the fabulous city of New York during the Christmas season. It’s charming and clever and the two main characters are very likeable. And I loved the literary references.
LINK to my full review
Italo Calvino,
Invisible Cities
[1972, tr. 1974] 165 pagesNot exactly a novel, not exactly a story collection, Invisible Cities is one of Calvino's most experimental and least classifiable works. Each of the nine chapters begins and ends with a dialogue between "Marco Polo" and "Kublai Khan". In between are several short (one to three page) descriptions of imaginary cities, all designated by women's names, which are supposedly being narrated by Polo to the Khan. The descriptions are classified into categories such as "Cities and Memory", "Cities and Desire", "Cities and Signs", "Cities and Eyes", "Cities and Names", "Cities and the Dead", "Continuous Cities", "Trading Cities" and a few more. "Cities and Signs" and "Cities and Names" make points about the nature of language and symbolism, in line with Calvino's interest at the time in semiology; other descriptions make points about the relativity of our perceptions, and so forth. For many of the descriptions, however, I could not see any clear intention; nevertheless, they were all interesting in various ways. All in all, this was a book which was both easy to read and difficult to interpret.
Italo Calvino,
Difficult Loves
[1949, Eng. tr.] 181 pagesItalo Calvino, Difficult Loves [1958, Eng. tr.] 303 pages [Kindle, Overdrive]
These are two different collections with the same title (and the Wikipedia article on Calvino lists yet a third one with different contents from both). The e-book I borrowed from the Library contains translations of the thirteen stories written in the 1940s and 1950s and collected in Italian in 1970 as Gli amori difficili, together with two novellas, The Argentine Ant (1952) and Smog (1965); the printed book, which I had, contains eight stories from Gli amori difficili and twenty other stories from the 1949 collection The Crow Comes Last (Ultimo viene il corvo). (For that I counted the pages only of the twenty stories, to avoid duplication.)
The stories are among Calvino's earlier work, from the period of The Path to the Spiders' Nests and Our Ancestors; they are written in his realist style rather than his later postmodern style, although some like "The Adventure of a Photographer" and "The Adventure of a Motorist" foreshadow his later concerns. I especially liked "The Adventure of a Reader." (The "Adventures of" stories are the ones from the original Gli amori difficili.)
The twenty from The Crow Comes Last are divided into three groups: "Riviera Stories" are largely nostalgic stories about adolescents in a simpler time, "War Stories" are about the Second World War and the partisan movement, and "Postwar Stories" tend to be more humorous in the "Chaplinesque" style of Marcovaldo ("The Theft in the Pastry Shop" reminded me of the scene of the robbers in the Department Store in Modern Times).
Italo Calvino,
Mr. Palomar
[1983, tr. 1985] 113 pages [Kindle Unlimited]Another unclassifiable work by Calvino, Mr. Palomar is made up of short episodes, not really stories, which take place in the consciousness of a single protagonist, Mr. Palomar. There is an "index" at the end which suggests that there is an architecture to the work, moving from visual images through cultural observations to speculative meditations, which is sort of true. Many of the episodes seem to be just Calvino playing with ideas, using Mr. Palomar as a device for expressing his opinions on various philosophical and political questions. The episodes seemed to me to be much more uneven than other stories I have read recently by Calvino — the section on Mr. Palomar at the Grocery Store bored me completely — but this may just be because I have read so many of his books in a row that I am getting burnt out. In any case, not my favorite work of the author.
Mod
All the Ways We Said Goodbye – Beatriz Willliams, Lauren Willig and Karen White – 3***
Three women are linked by the legend of the talisman of Courcelles, across half a century: 1914, 1942, and 1964. The central setting is France. I figured out the big “secrets” as soon as they were introduced. It held my attention, but I’m getting tired of the World War II scenario and the various tropes used.
LINK to my full review
Mod
City of the Beasts – Isabel Allende – 3***
Allende has crafted a very engaging, fantastical adventure story, with a fair amount of information provided regarding environmental conservation. A couple of the adult characters were rather cartoonish, but the young people really shone, and I loved the way that the native indigenous tribes were portrayed.
LINK to my full review
Italo Calvino,
Under the Jaguar Sun
[1986, tr. 1988] 86 pagesThese three stories, published posthumously, were actually written earlier but intended for a book on the five senses, which was not completed at the time of the author's death. The title story, "Under the Jaguar Sun" (1982), is told largely through the sense of taste, mixing archaeological tourism at an Olmec-Zapotec-Mixtec sacrificial temple with meals of current Mexican cuisine. "A King Listens" (1984) is told through sounds (and is another of Calvino's experiments with a second-person narrative). "The Name, the Nose" (1972) deals with the sense of smell; it alternates between three parallel stories, one set in prehistory, one in eighteenth or nineteenth-century Paris at a perfumerie, and one in twentieth-century London where a group of hippies are crashing together. All three were interesting experiments.
John Herman Randall, Jr.,
The Career of Philosophy
v. 1:
From the Middle Ages through the Enlightenment
[1962] 997 pagesAlmost a thousand pages, this is the most comprehensive secondary work I have read on what my college classes called "early modern philosophy"; I have been reading it on and off for over a month. The organizing ideas are that modern philosophy is not a complete break with the past, but has a continuity with the philosophy of the later middle ages, and that it is largely an attempt to do two things, assimilate the new science of Galileo and Newton, and justify the struggles of the rising capitalist class (which he refers to throughout as "the middle class" — a perfect example of how vague that term is, and how absurd it is that certain leftists today try to make it synonymous with the Marxist term "petty bourgeois" — against the Church and the feudal system. Given that perspective, it is almost as much a history of the rise of science as it is a history of philosophy.
The volume is divided into four very unequal "books"; the first book is 43 pages, and the fourth book is over 500. The first book is essentially an introduction. It is rather schematic and his comparisons with contemporary ideas struck me as generally wrong, perhaps because he is a specialist on the late mediaeval and early modern periods, while his knowledge of the present, especially in science, is basically that of an "educated layman" (and like most American academics, he misunderstands Marxism, and confuses it with the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union). His own bias is never quite made clear, but I would say he is essentially a pragmatist and a liberal, as one would expect given that he was a student of John Dewey; his references to "sound theology" suggest that he is also probably at least nominally a liberal Christian. None of this really matters once he enters into the detailed study of the philosophers.
He begins with the recovery of the "new" Aristotle via the Moslem commentators (Averroes) at the end of the twelfth century, and briefly summarizes the three main tendencies in thirteenth-century philosophy: the older Platonic tradition stemming from St. Augustine, the Aristotelian tradition of Duns Scotus (and its theological variant of Thomism), and moving into the fourteenth century, the via moderna of William of Ockham's "terminism". In the first part of the second book, he turns toward the early Humanists, discusses the recovery of the "Hellenic" Aristotle (i.e. Aristotle in Greek, and the Alexandrian commentaries), then describes the introduction of Humanism north of the Alps and the Reformation, ending up with a discussion of sixteenth-century political theories.
He does a good job of explaining what seems to the contemporary reader so paradoxical, that it was the supporters of absolute monarchy and the divine right of kings who were the progressives of the time (looking to the monarchy to suppress the power of the Church and feudal nobility), while the more modern-seeming writers who favor a limited monarchy and natural law were the reactionaries who were supporting the traditional feudal-ecclesiastical establishment. It was only after the nobles were deprived of independent power and the Church tamed (or replaced by the more Erastian Protestants) that the bourgeoisie in the next century turned against the kings and began favoring natural rights (especially of course the absolute right to private property.)
The main interest of book two, however, is the discussion of the Padua Aristotelians, who combined Ockhamism with the Alexandrian Aristotle. Randall had previously written a book specifically on the Padua tradition, so here he is at his most detailed. (Padua had no theological faculty; it was primarily a medical school, and so Aristotle from the beginning was treated as a secular scientist rather than a metaphysician.)
Part two of the second book deals with the Italian nature philosophers, both Platonists and Aristotelians, investigates the mediaeval heritage leading up to Galileo (in an interesting discussion which confronts Pierre Duhem's account with his later critics) and continues the discussion of Padua, ending with a chapter on Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Giordano Bruno. Book three deals with the attempts to interpret the new science, and the scientific method, with the inherited traditions about the sources of knowledge: Descartes and the Cartesians, building upon the Augustinian tradition, Spinoza combining the traditions into a consistent system, and the British Empiricists building upon the Ockhamist tradition; the book ends with a chapter on Hobbes.
The fourth and longest book begins with Newton's philosophy of nature, then covers Locke, Berkeley, and Hume as epistemologists. This is followed by a chapter on Locke's political theories, and chapters on rational religion (the rise of Deism), and rational morality (the Cambridge Platonists); and follows the further development of ethics in Shaftsbury and so forth, ending with another chapter on Hume. The book then turns to the French Enlightenment, with chapters on Voltaire, the Encyclopedists, the materialists such as LeMettrie and Holbach, and the psychology of association. Finally, the book ends with the political theories of Montesquieu, Vico, the Physiocrats, and Rousseau.
All the philosophers I studied in my college class in "Early Modern Philosophy" (or "Philosophy Before Kant" — I assume the second volume will begin with him) are discussed at length, except for some reason Leibniz, who isn't dealt with at all. This was a dense and comprehensive work, and it has tempted me to reconstruct my TBR list for the next two years to include more philosophy and fill in the gaps in my reading.
Mod
A Spy In the House – Y S Lee – 3***
This is the first in a series featuring Mary Quinn (nee Lang), a Chinese-English young woman who has been recruited into The Agency – an all-female organization providing discreet investigations. Mary is intelligent, inquisitive, observant and compassionate. She is also self-possessed, resilient and quite capable of getting herself out of a jam, though Victorian gentlemen are prone to coming to her rescue regardless of her own abilities. I look forward to reading more books in this series, and more from this author.
LINK to my full review
Italo Calvino,
Hermit in Paris: Autobiographical Writings
[2003, Eng. tr. 2003] 255 pagesThe last of my readings in Italo Calvino for the time being, this is a collection of autobiographical writings, mainly interviews and biographical blurbs from his books, some found in a folder after his death, and edited by his widow Esther Calvino, together with his letters from his first trip to the United States (which make up about half the book). Some cast some light on what he intended by his fictional writings, while others explain his political development, his reasons for joining and later leaving the PCI (Communist Party of Italy.) He gives an account of the various influences on his literary production, especially Emilio Vittorini and Cesare Pavese; there is no mention of his involvement with the OuLiPo group.
Paging All Bookworms!
Books mentioned in this topic
Unfortunately Yours: a novel (other topics)Leave the World Behind (other topics)
The Underground Railroad (other topics)
To All the Boys I've Loved Before (other topics)
Mrs. Jeffries on the Ball (other topics)
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Lévi-Strauss begins this book by describing three types of masks produced by the Salish and Kwakiutl peoples of the Pacific Northwest (Northern Washington State, British Columbia, and Vancouver Island), the Swaihwé of the Salish, the similar Xwéxwé of the Kwakiutl, and the opposite type of Dzonokwa, giving a structuralist analysis of both their plastic art and the origin myths connected with them. He goes on to discuss the relation of the myths connected with the masks to the myths about the origins of copper and sums up his conclusions. In the second part, mainly reworkings of articles he had already published in journals, he considers another type of mask, discusses the probable social structure of the Kwakiutl (which was controversial at the time) making analogies with the noble houses of Mediaeval France, and then enlarges his examination of related myths to the entire geographical/cultural area as far north as Alaska. The book is fairly technical and somewhat difficult, but very interesting.