What Are You Reading / Reviews - July 1 thru Dec 31, 2025

[Book Concierge]

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue – V E Schwab – 4****
In 1714, a young woman flees from the planned / arranged marriage and begs the gods for her freedom. Luc grants her wish but … What a wonderful, engaging story. I was completely captivated. And while I’ve grown to hate the ubiquitous dual timeline, in this case it was necessary, for how else to tell the story of “invisible” Addie LaRue, and her Faustian bargain? What a cunning, clever woman!
LINK to my full review

[James]

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland [1915] 124 pages

One of my favorite science fiction stories (from when I used to read a lot of science fiction) was Joanna Russ’ “When It Changed”, published in Harlan Ellison’s Again Dangerous Visions anthology in 1972. Gilman’s utopian novel Herland, written more than a half-century earlier, is based on the same premise: male explorers discover a society composed entirely of women, and have a hard time accepting that it is a stable society which in no way misses the presence of men. In Russ’ story, it is on another planet; in Gilman’s novel, it is in a lost and hidden valley. Both Russ and Gilman were socialist-feminists; in some respects Gilman seems more radical: while on Russ’ Whileaway the society is based on lesbian couples and nuclear families, in Herland child rearing is socialized and the friendships among the women are not exclusive couples.

The plot of the novel has three male adventurers with a small biplane find the hidden valley. One, Terry, is a “macho” male, who never manages to accept the fact that women can accomplish what he finds in Herland, and eventually gets expelled from Herland for his tendencies to violence; another, Jeff, idealizes women; the third, Van, the narrator of the book, is, like Gilman herself, a sociologist, who tries to understand the society, and he provides us with our information about it. The basic ideology of Herland is a kind of universal Motherhood; they have a Mother Goddess but there is no worship and they do not understand the concept. The narrator promises to tell us about the economic system but never gets around to it; but we do learn that it is an egalitarian society with no classes. There is somewhat of a didactic feeling about the book, but Gilman balances it with adventure as well as a book of this type can. Apparently the book was influenced by Bellamy’s Looking Backward. She had previously written another “utopian” novel, unconnected with this one, and followed Herland up with a sequel called Her in Ourland, with Van and his wife, Ellador, from Herland, in the contemporary world of the First World War; the three books are sometimes linked as the Herland trilogy.

[James]

Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried [1990] 211 pages

It seems as though every important war gives rise to one or two works of real literature (e.g. The Red Badge of Courage, All Quiet on the Western Front, Red Cavalry). I’m not talking about historical novels, which are written after a considerable interval (the definitions range from 25 to 50 years) from research, but novels by persons who were or might have been involved in the events described. I would say that The Things They Carried is in that sense the main literary response to the Vietnam War.

The book is what is often called a “novel in stories”; it alternates stories set during the war with stories about the narrator (essentially the author, but somewhat fictionalized) trying to come to grips with his wartime experience decades later. These are “war stories” but not the type of story which glorifies the war or presents heroic actions; the characters are young men who are thrust into a war none of them really believes in and have to adapt and survive, both physically and mentally. It blends humor and tragedy in a very human way and gives a very real sense of what the war meant to those who were caught up in it. The stories were mostly published separately in the 1980's before being combined into the novel.

[Book Concierge]

Kept – Y. Euny Hong – 3***
Judith Lee is descended from a Korean royal family and is used to the privileges of her status. But when her family cuts her off after she graduates, she is at a loss for how to pay off her many debts. Then she’s introduced to the madame of a house of high-society girls who are in-demand courtesans. Social satire is not my favorite genre, but there were some episodes I found quite entertaining. Not sure Jude learned anything from the experience; she still relied on men to save her from troubles of her own making.
LINK to my full review

[James]

Kate Chopin, The Awakening and Selected Short Stories [1891-1896] 158 pages [Kindle]

Kate Chopin was a noted author in her own time as a regional writer; most of her work is set in Louisiana. She was largely forgotten until she was rediscovered as a feminist author in the 1970s, although she denied being a feminist or a suffragist. This e-book contained the short novel The Awakening and eight short stories. The Awakening, published in 1894, is the story of a bored and rather neglected middle-class housewife who falls in love at an island resort and “awakens” to the idea that she is an independent person with interests outside her home and family. This certainly seems like a feminist theme, and was controversial at the time it was written, although it is not particularly shocking today.

The book also contained eight short stories, which were all interesting: Beyond the Bayou [1891, pub. 1893] is a symbolic story about a woman who breaks through a literal mental barrier, Ma’ame Pélagie [1892, pub. 1893] is a regional story about the postwar South, Désirée’s Baby [1892, pub. 1893] takes on the theme of interracial relationships. The other stories included were A Respectable Woman [1894], The Kiss [1894, pub. 1895], A Pair of Silk Stockings [1896, pub. 1897], The Locket [1897, pub. 1969], and A Reflection [1899, pub. 1932]. I also read separately The Story of an Hour [1894], which was not included in the book.

[James]

Elias Lönnrot, The Kalevala [1849, tr. 1989] 734 pages [Kindle]

This month’s reading for a group I am in on Goodreads, The Kalevala is an epic poem in Finnish, stitched together by Elias Lönnrot from oral tradition going back to the early middle ages, first in 1835 and later in a much longer form in 1849. There are at least a half-dozen complete English translations; I chose the 1989 translation by Keith Bosley in the Oxford World Classics, which is available in Open Library.

I called it an epic, but it really something unique. It is based on oral stories which Lönnrot and his colleagues collected in the Karelian region on both sides of the border between Finland, then a province of the Russian Empire, and northwestern Russia. However, he reworked them to make his epic, so it is really not an authentic study in folklore. On the other hand, he did not rework them as radically as Homer did the oral sources of the Iliad and the Odyssey, to make them into a real unity. The stories are really just episodes, only connected by being about the same individuals and by references to a mysterious artifact called the Sampo. Perhaps the closest analogy is the Elder Edda from Iceland. The original stories are in a form of verse called the Kalevala meter, which is a type of trochaic tetrameter; Bosley does not follow this as consistently as some of the earlier versions, but he still manages to convey an idea of the poetic style of the epic.

After a short prologue the poem begins with a creation myth, ending with the creation of the first man, Väinämöinen, and the first ten of the fifty cantos tell stories about him and his quest for a bride in the Northland, in the course of which his friend, the smith Ilmarinen, forges the Sampo for Louhi, the Mistress of the North. Both men are unsuccessful in gaining the bride.There follow five cantos about a man names Lemminkäinen and his quest for a bride, in the course of which he dies but is brought back to life by his mother. The story then returns to Väinämöinen for three cantos, who goes to the Tuonela, the land of the dead, to find spells to build a boat, to seek a bride. However the intended bride prefers his friend Ilmarinen, and there follow seven cantos about Ilmarinen’s quests to win her hand, and about their wedding and return home. We then come back to Lemminkäinen, who is angry for not having been invited to wedding and kills the Master of the North, but flees and hides from the Northlanders’ revenge. Then follows a completely unrelated episode about a man named Kullervo. After the death of Kullervo, the poem returns to Ilmarinen, who forges a bride out of gold but is unable to bring her to life. Then Väinämöinen and Ilmarinen decide to steal the Sampo. After a battle at sea, Louhi hides the sun and moon, but is eventually forced to return them to the sky. Finally in canto 50 there is a very distorted account of the birth of Jesus, who becomes King of Karelia, and Väinämöinen sails away.

Apparently, in a kind of reverse euhemerism, Väinämöinen and Ilmarinen were originally pagan gods who have been humanized as heroes. This was an extremely interesting book. It was one of the sources of The Lord of the Rings according to Wikipedia.

[James]

Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations [1776, 5th ed. 1789, mod. ed. 1937] 976 pages

The Wealth of Nations is a book that has been on my reading list for a long time; my friends gave it to me as a farewell present when I moved to another state after my junior year in high school back in 1969. Somehow I never found time to read it until now.

It is a highly significant and influential work, which was the first to try to really understand and describe the capitalist system, and defend it against both the vestiges left behind by feudalism and the mercantilist ideology of the time it was written. He devotes much space to explaining why import duties (i.e. tariffs) are a bad idea, as detrimental to the countries which impose them as to those which they are imposed against; it is amazing that after a quarter of a millennium there are politicians who still think they are some sort of a panacea.

Naturally, being the first attempt of its kind, there is much that is mistaken, and much that has simply become obsolete due to the further development of capitalism, especially in his discussions of the role of gold and silver and the banking system, but there is also much which has stood the test of time and seems really prophetic. He was writing in the first years of the industrial revolution, and his model of capitalism was still based largely on artisanal production or small factories; he underestimates the role of corporations, which he considers inefficient compared to individual ownership or partnerships.

He tries to take a historical view, although his history is rather inadequate by modern standards and he tries to apply capitalist categories to earlier economic formations where they do not really apply. He ends the book with a proposal for English unity with the colonies, which was already too late in 1776 and even more so in 1789, the date of the last edition published during his lifetime, which is the basis of the Modern Library edition I read. The book has an introduction and notes by Edwin Cannan, first published in 1937. One of the problems I had with it is that there is no clear distinction between Cannan’s footnotes and Smith’s.

In any event it is a foundational work which I am glad to have finally read.

[James]

Stephen King, The Dead Zone [1979] 567 pages

After reading several long books this month, I decided to relax and read a horror novel before Halloween. Despite being from Maine, I had never read anything by Stephen King, because I thought he only wrote paranormal horror, and I am too much of a materialist to take that seriously; but although there is a paranormal plot in this novel, it is not the source of the horror. Actually, the paranormal is the positive side, the horror is all from humans: a serial rapist-murderer, and a politician.

To tell the truth, I chose this particular King book because I had read somewhere on the Internet that it predicted the rise of Donald Tr**p, which is more like what I consider a horror story. In fact, there was almost nothing that is specific to Tr**p, except that the villain, Greg Stillson, has a history of fraudulent real estate transactions. Unlike the real President, he was never caught, much less convicted. There was also a similarity in that he acts like a buffoon to convince people he is harmless. Otherwise he is a fairly generic right-wing demagogue. What I disliked in the book was less the paranormal aspect than the way it presented assassination as a legitimate response, which I think is politically dangerous; these right-wing politicians need to be answered politically by mass action, not individual terrorism that just plays into their hands.

I will admit that King really is a better writer, in terms of style and technique, than I had expected from a best-selling author. The book is set in the late sixties and early seventies, and King gets the atmosphere right, unlike most of the novels I have read about that period: there are antiwar protests but no drug-crazed hippies, for example. That gave it a star more than I would have given it based on the plot.

[Book Concierge]

A Perilous Undertaking – Deanna Raybourn – 4****
Book two in the Veronica Speedwell series has our heroine taking on a case at the behest of Lady Sundridge, who begs Veronica to save a man from execution. I really like this series. Veronica is quite the strong heroine. She is a naturalist, studying butterflies, but she is also an astute observer and not prone to sit idly by when there is an injustice that needs correction. Her spats with Stoker are priceless, and I love the sexual tension between them. Veronica is NOT your typical Victorian lady! She knows what she likes and is not shy about seeking her own pleasure.
LINK to my full review

[James]

Harry Cliff, How to Make an Apple Pie from Scratch: In Search of the Recipe for Our Universe, from the Origins of Atoms to the Big Bang [2021] 385 pages

Harry Cliff is an experimental particle physicist working at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. The title of the book is taken from Carl Sagan’s famous statement, “If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” Cliff works backwards from an apple pie to atoms, the production of heavy elements in stars, supernovae, and neutron star collisions, subatomic particles and the associated quantum fields, the production of hydrogen and helium in the Big Bang, the Higgs field, and the various problems and possible theoretical solutions connected with them.

This is the most recent book I have read on cosmogony and I would say it is a fairly high-level popularization; I learned quite a bit from it that I didn’t know, particularly concerning the discoveries (and lack of discoveries) of the LHC in the four or five years since the previous most recent book I had read. Unfortunately, the book in an attempt to be more popular is written in a very colloquial style and has language which would probably get it banned from many American school libraries – really, should we have to worry about that in a science book?