thwap's 2024 readings

 

Well, another year.  (Here's last year.  Here's the first book depository.)

2024-01-18

Today I finished Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.

One Hundred Years of Solitude can be read and enjoyed as merely a chronological sequence of events in the lives of the Buendia family, but it helps to know something of the underlying meaning. Gabriel García Márquez uses a fantastic fictional story as an expression of reality, with myth and history overlapping. Myth serves as a vehicle to transmit history to the reader. For example, the characters in the novel experience the Liberal political reformation of their colonial way of life, the arrival of the railway, the Thousand Days’ War (1899-1902), the corporate hegemony of the “banana company,” the cinema, the automobile, and the massacre of striking workers.

The inevitable and inescapable repetition of history is a dominant theme in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Márquez reiterates the metaphor of history as a circular phenomenon through the repetition of names and characteristics belonging to the Buendía family. The characters are controlled by their pasts and the complexity of time. Throughout the novel the characters are visited by ghosts that are symbols of the past and the haunting nature that the past has over their lives.

I found the writing to be quite poetic at times.  There was a sense of history and grandeur and folly and farce and wisdom.  At other times I felt like Marquez was a little too in love with his own talent.

2024-01-24

I don't really like ebooks.  But sometimes I don't feel like lugging a physical book around with me.  So I got something short.  Britannica Educational Publishing's Ancient Rome, Michael Anderson ed.

I wouldn't say it's "provocative."  It DOES very succintly talk about a lot of important stuff, such as the attempts of the Plebians to challenge the Patricians and the descent into imperialism; Roman literature; Rome's wars; Roman architecture.  It's only 88 electronic pages!!!

2024-01-30

Yesterday I finished reading Jon Ronson's The Psychopath Test.

Ronson is his usual funny naif self.

The Psychopath Test is funny, informative, and even suspenseful. I want to point out the first chapter in particular: the first chapter might be the best thing Ronson has ever done as a writer. The book begins with Ronson learning about a series of self-made books that have been distributed to an exclusive group of people internationally. The people who receive these books are primarily academicians and intellectuals, but no one can quite discern WHY they received this cryptic book. The book itself seems to be a coded message, and many of its passages are ominously foreboding. Ronson attempts to get to the bottom of this mystery, and it launches him into search for what makes a psychopath. This first chapter was such a joy to read, and things become so crazy and strange — Ronson makes for a good character to lead us down this rabbithole. If you are on the fence regarding this book, sample the first several passages on Amazon, and that should be your litmus test.

The story that is told in the first chapter ultimately serves as the smoking gun for what comes later. Ronson interviews alleged psychopaths in a mental ward, researchers who pioneered work in psychopathy, the man who developed the current scale used to diagnose psychopaths, a psychopathic millionaire CEO, one of the first criminal profilers, and the man who devised the current form of the DSM (more on that in a bit). I do a lot of work in the field of psychology, so a lot of this information was not particularly new. However, with that said, the materialthat wasn’t new to me was still fun to revisit. Ronson retells a lot of this information with incredulously wide eyes and in a dry, witty way that’s hard not to love. If you’ve read any of Ronson’s work before, you know that the man is a very anxious, neurotic individual. This trait is accentuated here as Ronson travels among murders and other unhinged individuals. As Ronson becomes more involved in the subject matter, the more neurotic and paranoid he gets. Is he himself a psychopath? Are psychopaths going to find him and kill him for exposing him?

Interestingly, I found that most of the best moments in this book came from when Ronson was interviewing the perfectly “sane” people — the researchers who have spent their lives trying to pinpoint the identity of psychopaths seem to show the most psychopathic traits. This point is overtly made in one of Bob Hare’s seminars. Hare is the inventor of the current scale used to assess for psychopathy, and one of the members of his audience stands up and proclaims the man to be a psychopath himself. Hare, along with some of the researchers in the field all exhibit strange, quirky mannerisms, and their curious interviews were more interesting than, say, when Ronson interviews a mass murderer later in the book. To that point, hearing about the creation of the Diagnostic Statistics Manual (or DSM; the handbook on which ALL current abnormal psychological disorders are diagnosed and informed) was one of the highlights for me. When this interview comes late in the book, it feels only tangentially related to the main thread of The Psychopath Test, but as someone who works in the field, I was captivated by the story behind the influential manual.

It's clear from the testimony of some people that they really do lack any understanding of how other people feel.  But the case of Al "Chainsaw" Dunlap shows the dangers of generalizing.  Dunlap is clearly a selfish, self-centered, self-important asshole.  But not a psychopath.

2024-02-01

Just finished Scott Anderson's Lawrence in Arabia: Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East.  (It was published in 2013.)

From the link:

So let me come right to the point: Scott Anderson does not disappoint with Lawrence in Arabia. While nominally naming his book after Lawrence, he expands his story to three other scions of the age who also participated in the forces that transformed the political lines of the area. Here we have Curt Prufer, a mid-level German diplomat, Aaron Aaronsohn, an accomplished agronomist who was also a committed Zionist, and William Yale, an American and son of a down-on-its-luck upper-class family who somehow found himself looking for petroleum resources for Standard Oil on the sly. Their paths intertwine and overlap, and each becomes a protagonist in their own right as much as Lawrence, leaving me as intrigued with each as I was with him. As a rose by any other name is still a rose, each becomes in one form or another a spy for their own people, whether Prufer for Germany, Aaronsohn for Zionism, and Yale for Standard Oil, and them for the Americans.

 

To be sure, the underlying tragedy here is that each is really just part of a sideshow while the greater narrative—World War I—is centered elsewhere, boiling over into the Middle East in the contest of empires that caused the death and suffering of so many, not just on the frontlines of the battles, but as resources and crops and materials were gobbled up and taken for the war effort. Here we see the Turks killing the Kurds, the Jews and Arabs competing for survival, and the British and French (and to a lesser extent the Americans) competing for lines on a map for the prestige of empire.

 

It’s a tragedy.

Given the horrors since 2013, especially the Israeli Nazi Party's genocide of the Palestinians happening at this very moment, the arrogance and the idiocy of the European imperialists depicted within this book are all that much more maddening.  Anderson does provide a very compelling portrait of T. E. Lawrence.

2024-02-11

I read Michael Kupperman's graphic memoir All The Answers.  The title is very clever.  Because (as the review states) M. Kupperman's father had been a child prodigy on 1940's radio quiz shows.  He knew all the answers.  The guy who designed those quiz shows went on to design the 1950's television quiz shows like "The $64,000 Question" which later turned out to have been rigged, with popular contestants having "all the answers."  But his father's childhood experiences marked him forever and therefore impacted the author's life and he finally wants to sit down and discuss this verboten topic with his father to get "all the answers."

From the review:

All the Answers documents Michael Kupperman’s efforts to learn more about the years his father, Joel Kupperman, spent as a child performer on Quiz Kids, first a radio game show and later an early television program. Throughout the book, he contends with both the hastening of his father’s dementia and a reticence about Quiz Kids that predates that diagnosis. The program had been a "forbidden subject” during Kupperman’s own childhood, and he devotes much of All the Answers to exploring how the experience might have damaged his father. This means also turning toward a curious intersection in US history.

...

In its gravity, scope, and personal focus, All the Answers marks a major departure for Kupperman, best known for absurdist humor comics such as Tales Designed to Thrizzle. And yet fans of those comics may still find much to like in Answers. Kupperman arrives at a variety of surreal images, such as a row of Quiz Kids participants in graduation gowns, waiting to be heard across the nation. The strangeness of Joel Kupperman’s youth often defies belief; he meets Orson Welles at one point and has no patience for Welles’s magic tricks. Kupperman’s talent for the bizarre is especially useful during a sequence in which a ghoulish Henry Ford—“trying to repair his image by reversing his stance on Jews”—stops by a hotel room Joel is occupying with his parents, keen to speak with the boy.

Answers includes a more limited selection of formal flourishes than a reader would find in a Thrizzle collection. This is a more restrained Michael Kupperman. 

Glad I got it out from the library.

2024-02-20

I finished Tim Cook's second volume of his history of the Canadian Expeditionary Force in World War I: Shock Troops: Canadians Fighting the Great War, 1917-1918 last night.

I read his first volume: At the Sharp End a few year's ago.

The linked review provides lots of stuff to summarize the book.  I'll add that there are interesting anecdotes such as the troops believing there were deserters from both sides living as ghouls in No Man's Land between the trenches, living by coming out of their holes at night and eating fresh corpses.  The biggest takeaway for me was the insane waste of soldiers' lives (especially effective veterans) in the "Hundred Days."  In my innocence I thought that the biggest casualties were taken earlier in the war and that all the training of the Canadians and the depletion of the Germans had made the casualties of the CEF in the last months of the war relatively light.  Instead, it seems that instead of having really absorbed the lessons of the war, the generals (especially the French generals such as Allied Supreme Commander Ferdinand Foche) were still wedded to the "hit them hard, hit them everywhere and wear them down [and ignore the toll it's taking on us]" that had inspired the Somme and the Nievelle and Passaschendele offenses.  You see, the Germans had spent their last bolt in their 1918 offensive and Canadian Commander Arthur Currie's initial counteroffensive was done according to his own timetable, despite the protestations of his superior Douglas Haig.  And it was a great success.  But after that, Currie either succumbed to, or agreed with the orders of his superiors to keep on attacking, again and again, and Canadians died in the thousands running up against still effective German defenses, without artillery support, without proper reconaissance, with nothing, basically, but the hard-won offensive skills of infantrymen who were being constantly sacrificed.

Would the war have been prolonged into 1919 if Currie had been given or taken a few more days here and there to plan his offensives?  

The story of the soldier saved by a dream of his brother.  The sections on how information was better shared within the smaller, less conservative CEF than in the British Army, the sections on the occupation of Germany and then the demobilization, when pent-up anger and frustration occasionally went past the boiling-point; and the sections on the postwar experiences of the veterans and the war's impact on Canada were quite well done. 

2024-03-06

I finished Christopher McDougall's Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen a couple of nights ago.

It's from 2009.  (I think.) I first heard about it when randomly flipping with the remote and coming across McDougall being interviewed on "The Daily Show" by Jon Stewart.  It sounded fascinating.  I actually kept it in mind for years, but never got around to reading it until someone left a copy in one of those little libraries where people put books they're finished with.

McDougall covers a heck of a lot of ground, and the book would seem scattershot if not for the throughline of McDougall’s fascination and interaction with Caballo Blanco (White Horse), the near-mythical figure at the heart of the story. Caballo is alternately venerated and vilified in the book; on the one hand, he’s a gringo on a quest for self-discovery like so many runners, on the other, he’s a grouchy, flaky, off-putting sort. He’s weird, but he works, because he feels like fiction, even though he isn’t. Too strange to make up sums him up nicely.

What also works for the book is its grounding in a couple of places: specifically the Leadville 100 Race and the underground race that takes place in the Copper Canyons. Multiple chapters are given over to these two races, which gives the reader a sense of the sprawling nature of distance running and the time and introspection that such an endeavor invites.

And I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk about the two chapters that keep me coming back to the book the most (and which have nothing to do with its narrative … more on that later): the chapters on the history — and indictment, really — of running shoes and on biomechanical evolution (chapters 25 and 28, respectively). These two chapters have done more to change the way I think about running as a whole and the way I run than a couple of years’ subscription to Runner’s World magazine and endless hours trawling running and exercise forums. In short: the human body evolved as a paragon of distance-running, and it didn’t evolve that way with $200 motion-controlled shoes on its feet.

Here's another reviewer:

Beginning with Caballo Blanco, an elusive runner who lives as a loner among the Tarahumara in Mexico’s Copper Canyons, a rush of eccentric characters runs through the book’s pages. We’re introduced to Ann Trason, ultra-running prodigy of the 80s and 90s. She’s pitted to race against Tarahumara men who wear little more than colorful robes and sandals for a high elevation, 100-mile run, day and night through the Colorado Rockies.

That’s just an introduction. Next we’re told about Emil Zatopek, a Forrest Gump-esque Olympic prodigy of the 1950s from Czechoslovakia. Soon we’re on to Scott Jurek, arguably the sport’s biggest star, as he collapses in Death Valley on yet another sadistic race.

From there we go to the east coast, where a young couple runs together at Virginia Beach to the rhythm of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” tearing up ultra events throughout the Appalachians.

Eventually McDougall gets back around to the question of “Why does my foot hurt?”

The answer, as you might guess by this point in the story, is because of the modern running shoe industry. He argues that the human body is designed to run for long distances without all that cushioning and arch support, and that such “protective” shoes are the reason behind such a high incidence of running injuries.

He takes it a step further, sharing a theory about human evolution. To sum it up, some think that distance running played a role in homo-sapiens becoming the dominant species on earth. Despite our smaller brains and less-impressive physical stats compared to neanderthals, homo-sapiens possessed an Achilles tendon and other evolutionary features that led to greater endurance.

Our aerobic capacity allowed us to hunt in packs and literally run our prey to exhaustion, supplying a steady diet of meat that grew our brains and helped us thrive as a species. You could say that evolution has made humans born to run, thus the title. McDougall makes a compelling argument, with scientific data to back it up.

Both of those reviews say what I was going to say.  It's a page-turner.  I felt somewhat lost from time to time, as McDougall jumps around and keeps introducing new characters.  But not as bad as the first reviewer evidently did.  And the order of the stories makes sense.  Especially after you've completed it. 

The first review ends with high praise that I (who am not a runner, I find it boring and my right knee is fucked) agree with:

Warts notwithstanding, Born to Run, I think, takes the flying leap from being a good book about running to being a good book. If you’re going to read a book about running, this is the one to read.

And yesterday I finished Stephen F. Cohen's War With Russia? From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate.

It's kind of depressing, reading it 2024, as Cohen describes the lying, the delusion, the stupidity of the neocon's actions against Russia since 2014, and knowing how things only got worse since the book's appearance in 2019 and Cohen's death in 2020.

This book is based on a series of weekly radio broadcasts made by Cohen under the rubric The New US-Russian Cold War. The broadcasts began in 2014 but Cohen had long argued that a new cold war was unfolding in American-Russian relations.

There is an urgency and anxiety running through Cohen’s commentaries because he sees the new cold war as much more dangerous than its predecessor. Russiagate has been accompanied by a pernicious Russophobia that demonises not just Putin but the Russian people. The resultant hysteria has been ramped up by US media, by grandstanding politicians, and by blatantly self-serving military and industrial interests. American elites seem to have lost their fear of atomic warfare, while there is little or no mainstream political opposition to current hawkish policies aimed at Russia. As Cohen points out, even at the height of the Soviet-American cold war – an existential struggle between capitalism and communism – there were many mainstream advocates of détente with the USSR. During the old cold war the communist bloc acted as a buffer between the two sides. The new cold war is being fought directly along Russia’s borders, most dangerously in a proxy civil war being battled out in Ukraine.

One response that I had was when Cohen continually mentioned how Putin was trying to help the USA to combat Islamic terrorism and that Washington's blinkered Russophobia was throwing away a valuable partnership.  It is now clear to me that the Washington foreign-policy psychopaths don't give a shit about terrorism.  Otherwise they wouldn't do so much to actually fund and arm and generally support them.  It's all about the chaos.

2024 -03-09

Yesterday I finished Samantha M Bailey's Woman on the Edge.  This turned out to be a bigger departure for me than I'd planned.  A scan of my blog posts about my reading will reveal that I am not a big fiction reader.  I've recently tried to rectify this because there are classic works of fiction out there that speak to the realities of their time and place as well as the timelessness of the human condition.  And, as well, I know that there are current authors writing brilliant works, some still under the radar, who I would like to discover.

With that in mind I googled something like "Best Canadian Thrillers 2000's" and found a link with the "10 Best Canadian Mystery & Thriller Writers."  Woman on the Edge was the first one and the fact that it had a female author appealed to me as I want to read more works by women.  It was about something that happens at a subway station so I thought it would be set in Toronto.

The first few pages were dedicated to glowing reviews.  I didn't want to risk any spoilers so I skipped them and started reading.  I'd gotten it as an ebook from the library and, as such, I had no real indication of how long it would be.  It turned out to be a short book.  More plot than characterization as the review linked to above says.  There's two women, one a new mother and one a lonely young widow, and the new mother has some dark secrets in her past that, combined with post-partum depression, turn her into a basket-case emotionally.  She's being targeted by persons unknown who start to really turn the screws that send her over the edge.  (That ain't no spoiler.  It happens in the first chapter and is hinted to on the cover.)  

The lonely young widow has her own skeletons in her closet and she gets wrapped up in the other woman's life and can't figure out why.  I have to say that I found it irritating how, even before the pressure is really applied, the first woman can't confide in her husband AT ALL.  She supposedly loves the guy but not only will she not tell him why she's acting so strangely (the stuff from her past more than the post-partum bizness) but she rejects any and all offers from him to help her.  Like, if I was him, it would have gone WAY beyond a new mother overwhelmed by her hormones and the huge change in her life.  I would have been thinking of getting the fuck out of there myself.

Meanwhile, while the new mother is refusing to talk to anyone but her P.A., the widow can't stop going after people to find out what's going on.  Even when her lawyer is begging her to just stay put and not give the police any more reasons to suspect her of anything.  

After I finished it I went to read all the glowing reviews and it turns out they're all from other women authors of similar books who probably do these things with their publishers as a form of mutual aid.

2023-03-11

Last night I finished Graham Robb's Victor Hugo: A Biography.

'One of the best biographies I have read, ever' Selina Hastings 'Mr Robb has written an enthralling book -- one of the great biographies of our time. He contrives not to be dwarfed by his subject, which is some contrivance. He makes of Hugo's life a story as exciting to read as it was extraordinary to have lived. He has a matchless gift for narrative. His style is epigrammatic and compelling. His judgements seem fair -- not something Hugo was used to in life. Every Place Victor Hugo should now have a Cafe-Bar Graham Robb. He deserves, and will probably get, the Legion d'honneur' Allan Massie, Daily Telegraph 'Robb achieves the goal of all good literary biographies by making us long to regain, or savour for the first time, Hugo's company as a writer. Surely no chronicler of his life or analyst of his work has ever looked this prodigy of nature so unflinchingly in the eye' Jonathan Keates, Literary Review 'Graham Robb's exuberant biography of the French writer blows the cobwebs away from a neglected hero and sets him before us in lurid and quite unforgettable shape. Robb's jaunty, self-confident style is gloriously appropriate to his subject ...Robb's enthusiasm is hugely exhilarating and his biography is a fascinating study in the making of a celebrity' Miranda Seymour, Sunday Times, Books of the Year 'The best life of the writer available in English (and likely to remain so for some time) . ..His fascinating, totally readable Life will introduce Hugo to many readers who know him only as a name' Robin Buss, Independent on Sunday

As I understand it, Robb says that most Hugo biographies (whether French or English or whatever) are either hagiographies or hatchet-jobs.  Robb claims that his biography of Hugo is going to be objective and based on a wider reading of sources, both of Hugo's contempories and Hugo's own writings and personal papers.

I saw this book and I figured that I'd known about his name and the titles of some of his works for almost my entire life, even though I'd never read anything by him (a very common thing in the English-speaking world) and what I did know was that he was a hero of the French Left and, as an old man, he remained something of a satyr.

This biography is nicely written.  Robb has his own voice and his own sense of humour.  It is effortlessly interesting because Hugo's life was inherently interesting.  (For instance, at one point in his childhood he live in a palace in Spain because his father was a Napoleonic general engaged in the sort of activities depicted by Goya in his "Horrors of War" series.)

Hugo's reputation as a socialist is remarkable considering his neutral opinion on the 1830 Revolution, his violent opposition to the 1848 Revolution, his penchant for sex (occasionally paid) with female servants and other working class women and, lastly, his great wealth.

With regards to the sex part, in 1870, when Hugo returned to France from nineteen years of exile at the age of 68, women lined up on his stairwell to have sex with him.  I was particularly surprised (and somewhat delighted) to read that the courageous revolutionary Louise Michel was one of them.  [It turns out from that Wikipedia page that they'd been corresponding through letters for five years by that point.  I'd read that page before, but hadn't processed that factoid.]

2024-03-16

I read David Eagleman's The Brain: The Story of You from 2015.

It was about 220 pages of fairly large font but it had a lot of cool stuff in it.  I'd seen the bit of the BBC documentary about the teenaged brain being very insecure about its developing personality.  Agonizing about fitting in socially and an undeveloped part of the brain that evaluates risk makes for a risky time of life.

His depiction of the world outside our senses was one of the clearest expressions of what I'd refer to as Schopenhauer's "Will."  According to Eagleman it is silent, dark, odourless.  It is just energy.  Light photons bouncing off of objects, atoms within molecules moving around environments of other molecules.  None of it having any impact except when it impacts on the senses of biological creatures and those senses are sent (in our case and in some other life forms) to these brains, encased in the darks of our skulls.

He says a lot of fascinating things.  As a leftist I got a little irked how he used the 2008 financial crisis as an illustration of how people tend to value immediate goals over future benefits.  Most of the people who signed those garbage mortgages were lied to.  But he does mention how the financial sector was also guilty of thinking short-term.  (Unless they were sure they'd get bailed-out by the taxpayers.)  And the weakest part of the book was the part about transhumanism.

But the parts about synesthesia, schizophrenia, how time doesn't really slow down like it sometimes seems to do in a crisis, and about how much calculation and unconscious activity is going on to allow us to not only play chess, but to move the pieces, adjust our position, walk without thinking about it, and so-on and such-forth, ... really cool.

2024-03-27

I read Serotonin by Michel Houellebec (translated by Shaun Whiteside).  

I didn't think it was as horribly misogynistic as that reviewer did.  Though I didn't think it was a feminist tract either.  The novel is credited with predicting the Yellow Vest movement in France and, upon re-reading it in that context it's pretty cool.  The narrator's parents loved each other and not so much him.  I couldn't really sympathize with the narrator.  Good looking.  Upper-middle class background.  Financially rewarding career.  A series of beautiful love interests, two of whom he betrayed and now regrets that.  At many times a shallow man.  But, I suppose, depression can afflict anyone and we are all the self-pitying tragic hero of our individual stupid lives.  It was interesting to read about contemporary France in the voice of an actual Frenchman.

2024-04-08

I finished Alessandro Barbero's Dante (Allan Cameron, trans.)

Turns out that not much is known conclusively about Dante's life.  Much of the book is about piecing together fragments from letters and legal documents directly connected to Dante himself.  Also, the contribution of current events to the writing of his poems, and speculation about how things said in Dante's poems might establish when they were written, and where.  Finally, historical knowledge of the period that would have had an impact on Dante's life are looked at. 

It was interesting to see how merchant republics incorporated the idea of "nobility" into their value system.  I was a trifle disappointed that Dante's great love, Beatrice, was just someone he met once at a party when they were both children.  Men and women lived greatly segregated lives in Medieval Florence.  Dante saw Beatrice only twice after that.  And, if I recall correctly, was too shy to say anything to her both times.  I knew that she married someone else and that Dante later married a woman with whom he had a few children and that Beatrice died young from an illness.  But I thought there'd been more to the relationship.  Finally, it was kind of funny to read about how Dante was forced to write the praises of men he'd condemned in his earlier poems because, as an exile, he needed their help.  Luckily for him his status as a great poet made his friendship valuable to them.

2024-04-13

Just finished Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility from 1811. 

I'd read Pride and Prejudice (1813) before and quite enjoyed it.  I actually liked it more than Sense and Sensibility.  But I think her big success in her lifetime had been Sense and Sensibility for which she had accepted a lump sum payment from the publisher who thereafter took all the proceeds from its sale.  She negotiated better terms for subsequent novels but they didn't sell as well and she remained in genteel poverty for the rest of her short life. (She died aged 41.)

That being said, Austen does have her critics. Charlotte Brontë was quoted describing this debut as, ‘a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of a bright, vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck.’

...

There’s a lot of walking, and talks of love and marriage while WALKING in a rose garden – at least that is something different. Marrianne, who is considered the ‘sensibility’ portion of the two sisters, while walking (I feel like I am repeating myself, but there is just so much walking. I might as well call this book ‘The Guide to Walking’ by Jane Austen), slips and sprains her ankle and is saved by the dashing and highly eligible Willoughby. Love starts to bloom . . . kind of (it’s a bit of a slow burn, but I don’t mind a slow pace). Drama of regency proportions follows Elinor, who constitutes the ‘sense’ of the book. She also has a love blooming . . . kind of (on and off again).

...

I would recommend Sense and Sensibility if you are like me and are reading the books in order (I like chronology) and wanting to begin with the first of Austan’s published works. However, as fast paced as this book is, it comes to a halt towards the end. I definitely think Austen got better at her craft as she went along (at the time of writing, I am making my way through Pride and Prejudice, and I can see the improvement).

For my part, Austen's treatment of the servant class, as irrelevancies beyond the occasional tasks they perform, is jarring.  We have these idlers consumed with their romances, decorating their homes (if they can afford it) and attending dinners and parties where (according to Austen) most of the conversation is artificial and boring.  They all talk about being unable to live on incomes at least three times greater (for the poorest among them) than a working man's wages, as if the human beings making up their beds, getting their horses, or sending their messages, have no personal lives of their own worth speaking about.

Still, Austen is a good writer who describes her characters well.  The development of the main characters' opinion of Mrs. Jennings was something I enjoyed.  She, herself, remained a somewhat overbearing, talkative, good-hearted busy-body, but her innate decency and good nature, and her devotion to her friends, gradually win her their affection.

2024-04-29

I brought three books to a conclusion this weekend.  First, I read an e-book version of A. C. Grayling's War: An Enquiry.  Here's two reviews ONE and TWO that liked it more than I did.

Personally, I found the first chapter confusing at the beginning.  It seemed to be a hurried summary of the major wars and warriors of the Mediterranean region and onward, but it eventually resolved itself into an account of how technology affected war-making and therefore political power.  If it had clearly been introduced as such, I wouldn't have been so puzzled thinking that I was supposed to be reading a book about the history of ethical and moral thinking about war.

Then there was a chapter on the origins of war that wasted a lot of time wondering if WAR (organized violence on the part of states) could be blamed on human nature.  The discussion seemed confused because it didn't define its terms at the beginning and, therefore, the fact that individuals and prehistoric societies don't engage in war (because war is something done by states) led Grayling and his cited authors to conclude that war is not a natural thing.  But  of course pre-state human societies (families and tribes) and individual humans up to the present day cannot did not and cannot engage in something that, by definition, has nothing to do with them.  If Grayling had instead discussed VIOLENCE and traced the path from violence to war, and the path from individuals and tribes to organized states, it would have been a much more useful discussion.

Then there's a chapter on the "Just War" theorizing from Saint Augustine through to the Renaissance and up to the present day.  It was here that the stink of Western liberal delusion about the moral superiority of the Western Europe and the Anglo-American world truly interfered with my enjoyment of the book.  Apparently terrorism and violent conflict (in places like El Salvador and Colombia) are, like Russian and Chinese irredentism, problems that the ethical superstars in Washington, London and The Hague are forced to wrestle with as they strive to maintain peace and build a better world for us all.

I also finished Shigeru Mizuki's Showa 1944-1953: A History of Japan.




This is the third volume of a multi-volume work.  I haven't read the other two.  This was just on display at my local library and I decided to check it out.

Showa 1944-1953: A History of Japan continues the award-winning author Shigeru Mizuki's autobiographical and historical account of the Showa period in Japan. This volume recounts the events of the final years of the Pacific War, and the consequences of the war's devastation for Mizuki and the Japanese populace at large.

After the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor, Japan and the United States are officially at war. The two rival navies engage in a deadly game of feint and thrust, waging a series of microwars across the tiny Pacific islands. From Guadalcanal to Okinawa, Japan slowly loses ground. Finally, the United States unleashes the deathblow with a new and terrible weapon-the atomic bomb. The fallout from the bombs is beyond imagining.

On another front, Showa 1944-1953 traces Mizuki's own life story across history's sweeping changes during this period, charting the impact of the war's end on his life choices. After losing his arm during the brutal fighting, Mizuki struggles to decide where to go: whether to remain on the island as an honored friend of the local Tolai people or return to the rubble of Japan and take up his dream of becoming a cartoonist. Showa 1944-1953 is a searing condemnation of the personal toll of war from one of Japan's most famous cartoonists.

I found the part where he sneaks away from the army hospital to live with the forest people to be rather strange.  The savage discipline of the Japanese army didn't seem to extend to the medical sector.  And why other men didn't run off to eat better in the jungle was odd.

And then there's a part where the almost total breakdown of the Japanese economy in the immediate postwar years caused Shigeru Mizuki's fellow wounded veterans to decide to form a club, to do what, exactly, they hadn't decided.  And they squat in an abandoned building and just hang-out like a gang of adolescent boys.  Strange.

It's a good way to introduce yourself to this part of Japanese history.

Finally, I finished Peter Ackroyd's biography of Charles Dickens.

I'd been meaning to find a biography of Dickens for over a year.  I'd heard that he fell in love with a younger woman and tried to have his wife committed to an insane asylum.  That turned out to be an exaggeration.  But he did separate from his wife (who never stopped loving him) and he did have an infatuation with a younger woman.  (This happened more than once.  And I think I agree with Acroyd's contention that these infatuations were never sexual.  Dickens had a bizarre fixation on pure, angelic young women who he could love as purely as a brother loves a sister.  If they died young and tragically, even better.)

I also heard that he started out as a journalist.  This was true.  I'm glad that I read this biography that explains this giant of a writer.

Dickens seems to me to have been an extremely charismatic man-child.  He gave public readings from his books later in his career where his personal magnetism could work on crowds.  He suffered from the adulation of national celebrity.  He knew he was on display early in his career.  He was a man of great devotions and petulant hatreds.  A selfish, insecure, generous and confident extrovert.