rocketjk's 2022 reading travels

ConversesReading Globally

Afegeix-te a LibraryThing per participar.

rocketjk's 2022 reading travels

1rocketjk
Editat: gen. 12, 2023, 12:22 am

I've had fun charting my travels the last twelve years. 2021's reading brought me to only 14 countries, including the U.S., and nine states within the U.S.

I didn't really do much globe trotting last year. A big part of that has been my ongoing project of reading from a rather long list of books about African American History and the history of racism in America. So a large percentage of my reading fell into the "U.S. non-state specific" category. There were also a few "non-country specific" books, and I left Earth once via the science fiction novel Voice of the Whirlwind by Walter Jon Williams.

As always, I don't select my reading to purposefully "travel" in any particular way. Rather, I just have fun seeing where my more random reading choices take me! I'll be writing at greater length about each book on my 2022 50-Book Challenge thread: https://www.librarything.com/topic/338366. Finally, while I do add every book I read to my list in this top post, I only add individual posts to describe books that are, at least tangentially, to do with the general theme of the group.

NON-COUNTRY SPECIFIC
Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law by Mary Roach
The Background of Our War by The U.S. War Department Bureau of Public Relations (military history)

ASIA
China
1000 Years of Joy and Sorrows by Ai Weiwei (memoir)

Japan
Snow Country by I.J. Parker

Korea
The New Breed: The Story of the U.S. Marines in Korea by Andrew Geer (military history)

EUROPE
Czechoslovakia
Watch Czechoslovakia! by Richard Freund (politics/history)

England
The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of his Theory of Evolution by David Quammen (biography)
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
The Constant Rabbit by Jasper Fforde
Homecomings by C.P. Snow
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

France
Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet
First Harvest by Vladimir Pozner
The Tenth Man by Graham Greene

Germany
John Heartfield: Laughter is a Devastating Weapon by David King and Ernst Volland (biography/art history)

Northern Ireland
Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe (history)

Poland
Satan in Goray by Isaac Bashevis Singer
The Family Moskat by Isaac Bashevis Singer

Portugal
Liberal Porto: A Guide to the Architecture, Sites and History of Porto edited by Manuela Rebelo (guidebook)

Russia
A Man Without Breath by Philip Kerr

Switzerland
The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson

NORTH AMERICA
Haiti
The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution by C. L. R. James

The United States
Non-State Specific
American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783-1850 by Alan Taylor
The Education of an Idealist by Samantha Power (memoir)
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
Lucky: How Joe Biden Barely Won the Presidency by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes
Northwest Passage by Kenneth Roberts
Going to Meet the Man by James Baldwin (short stories)
Caste: The Origin of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson
Ruling Over Monarchs, Giants & Stars: Umpiring in the Negro Leagues & Beyond by Bob Motley (memoir)
The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein (history/sociology)
Dorothea Lange: Migrant Mother by Sarah Hermanson Meister (history)
Rough Translations by Molly Giles (short stories)

The South
Conjure Women by Afia Atakora
Ar'n't I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South by Deborah Gray White
Vinegar Hill by Franklin Coen

California
The Sellout by Paul Beatty

Connecticut
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

Florida
Darker Than Amber by John D. MacDonald
Flats Fixed - Among Other Things by Don Tracy

Maryland
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave by Frederick Douglass

Michigan
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

Mississippi
Turning Angel by Greg Iles

New York
Diary of a Lonely Girl, or The Battle Against Free Love by Miriam Karpilove
Dead Dead Girls by Nekesa Afia
The Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn (memoir)
Tropic of Capricorn by Henry Miller

North Carolina
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet A. Jacobs (autobiography)

Tennessee
Good Rockin' Tonight: Sun Records and the Birth of Rock 'n' Roll by Colin Escort with Martin Hawkins (history)
Boy in Blue by Royce Brier

Texas
The Handle by Richard Stark

Washington
The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown (narrative non-fiction/history)

2labfs39
gen. 6, 2022, 3:49 pm

Hi Jerry, I love seeing where people's reading takes them, something that is hard to visualize from a general thread. Will you be posting your reviews on CR too?

3rocketjk
Editat: des. 31, 2022, 3:59 pm

>2 labfs39: Absolutely. I only post the reviews on this thread that have to do with the "Reading Globally" main idea, which is, of course, reading travels around the world. So, for example, no review of Darker Than Amber on this thread, because it's a book in English written by an American, taking place in America. So drawing members of this group to this thread for a review like that would be irksome to a lot of RG group members, quite understandably. I do fudge by including books in English that take place in other countries, which is coloring outside the lines here. But I've been doing this for 12 years and nobody has complained so far, which is something I appreciate. But I can always add on books of any sort to the Post 1 list because it's really just editing the post, which won't show up as something new. The review for Darker Than Amber is, however, already up on my CR thread. Hope that all makes sense.

FYI, my 2020 thread is here: https://www.librarything.com/topic/328374

4labfs39
Editat: gen. 7, 2022, 9:43 am

>3 rocketjk: Makes perfect sense. I was asking because in >1 rocketjk: you talk about posting full length reviews on 50 Book Challenge, not CR, and I didn't know if I should go there to find them.

including books in English that take place in other countries

I have wondered this too. Sometimes it's a book by a non-native who has lived in the country for a long time or a good travelogue that makes me pause. At other times it's trying to decide the nationality of an author who was born in one country, but resides in another. So many grey areas.

ETA: I'm putting all my reviews on CR, and pertinent ones on my global challenge page (or a link), and the RG regional threads.

5rocketjk
Editat: gen. 7, 2022, 12:20 pm

>"you talk about posting full length reviews on 50 Book Challenge, not CR,"

Ah, yes. I see. That's my bad. I actually post the exact same reviews on my 50-Book Challenge thread and my CR thread, with the simple difference that I count the books on the former, and provide a listing in the first post there as well. The latter is the reviews only. Conversation welcome on both, of course. So, for example, here's my 2021 50-Book Challenge thread: https://www.librarything.com/topic/328305

I also post appropriate reviews (usually somewhat edited down) on my ROOTS group thread (that's "Reading Our Own Tomes" - only books that have been in your house for a while when you read them, as opposed to books you've just bought). Also, in the more general "What Are You Reading" threads in the "History Fans," "Non-Fiction Readers," "Memoirs/Biographies." "Military History," "Crime, Thriller & Mystery," and "Baseball" groups, plus two or three others, as well. I find it fun to parse my reading in different ways.

Cheers!

6rocketjk
Editat: jul. 16, 2022, 5:54 am

I finished Satan in Goray, Isaac Bashevis Singer’s first novel, originally published in Poland (in Yiddish) in serial form in 1933, and then in novel form in 1935. The novel wasn’t published in English until 1955. Satan in Goray is an historical novel, taking place in 17th Century Poland, and based on two historical facts. One is the uprising of Cossack armies in 1648. They were revolting against Polish rule, but they found their easiest targets among the Jewish towns across the country, and the result was a series of furious attacks and massacres. The other is the rise several years later of Sabbatai Zevi, a charismatic figure who claimed to be the Messiah that Jews had been waiting and praying for since the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. The Jews were to be finally redeemed, their suffering on Earth at an end! Zevi gathered a huge following of Jews desperate to believe in the end of their travails.

And so we come to Goray, “the town that lay in the midst of the hills at the end of the world,” and practically obliterated by the pogroms. The action of the story begins 20 years later. The scattered survivors of the town have gradually drifted back to their homes. The town’s spiritual leader, Rabbi Benish Ashkenazi, is attempting to restore a sense of normalcy through the age old religious teachings of the Torah that have been followed for centuries. But first one and then another messenger arrive in the town heralding the rise of the new Messiah. Soon, the agony of the Jews will be over. Why follow old laws and old rules of morality? And so the battle is on. It’s a fascinating novel about a tragic, horrifying time and place, but it also tells a deeper tale of good vs. evil, old ways vs. new, and human folly.

7rocketjk
gen. 30, 2022, 3:44 pm

I finished Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet, which I found to be a profoundly rewarding reading experience. The narrator, "Jean Genet," a habitué of French prisons, tells this tale from inside a prison cell, telling us that he is doing so and also telling us that he is spinning his tales and creating his characters out of his imagination. These characters, most predominantly Divine, Darling and Our Lady of the Flowers, are members of a Paris shadow world of homosexual grifters, thieves, prostitutes and pimps. The membrane of the narrative is porous, however, for though most often we read about these figures in the third person, frequently we get the idea that Divine is Genet (or Genet is Divine). The narrator's imagination takes us back and forth in time, as we get, especially, Divine's origin story and see the ways in which his (her) sense of difference and isolation as a child push him (her) to the fringes of society as time goes on. We see how the characters simultaneously depend upon and prey upon each other. And sometimes this shadow world collapses entirely and we land back with "Genet" in his jail cell, back to the source of this whirlpool of storytelling. All of this comes to us through what I found to be a powerful lens of poetic language and surrealist imaginings. And it all works because, as fractured as it is, as often distasteful as the characters' actions make them, Genet renders them entirely human, people we end up feeling for despite their crimes and betrayals. At heart, what they desperately need out of life is what we need.

8rocketjk
feb. 18, 2022, 2:34 pm

I finished First Harvest by Vladimir Pozner (translated from the French by Haakon Chevalier)

The author of this novel about the German occupation of a small French Channel Coast village is not Vladimir Pozner, the contemporary journalist, but Vladimir Pozner, the French/Russian Jewish writer and intellectual. He was born in France in 1905, where his Russian/Jewish parents had fled after publicly supporting the failed Russian Revolution of 1905. In 1909, the family returned to Russia after a general amnesty was declared. Pozner studied in Leningrad, and in the meantime his parents gathered a literary community around themselves. Pozner returned to Paris in 1921 to study at the Sorbonne. He remained a Communist and socialized with the prominent Russian expatriate writers (and continued writing himself) who had gathered in in France. With the rise of Hitler, Mussolini and Franco, Pozner became a vocal anti-Fascist. He either did (the book's flyleaf) or didn't (Pozner's Wikipedia page) serve in the French Army during the German invasion. Either way, a fascinating life, which I've learned about only because somewhere along the line I purchased this beautiful first edition copy and somewhat randomly decided to pull it down off my shelf and read it last week. So, now maybe, finally, I should actually talk about the novel itself!

The novel takes place, as mentioned above, in a small, Channel Coast French village under occupation by the German Army. For the bored occupiers, there is very little going on except cold, rainy weather. For the villagers, what's going on is malnutrition, as their cattle and crops are requisitioned by the Germans. A plan is underway among the villagers to hide their wheat crop, but where? This malevolently placid setting is interrupted when a German enlisted soldier turns up missing and the occupiers look to the occupied for answers. There is a mist of unreality throughout the proceedings, particularly in the novel's first half. The characters are not fully drawn. The Germans in particular seem almost cartoon like in their foolishness. There is a degree of fable telling in the narrative, perhaps. At the beginning, I thought once or twice of the book, The Good Soldier Schweik, although here the comedic element is much more subdued. During the book's second half, however, as the tension and sense of menace mounts, any comedic sense still maintaining serves only to underscore the cruelty of the situation. This novel, one could say, is about the banality of evil. This is not a great novel. Although we do come to know and care about several of the villagers, the relative shallowness of the characterizations drains some impact from the proceedings. But the power of the situation itself has rendered this novel a very memorable one for me. I should mention that the book was published in 1943, so it was very much a novel of the moment.

9rocketjk
març 6, 2022, 1:33 pm

I finished The Tenth Man by Graham Greene. This short novel by a very sharp storyteller provides a very interesting and readable morality play. During the Nazi occupation of France, a group of 30 Frenchmen are being held by the occupiers in a large jail cell as hostages. The day after two German soldiers in the town are killed by resistance fighters, a German officer enters the cell to announce that three of the hostages are to be shot the next morning, and it is up to them to decide which three it will be. They decide to draw lots, and the results of the drawing have consequences that echo dramatically into the years after the war. I don't want to give away any more of the plot than that, other than to say that in the set-up, the characterizations and the book's final act, Greene's debt to Conrad is apparent (in theme and narrative construction, though not in writing style, of course).

Also interesting is the book's backstory, which I will simply quote from my copy's back cover: . . . "A short novel that {Greene} wrote in the 1940s for MGM as the dry run for a screenplay, and that remained untouched in a studio file until its discover in 1983." Greene writes in his introduction that he had no memory of writing the story. Because he had been under contract to MGM when he wrote the manuscript, the person who bought the rights to it upon its discovery owed writer's royalties to MGM rather than to Greene. However, Greene says, a) upon reading the manuscript so many decades after writing it, he found that he liked it enough that he couldn't object to its publication and b) the person who owned the rights generously agreed to co-publish the book with Greene's own publisher, meaning that Greene did see some money out of it after all.

On a personal reading note, this calendar year I have now read three books taking place in France: The Tenth Man, Our Lady of the Flowers and First Harvest. The first two have to do with French townspeople held hostage by the Nazis during World War Two, and all three of them take place entirely or partly within prisons! It's not a theme I envisioned for myself beforehand.

10rocketjk
març 21, 2022, 2:12 pm

I finished The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution by David Quammen. In The Reluctant Mr. Darwin, David Quammen has delivered a well-written and researched, but relatively short, biography of Charles Darwin that also provides clear explanation of his work and famous theory. Quammen also makes clear the revolutionary nature of Darwin's findings, particularly within the context of Victorian England, where all scientific belief was firmly rooted in Anglican creationist theory to greater or lesser degree. Quammen tells his tale in an engaging, sometimes even breezy, style, upon occasion inserting himself into the narrative to mention his decisions about what to include or leave out, about his research, and about what he knows from his close readings of Darwin's diaries and other works and what, instead, he feels "we can conjecture." (I should point out that these "conjectures" are on minor matters only, such as what Darwin might have been thinking of when he made particular notations in those diaries.) I suppose some readers would find this style annoying, but on the whole, I appreciated this manner of telling the story (although were were isolated spots where I felt Quammen did cross the line from "breezy" to "glib"). I'm including this for my own purposes as a reading trip to England,, for while evolution itself of course has no political or cultural bounds, Darwin's story is rooted very strongly in the cultural/scientific world of Victorian England.

11rocketjk
març 27, 2022, 2:02 pm

I finished Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen. Sense and Sensibility is, of course, a satire of manners about the landed gentry of late 18th-Century England. The real joy for me in reading the story was in soaking up Austen's use of language, and especially her sly wit in taking down the mostly idle men and women of this essentially obsolete class. They seem to my 21st Century eyes a holdover from an earlier version of the English economic system, no longer serving any discernible function, and it seems clear that Austen thought so, too. (I must admit that I've read very little about Jane Austen and have never studied her works in an academic setting.) The descriptions of the fools and knaves among the characters, and their actions, take a while, sometimes, to fully unfold, but once you see where Austen has been going all along in a paragraph, you end up with a delightfully humorous stiletto job. The problem with the book, or at least with my experience with it, is that mostly the story is static. We wait with our heroines, the Misses Dashwood (Elinor and Marianne) and their widowed mother, for the men in their lives to either get their acts together or reveal themselves as irredeemable rascals. Elinor in particular is the sensible and discerning rock upon with the family fortunes depend. And while I have no doubt that the situation of women in Austen's time was very much as described here, the two main characters' condition of relative stasis did take some of the air out of the plotting. In some ways, the dastardly schemer Lucy, Elinor's main foil throughout the book, is the most interesting character in the lot. She has no scruples and more than her share of malevolence, but she is certainly capable of taking action in her own selfish service. At any rate, I did enjoy the reading. Austen's sense of humor and turn of phrase make up for the slow points I experienced in the narrative.

12rocketjk
Editat: abr. 18, 2022, 3:04 pm

My monthly reading group assignment this month was The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. I thought the novel did a pretty good job of providing a plausible look at how climate matters may well progress, and of individual components of the problem that many of us may not be specifically aware of, followed by a speculative and mostly hopeful view of how things might get turned around. Not all of the latter elements felt particularly likely to me, sad to say. The characters themselves are mostly razor thin, though Robinson does make some attempt to deepen the characterization of his main character somewhat, giving her a personal side issue that at first is quite interesting but which eventually becomes (or at least became for me) mostly extraneous. A lot of this novel is quite good, although Robinson's scattershot approach can become wearing, and I got the feeling eventually that Robinson was simply determined to tell us everything he knew and crowbar in every piece of research he'd done. Of course, the problems are global and massive, so in Robinson's defense we might agree that they needed a massive novel to do them justice. My paperback edition checked in at 563 pages. After page 400 or so, I was ready to be finished. But, as this was a selection of a member of my monthly reading group, I was obliged to carry on. Mostly I'm glad I read this novel, though I doubt I ever would have selected it on my own (which I guess is one chief value of book groups). I did learn a lot, assuming of course that Robinson knows what he's talking about. Although the novel is clearly global in scope, I'm placing it in Switzerland for my purposes here, as the ministry of the title is based in Zurich, and we get a lot of detailed description of that city and of the nearby Alps.

13rocketjk
maig 17, 2022, 5:47 pm

I finished The New Breed: The Story of the U.S. Marines in the Korea by Andrew Geer. This book was not what I was expecting. It was written while the Korean War was still going on. On the book's front cover flap, we're told that the author, a WW2 Marine veteran who'd returned to duty for the Korean conflict, serving in 1950-51, "had access to the complete file of Marine combat reports and was able to gather material at firsthand as an active Marine field officer during the dreadful spring and summer of 1950-51 in Korea. He interviewed 697 Marines individually in preparing this history." It was those 697 interviews that gave me the impression that the book was going to be a series of oral histories about frontline life and combat during the war. What Geer did instead was lean more on those official combat reports to create detailed narratives of the troop movements, battles, down to individual skirmishes, throughout the Marines' first years of combat in Korea. Geer's accounts get very, very detailed, down to orders given and followed by individual rifle companies on a day-to-day basis. Battle scenes are often detailed by the acts--frequently the heroics--of individual enlisted men, non-coms and officers during battle, including the specifics about what individual Marines were doing, or attempting to do, when they were killed, and what they said just before their deaths. I assume that these details come from those 697 interviews. The time period related here spans from the Marines' first entry into Korea shortly after the beginning of hostilities, their fight to liberate Seoul, their march northward to the Chosin Reservoir, where they became surrounded, and their fight to break through this containment and make their way to the sea and evacuation. The enervating and deadly cold and the effects of frostbite and malnutrition, as well as the horrifying attrition as Marines are wounded or killed, are described in detail effectively enough to give the reader a feel, even from the remove of decades, of what the men experienced.

You won't find much if anything here about the politics or larger command strategies of the Korean War. Instead, this is a report of the day to day experiences of soldiers within a hellish cauldron of war. It should be noted that as realistic and well written as the book is, it's also essentially a work of propaganda. No matter how poorly a particular battle goes, for example, it is never described as having been the result of a strategic mistake. And while there are occasional references to "slackers" or "stragglers" among the Marines, for the most part, everyone is a hero. There is, I am grateful to be able to say, no description of the Korean War itself as a noble cause. The war is simply taken for granted as an assignment.

14rocketjk
Editat: jul. 16, 2022, 5:49 am

I finished 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows. This is the memoir of Ai Weiwei, a famous Chinese conceptual artist, architect and activist. Although Ai Weiwei has struggled determinately and consistency against the censorship and other oppressions of the current Communist Chinese regime, and has presented his conceptual art in major exhibitions and museums around the world, this is the rare memoir in which the portrayal of the author's childhood is actually more interesting (or at least that was my reaction) than the portrayal of his or her adulthood. That's because Ai Weiwei's father, Ai Qing, was also famous, a world renowned lyric poet, who was targeted and harshly oppressed by the forces of Mao's Cultural Revolution. In approximately the first half of his memoir, Ai Weiwei relates his time as a child, moving with his father and his half-brother from one remote and desolate punishment outpost to another, with only intermittent contact with his mother. From his father's early comradeship with Mao, through the descriptions of these horrible work settlements and Ai Qing's day to day degrading humiliations as a "Big Rightist" who is made an example of on an hourly basis, Ai Weiwei walks us through the events and repercussions of the Cultural Revolution and describes the profound loss of history and Chinese cultural identity that resulted.

Oddly, though, once Ai Weiwei grows to adulthood and, especially, once he becomes a noted artist and activist, the narrative flattened out for me. Perhaps some of this has to do with the translation from Chinese to English. Ai Weiwei certainly has led a fascinating and, it seems, a quite admirable life. His conceptual art installations have been aimed at promoting ideas of freedom and individuality, of protesting against the harshness and absurdity of the repression of the Communist regime, and of pointing out the regime's corruption and ineptitude as they steer the country toward capitalism under the guise of communism. One of the issues for me, as I think back on the reading experience, is that Ai Weiwei often presents his own activities in isolation, as if he were the only activist in China. Occasionally other names are mentioned, but I found it off-putting that so much of Ai Weiwei's narrative consisted of statements along the lines of "I created this work in order to say that." Well, it's a memoir, so of course he'd be talking about his own accomplishments, but he seemed to me to be entirely self-focused. With a few exceptions, the entirely of Chinese history during the time under discussion seemed to me to be focused too sharply through the lens of his own perspective.

One example of this sort of thing: In his role as an architect, Ai Weiwei had an active role in the designing of the stadium (referred to by Ai Weiwei as "the Bird's Nest") to be used for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The description of the teamwork and creative process in this work was very interesting. But Ai's final comments on the endeavor had me scratching my head:

"The design of the Bird's Nest aimed to convey the message that freedom was possible: the integration of its external appearance with its exposed structure encapsulated something essential about democracy, transparency, and equity. In defense of those principles, I now resolved to put a distance between myself and the Olympics, which were simply serving as nationalistic, self-congratulatory propaganda. Freedom is the precondition for fairness, and without freedom, competition is a sham."

I found Ai Weiwei's assumption that any more than a slight handful of observers would notice a message of freedom in the design of a stadium to be unfortunately self-absorbed, and his shock that the Chinese government was using the Olympics as a propaganda tool, despite the artistic splendor of the stadium design, to be more than a little disengenuous.

I have waited much too long to say that Ai Weiwei is clearly a man of courage who has inspired a great many of his internet followers, and admirers of his art, to maintain a resistant attitude toward the oppression of the Chinese regime. He has done so despite the constant threat to his own freedom, even to his life. In this, we has clearly been inspired by his father's example. Also, I have a lot of respect for conceptual artists, those who attempt to challenge our preconceived notions of reality, life and politics through their work. Ai Weiwei's output, and the degree to which he is clearly admired and respected by other artists and curators, speaks volumes about the value of his accomplishments. Many of the installations and exhibits Ai Weiwei describes sound like works I would love to see and experience, and there's quite a lot of interest in the memoir about the creative process in general. And as a tour through Chinese history from the end of World War 2 through the present day, and as a close-in look at the threats, oppressions and dangers experienced by artists fighting to stay relevant within oppressive regimes, 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows is a valuable narrative and testimony.

15SassyLassy
jul. 2, 2022, 6:25 pm

>14 rocketjk: Great review - interesting about the division between childhood and adulthood, not because of the difference in perspective which one would expect, but because of the background of Ai Qing. The GPCR is a topic that interests me, and I always look for overlapping accounts.

In terms of the adult Ai Weiwei, I was lucky enough to see an exhibit of his in Toronto a few years ago. I've also heard several interviews, and he perhaps discusses his work more succinctly and clearly when speaking of it in conversation rather than when writing of it for artists among others. That sense of ego doesn't come across as much in conversation.

I've added this to my list of books from others' threads.

16rocketjk
jul. 3, 2022, 11:14 am

>15 SassyLassy: Hi! Thanks for the kind words about my review. I hope you are able to get to this book soon, as I'd love to see your take on it, especially if you've already got knowledge of and interest in Ai Weiwei. It's very possible that you'll have a different reaction to the tone of the writing than I did. Sometimes you get an early impression while reading a book and you can't shake it, even as you're wondering whether you're being really fair. I suspect that might be what happened with me, here.

p.s. My wife and I just got back from our visit to Toronto for the wedding of a cousin (second cousin, once removed, or something like that) and had a glorious time, both at the wedding but also wandering around Toronto in general. Cheers!

17rocketjk
Editat: ag. 4, 2022, 1:18 am

I've just finished the extremely powerful novel The Family Moskat by Isaac Bashevis Singer. The Family Moskat is Isaac Singer’s second novel, published originally in 1950, or approximately 15 years after Singer’s immigration from Poland to the U.S. The novel portrays the at first gradual and eventually rapid collapse of the Jewish community of Warsaw in particular and of Poland in general, from the early years of the 20th century through the German invasion in 1939. The novel ends with bombs falling over the city.

The book is alive with detail and movement. Life, fear, lust, squalor, crowds, noise and smells. Near the beginning of the narrative, Singer propels us into the midst of a marketplace in the Jewish quarter of Warsaw as if ejecting us from a carriage with a boot to the small of the back. In an instant we are in the midst of a rousing blast of striving and clamor.

The tale is told through the lense of the life of the titular family. As the book opens, Menshulam Moskat is the late-middle aged financially successful patriarch of a sprawling family. Adult children, in-laws and grandchildren abound, though Menshulam’s right-hand man in business is not a family member at all, but a retainer named Koppel Berman. The family is a mixed bag. Some are still pious Jews, even Chassidim, while others have become more secular, gradually or entirely turning their backs on the old religious ways. At the beginning, the tale of the feuding, fractious but insular family is told in almost comic fashion. And into the mix comes young Asa Heshel Bennett, who comes to Warsaw to get away from the smothering Jewish culture of a small shtetl town on the Polish-Belorusse border and instantly falls in with Abram Moskat, Menshulam’s most ne’er do well son who takes the young newcomer under his wing.

As the decades go by, the family’s fortunes deteriorate, as does the coherent nature of Polish Jewry, as younger generations increasingly (but certainly not entirely) turn their back on old ways. Many become socialists, Communists, Zionists, hedonists, academics . . . the whole range within the whirlpool of European intellectual life in the 20s and 30s.

Singer looks at these phenomena with a complex mix of understanding, criticism and sadness. In his own life, Singer was the son of a Warsaw rabbi and saw these developments at first-hand, himself turning from the religious to the secular/intellectual. I’ll finish up with a lengthy quote that in many ways sums up the sadness that, understandably, runs through The Family Moskat. Here, Asa Heshel has returned to his hometown village to visit his mother:

After the meal . . . Asa Hershel walked off along through the village. For a while he stopped at the study house. Near the door, at a long bare table, a few old men bent over open volumes dimly illuminated with flickering candles. From the shul Asa Hershel turned into the Lublin Road. He halted for a moment at a water pump with a broken handle. There was a legend current in Tereshpol Minor that although the well underneath had long since dried up, once during a fire water had begun to pour from the spout, and the synagogue and the houses around it had been saved from destruction.

He turned to the road that led to the woods. It was lined with great trees, chestnut and oak. Some of them had huge gashes torn in their sides by bolts of lightning. The holes looked dark and mysterious, like the caves of robbers. Some of the older trees inclined their tops down toward the ground, as though they were ready to tumble over, tearing up with them the tangled thickness of their centuries-old roots.

18rocketjk
ag. 29, 2022, 12:34 pm

I've just finished The Constant Rabbit by Jasper Fforde. It is modern day England, with the slight alteration that rabbits and foxes can talk and have grown to human size due to the Spontaneous Anthropomorphizing Event of 55 years ago. Fforde's extended comedic metaphor about anti-immigrant fear and prejudice works very well after a slow start. With Fforde's usual genius, funny and acutely imaginative world building, The Constant Rabbit is a fun and enjoyable satire with a sharp-edged current of societal criticism running through it.

19rocketjk
set. 28, 2022, 1:40 pm

Back to England for Homecomings by C.P. Snow. This is the seventh book in C.P. Snow's Strangers and Brothers series that takes a reader through several layers of middle- and upper-class English society from the 1920s through the 1950s. All of the novels feature a man named Lewis Eliot, who over the series fights his way from a lower middle-class upbringing into the halls of administrative power, first in industry and then, during World War 2, in British Civil Service. Eliot has a job that is stressful with responsibility, but he is still attending to more powerful men. From his spot near but not at the top, Eliot is able to make sharply drawn observations about the nature of the bureaucracy--and the qualities of the people--both above and below him on the organization chart. At the same time, Eliot's private life, as his wife, Sheila's depression worsens. The book is filled with small but powerful observations about the nature of love and responsibility, and the handicaps inherent in a life pointed too much inward. This is not just a flaw of Sheila's as Eliot describes things for us, but also of Eliot himself. There is a varied and entertaining cast of characters attendant, as well, and Snow is adept at describing their personalities and actions, for good or ill. Several figures from the early books are brought back into the scene here.

I find Snow's writing style understated and enjoyable, and his observations and characterizations, his talent for detail, to be satisfying in the reading. The plotting of these novels is often slow, but I'm OK with that. I know that this is the sort of book that many of my LT friends are more or less avoiding these days: a book by a white, straight, male featuring a white, straight male protagonist living in a white world of power and relative privilege. I complete sympathize with all this, and tend to lean in this direction myself. Yet for me, the books of this series, which are about in the end about human nature, the joys, pitfalls and dangers of all sorts of relationships, be they private or public, provide rewarding reading experiences nevertheless. There are four more books in the series, and I expect to be attending to them gradually over the next couple of years.

A quick note on the title. As you'll see in the cover image I've posted, my American edition from the 1960s called the book Homecoming (no "s"), but almost every other cover image on LT shows the title with that "s."

20rocketjk
nov. 8, 2022, 6:42 pm

I finished A Man Without Breath, the 9th book in Philip Kerr's excellent Bernie Gunther noir crime series. The beginning of this series found Bernie Gunther as a Berlin homicide detective in 1935, as the Nazi's were quickly taking over all aspects of life in Germany, much to Gunther's dismay and disgust. Gunther has both a solid moral compass and a backbone, and was not loath to let his strong anti-Nazi sentiment be known. It is 1943. Gunther, due to his long career as an investigator, finds himself, to his own disgust, officially a member of the SD, the intelligence wing of the SS. He is sent to Smolensk in German occupied Russia. The war's great turning point, the German defeat at Stalingrad, has just occurred. But just outside Smolensk, a giant unmarked graveyard has just been discovered in a place called Katyn Woods. Gunther sets about doing this job, surrounded by a cast of German officers and Russian locals who motives vary. And then murders begin occurring, as murders will in murder mysteries. Gunther has his mission, and yet, of course, his homicide detective instincts come to the fore. As always, Gunther is swimming in a stream of shifting motives, violence, compromise and downright evil. He manages to keep his own sense of right and wrong afloat, but his soul becomes more battered and scarred with each book.

21rocketjk
nov. 11, 2022, 1:20 pm

I enjoyed a read through the brief guidebook, Liberal Porto: A Guide to the Architecture, Sites and History of Porto edited by Manuela Rebelo, a memento from my recent vacation in Portugal. This is a small (4.5 by 6 inches or 11.5 by 16.5 cm) book meant to be carried about with you while you walk the streets of Porto, Portugal. There are several distinct walks presented in the book, with, of course, historical information about the sights to be seen on each. A very large portion of the history provided centers around events that took place in the city from 1820, when a revolt against the absolutist reign of Don Miguel was harshly put down, to 1832, when Don Miguel's brother, Don Pedro IV, landed troops and occupied the city in support of his daughter, Queen Maria. Maria was a fierce supporter of a Charter that had been developed to create a constitutional monarchy rather than absolute rule. Hence the "liberal" tag of the book's title and text, although the writers also make the claim that the city had always had a reputation for learning and internationalism that leant themselves to liberal leanings, at least relative to the times. Don Miguel showed up and laid siege to the city for over a year, but Don Pedro's forces were ultimately successful in breaking both the siege and Don Miguel's claim to power. Anyway, that's the story told in this book, and, as I mentioned above, most of the buildings and parks and history are described within the context of the roles they played in the events of 1832-33. I didn't find this book until one of our final days in the city, and anyway my wife has an aversion to "walking tours," historical or otherwise. I'd say that on our own we found our way to about half of the locales described in this guidebook, though the full history of the Portuguese Civil War, as described here, didn't take real shape for me until I read over the short book this week. At any rate, we had a lot of fun in Porto and still learned a lot about the city and its people while we were there. Also, I'm aware that there's a lot more to learn about the events of the conflict and siege than is set forth here. Still, this is a fun reading trip around a very fun, interesting and beautiful city.

22rocketjk
nov. 28, 2022, 12:19 pm

I finished John Heartfield: Laughter is a Devastating Weapon by David King and Ernst Volland. Helmut Herzfeld was an artist and graphic designer who came of age as an artist during the fraught and chaotic days of 1920s Weimar Republic Germany. He changed his name to John Heartfield as a political protest against what he saw as the disastrous rise in toxic German nationalism that had already led to the insane, meaningless carnage of World War I. Heartfield was a founding member of the short-lived but extremely influential Dadaist movement and, along with artist George Grosz, is credited with more or less inventing the art of photomontage. It was obvious to Heartfield that German industrialists were manipulating the politics and economics of the day and criminally exploiting German workers. He became a lifelong Communist, a very early member of the German Communist Party. Heartfield turned his artistic talent, plus his anger, determination and sharp wit, to message-bearing graphic design, most notably designing dozens of classic covers for the weekly German Communist Journal, AIZ, or Arbiter Illustrierte Zeitung: in English, Workers' Illustrated Newspaper. His profoundly affecting and often savage designs took on the monied interests and, increasingly, the rising fascist movement, personified of course by the Nazi's. Heartfield portrayed Hitler as being not only hateful but corrupt, funded, as can be seen in the book's cover image, by the industrialists themselves as a way to keep the workers in line. When the Nazi's finally took power in 1933, Heartfield had to flee Germany, literally escaping out a window and hiding in a trash bin for seven hours when the Gestapo raided his studio. The AIZ set up shop in exile in Prague until the Munich Agreement in 1939. Soon Heartfield was in England, where his determined anti-Fascist bona fides didn't mean much to the British authorities, who interned him for being a German national and a Communist. Released after six months due to poor health, Heartfield remained spied upon and, to a certain extent. He moved back Germany, specifically, to the DDR, in 1950, where he was once again viewed with suspicion due to his 11 years in England, not being formally admitted to the DDR's Academy of the Arts until 1956.

I've only touched on some main points of Heartfield's astounding and fascinating life story. This book is mostly filled with large and colorful prints of Heartfield's most famous posters and book jacket arts. In many cases, we see the original montages flanked by the finished products including the use of shading and text that appeared in AIZ and elsewhere. I would be remiss if I failed to point out that his art was not only anti-capitalism/fascist, but also in many cases pro-Communism, in which he stongly and determinedly believed.

23rocketjk
des. 16, 2022, 12:55 pm

England again for Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel's work historical fiction excellence about the era of Henry VIII as seen through the eyes of Thomas Cromwell.

24rocketjk
des. 25, 2022, 1:37 pm

I finished Snow Country by I.J. Parker, the third entry in Parker's Sugawara Akitada Mysteries series. Akitada is a low-level nobleman in 11th-century Japan who's become known, in the series' first two books, for his ability to solve murders and annoy his superiors. Now he's been sent to be the governor of a far northern province where the emperor's authority is but barely acknowledged and a powerful warlord holds sway instead. Akitada's job is to get this situation in hand. He is accompanied by his wife and by his two loyal lieutenants, Tora and Hitomara. Soon, as will happen in murder mysteries, there is a murder. Then the bodies begin accumulating. Plus there is the problem for Akitada of asserting his imperial authority. These books have been fun all along, and I will say that in this third book the quality of the writing has gone up a notch, both in terms of the sentence-level work (many fewer cliches, for one thing) and the the plotting.

25rocketjk
des. 30, 2022, 3:28 pm

Just before the year's end I finished The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, C.L.R. James' classic history of the Haitian Revolution and biography of its brilliant and charismatic leader, Tousaint L'Overture. This is a fascinating, multi-dimensional history and biography of a chapter of history I knew very little about. The book was originally published in 1938. My copy was a second printing of the book's 1971 republishing with a new introduction and an appendix by the author.

26rocketjk
des. 31, 2022, 3:59 pm

I snuck in one more before year's end. I finished Watch Czechoslovakia! by Richard Freund. This is a very short book, written in 1937, just months before the infamous Munich Agreement that allowed the German Army to occupy Czechoslovakia without a shot fired. The book is, at its heart, an examination of the conflicts within the country between the Czechoslovak majority and the German minority, the use that Nazi Germany might be likely to make of these conflicts, and the very important reasons why they would care. I could find very little information about the book's author. I did find a couple of contemporary book reviews online. Freund is referred to in one as an "Anglicized Austrian journalist" and in another as an "Anglo-Austrian journalist." At any rate, he seems to have known his business.

Freund gives a thumbnail sketch of Czechoslovakian history and describes the geographic and economic factors that have made the country of such strategic importance in Central Europe throughout the centuries. As Freund wrote:

"Four points should be remembered: (1) the Western mountain arch, pointing towards the heart of Germany; (2) the 50 miles' gap in the northern range which, as the "Gateway of Moravia," has played an important part in the migrations of the European races for thousands of years; (3) the long sweep of the Carpathians pointing towards Rumania and Russia; (4) the Danube in the south.

The Bohemian basin with its mountain walls has been coveted by ambitious nations from the dawn of history, because its possession gives to a strong military power a strategic basis for operations over vast tracts of the European Continent."


The German minority in the country actually made up around 22% of Czechoslovakia's overall population. As Freund describes things, quite a few of their grievances were legitimate. But by time of his writing in 1937, he says that rather than working towards solving these problems, a nationalist German party, under the leadership of a Nazi sympathizer named Konrad Henlein, was much more interested in kicking up dissension and creating an excuse for the Nazi Army to take action. Freund describes the separate mutual defense agreements the Czechoslovakians had with both France and Russia, and talks about what these allies were likely to do in the face of a German incursion. Freund seems to have been able to imagine every eventuality other than what actually occurred, the Allies ignoring their own strategic interests by handing over the country to the Nazi's. Given the strategic military use Hitler and his generals were obviously likely to make of occupying the country, it's astonishing in retrospect that Neville Chamberlin could have ever supposed that the result of the Munich Agreement would be a significant period of peace.

27rocketjk
des. 31, 2022, 4:04 pm

And that's a wrap for 2022. Again, my reading about African American history and the history of racism in the U.S. minimized my globe trotting somewhat. All in all I made reading visits to 14 countries, including the U.S., and 11 states within the U.S., plus assorted non-country or state specific books. I'll have a new thread up here soon, assuming folks are still OK with this sort of posting in this group. Cheers!