thorold lights out for the territory in Q2 2024
ConversesClub Read 2024
Afegeix-te a LibraryThing per participar.
1thorold
… so there ain't nothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it, because if I'd a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn't a tackled it, and ain't a-going to no more. But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can't stand it. I been there before.
Welcome to my Q2 thread! The Q1 thread was here: https://www.librarything.com/topic/356199
Since I ended Q1 with an author riffing off Mark Twain, why not continue? I don’t think I’m likely to reach anywhere more exotic than the Western Reserve in Q2, but you never know…
2thorold
Q1 Reading stats
26 books read, by 25 distinct main authors.
By language
Dutch: 4
English: 17
French: 1
German: 3
Italian: 1
By Genre
Art history: 1
Essays: 1
Fiction: 18
History: 1
Language: 1
Memoir: 1
Poetry: 2
Theatre: 1
By format
Other borrowed: 1
Paid ebooks: 2
Library: 10
Paper books from TBR pile: 12
Re-reads: 1
26 books read, by 25 distinct main authors.
By language
Dutch: 4
English: 17
French: 1
German: 3
Italian: 1
By Genre
Art history: 1
Essays: 1
Fiction: 18
History: 1
Language: 1
Memoir: 1
Poetry: 2
Theatre: 1
By format
Other borrowed: 1
Paid ebooks: 2
Library: 10
Paper books from TBR pile: 12
Re-reads: 1
3thorold
Q1 was quite satisfactory: I read a little bit less than usual, and although I don’t seem to have read anything really earth-shattering, I didn’t really have much fluff or rubbish either. I only managed two reads for the RG pre-renaissance theme read, but I did get from Belgium to India on the “reading round the world” theme. Including the first book I’ve read from Slovakia.
Aims for Q2:
I’m in Cleveland, away from my main TBR pile, for the first half of Q2, and I’m aiming to travel a bit more when I get back to Europe, so it’s hard to make any plans. My TBR-pile-away-from-home is building up, as I explore the bookshops around here. I’m certainly planning to go a bit further with the “reading round the world” project, and I want to read a few books for “landlocked countries”, the RG Q2 theme. Uzbekistan and Hungary are already on the pile, at least. I expect I’ll read a few more books about the Great Lakes as well.
When I get back to Holland, the book that’s calling out to me is Beyond the wall, which was a Christmas present to myself but which I’ve had to postpone starting because of other commitments several times.
Aims for Q2:
I’m in Cleveland, away from my main TBR pile, for the first half of Q2, and I’m aiming to travel a bit more when I get back to Europe, so it’s hard to make any plans. My TBR-pile-away-from-home is building up, as I explore the bookshops around here. I’m certainly planning to go a bit further with the “reading round the world” project, and I want to read a few books for “landlocked countries”, the RG Q2 theme. Uzbekistan and Hungary are already on the pile, at least. I expect I’ll read a few more books about the Great Lakes as well.
When I get back to Holland, the book that’s calling out to me is Beyond the wall, which was a Christmas present to myself but which I’ve had to postpone starting because of other commitments several times.
4thorold
And the first book for Q2, which I already accidentally posted in my Q1 thread and then deleted again, is another station on the world tour — after visiting India with R K Narayan last Sunday, I spotted a book from Bangladesh:
This won a lot of awards at the time it appeared, and Anam has since expanded it into a trilogy. She comes from a prominent Bengali family of politicians and journalists, and currently seems to be based in the UK.
A Golden Age (2007) by Tahmima Anam (Bangladesh, UK, 1975- )
A moving account of the Bangladesh War of 1971 from the point of view of a middle-aged widow, Rehana, who is drawn into the independence struggle by her adult children. Maybe a little bit over-romantic in places, but it gives a convincing picture of what it must feel like to find your normal life overturned by a civil war. Anam was only born in 1975, so she’s writing about people in her parents’ and grandparents’ generation, but she seems to have based the book on an extensive set of interviews with people who were directly involved.
This won a lot of awards at the time it appeared, and Anam has since expanded it into a trilogy. She comes from a prominent Bengali family of politicians and journalists, and currently seems to be based in the UK.
A Golden Age (2007) by Tahmima Anam (Bangladesh, UK, 1975- )
A moving account of the Bangladesh War of 1971 from the point of view of a middle-aged widow, Rehana, who is drawn into the independence struggle by her adult children. Maybe a little bit over-romantic in places, but it gives a convincing picture of what it must feel like to find your normal life overturned by a civil war. Anam was only born in 1975, so she’s writing about people in her parents’ and grandparents’ generation, but she seems to have based the book on an extensive set of interviews with people who were directly involved.
5kjuliff
>4 thorold: I already had this in my wish list so will star it now. I don’t think I’ve read anything set during that war, which for some reason always makes me think of George Harrison. Thanks for prompting me with your review.
6labfs39
>4 thorold: Good reminder. I have the first two books in that trilogy, but haven't read them yet.
7thorold
Something very British, for a change. One of the great title of recent years, which I’ve been meaning to get to for a while to see if the book lives up to it. And it reminds me that I haven’t read any of Susan Hill’s novels in an eternity — certainly not since I’ve been on LibraryThing. That ought to be remedied…
Howards End is on the Landing (2009) by Susan Hill (UK, 1942- )
Long before “working from home” was a phrase people bandied about, Susan Hill decided to spend a year just reading books she already had lying around the house. “Attacking the TBR pile”, as we would put it. Except that she was mixing in a fair proportion of re-reads: the main principle seemed to be to follow her nose and the quasi-random patterns in which books had settled in different parts of her home. And of course this isn’t just a collection of book reviews, she drifts off engagingly into memories from her long career as an author, broadcaster and publisher. Her first novel was published when she was still in her teens, and she’s been in the literary scene long enough to have baby-sat Arnold Wesker’s children and have E M Forster drop a book on her toe in the London Library, so she knew a lot of the writers she is talking about here, and many of them were evidently friends. But she seems to be quite capable of separating the books from the people: V S Naipaul, for example, seems to have been rude to her the one time they met, but she still praises him as one of the best prose-writers of his generation.
A fun little book, which comes with a serious risk of encouraging you to buy more books, even if it doesn’t make you disarrange your home library to increase the serendipity factor…
Howards End is on the Landing (2009) by Susan Hill (UK, 1942- )
Long before “working from home” was a phrase people bandied about, Susan Hill decided to spend a year just reading books she already had lying around the house. “Attacking the TBR pile”, as we would put it. Except that she was mixing in a fair proportion of re-reads: the main principle seemed to be to follow her nose and the quasi-random patterns in which books had settled in different parts of her home. And of course this isn’t just a collection of book reviews, she drifts off engagingly into memories from her long career as an author, broadcaster and publisher. Her first novel was published when she was still in her teens, and she’s been in the literary scene long enough to have baby-sat Arnold Wesker’s children and have E M Forster drop a book on her toe in the London Library, so she knew a lot of the writers she is talking about here, and many of them were evidently friends. But she seems to be quite capable of separating the books from the people: V S Naipaul, for example, seems to have been rude to her the one time they met, but she still praises him as one of the best prose-writers of his generation.
A fun little book, which comes with a serious risk of encouraging you to buy more books, even if it doesn’t make you disarrange your home library to increase the serendipity factor…
8SassyLassy
>7 thorold: What a wonderful way to spend a year. This is a title I love, but for some reason have never seen the actual book except for in the picture you posted. Good to see it's worth the (risky) read.
9kjuliff
>7 thorold: Sounds a little like Mantel Pieces in scope. I’m reading Pieces now and enjoying it - mix of book critiques, essays, memoir pieces. Now I need re read Hill’s.
P.S V.S. Naipaul was rude to me too.
P.S V.S. Naipaul was rude to me too.
10Jim53
>7 thorold: I guess this is the same Susan Hill who wrote The Various Haunts of Men, is that right? I read that one for a mystery book club back in 2011 and wasn't excited enough to continue with the series. There are a lot of Susan Hills writing books.
11thorold
>9 kjuliff: There seem to be a lot of those little “books I’ve met in my long life” books around. I was half-convinced I’d already read Hill’s, but it turned out to be a quite different book by someone else.
Naipaul obviously had a talent for upsetting people. Interesting that another of Hill’s favourites-but-not-as-people is Roald Dahl, who has also been getting a lot of probably justified negative comment lately.
>10 Jim53: Yes, that one. She seems to have done a lot of different kinds of fiction at different times — I vaguely remember her from Strange meeting and In the springtime of the year, written in the early seventies, and from being on the radio a lot. I didn’t realise she’d done crime as well, but it makes sense.
Naipaul obviously had a talent for upsetting people. Interesting that another of Hill’s favourites-but-not-as-people is Roald Dahl, who has also been getting a lot of probably justified negative comment lately.
>10 Jim53: Yes, that one. She seems to have done a lot of different kinds of fiction at different times — I vaguely remember her from Strange meeting and In the springtime of the year, written in the early seventies, and from being on the radio a lot. I didn’t realise she’d done crime as well, but it makes sense.
12rv1988
>4 thorold: Great review. I've only read nonfiction about the 1971 war, this is going on my list.
13kjuliff
>11 thorold: I know little of Roald Dahl’s works except for the chocolate factory one which my kids loved. I didn’t see anything wrong with it at the time, and haven’t followed the anti-Dahl news. With Naipaul, I’ve not read any of his books lately but I don’t think he was politically incorrect, though I gather that he treated his first wife badly, and that he was generally an unpleasant person. Which brings us to that 21st century question, are we to cancel artists such as Caravaggio and Picasso because of their morally-lacking their private lives?
14rocketjk
>4 thorold: I read and enjoyed A Golden Age back in 2016. I had a couple of quibbles, particularly with the pacing of the first half, but overall reviewed it very positively.
15dchaikin
That Susan Hill book sounds so nice. I’m catching up. Enjoyed your reviews. I was really pleased to read your review if James. (I’m not going to try to tag that.) I’m very interested and that was a terrific review.
16kidzdoc
I enjoyed A Golden Age but I loved The Good Muslim, the second book in the Bangladesh Trilogy.
17kjuliff
>16 kidzdoc: I hadn’t heard of The Good Muslim but it looks good. Adding it to my list, along with A Golden Age
18thorold
>16 kidzdoc: >17 kjuliff: I’m looking out for it.
Moving to the “landlocked countries” theme:
The Railway (1997,2006) by Hamid Ismailov (Uzbekistan, UK, 1954- ) translated from Russian by Robert Chandler
A complicated novel, telling the intersecting but sometimes contradictory stories of a large group of characters in a small railway town north of Tashkent between about 1900 and 1980, interleaved with the story of an unnamed character just referred to as “the boy”. The stories are often ribald and usually involve at least a hint of magic realism, and the point of view is always that of a Muslim, Uzbek observer, looking with slight puzzlement at western civilisation and the Soviet project.
Ismailov says in an interview with the translator included as an afterword here that he wanted to contrast the regimented, hierarchical, Soviet way of looking at the world — obviously symbolised here by the railway — with the unprejudiced, fluid, Sufi-like gaze of the innocent boy. Ismailov takes no prisoners either in his social and political satire or in his brutally matter-of-fact descriptions of sex and violence, so this definitely isn’t for everyone, but it is a quite remarkable book, and often very funny indeed, even in places where you had rather it wasn’t… Certainly another one that invites a re-read to get the most out of it.
Moving to the “landlocked countries” theme:
The Railway (1997,2006) by Hamid Ismailov (Uzbekistan, UK, 1954- ) translated from Russian by Robert Chandler
A complicated novel, telling the intersecting but sometimes contradictory stories of a large group of characters in a small railway town north of Tashkent between about 1900 and 1980, interleaved with the story of an unnamed character just referred to as “the boy”. The stories are often ribald and usually involve at least a hint of magic realism, and the point of view is always that of a Muslim, Uzbek observer, looking with slight puzzlement at western civilisation and the Soviet project.
Ismailov says in an interview with the translator included as an afterword here that he wanted to contrast the regimented, hierarchical, Soviet way of looking at the world — obviously symbolised here by the railway — with the unprejudiced, fluid, Sufi-like gaze of the innocent boy. Ismailov takes no prisoners either in his social and political satire or in his brutally matter-of-fact descriptions of sex and violence, so this definitely isn’t for everyone, but it is a quite remarkable book, and often very funny indeed, even in places where you had rather it wasn’t… Certainly another one that invites a re-read to get the most out of it.
19kidzdoc
>17 kjuliff: I thought I had written a review of The Good Muslim for Belletrista, Lois' online literary magazine, and I did, back in 2012. Here's a link to my review, which I've now posted in full on LibraryThing: https://www.librarything.com/work/11278105/reviews/77931718
20kjuliff
>19 kidzdoc: it looks excellent. I’m looking for it on audio as I can no longer read in print. So far no luck :(
21thorold
>19 kidzdoc: Thanks! Looks interesting.
22kidzdoc
Fabulous review of James from your previous thread, Mark! I'll buy and read it soon.
My least favorite memory of high school was my English class in 11th grade, when the teacher decided to make us read excerpts from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I was one of maybe three or four Black students in my class of 250-300 students, so I stood out like a sore thumb, although the teachers there generally liked me, even if I didn't take any of their classes, as I was the "smart Black kid" who broke through stereotypical barriers. This English teacher was a White woman with a head full of frizzy red hair and huge glasses who obviously took waaay too many hallucinogenic drugs in the 1960s, and she insisted in having me read Jim's dialogue in an "authentic" voice, as, being the only Black student in the class, I was the only one who could speak like that (this, despite the fact that I don't have a "Black" accent). I was intensely uncomfortable, as were my well meaning classmates, who generally liked me and hated that this druggie teacher put me in that position; they also hated trying to speak like White Southerners, especially since no one in the Philadelphia area talked like that.
Unfortunately that experience set me again literature in general, and American literature in particular, for many years.
Percival Everett is my favorite living American novelist, although I've only read half or fewer of the books he's published to date. My favorites are, in order of LT rating, The Trees, I Am Not Sidney Poitier, Erasure, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, and A History of the African-American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond, as told to Percival Everett & James Kincaid.
My least favorite memory of high school was my English class in 11th grade, when the teacher decided to make us read excerpts from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I was one of maybe three or four Black students in my class of 250-300 students, so I stood out like a sore thumb, although the teachers there generally liked me, even if I didn't take any of their classes, as I was the "smart Black kid" who broke through stereotypical barriers. This English teacher was a White woman with a head full of frizzy red hair and huge glasses who obviously took waaay too many hallucinogenic drugs in the 1960s, and she insisted in having me read Jim's dialogue in an "authentic" voice, as, being the only Black student in the class, I was the only one who could speak like that (this, despite the fact that I don't have a "Black" accent). I was intensely uncomfortable, as were my well meaning classmates, who generally liked me and hated that this druggie teacher put me in that position; they also hated trying to speak like White Southerners, especially since no one in the Philadelphia area talked like that.
Unfortunately that experience set me again literature in general, and American literature in particular, for many years.
Percival Everett is my favorite living American novelist, although I've only read half or fewer of the books he's published to date. My favorites are, in order of LT rating, The Trees, I Am Not Sidney Poitier, Erasure, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, and A History of the African-American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond, as told to Percival Everett & James Kincaid.
23cindydavid4
>22 kidzdoc: oh gosh Im so sorry that happened to you! Horrible things that adults do to kids that arent exactly abuse, but certainly adjacent. Twain was one of my fav authors in jr high, I still have good memories of our 6th grade teacher reading some of his stories. Sorry that teacher kept you from his work. I am very interested in reading James got it on reserve
A History of the African-American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond, as told to Percival Everett & James Kincaid.
!!!!!!!!!!! oh my I want to read that!
A History of the African-American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond, as told to Percival Everett & James Kincaid.
!!!!!!!!!!! oh my I want to read that!
24kjuliff
>22 kidzdoc: I’d never read any Percival Everett and just started The Trees a couple of days due to rv1988’s recommendation. What a wonderful book. I’ll have to read more Everett. Growing up in Australia we were not introduced to many American novelists. Only James Baldwin stands out in my memory as high school reading. So I am constantly finding writers new to me from LT members.
25thorold
>22 kidzdoc: Ouch! It’s always scary how easy it is to end up insensitively trampling on toes when you go plunging into something with the best intentions — as your teacher obviously thought she was doing. Our liveliest teachers at that period often exhibited similar clumsiness: I don’t suppose they had any meaningful training in dealing with diversity.
I’m pursuing the Everett rabbit hole — more coming shortly. Thanks for the ordered list! His output is impressive, but of course he has been writing for a good forty years.
I’m pursuing the Everett rabbit hole — more coming shortly. Thanks for the ordered list! His output is impressive, but of course he has been writing for a good forty years.
26thorold
As promised:
I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2011) by Percival Everett (US, 1956- )
This feels a lot like a one-joke book, but Everett is clever enough to keep the joke going with subtle variations throughout the book, and turn it into an effective satire that constantly messes with our preconceptions about the experience of growing up black in America. The narrator is a young, unemployed black man, child of a single mother, a high-school dropout … but through no fault of his own, he is also extraordinarily wealthy. And he has been named “Not Sidney” by his somewhat eccentric mother, something that leads to an astonishing variety of misunderstandings, not helped by the fact that his surname is Poitier and he looks rather like the famous actor.
Not Sidney is helped along his way through adolescence by a friendly Atlanta media mogul named Ted Turner and a crazy college professor named Percival Everett (who teaches a course on “the epistemology of nonsense”) — both clearly totally fictional characters. The author cheerfully messes with our minds as the young hero gets arrested in a backward part of the Deep South for Driving While Black and is sentenced to an authentically thirties-style chain gang, or as a light-skinned girl takes him home from their black college to shock her conservative parents (the tables, of course, are turned when he is revealed to be rich enough to be husband material). At a later point he finds himself held prisoner by nuns, and before long he is investigating his own murder. Along the way we get a selection of dream sequences in which the narrator becomes a slave in antebellum New Orleans or a fugitive from a lynch mob. Everett doesn’t actually tell us that persons attempting to find a plot in this narrative will be shot, but that seems to be implicit. Very clever and funny, but with a sharp point drilling into the fundamental absurdity of the American obsession with race. And Hollywood movies…
I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2011) by Percival Everett (US, 1956- )
This feels a lot like a one-joke book, but Everett is clever enough to keep the joke going with subtle variations throughout the book, and turn it into an effective satire that constantly messes with our preconceptions about the experience of growing up black in America. The narrator is a young, unemployed black man, child of a single mother, a high-school dropout … but through no fault of his own, he is also extraordinarily wealthy. And he has been named “Not Sidney” by his somewhat eccentric mother, something that leads to an astonishing variety of misunderstandings, not helped by the fact that his surname is Poitier and he looks rather like the famous actor.
Not Sidney is helped along his way through adolescence by a friendly Atlanta media mogul named Ted Turner and a crazy college professor named Percival Everett (who teaches a course on “the epistemology of nonsense”) — both clearly totally fictional characters. The author cheerfully messes with our minds as the young hero gets arrested in a backward part of the Deep South for Driving While Black and is sentenced to an authentically thirties-style chain gang, or as a light-skinned girl takes him home from their black college to shock her conservative parents (the tables, of course, are turned when he is revealed to be rich enough to be husband material). At a later point he finds himself held prisoner by nuns, and before long he is investigating his own murder. Along the way we get a selection of dream sequences in which the narrator becomes a slave in antebellum New Orleans or a fugitive from a lynch mob. Everett doesn’t actually tell us that persons attempting to find a plot in this narrative will be shot, but that seems to be implicit. Very clever and funny, but with a sharp point drilling into the fundamental absurdity of the American obsession with race. And Hollywood movies…
27Yells
I loved The Trees and keep meaning to read more of his stuff. Thanks for the interesting review.
28baswood
Enjoying your reviews and The Railway sounds right on the rails for you.
29kjuliff
>26 thorold: Sounds wonderful. After reading your review I found it in the NYPL and borrowed it immediately. I recently finished his The Trees, which was esquisite. Such intelligent humour.
30thorold
Today is “lights out” day — the sun is shining at the moment, our eclipse glasses are locked and loaded, and the forecast for this afternoon is … well, a bit mixed. Fingers crossed!
Meanwhile, yet another book from the mid-sixties by a Cleveland Plain dealer hack…
Great Stories of the Great Lakes (1966) by Dwight Boyer (USA, 1912-1977)
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This turns out to be mostly a collection of accounts of “great shipwrecks of the Great Lakes”, with the few pieces that aren’t about shipwrecks being about salvage operations or near-disasters. The main exception is the opening piece, an account of the celebrated steamboat race between the Tashmoo and the City of Erie in June 1901. Unfortunately, this opening piece also shows Boyer indulging his penchant for journalistic cliché to the hilt, putting dialogue into the mouths of the participants, including a Chief Engineer with a comic “Scottish” accent… Later in the book he moderates this sort of thing a little, but it remains hard to disentangle his historical research from his taste for reconstruction.
What I took from the book was a better sense of how extreme the weather conditions on the Great Lakes can be, as well as a general impression that most of the disasters he describes could have been avoided with better weather forecasting, better ships and skippers who weren’t under as much pressure to meet schedules. But that is probably true for marine accidents anywhere in the world. Obviously what is peculiar to the Lakes is that ships are on short and very familiar, frequently travelled routes, never more than a few hours from shelter, but the weather changes can be very rapid.
Fun if you like disaster stories, but you might prefer a more recent book, especially given that the most celebrated Great Lakes shipwreck, the Edmund Fitzgerald, occurred some ten years too late for Boyer to have included it.
Meanwhile, yet another book from the mid-sixties by a Cleveland Plain dealer hack…
Great Stories of the Great Lakes (1966) by Dwight Boyer (USA, 1912-1977)
This turns out to be mostly a collection of accounts of “great shipwrecks of the Great Lakes”, with the few pieces that aren’t about shipwrecks being about salvage operations or near-disasters. The main exception is the opening piece, an account of the celebrated steamboat race between the Tashmoo and the City of Erie in June 1901. Unfortunately, this opening piece also shows Boyer indulging his penchant for journalistic cliché to the hilt, putting dialogue into the mouths of the participants, including a Chief Engineer with a comic “Scottish” accent… Later in the book he moderates this sort of thing a little, but it remains hard to disentangle his historical research from his taste for reconstruction.
What I took from the book was a better sense of how extreme the weather conditions on the Great Lakes can be, as well as a general impression that most of the disasters he describes could have been avoided with better weather forecasting, better ships and skippers who weren’t under as much pressure to meet schedules. But that is probably true for marine accidents anywhere in the world. Obviously what is peculiar to the Lakes is that ships are on short and very familiar, frequently travelled routes, never more than a few hours from shelter, but the weather changes can be very rapid.
Fun if you like disaster stories, but you might prefer a more recent book, especially given that the most celebrated Great Lakes shipwreck, the Edmund Fitzgerald, occurred some ten years too late for Boyer to have included it.
31kac522
>30 thorold: Is there any mention of the Lady Elgin disaster on Lake Michigan in 1860? I had a surviving ancestor and 2 lost ancestors on that ship.
32thorold
>31 kac522: No, it wasn’t mentioned, or at least it’s not in the index and I don’t remember seeing it. Surprising, given the loss of life involved and the legal consequences — that was the accident that led to running lights becoming compulsory for sailing vessels at night.
33kac522
>32 thorold: Probably in the history of the Great Lakes it's smaller, but it is one of the larger disasters on Lake Michigan. Or too many Irish... ;)
Well, then I'll probably take a pass on the book.
So how was the eclipse in Cleveland? I saw one report--it looked a little cloudy.
Well, then I'll probably take a pass on the book.
So how was the eclipse in Cleveland? I saw one report--it looked a little cloudy.
34thorold
>33 kac522: Whispy high cloud, but we got a good view all the same. Fabulous light effects over the lake, as well. And it was much more of a social experience than I was expecting — we got chatting to all sorts of strangers. The eclipse put everyone in a holiday mood, I think.
35kac522
>34 thorold: Lovely, thanks for sharing.
36kidzdoc
Great review of I Am Not Sidney Poitier, Mark; I loved that book!
37SassyLassy
>30 thorold: Your review has generated an earworm - Gordon Lightfoot's The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. It will be going through my mind for days!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuzTkGyxkYI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuzTkGyxkYI
38thorold
>37 SassyLassy: The OH was talking about that yesterday — now I’ve actually listened to it I see it would be an earworm. Sorry!
If you want to chase it away with another shipwreck earworm, you could try this one, which was depressing people locally when I was growing up: https://youtu.be/qUvX3JIzT2A?si=TkVdoG9PwAzthH7G
If you want to chase it away with another shipwreck earworm, you could try this one, which was depressing people locally when I was growing up: https://youtu.be/qUvX3JIzT2A?si=TkVdoG9PwAzthH7G
39SassyLassy
>38 thorold: Well the chasing away worked, but you're right - another earworm.
41kac522
I've got to add the great Canadian singer Stan Rogers here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMRpYtAhGAo
"Northwest Passage" about the failed Franklin expedition across Canada.
Or his Barrett's Privateers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQbh7UNCZdc
"Northwest Passage" about the failed Franklin expedition across Canada.
Or his Barrett's Privateers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQbh7UNCZdc
42SassyLassy
>41 kac522: Now I'm really doomed. My book club did Frozen in Time last month, about the Franklin expedition and the Northwest Passage, and all of us had that song going through our minds. It was only just replaced by the Edmund Fitzgerald, and now Barrett's Privateers are jumping all around too. Well, maybe not jumping - "I'm a broken man on a Halifax pier...". All good rousing songs to sing at the end of a long night.
Stan's brother Garnet apparently brews some good stuff, and there is a great spoof of it to the tune of 'Barrett's Privateers', along the lines of "...a glass of Garnet's home made beer"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GI8P5Fhc5yU
Stan's brother Garnet apparently brews some good stuff, and there is a great spoof of it to the tune of 'Barrett's Privateers', along the lines of "...a glass of Garnet's home made beer"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GI8P5Fhc5yU
43thorold
Moving on swiftly, before I have to retitle my thread “thorold listens to depressing Canadian folk music in Q2”…. :-)
This was my first encounter with Willa Cather, a writer numerous other people here have told me good things about. It was a book I bought mostly because it was just such an attractive physical object. It was lying in wait for me in the eccentric little neighbourhood secondhand bookshop, and I couldn’t resist it, especially after the lady who runs the shop had kindly given us a couple of pairs of eclipse glasses from her own private supply. A slightly battered copy of what I think must be a later reprint of the Knopf first edition (it’s dated 1929), printed on heavy paper, with woodcuts by Harold Von Schmidt, and set in a gorgeous font called Poliphilus — a 20s Stanley Morison remake of a renaissance font used by Aldus Manutius. Sadly the dust jacket is long gone. But all for about the same price as a modern paperback, and five times as enjoyable to read. Elmer Adler is credited as the book’s designer.
Death Comes For The Archbishop (1927) by Willa Cather (USA, 1873-1947)
An odd choice of title, on the face of it, as the central character does not become an archbishop until well into the closing pages of the novel, and his death is one of the gentlest and least dramatic in the whole of modern fiction.
This is essentially a historical novel about the lives of two French missionary priests charged with setting up a new diocese after the US annexation of New Mexico in 1848, where Father Vaillant is the tough lower-class bruiser with the key human skills and sympathies for dealing with people from outside civilised European culture, while his officer-class friend and colleague Father Latour deals with the local gentry and keeps going off on long journeys to attend management conferences.
Both priests are presented as pious, idealistic, self-sacrificing and generally lacking in any interesting human vices (except maybe a taste for French cooking), in a way that might otherwise be rather tedious and even nauseating, but seems to be forgivable — and even appropriate — here, in the context of the epic framework Cather sets up, where the New Mexico scenery and the interplay of Spanish-Mexican and Native American cultures in it is always more foreground than background. Latour and Vaillant spend a lot of the book being tiny dots of black in a widescreen panorama of desert, cactuses and mesas. There isn’t really a direct plot, we learn about Latour and Vaillant and the transitional society of the new Territory through a series of Don-Camilloesque vignettes, and Cather takes the opportunity to remind us along the way of some of the values of Native American culture — particularly when it comes to living in harmony with nature — and the ways that they have often been mistreated by the US authorities (but not, apparently, by the Roman Catholic Church…).
Very odd, and not really my sort of book, but I enjoyed Cather’s writing all the same, and I liked the description of the cosy, lifelong friendship of the two priests, even if it did rely on a few clichés.
This was my first encounter with Willa Cather, a writer numerous other people here have told me good things about. It was a book I bought mostly because it was just such an attractive physical object. It was lying in wait for me in the eccentric little neighbourhood secondhand bookshop, and I couldn’t resist it, especially after the lady who runs the shop had kindly given us a couple of pairs of eclipse glasses from her own private supply. A slightly battered copy of what I think must be a later reprint of the Knopf first edition (it’s dated 1929), printed on heavy paper, with woodcuts by Harold Von Schmidt, and set in a gorgeous font called Poliphilus — a 20s Stanley Morison remake of a renaissance font used by Aldus Manutius. Sadly the dust jacket is long gone. But all for about the same price as a modern paperback, and five times as enjoyable to read. Elmer Adler is credited as the book’s designer.
Death Comes For The Archbishop (1927) by Willa Cather (USA, 1873-1947)
An odd choice of title, on the face of it, as the central character does not become an archbishop until well into the closing pages of the novel, and his death is one of the gentlest and least dramatic in the whole of modern fiction.
This is essentially a historical novel about the lives of two French missionary priests charged with setting up a new diocese after the US annexation of New Mexico in 1848, where Father Vaillant is the tough lower-class bruiser with the key human skills and sympathies for dealing with people from outside civilised European culture, while his officer-class friend and colleague Father Latour deals with the local gentry and keeps going off on long journeys to attend management conferences.
Both priests are presented as pious, idealistic, self-sacrificing and generally lacking in any interesting human vices (except maybe a taste for French cooking), in a way that might otherwise be rather tedious and even nauseating, but seems to be forgivable — and even appropriate — here, in the context of the epic framework Cather sets up, where the New Mexico scenery and the interplay of Spanish-Mexican and Native American cultures in it is always more foreground than background. Latour and Vaillant spend a lot of the book being tiny dots of black in a widescreen panorama of desert, cactuses and mesas. There isn’t really a direct plot, we learn about Latour and Vaillant and the transitional society of the new Territory through a series of Don-Camilloesque vignettes, and Cather takes the opportunity to remind us along the way of some of the values of Native American culture — particularly when it comes to living in harmony with nature — and the ways that they have often been mistreated by the US authorities (but not, apparently, by the Roman Catholic Church…).
Very odd, and not really my sort of book, but I enjoyed Cather’s writing all the same, and I liked the description of the cosy, lifelong friendship of the two priests, even if it did rely on a few clichés.
44cindydavid4
Im not a huge fan but her description of life in the southwest really is lovely.
45kjuliff
>43 thorold: Great review but book seems not so great for me.
46kac522
>42 SassyLassy: Thanks, that was fun! Did you enjoy Frozen in Time? I recently read a short story by Margaret Atwood called "The Age of Lead", in which she brilliantly weaves the Franklin expedition story (and later discoveries) with a young man dying of AIDS.
>43 thorold: I loved the descriptions, especially the colors, in Death Comes for the Archbishop. I'd never read anything about the Southwest, and reading that book made me feel like I was there. To me Cather's books are sort of myths or fairy tales; they're about the characters but they're also about larger ideas and truths. A short one to read is A Lost Lady, which is about a woman on the surface, but it's really about the lure of the Old West.
And thanks for sharing pictures from that wonderful old edition.
>43 thorold: I loved the descriptions, especially the colors, in Death Comes for the Archbishop. I'd never read anything about the Southwest, and reading that book made me feel like I was there. To me Cather's books are sort of myths or fairy tales; they're about the characters but they're also about larger ideas and truths. A short one to read is A Lost Lady, which is about a woman on the surface, but it's really about the lure of the Old West.
And thanks for sharing pictures from that wonderful old edition.
47thorold
This was the book I meant to read on the plane a couple of weeks ago, before R K Narayan interrupted me…
The House by the Lake (2015) by Thomas Harding (UK, 1968- )
In 1927 Thomas Harding’s great-grandfather built a weekend cottage for his family on the shore of a lake in Groß Glienicke, on the western edge of Berlin. The Alexanders were able to enjoy the house for a few years before Hitler’s anti-Jewish policies made them emigrate to Britain. Another family, the Meisels, then acquired the place cheaply as “abandoned Jewish property”, but lost it again when it became part of the Soviet Zone and later the DDR. Two further families lived in the house during the DDR period, when it changed from dacha to permanent residence — but with the peculiarity that the Berlin Wall now ran through the back garden, cutting the house off from the lake.
Harding went to Berlin in 2013 to look for the now-abandoned house his relatives had talked about, and to research its history by talking to residents of Groß Glienicke, an exercise which culminated in a project to turn the house into a protected monument and eventually a museum of local history.
Harding uses a mixture of oral history and documents to chronicle the history of the house and the village from the 1890s, before the local landowner sold off portions of his estate for housing, right through to the campaign to restore the house. This is all quite engaging, particularly because Harding treats all the people who have lived in the house with equal respect and focuses on their experience of living there rather than allowing himself to be tempted into recriminations about strangers living in the house his family built for themselves. We get a lively — albeit somewhat arbitrary — slice of German social history through time, with quite a lot of interesting details.
The book is a little less successful when Harding is trying to fill us in on the bigger picture of German history to give a context to the events: inevitably, he has to condense and simplify, and he often ends up with a story that is lacking in nuance and precision. A lot of relevant information is banished to the (ridiculously long) endnotes, and Penguin make things worse by not allowing him to put references to the notes in the text: you have to guess which passages might have notes attached to them and which don’t.
Not bad on the whole, but I think there are much more interesting books about German history written by actual Germans (OK, Australians too…).
The House by the Lake (2015) by Thomas Harding (UK, 1968- )
In 1927 Thomas Harding’s great-grandfather built a weekend cottage for his family on the shore of a lake in Groß Glienicke, on the western edge of Berlin. The Alexanders were able to enjoy the house for a few years before Hitler’s anti-Jewish policies made them emigrate to Britain. Another family, the Meisels, then acquired the place cheaply as “abandoned Jewish property”, but lost it again when it became part of the Soviet Zone and later the DDR. Two further families lived in the house during the DDR period, when it changed from dacha to permanent residence — but with the peculiarity that the Berlin Wall now ran through the back garden, cutting the house off from the lake.
Harding went to Berlin in 2013 to look for the now-abandoned house his relatives had talked about, and to research its history by talking to residents of Groß Glienicke, an exercise which culminated in a project to turn the house into a protected monument and eventually a museum of local history.
Harding uses a mixture of oral history and documents to chronicle the history of the house and the village from the 1890s, before the local landowner sold off portions of his estate for housing, right through to the campaign to restore the house. This is all quite engaging, particularly because Harding treats all the people who have lived in the house with equal respect and focuses on their experience of living there rather than allowing himself to be tempted into recriminations about strangers living in the house his family built for themselves. We get a lively — albeit somewhat arbitrary — slice of German social history through time, with quite a lot of interesting details.
The book is a little less successful when Harding is trying to fill us in on the bigger picture of German history to give a context to the events: inevitably, he has to condense and simplify, and he often ends up with a story that is lacking in nuance and precision. A lot of relevant information is banished to the (ridiculously long) endnotes, and Penguin make things worse by not allowing him to put references to the notes in the text: you have to guess which passages might have notes attached to them and which don’t.
Not bad on the whole, but I think there are much more interesting books about German history written by actual Germans (OK, Australians too…).
48kjuliff
>47 thorold: Sounds vaguely similar in plot to Erpenbeck’s house story. Forget the name of the book, but the idea of different families living consecutively in the one house in East Germany. I think a lake was involved in Erupenbeck’s book too.
Edited to correct spelling Apr 12
Edited to correct spelling Apr 12
49FlorenceArt
>47 thorold: I hate it when they do that with notes! The book does sound engaging.
50thorold
>48 kjuliff: Heimsuchung/Visitation — Yes, that was why I was a bit reluctant to try it when someone recommended it a while ago. Erpenbeck does it better, and she has the advantage of writing fiction, which lets you impose structure that wasn’t quite there in real life. But the Harding book might be more accessible to someone who doesn’t know very much about Germany.
51thorold
A real case of a book I didn’t know I needed until it leapt off the bookshop shelf into my hand.
Essays in Idleness (1332) by Kenkō (Japan, 1283-1352), translated by Donald Keene (US, 1922-2019)
Kenkō was a Kyoto courtier-poet who took Buddhist orders in 1324. He wrote these 243 short essays when he was in his early fifties, apparently mostly for his own amusement. They didn‘t become widely known until about two hundred years later, but once the book did start circulating, it became established as a minor Japanese classic, treasured for the way it sets out some core elements of the Japanese view of aesthetics, etiquette and religious life.
That aspect of the essays is very interesting to us, of course, a door right into the court world of 14th century Kyoto, but they are also a treasure for their sheer randomness. We get thoughts on the uncouthness of the younger generation, rants against the import of useless stuff from China, careful analysis of exactly how we should enjoy the beauty of moonlight or cherry blossom, anecdotes about priests who get their heads stuck in cauldrons or ox-drivers who get the better of fine gentlemen, as well as some very precise laying down the law about which kinds of fish may be carved in the presence of the emperor.
Kenkō can be delightfully inconsistent on occasion, too — there’s a piece where he goes on about the evils of alcohol for a couple of pages, violently attacking irresponsible people who force booze on their friends and reminding us how boring other people become when they are drunk — and then, mysteriously, he seems to have overcome his hangover and goes on to tell us how wonderful a social stimulant alcohol can be, and what fun it is to see a friend getting tipsy… Kenkō does sometimes come over as a bit of a Polonius, but most of the time he is endearing, witty (although even after 700 years of research, some of his jokes are apparently still quite opaque to Japanese scholars), and very enjoyable to read.
The late Donald Keene was, of course, second to none in the art of making Japanese culture accessible to Westerners: here he gives us a short, helpful introduction, a wonderfully lucid translation of what seems to be a rather difficult and often ambiguous text, and enough notes to give us a good sense of all the deep cultural allusions buried in Kenkō‘s writing.
Essays in Idleness (1332) by Kenkō (Japan, 1283-1352), translated by Donald Keene (US, 1922-2019)
Kenkō was a Kyoto courtier-poet who took Buddhist orders in 1324. He wrote these 243 short essays when he was in his early fifties, apparently mostly for his own amusement. They didn‘t become widely known until about two hundred years later, but once the book did start circulating, it became established as a minor Japanese classic, treasured for the way it sets out some core elements of the Japanese view of aesthetics, etiquette and religious life.
That aspect of the essays is very interesting to us, of course, a door right into the court world of 14th century Kyoto, but they are also a treasure for their sheer randomness. We get thoughts on the uncouthness of the younger generation, rants against the import of useless stuff from China, careful analysis of exactly how we should enjoy the beauty of moonlight or cherry blossom, anecdotes about priests who get their heads stuck in cauldrons or ox-drivers who get the better of fine gentlemen, as well as some very precise laying down the law about which kinds of fish may be carved in the presence of the emperor.
Kenkō can be delightfully inconsistent on occasion, too — there’s a piece where he goes on about the evils of alcohol for a couple of pages, violently attacking irresponsible people who force booze on their friends and reminding us how boring other people become when they are drunk — and then, mysteriously, he seems to have overcome his hangover and goes on to tell us how wonderful a social stimulant alcohol can be, and what fun it is to see a friend getting tipsy… Kenkō does sometimes come over as a bit of a Polonius, but most of the time he is endearing, witty (although even after 700 years of research, some of his jokes are apparently still quite opaque to Japanese scholars), and very enjoyable to read.
The late Donald Keene was, of course, second to none in the art of making Japanese culture accessible to Westerners: here he gives us a short, helpful introduction, a wonderfully lucid translation of what seems to be a rather difficult and often ambiguous text, and enough notes to give us a good sense of all the deep cultural allusions buried in Kenkō‘s writing.
52labfs39
>51 thorold: I'm glad your serendipitous find turned out to be such a gem. I'm intrigued.
53thorold
This is a left-over from the TBR pile I built up last time I was in the US — I seemed wrong to read it in Europe, so I left it here to mature for a bit. It still feels strange to think of Susan Sontag as a novelist, even though this is the second of her novels that I’ve read …
In America (2001) by Susan Sontag (USA, 1933-2004)
In 1876, the celebrated Polish actress Maryna Załężowska and a group of her Warsaw-intellectual friends set off to live on a Fourier-inspired commune in California. As so often happens with idealistic communities, it doesn’t quite work out as they had hoped, and Maryna finds herself going back on stage to create a new career for herself in America.
Sontag uses this historical-fiction framework to explore what it might have meant to be a famous woman, successful in a high-profile profession, in late-19th century Europe and America, as well as picking out some of the oddities of American life and thought from a European perspective, and vice-versa, and dissecting the ways that acting on stage intersect with real (family) life and relationships. But also about the way that migration creates opportunities — and pressures — for us to adopt new personas and names. We learn quite a lot about Victorian tastes in theatre, meet some interesting real-life figures from the period, and generally get an awful lot of information thrown at us.
Sontag also has a lot of fun playing around with a range of clever — and sometimes plain theatrical — narrative techniques, most notably in the opening chapter, where the far-from-omniscient narrator finds herself watching from the sidelines of a party taking place in an era and a place far outside her own experience, and trying to piece together who these characters might be and how they fit together. The closing chapter is another tour-de-force, a monologue, with stage directions, addressed to Maryna and delivered by her fellow-actor Edwin Booth (brother of…) as he slips in and out of the roles of himself and an assortment of Shakespearean protagonists.
A demanding read, but also quite a rewarding one, with its share of fun.
In America (2001) by Susan Sontag (USA, 1933-2004)
In 1876, the celebrated Polish actress Maryna Załężowska and a group of her Warsaw-intellectual friends set off to live on a Fourier-inspired commune in California. As so often happens with idealistic communities, it doesn’t quite work out as they had hoped, and Maryna finds herself going back on stage to create a new career for herself in America.
Sontag uses this historical-fiction framework to explore what it might have meant to be a famous woman, successful in a high-profile profession, in late-19th century Europe and America, as well as picking out some of the oddities of American life and thought from a European perspective, and vice-versa, and dissecting the ways that acting on stage intersect with real (family) life and relationships. But also about the way that migration creates opportunities — and pressures — for us to adopt new personas and names. We learn quite a lot about Victorian tastes in theatre, meet some interesting real-life figures from the period, and generally get an awful lot of information thrown at us.
Sontag also has a lot of fun playing around with a range of clever — and sometimes plain theatrical — narrative techniques, most notably in the opening chapter, where the far-from-omniscient narrator finds herself watching from the sidelines of a party taking place in an era and a place far outside her own experience, and trying to piece together who these characters might be and how they fit together. The closing chapter is another tour-de-force, a monologue, with stage directions, addressed to Maryna and delivered by her fellow-actor Edwin Booth (brother of…) as he slips in and out of the roles of himself and an assortment of Shakespearean protagonists.
A demanding read, but also quite a rewarding one, with its share of fun.
54thorold
Another quick dose of Percival Everett:
God's Country (1994) by Percival Everett (USA, 1956- )
Curt Marder, the narrator of this ironic anti-Western, is a coward, hopelessly prejudiced, utterly lacking in moral sense, and not especially clever. When outlaws burn down his house, kidnap his wife and shoot his dog, the neighbours are all very upset about the dog, but it seems that no-one is going to help him to rescue poor Sadie. Eventually he manages to secure the assistance of Bubba, the only African-American in the district, a man who has spent so much of his life being chased that he has become an expert tracker himself.
Naturally, the partnership is not without its difficulties, but, this being an Everett novel, we can be pretty sure that the incompatible pair will not bond, Hollywood-style, to form an unlikely friendship. Bubba knows perfectly well that he can’t trust Marder, and Marder is too dim to see how much he owes to Bubba, so they go on hating each other to the last page.
A dark, unrelenting, and very funny story, complete with gunfights, painted ladies, the Silver Dollar Saloon, a stagecoach, Red Indians and the 7th Cavalry. But not quite in the mix you might expect from a Western, and strongly laced with Everett’s characteristic antipathy toward neat narrative closure…
God's Country (1994) by Percival Everett (USA, 1956- )
Curt Marder, the narrator of this ironic anti-Western, is a coward, hopelessly prejudiced, utterly lacking in moral sense, and not especially clever. When outlaws burn down his house, kidnap his wife and shoot his dog, the neighbours are all very upset about the dog, but it seems that no-one is going to help him to rescue poor Sadie. Eventually he manages to secure the assistance of Bubba, the only African-American in the district, a man who has spent so much of his life being chased that he has become an expert tracker himself.
Naturally, the partnership is not without its difficulties, but, this being an Everett novel, we can be pretty sure that the incompatible pair will not bond, Hollywood-style, to form an unlikely friendship. Bubba knows perfectly well that he can’t trust Marder, and Marder is too dim to see how much he owes to Bubba, so they go on hating each other to the last page.
A dark, unrelenting, and very funny story, complete with gunfights, painted ladies, the Silver Dollar Saloon, a stagecoach, Red Indians and the 7th Cavalry. But not quite in the mix you might expect from a Western, and strongly laced with Everett’s characteristic antipathy toward neat narrative closure…
55kjuliff
>54 thorold: Great review. I feel such books - about the American West are too much outside my own culture for me to hold interest in them. I reaslise God’s Country is satirical but the very title sends shivers up my brain. Same with James. I haven’t read Huckleberry Finn so I just didn’t get the humor. On the other hand I was blown away by The Trees.
56thorold
>55 kjuliff: I don’t know — I don’t think you’d have to change all that much in God’s country to bring it into the idiom of a Henry Lawson story. Everett is basically demolishing the myth that there was something intrinsically brave and noble about people who carved out a life on the edge of civilisation, and Lawson was already puncturing the Australian version of that myth over a hundred years ago.
57kjuliff
>56 thorold: I haven’t read any Henry Lawson for many years so I’m probably remembering his short stories through much younger eyes. I remember his bush stories as poignant and sad. I vividly remember one called “Arvie Aspinall’s Alarm Clock” about an impoverished working class boy who has to wake at the crack of dawn to go to work. And “The Drover’s Wife” about a wife and child left alone in their shack in the Australian bush while the husband goes off driving.
My Australian bush in the early days of white settlement is one of unbearable sadness and the down-trodden lives of convicts and early settlers and the unimaginable damage done to the lives and culture of the first Australians.
My visions of the American West is quite different and is of painted wagons and painted women and battles with Indian tribes. It is colorful and full of sex and action, whereas Australian history to me is a sad eucalyptus gray, full of misery.
I see Lawson more as writing the Australian myth rather than demolishing it, but I suspect I’m remembering the sentimental Lawson that was rammed down the minds of Australian children in the ‘50s and ‘60’s.
I know my vision of American cultures in the 19th century is way off, but it’s stuck in my head and l can’t easily get rid of it.
My Australian bush in the early days of white settlement is one of unbearable sadness and the down-trodden lives of convicts and early settlers and the unimaginable damage done to the lives and culture of the first Australians.
My visions of the American West is quite different and is of painted wagons and painted women and battles with Indian tribes. It is colorful and full of sex and action, whereas Australian history to me is a sad eucalyptus gray, full of misery.
I see Lawson more as writing the Australian myth rather than demolishing it, but I suspect I’m remembering the sentimental Lawson that was rammed down the minds of Australian children in the ‘50s and ‘60’s.
I know my vision of American cultures in the 19th century is way off, but it’s stuck in my head and l can’t easily get rid of it.
58thorold
I seem to have overlooked my 17th Thingaversary three days ago, but my Cleveland book pile ( https://www.librarything.com/catalog/thorold/cleveland ) has grown from five to 28 books in the four weeks I’ve been here, so I’m not feeling the need to go on an extra book-buying spree. If things go to plan, all of those books are either going to have to cross the Atlantic or be disposed of here, eventually.
Major sources of temptation here have included:
— In Cleveland — Mac’s Backs Books on Coventry, Corner of the Sky in Old Brooklyn, and the time-and-space-bending Loganberry Books on Larchmere Boulevard.
— In Oberlin — Mindfair Books (in the old Ben Franklin store)
— In Wooster — Books in Stock
…and all those harmless-looking suburban branches of Half-Price Books
Who was it who kept telling me NE Ohio was a cultural desert…?
Major sources of temptation here have included:
— In Cleveland — Mac’s Backs Books on Coventry, Corner of the Sky in Old Brooklyn, and the time-and-space-bending Loganberry Books on Larchmere Boulevard.
— In Oberlin — Mindfair Books (in the old Ben Franklin store)
— In Wooster — Books in Stock
…and all those harmless-looking suburban branches of Half-Price Books
Who was it who kept telling me NE Ohio was a cultural desert…?
59thorold
>57 kjuliff: I also haven’t read Lawson for quite a while. I’m sure you’re right about the sentimental aspect in some of the stories, but I also remember a vein of slightly dark humour there. He’s gritty and realistic where Everett goes in more for irony and hyperbole, so it’s not a very strong parallel, perhaps. Especially since I looked back at my comments from the last time I read a Lawson collection and saw that I’d pointed out that he shares the common racist attitudes of white Australians of his time.
60kac522
>58 thorold: Wow, Ben Franklin stores...there's a blast from the past...haven't seen one of those in decades, but apparently they still exist.
If you're still around next Saturday it's Independent Bookstore Day, for one last binge: https://www.bookweb.org/independent-bookstore-day
If you're still around next Saturday it's Independent Bookstore Day, for one last binge: https://www.bookweb.org/independent-bookstore-day
61thorold
>60 kac522: I think it’s just the building that survives, not Ben Franklin as such. There’s a gift store as well as the bookshop. Oberlin has a fabulous art museum, too.
We’ll try to honour Independent Bookstore Day somehow…
We’ll try to honour Independent Bookstore Day somehow…
62kjuliff
>59 thorold: Yes it doesn’t surprise me that racist attitudes exist in Henry Lawson’s writings. He was born in 1987 and that does not excuse him. Australia has always been a racist country and even last year vote against to the Australian Indigenous Voice referendum.
I don’t see parallels between Lawson but I was impressed with your knowledge of him. Perhaps he was no more racist than American writers of the time, but I feel he was likely less racist than Australians of the time.
I don’t see parallels between Lawson but I was impressed with your knowledge of him. Perhaps he was no more racist than American writers of the time, but I feel he was likely less racist than Australians of the time.
63kac522
>61 thorold: Excellent use of an old "five & dime."
There was a Ben Franklin in my town on the way home from elementary school and it was a mandatory stop for candy, gum, baseball card packs, etc. I don't think the owners appreciated being over-run with schoolkids every afternoon, though.
I imagine Oberlin is an interesting town. I remember it being known for Oberlin College's music school. Still true?
There was a Ben Franklin in my town on the way home from elementary school and it was a mandatory stop for candy, gum, baseball card packs, etc. I don't think the owners appreciated being over-run with schoolkids every afternoon, though.
I imagine Oberlin is an interesting town. I remember it being known for Oberlin College's music school. Still true?
64thorold
>63 kac522: I believe so — we heard an Oberlin student playing the organ in a church in Cleveland last week.
65thorold
It was very cheap, and the title sounded fun…
Madame Bovary's Ovaries (2008) by David P. Barash (USA, 1946- ) & Nanelle R. Barash (USA, - )
Two biologists (father and daughter) set out to explain literature from a Darwinian point of view — but it ends up being the other way round, in that they give us the evolutionary background to a particular group of animal social behaviours and then use the plots of great works of literature to illustrate at a very superficial level what they mean. All quite entertaining, but not very new if you’ve read other popular science books about evolution (Dawkins & co.). Their ideas about literature don’t seem to involve anything beyond the plot, and it doesn’t really deepen our understanding of Jane Austen very much to know that female animals have good evolutionary reasons for being choosy when it comes to picking partners (for example).
Madame Bovary's Ovaries (2008) by David P. Barash (USA, 1946- ) & Nanelle R. Barash (USA, - )
Two biologists (father and daughter) set out to explain literature from a Darwinian point of view — but it ends up being the other way round, in that they give us the evolutionary background to a particular group of animal social behaviours and then use the plots of great works of literature to illustrate at a very superficial level what they mean. All quite entertaining, but not very new if you’ve read other popular science books about evolution (Dawkins & co.). Their ideas about literature don’t seem to involve anything beyond the plot, and it doesn’t really deepen our understanding of Jane Austen very much to know that female animals have good evolutionary reasons for being choosy when it comes to picking partners (for example).
66labfs39
>54 thorold: This sounds like an Everett I would enjoy, and I won't have to read Huck Finn first. :)
>65 thorold: Sounds quirky, but not overly enlightening.
>65 thorold: Sounds quirky, but not overly enlightening.
67thorold
An Anne Tyler I hadn’t got to before:
Clock Dance (2018-07-10) by Anne Tyler (USA, 1941- )
Anne Tyler has been doing the same kind of thing for decades now, but she is supremely good at it, able to conjure up complex sets of family relationships with a few telling lines of dialogue or a minor bit of background detail. This time she tries to fool us into thinking she’s doing something different from usual, by spending the first hundred pages with people who live in weird foreign places like Pennnsylvania and California. But don’t worry, we get back to familiar ground soon enough, and all the rest of the book plays in a pleasantly quaint neighbourhood of Baltimore, just as we’ve been expecting! The central character, Willa, is summoned there (from her retirement in Arizona) as a result of a minor misunderstanding, but of course it soon becomes clear that this is where her true elective family is waiting for her. Nothing very radical or challenging, just beautiful writing and a lot of diverse and unexpected people being very nice to each other.
Clock Dance (2018-07-10) by Anne Tyler (USA, 1941- )
Anne Tyler has been doing the same kind of thing for decades now, but she is supremely good at it, able to conjure up complex sets of family relationships with a few telling lines of dialogue or a minor bit of background detail. This time she tries to fool us into thinking she’s doing something different from usual, by spending the first hundred pages with people who live in weird foreign places like Pennnsylvania and California. But don’t worry, we get back to familiar ground soon enough, and all the rest of the book plays in a pleasantly quaint neighbourhood of Baltimore, just as we’ve been expecting! The central character, Willa, is summoned there (from her retirement in Arizona) as a result of a minor misunderstanding, but of course it soon becomes clear that this is where her true elective family is waiting for her. Nothing very radical or challenging, just beautiful writing and a lot of diverse and unexpected people being very nice to each other.
68kjuliff
>67 thorold: I stopped reading Tyler when I could no longer distinguish one of her books from another. I’m not trying to be mean, it’s true. The only one of her novels that stands apart in my mind is her excellent Accidental Tourist.
69thorold
>68 kjuliff: I think it’s fine if you don’t read more than one a year.
70thorold
Back on the World Tour. I couldn’t find a novel from Burma easily, but this popped up in a local bookshop:
The Hidden History of Burma: Race, Capitalism, and the Crisis of Democracy in the 21st Century (2019) by Thant Myint-U (Burma, USA, 1966- )
How did Aung San Suu Kyi go from being the next Nelson Mandela, with pop stars and world leaders queuing up to have their photos taken with her, to become a figure of universal disdain, presiding over a humanitarian crisis she seemed to refuse to believe was happening? Well, obviously, that has a lot to do with our own insatiable appetite for heroes and villains and our reluctance to read long foreign policy analyses, but it also has something to do with the realities of governing postcolonial countries, where the legacy of generations of inequality, poverty, lack of education and the complexities of geography, religion and ethnicity cannot simply be magicked away by the first free election.
Thant Myint-U, as U Thant’s grandson, a former UN official in his own right and a senior adviser to the transitional government of ex-General Thein Sein, has his own stake in Burmese politics and is not exactly a neutral outsider, but he does give us a very clear summary of the country’s history and its problems, as well as a lively memoir of the period in the early years of this century when he was personally involved.
When the British withdrew in 1948, Burma was given borders which roughly corresponded to the area that had been under the control of the Myanma kingdom that came to power in the late 18th century. The cities and the Irrawaddy valley and delta in the centre of the country formed a reasonably homogeneous area, Burmese-speaking, mostly Buddhist apart from Indian workers brought in by the British, and with a legacy of British administration. But the border areas, west, east and north, were ethnically diverse and had not been under colonial administration. After 1948, all these areas came under the control of a patchwork of local militias, most of which have been in a state of civil war or at best uneasy ceasefire with the Burmese government ever since. In the west there were tensions between Buddhists and Muslims, some of whom were the descendants of people who had been living there for centuries, others more recent immigrants from Bengal. In the east the militias had important economic links with China, controlling activities such as narcotics, gambling, logging and mining. Burma came to be governed by an authoritarian military dictatorship that more or less kept the lid on the civil war, taking rake-offs from these illegal activities, and violently suppressing political dissent.
The country’s political and economic isolation, and the extreme poverty of most of the population, were only increased by the sanctions the international community used to try to pressure the leadership into democratic reforms. The dictator Than Shwe attempted to find a way out of the impasse by setting up a succession plan for his own retirement that would lead to a new constitution with the appearance of democracy but all the real power still in the hands of the army, but events moved much faster than he had anticipated, partly due to the great popularity of the leader of the main democratic opposition party, Aung San Suu Kyi, who found herself de facto head of government at a moment when the country was still far from being governable in any meaningful way, with an army that was not under her control, and rebel forces on all sides ready to take advantage of the apparent weakness of the state. Tragically, the crisis that exploded first was in the west, with attacks by Muslim separatists provoking brutal army repression and resulting in the displacement of hundreds of thousands of refugees to Bangladesh.
Very interesting, both in filling in a lot I didn’t know about Burma, and as a first-hand case study of the realities of postcolonial states.
The Hidden History of Burma: Race, Capitalism, and the Crisis of Democracy in the 21st Century (2019) by Thant Myint-U (Burma, USA, 1966- )
How did Aung San Suu Kyi go from being the next Nelson Mandela, with pop stars and world leaders queuing up to have their photos taken with her, to become a figure of universal disdain, presiding over a humanitarian crisis she seemed to refuse to believe was happening? Well, obviously, that has a lot to do with our own insatiable appetite for heroes and villains and our reluctance to read long foreign policy analyses, but it also has something to do with the realities of governing postcolonial countries, where the legacy of generations of inequality, poverty, lack of education and the complexities of geography, religion and ethnicity cannot simply be magicked away by the first free election.
Thant Myint-U, as U Thant’s grandson, a former UN official in his own right and a senior adviser to the transitional government of ex-General Thein Sein, has his own stake in Burmese politics and is not exactly a neutral outsider, but he does give us a very clear summary of the country’s history and its problems, as well as a lively memoir of the period in the early years of this century when he was personally involved.
When the British withdrew in 1948, Burma was given borders which roughly corresponded to the area that had been under the control of the Myanma kingdom that came to power in the late 18th century. The cities and the Irrawaddy valley and delta in the centre of the country formed a reasonably homogeneous area, Burmese-speaking, mostly Buddhist apart from Indian workers brought in by the British, and with a legacy of British administration. But the border areas, west, east and north, were ethnically diverse and had not been under colonial administration. After 1948, all these areas came under the control of a patchwork of local militias, most of which have been in a state of civil war or at best uneasy ceasefire with the Burmese government ever since. In the west there were tensions between Buddhists and Muslims, some of whom were the descendants of people who had been living there for centuries, others more recent immigrants from Bengal. In the east the militias had important economic links with China, controlling activities such as narcotics, gambling, logging and mining. Burma came to be governed by an authoritarian military dictatorship that more or less kept the lid on the civil war, taking rake-offs from these illegal activities, and violently suppressing political dissent.
The country’s political and economic isolation, and the extreme poverty of most of the population, were only increased by the sanctions the international community used to try to pressure the leadership into democratic reforms. The dictator Than Shwe attempted to find a way out of the impasse by setting up a succession plan for his own retirement that would lead to a new constitution with the appearance of democracy but all the real power still in the hands of the army, but events moved much faster than he had anticipated, partly due to the great popularity of the leader of the main democratic opposition party, Aung San Suu Kyi, who found herself de facto head of government at a moment when the country was still far from being governable in any meaningful way, with an army that was not under her control, and rebel forces on all sides ready to take advantage of the apparent weakness of the state. Tragically, the crisis that exploded first was in the west, with attacks by Muslim separatists provoking brutal army repression and resulting in the displacement of hundreds of thousands of refugees to Bangladesh.
Very interesting, both in filling in a lot I didn’t know about Burma, and as a first-hand case study of the realities of postcolonial states.
71labfs39
One book about Burma that I enjoyed and would recommend is From the Land of Green Ghosts: A Burmese Odyssey by Pascal Khoo Thwe. He grew up in a rural area where his grandfather was a tribal chief, and also Catholic. The memoir talks about the intertwining of animism with colonial sponsored religion, the system of education under Ne Win, and Thwe's flight to the jungle in the 80s.
72Dilara86
>70 thorold: >71 labfs39: Thank you for the recommendations - both books look very interesting!
73thorold
>71 labfs39: AnnieMod mentioned this one in the world tour thread as well — I’ll look out for it.
74thorold
Another quickie from the pile:
It's Not Over (2015,2016) by Michelangelo Signorile (USA, 1960- )
Signorile’s summary of the campaign for LGBT+ rights in the USA as it stood in mid 2015, in the immediate aftermath of the Supreme Court‘s Obergefell decision affirming marriage equality. He points out the many challenges still ahead, and the dangers from right-wing groups all too ready to find new ways of oppressing those who don’t match their vision of the world. And of course he couldn‘t even know at the time of writing that the US would be facing four years of Trump horror…
Apart from the interesting historical snapshot, Signorile makes some good points about strategy, in particular the importance of not allowing ourselves to be pressured into “covering”, i.e. conforming outwardly to social pressure in order to stay below the radar. As far as he is concerned — and he’s probably right — the only way to fight injustice is to stand up for yourself and make a noise whenever it happens. We can’t always rely on other people doing that for us, unfortunately.
It's Not Over (2015,2016) by Michelangelo Signorile (USA, 1960- )
Signorile’s summary of the campaign for LGBT+ rights in the USA as it stood in mid 2015, in the immediate aftermath of the Supreme Court‘s Obergefell decision affirming marriage equality. He points out the many challenges still ahead, and the dangers from right-wing groups all too ready to find new ways of oppressing those who don’t match their vision of the world. And of course he couldn‘t even know at the time of writing that the US would be facing four years of Trump horror…
Apart from the interesting historical snapshot, Signorile makes some good points about strategy, in particular the importance of not allowing ourselves to be pressured into “covering”, i.e. conforming outwardly to social pressure in order to stay below the radar. As far as he is concerned — and he’s probably right — the only way to fight injustice is to stand up for yourself and make a noise whenever it happens. We can’t always rely on other people doing that for us, unfortunately.
75thorold
Landlocked countries: Magda Szabó was one of the most successful Hungarian novelists of the communist era, but not very well known in English until the translation of The door became a big hit about fifteen years ago. Translator Len Rix has been working his way through her back-catalogue since then; I think this is the fourth of her novels I’ve read.
The Fawn (1959; English 2023) by Magda Szabó (Hungary, 1917-2007), translated by Len Rix
Narrator Eszter grows up before and during WWII in an impoverished former bourgeois family in a provincial town, where she has to help her parents make ends meet by giving extra lessons to her classmates for cash. Her resentment in life is focused on the lovely, rich Angéla, daughter of a judge, who infuriatingly sees Eszter as a good friend. Angéla never discovers that it was Eszter who was responsible for the death of her pet fawn. In later life they come across each other again, when Eszter has become a famous actor in the state theatre, and Angéla is a prominent party member. The whole novel is a monologue by Eszter, addressed to a lover whose identity we only discover towards the end of the story.
Clever, unsentimental and gloriously angry prose, a really memorable account of childhood poverty with a strong, resourceful female central character.
The Fawn (1959; English 2023) by Magda Szabó (Hungary, 1917-2007), translated by Len Rix
Narrator Eszter grows up before and during WWII in an impoverished former bourgeois family in a provincial town, where she has to help her parents make ends meet by giving extra lessons to her classmates for cash. Her resentment in life is focused on the lovely, rich Angéla, daughter of a judge, who infuriatingly sees Eszter as a good friend. Angéla never discovers that it was Eszter who was responsible for the death of her pet fawn. In later life they come across each other again, when Eszter has become a famous actor in the state theatre, and Angéla is a prominent party member. The whole novel is a monologue by Eszter, addressed to a lover whose identity we only discover towards the end of the story.
Clever, unsentimental and gloriously angry prose, a really memorable account of childhood poverty with a strong, resourceful female central character.
76thorold
Another one that caught my eye in a clearance pile:
The Death of Expertise (2017) by Thomas M. Nichols (USA, 1960- )
Democratic societies work by having responsible, informed citizens choosing political representatives whom we trust to take complicated decisions on our behalf. Those representatives take their decisions based on the best advice they can assemble from competent professional advisers — analysts, administrators, technicians — who are experts in the topic in question. At least that’s the theory…
According to Nichols (who is a self-confessed foreign-policy expert as well as being a celebrated Jeopardy contestant), this model is breaking down in the USA because of a growing distrust of specialist professional knowledge. Lay-people have an exaggerated sense of our own expertise (we can Google it, after all, so we know as much as they do, don’t we?) and a tendency to resent anyone who tells us that they know better. We’re all too ready to suspect conspiracies and ulterior motives, we like to think that our opinion is (at least) as valuable as the next person’s, and we rarely bother to read anything written by people with a different point of view from our own. Nichols talks a lot about stupid, wilfully ignorant people, but he also makes the point — which I found rather more interesting — that this kind of thinking is also prevalent among people who are educated, experienced professionals in one field but dangerously willing to assume knowledge in other fields where they have no proper training and experience.
Nichols reminds us that expertise is gained through an education that challenges us to step outside our comfort zone and defend our ideas in serious logical argument, and through a long process of gaining practical experience and making mistakes. Things which he argues are no longer easily available to most Americans, because of the way the education system has turned into a commercial service-industry where the customer is always right.
There’s probably nothing new about any of these effects — I can remember a fellow-delegate at an important scientific conference forty years ago lecturing me over lunch about what he saw as the strong evidence for biblical-style creation. But they seem to have been accelerated by the effect of the internet, which allows stupid ideas and misinformation to spread around the world faster than ever before, and by developments in the way that news media work, serving us with the news they know their customers want to read, rather than the news they think it’s important for informed citizens to be aware of.
Obviously a lot of what Nichols says can be dismissed as the gloom-and-doom of an older, conservative academic, who sees the world changing around him, or as the reaction of a mainstream Republican to the rise of Trumpery. I’ve been reading British versions of the same kind of thinking since the Brexit referendum (apart from the fact that British commentators have the additional advantage of being able to blame America, which always goes down well…). I found a lot of what Nichols said quite patronising — for example, he is dismissive of the independence of mind of the current generation of students in the US, an assumption that is belied by the current protests against the Israeli actions in Gaza; and he implies that only stupid people could possibly vote for Trump, which clearly can’t be true: in real life a large proportion of the people who voted for him must have been decent, intelligent people who somehow allowed themselves to be convinced that the alternative was worse. But he does make some good points, although he unfortunately doesn’t come up with a solution to the problem…
The Death of Expertise (2017) by Thomas M. Nichols (USA, 1960- )
Democratic societies work by having responsible, informed citizens choosing political representatives whom we trust to take complicated decisions on our behalf. Those representatives take their decisions based on the best advice they can assemble from competent professional advisers — analysts, administrators, technicians — who are experts in the topic in question. At least that’s the theory…
According to Nichols (who is a self-confessed foreign-policy expert as well as being a celebrated Jeopardy contestant), this model is breaking down in the USA because of a growing distrust of specialist professional knowledge. Lay-people have an exaggerated sense of our own expertise (we can Google it, after all, so we know as much as they do, don’t we?) and a tendency to resent anyone who tells us that they know better. We’re all too ready to suspect conspiracies and ulterior motives, we like to think that our opinion is (at least) as valuable as the next person’s, and we rarely bother to read anything written by people with a different point of view from our own. Nichols talks a lot about stupid, wilfully ignorant people, but he also makes the point — which I found rather more interesting — that this kind of thinking is also prevalent among people who are educated, experienced professionals in one field but dangerously willing to assume knowledge in other fields where they have no proper training and experience.
Nichols reminds us that expertise is gained through an education that challenges us to step outside our comfort zone and defend our ideas in serious logical argument, and through a long process of gaining practical experience and making mistakes. Things which he argues are no longer easily available to most Americans, because of the way the education system has turned into a commercial service-industry where the customer is always right.
There’s probably nothing new about any of these effects — I can remember a fellow-delegate at an important scientific conference forty years ago lecturing me over lunch about what he saw as the strong evidence for biblical-style creation. But they seem to have been accelerated by the effect of the internet, which allows stupid ideas and misinformation to spread around the world faster than ever before, and by developments in the way that news media work, serving us with the news they know their customers want to read, rather than the news they think it’s important for informed citizens to be aware of.
Obviously a lot of what Nichols says can be dismissed as the gloom-and-doom of an older, conservative academic, who sees the world changing around him, or as the reaction of a mainstream Republican to the rise of Trumpery. I’ve been reading British versions of the same kind of thinking since the Brexit referendum (apart from the fact that British commentators have the additional advantage of being able to blame America, which always goes down well…). I found a lot of what Nichols said quite patronising — for example, he is dismissive of the independence of mind of the current generation of students in the US, an assumption that is belied by the current protests against the Israeli actions in Gaza; and he implies that only stupid people could possibly vote for Trump, which clearly can’t be true: in real life a large proportion of the people who voted for him must have been decent, intelligent people who somehow allowed themselves to be convinced that the alternative was worse. But he does make some good points, although he unfortunately doesn’t come up with a solution to the problem…
77kjuliff
Thanks for reminding me of this remarkable writer Magda Szabó . I read The Door years ago and had forgotten about her. I’ll have to see what other of her works are available now.
