Emery false-knight Goes to Book Purgatory

Hi! This is my first time participating in any sort of real book challenge, on or off LibraryThing; I'm a fairly new site member as well.

Brief introduction: I'm Emery, I'm 23, I'm more-or-less a dude (sometimes more, sometimes less!), I live in San Diego / occupied Kumeyaay land. I'm alarmingly obsessive about the Gawain poet and have more books than might be good for me. I like, uh…a lot of things? I like SF/F, I like historical nonfiction, I like some kinds of academic nonfiction, I like ~literary fiction~ to an extent. My 2020 favorites were Dead Astronauts, The Black Jacobins, The Fire Next Time, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and Territory of Light, if that's, like…an indication of anything. In a good week I read a lot, in a bad week I read 15 pages, get a headache, and wander off to watch cooking videos or be bad at Breath of the Wild or doomscroll on Twitter.

My 2021 goals are, 1) get through my unread books, especially since I just moved back home and so also have the box(es???) of unread books that's been living in my parents' garage while I was away, 2) maybe make a little dent in my massive book wishlist, if I have the money and can get through the unread books backlog (or can use the prospect of some of those books as a bribe…hm.). This means reading I'm not sure how many but definitely more than 75 books, but 75 seems like a nice benchmark.

Books I read in 2021: 45.5/???

Currently reading: Ravenna: Capital of Empire, Crucible of Europe by Judith Herrin
Up next: The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry, A Choice of Anglo-Saxon Verse, ed. Richard Hamer, The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler

Completed:

1. Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons — ☆☆☆☆☆, 1/1
2. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf — ☆☆☆☆½, 1/1–1/2
3. The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler — ☆☆☆½, 1/2–1/3
4. How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States by Daniel Immerwahr — ☆☆☆☆, 1/3
5. Orlando by Virginia Woolf — ☆☆☆☆☆, 1/5–1/8 (5.5: Seven Little Sons of the Dragon by Ryoko Kui — reread)
6. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John le Carré — ☆☆☆☆, 1/8–1/15
7. Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert MacFarlane — ☆☆☆☆☆, 1/15–1/16
8. The Island of the Day Before by Umberto Eco — ☆☆☆, 1/16–1/19
9. Artificial Condition by Martha Wells — ☆☆☆(½?), 1/19
10. WHEREAS by Layli Long Soldier — ☆☆☆☆½, 1/19
11. The Finest Music: An Anthology of Early Irish Lyrics, ed. Maurice Riordan — ☆☆☆, 1/21
12. The Black Middle Ages: Race and the Construction of the Middle Ages by Matthew X. Vernon — ☆☆☆☆, 1/22–1/26
13. Felicity by Mary Oliver — ☆☆½, 1/28
14. Ten Nights in a Bar-Room and What I Saw There by Timothy Shaw Arthur — n/a, 1/29
15. My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk — ☆☆☆☆☆, 1/28–1/29
16. The King in the North: The Life and Times of Oswald of Northumbria by Max Adams — ☆☆☆½, 1/30
17. Armistice by Lara Elena Donnelly — ☆☆☆☆, 1/31–2/2
18. A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (And Some Bears) by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling — ☆☆☆☆(½/☆), 2/3
19. Mouth Full of Blood: Essays, Speeches, Meditations by Toni Morrison — ☆☆☆☆½, 2/3–2/7
20. The Unreality of Memory and Other Essays by Elisa Gabbert — ☆☆☆☆☆, 2/11
21. Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera — ☆☆☆½, 2/12
22. The Honjin Murders by Seishi Yokomizo — ☆☆☆½, 2/14
23. Invisible Romans by Robert C. Knapp — ☆½, 2/12–2/18
24. Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin — ☆☆☆☆☆, 2/18
25. Celestial Bodies by Jūkhah al-Ḥārithī — ☆☆☆☆½, 2/19
26. Heavenly Bodies: Cult Treasures and Spectacular Saints from the Catacombs by Paul Koudounaris — ☆☆☆☆☆, 2/20
27. The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches by Matsuo Bashō — ☆☆☆☆½, 2/21
28. Tao Te Ching by Lǎozǐ — ☆☆☆?, 2/23
29. Medieval Paradigms, Volume I, ed. Stephanie Hayes-Healy — ☆☆☆☆, 2/25–2/26
30. If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin — ☆☆☆☆, 2/26–2/28
31. The Aeneid by Virgil (t. Fagles) — ☆☆☆☆☆, 2/28–3/01
32. Under Fire by Henri Barbusse — ☆☆☆, 3/03–3/10
33. Stealing Thunder by Alina Boyden — ☆☆☆, 3/12
34. My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite — ☆☆☆☆(½), 3/15–3/16
35. Medieval Paradigms, Volume II, ed. Stephanie Hayes-Healy — ☆☆, 3/?–3/18
36. The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius — ☆☆☆, 3/18
37. The Trojan War Museum and Other Stories by Ayşe Papatya Bucak — ☆☆☆☆, 3/18
38. The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony by Roberto Calasso — ☆☆☆½, 3/19–3/21
39. Stasis in the Medieval West? Questioning Change and Continuity, ed. Michael D.J. Bintley et al. — ☆☆☆, 3/22
40. Palgrave Advances in the Crusades, ed. Helen J. Nicholson — ☆☆☆, 3/22
41. 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created by Charles C. Mann — ☆☆☆☆, 3/22–3/24
42. The Unwomanly Face of War by Svetlana Alexievich — ☆☆☆☆☆, 3/24–3/25
43. The Lady in the Lake by Raymond Chandler — ☆☆☆½, 3/25
44. Time Song: Journeys in Search of a Submerged Land by Julia Blackburn — ☆☆½, 3/25
45. Other Voices, Other Rooms by Truman Capote — ☆☆, 3/25–3/26

Welcome! Looks like a good start to the year!

Hope you have a great year of reading.

>3 drneutron:

Thanks! It is a good start—I won't be able to maintain this pace once I'm let out of quarantine, most likely, but still it's put me in a good mood.

>4 thornton37814:

Thanks, you too! There's a lot of stuff I've been pretty excited to get to, so, you know, no evil eye.

4: How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States, Daniel Immerwahr (Picador, 2019)

Rating: ☆☆☆☆

This came off to me as a pretty solid overview of American imperial history, mostly focused outside the lower 48, although the first maybe quarter or so is about the colonization of the mainland. I think Immerwahr is a very approachable writer, and although sometimes to me he felt a little too jokey, some parts were very funny. Overall I think this would function very well as a companion piece to something like Zinn's People's History. I've only really got two issues with this book: one, in the last third Immerwahr kind of loses the plot a little bit and doesn't quite manage to lay out his argument as well as I'd like. By the end he manages to make it clear that the point of these long interludes about plastics and linguistic domination is that the existence of empire post-WWII doesn't rely on the same kinds of broad physically-present dominations that it did in, like, the Age of Sail, but in the moment he doesn't really tie it all together as effectively as he could have. Also, there's this bit in the chapter about the English language about Korea (both of them) never having been colonized by an Anglophone nation, which is true, but if the argument of his book is that modern American empire is manifested in a "pointillist" fashion via military bases then that's a statement about Korea that needs some qualification considering we bombed the North flat and have all kinds of military bases in the South. Actually he talks very little about Korea (or Vietnam…), and when he does it's almost entirely through the lens of the Korean War's impact on Japanese-American economic relations, which left me a little bit :?. Two, in the parts about our current forever wars in the Middle East there was possibly a bit too much taking Rumsfeld et al. at their words about not having imperialist or colonialist intentions. I feel like also he could've talked more about communism. With that said, the pre-WWII parts were really interesting, especially the discussion of white supremacist anti-imperialism (like, I had not realized that people refused to admit Alaska as a state because most of the people in it were Alaska Natives) and of how uneasy a lot of politicians were with the contrast between the USA's stated-on-paper goals of republicanism etc. and its prospective or already-accomplished imperial actions. Like they had all accidentally kind of re-invented "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?"

Anyway, I'm very hungry, it's past midnight, I'm going to make myself a quesadilla and then fire up the random number generator to see what I'll be reading this coming week.

Happy reading in 2021, Emery!

And keep up with my friends here, Emery. Have a great 2021.

Emery, I just found you! Thanks for stopping by at my thread. And welcome to the group and challenge! You'll love it here! But be aware that your wishlist will continously grow with new books you will want to read.

Excellent list of books you have already managed to complete! Happy reading year!

>7 FAMeulstee:
Thanks, you too!

>8 PaulCranswick:
You too! And I will, it's really fun to see what everyone else is up to.

>9 PersephonesLibrary:
Hi!! Thank you! Yeah, I've accepted that wishlist isn't going to shrink but maybe the contents will have changed by December? Anyway, happy reading!

5: Orlando, Virginia Woolf (Vintage, 2018; 1928)

Rating: ☆☆☆☆☆

This was definitely a novel that had kind of an acclimation process for me, because when I started it I was a bit jarred by the fact that it's not a straightforward, realistic (except for body change) historical fiction novel. That said, I'm a sucker for intrusive narratorial voice, and I really liked how it sort of subtly changed with the time period without feeling like pastiche. Until the gender change, it was probably more of a four-star read for me. After the gender change, though, I was fully on board. There are some parts, mostly on Orlando's boat trip back to England, where Woolf talks about this weird, dislocating feeling that I'm familiar with myself of going through a gendered situation as one gender and then later as another and only realizing halfway through the second time that you've been here before but on the other side, and also some parts that honestly resonated with things I've heard trans lesbians talk about with their own experiences, where I was like, for a writer in the 1920s who, to my knowledge, wasn't of trans experience, that's really good. And, in the second half, there's this concern with time and eternal recurrence (in a way?) that I found really moving in a way that's hard to put my finger on. It was kind of an accumulation of things like the time-lapse way Orlando's moving through history and her observation in the department store of the return of "magic" in the form of technology and her car ride near the end where she undergoes the constant accumulation of selves. I loved it. There were a couple parts that made me do the "inhale through teeth; oh nooo" thing; the whole recurrent thing with the Moor's head & racial slurs associated, kind of an Orientalist "the effeminate East!!" undercurrent in the Constantinople section, definitely racist portrayal of the Romani (by the way the Romani language / language family does, like every other language, have a word for beautiful, it's śukar.) That said, this is a book that I think I'll be returning to and rereading a lot—it feels like the kind of book that really rewards multiple readings.

Also, I'm not counting it for a full book, but I did reread Seven Little Sons of the Dragon by Ryoko Kui while I was unpacking and processing the books I'd mailed back home. I love Kui's emphasis on familial relationships and friendships, and although her xenobiological chops aren't as on display in these stories as they are in Delicious in Dungeon, the worldbuilding details of "The Mermaid Refuge" and "Wolves Don't Lie" still had a lot of the same feeling. I think my favorites are "My God," about an elementary schooler struggling with cram school who rescues the fish-god of a mountain that's being developed into housing, and "The Inutanis," a send-up of Seishi Yokomizo's The Inugami Clan, where a family's attempts to hide their supernatural powers from a visiting detective accidentally convince him that there's murder afoot. I've loaned it to my mother, but I don't know when/if she'll get around to reading it.

I spent the last week going through all the boxes of books I left in my parents' garage the September before last when I moved away for school. Got rid of a few, flagged some more for probable donation once I can move into my own place and unpack them all and wake them up. One of those is a copy of Bulfinch's Mythology that I don't remember where it came from, has a note in it from someone's grandma dated 1957, and was so dusty that when I opened it my sinuses started hurting and didn't stop for hours. I also found some Discworld books I borrowed in high school from a friend of my mother's and never gave back, so she's coming by on Monday to collect them and catch up with my parents.

Anyway, for various reasons (catalog brain, preference for the physical, ability to get really granular about sorting, the inscrutable exhortations of my soul) I also have spent the last week and a half making index cards for every book I own. I like having the cards! I wish the inscrutable exhortations of my soul would lead to paths that don't make me sneeze quite so much.





As to what I read:

6: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, John le Carré (Penguin, 2018; 1974)

Rating: ☆☆☆☆ (or so)

I think it's definitely a very solid book and it was an enjoyable reading experience; I'm going to hold off on the "greatest spy novel ever" judgments until I've read the rest of the trilogy. A thing I like about le Carré is his ability to move backwards and forwards in time within the narrative without it becoming confusing or overwhelming, and I thought that that was handled very well. I did have some trouble keeping track of the various layers of intrigue but that's really more of a me problem than a book problem.

7: Underland: A Deep Time Journey, Robert MacFarlane (Penguin, 2019)

Rating: ☆☆☆☆☆

I'd been holding off on reading this for a while, because I wanted to use it as a reward; I finally got my dissertation results back on Friday (late submission, late response) and they were really good, so I thought, OK, time for Underland. This book, man. I'm not really sure what to call it, cultural geology? Its LC call number puts it under "prehistoric archaeology," which is only occasionally true. The network of concepts he's dealing with, in terms of geological and human timescales and the way they intersect, and of how the human and nonhuman/inhuman/extra-human are themselves connected, and how thinking on these timescales and in these pathways is sort of alienating and also humanizing? I'm running up against a double boundary talking about this: one, I'm not super articulate on the fly, two, the only language I've got is very doggedly anthropocentric, which Underland isn't. Throughout the book, MacFarlane sort of implicitly resists conceptions of linear time, which makes for some really interesting writing; there's a bit, near the end, where he's in this long-term nuclear waste disposal/storage site in Finland, and the guy showing him around says that in its initial stages of construction there was a joke on-site that the first thing they'd dig up was a container full of nuclear waste and a warning not to dig. Probably the nuclear waste site chapter, the one about fungi, and the one about the Julian Alps were my favorites. I think that one facet of the book I really, really loved was the way it manages to summarize (intentionally or not) some of the things I love about weird fiction as a genre, just in terms of being another way to struggle with the same concepts. Might even go back through and underline bits of it.

>12 false-knight: Some great reading going on!

"The inscrutable exhortations of my soul" - I love that!

Have a nice weekend, Emery.

I am all in for cataloguing books, Emery! And I love the colour codes. How does your system work exactly? I imagine it to be hard to find a book you are looking for. Or is it more for "statistical" reasons?

You...made your own, physical card catalogue? I LOVE IT!

Also, congrats on the dissertation good news!

Under land has been on my wishlist. Looks like I need to get to it!

>13 PaulCranswick:: It's one of the many Calvin and Hobbes strips that lives in my head rent-free :). Thanks for the weekend wishes, and good luck to you in the coming week!

>14 PersephonesLibrary:: Oh man how much time do you have. It's theoretical in parts because a lot of the books themselves are still living in boxes in the garage. Basically, under nonfiction, essays and autobiography are sorted by author's last name and date of publication, the language textbooks go roughly by time period the language was spoken in (I'd probably change this for modern languages if I had any) and then by publication date, and the rest of the nonfiction is sorted by Library of Congress call number except where I don't like the number (like, there's one that they've shelved under "thanatology, death, and dying" when I think it should go under "folklore"; or how they put the section on socialism and communism waaaay at the other end from the section on capitalism). Fiction goes by author's last name and publication date or series order, whichever I think is more important, same with poetry; anthologies of both go at the beginning. Children's lit is, I think, going to be nonfiction, then fiction, then poetry, all by last name and publication date or series order, but there's very little of it. The premodern stuff, which cuts off around 1500-1550, goes by approximate date of composition, which is a bit troublesome for things that were orally transmitted for a long time before being written down but I like the alternatives way less. The additional color-coding on that section is primarily statistical, though, I like to see what writing styles predominate over time in my collection. I'm probably going to re-sort the "visual" section so that the non-narrative visual stuff gets separated from the graphic novels and manga (it's all, again, last name and publication date or series order). Basically the point is that with this I can get information sorted the way I like it without having to play too many tricks with LT's sorting engine, I can see broad genre categories really easily, and with the cards themselves I can put all the stuff like birth and death dates, edition notes, page numbers, and so on all in one place, and if I loan anybody a book I can keep track of what's gone where. So overall it's actually fairly easy for me to navigate. Also, it just makes me happy to have it. I like my information to be tangible.

>15 scaifea:: Thank you!! I made a first attempt in 2019 and it didn't go nearly as well, so I'm really happy with the way this one turned out. We'll see if it's sustainable, I guess!

>16 drneutron:: Oh yeah, definite recommend. How's the Atlas Obscura book going, by the way?

>17 false-knight: It was fun, but light. It’s a collection of unusual or little known places to visit around the world. Each place is described in a short blurb. I did make a list of places to visit, though! 😀

>17 false-knight: Oh my goodness - thank you so much for taking the time to write such a long reply for me! That's so interesting and I see why you would like it. I don't even manage to put every book on librarything. But I still like tangible sorting techniques. So cool!

Oh, and I ordered the Wayward Lives you recommended. It will take some time until it will arrive but I am looking forward to it! Happy Monday!

>12 false-knight: Underland hit me as a BB, thank you very much.

>18 drneutron: So like a best of the website sort of thing?

>19 PersephonesLibrary: Haha, no problem! It helps that I don't, uh, have a job right now.

>20 ffortsa: I'm not…sure what that means? Baby? BB gun? Basketball???

>21 false-knight: Emery, BB means Book Bullet - another book to be added to the collection.

8: The Island of the Day Before, Umberto Eco, trans. William Weaver (Penguin, 1995)

Rating: ☆☆☆

Briefly the premise of the book is that Roberto della Griva, an Italian minor nobleman, is shipwrecked in the Pacific Ocean and ends up washed up onto an abandoned (or is it…) ship anchored offshore of a mysterious island; the narration then goes back and forth between his time on the ship and his time in the War of the Mantuan Succession and hanging out with philosophers in Paris, and it's also about early modern efforts to find out how to calculate longitude, and about Roberto's imaginary evil twin. Eco's really good at a form of historical comedy that's well on display during the sections about the siege of Casale, and the part in the middle where the ship is proved not to be abandoned but inhabited by an old German Jesuit (everyone else on board thought he had the plague, left the ship, and then got killed by Pacific Islanders) is also probably the best part of the book. Father Caspar has a lot of manic energy which this book really needed, because Roberto is an incredibly passive and somewhat colorless character. And, because he's so inert, it means that a lot of the digressions Eco goes on—and there are a lot, because of course there are—are honestly super boring. It's obvious that Eco is having fun doing his send-ups of early modern novels and novelistic forms and the concept of capital-R Romance, and talking about alchemy and longitudes and the International Date Line (and Roberto's staunch inability to understand exactly what that means), and to an extent I can get carried along for the ride, but I think as a novel it really does suffer from how boring Roberto is as a person. After Father Caspar dies (rudimentary diving-bell accident) a lot of the energy gets sucked out of the book. I did like the last two chapters, but partially because that's where Roberto finally does something, for Pete's sake.

Also, I've read three of Umberto Eco's books by now (this, The Name of the Rose, and Baudolino) and I don't think in any of them there's a woman who has a name AND talks. C'mon, dude.

>22 PaulCranswick: OHHHHHHH OK, thank you! That makes way more sense…

>23 false-knight: I read that one years ago and I remember being totally baffled by it.

Sounds like a great list!

>21 false-knight: Yeah, that's kind of what it is - in fact, I think they pulled much of the material from their website where they collect people's recommendations and stories.

>23 false-knight: I have read only one of Eco's novels so far: Der Friedhof in Prag and I didn't really enjoyed it. I liked his works on language, semiotics, etc. better. I own and still plan to read The Name of the Rose at some point in the future... but maybe not this year. :)

>25 PaulCranswick: Yeah, I don't know a whole lot about the early modern period so I was fairly at sea (har har har) with some of the references.

>26 leperdbunny: Thanks!

>27 drneutron: Sounds like a good palate-cleanser type of read.

>28 PersephonesLibrary: Oh, I'm a Name of the Rose stan, honestly, it was really formative for me! But I haven't read any of his nonfiction. I should probably give it a shot (I say, looking at my towering piles of unread books.)

9: Artificial Condition, Martha Wells (Tor, 2018)

Rating: ☆☆☆—☆☆☆½

I'm not always the brightest knife in the drawer, so I accidentally got the second book in the Murderbot series rather than the first. With that said, I didn't feel too adrift with the story, which was a pretty brisk read. Murderbot itself is an engaging character, and I'd like to know more about its world; I also enjoyed its bonding time with ART, because the concept of "big fancy complicated artificial intelligence system gets unreasonably distressed over TV shows and metaphorically needs its robot hand held" is pretty cute. However, because I didn't read the first book, I wasn't as invested in Murderbot's journey to find out if it did actually break its governor module and murder a whole lot of people as I could've been. I think on the one hand it would've benefited from being read as part of a longer series where longer-term character growth can be made more evident, and on the other hand I think if I spent a whole full-length book with Murderbot's narrative voice it would start to wear thin a little. Like, it's definitely a funny narrative voice, but I don't know if I want to read a whole book narrated at that level of ironic remove-slash-muted affect by a character who will only admit their emotions if those emotions are various levels of irritation or anxiety. Again, though, I'm assuming that "learning to admit other emotions" is going to be part of Murderbot's character arc. I might look for other books in the series, but honestly I think I'd also be fine leaving Murderbot as-is.

>30 false-knight: I've read the series, and I've been engaged by the whole thing. I suspect that if you're feeling meh about this one that you'd probably have the same reaction to the rest. But I could be wrong...

>29 false-knight: Along with The Name of the Rose, I really liked Foucault's Pendulum and given the conspiracy theory driven events of the last year or more, I may want to give it a reread. But yeah, not much with the female characters, is he?

>31 drneutron: Yeah, you're probably right. I wouldn't complain if I had to read the rest of the series, it'd probably be a fun way to spend a couple days, but "if I had to" isn't a great metric for "do I want to". They're definitely books I'd recommend to other people, though; I think my brother might get along with them better.

I've had a copy of Foucault's Pendulum for years but it's this big ol' hardcover that always kind of intimidated me out of reading it. In The Name of the Rose there is at least the excuse of being set in a monastery + Adso's background as a monk, but still, Eco created that situation. I watched the recent miniseries with John Turturro and liked that Unnamed Woman was given a little bit more space as a character (although she still doesn't get a name, her actress is credited as Occitan Girl), and there was even, gasp, a second female character, both of whom I'm pretty sure survived and who might have even talked to each other in a manner that passed the Bechdel test. I still wouldn't call it a victory for feminism, though.

On the other hand, if Sherlock Holmes in a 14th-century monastery has already been done, that proves the possibility of Miss Marple in a 14th-century nunnery… (Edit: Argh, I'm blanking on the name, but I read somewhere a murder mystery short story where the Wife of Bath had to figure out whodunnit. I…think it was on AO3??? Yes it was, found it!!)

Oh, I need to find the Wife of Bath story! Thanks!

10: WHEREAS, Layli Long Soldier (Picador, 2019; 2017)

Rating: I'm not actually sure, high four stars, like 4.5? More below

Finally the random number generator gives me something in the poetry section! I haven't actually read very much poetry, which is why I haven't officially given it a rating, because I'm not sure whether or not I'm, like, experienced enough to say more than liked it/didn't like it because I don't have a lot to compare it to. In this case, I liked it! If I had to guess I'd say my response to it was abouuuut an 8.5/10? It's divided into two parts, "These Being the Concerns" and "Whereas"; the first is a more loosely connected set of poems about various things (language, motherhood…), and the second is two long poems/sets of poems in response to the 2009 Congressional Resolution of Apology ("Apology") to Native Americans. In "These Being the Concerns," I think my favorite poem was "Waȟpániča"—the ending line, "But this is a spill-over translation for how I cannot speak my mind comma the meta-phrasal ache of being language poor," is I think a really elegant distillation of one of Long Soldier's recurrent themes throughout the book. Language and grass are two major themes which get intertwined in interesting ways; one of the other poems I liked in that section, "38," is narrowly/initially about the hanging of 38 Dakota men during the Sioux Uprising, but mentions the story of Andrew Myrick. Myrick was a trader on the Dakota's reservation who refused to extend credit to them when they were starving and who famously said "If they are hungry, let them eat grass"; on the first day of the uprising he was killed, beheaded, and his mouth was stuffed with grass, which Long Soldier calls a poem without text. Throughout the book, she also plays with space and placement of text in some interesting ways, although sometimes I wasn't really entirely sure to what purpose. It's for her to know and me to find out, I guess?

I had a nice time physically reading it, too, I went out to sit outside at a coffee stand about 5 or 7 minutes' walk from here. It's cooled off a little today, we've been having the Santa Ana again the past couple days, so while it's still windy it's at least not like 80°F outside.

Happy reading weekend, Emery!

>34 false-knight: You got me with that one, Emery. It is down in my little black book of ones to look for (actually a spreadsheet but that doesn't sound as good).

I am hugely interested in the history of the Native Americans.

>35 PersephonesLibrary: Thanks! I hope yours went well too!

>36 PaulCranswick: Spreadsheets are great! Native American history is a really interesting set of topics that I don't know nearly as much about as I should; my mother got a couple books about California Native history and cultures for Christmas that I might borrow sometime. I remember 1491 being a pretty good overview of the pre-colonial Americas but haven't read much else specifically about Native peoples.

Happy first thread, Emery and have fun here with the friends and books!
>12 false-knight: >17 false-knight: Wow, what a great job.
>23 false-knight: I didn't like this book so much either, one of my favorites by Eco is Foucault's Pendulum - and Lorenza Pellegrini even speaks a bit ;-).

11: The Finest Music: An Anthology of Early Irish Lyrics, edited by Maurice Riordan (Faber & Faber, 2017)

Rating: ☆☆☆

This was an overall decent collection that got dragged down a bit in my opinion by the fact that, since Riordan is collecting a lot of different translations by different poets done in different time periods and styles, it feels somewhat uneven. Just in terms of how the translators are using different conventions—like, there's an extract from Tennyson's translation of the Immram Maele Dúin that's very, you know, long lines and rhymed couplets, and then a page or two later there's Thomas Kinsella translating some poetry attributed to Suibhne Geilt (Mad Sweeney) that's very stylistically different and much closer to prose poetry, or Thomas Clark's "Sliabh Cua," which reads almost like a translated haiku. I suppose you could argue that the original poetry's also stylistically different, because the anthology covers about a 700-year time range with a lot of different authors (something Riordan addresses in his introduction; there's a bit about how one effect of translation is a flattening of temporal difference), but then the thing is that the difference in the translations isn't temporal, like, not all the 10th-century poems are done in the same way. I liked Paul Muldoon's translation of "Pangur Bán," "Myself and Pangur," Ciaran Carson's excerpt from the Immram Brain, Riordan's translation of "Binn guth duine i dTír in Óir," and Eiléan ní Chuilleanáin's translation of the "Song of the Woman of Beare." Riordan's introduction did an alright job of providing some temporal context and of discussing the history of medieval Irish poetry in translation, but I was pretty skeptical about some of his assertions. I don't think that during the Medieval Warm Period you could've lived outdoors year-round in Ireland "without hunger or fear or dependency," and the statement that 7th- and 8th-century Irish poetry marks the first appearance of sophisticated literary devices like irony in "vernacular" poetry is, one, a bit of a wild assertion in general and, two, only true if your definition of vernacular is "not in Latin" rather than "not in the poet's home language", considering that Latin was a lot of people's vernacular. Overall it was fine to read but I don't really see myself returning to it a lot, at least not right now.

I'm about halfway through The Black Middle Ages right now and enjoying it, but I'm having some attention span issues that are probably going to continue for the next couple days. On the bright side, my mother did agree to come with me to the Asian supermarket in a couple days, which means I'll get to spend an afternoon making kimchi!! And also that we'll have condiments in the house that I'm more comfortable cooking with. (Which also means that I'll get to cook dinner more!)

12: The Black Middle Ages: Race and the Construction of the Middle Ages, Matthew X. Vernon (Palgrave New Middle Ages, 2018)

Rating: ☆☆☆☆

I thought this was a good book! People who pick it up expecting a discussion of race in the Middle Ages aren't going to find that*, except for a chapter on Gerald of Wales, who is fairly inevitable in these situations; Vernon's mostly talking about 19th- and early 20th-century receptions of medieval history and literature. The first two chapters focused on the creation of the idea of a literary and cultural "Anglo-Saxon" (sic) heritage and the way that Black American educators engaged with it, which I found really interesting, and also had a lot of side material of people being…really insane about what they thought early medieval England and its inhabitants were like. The book came out I think before calls to rename the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists really gained traction (they changed it in 2019 to the International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England, which is more unwieldy but also more accurate and less dunked in the extremely weird racist stuff that's built up around the term "Anglo-Saxon") but does make a good case on the side for how "Anglo-Saxon" is this sort of retroactively created category that has a lot more to do with imaginary antecedents of the people doing the discussion and the causes they wanted to support than anything that was like actually going on in Mercia or wherever. It was really interesting to see the same network of concepts about medieval England being marshaled in support of, like, slavery and race science, and also for abolition and black people's intellectual and linguistic capacity. The middle of the book is taken up with a very long chapter about A Connecticut Yankee and The House behind the Cedars, neither of which I've read, so it was kind of a drag for me. The Gerald of Wales chapter did a good job of adding nuance to discussions of his place in, like, colonialism-before-colonialism or whatever you want to call Henry II's invasion of Ireland, when he's also hyper-aware in his writing of his own status as a Welshman at the time. The chapter on Gloria Naylor (who I haven't read but now I want to) was, like, making a point but I'm not sure if the point was much more than a new way of saying "her books based on Dante and Chaucer are based on Dante and Chaucer". Vernon's approaching the topic in an interesting way, but it still felt like kind of a long walk to get to the corner store; the issue is probably partly that I haven't read the books and also that I'm not super experienced with, like, academic literary criticism of this sort. The last chapter is very short, about Django Unchained, and I didn't really care for it much. So on the whole it's a book that I'd definitely recommend individual chapters of to different people based on what they were looking for, and I think it could be used in interesting ways in a curriculum. The writing's fine, Vernon's generally very clear about what he's saying given that he's operating in a field with specialized terminology.

*if you want that, go find The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages.

>38 SirThomas: Hi! Thank you!! I probably should dig Foucault's Pendulum back out of the garage and give it a shot, then.

Speaking of the garage, it is now the resting place of almost 2 gallons of kimchi. Maybe by the time it's started fermenting we'll have made some room for it in the fridge.

>40 false-knight: Excellent review! I'm adding that one to the list. And I recommend checking out Naylor.

Definitely a good review - on my list it goes!

>41 scaifea: I definitely want to check Naylor out!

>41 scaifea: >42 drneutron: ILL or an academic library are probably your best bets for getting it, but Palgrave has some massive sales once or twice a year, so check their site after Thanksgiving.

>40 false-knight: Interesting review - I need to see if I can get that!

13: Felicity, Mary Oliver (Penguin, 2015)

Rating: ☆☆½

I don't know, I just didn't really click with this collection. I felt like there weren't enough different moods in it? In general I really like Oliver, and the poems in this book aren't bad per se, they just aren't really to my taste, I think. Joke's on me for not noticing that it says "these are all love poems" on the back cover—which, I mean, is a little reductive, but again there's definitely one mood. There were individual lines I liked for their imagery but I don't think any of the poems as a whole are really going to stick with me. She gets the extra half-a-star because I still like her other poems and also because it might just be a life experiences thing. Like, I'm 23, what do I know about anything?

>46 false-knight: Sometimes you have to catch a particular time to read a certain book. I have made that experience several times. Poems are particularly dominated by the moment.. thanks for the review!

14: Ten Nights in a Bar-Room and What I Saw There, Timothy Shay Arthur

Rating: n/a

I got distracted reading through some article comments, looked it up, and it was free on Wikisource so I decided to read it in case it was funny in a sort of proto-Reefer Madness way. It wasn't. Like there is the same vibe of "ONE TASTE of (alcohol / marijuana) will DESTROY YOUR LIFE", and there is a lot of heavy-handed melodrama that probably played way better in the mid-1800s, but also, like, I have seen the Ken Burns Prohibition documentary and the entire first episode is 70% "yes, this looks/sounds/is sort of goofy, but also it was a response to the fact that men had complete legal and financial control, and de facto physical control, over their families and if they were pissing away all their wages at the bar and coming home drunk every night "ban drinking" seems like a good response". The book's only worth looking at if you're really into the history of the temperance movement. I'm not rating it because it's, like, completely orthogonal to my ratings scale.

15: My Name is Red, Orhan Pamuk, trans. Erdaǧ M. Göknar (Vintage, 2001; 1998)

Rating: ☆☆☆☆☆

I picked this up because it looked like it might be kind of similar to The Name of the Rose, and there's probably an alternate timeline where I was told to read this instead in high school and got really into Ottoman art history instead of medieval Christian theology. Göknar did a very good job translating this; Pamuk's prose made me go more slowly than I'm sometimes accustomed to, but I appreciated that. I was also totally wrong about the central mystery, and in hindsight maybe I should have paid more attention to the uses of groups of three in the novel, because I feel like that was a hint. I loved how the characters would address the reader and the different ways in which they did so, and I think overall Esther was my favorite character—she was just very engaging and funny. Pamuk really made the whole novel feel very historically grounded and contextualized, and both the characters' awareness about their world and Pamuk's own knowledge of the time period lent the work a lot of depth—like, I have a lot to say about the way he makes Nusret Hoja work for the story—and made the ways that the characters discussed time and permanence feel…earned? Is earned the right word? It also made me think about some of the things I've read John Berger say about the purposes of early modern European oil paintings. I'd really like to reread it to see if I can catch on to the mystery earlier, and also to see what else jumps out to me on different rereadings.

>47 PersephonesLibrary: Yeah, there are one or two books I still love, because I first read them at really specific times in my life when they were exactly what I needed, but with the complete knowledge that if I read them for the first time now I'd probably throw them across a room. *cough cough the secret history cough*

>48 false-knight: There is a reading group for My name is red in creation I think. I really want to read that one, too!

>49 false-knight: Agreed! That only seems natural.

*sigh* Duplicate posts...

>48 false-knight:, >50 PersephonesLibrary: My Name is Red sounds great! I need to join the group read, I think.

I'm so happy to have lucked into your thread, Emery! I have read/will read many of the books on your first list but not at your speed, alas.
COVID stress has my ageing brain operating at less than optimal perception, so I'm still delaying Underland, but I really, really loved The Old Ways and look forward to more Macfarlane.
I'll be back!

>50 PersephonesLibrary: >52 drneutron: Man, I'd better check it out too then.

>53 LizzieD: Hi!! Yes, I loved The Old Ways too, he really is an amazing and perceptive author. Hopefully before too too much longer we can all get off of Miss Rona's Wild Ride. I'll be checking out your thread too, nice to meet you!

16: The King in the North: The Life and Times of Oswald of Northumbria, Max Adams (Head of Zeus, 2014)

Rating: ☆☆☆½

If you're looking for general-audiences histories of early medieval England Adams is apparently your guy; I got this book because I didn't think I'd ever seen one about Oswald before. Overall it's a pretty good examination of 7th-century Northumbrian history, of the kings-and-battles sort, which is kind of pulled in two different directions by the urge to be a biography of Oswald and the urge to be a more general history, and I'm not sure how successful Adams was at reconciling the big-picture and biographical tendencies. (The other issue is that there's a lot of guys with really similar names, and he does have a couple family trees in the appendices but there's only so much you can do when all the guys in a family decide that their names will all start with Os-. If you, like me, have trouble with Roman history because of the names, this will also be a tough ride for you.) I'm also not the biggest fan of kings-and-battles approaches to history, or of biographies to be frank, but like, given that, I think this was still a pretty well-done examination of a time period that most people know little to nothing about. The parts where he talked about hybridity of religion and religious practice were the most interesting to me, and also he discusses archaeological evidence in a pretty approachable way. Also, it'll probably come in handy whenever Nicola Griffith finishes Menewood—I know I spent a lot of time while reading it going "oh, yeah, I sort of remember that thing from Hild". I might look up Ælfred's Britain at some point, but it's pretty low on the priorities list.

I love your reviews, but have been guided by your favorite titles from 2020 - Thanks for some great new reading experiences!
We Have Always Lived in the Castle and Borne - I haven't found Dead Astronauts in translation yet, so I started with Borne
Have a wonderful Sunday, Emery.

>55 false-knight: Yet another I need to find. I have his In the Land of Giants on my wishlist, but haven’t read it yet.

Back again and recalling that I had read Snow and My Name is Red when I met a young Turkish woman here at LT who completely trashed Pamuk. She gave me a list of authors whose books she and her friends were reading - some available in English. Because I had enjoyed the two I read, I didn't follow up, and she left this site years ago. Interesting to me though.
I'm taking a possible BB on *Land of Giants* and need to try Hild before embarking on Oswald. Thanks, Emery!
Peggy

Again and again. I was interested enough to find my conversation with Zeynep, and here's what she had to say:
" Oh my, you keep telling about the writers I don't like, and I only strongly hate two writers, and one is Elif Şafak! (But, then it's quite normal that you don't as you cannot know the way she talks and the airs she gives herself, it's awful I tell you:)) And for Orhan Pamuk, he sounds better in English means this: He writes his books more to an European/American audience using oriental elements which may seem to make sense to you and makes you wonder... etc., but as we Turks, we can see true his illussions. But don't mind my word, read it if you like:) As I said on the group, I think his earlier works were better and now he kinda write garbage if you ask me, My name is red was good, the white castle even better, but after snow, it really started to bother me with the same old orientalist fairy-tale stuff."

The names she recommended were Nazim Hikmet, Yasar Kemal, and Ihsan Oktay Anar. Off to research again!

I have something by Max Adams on the shelves too - the same as >57 drneutron: Jim.

>56 SirThomas: Thanks, dude! Glad you liked the books!!

>57 drneutron:, >60 PaulCranswick: I think In the Land of Giants would probably play even better to his strengths as an archaeologist, from the description.

>58 LizzieD:, >59 LizzieD: That's an interesting criticism of Pamuk; since I haven't read any of his later stuff I can't really comment, but I'll try and look into the authors she recommended, at first glance they all sound right up my alley. Hild is great, IMO, Griffith is fantastic at historical immersion, although the romance subplot with her made-up cousin is kind of goofy it doesn't really detract from the work as a whole.

17: Armistice (The Amberlough Dossier, #2), Lara Elena Donnelly (Tor, 2018)

Rating: just about scrapes its way into ☆☆☆☆

It probably would've been better to reread Amberlough and remind myself of who everyone was—Donnelly does an alright job of backfilling, and it's never about anyone of immediate narrative importance, but I would still every so often be like "wait, who?" Also, in the middle section, the amount of schemes running into each other that were often maybe not as well-defined as they could've been left me kind of at sea in terms of things like "stakes" and "who is working with who", although by the end things got more or less shaken out. I really do like Donnelly's characters, though, and the setting is a lot of fun especially since by this point in the series it's managed to expand a bit beyond the original just-fantasy-interwar-Germany conceit. This isn't what I would direct someone towards if they wanted, like, the best of the best espionage novels, but if they were looking for a generally enjoyable time the Amberlough series delivers.

18: A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (And Some Bears), Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling (PublicAffairs, 2020)

Rating: ☆☆☆☆½—☆☆☆☆☆

This is very much an "only in America" book, and possibly even an "only in New Hampshire" book, about the very small, intensely anti-taxation, and chronically bear-plagued town of Grafton, NH, and the group of libertarians who descended on it in the early 2000s in an attempt to create a libertarian paradise, the "Free Town Project". It didn't work out, and not only because a "libertarian paradise" is what most people would consider "not actually a good place to live", but because a "libertarian paradise" in rural New Hampshire is also a place where the lack of regular trash collection and zoning laws and so forth (not to mention individual people feeding the bears grain and donuts twice daily) encourages bears to start breaking into people's houses (or trailers, or weird semi-permanent encampments out in the woods), and there's only so much the Second Amendment can really do for you in that situation. Which, I should mention, there's a couple descriptions of bears attacking people and pets that can be pretty harrowing. If you are deeply freaked out by the potential of bear-on-human, bear-on-cat, or human-on-bear violence, this may not be the book for you. However, I did learn that a determined guard llama can beat a black bear in a fight.

The book is very funny and reasonably sympathetic towards the people of Grafton (who did not ask several hundred internet libertarians to move in, and who are also living with the consequences of New Hampshire's extremely underfunded and understaffed Fish and Game Department—the bear problem is more or less statewide). It is also not an unbiased book, but to be frank I personally think that bias against right-wing libertarians / anarcho-capitalists / people in general who don't want publicly funded trash collection or libraries or schools is a good and healthy thing. Hongoltz-Hetling lays out the various facets of this extremely weird problem, going back to the eighteenth century, very well and with a lot of spirit. The bear issue did not start with the Free Town Project and it is not limited to Grafton—the problem, he points out, is in large part austerity policies and climate change (and, possibly, toxoplasmosis). It is simply expressed through bears. It's a great book; it's not trying to be earth-shatteringly important, but it knows its brief and fills it (and then some), and it's compulsively readable. I borrowed it from my father, decided last night to read a bit before I went to sleep, and then finished the whole thing in a couple hours.

>63 false-knight: Well, I will avoid that one because I don't cotton to dogs getting hurt in books, but I very much enjoyed your review and nearly did a coffee spit-take at "I did learn that a determined guard llama can beat a black bear in a fight," so many thanks for that!

>64 scaifea: Understandable! Glad you enjoyed the review, though; there're also a couple interviews with the author / articles about the book that sum it up pretty well without the pet violence.

Don't mess with llamas, man, they will get you.

19: Mouth Full of Blood: Essays, Speeches, Meditations (US title: The Source of Self-Regard), Toni Morrison (Penguin, 2019)

Rating: ☆☆☆☆½

This would have been a five-star book if a) it hadn't been quite so heavy on the speeches and b) hadn't very heavily front-loaded those speeches. Morrison has interesting things to say in those speeches, and was also incredibly skilled at the art of putting words together; the problem is really that the speeches are all fairly short, which is a good thing for a speech but not so great in a book, to me. If they'd have been reworked into a smaller number of longer essays, I'd have had literally zero problems with this book.

That being said! The book is, unsurprisingly, deeply insightful about a broad range of topics; the things she has to say about writing and ~the canon~ were super interesting to me, especially the essay "Unspeakable Things Unspoken" on the way the white American literary canon is haunted by black people and blackness, which forms kind of the heart of the second section, which was also the section I liked the most. I also liked the way she discussed her writing process in the last section, which definitely put more of her books up the reading list from "should get around to it sometime" to "get to them within the next two months".

>66 false-knight: *puts Morrison even higher up her TBR pile*
I see your point - I made the same experience with Adorno...

Have a great start of the week, Emery!

>67 PersephonesLibrary: Thanks, Käthe! It did start off pretty well—I got a job and I'll probably start within the month!! It's part-time, but it's also not food service and it pays above minimum wage, which is really all I ask.

>68 false-knight: Congratulations - and all the best!
Have a wonderful weekend, Emery.

20: The Unreality of Memory and Other Essays, Elisa Gabbert (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020)

Rating: ☆☆☆☆☆

So…okay, so before I started medically transitioning / living in my current gender positionality, for years I had this recurrent anxiety that I could only describe as "I feel like I'm being constantly chased by the big boulder from Indiana Jones wherever I go, except I'm not allowed to ever look at it, and I can never get out of the tunnel it's in." (Getting on hormones didn't exactly completely stop it but did tamp it down to much more reasonable levels.) This may or may not be connected to—certainly it was outlasted by—my fascination with the way people think about the end of the world. I am currently wearing a hoodie on which I hand-embroidered "MEMENTO MORI". Which is to say that this essay collection was absolute catnip to me, and also made me feel a bit like I was being chased by the boulder again. It was very…Much To Think About, especially the first section, which is about disasters and climate change and various ends of the world, and was just lighting up my brain in all sorts of ways. The middle section is about pain and "hysteria" and the ways people conceptualize and deal with their own suffering and how that connects to memory, and also had a lot of interesting insights; the third section is mostly about being online during the previous administration, and about "compassion fatigue", and I think I would've liked a little bit more interrogation of the idea that high empathy necessarily equals goodness or morality, because there are a lot of people, some of whom I know, who have little or no ability to organically feel empathy and are also moral people, and there are a lot of extremely empathetic people who are terrible. That's my only issue with the book. It also really made me want to read Hyperobjects.

I'm currently on Invisible Romans by Robert Knapp and am frankly kind of annoyed by it for various reasons I'll discuss in the review once it's done. I'll keep at it but don't know that I'll want to keep the book afterwards.

And in other book news, I found out that Netflix is adapting the Redwall books and 12-year-old me is bouncing off the walls. If they do Mossflower I will plotz, the old Canadian TV version never came out with that season…

>69 SirThomas: Thank you, Thomas! You too!

>68 false-knight: Great news! Congratulations! When can you start? Enjoy your weekend!

Congrats on the new job! And yay for transitioning (if you don't mind me cheerleading for you)! And hmm to the Knapp. I've not read that one and sort of don't have any desire to? And your lukewarmedness isn't exactly changing my mind. I'll be interested to see what you think of it when you're finished.

Good for you all around, Emery! And thank you for giving us a glimpse into your thinking about what you read.

>72 PersephonesLibrary: Thanks!! I don't know when I start, I only filled out the paperwork on Monday. About that—since it's a state job (exam proctor for the Department of Real Estate), they made me sign a loyalty oath to the state of California, and I was like…is it that deep?

>73 scaifea: Thank you! I'm fine with cheerleading :) The book looked interesting to me in the store but I kind of wish I'd read a little more of it before buying. Still not done, though, maybe it improves later on.

>74 LizzieD: Thanks!

21: Signs Preceding the End of the World, Yuri Herrera, trans. Lisa Dillman (And Other Stories, 2015; 2009)

Rating: ☆☆☆½

I was putting together a little package to send to my old roommate in York, and thought "I should send him a book with this, what do I have that's small, that I've read, and that I didn't see in any bookstores over there?" and came up with this, except I hadn't read it, so then I did. I thought it was pretty good; the translation was very well done and flowed quite naturally, and the interplay between "underworld" as in the mythical location/destination and "underworld" as in the various worlds that proceed out of sight of mainstream society was given room to expand without being shoved in my face too hard. I don't know that I was blown away by it, exactly, and I think it could've benefited from being longer, or maybe it's that Makina does her katabasis but there's no anabasis and so it feels half-done, which is maybe foreshadowed in the way that she thinks about the people she's know who leave for the US and then return. There's…actually now that I think about it it might be more fruitful to think of this as not a pure "underworld" i.e. solely land of the dead journey, but an "otherworld" i.e. more broadly supernatural realm? I don't know. I'm going to get myself another copy.

>76 false-knight: Oooh, that one sounds kind of interesting. I'm curating a list of for my Classical Mythology students of books with nods to ancient myths and stories - this sounds like it may fit the bill...

>75 false-knight: I've looked up "exam proctor" - so you watch exams being taken? Did I get that right? Then I think it only makes sense that you had to swear the oath. And yes, it sounds definitely better than a job in food service. Do you have to prepare something for the job or can you enjoy free time until you'll start?

>77 scaifea: It might! It doesn't really map to any specific ancient myth that I'm aware of, but I know basically nothing about indigenous Mexican legends or concepts of the underworld so probably there was a lot in there that I just missed.

>78 PersephonesLibrary: Yeah, I watch people take their exams. I'm not exactly surprised they wanted me to sign the oath, it was just funny to come across. They're going to put me through training, but haven't said when yet—depends how fast HR processes the paperwork and everything. So until then I am still full-time loafing around my parents' house.

22: The Honjin Murders, Seishi Yokomizo, trans. Louise Heal Kawai (Pushkin Vertigo, 2019; 1946)

Rating: ☆☆☆½

A perfectly fine locked-room mystery; the solution (as in the mechanics of how the murders got committed, not the motivation behind them) felt a little silly to me, but maybe it was just because I found it hard to visualize. I liked the awareness of the narrator and the other characters throughout that they were playing with and playing into a literary tradition, and the little bit at the very end where the narrator says "I explained everything from the outset, if you assumed that when I said these two people had been stabbed that I also meant that both of them had been murdered, and that I meant the two people whose bodies were discovered at the same time then that's on you, and I learned how to do that from Agatha Christie!" was actually very funny. However, I think that that same narrative conceit meant that the story was operating at a level of remove that I didn't really enjoy—I would've preferred maybe a bit more emotion. Still I had fun; I want to read The Inugami Curse as well, but I'm a little worried that I might have been spoilered for it by the parody in Seven Little Sons of the Dragon. Only one way to find out.

Great news on the new job, Emery.

>70 false-knight: I particularly like the look of that one.

>79 false-knight: Well, you mention katabasis and anabasis, which are ancient Greek Things, of course...

>81 PaulCranswick: Thank you! Yeah, Unreality of Memory was really good, it did also put me in a bit of a doom hole for a while but that's maybe part of the appeal?

>82 scaifea: Yeah, and it's definitely in dialogue with Orpheus and Eurydice at least (spoiler, I guess…)

23: Invisible Romans, Robert C. Knapp (Profile Books, 2013)

Rating: ☆½–☆☆

This is a generous two stars. On the positive side, Knapp does at least do a thorough job of recuperating his sources, the chapters on slavery and on soldiers were interesting, the overall point of the book, while obvious (Rome = more than elite male senators and a faceless mass of "everyone else"), is decently made, from a technical standpoint it's well written, and I could see individual chapters serving as secondary/optional readings in a syllabus. However. Knapp really should have included a discussion of citizenship somewhere in this book, and he didn't. It's a big topic and he only has so many pages but if you're talking about the occupants of the Roman Empire who are invisibilized in popular history then maybe it's important to talk about how before the Edict of Caracalla in 212 the vast majority of the free population was not Roman citizens? Especially since that significantly impacts his chapter on freedpersons: he's only talking about people who were freed by, and therefore could become upon freedom, Roman citizens (if they were men), which means that there's a 240-year period in which he's prevented himself from addressing several incredibly major population centers. In that chapter he mentions that there were "fewer freedmen" in the Greek East than in Italy and like yeah obviously because you're defining that population out of existence because you're using Artemidorus, who died before the reign of Caracalla and so was writing for a non-citizen population who by your metric couldn't create freedmen!!! This is bad demography! That aside, I really wanted there to be more discussion of the Imperial periphery, of differences in living within the various parts of the Empire, of differences in urban versus rural poverty? Ethnic/cultural minorities within the Empire? A chapter on poor people that's not 80% about fables, like surely there's at least a little archaeological evidence somewhere to discuss??? Also, this book just started me off on the wrong foot because the two chapters on "ordinary men" and "ordinary women" are about a population that, by his own admission, made up maybe 25% of the Imperial population, and what he means by "ordinary" is "most relatable in living station to his presumed-middle-class modern audience". Like an ordinary, as in statistically representative, person living within the Roman Empire was not anywhere near as well-off as the group he's defining as "ordinary".

Also in his chapter on sex workers—which is reasonably fair-minded otherwise—he persistently uses the term "whore", which is a slur and not a job description.

Oy.

24: Notes of a Native Son, James Baldwin (Penguin, 2017; 1984; 1958)

Rating: ☆☆☆☆½—☆☆☆☆☆

I think I take a more hardline position than Baldwin did on the utility and productiveness of anger, although maybe I'm misunderstanding him when he talks about it. There's a bit in The Black Jacobins where C.L.R. James says that while obviously the violence committed by black Haitian revolutionaries during the first stages of the war was not good, it was understandable in that that sort of violence was the primary model of exerting power to which they'd been exposed (and subjected) for several centuries*, so maybe I should be thinking about Baldwin's standpoint more from that perspective. Like, in a fundamentally sick and wounded society, models of how to express power and anger are going to be inherently self-defeating, is his thinking? Anyway! I'd mis-shelved this, it's an essay collection, not general nonfiction. It's, unsurprisingly, a very good essay collection about the ability to perceive personhood and history and community. Reading the preface—written in 1984 about work from the 1940s and 1950s—where he says "It is not pleasant to be forced to recognize, more than thirty years later, that neither this dynamic nor this necessity have changed. There have been superficial changes, with results at best ambiguous and, at worst, disastrous. Morally, there has been no change at all," in 2021 was like…welp! Also, I thought the chapter on "protest novels" was really interesting, because, although it's about a very different phenomenon, it made me think of an article I read a month or two back about what actually happened with all the anti-racism 101 books white people were ordering last summer.

*And, and this is a complete frivolity, this framework also led to C.L.R. James writing one of my favorite footnotes: "This statement has been criticized. I stand by it."

>84 false-knight: ...he persistently uses the term "whore", which is a slur and not a job description. Welp, that's gross.

>85 false-knight: I haven't read this one, but I do love and respect Baldwin tons. And yeah, same shit, different decade - it's so frustrating.

>86 scaifea: Yeah, and it's really weird, because the rest of the chapter isn't super judgmental about women doing sex work—he's basically like, well, free people chose to get into it for a variety of reasons and could have a range of experiences from "fine" to "really bad", probably a fair minority of free women were in and out of it at various points in their lives, there was stigma attached to sex work and sex work-adjacent professions but we shouldn't let that color our view of people who were just doing a job that's fairly universal, in the case of slaves it was bad regardless of individual experience for obvious reasons. And then he keeps using that word! Like, it doesn't just stop being derogatory if they actually are having sex for pay.

I'd definitely recommend Notes of a Native Son!

25: Celestial Bodies, Jokha Alharthi / Jūkhah al-Ḥārithī, trans. Marilyn Booth (Catapult, 2019; 2010)

Rating: ☆☆☆☆½

This is an intensely character-driven domestic novel, to the extent that there isn't really "a plot" but rather the edges of a bunch of different plots all kind of wandering in and out, getting mentioned in one chapter and then brought back up 50 pages later by a different character in a different light. Al-Ḥārithī bounces back and forth in time over about a 100-year span of Omani history—late 1800s to early 2000s—and the ways that Omani society changed (or didn't), with a lot of focus on the impact of slavery and its abolition in 1970 on the characters; however, this involves a lot of rapid movement between POVs and, within chapters, between times, that can make it kind of hard to keep track of what's been going on. The characters—starting with Mayya, Asma, and Khawla, the three daughters of Salima (bt. Masoud) and Azzan (b. Mayya), and spiraling outwards from there (there's a family tree at the beginning, it doesn't really help much)—are very tenderly and empathetically realized, and al-Ḥārithī puts a lot of nuance into the different ways they all engage with patriarchy and family. It's a very thoughtful and well-thought-out novel; it was a bit too back and forth in time for me, but that's a personal taste issue. I think definitely if you like the kind of interiority that's on display in, like, Virginia Woolf, this would be up your alley.

>85 false-knight: Oh, I just mixed up this and Wright's Native Son. Baldwin is on my list, as is Wright.

>89 PersephonesLibrary: Hi, Käthe! There are a couple essays in the book about Native Son, in fact. (I used to mix up H.G. Wells's The Invisible Man and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man all the time—for years I thought it was one book that they'd co-written, although I don't know what I thought happened in it.)

26: Heavenly Bodies: Cult Treasures and Spectacular Saints from the Catacombs, Paul Koudounaris (Thames & Hudson, 2013)

Rating: ☆☆☆☆☆

I am here for ONE THING and ONE THING ONLY and that is PICTURES OF SKELETONS IN FANCY COSTUMES. The text is interesting, too, more of an overview of the phenomenon of the catacomb saints than anything really in-depth; basically what happened is that in the late 1500s people rediscovered the Roman catacombs and the bodies of the people in there, while almost never getting officially canonized and generally being extremely unverifiable as martyrs*, were shipped off to German-speaking regions to replace relics that were lost/destroyed in the Reformation and in general bolster Catholicism in the region. Where they were dressed up very, very fancily. And occasionally given frankly excessively creepy wax half-faces. Honestly after the medieval period where your average relic was a little bitty chip of arm bone I would also have been very excited to get a whole skeleton to fancy up and put in a church. Really impressive craftsmanship on them, too, and the pictures are very good.

*One reason, among many, that the Church stopped doing this was they found out the catacombs in question were post-Constantinian, so no martyrs in there for obvious reasons.

>91 false-knight: Say what you will about the Catholic church (and there's oh-so-much to say), but they don't do anything by halves. Just...wow.

>92 scaifea: "Oh, Protestant Reformation, you think veneration of relics is 'weird' and 'cringe' and 'gross pieces of dead people'?? Huh? You think that? You wanna see something really weird? Hold my sacramental wine."

I kind of wish I could go back to the year 300 and find one of the people who got buried in those catacombs and tell them "So in 1250 or 1300 years the Christians are gonna have some internecine disputes and some of them are gonna dig up your skeleton and send it off to Germany as spiritual ammunition, but you will get absolutely covered in fancy embroidery and jewelry once you're there and people will believe you can ask God to fix their sciatica." Like, it sounds weird, but on the other hand you get to be part of a community again from beyond the grave?

>93 false-knight: *snork!!!* Exactly.

>93 false-knight: That made me laugh.

>2 false-knight: I am glad to see you gave My Name is Red five stars! There is a group read of that one in April. You should chime in with your thoughts. Link is on my thread in the middle somewhere. ; )

>12 false-knight: Nice! So organized!!

>68 false-knight: Congrats on the job!

>93 false-knight: LOL

Thanks for the birthday wishes on my thread. Glad you posted there 'cuz now I've starred you here! Your book reviews are amazingly insightful and very fun. Be seeing ya!

>96 Berly: Hi!! I might stick my head in on the group read, thanks for letting me know about it! Sounds like you had a great birthday :) See you around!

27: The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches, Matsuo Bashō, trans. Nobuyuki Yuasa (Penguin, 1966; 1702)

Rating: ☆☆☆☆½

Yuasa's translations are interesting, because he didn't adhere to the 5-7-5 syllabic form in translating haiku, feeling that it just wouldn't work as well in English, and so he turned them into short four-lined poems. I think the results worked…fine, like, it's still good poetry, and a lot of attempts to be more strict about syllabic rules in translation turn out kind of artificial, but sometimes I was wondering whether Yuasa was putting more into a poem, lexically, than was actually there. With that said, it's still good poetry! I found myself more drawn to the prose sections sometimes; they also made me appreciate the poetry more because it felt more contextualized emotionally. Like, seeing Bashō say "I went to this place while I was thinking about these things, and I saw these sights, and I tried to see this other thing but couldn't; I wrote a poem while I was doing this, here it is" unsurprisingly worked more for me than just seeing the poem on its own in an anthology. Also, I read this outside in the park (thanks, Käthe!) and that definitely added to my opinion of it.

28: Tao Te Ching, Lǎozǐ, trans. D.C. Lau (Penguin, 1963; 400s or 300s BCE?)

Rating: ☆☆☆?????

So the thing about philosophy is that if, the first time I read it, I go "yeah I get it I know what this is about", my immediate assumption is that either a) no, I don't actually understand it or b) it's bad philosophy. So "I don't get it?" doesn't count as a complaint. I liked that Lau's introduction provides some historical context, because with the Warring States period in mind I could more easily see how some of the conclusions about cyclical and destructive power were reached. It's a fine translation considering the difficulties of the text, which means that some of my questions about, like, what exactly is being referred to at any given time aren't Lau's fault. Also, I thought it was really funny that the Dàodéjīng is probably the originator of that Inspirational Quote about "the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step", because in context I think the text's point is "so stop this nonsense before it gets too big to stop. Stay at home." Whoops. Anyway I straight up have no idea what's going on and I think to try and figure it out I'd have to do a lot more reading, and I don't really want to.

Also, I know it was the 50s and 60s and I know pinyin wasn't made the standard romanization until the 80s (except in Taiwan) and I know pinyin has its own problems but man I do not like Wade-Giles romanization. It's not a problem outside of the introduction but still. It's just ugly, to me. Why were they so afraid to use the letter q.

Anyway I straight up have no idea what's going on and I think to try and figure it out I'd have to do a lot more reading, and I don't really want to.

This right here is why philosophy and I don't play well together. I just don't have the patience to put the time in to figure it out, on top of generally being annoyed that I don't get it the first time around and on my own. The dumbness of my brain irritates me. My undergrad Plato professor was amused at how actually angry I'd get at being able to translate the Greek but still not having a single flipping clue what it *said.* Texts may have been thrown across the room on occasion.

>99 false-knight:, >100 scaifea: Sounds like my reaction to quantum theory classes... 😀

WUGH okay I'm back! Emotionally I have been this video of Kermit singing "Once in a Lifetime" the past couple days. On the other hand I start work on Tuesday! And I managed to actually communicate with words to my parents that while I am here I would like there to be vegetables in the house that aren't lettuce so I can eat them, and then we also found out that if I take leaf lettuce and blanch it for like 10 seconds and then put oyster sauce and soy sauce on it I will eat that. So.

>100 scaifea: Oh my God, same, I definitely amused/scandalized my professors whenever we got onto Platonism or Neoplatonism (my take on the Neoplatonists was, and remains, "people who were too chicken to think about God having fingernails"). With me I feel like I have the same problem I do with higher math, which is, like, you're saying words but I don't know what this looks like in the real world? Can you draw me a diagram, mister philosophyman? The other problem is half the time I basically turn into that old Stoicism: A Rebuttal post on the Toast. IT'S A STUPID WEB AND I HATE IT

>101 drneutron: I never even took, like, high-school physics, because I was like "oh I'll have to do math in that class so it'll make me cry", so most physics concepts in my mind end up boiling down to "I think it's full of ghosts that make it do that?" and what very, very little of quantum physics anyone has ever tried to communicate to me hasn't really failed to disprove my Ghosts Theory.

>102 PersephonesLibrary: The image broke but I'm going to assume it was something nice, so, same to you! :)

>103 false-knight: Oh, come on... it was a nice card wishing you a great week. :)

>104 PersephonesLibrary: Well, thank you, and a great week to you too!

29: Medieval Paradigms, volume 1: Essays in Honor of Jeremy DuQuesnay Adams, edited by Stephanie Hayes-Healey (Palgrave New Middle Ages, 2005)

Rating: ☆☆☆☆

This is a fairly solid collection, possibly undermined a little by the fact that it's not really organized around a theme—"Patterns in Medieval Society" is…kind of too broad for that—so much as around "who could we get to write something and what are they currently thinking about?" That said, the individual chapters were generally convincing, although I will admit to skimming a couple, and a few of them didn't really feel like they were making an argument so much as pointing out a phenomenon (one of those, Penelope Johnson's "Fighting Words and Wounded Honor in Late-Fourteenth-Century France," was still really fun to read.) But overall I had a good time and felt like the chapters were all about the length they should've been. Aside from Johnson's, I liked best Peter Brown's chapter on Paulinus of Nola and the rhetoric of wealth in late antiquity, Christopher Gardner's chapter on Toulousan law and identity during the Albigensian Crusade, and Alexander Murray's chapter on a dispute between the prévost of Paris and the city's university, although that one sometimes felt like he was trying a bit too hard to be waspish. In all, I have good feelings about the second volume.

30: If Beale Street Could Talk, James Baldwin (Penguin, 2019; 1974)

Rating: ☆☆☆☆

So I think that the way this novel was structured worked very well for me, the way Baldwin hops backwards and forwards in time in just the way that he needs to to increasingly contextualize everything. It's panoramic and at the same time very grounded, and Baldwin's grasp of writing and communicating emotional depth and nuance is put front and center; the relationships between the characters are very well drawn. I see people using Romeo and Juliet as a comparison point and I don't think that's quite apt, but I don't know what is—I think this book speaks for itself in a way that's kind of hard to talk about for a lot of people, me included, without dropping into platitudes or obvious statements. Part of that might be because it's kind of pared down—or, that's not the right word, but there's this real economy of construction, like, everything is there just enough. I think the only problem I really had was that some of the dialogue didn't work for me—the scene where Ernestine yells at Fonny's sisters really stood out to me as feeling just kind of overwritten—and sometimes I felt like the narration was a little too much Baldwin-talking-through-Tish than Tish talking herself.

>103 false-knight: Oh, YES to the need for things to have real-world context! And definitely math/physics for that (drives my astrophysicist husband bonkers that I have a semi-violent hatred for his field). Also Derrida, Foucault, et al. Took me *ages* to really form a love for those goons. (I do love 'em now, though.)

>108 scaifea: Huh, must be an iiinnnnnteresting relationship... 😀

>103 false-knight: Ghosts sound about as reasonable as collapsing wave functions!

>108 scaifea: Context or even just, like, a helpful flowchart or illustration… My dad's a mathematician and whenever I ask him to explain something it usually takes like at least 3 levels of "okay but what does that do" before we hit real-world applications. (He is very patient.)

>109 drneutron: Unifying Ghosts Theory continues unopposed!

31: The Aeneid, Virgil / Publius Vergilius Maro, trans. Robert Fagles (Penguin, 2006; 29–19 BCE)

Rating: ☆☆☆☆☆



I just want to go back and grab me from three years ago and shake me back and forth like WHY DIDN'T YOU READ THIS ALREADY?????? (The answer is I was under a false and somewhat unfair impression, and also that at the time my animus towards having to read things in Latin extended also to things that were translated from Latin. Big apologies to my various Latin professors but I will still never figure out how to read a hexameter aloud.) I have so many thoughts. I have so many thoughts.

So you know how in the 18th Brumaire Marx says "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please … The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living." That's Aeneas except "dead generations" also include all the Romans in the underworld awaiting reincarnation—including himself??? (I could be convinced that Aeneas is should-be-dead but not being allowed to die.)—and he is having an extremely prolonged nightmare about the role of Aeneas, Epic Hero Founder of Rome strangling him alive. (Or. Is he alive.) I think that what being a demigod is, is knowing that you've been locked into a narrative but also knowing what your purpose in that narrative is, like it or not*. Aeneas knows what he's supposed to do; I think he really doesn't want to do it—he wants to stay in Troy, he wants to die in Troy, he wants to stay in Carthage, but he also knows what story he's in and that what he wants will never matter. (Still think he should have told Dido first.) And then there's this dialectic between Aeneas and the sort of self/personhood-annihilating role of Imperial Forefather, of Machine For Making Rome, and the ending becomes this horrible uneasy synthesis where it's an act of violence that creates, ideally, a civilization that won't require it more (against…who?) but…I don't know. I have this sort of bastardized and terribly unsound conception of dialectics as it relates to empire that's, like, every empire created contains the thing that will kill it, and the thing that will kill it is usually kind of the same on one level because of the annihilation inherent in Being Empire. It's a horror story, and I think Virgil's aware that it is, and that it will continue to be one regardless of the nuances with which anyone wants to read the killing of Turnus.

*I think it's probably pretty obvious to point out that Turnus thinks he's Achilles, but he does, and oops! He isn't! Now he's dead! He's, like, trying to LARP the Iliad against someone who just lived through it.**

**There's a lot of interesting stuff going on about how Virgil's being aware of/calling back to structural elements of the Iliad and Odyssey is maybe reflected in Aeneas's own awareness of his position? It's something that Fagles as a translator also handles well–I haven't read his Homeric translations but there were moments where I was like yeah this is, this phrase is reworking a Homer thing.

Anyway. Other things I liked: the entirety of book 2, especially the part where Venus grabs Aeneas by the arm to stop him trying to kill Helen and shows him that the gods are literally tearing Troy apart and there's this bit about Athena on the heights and all that you can see is the flash of the Gorgon on her shield, all these towering god-figures of shadow toppling the city, I was literally transfixed. I also…I was a little underwhelmed by parts of book 6, because it's a vision of the underworld that I've been sort of overexposed to, I like book 11 of the Odyssey better in flat terms of underworld-visualization, but it sort of brought home to me how absolutely incredibly haunted the REST of the Aeneid is. Like it's just…ghosts, ghosts all over the place, the land is a ghost too, it's all ghosts! I know the Iliad gets a lot of play as like, a book for thinking through wartime experiences…the Aeneid should get some of that spotlight too. Maybe. I mean I think it definitely doesn't provide like "how do I stop being at war" type answers but there's a lot there. I had this whole thing typed out about the way that ancient Greek literature has been used in the past 40-50 years to talk about modern wartime trauma and I think that the Aeneid could definitely complicate it.

Oh my God. I just, there's so much. Many thoughts, head full. Reading this made me actually go set up my alumni access thing on JStor so I can read articles about the Aeneid. How am I meant to go to sleep right now. I want to read Ursula LeGuin's book about this so bad I might just die.

>111 false-knight: *squish*

You have lovely things to say about this very one-of-my-favorite-things book.

Of course Homer is everywhere in here. Because how could he not be. You don't just choose to write an epic poem about war and setting out to find (a new) home and in a meter that was created for Greek and demonstrably NOT for Latin without, um, doing it because of Homer. (The fact that Vergil (and to a slightly lesser extent Ovid and Lucan) can take such a difficult-for-Latin meter and make the language flipping SING in it just makes my brain so happy.)

And you hit the nail on the head about Aeneas being the reluctant hero, although I would argue that he, in fact, *doesn't* understand what it means. Yes, he realizes what he's supposed to be doing (how could he not when the gods keep coming down in a huff at his epic himbo-ness and poking him back on track?!), but he doesn't *understand* his place in the grander scheme, which is played out in so many little moments: he looks at the temple in Carthage and weeps and is relieved that these people will surely be friendly because look, they know about the war and look, there I am! but in reality it's a temple to Hera and so NOPE he's not the good guy in those friezes; he tries to read the pictures on the temple at the Sibyl's place but she comes back and tugs on his arm and says NO TIME FOR THAT COME ON; he sees his descendants in the underworld, all of whom the reader knows and understands as historical figures from their past, and he pretty much has no idea what's going on with them; he has another back-to-the-future moment with his shield, all that Roman history, which he just looks at, says, "whoa, cool, but huh?" and then literally puts the weight of the future/history of Rome on his back and marches into battle... There is so much unease in the poem, about Aeneas's worthiness (I mean my god he has to *tug* on that golden bough!), and between the poem's role as an encomium to Augustus and all the underlying questioning of Augustus's right to rule. All this on top of Vergil taking on Homer and blowing him right out of the water. Nails it. Completely. (Sorry, I may love this poem more than is customary.)

For scholarship, I would suggest as a good starting point Reading Vergil's Aeneid. Some fantastic stuff in there.

(PS: I asked my students about Cascade. Only one of them knew, but the rest are now *very* curious and will likely youtube it. So we may have sparked a renaissance... (The *all* knew Avril right away, interestingly.))

ETA: Reading the Latin in the hexameter: If you can feel the push and pull going on in something like Eminem's Lose Yourself or Beastie Boys' So What'Cha Want, then you can understand the tension between ictus and accent in Latin hexameter. NBD.

>112 scaifea:

And Virgil's (Vergil's? Big V's?) also standing at the head of this really long and interesting line of Homeric reception in the Middle Ages where claiming a Trojan history for yourself can get really important—mostly in the British Isles, AFAIK, but within Arthurian literature/mythology and medieval histories of Britain and the overlap between those two things, there's this long-running thread of obsession with Troy and Rome because that was an inherited language of talking about power and identity.

Yes yes yes his (un)worthiness!!! Aeneas wants so much to be a hero in the way that he understands heroism, but he's being sat on by the role of Hero that's railroading him into doing all these unheroic things; I think—I think two things about whether or not he understands his role. I think before he goes into the underworld, you're right that he doesn't understand his place, because he still thinks he can get out of it. Once he comes back out (…?) I think he understands but I don't think he's, like, all there; I think when Anchises shows him the mass of yet-to-be Romans including himself, that sight and knowledge are when his Aeneas Role eats him. He's still in there but I think in the tradition of gaining knowledge which only gods and the dead usually have he's had to give up a lot of his own selfhood. And Virgil's looking at that, and the death of Turnus and all the Italians and Trojans and Greeks, and of Dido, and at her curse, and the ending of the line of Arcadia, and then at the power and glory of the empire that will one day emerge from all this, and asking Augustus how much value each has, which is more important? I didn't know until after I read this that he was from Mantua, which I think—again, this is probably Aeneid 101 but I never ended up in that seminar—is probably complicating the Aeneid as well.

RE: hexameter, I listened to a couple recordings and it makes a little more sense but quantitative verse still in general confuses and disorients me, and I will retreat into the warm and safe arms of alliterative verse.

>113 false-knight: Vergil, not Virgil, because his name is, in fact, Vergilius. Plus, it just looks nicer? To me, anyway.

And remember that he leaves the underworld through the false dreams gate. Because of course he does.

Yes to all the Augustus stuff - Vergil's family farm was taken from him as part of Octavian's plan to resettle his veterans with land, but the he also commissions this poem and pulls Vergil into the Maecenas Circle, so there's all sorts of uneasiness there. It's *fascinating.*

One more thing about reading the hexameter and then I'll let go and let gods: Vergil shapes his verses in such fantastic ways, and one of the best is how he gives his main characters theme songs of a sort. Just like Peter and the Wolf or Star Wars, when Aeneas or Juno or Dido come on the scene, the rhythm of the lines change subtly, and each character gets their own beat, so to speak. And he does this *in a meter not suited to Latin.* AMAZING.

I hear Derrida and Foucault... and start to miss my university courses. I thought I'd continue with that kind of reading material. But alone it's just not as much fun.

>114 scaifea: "Vergil's family farm was taken from him as part of Octavian's plan to resettle his veterans with land" that is so close to just a 1:1 correspondence that I'm actually upset. (not actually upset) Does this make Vergil Juno????

That's really neat with the rhythm! It doesn't come across in the Fagles translation, I don't know if anyone's done one that reflects it—I'm not sure it's possible to do in English in a way that's not much less subtle?

>115 PersephonesLibrary: Same… I look at some of my premodern stuff and think, am I actually going to read it without the threat of looking really dumb in a seminar if I don't? One more argument in favor of group reads!

You can always count on me for group reads. I have something by both Foucault and Derrida on my shelves.

>116 false-knight: OoooOOOOooooo, I kind of love the idea of Vergil as Juno, especially as she seems to give in so easily at the end in a really unsatisfactory way. I could like her ending more if we read it as Vergil's concession to the inevitability of Augustus' power and the ultimate futility of his resistance to it...

And no, it's not possible to do that in English. The Latin gives you just enough more freedom to move words around and make them fit the rhythm you need (because inflection) and if you tried that with English you'd end up with gibberish. Vergil also uses that inflection freedom to make his lines sometimes reflect the action. Ex: at the beginning when he has Aeneas's ship surrounded by big waves, the line has the noun/adjective combo for "big waves" one on each end of the line and the word for ship in the middle of the line. So very cool. AND IN A METER NOT MEANT FOR LATIN. See what I mean? Genius.

(Please do tell me just to please for the love of Jove STOP if you're tired of my prattling on.)

>117 PaulCranswick: I mean, I might just watch from the sidelines if it's Derrida, but…

>118 scaifea: The way Jupiter is like "no, I promise, you'll love them! It'll be great, honey!" and she's like "……………………………………k" because at the end of the day he is Jupiter and, like, every story about Hera/Juno is basically one about "well, I can't retaliate against him, not directly, so I have to take out all my anger on his victims." It sucks to be in a world where Jupiter is and you aren't him! Or where Rome is. Even if you get, like, aqueducts.

Ah. For a second I was so caught up in the euphoria of potential trochaic tetrameter that for a minute I lived in a world where translating from a highly-synthetic language to a highly-analytic language is easy. Out of curiosity, what meters work better in Latin? From brief Googling it looks like they snagged most of their meters from Greek and I'd assume those all presented the same problem.

I started at my job last Wednesday! It's a lot of fun, everyone there is very nice (they're also the first new people I've met IRL since, like, last January, so I am kind of at risk of imprinting on all of them like I'm the baby condor at the zoo and they're all the hand puppet the zookeepers use to feed me so I don't imprint on people), and I don't have to spend more than 15 or 20 minutes max at a time actually in the proctoring room. When I'm in there I mostly play the "how many songs do I know that are in ballad meter" or "how much of 'The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald' do I remember" games in my head. The only downside is that I have to get up at like 6 or 6:30 to get there on time.

I'm working through Under Fire by Henri Barbusse at the moment, but don't really like it very much. I'm about 100 pages in and don't like that the narrator is implied to be a character in-story but is never addressed by the other characters at all, and also don't really like the translation. It's interesting as a historical artifact, I guess, but I might give up on it and go do something else with my time.

I'm glad you like your new job, Emery.
Have a great start to the week.

>120 false-knight: That's so great, Emery! I am glad that the the people are so nice! I think that's so important - the working atmosphere influences everything. Enjoy! :)
I am not a morning person either and am basically done if I have to get up before 7 o'clock. Do you have the possibility to read during your commute?

Oh, and I had to google baby condors... they are adorable!

I’m glad the job is going well!

>119 false-knight: Ah, yep, the meters are pretty much all Greek ones, which makes what *all* the Roman poets do pretty impressive (Catullus' nearly-word-for-word translation of Sappho floors me every time, for example).

(re: Rome and aqueducts: You're not going to make me pull out the Monty Python sketch again, are you?)

And congrats on the job!! I'm so glad it's a good one and you have good people/ new friends there!! That's completely wonderful!

>121 SirThomas: Thank you! You too!

>122 PersephonesLibrary: I will! Unfortunately, no, I can't read on the commute—it's a 20-minute drive (without traffic…currently that's not much of an issue but I dread the state reopening because afterwards that freeway will just be a solid mass of car) but at least an hour and a half-long bus ride, because Southern California public transit is not that great, and I'm not much of an audiobooks person. So I use the drive to pick which earworms I'll have for the day and try to read on my lunch break.

Baby condors are great!



>123 drneutron: Thanks! So am I!

>124 scaifea: That's actually kind of funny, they stole/repurposed all the gods and then they stole the meters too…

(Well what else has Rome ever done for them?!)

And thank you!

32: Under Fire, Henri Barbusse, trans. Fitzwater Wray (Casemate Classic War Fiction, 2016; 1916)

Rating: ☆☆☆?

Really my major beef is with the translation; Wray translated this in 1916 or 1917, so there's only so much I can ask, but the dialogue is very, very stilted and his attempts to drop in equivalent English slang to whatever was in the original just feel artificial. I mean honestly for one there probably should've been more cussing even if Wray had to write it all out as f— and s— and so forth. (Maybe it's also a British vs. American English difference—like, if the translation used "mug" instead of "neb" for "face" I'd feel less weirded out?) Also I wasn't sure where to mention this but I feel like it bears noting that early in the book there's a couple uses of the n-word in dialogue and that's fine but god forbid a soldier under bombardment says fuck? So the first third or so, which is the most dialogue-heavy, was rough going for me; after that, there's less chapters that are almost entirely dialogue, and the narrator (who, it's more or less implied, is Barbusse) gets interacted with more by the other characters. The latter part of the book is difficult reading as well, intentionally, because it's an almost unrelieved succession of chapters about the front lines that are straight-up phantasmagorical. Like starting from about chapter 12, "The Portal", it turns from living with bodily misery of the we've-all-got-lice-the-food-sucks-and-it-won't-stop-raining sort to that plus there's corpses everywhere, more all the time, and you're just living with them (12 is also the first chapter where a named character dies) and it's just this landscape of complete bodily dismemberment. There are passages that get full Bosch- or Brueghel-painting on you and, I mean, you expect some of that getting in because it is a WWI book after all but the omnipresence of it wears you out. (And I'm sitting on a couch indoors in southern California reading this! I can put the book down and go outside if I don't want to deal with it, and all these guys could do was, like, shoot themselves in the foot and hope the medical dugout didn't get shelled before they got sent further back.)

So it's not something I think I would really reread unless I was trying to write something about WWI, because I didn't much like the first part and the second part is just emotionally a lot and kind of gross, but it captures very well a particular reaction to the war which is summed up in the last chapter. ""We shall say to ourselves," says one, "'After all, why do we make war?' We don't know at all why, but we can say who we make it for. We shall be forced to see that if every nation every day brings the fresh bodies of fifteen hundred young men to the God of War to be lacerated, it's for the pleasure of a few ringleaders that we could easily count; that if whole nations go to slaughter marshalled in armies inorder that the gold-striped caste may write their princely names in history, so that other gilded people in the same rank can contrive more business, and expand in the way of employees and shops—and we shall see, as soon as we open our eyes, that the divisions between mankind are not what we thought, and those one did believe in are not divisions."" If only, man.

Aaw, little, half-nakey feather ball... 😍

I understand. When I tried audiobooks in the car it was a bit scary - for example I listened to an audioplay and there was one car accident after another in the story. I stopped that quite soon. :) When I change workplace I will have the possibilty to read for 30 minutes in the bus, I am looking forward to that.

>126 false-knight:: Brilliant review! I like the depth you get into your reviews a lot in general!

>127 PersephonesLibrary: Extremely-baby birds are the best, they look like little old men…and then because buzzards and vultures and condors don't grow head or neck feathers they just go right on looking like someone stuck an old man inside a tennis ball. Absolutely top-notch creature design on evolution's part.

Yeah, I can't really manage anything that requires sustained listening concentration while I'm the one driving. So what it always is, is me with my poor breath control hollering along off-key to any given Tri Yann album and having a great time. I love public transit but if I did that on the bus I'd be rightfully thrown out.

Thank you! I like to ramble about the things I read and I'm really glad you like reading them!! :)

33: Stealing Thunder, Alina Boyden (Ace, 2020)

Rating: ☆☆☆

So, I enjoyed reading this—I read it in one day—and, I mean, it's, it is what it is. I liked the setting; the author's not Desi herself but she's lived and worked with hijra and khwaja sira communities (culturally specific Indian and Pakistani gender identities, sometimes considered a "third gender", roughly analogous to trans women / transfeminine people) for years, she's done her research, and insofar as fantasy can be authentic it felt authentic. The Gunpowder Empires except with dragons is a fun enough concept as well, I haven't read the Temeraire series but it seems like it's along the same lines? The writing's kind of repetitive but I was fine with that. The story itself, it's…like, okay:

So the thing is that when you're (X) and there's a First (X) To Do (Y) there's this feeling that the (Y) that gets done has to be The Best (Y) Ever, Everything Everybody Could Want, Completely Unassailable…and Stealing Thunder isn't that. It's the first non-YA* fantasy novel written by a trans woman with a transfeminine main character to be published by a major imprint. That's something! There's also a whole lot of wish-fulfillment, and the thing is cis people have been writing that for decades. Centuries, even! So, you know, seeing trans people get some of that action—Razia is a teen who can do anything, she can dance and ride dragons and fight and climb 200-foot cliffs, she gets the hot rich prince who loves her for who she is, she can protect her found family, she fights for respect from the powerful garbage men who run her world and earns it, she gets her dragon back—I enjoyed it. (And also, the circumstances she's coming from aren't sugarcoated either; content warning in the book for child abuse, transmisogyny, discussion of sexual violence including against children, and outing/the threat thereof being used a whole lot as a plot point**, and a character who's sexually assaulted Razia in the past is someone she ends up working with though I wouldn't really say he's "redeemed" so much as treated as someone who's necessary strategically and Razia doesn't really have enough clout to just get rid of him.) Sometimes you do not want to read the big super-intellectual books that keep you constantly on tenterhooks about whether any of the characters can survive, you want to read about the cool girl who rides dragons and makes people respect her and not confine her to gender roles and falls in instant love with the extremely smitten and extremely hot prince, and I think it's cool that now trans authors are getting in on that. Equality means we have to be allowed to also make stuff that's, like, Just Okay. I'll read the sequel when it's out!

*I mean, I'd hand it to a 15/16-year-old.
**The outing isn't, in this case, outing her as trans, because she's openly a hijra, but revealing her pre-transition identity. I spent a lot of time reading this going, girl, you are not quite as smart as you think you are if you never managed to come up with any sort of cover story about your origins that you could actually stick to. Then again, Razia's seventeen.

Equality means we have to be allowed to also make stuff that's, like, Just Okay.

YES to this. YES. There *is* a pressure to make non-cis/ non-straight/ non-male/ non-white character-driven books PERFECT (and I know I'm guilty of putting that kind of pressure on the books I read, just because I feel the need for representation and I want to cheer that on so much), but to get to a point where these kinds of books have the luxury of being mediocre? I'd happily live in that world.

>130 scaifea: Yeah, and as somebody who grew up on Tumblr in and around a sort of specific social/discursive milieu where Representation as a concept kind of took precedence over everything else in discussions of narrative works, and it was also basically a bunch of overexcited, black-and-white-thinking teens all very eager to overidentify ourselves with the media we consumed, it created this whole mindset of, like, "if it has Representation it's automatically The Best Thing Ever, and if you don't love it then either you hate the group being Represented or the thing is somehow Problematic and Bad Representation." Which is a mindset that I've had to struggle to get out of the past four-to-five years and also just kind of not a good way to approach or enjoy media. (Then I see all these teens on Twitter doing the same thing but with whatever it is the teens these days like and it's like, oh no, time is a flat circle.)

But like I was halfway through the book and having some cringe responses and then something clicked and I was like, oh, this is basically, like, one of those Sarah J. Maas books, would you be reacting like this if it was a cis woman writing a cis heroine? And the answer was, probably but not to this extent. And that sort of helped recalibrate my responses and expectations and I was fully along for the ride. (The gender politics I think were better than the Maas books I've read but I'm not really about to go back and reread the A Court of Nouns and Nouns series for confirmation, once was plenty, thanks.)

Today I was supposed to work an evening shift, which is something they're trying out at the testing center now, but about 5 minutes away from the center I got a call saying they'd canceled it because they're still trying to work out the contracts for the building security. So I went to H-Mart and then the bookstore and then tried to read outside for a bit but it was too windy. And then when I was leaving I found out that something was broken with our car so that its backing-up camera and fuel meter and speedometer don't work anymore, so—if you're a highway patrol officer you have to tell me or it's entrapment—I got to drive home on the freeway without a working speedometer, and then also found out that whatever's broken also meant I couldn't turn off the car. My dad and I did eventually figure out how to turn it off. I think it's the combination meter that's broken? Anyway now we have to figure out if it's worth it to get the meter replaced. I guess this is the law of equivalent exchange or something??? At least it's the second-string car that's a relic of when both my parents had jobs outside the house, so we're not all stranded.

Anyway I'm about half done with the second volume of Medieval Paradigms and not really liking it, and I started on My Sister, the Serial Killer and am very much enjoying that. Also I saw the first volume of the new Animorphs graphic novel and while I'm not going to buy any until the fourth one, where Ax is introduced, it was exciting!

Oh I hope you can get the car repaired cheaply, Emery.
You have now given me the final push to pre-order My Sister, the Serial Kille from my local public library - I am looking forward to it.
One advantage of ebooks is that you can check them out during lockdown.

>133 SirThomas: Fortunately we have found a place that'll fix it for a reasonable amount.

Hooray! I haven't written up the review yet but I really enjoyed the book, I hope you do too! And that is one of the upsides of ebooks, yes, in addition to being portable and impervious to wind.

34: My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite (Anchor Books, 2018)

Rating: ☆☆☆☆(½)

This was a lot of fun to read! It's a very tightly, economically written novel (I was not surprised to find out Braithwaite is a poet—there's a lot of attention paid to the book on a sentence-by-sentence level), and very funny in a dark, acerbic way—honestly, it reads a lot like a Coen Brothers movie, like Fargo or something. Don't go in expecting a thriller, though. The driving force of the novel, the relationship between Korede (older sister, plain, methodical, driven, observant, always second fiddle) and Ayoola (younger sister, very attractive, scatterbrained, no moral compass, keeps murdering her boyfriends), is extraordinarily well-drawn, as Korede's drive to keep her sister safe conflicts with and distorts her sense of her own morality, and the way that plays off their family history and the legacy of their abusive father and Korede's efforts to define a life for herself is really interesting. If I have an issue with the book, it's that a lot of the other characters—their mother, Dr. Tade the love interest, Korede's coworkers—are kind of two-dimensional, and I would have liked Korede to ask Ayoola more about why she keeps murdering her boyfriends. (With her dead father's knife, even!) Then again, maybe part of the point is that that's not something Korede thinks is important. The ending was not what I expected, and gave me some real We Have Always Lived in the Castle vibes, if that's not too much of a spoiler? Anyway, I very much enjoyed it, and I'm interested to see what Braithwaite comes out with next.

>134 false-knight: I am glad to hear that.
>135 false-knight: After your review I am even more excited about the book!

>135 false-knight: I *need* to get round to this one soon.

>136 SirThomas: >137 scaifea: *reckless enablement continues*

35: Medieval Paradigms, volume II: Essays in Honor of Jeremy DuQuesnay Adams, ed. Stephanie Hayes-Healy (Palgrave New Middle Ages, 2005)

Rating: ☆☆

I'm tacking on an entire star solely for Caroline Walker Bynum's chapter, "A Matter of Matter: Two Cases of Blood Cult in the North of Germany in the Later Middle Ages." Almost all the other chapters were incredibly boring to me, which is sad because this volume is the one with the section on religion and devotion. I guess Patrick Geary's chapter on frontier Christianity in the early middle ages was all right, and so was Amelia Rutledge's on masculinity and Arthur in the novels of Bernard Cornwell and Jack Whyte. But, like, everything else was mad boring, I put off finishing this for like a week or 10 days. I'll keep the book around because I don't like having a vol. 1 without a vol. 2, but to be honest I'd be willing to give both volumes away if I scanned a couple of the chapters I liked.

36: The Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius / Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, trans. Victor Watts (Penguin, 1999; 524 CE)

Rating: ☆☆☆????

I mostly read this because I was supposed to have read it for a seminar on medieval English literature in undergrad and I didn't and so was kind of lost whenever we had to talk about consolatio as a genre. So reading this did at least clarify some of the philosophical background to the Pearl poem (which, tangent, but I think that's one of the most beautiful poems in the English language, for a permissive definition of English), and I liked the poetry interludes well enough. I guess the translation was fine? It made sense to me, but Boethius isn't really advancing a view of morality or justice that I find particularly convincing or appealing. Like I can get why he'd be thinking that the whole virtue-is-its-own-reward, evil-is-its-own-punishment thing works for him, but it doesn't work for me. I still don't like Neoplatonists. I guess if writing this helped him while he was waiting to be executed, so much the better.

37: The Trojan War Museum and Other Stories, Ayşe Papatya Bucak (Norton, 2019)

Rating: ☆☆☆☆

A fine collection of stories; I liked the first, "The History of Girls", the best, and was a little bit underwhelmed by the title story, but the vast majority were well-written and moving. Overall I don't know that any of them are really going to, like, stick in my brain forever, but I am glad I read them and I had a good time doing it. A lot of them are about real people—Yusuf Ismail, the wrestler; a lightly fictionalized version of Aurora Mardiganian, a survivor of the Armenian Genocide; Halil Bey (Halil Şerif Pasha), a diplomat and art collector; William Schlumberger, one of the operators of the Mechanical Turk. Bucak's got a very dreamy writing style, despite occasionally dipping into very difficult subject matter (like the Armenian Genocide, which occupies a lot of the background of "The Dead"), and it all felt a little bit unreal or maybe heightened-reality but by the time I read it I'd been sitting in direct sunlight for several hours so maybe I was just kind of loopy.

I might still be a little loopy, because today what I ended up doing was going to the nearest walk-through vaccination site with a folding chair and a backpack full of snacks and sitting in line for six hours with everyone else who didn't have an appointment waiting to see if there were any leftovers. There were!! I got my first dose of the Pfizer shot, I go back in three weeks for the second one, and I didn't have to go on 10 different websites and refresh them a billion times to set up an appointment! I did spend six hours sitting in direct sunlight, though (I had a hat on but still), and got my arms and hands sunburned pretty bad. But, you know, I got my reading done, I got my daily vitamin D intake, and I got that sweet sweet vax juice, so it's a win in my book.

Yay for the shot!
All the best for you.

Woot!! Congrats on the vaccine!!

I love the mask, by the way!

Oh my goodness, what kind of car do you drive when you can't turn it off because the meters break down?
Hopefully the repair won't be to expensive and it can be easily fixed!

Awesome mask and congratulations on the shot! Very good news!

I haven't read My Sister, the serial killer yet - but I have read Braithwaite's latest book Das Baby ist meins! It was a very interesting read and reminded me of Sartre's Huis Clos. You might enjoy that, too!

Have a lovely week, Emery!

>142 drneutron: Thanks! It's technically an item of League of Legends cosplay, but I don't play League and likely never will, so I'm always a little afraid that someone will try to talk to me about it and I'll be revealed as a fake gamer. On the other hand it's glow in the dark and has a really good wire nosepiece so my glasses hardly ever get fogged up.

>143 PersephonesLibrary: '07 Prius! It's apparently just, like, a thing that happens to them, and once I got it home we did find out how to turn it off, it was just kind of an unintuitive process. And we did get it fixed! I'm still not going to try and drive it to work any time soon.

I saw you reviewed that! It does look pretty interesting, I'll scope it out once it's in print over here!

OK there's a lot to work through here—

38: The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, Roberto Calasso, trans. Tim Parks (Penguin, 2019; 1988)

Rating: ☆☆☆½

The writing was very vivid, it's a generally good sort of "are you into Greek mythology? Try this!" book, and I liked some of his conclusions and thoughts but on the whole it felt a lot like he kept being suggest-ive without really having a suggestion, just sort of amorphously waving his hands and saying "this sure means…something!" Also it felt kind of weird about women and as a staunch member of the Helen Defense Squad I am going to chuck him down a well.

39: Stasis in the Medieval West? Questioning Change and Continuity, ed. Michael D.J. Bintley, Martin Locker, Victoria Symons, Mary Wellesley (Palgrave New Middle Ages, 2017)

Rating: ☆☆☆

Honestly, I got more excited by the introduction than by any of the essays. Medieval approaches to time/past/the future are, like, kind of my Thing; unfortunately none of the essays really grabbed me much (and also they were basically all only about England, and some of them—especially the one on the Franklin's Tale—really felt like a stretch of the concept of "stasis".) The only one I really, really liked was Michael Shapland's chapter on Anglo-Saxon (sic) churches and concepts of eternity, and at the end of it he flat-out admits that he isn't saying anything new.

Monday through today my parents and I were visiting my little brother, who's up in Davis and almost done with college, and also some other family in the Sacramento area, distanced masked etc. So Monday and today were almost entirely taken up with driving, and I spent most of that reading; this specific book was also me trying to see if I could finish one before we got through the Grapevine. (I did, mostly because of all the traffic around LA.) (Report from the I-5, for those interested: the "CONGRESS-CREATED DUST BOWL / WE HATE PELOSI" signs have all been replaced with "BUILD MORE DAMS / WE HATE GOVERNOR NEWSOM" signs.)

40: Palgrave Advances in the Crusades, ed. Helen J. Nicholson (Palgrave Advances, 2005)

Rating: ☆☆☆

Basically just an overview of where major topics in studies of the Crusades stood in 2005. Overall it was fairly interesting, although some of the chapters spent so long doing set-up that they barely managed to get around to what the advances had been. I did learn things, such as "William Urban thinks the Crusades were a "moral cause" and crusaders were "peacekeepers" and this chapter's author really wants to see him get pantsed and dragged around the track by Russian and Baltic historians". The chapter on gender theory was unfortunately not as good as I wanted it to be.

41: 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, Charles C. Mann (Vintage, 2011)

Rating: ☆☆☆☆

This was a really fascinating book; the only reason I didn't give it five stars was that I'd have liked maybe a little more explicit analysis of the development of (racial) capitalism. Really what I want to do is go through his footnotes for all his sources on Ming China and read those, because the parts of the book about China and about Fujian and the Philippines were super interesting.

42: The Unwomanly Face of War, Svetlana Alexievich, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (Penguin, 2017; 1985)

Rating: ☆☆☆☆☆

God, this book was absolutely wrenching. It's a collection of interviews with women who fought in the Soviet army in WW2 (and also women who did laundry for the army, or worked in military hospitals, or fought in partisan brigades, or…), about their experiences in wartime and in civilian life after the war. I don't have anything intelligent that I think I can say about it—if "hero" is ever an appropriate word or non-dehumanizing concept, it ought to be for these women. I think everyone should read it if they can handle it.

43: The Lady in the Lake (Philip Marlowe, #4), Raymond Chandler (Penguin, 2011; 1944)

Rating: ☆☆☆½

I needed a palate cleanser, spent 5 minutes digging around in my backpack realizing that because of the order I'm reading books in I'd failed to bring anything suitably escapist, and settled for this. I feel about it about the same way I do about The Big Sleep, although this one's somewhat less weird about women; it was satisfying, moved at a good clip, and had a lot of good lines. I kind of wish that less of the twist was just dumped on us at the end—it was foreshadowed well enough but there was just this sudden big lump of exposition where I was like, why isn't anyone interrupting him to be like WHAT?

44: Time Song: Journeys in Search of a Submerged Land by Julia Blackburn

Rating: ☆☆½

I wanted to like this more than I did, but it was just too neither-fish-nor-fowl for me. Like, there just wasn't enough of any one thing for the whole book to click together. If it'd been only about the archaeology of Doggerland (the "submerged land" in question, an area between the Netherlands and the UK currently under the North Sea) and, like, how people carry that out, I'd have liked it more, if it'd been only a travelogue, I'd have liked it more, if it'd been more introspective, I'd have liked it more. But it wasn't. Also, this feels mean to say, but the "Time Song" poems to me just read like a joke that made the rounds on Tumblr for years about how the way to write deep-sounding poetry fast was to write a normal sentence in all lowercase with line breaks at random intervals. I didn't feel like they, or the pictures, added anything to the experience.

Also we saw this incredible water tower (???) around Tejon Ranch. FRUIT WIZARD

>146 false-knight: Excellent reviews, as always!

I really want to love Chandler's stuff but just can't quite seem to manage it. The women stuff is just...ugh.

LOVE the Fruit Wizard!

*Does secret official Helen Defense Squad handshake*

>148 scaifea: Yeah, the like misogyny and general weirdness about women is kind of endemic to the whole genre I guess; Chandler's not as bad about it all the time as some, and Lady in the Lake isn't as bad about it as The Big Sleep, but it's still, like, dude why are you like this.

The Fruit Wizard was the highlight of the trip. Who cares about "seeing" my "family"?? All I want to see is wizards.

*Helen Defense Squad handshake right back atcha*

45: Other Voices, Other Rooms, Truman Capote (Penguin, 2004; 1948)

Rating: ☆☆

I got this because one of the hosts of the podcast Bad Gays really, really loves Capote, and In Cold Blood was pretty good, and so I thought I'd give it a try. I guess some people like this? It feels silly to say this about a sub-200 page book but there were so many words. I just did not like how it was written at all, it was this big overheated pile of not-much. Occasionally I liked it, but as the book went on the prose just got more and more wearying. Also it felt like the way Capote's trying to handle racism got undercut a bit by his descriptions of the black characters.

>149 false-knight: Yeah, you're right about it being characteristic to the genre, I think, and that stinks because otherwise it's a type of novel I'd adore. Gah.

Giant wizards painted on structures will always trump time with family. It is the way.

>145 false-knight: I just found your thread this morning. Your reviews are quite interesting. For your Prius problem if you hold down the power button for 30 seconds the car will turn off. When you turn the car back on the speedometer and such should come right on. We have an '05 and an '08 Prius that have had this same problem.

>145 false-knight: I am just glad you're safe. :)

>146 false-knight: Woow, impressive reading progress!

>147 false-knight: That's so cool! There would be so many places that could be "prettied up" (if that's a word at all) with illustrations and street art!

>147 false-knight: That image reminds me of a storage tank in Rotterdam harbor. The original name of the owner was "Pakhoed" = "packed hat", so it was painted as a giant hatbox. With the new name it makes less sense.

>154 FAMeulstee: Well, but they still have got the hat logo... so it partly fits. :)

Have a lovely Easter weekend, Emery! I hope you are doing well!

>151 scaifea: Yeah… I'd be interested in searching out some neo-noir, maybe, but I don't know where to start with it. I've got Devil in a Blue Dress?

"Cool wizard" is an endangered and valuable species of art, IMO; I'm gonna apply for like a grant to fund people who want to get stoned out of their minds and paint some incredible wizards on vans or anywhere else they feel like.

>152 SilverWolf28: Thanks! Yeah, what we ended up doing was putting the keyfob physically inside the, uh…keyfob hole? the thing it goes in…which let us turn it off. It's fixed now but I'm still not gonna try and drive it to work any time soon.

>153 PersephonesLibrary: It's a looong drive from here to Sacramento and aside from the occasional cool wizard there isn't really a lot to look at for most of it, so I had a whole lot of time to read. Also, yep, prettied up is a word! And you're right, there's a lot of places that could do with it (on our Easter Zoom call, my great-uncle was talking about this new landmark thing they're going to build in San Jose, and I was like, how did that win the contest?)

>154 FAMeulstee: Oh, I love it! Novelty architecture!! Did they sell hats, too?

>155 PersephonesLibrary: Thank you—I hope your Easter weekend went well! :)

46: Ravenna: Capital of Empire, Crucible of Europe, Judith Herrin (Princeton University Press, 2020)

Rating: ☆☆☆☆

When I got this the extremely nice guy at the bookstore said "Yeah, I was wondering how long you'd be able to keep away from this; make sure to give me a book report" so I moved it up in the reading order. Herrin doesn't write a style of history that I'm, like, super into—she tends more towards biographical-vignette stuff, IIRC it's the same with her book about Byzantium—and that's exacerbated a little by the fact that there's just not a whole lot of documentation to work from about Ravenna in this time period. That said, I think she did a good job laying out Ravenna's weird little couple centuries in the spotlight in terms of like, why it happened, what did it mean in relation to visions of empire, what part did Ravenna play in the adaptation of what "Roman Empire" meant under the circumstances. Which is a part of history that really doesn't get its fair share of sincere popular-history treatments, so I'm glad she wrote it. Also, the illustration plates are really nice, which helps because a lot of her point is kind of art-historical, or at least argued through an art-historical lens.

47: The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler (Penguin, 2011; 1953)

Rating: ☆½

There are at least 150 pages too much of this book. Like, you can do social criticism and a mystery novel at the same time but I don't think Chandler integrated those two things well and so you end up with this awful overlong middle section that's basically Philip Marlowe yelling at the Chandler self-insert to do better as a person.* There is an upper limit to how long I want to spend with Marlowe's voice in my brain, this book surpassed it, I do not want to deal with the way this narrative voice handles women or domestic violence or Latinos at that length (I spent more time than I wanted to thinking, wow, that's a way to talk about Mexicans! And are you going to stop calling the guy who's been very assertive about being Chilean a Mexican?) Also, the ending is super implausible, because everything else aside firing a blank at someone's head at point-blank range will still kill them. It was—I mean, there's a type of novel, to me probably best exemplified by Tender Is the Night, where my primary response is "jeez, I'm glad we have no-fault divorce", and to me this is "jeez, I'm glad we have therapy, please stop repeating yourself now".

Also, this made me lose some patience with Penguin as a publisher, because in this reissue nobody fixed the Spanish! There's all these mistakes made by ostensible native speakers—someone "es ocupado" instead of "está ocupado", dude says "no entendido" instead of "no entiendo", Marlowe calls a butcher shop a "chanceria" instead of a carnicería, there's probably more I didn't catch because my Spanish is super rudimentary but, like, come on. (The "chanceria" thing really bugged me because, like, OK, it's 1953 so no Google Translate and maybe Chandler legitimately doesn't know anyone who can speak Spanish, but dude you are in LA and if you just get in your damn car and drive east on Pico long enough you will find a carnicería and it will say carnicería on it oh my GOD.)

*You know where I saw this done better? Samurai Gourmet. A TV show about a Japanese retiree who imagines a Toshiro Mifune-alike ronin showing him how to get over himself and order a beer at lunch.

48: Bestiary, K-Ming Chang (One World, 2020)

Rating: ☆☆☆☆½

This was a really interesting book! It was way more magical realism than I was expecting getting in, and is also probably the textbook definition of "a lot going on"—it's about generational narratives, generational trauma, generational violence, generational generating, it's definitely something that if you're bored or frustrated with mainstream diaspora novels I'd say to give a try. Throughout the novel there's this sense of the deficiencies and also the capabilities of language as a tool that I thought was really effective, and to be honest I'm a little blown away that this is Chang's first book? I found this interview with the author that I think unpacks a lot of what I found really enjoyable and engaging about the book. Probably my main issue with the book is that there's a lot of bodily fluids talk and sometimes it got to be a little much for me. I'm definitely going to look into her short story collection whenever it's out.

Last week was really tiring; four days (got Wednesday off for Cesar Chavez Day, perks of state employment) of getting up at 6 AM to do a job where I'm not allowed to do anything more interesting than write as much of a song as I can remember on post-it notes for most of it kind of drained out all my posting energies. Also we're getting the house fumigated for termites so packing up all the stuff that can be damaged by the gas is kind of a pain. But I get shot #2 on Thursday and by early or mid-May we'll have a house full of vaccinated people and presumably empty of termites (and also of the persistent cricket infestation?) so that'll be nice!

Oh! And!! A thing I learned how to do last week was rudimentary bookbinding—my dad used to do some, and he showed me how. (He got about as excited as he did when I mentioned a couple weeks ago wanting to try and make lap cheong at home; bookbinding, unlike home-curing meats, does not make my mom shout ABSOLUTELY NOT from wherever she is in the house, so.)



It wasn't anything especially fancy, but now I have the free software (if you're on Mac and are interested: Cheap Impostor!) and know where the shoebox full of bookbinding equipment is.



Facing-page translation!! Without horrible difficulty!

Hi, Emery! Missing you here and hoping you're doing okay.

Just stopping by to wish you a wonderful weekend, Emery.
I hope everything is well with you.

Hi Emery, how are you doing? A lot of work? Have a lovely start of the week!

I'm doing good! Fell off the posting train. Gonna do my best to catch up and get back on. Amber, Thomas, Käthe, thanks so much for stopping by! :)

I can't remember the dates or order I read anything in for the last month, so I'm just going to separate everything out into broad genre categories and go from there.

Nonfiction:

49: The Leveller Revolution: Radical Political Organisation in England, 1640–1650, John Rees (Verso, 2016)

Rating: n/a

His argument about the place of the Levellers in the English Civil War was, as far as I can remember, convincingly argued, but I realized about 50 pages in that I don't know nearly enough about the English Civil War to actually be able to follow the plot, so I was fairly lost the entire time as to what was going on and as such can't really rate it.

50: Love of Country: A Hebridean Journey, Madeleine Bunting (Granta, 2016)

Rating: ☆☆☆☆☆

Bunting did a really great job of illuminating the complexity of the Hebrides and of their place in Scottish, English, and British-more-generally (self-)mythology and psyche. "Troubled and troubling" is a cliché but, you know, they are that kind of place, especially when you're concerned about the ways that the Hebrides and Hebridean people have both been acted upon by and acted with English(-and-British-more-generally) colonialism.

51: The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic, Mike Duncan (Public Affairs, 2017)

Rating: ☆☆☆½

This might sound like a knock on the book, and it's not, but you can really tell Duncan's a podcaster. The chapters are really self-contained in their, like, narrative structure, he's an engaging writer, and it works very well as an introduction to the time period. On the other hand, he doesn't do a lot of diving into social history or archaeology. (To me this feels like another artifact of podcasting—I listen to a different one, not one of Duncan's, whose host tends to get really into sources and background, with the effect that he's been running it since 2014, it's ostensibly on the Wars of the Reformation, and he's still in the high medieval. Granted he has a day job but DUDE.)

52: Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, Edward W. Said (Penguin, 2004; 1972)

Rating: ☆☆☆☆

When Said made his argument, it wasn't entirely new, but he's a very lucid and skilled writer; even though the things he's saying are even less new to me, he still very much held my attention. My issue is not really so much with him as with kind of the turn he inaugurated in critical thought towards this, like, idea that literary criticism as a framework can/should be applied to the rest of the world for fruitful results. IDK. I read this article, which I definitely don't agree with on all points (dude overstates his case a lot at points, and also seems wayyy more invested than necessary in saving Marx from being accused of racism), I mean, we're not here for my takes on The Immortal Science And Can You Successfully Apply It To The Year 1200 so I'm not getting into that, but, my take: pre-colonial-era European attitudes re: MENA weren't coming from a position of power over those places and didn't themselves create the circumstances required for colonialism but did provide/help to provide the rhetorical framework and retroactive justification for colonialist actions in the same way that, like, white Southerners in the 1800s liked to talk about ~chivalry~. Which I guess is maybe a middle ground between that article and the book?

53: The European Other in Medieval Arabic Literature and Culture: Ninth-Twelfth Century AD, Nizar F. Hermes (Palgrave New Middle Ages, 2012)

Rating: ☆☆☆☆

Honestly when I opened this I was fully in the mood of "well I guess I have to eat my vegetables ugh" because in 2019 I went bonkers on the Palgrave Black Friday sale and am still faced with the consequences of Why Did I Think I Wanted This. And then I was like hey, actually, this is a lot of fun and it gets way deeper into various medieval Arabic perceptions of Europe than anything else I've read. I started getting kind of itchy during the last chapter, because it felt like it just turned into a literature review. Also, with this and with Orientalism, both authors kept bringing up Bernard Lewis as someone (specifically, as a racist dummy who doesn't know what he's talking about) that they were responding to and I kept going, I've heard that name, where have I heard that name, and then realized he was probably assigned reading one week in my college seminar with my least favorite professor and just kind of cringed into the couch.

53.5: Battlefronts Real and Imagined: War, Border, and Identity in the Chinese Middle Period, ed. Don J. Wyatt (Palgrave New Middle Ages, 2008)

Rating: DNF

I read the table of contents and three pages of the introduction and said to myself, the font is really small and I don't have the background knowledge to really get anything out of this and I don't want to read it. So I didn't.

54: The Scramble for China: Foreign Devils in the Qing Empire, 1832–1914, Robert Bickers (Penguin, 2011)

Rating: ☆☆☆☆

This was very engagingly written and I liked how he approached the emotional and political complexities that a lot of Chinese people had to handle in how they engaged with foreign encroachment, and there was a lot of interesting stuff about the things that Christianity came to mean in China during the 1800s. I had an interesting talk with my mom about how Bickers tries to counter the mainstream modern Chinese narrative about the Century of Humiliation and the culpability of the Qing government and how that plays into the popularity of the Ming era as a setting for fantasizing about the untouched empire (I'm watching Sleuth of the Ming Dynasty with her and she's editing someone's incredibly long book about Mt. Tai and the goddess Bìxía Yuánjūn, so it's on her mind) even though they were just as feudal. My big issue is he tends to sometimes skip over things that feel like they're probably important.

It was also a bit funny to read a book that was so completely unconcerned with anything at all the US was doing re: China at the time. I kept going like "where's us?" and then remembering I got this in England and books have audiences.

55: The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present, David Treuer (Riverhead, 2019)

Rating: ☆☆☆☆½

So in histories of Jewish people and especially of Ashkenazim there's a school called "historia lacrimosa" which is broadly that Jewish history is foremost a history of suffering and more narrowly that European Jewish history is kind of an inevitable descent towards the Holocaust. And Treuer (Ojibwe, Leech Lake Band) is responding to a similar tendency in histories of indigenous Americans, which he identifies with Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee as this sort of "the worst has happened, history has ended for Native Americans", and he says, well, yes, 1500–1900 were, bluntly, apocalyptic for Native Americans—how did various tribes respond to that, while it was happening, and how did that shape what individual tribes, and what Native Americans as intertribal groups or as nascent pan-Indian coalitions, did and were/are capable of doing afterwards as dynamic people and communities? So like, taking 1890 and the Wounded Knee Massacre as the nadir of Native life in America, he moves back and forth around these periods of time and the responses and actions Native people took and conversations he's had with his relatives and other people in his tribe and members of other tribes. Sometimes the book gets a little baggy about time periods, but on the whole I'd definitely recommend it.

OoooOOOOoooo Said. Blast from the grad school past, that. I have a soft spot for the guy.

(It's great to see you back!)

Fiction:

56: Famous Men Who Never Lived, K. Chess (Tin House, 2018)

Rating: ☆☆☆½

In all honesty I remember very little about this book, which isn't a great sign. I didn't hate it and I liked that Chess creates an alternate universe for the protagonists to have come from that isn't really better or worse than our own (except, I guess, for the nuclear disasters that are why they came to ours; oops and RIP to Poughkeepsie), but I didn't really have strong feelings about it and will probably give it away.

57: The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water, Zen Cho (Tor, 2020)

Rating: ☆☆☆

I liked how Cho wrote dialogue and some of the character interactions but the plot didn't feel terribly well thought-through. This could be a fine two-part episode of, like, a decent TV show, which is what it felt like.

58: The Black God's Drums, P. Djèlí Clark (Tor, 2018)

Rating: ☆☆☆½

Returning to the "two-part episode of decent TV show" comment except to say that I liked Clark's writing better in that case than Cho's; it felt more cinematic.

59: The Haunting of Tram Car 015, P. Djèlí Clark (Tor, 2019)

Rating: ☆☆☆½

I like the universe Clark is working with in the Ministry of Alchemy (etc) stories a lot, and the writing was good, but the jokes didn't really land for me a lot—Clark seemed to be aiming towards some vaguely Nigel Bruce-as-Dr. Watson stuff with Agent Youssef that I just personally don't have a lot of patience for. If that's toned down in the full-length novel that just came out I'll look into it.

60: Ring Shout; Or, Hunting Ku Kluxes in the End Times, P. Djèlí Clark (Tor, 2020)

Rating: ☆☆☆½–☆☆☆☆

Of the three Clark novellas I read, this one had, I think, the most grounded and well-defined voice and the best conduction of set-pieces. I also appreciated that the eldritch hate-beast fueling the resurgence of the KKK wasn't, itself, racist, if that doesn't sound too weird?—the alternative is that this terrible Lovecraftian entity that views humans and human emotions as basically despicable yet tasty little M&Ms to eat a fistful of when the mood strikes is also like "yeah but I hate black people specifically", which is…petty. Also I was a little confused over whether Cordy/Chef was being presented as a trans woman or as a butch lesbian who passed as male to join the army, or whether this was an alternate history where black women could join the US Army on the frontlines. Anyway if you're looking to read anything P. Djèlí Clark has written, I'd recommend this the most.

61: Piranesi, Susanna Clarke (W.W. Norton, 2020)

Rating: ☆☆☆☆

Okay so if you want to read this at all don't read the spoilers or any reviews of it. Go in as blind as possible.

HEY GIRL I AM INVESTIGATING ACADEMIC MYSTERIES / GIRL HELP A MAGICIAN-PROFESSOR HAS TRAPPED ME IN A LABYRINTH-PLANE OF PLATONIC FORMS / HELP GIRL I AM AMNESIAC AND DRIFTING OUT TO SEA IN THE TIDES OF THE LABYRINTH

I had fun with this book! I had expected it to be much more Renaissance-inflected than it is, so I was a little alarmed at the first appearance of a smartphone. I really liked Piranesi's narration, even though it could get a little frustrating sometimes to be like "dude, he's OBVIOUSLY EVIL"; I loved the way he found beauty and intention in his environment and read his surroundings as constantly speaking to themselves and to him. Also the part where it's ambiently revealed that the Other is the son of the titular Magician from The Magician's Nephew was fun—the House is very much one of the worlds-between-worlds like the garden with the pools in Lewis's book.

62: All Fires the Fire, Julio Cortázar, trans. Suzanne Jill Levine (New Directions, 2020; 1966)

Rating: ☆☆☆☆

I think my favorite stories out of this were "The Southern Thruway," about people forming a society while being stuck in a months-long traffic jam, "The Island at Noon," about a flight attendant who fixates on a small Greek island, and "All Fires the Fire," which moves back and forth between a day at the gladiator fights and a modern couple; I also liked "Meeting". "All Fires the Fire" had this wonderful fluidity between the two time periods and situations that I enjoyed, and "The Southern Thruway" gave me anxiety (if I was trapped on the 805 for more than, like, two hours, I would just lie down and die.)

63: Thornfruit (The Gardener's Hand, #1), Felicia Davin (Etymon, 2018)

Rating: ☆☆☆

I picked this up mostly because I really liked the names. The rest of it I was just fairly meh about. It's not bad, it's just not really something I liked, and I don't really care to find the sequels.

64: The Enchanted, Rene Denfeld (Harper, 2020; 2014)

Rating: ☆½–☆☆

A lot of other people really like this, and I guess that's their prerogative, but I thought it was just kind of dreck. I didn't like the narration, the whole thing felt overdone and cheesy and gloopy, and I just didn't feel any actual anger from any of the characters, ever, because if it was there it got drowned in the narration, it was just stupid and relentlessly mystical. Occasionally there was some striking imagery but it wasn't nearly enough to come even close to saving this thing. Also, there is a lot of discussion of sexual abuse, including against very young children.

65: Notes from Underground, Fyodor Dostoevsky, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (Vintage, 1994; 1864)

Rating: N/A

I feel peer-pressured into not rating this terribly but literally all I got out of it was a headache, so no rating.

66: The Archive of Alternate Endings, Lindsey Drager (Dzanc, 2019)

Rating: ☆☆☆☆☆

It's unironically really great to be reading a book and have to stop in the middle of it to sternly remind yourself not to have hysterics on the Starbucks patio! It's about Hansel and Gretel and sibling bonds and closets and the different things people take from a recurrent narrative and comets and I had to keep being like I know everyone's weird because of the pandemic but you still should try not to sob in public, self, put the book down. I'm not going to be able to actually do justice to it in a review, I don't think; it's sub-200 pages just go read it.

67: The Death of Vivek Oji, Akwaeke Emezi (Riverhead, 2020)

Rating: ☆☆☆☆½

This didn't quite Get At Me the way Freshwater did, but I still loved it a lot. The gradual shifts in what, exactly, a kind of story you think it's going to be, in terms of how it's about Vivek and Vivek's family, I thought was really well done, and just on a prose level I love Emezi's writing.

68: The Echo Wife, Sarah Gailey (Tor, 2021)

Rating: ☆☆☆☆

This was a well-done psychological thriller—I haven't read, like, Gone Girl or anything but I think if you liked that you'd like this. Gailey handles the horror undercurrents really well, like the way the main character thinks about what she's actually doing as the head of this cloning lab (e.g. the "conditioning" of the clones in order for them to work as body doubles), and I was absolutely not expecting the twist 2/3 or 3/4 of the way through. Yeeow.

69: Hear Our Defeats, Laurent Gaudé, trans. Alison Anderson (Europa, 2019; 2016)

Rating: ☆☆☆☆☆

I really loved this book, the way it treats History as this devouring and devoured-by-us force, this sort of thing you have to feed in order to understand yourself that also destroys you somehow to do so. Anderson's translation was very well-done—I tend to have issues with things translated from French to English, I don't know why, but I didn't with this book, which was gratifying. I also thought it was interesting that he chose U.S. Grant and the Civil War as one of his temporal strands (the others being the modern-day plot, Hannibal's invasion of Europe, and Haile Selassie in the war with Italy); like, on the one hand, one of the first "modern" wars, on the other…just a bit of an odd choice for a French dude, I guess.

Also, one thing: a character is stated to be from rural or possibly small-suburban Minnesota, and is also stated to speak with a Southern drawl. There is a distinct regional Minnesotan accent. It's not a Southern drawl. It's "Oh ya hey the snow was yea high and he come up the back way!" (…course i don't know nothin bout that…)

70: I, Claudius, Robert Graves (Penguin, 2006; 1934)

Rating: ☆☆☆

I think Graves succeeded in writing a book that really feels like it's of the time it's about, which is not a negligible achievement, and sometimes he was very funny. That said, I think there was just too much taking his primary sources and the attitudes of his primary sources at face value, or maybe sharing some of those attitudes, with the result that the book ends up being really weird about women and gay people. Also the first half is like this sustained character assassination of Livia? I spent a lot of time being like…okay Suetonius.

71: Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi (Vintage, 2017)

Rating: ☆☆☆☆

I would've liked more time with some of the characters, especially later in the book; that said, this definitely lived up to the hype for me. I thought that the way she used family unity or separation as a throughline was very deftly handled—it could easily have become way too heavily signaled, and Gyasi avoided that—in addition to the other fire-and-water themes, and also, the first paragraph is a banger. She really stuck the landing, too, and I think I'm going to go look for her next book when I get a chance.

72: The Good Soldier Schweik, Jaroslav Hašek, trans. Paul Selver (Penguin, 1965; 1930)

Rating: ☆☆☆

Funny a lot of the time, but after a while of reading it would get really wearing, and it was easy to tell that Selver had cut big chunks out while he was translating (or just started giving up 2/3 of the way through, which, relatable), and sometimes he'd refuse to footnote-translate some dialogue from German or Hungarian and that was annoying. Maybe someday I'll look for a less-abridged version.

73: Master of Poisons, Andrea Hairston (Tor, 2020)

Rating: DNF

I got about 100 pages into it, said "oh man the next 400 pages are all gonna be written like this," and quit. Not bad but just stylistically absolutely not to my taste; the narration is really weird about what it chooses to put emphasis on. If you liked Black Leopard Red Wolf and want to read something kind of similar, or if you read a content warning list for Black Leopard Red Wolf and decided to skip it, this might work for you.*

*Note: I gave up 100 pages in and can't warn for anything getting super-duper dark past that point so if Master of Poisons is actually that dark, sorry.

74: Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston (Virago, 2018; 1937)

Rating: ☆☆☆☆☆

OH MY GOD. I was SO mad nobody made me read this in high school already, but also "made to read in high school" is a terrible fate for a book this good, this, like, luxuriant. I was just blown away, I don't even know, I'm really glad I didn't finish it in the employee break room, I had to just sit on the couch reading the last paragraph like 10 times having an emotional crisis. This is already in the top 5 of 2021. I'm kind of mad I have all these other books to read before I can let myself reread it.

75: Goodbye to Berlin, Christopher Isherwood (Vintage, 1989; 1939)

Rating: ☆☆½–☆☆☆

Not terrible but more of interest for the time it was written in than anything that really goes on in it. Eh.

76: The Shadowed Sun (The Dreamblood, #2), N. K. Jemisin (Orbit, 2012)

Rating: ☆☆☆☆

The Dreamblood series is definitely my favorite of Jemisin's books, and it took me literally forever to find this one for whatever reason, so I had to look up a summary of The Killing Moon before I started. Honestly, this is at heart kind of a traditional fantasy in terms of narrative, but I did love / love-to-hate the characters (sometimes both at once, cough cough Wanahomen) and the setting and worldbuilding is a lot of fun. And, you know, nothing really wrong with a well-executed exiled-prince-returns fantasy plotline.

77: Jackalope Wives and Other Stories, T. Kingfisher (Argyll, 2017)

Rating: ☆☆☆☆☆

Man, I love T. Kingfisher / Ursula Vernon. The only other full thing of hers I've read is Digger, and a couple of these short stories beforehand ("Jackalope Wives" and "Pocosin"), but she has this very charming, practical voice and a really good hand for sensory detail in a setting, and a lot of fun mythological ideas. My favorites were "Wooden Feathers," "That Time With Bob and the Unicorn," "The Tomato Thief" (I want to know more about train gods Right Now, Ma'am), and "Pocosin". Loaned it to my mom, who's having trouble with reading block and wanted some short stories.

78: The Unspoken Name (The Serpent Gates, #1), A. K. Larkwood (Tor, 2020)

Rating: ☆☆☆☆½

This scratched an itch for me that I think Gideon the Ninth did for a lot of other people, in that it was exactly a kind of fantasy I'd been looking for (and there are also some similarities, but this isn't where I want to talk about my Opinions the Ninth). I really liked the wry turns the narration took, I liked that it shared with The Raven Tower the concept of "rocks with divine personality", I thought the portals were cool and the worldbuilding was really fun, I was very much along for the ride with the plot. It sort of meanders a bit, but I was cool with that because I was just having fun with the characters. Definitely gonna get the sequel.

>164 scaifea: Hi!! It's good to be back, I'm gonna hit up the other threads when it's…not 5 AM.

He is a good author! I want to look up what else he's written.

Congratulations on reaching 75, Emery!

>165 false-knight: Congratulations on reaching 75, Emery!

Poetry:

79: The Peace of Wild Things, Wendell Berry (Penguin, 2018)

Rating: ☆☆☆½

I sort of vacillated between really liking some poems and going "man, if I wanted to read Frost, I'd go read Frost," so. My favorite was probably "The Farmer and the Sea".

80: 1919, Eve L. Ewing (Haymarket, 2019)

Rating: ☆☆☆☆☆

This really hit hard; Ewing's a very powerful poet, and she has an incredible range both in style and substance. My favorites were "True Stories about the Great Fire," "Exodus 5," "Jump / Rope," which I heard her read aloud once and which has stuck to me since, and "The Day of Undoing."

81: New Hampshire, Robert Frost (Vintage, 2019; 1923)

Rating: ☆☆☆☆–☆☆☆☆½

I brought the copy I'd been meaning to read to my grandmother's house (everyone involved is fully vaxxed don't worry) along with the other books I was on at the time and she stole it. (This happens a lot with Nana, I had to hide Homegoing under an old newspaper so she wouldn't take it too.) So I had to get another copy. I didn't like the titular poem at all, to be honest, but I did like the rest quite a bit.

Juvenile literature:

82: Howl's Moving Castle (World of Howl, #1), Diana Wynne Jones (Eos, 2008; 1986)

Rating: ☆☆☆☆☆

If I were 10 years younger I'd have imprinted on this in a heartbeat; as is, I thoroughly enjoyed reading it, although it was a bit difficult for me to get the movie out of my head. Howl would be completely exhausting to be around IRL but I loved him, I love that he's some grad student from Wales and he's just like that, Sophie is a wonderful main character. Chef's kiss.

Premodern literature:

83: A Choice of Anglo-Saxon Verse, ed. and trans. Richard Hamer (Faber & Faber, 2015; 7th–11th centuries CE)

Rating: ☆☆☆

From a cost, general approachability and shelf space standpoint this is better than, like, Craig Williamson's Complete Old English Poems; I like a facing-page translation and it offers a good selection, although I'm cranky it didn't have "The Phoenix". That said, I'm not the biggest fan of Hamer's translations, especially not of "The Wife's Lament". "Wā bið þām þe sceal / of langoþe || lēofes ābīdan" he translates as "Grief must always be / For him who yearning longs for his beloved," and I think Williamson's "Woe to him whose love lies longing" preserves the ambiguity of the poem much better.

84: The Song of Roland and Other Poems of Charlemagne, ed. and trans. Simon Gaunt and Karen Pratt (Oxford World's Classics, 2017; 1100–1300 CE)

Rating: ☆☆☆☆

The translations are well-done and I like the selection of poems. "Roland" is an absolutely meat-headed, occasionally enjoyable poem that can be entirely summed up with Roland's exclamation that the Muslims are Wrong and the Christians are Right, followed by several hundred lines of head-splattering, horse-cleaving violence. It's…I mean it's basically the movie 300 with more clothes on. The other two poems, "Daurel and Beton" and "The Voyage of Charlemagne to Jerusalem and Constantinople", are quite different—I preferred "Daurel and Beton" personally as it has more of a plot than "Charlemagne and his buddies road-trip, impinge on the hospitality of the Byzantine emperor"—but are both a lot of fun and a good reminder that just because "Roland" took Charlemagne seriously didn't mean everyone else had to.

85: The History of the Kings of Britain, Geoffrey of Monmouth, ed. and trans. Lewis Thorpe (Penguin, 1977; 1136)

Rating: ☆☆☆½

Wildly untrustworthy as a history, occasionally bonkers about the Roman Empire in the way that a lot of Welsh medieval authors were (like, it's their dad who thought they were so cool and so tough, and he just went out for cigarettes, he said he'd be back!!), lots of fun stuff about Arthur and Merlin, and the constantly repeating cycle of invading powers as vampires people keep inviting in so that they'll go bite someone else on the island. Some of the Roman stuff was kind of a slog. Some of the Arthurian stuff was also a slog, TBH; the Alliterative Mort D'Arthur is going to give you a better time of the "King Arthur decides to take over Europe" story.

86: Yvain: The Knight of the Lion, Chrétien de Troyes, ed. and trans. Burton Raffel (Yale University Press, 1987; ca. 1165)

Rating: ☆☆☆☆☆

Goofy in the absolute best chivalric romance tradition; everything just keeps happening, don't go in the Castle of Infinite Misfortune oops he's already inside Yvain why. This is also the first time I've read Yvain and actually followed what's going on, because other times it's always been prose translations, which are for various reasons honestly a terrible idea for chivalric romance, because there's so much EVENT that putting it all in paragraphs makes it impossible to figure out. So this was great because I could actually appreciate, like, Yvain having a character arc. (He has a character arc! He's still really dumb the whole time.)

87: Hrafnkel's Saga and Other Icelandic Stories, ed. and trans. Hermann Pálsson (Penguin, 1983; 13th century)

Rating: ☆☆☆

It was funny to see "Saga" on the title page and then for that story to be "Local landowner kills employee for riding horse he was told not to ride, lawsuit and feud ensues". The stories weren't as interesting to me as they are to other people but I had an OK time reading them. I was reading some of them at a time I wasn't supposed to be reading anything which made it hard not to react during "Thorstein Staff-Struck," which has a character whose sole purpose seems to be accusing people he's arguing with of having sex with horses.

Graphic novels:

88: Dorohedoro vol. 1, Q Hayashida (VIZ, 2010; 2000)

Rating: N/A

It's like, theoretically good, but I just couldn't get past the art style, which made me a little queasy. It's a shame, because I'm a huge Kill Six Billion Demons fan, and the author of that has cited Dorohedoro as an influence.

89: Witch Hat Atelier vols. 1 and 2, Kamome Shirahama (Kodansha, 2019; 2017)

Rating: ☆☆☆☆½ (provisional)

This has a very charming sort of old-fashioned children's novel quality to it; something about it reminds me a little of the Oz series although I'm not quite sure what. I'm glad to watch the relationships between Coco and the other girls at magic school develop, especially Agott, and I'm going to keep reading.

I think that's everything? I think that's everything. I stayed up all night doing this because otherwise I'd have put it off forever out of Poster's Shame. I'll be around to the other threads this afternoon or tonight.

Howl is definitely so very exhausting and so definitely a permanent resident of my Literary Boyfriends Couch. I am HERE for his drama. *dreamy sigh*

Wow, you've really blown past the goal! Congrats!

Hi Emery, how are you doing? I hope everything is going smoothy for you!

Emery, we miss you!

I hope all is well with you, Emery.

Another chiming in looking for Emery.

Have a lovely holiday, Emery.

"Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass. It’s about learning to dance in the rain."
Zig Ziglar

With you and the group life is like a dance class - thank you.
I wish you and yours all the best in theese days and Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas!

These were our family ornaments this year and, despite COVID, a merry time was had by all. I hope the same is true for your holiday and here's to next year!!

Forget your stresses and strains
As the old year wanes;
All that now remains
Is to bring you good cheer
With wine, liquor or beer
And wish you a special new year.

Happy New Year, Emery.

Happy New Year!