Howling Frog Books

The Alloy of Law

2012-02-14T12:04:00.000-08:00

The Alloy of Law, by Brandon Sanderson

Hello to everyone who stopped by because Eva mentioned my name! Nice to see you.

It's been a while since I've read a nice Sanderson book for grown-ups (Warbreaker is on my TBR pile!). I really enjoyed the Mistborn trilogy a lot, and it seems that he's planning a second and then a third trilogy, each set further on in time. This book is just a fun little interlude--a short story by Sanderson standards, since it's only 325 pages long instead of 1000--set over 300 years from the original story. It's a Western! There are lots of guns, and train robberies, and law-keepers, and of course Allomancy. (If you're not familiar with Brandon Sanderson, he likes to create worlds around very complex magic systems. The Mistborn books have three separate, but related, magic systems centered on metals. Magic users can access the properties in different metals. It's modern high fantasy at its finest.)

There are some great characters in The Alloy of Law, and I hope to see more of them sometime. I couldn't help picturing Nathan Fillion in the role of the protagonist, Wax, so I think someone should make a movie. In fact, Adam Baldwin would make a pretty good Wayne! Marasi would have to be played by someone new, though.

I've been really slow with the reading lately. Life caught up with me this month and I have too much to do! So here's an interim report on what I'm reading:

I have fewer than 100 pages to go in The Romance of the Rose, which got very tedious in the middle. I like Guillame de Lorris just fine, but Jean de Meun is my new nemesis.

I got an ILL of a book I've been wanting to read for some time called The School of Freedom, about liberal education through the ages. It's really a collection of historical tidbits. I'm almost done with Cicero's thoughts, so there's a way to go yet.

I've started John Keegan's history of World War I and am going very slowly so far. I'm learning a lot about Schlieffen at the moment. WWI always seems so depressingly avoidable in hindsight.

I've read a few chapters of The Old Curiosity Shop because it's Dickens' 200th birthday!

My First Readathon

2012-02-11T21:11:00.000-08:00

I've never signed up for a read-a-thon, because I can't really see how I could get a whole day (or two!) to read in. But Cassandra over at Literary Stars says I can treat it as a pretty casual one, and I've always wanted to do it, so I'm signing up. Cassandra is celebrating the beginning of her school vacation on February 18-19, which is not at all when I get a school vacation, but who cares?

Grave Mistake

2012-02-09T19:48:00.001-08:00

Grave Mistake, by Ngaio Marsh

It's been the kind of week where I read a lot of brain-candy mystery novels. My little girl has been having trouble with her eyes and started vision therapy today, so I've been very taken up with that. Wish her luck!

I picked Grave Mistake out of my pile of old mysteries. I like Ngaio Marsh; her writing is really nice to read, though she does tend to focus on painting and the theater to the exclusion of all else. Most of her mysteries are set in England, but since she was really a Kiwi from New Zealand, she set a few stories there too (not this one), and those make a nice change.

This story is mostly told from the point of view of the victim's neighbor and old friend. The charming, ultra-feminine, hypochondriac Sybil is killed at a nursing home during a vacation. Was it the unscrupulous doctor? The wastrel, semi-criminal stepson? Perhaps even the jealous nurse or the covetous neighbor?

They Found Him Dead

2012-02-07T18:25:00.001-08:00

They Found Him Dead, by Georgette Heyer

I love Georgette Heyer's historical fiction, but until now her mysteries have left me cold. Now, finally, I have read a Heyer mystery that I liked! It's a good puzzle, the characters are memorable (and sometimes memorably hateable), and it was fun. Just what I needed!

Works and Days

2012-02-04T19:44:00.000-08:00

Works and Days, by Hesiod

Works and Days was quite fun to read. The translation I have is by Richmond Lattimore, and it has little summary lines on the side to let the reader know what's going on. Unlike my copy of the Theogony, it has no footnotes at all, so while I may have missed some nuances, it was easier to stay focused. Works and Days is a more straightforward poem anyway.

Evidently Hesiod had a wastrel brother named Perses, who squandered his half of the family property and then successfully sued the poet for some of his half. Hesiod responded with a sort of life instruction book. He starts off with the stories of Prometheus, Pandora, and the Five Ages of Man to explain why life is stern and life is earnest and you have to earn a living. Then he gives instructions on how to run a farm: when to plow, what kind of help to hire, how to make convenient clothes, how to choose a wife, all sorts of good advice. Other advice is included too; how to send out a merchant ship (if you insist on running that kind of risk), what the proper auspicious days are, how to please the gods and how to keep good company and be a good friend.

I bet it really got up Perses' nose, and Hesiod probably meant it to.

This bust is supposed to be Hesiod, but of course it's entirely imaginative. He looks a bit too agonized for my taste. And this text is from a 1539 printing, with convenient Latin translation.

Next up is Sophocles' Theban plays in the Fagles translation, and it will be my first experience with Fagles. I've almost always read Lattimore. I've always thought that the Oedipus cycle must have been the Greeks' idea of thinking up the worst thing that could possibly happen. Here Oedipus is, a virtuous and intelligent man with everything he could want, and it turns out that he has unwittingly committed the most horrible crimes anyone could imagine. Never call a man happy until he is safely dead!

Distant View of a Minaret

2012-02-03T20:07:00.000-08:00

Distant View of a Minaret, by Alifa Rifaat

I only heard of this collection of stories recently, and now I can't remember where I got the title, but I was interested right away. Alifa Rifaat is a writer in Egypt with relatively little exposure to Western ideas--she speaks no English and wouldn't care about the West anyway--and so while her stories are considered to be feminist, they are feminist from a very different point of view, one that is orthodoxly Muslim. (Is orthodoxly a word? It should be.)

Most of the stories are very short, and realistic, portraying pivotal moments in ordinary women's lives. I liked most of them and zipped through thee book very quickly. Some of the time she looks at how men lose the right to respect when they treat women badly--but she would not say that men should not be in charge at all, I gather.

Great Stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

2012-02-03T19:57:00.000-08:00

Great Stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, selected by John Dickson Carr

Arthur Conan Doyle wrote about a squillion adventuresome short stories, and the best of them are collected together here. There are a couple of Sherlock Holmes tales, but the rest are stand-alones with the exception of one Professor Challenger story. Several are rather how I imagine Jules Verne stories must be, about fantastic adventures in the air or under the earth. Others are sporting stories about boxing and so on. I liked most of them.

"The Final Problem" is not included in this collection, but I read it too. It is the single Sherlock Holmes story featuring Holmes' intellectual equal, Professor Moriarty. Unfortunately, since Doyle really only wrote it in order to kill Holmes off, it wasn't all that interesting. Holmes talks a lot about the Napoleon of crime, but all that really happens is that Moriarty follows him to Switzerland and they disappear. It's pretty disappointing, but it counts for my League of Extraordinary Gentleman challenge.

Doctor Thorne

2012-02-03T18:59:00.000-08:00

Doctor Thorne, by Anthony Trollope

The Barsetshire Chronicles make me happy. They are just fun, pleasant books to read. Doctor Thorne is the third Barsetshire book, and it is really long and really nice. I have read a lot of Angela Thirkell novels (she lifted and used the Barsetshire setting) and it surprises me how familiar Trollope feels; Thirkell must have done a really good job of writing in the same vein.

In Doctor Thorne, we get to know the doctor and his niece Mary, who is a lovely girl but unfortunately illegitimate. The young squire of the county, Frank Gresham, falls in love with Mary--but his mother is conscious of the duties of high breeding and noble blood, and his father has run the Greshamsbury estate deeply into debt, so that everyone assumes that Frank must marry money. Can the lovers ever be united? Only Doctor Thorne knows that Mary might be the solution to all of Lady Gresham's problems.

I liked it. The next Barsetshire novel is Framley Parsonage, so I'll read that sometime soon when I'm feeling cozy.

World War I Challenge

2012-02-01T20:15:00.000-08:00

I found another challenge to join! This one is hosted by War Through the Generations and is all about World War I. The information:

War Through the Generation’s 2012 reading challenge will be World War I. The challenge will run from January 1, 2012, through December 31, 2012.

Rules:

This year you have options when reading your fiction, nonfiction, graphic novels, etc. with the WWI as the primary or secondary theme.

Books can take place before, during, or after the war, so long as the conflicts that led to the war or the war itself are important to the story. Books from other challenges count so long as they meet the above criteria.

Dip: Read 1-3 books in any genre with WWI as a primary or secondary theme.

Wade: Read 4-10 books in any genre with WWI as a primary or secondary theme.

Swim: Read 11 or more books in any genre with WWI as a primary or secondary theme.

Additionally, we’ve decided that since there are so many great movies out there about WWI, you can substitute or add a movie or two to your list this year and have it count toward your totals.

You can decide which books you’d like to read right away, or you can choose them during the course of the challenge. Check out the Recommended Reading: WWI page for suggestions.

We wanted to try something a little different this year, and we thought that it would be fun to do a group review here on War Through the Generations midway through the challenge.

The 2012 book for the read-a-long will be A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway.

I am going to sign up for the "Dip level--3 books about the Great War seem like enough for me. I've never read A Farewell to Arms, so that will be good for me. I'll probably hate it. I also plan to read John Keegan's history, The First World War. I'm not sure what #3 will be.

The New Road to Serfdom

2012-02-01T15:47:00.000-08:00

The New Road to Serfdom: a Letter of Warning to America, by Daniel Hannan

Daniel Hannan is the Member of the European Parliament for South-East Britain, and he's an articulate conservative who is especially passionate about localism and decentralization of power. He shows up on TV cable news shows every so often, so you might have seen him. Hannan felt that many Americans might not be aware of how governance works in the UK and the EU, and wrote this book to show where the US might end up if we continue to consolidate power at the federal level.

One of the first points he hits is how much British government is run by non-elected agencies now. I had no idea that UK citizens do not elect their local sheriffs or school board or much of anybody--apparently many local functions now operate through "quangos," which are state agencies run by appointment rather than election (this does explain something to me about why British home educators are so leery of their Local Authorities). It's entirely possible to have an illustrious political career in the UK without ever being elected to anything.

Most of the book is given over to explaining why Hannan is such a fan of localism. He feels that the more governance can be run at the local level, flexibly subject to local conditions and needs, the better. There is a lot about the EU and how it runs so much by government fiat, avoiding referendums whenever possible, and what the philosophy is behind that. He especially emphasizes that once you take any power away from a local body and give it over to a more centralized power, you are unlikely ever to get that power back--so watch what you're doing.

I found it to be a very interesting book that makes some excellent points. Hannan is a sharp and articulate guy. And I'll be paying much more attention to local elections from now on.

This book was on my TBR pile! Though admittedly not for long, since I only bought it late last fall. Still, it counts!

Greek Classics: January Wrap-Up

2012-01-30T10:58:00.000-08:00

Have you been reading Euripedes or Sophocles? This is the place to be! Link up to your posts for the Greek Classics Challenge here, or comment and tell me about what you've been up to. I hope you've gotten off to a good start!

I got an award

2012-01-29T21:20:00.000-08:00

I've never gotten an award before and I'm not quite sure what to do with it. Yay! Wait, I have to pick more?

JNCL over at The Beauty of Eclecticism was very kind and selected me to get this Versatile Blogger Award (which is my favorite color!) so thank you J! I have really enjoyed getting to read her blog since I joined her Medieval Lit Challenge this year. I particularly like the bit where she has a Master List you can read from, because last time I did a medieval challenge I had an awful time choosing books and this year it's going much better. (It's just like how in a library it's a good plan to have a trough of "good books" that you can point overwhelmed patrons to. It doesn't matter so much what's in the trough as long as it's a variety--the point is to give a limited range of choices.)

The rules of this award are as follows.

-In a post on your blog, present at least 5 fellow bloggers with the Versatile Blogger Award.

-In the same post, include the Versatile Blogger Award.

-In the same post, thank the blogger who nominated you and link back to his or her blog.

-In the same post, share 7 completely random pieces of information about yourself.

-In the same post, include these rules.

-Inform each new winner of their award by posting a comment on their blog.

OK, so I actually have a problem now and I'm not sure what to do about it. I'm not very comfortable picking 5 more people to give this to. It's too much like a chain letter. So...I'm not going to. Does that mean I lose the award? I don't know. I'm going to decide that this is all in good fun and it doesn't matter much.

Here are 7 random and fairly unimportant things about me:

I love homeschooling but really don't want to do big crafty projects, unless they involve sewing. I do like science projects, especially if they aren't too hard to set up. I adore learning lots of history. And I really, truly think that classical education is the bees' knees. While I am all for individual choice in homeschooling, if it so happened that the Department of Education asked me to set the educational standard for American public schools, I would pick classical education as the best general preparation for the majority of children for life, informed citizenship, and any career path. And also Susan Wise Bauer and her mother, Jessie Wise, are my favorite homeschooling writers.
I tend to use parentheses too much and always have to go back and edit them out (especially if I'm being talkative). I also use too many semi-colons. I'm not much good at expressing my thoughts, so this blog is as publicly articulate as I will ever get, and that's not much.
I enjoy singing in a choir, but otherwise I am not terribly musical. I can't play an instrument or anything, though I took some years of piano and never got past the really really mediocre level. Nor can I claim to have an amazing voice--I wouldn't want to go solo or do a small group number. I do sing around the house a lot, so I wonder what my daughters will remember.
My amazing special talent (if you don't already know me IRL) is that I make hand-dipped chocolates. Like See's, only better. 14 different kinds, even cherry cordials. My mom is better at it, but I'm pretty good. This is why it's a good idea to be my friend.
Long ago, I spent my junior year of high school abroad--I lived in Denmark and joined a family and went to school. That was the factor that got me into Berkeley; my scores were barely adequate and I was surrounded by people who were far more intelligent and better prepared than I was. But I loved it and got a really super husband out of it, so on the whole I'm glad that I decided to be an exchange student when I was 12. It was a good idea (probably the only good idea I had when I was 12!).
I like Diet Dr. Pepper way too much. On the other hand it is almost the only soda that I like at all. I still drink too much of it though. (Come on, a gal has to have some vices, right?)
I love Oingo Boingo's music and will happily listen to nothing else for days at a time. It just makes me happy. That, and Bollywood movies.

Bonus thought: Go Bears!

Unnatural Selection

2012-01-29T18:56:00.001-08:00

Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men, by Mara Hvistendahl

For the past few years, we've been hearing about the imbalance of boys vs. girls in China--people want to have boys, and so you get orphanages full of girls and schools full of little boys who won't have anyone to marry when they grow up. We've been hearing about it happening in India too, though China usually seems to get what headlines are going. Hvistendahl has investigated this social trend and documents it thoroughly. The news is really bad: throughout Asia and now Eastern Europe, people frequently choose to abort baby girls in hopes of getting sons instead. The practice is far more pervasive than anyone realized (it persists in groups in the US too), it's growing in many areas, it's routinely ignored, and it results in millions of angry young men with no hopes of marriage but plenty of time for violence.

This is a really horrifying issue. The basic story is that in developing countries that are starting to become more prosperous, the one- or two-child family is often held up as an ideal. Decades of pressure to exert control over population growth has resulted in families that plan to have one or two children. But these would-be parents want sons more than they want daughters. If the first child is a daughter, they just plan to try again. But when second or third children show up on the ultrasound as female, they are very frequently terminated in hopes of trying again and getting boys. Many women have multiple abortions--and these happen after 20 weeks, fairly late--and the cumulative effect is that there are 163 million 'missing girls' in Asia.

The first section details the demographics of this trend. Korea has peaked and is now normalizing (though at an incredibly low rate of birth), India and China are peaking now, while Albania is very out of balance and the government denies any problem. Hvistendahl documents why parents do it, why doctors encourage it or go along, and there's some history about colonial India.

In the second section she delves deep into population-control history. In the 50's, 60's, and 70's, everyone was worrying about the "population bomb"--most especially in Asia and India. Paul Erlich might as well have outright said the words "Yellow Peril" in his book, but he was a minor player. The World Bank was right in there too, enforcing strict population-control measures. India cooperated and came up with awful ideas like forcibly sterilizing millions of poor men, and in Korea it was worse, with women forcibly put through abortions and then sterilized. China got enthusiastic too and enforced similar measures. For some reason, policy-makers seem to have thought that getting rid of unborn baby girls would be an especially great idea, delivering a double dose of population control, and they said so publicly.

Well, decades of pressure worked. The descendants of the innocent victims of population control learned their lesson, and they get rid of their girls voluntarily. In the last section, Hvistendahl looks at what a society without enough women looks like. Girls are valuable, but that doesn't make them powerful--it makes them vulnerable to trafficking, or to being sold to wealthier men. The poorest men then have no prospects for marriage, which must make life look pretty bleak. Angry young men with no girls around tend to be more violent and more criminal.

Feminist activists have labored to make abortion freely available and morally neutral. In much of Asia, that is the case, and I'm not sure I like the picture. Most women getting abortions are not young and desperate--they are married women who want sons. Feminists have not wanted to make even the tiniest move towards disapproving of abortion--even when girls are the primary victims--and they have tended to ignore sex selection entirely. The result is overall worse conditions for all women, at least the ones who made it to birth, and Hvistendahl (who is also reluctant to say that any limits on abortions would be a good idea) draws the lesson that ignoring problems will not make them go away.

An odd detail caught my eye. At the end of the final chapter, the author interviews a Korean woman who waited too long and was unable to have more than one child. She now advises her friends to have babies early. Hvistendahl comments that such concerns are becoming "less relevant as technology makes it possible for women to have children into their forties and fifties," citing IVF as the new thing in Seoul. But just three pages later, she points out that IVF is an arduous and expensive process with a pretty low success rate.

The conclusion looks at a fertility clinic in LA, where sex selection through IVF is becoming a trend. Americans tend to want girls, but the ethical questions remain the same. When it comes to having a baby, what is OK and what is not? Hvistendahl never covers the question of whether or not it's ethical to terminate a pregnancy when a genetic problem such as Downs is present, and I suppose that is outside the scope of the book, but it's certainly a related issue. In the US, about 90% of babies with Downs are aborted before birth, and that is not something that we discuss much, but I think that's pretty horrific too.

It's an incredibly sad book, detailing a level of wickedness I never imagined, even though I knew something about sex selection. Think twice before you read it, but then read it because it's an issue that will affect all of us.

I'm counting this title as my Social Sciences selection for the Mixing It Up Challenge. I also had a hard time figuring out where to put it on my reading map (that no one but me cares about), but the author lives in Beijing so I put my marker there.

The Haunted Dolls' House

2012-01-29T18:20:00.001-08:00

The Haunted Dolls' House and Other Stories, by M. R. James

I've been saving this second volume of James stories for a treat. Though they are not as consistently good as the earlier stories, I enjoyed them quite a bit and there are some really good ones here. James was very subtle about his ghosts and ghouls, which make them really good to read about--they're just suggested.

The title story, "The Haunted Dolls' House," sounded awfully familiar to me although I knew I'd never read it before. My 11-year-old daughter took one look at it and knew--the plot was lifted for a children's book she read last year called The Dollhouse Murders. It's really similar.

There's an extra treat at the end of the book--a little collection of 12 medieval ghost stories written in Latin and translated by James. The Latin is included, so you can try your hand at it too! And there are a couple of short essays on ghost stories.

I'm counting this as my horror selection for the Mixing It Up Challenge. At first I was wondering if this would really count as horror--they're not actually very scary stories, just nicely creepy--but then the hostess, Ellie, outright mentioned James as a classic horror author. So yay, I win! This is also my 6th title from my TBR pile.

Nightmare Abbey

2012-01-27T16:01:00.000-08:00

Nightmare Abbey, by Thomas Love Peacock

Thomas Love Peacock wrote short satirical novels at the beginning of the 19th century--about the same time as Jane Austen was writing. He would create eccentric characters--often caricatures of the literary lights of the day--set them down on a country estate, and make them talk. I started Nightmare Abbey several years ago and failed to get into it (I don't think I was in the right mood) so it's been sitting on my TBR shelf ever since. Now I've finished it and it was quite funny!

Nightmare Abbey, owned by the illustrious Glowry family, is an estate that stands between the sea and the Lincolnshire fens. The Glowrys are a gloomy family, and the young heir, Scythrop, is crossed in love. Some of the houseguests include Miss Marionetta, a coquette, Mr. Toobad, who loves to preach on the devil, Mr, Asterias on a quest to find a mermaid, and a mysterious lady hidden in a tower.

I couldn't help imagining the whole thing in Gorey illustrations. It was a really fun little satire on polite society with a semi-Gothic setting.

Here's an odd little fact: so far this year I have read 7 books set on the island of Great Britain. Five of them happen in Lincolnshire. Seems funny.

Hesiod's Theogony

2012-01-27T13:05:00.000-08:00

I just learned that Hesiod's works are some of the earliest Greek poetry we have, which I had not realized at all. He and Homer were contemporaries and lived somewhere around 750 BC or so. Scholars think that Hesiod composed his Theogony (the story of the origin of the gods, and in this case the world too) for a contest at a funeral on the island of Euboia and won the prize--a tripod* that he dedicated to the Muses.

Hesiod was a Boeotian farmer, probably a fairly well-off one. He happened to compose his poem at just about the time that alphabetic writing was coming into use, and someone wrote it down. Because of that, the Theogony became the most popular standard version of the story of the gods; if there were other stories earlier on, they got lost. This is where we get much of the material we teach to our kids in books like D'Aulaires Greek Myths (which is a favorite of mine). My book says that it's "our best and earliest evidence for what the ancient Greeks believed about the beginning of the world and its divine governance" and that it is "possibly the oldest surviving example of Greek written literature."

The Theogony is about a thousand lines long and tells the genealogy of the gods and monsters from the beginning. Since genealogy is pretty boring stuff even when people are marrying their sisters and producing hideous creatures or beautiful nymphs, Hesiod livens it up with digressions on the natures of certain goddesses or the underworld and so on. The main story he tells is the generational conflict of the gods, as each father in turn tries to keep his sons from gaining power--and each mother helps her children win the battle.

Because the poem is so dense with names and it's not always easy to understand what Hesiod is talking about, it's a good idea to have a nicely annotated edition. Mine is a little old, since it's the one I used in college; it's by Richard S. Caldwell and has a straightforward translation with notes and a couple of explanatory essays that I found helpful. It's still in print, with a prettier cover.

Though it's pretty short, I found it difficult to concentrate on the text for long periods of time. Maybe because it was so dense and I had to keep stopping to read the footnotes--even if I already knew what was in them, because of course we can't just ignore footnotes!--or maybe because I read most of it while I was still pretty sick. It's a good poem to read, though, and I had a good time with it. I'm going to read Hesiod's Works and Days next and I have the Lattimore translation ready to go, fresh from where it's been mouldering on the college library shelves for the past 15 years or so.

*Haven't you always wondered what the heck those tripods were that people were always winning? I have. I went and looked it up, and here's a picture for you. A tripod was a bowl mounted on three legs, and you'd use it for religious sacrifices. The oracle at Delphi sat in one, which couldn't have been comfortable.

Feynman

2012-01-25T18:33:00.000-08:00

Feynman, by Jim Ottaviani and Leland Myrick

Well, who knew--there's a graphic novel biography of Richard Feynman! I found it at the library the other day, and since I'm a Feynman fan, I picked it right up. The storyline jumps around kind of a lot at first, but soon settles down into a fun rhythm.

If you're not familiar with the name, you should know that Richard Feynman was one of the eminent physicists of the 20th century. He got to be quite famous because he was kind of a big personality--he was outspoken, direct, had a bunch of unusual hobbies, and was all around an interesting guy. He wrote a couple of books of entertaining vignettes about his life and experiences that people who didn't understand physics (like me) could enjoy, and he also worked hard to make physics comprehensible to us ordinary folks.

The graphic novel covers a lot of material that I was already familiar with, and added more that I didn't know--it gives a better overall picture of Feynman's life than the vignette books do, so that was helpful. It's all narrated in first-person, with quite a bit of the text taken directly from things he wrote or said, so his voice comes through pretty strongly. You also get a nice sense of Feynman's personality, especially his constant desire to get rid of image and public-relations-type talk and get right to the point. (This was what made him so well-known in 1986, when he was on the panel that investigated the Challenger disaster, but you see it earlier too, especially at Los Alamos.)

Towards the end, the authors do their best to put a couple of Feynman's lectures on physics for regular people into graphic novel format. I must confess that I skimmed these bits. It was probably really well-done too, so now I feel guilty--maybe I'll go back and try to pay more attention.

If you already know something about Feynman's life, you'll probably enjoy this graphic novel. I would really recommend that you read his two books, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, and What Do You Care What Other People Think? over this biography--because it's good, but those two are classics. Best of all, read all three!

Julius Caesar

2012-01-24T19:26:00.001-08:00

Julius Caesar, by William Shakespeare

My daughter's writing curriculum required us to read Julius Caesar--out loud, a scene at a time. First we read a synopsis of the story and watched the play with the book in hand, and we've been reading the play out loud for a few weeks now. Today Brutus finally ran himself through and we finished. Although Julius Caesar is perhaps not the most fun Shakespeare play (my daughter is not a fan of all the death), it is a fairly straightforward one and I think we understood it pretty well. I had fun translating the difficult bits into something she could understand.

She has set a goal for herself this year to read five Shakespeare plays, and we have some good movies to watch. The writing course now requires us to start studying The Merchant of Venice too (I suppose because of the quality of mercy speech--the authors like to provide moral examples along with great literature. Or else because some speech goes along with a skill they're trying to teach. Could be either one), so we are getting plenty of Shakespeare around here. Only the library's copy of the movie has apparently been stolen, so we don't have one to watch, unless I borrow it from the next town over--but that one isn't a BBC production or anything, it stars Al Pacino and is rated R. So I'm thinking not.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

2012-01-24T13:30:00.002-08:00

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson

I ran into this yesterday at work and since it's so short, I just picked it up and read it in an afternoon for the "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" challenge.

It's hard to know what there could be to say about such a famous story. Foolish Dr. Jekyll wants to indulge in his private vices without besmirching his reputation, and he comes up with a drug that allows him to bring the evil side of his nature to the fore, transforming him into Mr. Hyde. All too soon, Hyde gets too strong to be controlled.

Hey, look! A paperback cover! Sadly it is not as racy as a proper pulp cover should be, but I'll take it.

Before I Fall

2012-01-24T13:30:00.000-08:00

Before I Fall, by Lauren Oliver

Samantha is one of the most popular girls in school, the girl everyone envies who can get away with anything. But then she gets killed in a car wreck--and wakes up on the morning of the same day. Sam keeps reliving her last day, until she can figure out what she needs to do.

The interesting thing about the story is that Samantha is really a pretty awful person--she's utterly thoughtless. As she starts to look around her for the first time, she realizes that she has never seen the people around her for who they are. She has never understood that she has choices, and that what she does every day has consequences. It's not that she's been intentionally evil, but she has never once stopped to think about anything. Watching her learn to make choices and care about people was the element I liked.

The story is a bit long but very readable. It's been making a big splash in the YA world, and you could give it to your teen (though I'd say 14+).

January Classics Discussion: Anthony Trollope

2012-01-20T18:11:00.000-08:00

November's Autumn's Classics Challenge involves saying something about whatever classic you're reading at the moment. This month's focus is on the author. I started reading Doctor Thorne a little while ago, so this post is about Anthony Trollope. I'm not far enough into it to get to Level 3!

Level 1 Who is the author? What do they look like? When were they born? Where did they live? What does their handwriting look like? What are some of the other novels they've written? What is an interesting and random fact about their life?

Anthony Trollope was born in 1815 in London. His parents were impoverished gentry, and Anthony suffered throughout his childhood from his father's ambition to live like a wealthy man when he had no money to do it with. The family spent time in Belgium to escape debt, but Anthony returned to London to take up a post in the Post Office. He wasn't very good at it. In trouble for debt himself, he took a post in Ireland, where things started looking up. Once he was getting established as an author he moved back to England so as to be near the publishing scene.

Trollope is most famous for his Chronicles of Barsetshire, which are the books I'm reading first. Then there are his Palliser novels and many others, for a grand total of 47. He was a very realistic writer and often humorous.

It's ridiculous, but the only sample of his handwriting that I can find is on this check!

Fun facts:

In 1868, Trollope stood for MP as a Liberal candidate for the borough of Beverley in Yorkshire. This was something of a setup; it was a corrupt borough known for vote-selling, and the real aim was to expose Conservative vote-buying. I'm not sure Trollope had this figured out and it seems that he was a pawn in the game.

After Trollope's death in 1882, his Autobiography was published. It contained the awful information that he wrote on a strict schedule, and that he wrote for money, which was hardly the proper attitude for a writer (writers should be inspired). His reputation suffered with the critics.

Level 2 What do you think of their writing style? What do you like about it? or what would have made you more inclined to like it? Is there are particular quote that has stood out to you?

I enjoy Trollope's writing quite a lot. His sentences are pretty straightforward for a Victorian, but he crams in a lot of background information and story. He likes to get confidential with little asides addressed directly to the reader. He is nicely humorous and seems to enjoy his story and to be fond of his characters--even the kind of awful people are human beings with reasons (if not very good ones) for what they do.

Daughter of Smoke and Bone

2012-01-19T19:40:00.000-08:00

Daughter of Smoke and Bone, by Laini Taylor

I've seen this book all over the YA blogs, and eventually one of the descriptions caught my attention. It's a pretty enjoyable book, very current in the paranormal romance genre.

Karou is 17, an art student in Prague. But she grew up in a shop that is run by a chimaera who collects teeth. Her hair grows blue. She speaks 20 languages, and she doesn't know where she came from. Then an angel appears and tries to kill her. Since they are deadly enemies, it follows that they are meant to be together! Or, maybe not, considering what they each have to forgive.

I am not a 'paranormal teen romance' person, but I did quite enjoy the story and writing, and I'll be reading the rest of the trilogy. I'm counting this as the YA requirement for the Mixing It Up Challenge.

I just noticed that today is the 19th of January and so far I've averaged a book per day--partly because I've read 5 light books during 3 days of being sick. Well, next week I go back to work, so all that's about to be over. But it was nice to get to read so much for a while.

The Book of Beasts

2012-01-19T18:00:00.000-08:00

The Book of Beasts: a translation of a 12th-century Latin bestiary, translated by T. H. White

My 11-year-old daughter read most of this bestiary last summer in preparation for her year of medieval history. I've had it on my shelf for a long time, but had never gotten around to reading it. Now, thanks to the Medieval Literature challenge, I've finally done it!

This is a translation of a catalog of animals from all over the world--it's an animal encyclopedia and a serious scientific treatise. Bestiaries were very popular, and this particular one was probably written at Revesby Abbey in Lincolnshire, which at that time was a sparsely populated semi-wilderness (and remember that England had a long and devastating civil war around then). The book would have been dictated to several monks, each of whom produced a copy. Then the illustrator would do the pictures.

To modern eyes, the descriptions of animals are adorably credulous; the older the story, the more credible it is, so Aesop's word is taken as gospel. In this way, all sorts of odd factoids and legends were preserved, such as that monkeys are lively at the new moon but depressed at its full, that elephants have no knee joints and cannot get up if they fall, and that hyenas change sex at will.

These behaviors and traits are then turned into allegories that illustrate religious principles, which accords with the medieval view of the universe as a highly ordered creation that continuously points to God. For example if an elephant falls over, he calls out and summons a big elephant to help him. That elephant can't do the job, so 12 more come and try, but they also fail. Finally a little, insignificant elephant comes and raises up the helpless elephant. This is an illustration of the gospel, showing that the Law of Moses (big elephant) and the Old Testament prophets (12 elephants) could not help fallen man, but that Jesus, lowly though he appeared, came to save mankind.

As with modern animal encyclopedias, the pictures are an important part of the book. The artist, of course, had never seen most of the animals he drew, and any pictures he had seen were drawn by artists who had never seen them either. The result is that while horses and domestic birds are beautifully drawn, lions look an awful lot like dogs and elephants look like pigs with long noses, right down to the cloven hooves. Bats are interesting--and classified as very unusual birds)--and the camels don't have nearly enough hump.

I think we're inclined to dismiss all this as adorable medieval credulity, but luckily T. H. White wrote a wonderful appendix that makes the monks' world come alive for the modern reader. It's really helpful (and humbling!). So the appendix is very worth reading--don't skip it.

Mr. Dixon Disappears

2012-01-19T16:20:00.000-08:00

Mr. Dixon Disappears, by Ian Sansom

I don't know why I didn't read this Mobile Library mystery before, except that maybe I like to have one in reserve so I don't get to the end of them? It's been on my shelf for a while, patiently waiting to be read, even though I've already read one or two sequels.

The Mobile Library series is about Israel Armstrong, the vegetarian English Jewish librarian posted to the outer edges of Northern Ireland. "Hapless" is not a strong enough term to describe just how hapless Israel is--I think I've described him before as a librarian Arthur Dent. In this adventure, he's setting up a historical display in a department store when the store's owner goes missing. Israel takes a look around and the police show up and arrest him, so he has to prove his innocence.

These stories are always funny and relaxing--just what I needed!

And There Was Light

2012-01-19T14:17:00.001-08:00

And There Was Light, by Jacques Lusseyran

I can't remember now who recommended this book on her blog, so if it was you, tell me so I can thank you!

Jacques Lusseyran lost his sight in an accident when he was about 8 years old, and the first half of the book is about his experiences coping with blindness. I don't know if I should say "coping" because that's not how he tells it at all; it's an amazing story, and I can't do it justice.

Then, when Lusseyran was a teenager, the Germans invaded France. He describes living in occupied Paris, and how he and his friends started a resistance organization. That's also an amazing story! Before too long they joined up with the rest of the French Resistance. They were nearly all still under 18, which gave them something of an advantage. Their unit was eventually betrayed and Lusseyran spent the remainder of the war in a concentration camp, but he spends very little time on that period.

This was a great book and I plan to make all my friends read it. I always have trouble properly describing the books I really like, so you'll have to take my word for it, but go read it!

I'm also counting it as a biography for the Mixing It Up Challenge, which I seem to be burning through. I guess I like a lot of different kinds of books.

Snuff

2012-01-19T12:52:00.000-08:00

I have been sick. So, so sick. Now I have a pile of books to write up, but they're mostly pretty light stuff because you can't read anything heavy when you're miserable. Anyway I'm grateful to have had Terry Pratchett's new book, because it got me through the worst bit.

Snuff, by Terry Pratchett

It is completely amazing to me that Terry Pratchett has written 39 Discworld novels, and they're still good. I cannot think of another fantasy author--or any author at all--that has done that (if you can, let me know). Piers Anthony has written 35 Xanth novels so far; they started off so-so and have been utterly abysmal for years. Whereas with Discworld, the first couple aren't so great, but they got better and better for a long time, and are still really enjoyable. Maybe it's because Pterry changed so much over time and kept doing things differently; if he'd stuck with the same light parody he started with, it would never have worked so well.

Snuff is another Sam Vimes book, and we can always use one of those. His wife, Lady Sybil, has finally succeeding in dragging him off on a vacation to the countryside, and he's not at all sure what to do. But crime is everywhere!

I liked it (especially the very complicated chickens) and it's a worthy addition to the Discworld list.

The Man in the High Castle

2012-01-15T16:53:00.000-08:00

The Man in the High Castle, by Philip K. Dick

I've had an old paperback library copy of this on my TBR pile for quite a long time. I don't know if anyone wrote any alternate-universe books about a different outcome to World War II before Dick did, but this is the most famous one. It's the late 60's, and the Axis won the war. Japan occupies the West Coast of the American continent and Germany owns the East Coast as well as all of Europe and Africa. Africa has been depopulated, black people are mostly enslaved, Jews live in hiding, and everything is very racialized. White people in California live in subservience to the Japanese (as do the Chinese). And Germans are sending rockets out to colonize the solar system, too. Although Japan and Germany are officially friendly, the cracks are starting to show.

The action mainly takes place in San Francisco or the Midwest (which is the only remnant of the USA and mostly ignored), and jumps between several main characters. An influential Japanese businessman, a Jewish craftsman passing as Aryan and his estranged wife, an antiques dealer, a German trying to warn Japan of imminent attack--all of them are trying to survive. Then there's a book circulating around about an alternate universe in which the Axis lost the war...but it's not our version of what happened.

Anyway, the ending is strange. Funny, but for an SF classic it's not exactly very heavy on the science fiction. It's worth reading, though, if you're interested in alternate histories or SF classics. I'm counting this as my SF requirement for Mixing It Up, too.

Hopjoy Was Here

2012-01-15T16:40:00.000-08:00

Hopjoy Was Here, by Colin Watson

I thought maybe the Watson mysteries would improve, so I picked up the next one on the pile. It's called Hopjoy Was Here and I'm happy to report that it was indeed much better--more interesting and yes, kind of funny. It was really kind of an oddball mystery, but in an entertaining way. Now I will be happy to read more Watson in future.

My book cover is not nearly so nice as this picture from a new run of the series. It is quite a boring cover and has a photo on it of a British actor with a pipe and tweed hat, from the BBC series based on the books--it was called "Murder Most English." The show ran in the late 70's and featured the guy who played James Herriot in "All Creatures Great and Small" as the sargeant. Maybe I'll see if I can find it sometime, though really I don't like televised mysteries very much, just books.

I'm going to count this as the mystery selection in the Mixing It Up Challenge.

The Story of an African Farm

2012-01-11T20:02:00.000-08:00

The Story of an African Farm, by Olive Schreiner

The story concerns three children growing up together. Em and Lyndall are orphaned cousins. Lyndall is intelligent, beautiful, and troubled, while Em is plain and ordinary, but very kind. They are cared for by Em's stepmother, a thoughtless Boer woman. Then there is Waldo, the son of a German herder who works on the farm. Waldo and his father are by far the nicest people (other than Em) in the book, and I think the father was my favorite. Waldo is something of an odd genius, very mechanical and a deep thinker--although inarticulate about it. All of them go through quite a lot of hardships of very different kinds.

Lyndall is ambitious and determined, and gets herself to school, but she is oppressed by society's limits on women (and she has a lot to say about that). Waldo loses his faith in God and searches for truth, and Em gets the short end of the stick every time. It's really a very sad novel.

There's plenty to discuss here. Schreiner argues against Christianity and for women's freedom, and always talks about the beauty of the South African land. She has often been criticized for worrying more about women's rights than about apartheid, but apparently she was also for the abolition of the color bar too, though it's not an issue that is covered in this novel. Anyway she seems to have thought that black women deserved rights too. My Dover copy calls this "the first great South African novel," and I'm not qualified to make a judgement on that point, but it was published in 1883 and was probably one of the first serious novels to be published about South Africa at all.

I'm counting this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge as "a classic set in a country that you (realistically speaking) will not visit during your lifetime." Since Schreiner lived in colonial South Africa, in the part that is now Lesotho, I think this counts. I'd love to go to Africa someday, but my chances of landing in Lesotho are pretty slim. It's also part of the Mount TBR Challenge--I bought this book years ago (and thought it was a memoir, not a novel) and never got around to reading it before.

The Graves of Academe

2012-01-11T16:40:00.000-08:00

The Graves of Academe, by Richard Mitchell

Richard Mitchell was a professor at Glassboro State College (now Rowan University) and one of the earlier grumpy outspoken critics of the education system. He ran a self-published magazine, The Underground Grammarian, wrote four books about language and education, and always encouraged free distribution of his works, so you can find all of it online.

Back in 1918, the Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education wrote a pamphlet outlining the main goals for American education. Only one of these goals was academic, and it called for the 1918 version of Basic Minimum Competency. The pamphlet was called Cardinal Principles, and you can read it at the link or see the principles at the end of this post. Mitchell calls the authors "The Gang of Twenty-Seven" and figures that they assumed that most children were not capable of real academic achievement, much less serious thought, and that school is really an instrument for re-making society in the form that educators think is best. The Graves of Academe is his take on the principles and the state of modern education (well, as of about 1980), and he does not approve.

Here's the sort of thing that really made him foam at the mouth, a statement on school vouchers and parent choice (I didn't know that the argument about vouchers was going on 30 years ago):

If you think it too rash to charge our educationists even as unwitting agents of tyranny and thought control, consider these lines from a recent proclamation of the Association of California School Administrators:

"Parent choice" proceeds from the belief that the purpose of education is to provide individual students with an education. In fact, educating the individual is but a means to the true end of education, which is to create a viable social order to which individuals contribute and by which they are sustained. "Family choice" is, therefore, basically selfish and anti-social in that it focuses on the "wants" of a single family rather than the "needs" of society.

The book is definitely ranty, but very interesting and has plenty to think about. I always like to read Mitchell, but then I like grumps.

I've actually been reading this off and on for about 6 months; it was one of the first books I downloaded when I got an e-reader. It's a book best taken in small doses!

Cardinal Principles:

1. Health
A secondary school should encourage good health habits, give health instruction, and provide physical activities. Good health should be taken into account when schools and communities are planning activities for youth. The general public should be educated on the importance of good health. Teachers should be examples for good health and schools should furnish good equipment and safe buildings.
2. Command Of Fundamental Processes
Fundamental Processes are writing, reading, oral and written expression, and math. It was decided that these basics should be applied to newer material instead of using the older ways of doing things.
3. Worthy Home Membership
This principle "calls for the development of those qualities that make the individual a worthy member of a family, both contributing to and deriving benefit from that membership" (Raubinger, Rowe, Piper, West, 108). This principle should be taught through literature, music, social studies, and art. Co-ed schools should show good relationships between males and females. When trying to instill this principle in children the future as well as the present should be taken into account.
4. Vocation
The objective of this principle is that the student gets to know him or herself and a variety of careers so that the student can choose the most suitable career. The student should then develop an understanding of the relationship between the vocation and the community in which one lives and works. Those who are successful in a vocation should be the ones to teach the students in either the school or workplace.
5. Civic Education
The goal of civic education is to develop an awareness and concern for one's own community. A student should gain knowledge of social organizations and a commitment to civic morality. Diversity and cooperation should be paramount. Democratic organization of the school and classroom as well as group problem solving are the methods that this principle should be taught through.
6. Worthy Use Of Leisure
The idea behind this principle is that education should give the student the skills to enrich his/her body, mind, spirit and personality in his/her leisure. The school should also provide appropriate recreation. This principle should be taught in all subjects but primarily in music, art, literature, drama, social issues, and science.
7. Ethical Character
This principle involves instilling in the student the notion of personal responsibility and initiative. Appropriate teaching methods and school organization are the primary examples that should be used.
Naming these seven objectives does not "imply that the process of education can be divided into separated fields" (Raubinger, Rowe, Piper, West, 106). Therefore all of the seven principles are interrelated. In order for these principles to be successful the student must have a willingness to follow these and an ethical character that will allow this learning to take place.

Black Out

2012-01-10T17:00:00.001-08:00

Black Out, by Lisa Unger

Robin of My Two Blessings recommended an Unger novel for her U week last year, and it looked interesting so I read that, and then that book included the first chapter from Black Out and it looked interesting so I got it. It's a thriller about secret identities buried in the past and all sorts of things--very exciting but pretty dark. It was fun though.

The Phantom of the Opera

2012-01-10T16:42:00.000-08:00

The Phantom of the Opera, by Gaston Leroux

I did not know that this was even a book. When I was about 16, the Broadway musical was a big hit and most of my friends lived in the grip of Phantom-mania. I never saw the show or the movie, so I was pretty clueless about all of it.

But it turns out that originally, it was a mystery by one of the original detective-story geniuses! The Phantom of the Opera was published in 1910 (in French of course), and it wasn't very popular at all, but the film adaptations did much better.

The story is told by a detective who does relatively little detecting in the story; mostly he just narrates the information he has gathered. It is the story of the young Swedish singer, Christine Daae, the young and romantic aristocrat Raoul who loves her, and the "Opera Ghost" who is obsessed with her. He has a deformed face which makes him an outcast. He is also diabolically clever and entirely insane.

I enjoyed the story, which is more Gothic tale than detective novel. That was a pleasant surprise. I still don't plan on seeing the show, though.

The Consolation of Philosophy

2012-01-08T19:00:00.000-08:00

The Consolation of Philosophy, by Boethius

I am quite proud of myself; I've always wanted to read Boethius and now I've done it. Of course, it turned out not to be nearly as difficult as I'd always thought it was going to be, so maybe it's not such an amazing accomplishment.

C. S. Lewis has a whole section on Boethius in The Discarded Image, and he says that it "was for centuries one of the most influential books ever written in Latin...Until about two hundred years ago it would, I think, have been difficult to find an educated man in any European country who did not love it. To acquire a taste for it is almost to become naturalised in the Middle Ages."

Anicius Manlius Severinus Boëthius (~480-525) lived in Rome just as the Western Roman Empire was crumbling into the last little bits. He belonged to an eminent family, served as consul, and worked for Theodoric the Ostrogoth. He wound up on the wrong side of a power struggle and Theodoric imprisoned and finally executed him. (This capital letter from a 14th-century manuscript shows him teaching students, but of course no one knows what he looked like.)

The Consolation of Philosophy was written while Boethius sat in prison. It starts with him feeling sorry for himself--his wealth is gone, he's worried about his family, his name is mud. (He doesn't seem to be terribly worried about execution, though, so maybe he wasn't expecting that.) A woman appears to him, introduces herself as Philosophia, and by using the tools of reason and philosophy, she proves that things are, in reality, very different than they seem. As he learns to see the world through philosophical eyes, he becomes calmer and better able to deal with his imprisonment.

Each section of the book delves deeper into why people experience bad and good fortune, why the wicked prosper while the virtuous are trampled, why there is evil in the world, and how free will can exist. Although Boethius is not talking religion, he uses the tools of philosophy to come to conclusions that sound pretty Christian. That seems to be the task he set himself.

I enjoyed this one a lot and am very pleased that I read it. Next up in medieval literature--The Book of Beasts! (I've owned it for years but have never read it properly, though my 6th-grader daughter did this year for her medieval history studies.)

The Oresteia

2012-01-08T18:30:00.000-08:00

The Oresteia, by Aeschylus

I used George Thomson's 1932 translation, which is collected in the Viking Portable Library's Greek Reader edited by W. H. Auden. It's mostly done in blank verse--unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter--though the rhythm changes sometimes during songs. I liked the translation just fine, for the most part.

As background, we must know that ten years ago, when Agamemnon and his men started off to attack Troy, they were becalmed and could not launch the ships because they had somehow angered Artemis. The only way to appease the goddess was to sacrifice Agamemnon's daughter Iphigenia. Torn between his duty to his men and his love for his daughter, Agamemnon chose war and killed Iphigenia. Clytemnestra, of course, could not forgive this sin. She took Agamemnon's cousin Aegisthus as a lover and together they plotted revenge; Aegisthus' grievance is against Agamemnon's father Atreus, who killed his brother's children and fed them to him during a fight over the throne of Argos. Old sins have long shadows and this story is all about how sin leads to revenge and more sin--how can it be stopped?

Agamemnon starts with the news of victory at Troy arriving in Argos. A chorus of old men speaks with Clytemnestra, and she keeps up the appearance of loyalty and joy as King Agamemnon returns from the war. Agamemnon retains his wishy-washy character to the end and allows himself to be talked into a prideful display. He leaves his new captive and mistress, the prophetess Cassandra, outside and her song of lament for the past and the future is the climax of the play. As she goes in, she and Agamemnon are killed off-stage (the Greeks considered it inappropriate to show a death onstage). Clytemnestra justifies herself to the chorus, which blames her but has no solution about what she should have done about her daughter's sacrifice. Aegisthus shows up at the end, having been happy to let Clytemnestra do the dirty work, and they plan to rule Argos together.

In a society that considers blood revenge to be the only suitable response to a killing, how do you stop people from killing each other until no one is left? What do you do when one duty conflicts with another, and there is no way to avoid doing wrong? Aeschylus asks these questions over and over, and he doesn't really have an answer. There's a nice bit of foreshadowing at the beginning:

It is only deeds unholy

That increase, fruitful in offspring

Of the same breed as its fathers.

Where justice rules in the house,

Blest of God is the issue.

But ancient pride loves to put forth a fresh bloom of sin out of human evil...

Envy is another theme that runs through the whole play; the chorus brings up several times and warns against getting so famous or so prideful that one attracts the envy of others. That's just asking for trouble, either from your people or from the gods:

Mine be the life unenvied,
Neither to plunder cities
Nor myself a prisoner bow
Down to the will of others.

Which reminds me of that idea of the Greeks that you should never call anyone happy until they're safely dead. After all you never know--anything could happen, so it's not a good idea to call yourself happy.

On to The Libation Bearers (or Choephroe as my book has it)--Orestes has returned from his state of exile in order to avenge his father. Apollo himself has ordered him to kill his mother, so he feels completely justified. He finds his sister lamenting over Agamemnon's grave and longing for her brother, and they joyfully reunite and plan their revenge. Although they mention their lost sister, neither of them refer to the fact that she was killed by their father; I don't know if they consider that to have been wiped out by his death, or just not as important as his murder. The chorus this time is made up of slave-women, who alternately encourage the siblings and remember how terrible it is to be captured and made a slave. At length, Orestes and his friend (disguised as strangers) enter the palace and are welcomed as guests and messengers. Orestes tells Clytemnestra that her son is dead, and she doesn't seem too sorry, though his nurse grieves. Aegisthus arrives and is killed, and then Clytemnestra sees her son and pleads for her life. Her last act is to curse her son and call down the Furies upon him.

The action of The Eumenides moves to Delphi and Athens. The Furies have been chasing and tormenting Orestes and he has run to Delphi for help from Apollo. But the Furies are older than Apollo or any of the younger gods; they are Justice itself and Apollo has little power over them. All he can do is make them sleep for a while as he sends Orestes off to Athena, who can act as a judge in the case. Legend says that the scene where the Furies awaken and sniff around for Orestes' guilty, blood-ridden scent to follow was so frightening when it was first performed that people fainted or even died. Their justification for tormenting Orestes is that he is guilty of matricide, which is a worse sin than killing a spouse because it involves violating a blood tie. Thus Orestes is more guilty than his mother was.

It takes a whole year for Orestes to get to Athens and call upon Athena, and he is tormented the whole time. Athena calls some judges and hears the case, with Apollo defending Orestes. Orestes maintains that he is perfectly clean and has no guilt, and Apollo argues that the marriage tie is at least as sacred as blood, and anyway a mother only carries a child; she has no part in producing it. This is proven by the fact that Athena herself has no mother. The judges are tied in their verdict, and Athena breaks the tie and pronounces Orestes innocent. To soothe the enraged Furies, she convinces them to live in Athens and encourage the citizens to live in happy justice, doing good deeds to each other instead of killing:

Ne'er, I pray, ne'er may that Root of evil, civil strife, Rage within her boundaries; Ne'er may the earth's dust drink of the blood of her children, And wroth thereat thirst greedily after revenge, Blood in requital of blood; Rather in friendly communion Gladness be rendered for gladness, All at one in love and hate. Therein lies a cure for human ills.

So I suppose the only solution for the problem of blood feuds is not to start them in the first place.

The Greek Reader I'm using has a nice introduction by W. H. Auden that was fun to read too. He describes a little bit of what it was like to grow up back when British boys (the ones whose families could afford it) went to boarding school and mainly learned Latin and Greek, and not much else. Science was lower-class and offensively modern. Auden then talks a bit about the high-flown, roundabout language the ancient Greeks used in plays or poetry, which is fun.

I quite enjoyed reading the plays and will certainly plan to read more Aeschylus in future. I hope you're all enjoying your reading too!

January Classics Discussion

2012-01-06T18:47:00.000-08:00

November's Autumn's Classics Challenge involves saying something about whatever classic you're reading at the moment. This month's focus is on the author, so every so often I'll post some information about whoever I'm reading. At the moment, my problem is that her questions kind of assume that you're reading a novel, and all I've got is a trilogy of Greek plays and an early medieval treatise on philosophy. But no matter, we'll do our best.

This post will be on Aeschylus!

Level 1 Who is the author? What do they look like? When were they born? Where did they live? What does their handwriting look like? What are some of the other novels they've written? What is an interesting and random fact about their life?

Aeschylus lived from ~525-455 BC. He is supposed to have been a native of Eleusis, which isn't too far from Athens, and seems to have lived there much of the time. No one knows what his handwriting looked like, and most of his many (70-90) plays have been lost, but besides the Oresteia, we have The Persians, Seven Against Thebes, The Suppliants, and the iffy Prometheus Bound (which may or may not be genuinely by Aeschylus).

Aeschylus fought at the Battle of Marathon and the Battle of Salamis. He is supposed to have begun his career as a playwright as a youth, when he fell asleep while working in a vineyard and had a vision of Dionysus, who ordered him to write tragedies. (The vineyard was of course the right place for such a vision, and the dramatic competitions the plays were for were in honor of Dionysus.) Much of the reason that we have lost so many of these Dionysian plays is that they were only intended to be performed once--there were new ones every year and it was only much later that the 'best of Greek drama' started to be put on in revivals. Kind of like the Eurovision competition!

Level 2
What do you think of their writing style? What do you like about it? or what would have made you more inclined to like it? Is there are particular quote that has stood out to you?

Aeschylus' style is very high-flown poetic rhetoric (as all Greek drama was in his day), and very heavy on compound epithets that are hard to translate. From what I hear his contemporaries didn't always get him either. To our ears it's very archaic and roundabout, taking forever to say any one thing. Here's a bit I liked from Agamemnon:

It is only deeds unholy
That increase, fruitful in offspring
Of the same breed as its fathers.
Where justice rules in the house,
Blest of God is the issue.

But ancient pride loves to put forth a fresh bloom of sin out of human evil...

Level 3
Why do you think they wrote this novel? How did their contemporaries view both the author and their novel?

The Oresteia was an entry in the annual competition at the Dionysian festival, and it is known to have won first place. Aeschylus' war record was considered to be more important than his literary talent, but he won first place quite often. He was also an innovator in the drama, so he must have been considered quite the rising star for a while. Apparently he was also accused of revealing some of the Eleusinian mysteries onstage, and he had to run away from an angry mob!

Theme Thursday

2012-01-06T17:51:00.000-08:00

Theme Thursday, hosted by My Reader's Block:

Rules
*A theme will be posted each week on Thursday
*Select a conversation/snippet/sentence from your current book that features the theme
*Post it and don't forget to mention the author and title of the book
*Event is open for the whole week
*Link back to Reading Between the Pages

This week's theme is NEW (fresh, newest, latest, etc).

I'm reading The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux, and this is the description of Christine Daae's first big performance:

She began by singing a few passages from Gounod's Romeo et Juliette. This was the first time she had sung anything from that work....Yet that was nothing compared with the superhuman performance she gave in the prison scene and the final trio in Faust, which she sang in place of Carlotta, who was ill. No one had ever heard or seen anything like it. It was "the new Marguerite" that Christine had revealed, a Marguerite with a previously unsuspected splendor and radiance.

It's a very good book and I'm liking it. But I must confess that every mention of Marguerite in Faust makes me think of Bianca Castafiore in Tintin comics.

A favorite essay of mine

2012-01-06T14:02:00.001-08:00

The other day I got down C. S. Lewis' book of essays, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, from my bookshelf. I wanted to see if there was anything in there about Boethius, since I'm reading the Consolation of Philosophy right now (I've finished Book IV! Yippee!). There wasn't, but there is a wonderful essay called "Imagination and Thought in the Middle Ages" which I would highly recommend to anyone interested in medieval literature.

The essay is mostly a short description of medieval cosmology and where it came from, which is a topic that Lewis turned into a whole book called The Discarded Image. It's one of my all-time favorite books (because I'm a geek?). But this essay is worth reading even if you've already read The Discarded Image, I think. For one thing, Lewis takes a lot of time to describe how literate and, really, pedantic medieval scholars were, and how much they loved to categorize, describe, and organize everything in the universe--as in Boethius, Dante's Comedy, or bestiaries, or anything they could manage to insert a good long explanation into. Here is one of my favorite bits:

I described them as a literate people who had lost most of their books. And what survived was, to some extent a chance collection. It contained ancient Hebrew, classical Greek, classical Roman decadent Roman and early Christian elements. It had reached them by various routes. All Plato had disappeared except part of the Timaeus in a Latin version: one of the greatest, but also one of the least typical, of the dialogues. Aristotle’s logic was at first missing, but you had a Latin translation of a very late Greek introduction to it. Astronomy and medicine, and (later) Aristotle, came in Latin translations of Arabic translations of the Greek. That is the typical descent of learning: from Athens to Hellenistic Alexandria, from Alexandria to Baghdad, from Baghdad, via Sicily, to the university of Paris, and thence all over Europe…A scratch collection, a corpus that frequently contradicted itself. But here we touch on a real credulity in the medieval mind. Faced with this self-contradictory corpus, they hardly ever decided that one of the authorities was simply right and the others wrong; never that all were wrong. To be sure, in the last resort it was taken for granted that the Christian writers must be right as against the Pagans. But it was hardly ever allowed to come to the last resort. It was apparently difficult to believe that anything in the books – so costly, fetched from so far, so old, often so lovely to the eye and hand, was just plumb wrong. No; if Seneca and St. Paul disagreed with one another, and both with Cicero, and all these with Boethius, there must be some explanation which would harmonize them. What was not true literally might be true in some other sense…And so on, through every possible subtlety and ramification. It is out of this that the medieval picture of the universe is evolved: a chance collection of materials, an inability to say ‘Bosh’, a temper systematic to the point of morbidity, great mental powers, unwearied patience, and a robust delight in their work. All these factors led them to produce the greatest most complex, specimen of syncretism or harmonization which, perhaps, the world has ever known. They tidied up the universe. To that tidy universe, and above all to its effect on the imagination, I now turn.

So, if you're interested, run out and find this essay, and maybe The Discarded Image too, at your friendly neighborhood public library. They are just so enjoyable to read!

King Solomon's Mines

2012-01-05T19:20:00.000-08:00

King Solomon's Mines, by H. Rider Haggard

It's the first book for the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Challenge! I gather that Allan Quartermain, the narrator of this story, is the leader of the League. King Solomon's Mines was the first book about Allan Quartermain, but it was so popular that Haggard wrote another 15 or so stories about him. I've only ever read one Haggard book, and it wasn't a Quartermain story.

Quartermain is an expert hunter living in South Africa, and he's approached by a couple of men who want to search for a lost brother. It so happens that Quartermain knows that the brother went searching for King Solomon's Mines, and he is also the sole possessor of a 300-year-old map to the mines. So off they trek, across veldt and desert and mountain, until they end up finding a lost civilization. Their noble bearer Umbopa turns out to be the lost rightful king, so he gets the support of several generals and they all depose the evil usurper Twala, bringing justice to the people of Kukuana. And then the intrepid explorers find the mines, but the super-evil witch Gagool has plans for them!

It's all very exciting and rip-roaring, and not as entirely horrifically racist as it could be (which is not to say that you'll never be taken aback, but it could have been a whole lot worse), and the writing style is pretty good for an adventure novel that was dashed off in six weeks. Indiana Jones and other serial adventures owe much to Haggard, so it will be pretty familiar if you read it--just keep in mind that this is one of the originals that inspired all the imitations.

Coffin, Scarcely Used

2012-01-04T12:48:00.000-08:00

Coffin, Scarcely Used, by Colin Watson

I was given a large box of old paperback mysteries, hooray! Lots of them are going straight to the library booksale, but I kept a pile, including several Colin Watson titles, which are supposed to be dryly witty. Well, my reaction to this first one is meh, but maybe they will get better when Miss Lucy Teatime shows up? If any of you would like to convince me that Watson was a genius of mystery-writing, now is your chance.

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

2012-01-02T19:33:00.000-08:00

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, by Ransom Riggs

It's hard to resist the creepy vintage photographs in this novel. I assumed at first that the photos were modern products of Photoshop, but they are old, and were found by people who like to look through piles of unknown old photographs. Riggs borrowed the pictures and built a story around them, which I think is really neat.

Jacob is an utterly ordinary teenager in an ordinary suburb, but when his grandfather dies mysteriously, he starts to have problems. Grandpa used to tell him stories about his amazing friends on a magic island, and how he fought monsters--was he lying to a little kid, or could he have been telling the truth? Jacob ends up looking for the real story on a tiny Welsh island, and gets more than he expected.

The writing was good, the story is engaging and creepy, and there's something original about the whole thing that is more satisfying than I would have expected from a well-used storyline. Riggs could easily set this up for a trilogy, but I got the feeling that he didn't intend to do that--though I wouldn't be too surprised to see it happen, given the book's enormous popularity. It's already being made into a movie.

Half of a Yellow Sun

2012-01-02T16:50:00.001-08:00

Half of a Yellow Sun, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

This is the first Adichie book I've heard of or read, and she is going on my list of authors I need to read more of. Her writing is beautiful. And tragic.

The story revolves around a small constellation of people in Nigeria and explores their personal relationships. All become involved in the Biafran independence movement of the late 1960s, and we see how war and hardship change them.

Some background information: Biafra was an attempt at secession from Nigeria in 1967, and it only lasted a couple of years; Nigeria declared war and few governments wanted to encourage post-colonial African independence movements, and the Biafrans were massacred or starved. The title refers to the Biafran flag.

This is yet another title recommended by Eva, so she gets the credit. And, I'm counting this as my modern fiction entry in the Mixing It Up Challenge.

Greek Classics: Here We Go!

2012-01-01T15:37:00.000-08:00

Happy January 1st--are you ready to start reading the ancient Greeks?

I'm going to start with Aeschylus' Oresteia trilogy: Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides. These plays tell the awful story of Agamemnon's family after he returns from the Trojan War. Before setting out, he had sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia, and in revenge (not to mention how Agamemnon took Cassandra as a mistress) his wife Clytemnestra murders him, and Cassandra too. Now it's up to their son Orestes to avenge his father, and he kills Clytemnestra and her lover. This makes Orestes guilty of matricide, so the Furies pursue and torment him, and he appeals to Apollo, who encouraged Orestes in the first place. Athena has to step in as arbiter, which leads to some discussion on reason and law. What happens when justice and duty are at cross-purposes?

Aeschylus' plays are the oldest we have, and only seven have survived; he wrote at least seventy. All the plays before Aeschylus have been lost, and apparently they were somewhat different, with fewer characters that could only speak with the chorus. Aeschylus developed conflict between characters and is often known as the Father of Tragedy. He wrote many trilogies, but all have been lost except for the Oresteia. From what I hear, his plays are written in difficult Greek that often puzzled his contemporaries and now gives translators fits.

He was born in Eleusis around 525 BC of a wealthy family, and was a member of the Eleusinian mysteries that were based in his home city. He served in the Persian wars and fought at the Battle of Marathon, as did his brother Cynegeirus, who was killed in action there and revered as a hero. Later, he fought at the Battle of Salamis as well. This war service was much more important to the Greeks than literary accomplishment, and so his epitaph reads:

Beneath this stone lies Aeschylus, son of Euphorion, the Athenian,

who perished in the wheat-bearing land of Gela;

of his noble prowess the grove of Marathon can speak,

and the long-haired Persian knows it well.

Aeschylus' death is the subject of a legendary (and probably apocryphal) story: he is supposed to have been killed around 455 BC when an eagle dropped a tortoise on him, mistaking his bald head for a rock.

Now that you know something about Aeschylus, what Greek literature are you planning to read?

The Classical World

2011-12-31T16:49:00.001-08:00

The Classical World: An Epic History From Homer to Hadrian, by Robin Lane Fox

This book has been on my mental wish list for a long time, but the length put me off for a while. Once I decided to run the Greek Classics Challenge, though, I thought I'd better brush up my history and prepare by reading it. And I've finished just in time!

"Epic" is the right word to describe Fox's book, which covers nearly a thousand years of ancient history. That amount of material requires an organizing element, and Fox chose to use the Roman emperor Hadrian as a frame and reference point. Hadrian's reign is the final event of the book, and he was an emperor with "classicizing taste." He traveled over the whole Empire and did much to promote the styles we think of as classical.

We start off with Homer, and the first third or so of the book is all about ancient and classical Greece. Then it's on to Alexander and the Hellenistic Age, and the Roman Republic, which becomes the Roman Empire. The fairly short chapters make it easier to read, I think. There is so much to cover: wars, political intrigue, all the different forms of government, and then there's literature, society, family habits, and everything else. It's all too much to really take in at once, but Fox does a pretty good job at helping the reader to digest everything and get an idea of what was going on.

It's a good book and worth reading, but I hope you have plenty of time to devote to it. Slow down and try to absorb the history; this is a book that can't be rushed.

And with that, it's the end of the year! So I hope you all have a great 2012 ahead of you. Tomorrow we get to start reading the ancient Greeks!

Pershing

2011-12-31T16:16:00.001-08:00

Pershing: Commander of the Great War, by John Perry (The Generals series)

General John J. Pershing is probably the most-forgotten eminent general in American history. Before I read this biography, I knew the name but could not tell you what he did--and yet he was one of the most famous men of the early 20th century, and the first man to be appointed General of the Armies.

Overall, the book is a good short biography, excellent for those of us who want to learn but don't want to tackle one of those 800-page definitive biographies. It's readable, flows well, and is suitable for adults or high-school students interested in history. I thought it was fair to Pershing; it didn't whitewash his flaws or blame him for being a human being.

The book mainly focuses on Pershing's career and family relationships. There's not much about his childhood, but his life at West Point and in the military before World War I is thoroughly explained, and really interesting to read. Pershing served in the West, learning to get along with Native Americans and Mexicans; apparently he was quite good at peacemaking and helping everyone live with each other. This experience served him very well when he was posted to the Philippines and expected to quell the Muslim Moro minority, which was inclined to fight the Americans as much as they had fought the Spanish. Pershing did his best to make friends with the Moros and calm the tensions in the area, and he was very successful. I enjoyed reading about all of that.

The second half of the book is all about World War I. In 1917, the United States joined the Great War, and not a minute too soon as far as the Allies were concerned; they were about to collapse. General Pershing managed to annoy the other generals quite a lot by insisting on keeping his army out of the field until they were trained, and refusing to fill in French or British lines with American soldiers. The generals' anger is understandable, but Pershing was right and it's not an exaggeration to say that his leadership was instrumental in winning the war. Without his organization and competence, I think it's quite likely that Germany would have won. I was glad to learn more about World War I; we never seemed to learn much about it in school, and I don't like reading about it because it was so awful, but we live now in a world shaped by what happened then, and we should study it more.

I would recommend this title to anyone wanting to learn about World War I; unless you're going to get far more in-depth than most people ever manage to do, this should be on your pile of WWI books. It's a good overview of Pershing's life.

I received this book free from Booksneeze in exchange for an honest review.

Theme Thursday

2011-12-29T19:04:00.000-08:00

Theme Thursday is a reading meme hosted by Reading Between Pages. I'm not in the habit of doing these, but today I'll give it a try:

Theme Thursdays is a fun weekly event that will be open from one thursday to the next. Anyone can participate in it. The rules are simple:

A theme will be posted each week (on Thursdays)
Select a conversation/snippet/sentence from the current book you are reading
Mention the author and the title of the book along with your post
It is important that the theme is conveyed in the sentence (you don’t necessarily need to have the word)

As we are winding one year, we will hopefully cast away everything that is old and look forward for a brighter and more prosperous year. So look for the word OLD or anything that symbolizes it. (worn out, torn, past etc)

Today I'm reading all about something old in The Classical World, a giant history that spans from early Greek times to the reign of the Roman emperor Hadrian. It's by Robin Lane Fox. In a chapter on Roman society during the reign of Caesar Augustus, Fox says:

"A reassertion of ancient dignity would appeal to new men who were newly arrived in high places; it persuaded them, Catos and Ciceros at heart, that their new eminence was indeed as sound and traditional as they had expected...He [Augustus] later wrote how he had brought back 'many examples of our ancestors which were disappearing from our age.'"

Augustus spent a lot of time trying to bring back old mores and encourage fertility; after 20 years of civil war, the population needed replenishment.

Reading the Middle Ages

2011-12-29T14:21:00.000-08:00

Reading the Middle Ages, by Theodore L. Steinberg

Eva at A Striped Armchair recommended this to me and I thought I'd try to get it read before I start the Medieval Literature Challenge at the new year. I'm glad I did, because this is a really nice useful book. Steinberg has written an introduction to medieval literature that hooks you in and makes you want to read the works he describes.

The first section is a general introduction to the middle ages, and it's quite good, avoiding too many generalizations. After that each chapter focuses on one particular work or genre. There is a good variety here; as expected, there are chapters on Beowulf and Dante and Chaucer, but there are also sections on Jewish literature, The Tale of Genji, and French women writers such as Marie de France and Christine de Pisan. (After reading two books in a row that talk about Christine de Pisan, I've decided that the universe really wants me to read her book. Message received, universe!)

Steinberg's main goal is to help readers realize that although the Middle Ages can feel very strange to us, its literature is still relevant, not that difficult, and most of all enjoyable to read. To that end he keeps it fairly light while explaining historical context and the issues writers were addressing--some of which sound familiar even a thousand years later. As far as I'm concerned he succeeded, because now I would like to read every work he discussed. So this was a great book to fire my enthusiasm for the challenge.

It's not a long book, and would be an excellent introductory volume for a college student preparing to take some medieval literature courses. I wish I'd had it when I was a student! Someday I would like to purchase a copy for my kids to read when they're older (the joy of homeschooling: making your kids read anything you think is cool!).

I do sometimes wonder, though, why so many publishers choose pre-Raphaelite paintings for the covers of books on medieval topics. This one is Edward Burne-Jones' King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid, and I'm not that wild about it. The story is a medieval legend, but is not addressed in Steinberg's book.

And for the record, my first pick for the Medieval Challenge is going to be Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy. It's all ready to go.

Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History

2011-12-26T13:42:00.000-08:00

Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History, by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

Sometime in the mid-90's, somebody noticed a sentence in a scholarly article on Puritan funeral sermons by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. It read, "Well-behaved women seldom make history." The sentence got onto a t-shirt, and from there became a popular feminist bumper-sticker slogan. Ulrich was bemused by the sudden fame of her sentence, and this book is something of a response to it. She tells the story of the sentence and from there, launches into a discussion of women in history, well-behaved or otherwise.

Ulrich uses 3 particular women as her focus: the medieval French writer Christine de Pisan, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Virginia Woolf. But they are just the platform from which we can learn about all sorts of women throughout history. I enjoyed the structure of the book, which meanders all over the place, but always in a way that makes sense. The whole thing was just great. Put this one on your shelf!

Christmas Books

2011-12-26T13:02:00.000-08:00

Now I'm late and no one will want to read about Christmas books.

After The Country Child, the other Christmas book I wanted to read this year was Christmas Stories, an Everyman collection of short stories. They're arranged approximately chronologically, starting with Charles Dickens and ending with some modern selections. I particularly enjoyed stories by Trollope, Tolstoy, Willa Cather, and O. Henry (not the Magi one, a cowboy story), and I wasn't so wild about the modern ones.

If you'd like to know about my favorite Christmas books that I always like to read in December, they are both children's books. The Children of Green Knowe is part of the classic-but-forgotten series by L. M. Boston--I think it's really the first one. Tolly goes to visit his great-grandmother at her old manor house of Green Knowe and starts to meet the many inhabitants of the place, but some are ghosts. My husband read this aloud to our kids last year and thought it was completely weird and creepy, but it's really good! If you're an Anglophile and like old stories and legends, this series is necessary for you to read.

My other favorite is The Dark is Rising, which is the second book in Susan Cooper's series of the same name. Will turns 11 on Midwinter Day and is sent on a quest for 6 ancient signs that he must collect over the Christmas season. This is a great series for a kid who enjoys fantasy, and another good selection for anyone who likes old British legend.

I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas, as we did. The best part was that everyone in my extended family is employed, so that all by itself made it the best Christmas ever.

52 Books Wrapup!

2011-12-26T11:00:00.000-08:00

Robin asked us these questions:

Did you reach the goal of 52 books or did you manage to beat your own personal best?

I blogged about over 100 books, so yep. I have no idea how that measures up to the quantity of books read in the past, but I had less time for reading this year so I expect I read less.

What book are you ending the year with?

I'm preparing for my Greek Classics challenge with The Classical World, and for the Medieval Challenge with Reading the Middle Ages (which I am loving, thank you Eva!).

Did you discover a new author or genre? Did you love them or hate them?

This year I discovered H. R. James, Joyce Dennys, and Erin Bow, among others. I guess if I read an author I didn't like, I didn't think of it as a discovery, more like a chore.

Did you challenge yourself to read more non fiction if prefer fiction or more fiction if you prefer non fiction?

No, I just read whatever I wanted. It turns out that I read almost exactly 50% of each--I counted up (for the first time ever) and got 71 fiction titles and 71 non-fiction, but that does not include mystery novels or other fluff I didn't bother to document, and most of that was probably fiction.

Did you read from a list or wing it?

I only read from a list when I have to, and I did with the Feminist Classics Challenge. Otherwise I winged it. I have a very hard time sticking to a list.

How many classics did you read? What did you think of the writing style or author?

I enjoyed reading Pushkin most, and I also really liked Trollope and Thackeray. And Nabokov too! But I don't know exactly how many I read.

Name one book that you thought you'd never read and was pleasantly surprised you like it.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.

What are your top ten favorite books?

The Scent of Water
Nine Lives
Plain Kate
The Rational Optimist
Little Princes
The Con
Albion
Count Magnus and Other Stories
Who Killed Homer?
One of Our Thursdays Is Missing
Henrietta's War
end-of-year bonus: Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History

What are your ten least favorite books?

What the Tortoise Taught Us
Radical Homemakers
Gender Trouble
The Twentieth Wife
The Beauty Myth
Farm City (I liked parts but not other parts)
The Secret History
The Fall of Troy

Did you start any books that you just simply couldn't finish?

The Twentieth Wife--I didn't bother to finish that one. And Gender Trouble. Any others I couldn't finish were forgotten. I often don't finish things if I don't like them, but then they don't get written down either.

What did you think of the mini challenges and did you join in or complete any?

I thought they were a good mix. I did the one about reading in different countries and got about 30.

Did your family join in on the fun?

No, but my older daughter sure does covet a book blog now.

How many books have you added to your wishlist since the beginning of the year?

Way too many, but I don't know a number.

What was your favorite thing about the challenge?

This is the challenge that got me started in book blogging and challenges, so I'm grateful to Robin because I'm having a lot of fun with it! I especially like how many WTM people participate so we can trade titles easily.

Week 52: The Saturday Big Tent Wedding Party

2011-12-25T13:13:00.000-08:00

The Saturday Big Tent Wedding Party, by Alexander McCall Smith

It's the latest installment of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency! I like these books. They are just nice. There's not much that can be called a mystery; really they're just stories about good people doing the best they can. This is something like #12 and I still like them.

Week 52: The Country Child

2011-12-25T13:10:00.000-08:00

The Country Child, by Alison Uttley

I haven't read nearly as much by Alison Uttley as I would like to, but she's not easy to come by these days. She wrote quite a lot, but apparently most of it was picture books. I've had The Country Child for years, and I wanted to read it as a Christmas book, even though really the story goes through a whole year. The Christmas parts are what stuck in my head from my first reading.

Susan Garland lives on an isolated farm high in the hills, and the story simply follows her through a year. There is a lot of very detailed, very beautiful description of the country, the people, and the things in Susan's life. It's really a fictionalized version of Uttley's own childhood at the end of the 19th century. Americans will find it a bit similar to the "Little House" series, but of course with a very different feel.

The other Uttley book I have is probably her best-known, A Traveler in Time, about an adventure back to the life of Mary, Queen of Scots.

This cover is the one I have; it's a very old Peacock edition "for older children." It looks like it hasn't been in print in the US for quite some time, but is in the UK.

Week 52: Laika

2011-12-25T13:00:00.000-08:00

Laika, by Nick Abadzis

I didn't like this graphic novel about the most famous Russian space dog ever as much as I hoped to. It's pretty good, and interesting, but I felt like Abadzis tried a little too hard to pull on our heartstrings. And the art wasn't my favorite.

The story starts with Sergei Pavlovich Korolev staggering out of a gulag. He's been recalled to to Moscow to have his case reviewed, but only if he doesn't freeze on the way there. His determination and a little luck keep him alive, and we skip to 1957 as Sputnik is launched. Korolev is the director of the Soviet space program now, but he still has to do whatever Khruschev orders--and what Khruschev orders is another launch within a month's time.

After that there are quite a few flashbacks about the Soviet space program, and Laika is introduced. She gets a fictional backstory. It takes about half the book to settle down to a single timeline and start preparations for Sputnik II (which is Laika's flight). Abadzis puts a lot of emphasis on the caregiver's emotional turmoil and on how special Laika is so as to get the maximum number of tears out of the reader. I thought that was a bit overdone and it would have been more effective just to let the story stand; there's plenty of pathos and emotional difficulty as is.

Here is a photo of the actual Laika:

Week 51: Torn

2011-12-18T13:10:00.000-08:00

Torn, by Margaret Peterson Haddix

The is book #4 in Haddix' latest book series, a time-travel adventure with a whole cast of characters. Here, the brother-sister duo of Jonah and Katherine are thrown into 1611, onto Henry Hudson's voyage searching for the Northwest Passage. It's June, everything is frozen, everyone is starving, and time has broken down enough that the kids aren't sure what to do. And Captain Hudson seems kind of on the delusional side, and some of the crew are planning a mutiny...

I've liked this series so far and am looking forward to the rest of the series; there are going to be 7.

Haddix uses a device here that seems to be getting increasingly common. I'm noticing more boy/girl pairs as double protagonists--they may split up and have separate storylines, or stick together and work to solve their problem. I think it's a strategy to try to get more girl heroines in without breaking the common "rule" that boys won't read books about girls.

Week 51: Gaudy Night

2011-12-18T13:09:00.000-08:00

Gaudy Night, by Dorothy Sayers

Dorothy Sayers is one of my favorites. In fact, the classical homeschooling philosophy I follow is based on a speech she gave, which kind of makes me boggle a bit. I just really enjoy her style, and have read some of her theological books as well as the mysteries. Gaudy Night is my favorite of the Wimsey mysteries--and he hardly appears in it, and there's no murder. Instead, the story focuses on Harriet Vane as she goes back to Oxford for the first time since her trial. She ends up staying in her old college for quite some time as she tries to figure out who is vandalizing things and writing poison pen letters.

Harriet spends a lot of time pondering questions that Sayers had a lot of opinions about--the difficulties (for women) of combining work and marriage, the importance of scholarly integrity, and suchlike. And as she ponders, she comes to realize a few things about herself and Lord Peter...

Week 51: The Secret Life of the Grown-Up Brain

2011-12-18T13:00:00.000-08:00

The Secret Life of the Grown-Up Brain, by Barbara Strauch

Until quite recently, no one was really studying the ordinary adult brain. Scientists mainly studied children's development and the decline of mental abilities in the elderly. We made a lot of assumptions about how the adult brain works, and it turns out that many of them are wrong.

Adult brains are much more malleable than researchers had realized. Instead of starting a slow decline in adulthood, middle-aged adults can synthesize knowledge and draw on years of experience. They are calmer and happier, even if a bit slower and more scatter-brained. They can grow new neurons (exercise is especially good for this) and possibly even stave off the effects of Alzheimer's through education and interaction.

So this was a very interesting book with a lot of new science to learn.

2011 Challenges Wrap-Up

2011-12-17T14:15:00.000-08:00

I'm a few days early, but I'm going to wrap things up now.

The Year of Feminist Classics Challenge: I read nearly all the selections, but opted out of God Dies by the Nile, The Second Sex, and the academic anthology (I looked at it!). I'm pretty satisfied with that even though I don't get to tick all the boxes, but the real point is that I got to read a lot of great books and enjoyed them very much.

A Vindication of the Rights of Women by Mary Wollestonecraft
So Long a Letter by Mariama Ba
The Subjection of Women by John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill
A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen
Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
God Dies by the Nile by Nawal Saadawi
The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston
The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf
Ain’t I a Woman? by bell hooks
Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism Anthology
Gender Trouble by Judith Butler
Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde

Victorian Literature Challenge: I originally aimed for the lowest level, but ended up at the highest, with 15 titles:

Idylls of the King, by Tennyson
The Professor, by Charlotte Brontë
Uncle Tom's Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe
Under the Greenwood Tree, by Thomas Hardy
The Subjection of Women by John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill
A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen
Barchester Towers, by Anthony Trollope
Herland, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The Heir of Redclyffe, by Charlotte Yonge
The Frozen Deep, by Wilkie Collins
Vanity Fair, by William Makepeace Thackeray
Victorian Tales of Mystery and Detection
Short prose selections by Alexander Pushkin
Lady Audley's Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Phantastes, by George MacDonald

Take a Chance Challenge 3: This one was fun! And it really did get me reading some books I would not have picked up otherwise.

1: Staff Member’s Choice: Pnin, by Nabokov

2: Loved One’s Choice: The Russian's World AND The Twentieth Wife

3: Blogger’s Choice: Plain Kate, by Erin Bow

4: Critic’s Choice: The Age of Wonder

5: Blurb Book: Seeing Voices, by Oliver Sacks

6: Book Seer Pick: The Pedant and the Shuffly, by John Bellairs

7: What Should I Read Next Pick : Are Women Human? by Dorothy Sayers

8: Which Book Pick: Elegance

9: LibraryThing Pick: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime

10: Pick A Method: The Mystic Grail AND On Her Majesty's Secret Service

Finally, The 52 Books in 52 Weeks Challenge! I read way more than that this year (I tried to have two for every week and nearly succeeded), so this is completed. Don't worry, I'm not going to list them all. I also tried the Read Around the World Mini-Challenge, and if you look at my lovely map on the sidebar you can see that I read in a bunch of states and countries. I think I covered 29-30 countries and 26 states. I found that I am pretty hopeless about the Southern Hemisphere, especially South America and Australia, and also I read an awful lot about the UK. Kind of embarrassing... In the US, it turns out that most non-fiction writers live on the East Coast.

I'm happy with all I've gotten read this year and am looking forward to the new 2012 challenges a lot!

Feminist Classics: Sister Outsider

2011-12-15T18:00:00.000-08:00

Sister Outsider, by Audre Lorde

This collection of essays, speeches, and other pieces by Audre Lorde was worth reading (and in my view better than the last one on our list!). The pieces that interested me most tended to be the ones that recounted Lorde's personal experiences: an essay about a visit to the USSR, excerpts from an interview, and "Eye to Eye."

I don't know that I have a lot of amazing insight into the book, but it was an excellent addition to this year's list of feminist works. This book also wraps up the list! Stay tuned for a possible continuation of the project.

Mixing It Up Challenge

2011-12-15T11:31:00.000-08:00

I know, this is going a bit overboard, but I like this one! It's the Mixing It Up Challenge hosted by Ellie at Musings of a Bookshop Girl.

Here are the rules:

Read one book from each of the challenge categories, using the guidelines above. Don't use the same book for more than one category!
The challenge will run until December 31st 2012, so you can sign up any time during the year.
Create a blog post for the challenge, to keep track of what you've read. Add review links for each completed book so we can see how you're getting on. My post, for example, looks like THIS.
The URL you leave in the Mr Linky MUST be a direct link to your challenge post, not to your blog homepage - I don't have time to comb through several months' worth of posts searching for it as the year wears on!
Leave a comment on this post with your blog name (so I can match you to your Linky entry) and your chosen level of participation.
Bookmark this post so you can come back later! I'll be adding links to update posts over the year, plus you'll have the category guidelines handy if you need them!
At the end of the year, everyone who has read along and hit their chosen target will be entered into a bookish giveaway. Prizes to be determined!

And here are the levels:

MEASURING JUG: Playing it safe with 1-4 categories
CUPCAKE MIX: Livening things up with 5-8 categories
MIXING BOWL: Branching out with 9-12 categories
TWO-TIER CAKE: Getting ambitious with 13-15 categories
ALL THE TRIMMINGS AND A CHERRY ON TOP: Going for gold with the full 16!

I am feeling greedy as usual and will be going for the full 16. Here are the categories:

1. Classics

2. Biography And There Was Light, by Jacques Lusseyran

3. Cookery or food

4. History

5. Modern Fiction: Half of a Yellow Sun, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

6. Graphic Novel/Manga Feynman, by Ottaviani and Myrick

7. Crime/Mystery Hopjoy Was Here, by Colin Watson

8. Horror The Haunted Dolls' House and Other Stories, by M. R. James

9. Romance

10. SF/Fantasy The Man in the High Castle, by Philip K. Dick

11. Travel

12. Poetry/Drama

13. Journalism/Humor

14. Science/Natural History

15. Children's/YA Daughter of Smoke and Bone, by Laini Taylor

16. Social sciences/Philosophy Unnatural History, by Mara Hvistendahl

I'm looking forward to adding this challenge to the pile. The funny thing is, that I'm seeing a lot of book bloggers out there now who have more challenges than this and who read quite a bit more than I do....so if you think I'm bad, just look around a little more!

Feminist Classics: Gender Trouble

2011-12-12T19:14:00.001-08:00

Gender Trouble, by Judith Butler

This book is famous for its impenetrability, and the reputation is deserved. Butler's prose will leave most people confused and frustrated, and that includes me. I am conceding defeat on this one; I got about halfway through it, and my ILL copy has to go back.

A fairly easy sentence taken at random from page 7 reads, "As a result, gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which "sexed nature" or "a natural sex" is produced and established as "prediscursive," prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts." The liberal use of quotation marks is a consistent feature of the book, since Butler is trying to question the meaning of all the words.

To me it read as a more opaque version of the kind of academic prose that seeks to impress readers through jargon. I'm not sure I buy the necessity of that kind of language. Too often it seems to be either padding, or covering up for a lack of clarity. Butler's claim is that her writing had to be extremely difficult to read in order to say things that ordinary language could not say, and in order to shake up the status quo. I am not sure I buy that either.

I wanted to read and understand the whole book, because it's quite an influential one. We are all living with a few consequences of Butler's ideas, so I want to understand where they came from. And besides, Butler is a professor in my very own academic program! Though I never took a class from her.

So, I lose, but at least I gave it a shot.

The Improvement of the Mind

2011-12-12T16:38:00.000-08:00

The Improvement of the Mind, by Isaac Watts

One of the things I really love about having a tablet with e-reader apps is that I can get old and obscure books --for free! --that I can't easily get in real life. Isaac Watts' Improvement of the Mind is one of the first books I downloaded, and it's been a reading project for a while now. My copy is 400 pages long, and quite old--a second edition from 1743, printed in that old-fashioned script where nouns are capitalized and most of the S's look like F's. It's a copy from the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, which also made me happy.

Isaac Watts is most famous for his hymns and poetry, but he was also a well-known theologian and logician. His handbook of logic (which I've also downloaded!) was the definitive work on the subject for many years, and Improvement of the Mind was a follow-up work, all about self-education. I originally heard of it in a lecture on self-education for busy moms by my favorite homeschooling theorist, Susan Wise Bauer. She quotes Watts' encouragement for those of us who feel unqualified to tackle difficult works: "acquaint yourself with your own ignorance, and ... impress your mind with a deep and painful sense of the low and imperfect degrees of your present knowledge..." His point is that everyone is ignorant, so don't worry and dive in.

It's got quite a lot of good stuff to think about, and I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it. His style is nice and clear, and I found it quite easy to read. Here are some of my favorite bits that struck me as entirely relevant to the modern reader:

On our natural mental defences against losing an argument:

When Truth with bright Evidence is ready to break in upon a Disputant, and to overcome his Objections and Mistakes, how swift and ready is the Mind to engage Wit and Fancy, Craft and Subtilty, to cloud and perplex and puzzle the Truth, if possible? How eager is he to throw in some impertinent Question to divert from the main Subject? How swift to take hold of some occasional Word, thereby to lead the Discourse off from the Point in Hand? So much afraid is human Nature of parting with its Errors, and being overcome by Truth."

On the advantages and disadvantages of debate:

But there are some very grievous inconveniences that may sometimes overbalance all these advantages. For many young students, by a constant habit of disputing, grow impudent and audacious, proud and disdainful, talkative and impertinent, and render themselves intolerable by an obstinate humour of maintaining whatever they have asserted, as well as by a spirit of contradiction, opposing almost every thing that they hear. The disputation itself often awakens the passions of ambition, emulation, and anger; it carries away the mind from that calm and sedate temper which is so necessary to contemplate truth.

And this is such a good description of my own distractibility that I should probably print this out and stick it on my mirror as a reminder to focus:
In the pursuit of every valuable subject of knowledge, keep the end always in your eye, and be not diverted from it by every pretty trifle you meet with in the way. Some persons have such a wandering genius, that they are ready to pursue every incidental theme or occasional idea, till they have lost sight of their original subject.

So I found it very worthwhile reading.

Week 50: Evil Genes

2011-12-11T13:23:00.000-08:00

Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend, by Barbara Oakley

Why are some people so manipulative and rotten? What could be the causes of sociopathy, narcissism, or borderline personality syndrome? Inspired by her manipulative older sister (who really did steal her mother's boyfriend!), Oakley looks into the complex and poorly-understood reasons behind Machiavellianism.

The chapters alternate between describing cases of the "successfully sinister" from Mao to Skilling and heavy-duty neuroscience. Some of it is fascinating, and some is awful, and some is depressing. Oakley points out historical events influenced by Machiavellians; chaotic circumstances tend to allow them to rise to leadership positions.

For me, one of the major lessons in this book was this: "...emote control allows our best traits--love, caring, loyalty, and trust--to be used as manipulative levers....the successfully sinister have no compunction about using our best intentions to further their own purposes--and themselves. By believing a heartbreaking speech about how important it is for us to be treated "fairly," or a tale of how we've been victimized, or a plea to put our hearts and minds toward helping others, we may be doing our tiny part to stoke the fires and empower a Machiavellian. It is bitter balm indeed to learn how easily Machiavellians can use our own neurological quirks to fool us into actively working against the very ideals we hold most dear." (p.192)

Week 50: Wildwood

2011-12-11T13:16:00.000-08:00

Wildwood, by Colin Meloy

One day, Prue takes her baby brother Mac to the park to play, and is horrified when a murder of crows suddenly appears to grab Mac and fly away with him...to the Impassable Wilderness. Prue and her tag-along friend Curtis set out for the Wilderness to save her brother, but first they find a country in a state of war, an evil madwoman queen, and a lot of talking animals.

The story is set in a fictionalized (and either way in the future or alternate-universe) version of Portland's Forrest Park, and the geography is just the same. I had some fun studying a map of the real Portland and noting that the bridges and so on are put directly into the book. But in the story, the park is the Impassable Wilderness to outsiders and a small collection of countries inside.

The two friends lose each other right away, and each has an adventure to tell. Curtis' story spends half its time feeling too much like Edmund's in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, but otherwise it's a pretty good read. The protagonists are twelve, and strong readers between 10 and 12 would enjoy this, especially if they are already fans of long adventure/fantasy novels. It's perfectly good for teens as well (though they might not want their friends watching).

Although the book is long enough to be a trilogy all by itself (it's nearly 600 pages), it's called Book I. The author, Colin Meloy, is a first-time author, but you might recognize his wife Carson Ellis' illustrations. Really they seem to have created the whole thing together, and the protagonists are somewhat modelled on them.

I thought it was a good read, pretty well-done, but not in the top tier of fantasy adventures.

Week 50: On the Wasteland

2011-12-11T13:09:00.000-08:00

On the Wasteland, by Ruth M. Arthur

This is an old children's book that is now almost forgotten, but I thought it was very good. It's too bad no one hears about it any more. My local library has one of the few library copies left in the US, so when I heard about it, I could get it easily.

Betony is an orphan girl living in a group home in Suffolk. Although she has no family, she knows that her mother was from Suffolk and feels a strong attachment to the local land. And when she spends time on a piece of waste land that was a harbor 1000 years ago, she is taken back to a time when Vikings and Saxons were neighbors and enemies.

OK, One More Challenge...

2011-12-08T20:37:00.000-08:00

...but I was already going to do this anyway! The Where Are You Reading Challenge is simple; you just put all your books on a Google map, exactly as I did this year. Only now I can look at other readers' maps too!

You can see my 2011 map on my sidebar. It shows that I have shamefully neglected Australia and South America this year, that I have a bad case of Anglophilia, and that American writers live disproportionately on the East Coast--most of my general non-fiction books seem to have ended up there.

Here's the link to my completely empty 2012 map. I'll start adding to it in January. Whee!

Week 49: The Death Cure

2011-12-04T13:25:00.000-08:00

The Death Cure, by James Dashner

It's the final book in the Maze Runner trilogy! In this volume you'll see a lot more of the world and find out the whys and wherefores of the story. Plenty of dystopian post-apocalyptic fun for everyone! I enjoyed this trilogy and look forward to seeing more from Dashner.

Week 49: Cinderella Ate My Daughter

2011-12-04T13:00:00.001-08:00

Cinderella Ate My Daughter, by Peggy Orenstein

Who could resist a title like that? Although I have read enough "advertising and modern culture are oppressing our children" books to fill a wheelbarrow, I had to read this one too. Orenstein focuses on the pink and glittery girly-girl culture that has risen up since about 2000--I actually didn't realize it was so recent, since my own daughter was born in that year. I've never really seen a toy store without swathes of pink glitter everywhere.

Did you know that Disney Princess merchandise only dates from 10 or so years ago? I didn't. Apparently Disney's merchandising department wasn't doing too well until someone noticed that little girls were all wearing homemade princess outfits. And why let people sew their own when you could sell them one with a character on it? Five seconds later you could buy absolutely anything with a Disney princess on it.

The analysis was mostly fine, if not terribly surprising. She covers the rise of Disney princess mania, toddler beauty contests (happily with more depth than usual), and media for older girls such as Hannah Montana and online culture. I read the book quickly and with great interest. I was kind of irritated by Orenstein's thoughts about American Girl dolls, though. She complains about the high prices and plethora of expensive accessories and clothes, even as the books try to push an anti-materialistic message. I can understand her annoyance at the price tag (that's why I've never bought the furniture and sew all the clothes myself), but in just the previous chapter, she praises the high quality of Shirley Temple dolls, noting that during the Depression they cost four times as much as other dolls--just as American Girl dolls do today.

The section on neurodevelopment in children and why little kids get obsessed with defining things as 'boy' or 'girl' around age 4 was quite interesting. I think I learned most there. One side-effect of that chapter has been to get me thinking a little bit about those folks who pop up every few years with a baby whose gender they refuse to reveal. I always thought this was a harmless--if slightly silly--experiment, but knowing a little more about how children come to define themselves, I'm now wondering if it isn't a pretty bad idea.

If you have a daughter, especially a small one, this is a reasonable book.

Week 49: Wonderstruck

2011-12-04T13:00:00.000-08:00

Wonderstruck, by Brian Selznick

I was so excited when I saw this in the bookstore! I loved The Invention of Hugo Cabret and this story is similarly structured, with over half the book taken up with illustrations. But this story is also quite different. It concerns two children living 50 years and several states away from each other. One story is told in images, the other in words, but they intersect often and finally merge together.

I really enjoyed the stories and the art, and I'm so glad that Selznick decided to do another one. It must take a tremendous amount of work and time to create so many detailed illustrations.

My older daughter also loved Wonderstruck and I'm hoping to get my younger one to read it too. (She's picky and doesn't like to read anything she doesn't already know she enjoys.) Put this one on your list for sure!

Week 48: Austenland

2011-11-27T13:03:00.001-08:00

Austenland, by Shannon Hale

I'm always hesitant to pick up anything that looks like part of the Jane Austen industry, so it took me a while to get around to reading Austenland, even though I really like Shannon Hale. It turns out that this is a fun and worthwhile quick read.

On the outside, Jane is a normal New Yorker, but in reality she can't seem to keep a boyfriend and instead, reads or watches Pride & Prejudice over and over. No one ever seems to live up to Mr. Darcy. When her wealthy great-aunt dies and leaves her a plane ticket to England and three weeks in a resort dedicated to re-creating the Regency lifestyle, she can't decide whether to use it to exorcise the ghost of Mr. Darcy forever or to try to find some romance. Once she arrives, Jane is disturbed by the blurring between fantasy and reality. Is anyone at Pembrook Park real?

I took so long to read this that another Pembrook Park novel is due out in a few weeks. I did enjoy it, even though I'm not a fan of Jane Austen spinoffs.

I really do like everything I've read by Shannon Hale. If you have young kids (5+), then you absolutely must find the graphic novels Rapunzel's Revenge and Calamity Jack, which are brilliant.

Week 48: Count Magnus & Other Ghost Stories

2011-11-27T13:03:00.000-08:00

Count Magnus & Other Ghost Stories, by M. R. James

M. R. James is my new favorite creepy writer. His stories involve old artifacts or houses, unnamed horrors, and vague but sinister warnings. I also have the second volume of stories, but I think I'm going to save them for a little while so as to make it last longer.

Week 48: The Fall of Troy

2011-11-27T13:00:00.000-08:00

The Fall of Troy, by Peter Ackroyd

This odd little novel features Heinrich Obermann, a fictionalized version of Heinrich Schliemann. I'm not quite sure why anyone would want to write a novel about Schliemann with a changed ending, but there it is. Obermann marries a young Greek woman, who then travels with him to Hissarlik, the mound that we now consider to be Troy. She works on the dig and watches her new husband, a fanatic who prefers to ignore evidence that does not agree with his vision of Homeric Troy.

I wouldn't necessarily recommend this novel; I liked it OK, but I'm kind of baffled by it. Still, I liked learning about the dig at Hissarlik, though it has to be taken with a grain of salt.

What the Tortoise Taught Us

2011-11-24T08:20:00.000-08:00

What the Tortoise Taught Us: The Story of Philosophy, by Burton F. Porter

I am very disappointed by What the Tortoise Taught Us. It's supposed to be a short overview of the history and development of philosophy, starting with the ancient Greeks and ending with current ethical arguments. The philosophical history does seem to be accurate, as far as I can tell--but I picked the book up because I don't know much about the subject and wanted to learn more in preparation for my Greek challenge, so I'm not really in a position to judge. The real problem with this book is that it is riddled with egregious errors in the "interesting anecdotes" liberally sprinkled through the narration.

I think most of us have an area in our heads where urban legends and unattributed anecdotes and quotations slosh around. We've all heard or repeated the story about Walt Disney being frozen somewhere in Disneyland. Porter seems to have given that part of his mind free rein in this book, throwing off quotations and stories where he thought they would fit, but without checking to see if they were accurate or even true. By the end I was waiting for him to tell me that ducks' quacks do not echo. I expect a higher standard in a book that claims to be a history written by a scholar. If a student at my school uses this book as a source, he'll be repeating inaccurate information, so I'll be recommending that this title be pulled from the collection on the grounds that it is not reliable.

I'm going to list some of the problems I found, but I'm sure I didn't find all of them. This is just what struck me:

The first, and worst, error is on page 8, as Porter introduces Greek ideas: "'In the beginning was the logos,' the book of Genesis states, which is usually translated as 'word.'" I really can't believe no one caught this. It's the first line of the gospel of John in the New Testament-- "Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν, καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος." Porter not only mixes up the Old and New Testament, he seems to think that the ancient Hebrews were Greek-speakers. I can see how someone not too familiar with the Bible would get this mixed up, but a moment's thought--or a decent editor--should have corrected this.

On Stoicism, "...we cannot say that anything in the future is inevitable, even with regard to commonsense assertions, such as 'The sun will rise tomorrow'...the earth could stop rotating at some point..." (p. 54) Well, no, it couldn't. Anything strong enough to stop the earth's rotation would also destroy it, and the bits would still spin. The earth is slowing down, and someday it will rotate once a month, like the moon--but it can't stop. Angular momentum is stubborn stuff.

On page 112, Porter tells two apocryphal stories. First is Galileo dropping things off the Tower of Pisa, which is a popular historical anecdote that most historians agree never happened (see this excellent summary). Then there is a story about William James and an audience skeptic who claims "It's tortoises all the way down!" This is another popular anecdote often attributed to various public figures (and turtles; I presume he wanted to go with the tortoise theme), most often James, but the story seems to go back much further than that.

In a section on linguistic philosophy, Porter says, "Some critics have even charged that language philosophers have focused exclusively on English...This seems arrogant, and it did not help when one analyst remarked, 'If English was good enough for Our Lord, it should be good enough for us.'" (p. 168) This is one of those quotations that gets attributed to anyone people want to poke fun at, and is most commonly credited to Governor Miriam "Ma" Ferguson of Texas as "If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it ought to be good enough for the children of Texas.” However, it was floating around before that, put in the mouths of various country folks as a proof of ignorance, and has no solid origin that I can find. If a real linguist said it in earnest, I want a citation.

After that is a section on feminism, which starts off: "As one feminist put it, men regard women philosophers the way they do an elephant dancing: it's not that they do it well; it's only surprising they can do it at all" (p. 169). I cannot find this quotation as stated, or anything like it. All I can find is Samuel Johnson's famous quip of 1763: "Sir, a woman preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all."

Porter then describes Mary Wollstonecraft, who is usually considered to be the first vocal feminist: "She echoed Elizabeth Cady Stanton that women should regard themselves not as adjectives, but as nouns" (p. 170). There are two serious problems with this sentence. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was born in 1815, 18 years after Wollstonecraft's death in 1797, so it would be difficult for Wollstonecraft to "echo" her in anything, and I cannot find any instance of Wollstonecraft ever saying anything about adjectives or nouns. Porter goes on to state that Wollstonecraft was supported by Samuel Johnson, but in fact she was supported by the liberal publisher Joseph Johnson, not the famous wit and dictionary-writer (who, as above, was not much on women's equality).

The rest of the section on feminism has its own problems with stereotypes; it is generalized to the point of absurdity, crediting all feminists with theories on feminine ways of knowing that are in fact claimed by only a few.

In another error concerning Samuel Johnson, Porter credits him with defining man as "the tool-making animal" (p. 180). That definition belongs to Benjamin Franklin, but Johnson did argue against it in 1779, saying, "But many a man never made a tool: and suppose a man without arms, he could not make a tool." I'm not sure what Porter has against poor Dr. Johnson.

There may be a few more, but these are the ones that really made me clutch my hair in frustration. The closing sentence of the book is "Our lives should be founded on truth, not illusion, and that means hard philosophic thinking." I would amend it to "Our lives should be founded on truth, not illusion, and that means hard philosophic thinking--and some good solid fact-checking."

One book, two book, three book, more!

2011-11-20T13:30:00.000-08:00

Here's a fun book-blogging meme that is making the rounds today--I found it on My Reader's Block. It was invented by Simon at Stuck-in-a-Book.

1. The books I’m currently reading: What the Tortoise Taught Us, a short overview of philosophy. So far I'm iffy. He may be an expert in philosophy, but he's egregiously misquoted the Bible and gotten some science wrong. Also, Wildwood, a children's/YA book about two kids and their adventures in the Impassable Wilderness. Interesting, but the boy's experiences so far are an awful lot like Edmund's in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Also also, Isaac Watts' book on improving the mind, but that's a long-term ebook project. I really liked the bit I just read, it reminded me of many college students I have known.

2. The last book I finished: Austenland, by Shannon Hale, quickly read last night. A short, fun book.

3. The next book I want to read: Gender Trouble, which is the next Feminist Classics Challenge book (and very impenetrable it looks too), Evil Genes (see today's Cold-Blooded Kindness post--I found the book at work, it jumped out at me from the first shelf next to my office) and Well-Behaved Women Rarely Make History, a commentary from Laurel Thatcher Ulrich on her inadvertently-coined slogan.

4. The last book I bought: Trusting Jesus, by Jeffery R. Holland. I got to go to a church bookstore Saturday, which is a rare treat for me.
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5. The last book I was given: Moomintroll series, for my birthday. Five of them, anyway.

Week 47: Quadrivium

2011-11-20T13:08:00.000-08:00

Quadrivium: The Four Classical Liberal Arts of Number, Geometry, Music, and Cosmology, ed. by John Martineau

This is a very, very pretty book. To look at it is to want it. It's full of lovely little diagrams, and the ink gradually changes from brown to green to navy to deep purple.

It's a collection of 6 smaller books on the four classical liberal arts. The first is on numbers, and it's a nice little collection of traditions and neat information about simple numbers. Then it's on to flat geometry; through the basic pentagrams to arches and patterns. The third book is on solid geometry and has a lot about Platonic solids and the neat permutations you can make from them. Next is an odd little section on geometrical designs that can be made with a harmonograph--sort of like a spirograph, only using harmonic sections. It's interesting but difficult to understand.

The last two books, on music and astronomy, are quite hard to wrap your brain around, or at least they were for me. The musical book has a lot to say about harmonic intervals and all sorts of things that I know very little about, and the one on cosmology is all about orbits of planets and their harmonic intervals. It's neat, but most of it was beyond me and it may have gone into the region of woo, but I can't tell; it would take someone who knows a lot more mathematics than I do to tell. It gets quite weird, anyway.

The publishers, Wooden Books, seem to specialize in this kind of small, pretty book that's probably too New Agey for its own good.

Week 47: Moomintroll books

2011-11-20T13:03:00.000-08:00

Moomintroll series, by Tove Jansson

My parents gave me 5 Moomintroll books for my birthday! They were recently reprinted in a nice paperback edition and I've been coveting them, since I only had a few before and they are very elderly. I got two or three I had never read before (or maybe just don't remember).

Jansson was a Finnish writer, and roughly speaking, as Pippi Longstocking is to Sweden, Moomintroll is to Finland. These are children's classics, so be sure to get them if you're looking for read-alouds for your family. Moomintroll books are not terribly well-known in the US, but they're very popular in Europe and huge in Japan. You can buy all sorts of adorable Moomintroll stuff in Japan--I have a keychain fob and a Snufkin washcloth.

For the uninitiated, Moomins are a kind of troll, distant relatives to ordinary trolls and close cousins to Snorks (but white, while Snorks are green or mauve). They like free and easy living and adventure, and have many odd friends, such as Snufkin the wanderer, Little My, and various Hemulens and Creeps. Though my own favorites are the Hattifatteners.

To start with, I would recommend Finn Family Moomintroll, which is the second book and the easiest to get into. They don't really have any particular order anyway.

Week 47: Cold-Blooded Kindness

2011-11-20T13:00:00.000-08:00

Cold-Blooded Kindness: Neuroquirks of a Codependent Killer, or Just Give Me a Shot at Loving You, Dear, and Other Reflections on Helping That Hurts, by Barbara Oakley

This book is 40% true crime story, and 60% neuroscience explained to the layman. Oakley tells the tale of Carole Alden, an eccentric artist and mother of 5 who killed her husband and tried to hide the body. Alden claimed he was abusive and about to kill her. Was it self-defense, or was it a lot more complicated than that?
Oakley uses this story to delve into a wide variety of topics in psychology and neuroscience, including codependency, domestic violence, genetics, animal hoarding, the hemispheres of the brain, the dark side of altruism, and just how little we know about any of it. Her wider point is that for the past 30 years or so, scholars and therapists have done a lot of assuming that men are always the aggressors, and women are always the victims, when in fact it is usually a whole lot more complicated than that. We are going to have to shed those assumptions if we want to truly understand domestic violence and help others.

It's hard to put the book down; Oakley has a good writing style and makes complex topics understandable to the reader. I would like to read her previous book just for the title: Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend. Who can resist that?

Victorian Literature: Phantastes

2011-11-17T17:08:00.000-08:00

Phantastes, by George MacDonald

I suppose you could call this a very early prototype of the modern fantasy novel. MacDonald called it "A Faery Romance," and it's the story of Anodos (which means something like 'upward path' in Greek), a young man who enters Fairyland and wanders there, searching for his ideally beautiful woman, who appears to him twice as a statue. Aspiring to knighthood in imitation of Sir Perceval, he achieves a few good deeds, but every time someone warns him not to do something, he promptly does it and suffers the consequence. Imprisoned by his own pride, he has to learn humility and how to give up the selfish parts of his love for his ideal.

The story seems a bit shapeless to modern tastes; I think we're used to more established plots in fantasy novels, which is now so much more developed (and clichéd) as a genre. MacDonald was writing something without a lot of precedent in 1858, and he's not bound by so many expectations. It's a lovely book, though not always easy to understand.

I read this half in print and half on my tablet. The print in my paperback goes right into the binding and is difficult to read, and then I misplaced it for a few days. I downloaded a free Google books copy and read it at night too. Unbelievably, this is my 15th Victorian book of the year, which puts me over the top for Subtle Melodrama's challenge. I made the "Desperate Remedies" level! Woo!

A Different Classics Challenge

2011-11-15T20:05:00.000-08:00

Katherine at November's Autumn is also hosting a classics challenge, but this one is a little different. I'm going to join up for the discussion fun, but it won't actually require me to read anything more than I already have slated unless I want to. Here are the rules:

The Challenge

Read seven works of Classic Literature in 2012
Only three of the seven may be re-reads

How Does it Work?

I've organized this challenge to work a little like a blog hop. I hope this will make it more interactive and enjoyable for everyone.

Instead of writing a review as you finish each book (of course, you can do that too), visit November's Autumn on the 4th of each month from January 2012 - December 2012.

You will find a prompt, it will be general enough that no matter which Classic you're reading or how far into it, you will be able to answer. There will be a form for everyone to link to their post. I encourage everyone to read what other participants have posted.

What if I'm not sure I can participate every month? Don't worry, the main goal is to read seven Classics. Try to participate in at least three prompts throughout the year
What if I'm still reading the same book as last month? That's ok!
What if I'm not reading something for this challenge during one of the months? You can choose to either skip that prompt or answer about the Classic you've most recently read.

Join the Challenge

Anyone who loves to read and has a blog is invited

You can join at anytime

Write a post on your blog with a list of the seven works you hope to read in 2012 and why you chose them-- but don't feel bound by the list.
Please include a link back to this page in your post, so others can learn about the challenge and join us.
Fill out the form at the bottom, linking to your post.
Check back on the 4th of each month.

Here are some tentative picks (almost the same ones as for the other challenge!):

Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert

Eugene Onegin, by Alexander Pushkin

She Stoops to Conquer, by Oliver Goldsmith

The Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton

Doctor Thorne, by Anthony Trollope

The Portrait of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde (this is a re-read)

Dracula, by Bram Stoker

Feminist Classics: Ain't I a Woman?

2011-11-13T16:00:00.000-08:00

Ain't I a Woman?: Black Women and Feminism, by bell hooks

This month we read bell hooks' 1981 book Ain't I a Woman, which chronicles the massive injustices black women have endured in America, from colonial days right up to the time the book was written. I completely agree with hooks' main premise that black women have suffered from a double bind of racism and sexism. It's hard to argue with that! It was both fascinating and painful to read; I had to take it fairly slowly.

I did feel like she made more generalizations and used more stereotypes than she maybe should have. It's possible that in 1980, academics hadn't yet gotten obsessed with making those distinctions in the way that we do now, but I would have expected a lot more language along the lines of "many black women..." or most white women..." and so on. Or, in the first section on Colonial history, she does seem to use a lot of stereotypes about religion at the time and I think she makes overly-broad statements. Especially, she talks a lot about Puritan hatred of sex and women; and while, yes, Puritans were not exactly female-positive types, they did consider sex within the marital bond to be an important good for both husband and wife. A wife could legally complain to authorities if her husband was not giving her what she wanted, which would seem to imply that Puritans didn't hate sex as much as their popular image claims. Then, most black slave women didn't live with Puritans at all.

It's sometimes hard to tell exactly what it is hooks wants. I spent some chapters reading long lists of injustices and wondering what her solution is. I know she is against racism and sexism and capitalism and imperialism and patriarchy, but I'm not sure what economic system she does want. She wants all people to be treated like human beings--I'm all for that--but concrete suggestions are lacking. Maybe the suggestions would amount to "stop discriminating against black women," but I can't help feeling that if you're going to denounce capitalism you should say what you'd like to replace it with.

Sometimes, I couldn't help feeling that hooks is blaming people for being fallible human beings. She's certainly correct about all the racism and sexism; it's just that some of her listed injustices--such as white feminists hanging on to racism, or using the feminist movement for their own personal benefit (to careers, etc.)--are no more than we can expect from human beings, and hooks is not one to make allowances.

People do usually care much more about their own problems than about others' problems, even when others are suffering more. We are tribal in nature and will usually think of other people as The Other until presented with plenty of reasons to include them in the tribe. And as far as I can figure out from reading history, imperialism is an intrinsic part of human behavior; a group is either expanding its power over others, or it's shrinking and losing power, and that's been going on since the earliest times that we know of. To whatever degree these behaviors can be changed or eliminated, it can only be done through cultural habits, education, and training. Even so, I think people will always fail somewhere, and will usually be utterly blind to those failures until they are pointed out over and over. I can understand hooks' anger and dismay at so many failures to accept black women as equals; it is indeed an awful record, and I'm not saying she shouldn't be talking about it. It's just that most of human history is pretty awful and disappointing.

Hooks' thesis is solid and she tells a lot of truths that make you think. I'm very glad to have had the opportunity to read this. She ended with a wonderful 1892* quotation from an address of Anna Cooper (go and read the whole thing, and sorry about the weird coloring I can't seem to fix it):

Let woman's claim be as broad in the concrete as in the abstract. We take our stand on the solidarity of humanity, the oneness of life, and the unnaturalness and injustice of all special favoritisms, whether of sex, race, country, or condition. If one link of the chain be broken, the chain is broken. A bridge is no stronger than its weakest part, and a cause is not worthier an its weakest element. Least of all can woman's cause afford to decry the weak. We want, then, as toilers for the universal triumph of justice and human rights, to go to our homes from this Congress, demanding an entrance not through a gateway for ourselves, our race, our sex, or our sect, but a grand highway for humanity. The colored woman feels that woman's cause is one and universal; and that not till the image of God, whether in parian or ebony, is sacred and inviolable; not till race, color, sex, and condition are seen as the accidents, and not the substance of life; not till the universal title of humanity to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is conceded to be inalienable to all; not till then is woman's lesson taught and woman's cause won—not the white woman's, nor the black woman's, not the red woman's, but the cause of every man and of every woman who has writhed silently under a mighty wrong. Woman's wrongs are thus indissolubly linked with undefended woe, and the acquirement of her "rights" will mean the final triumph of all right over might, the supremacy of the moral forces of reason, and justice, and love in the government of the nations of earth.

*hooks says 1892, Blackpast.org says 1893.

Week 46: Through the Language Glass

2011-11-13T13:03:00.000-08:00

Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages, by Guy Deutscher

If you've ever learned to speak a second language fluently, you know from personal experience that other languages come with a slightly different way of thinking. But linguists have been arguing for years over exactly what that means, and what the limits are. Quite often, popular assumptions have led to wildly bigoted conclusions. Deutscher tackles some of the more intriguing corners of language in this book, and he does it very well; his writing is interesting and doesn't get too bogged down in minutiae.

Deutscher covers three language topics in detail: color, direction sense, and gender. All turn up some really surprising results. We start off with Homer, who doesn't really talk much about color at all, but if you collect all his color references and look at them, they are very strange. Everyone recognizes 'wine-dark sea'--but since when is the sea the color of wine? And he calls both hair and sheep 'violet.' Oddest of all, according to Homer, honey is 'green.' Why on earth should that be?

I won't spoil the rest of the book; go find out yourself why honey would be called green--and why English doesn't really have noun gender any more.

Week 46: The Mockingbirds

2011-11-13T13:00:00.000-08:00

The Mockingbirds, by Daisy Whitney

Themis Academy is one of those prep boarding schools for highly talented teenagers, but the administration has a blind spot. All the adults seem to be under the impression that these students are so stellar that they would never do anything wrong, so there is no real structure for dealing with problems. When Alex is date-raped, there is nothing she can do--unless she decides to go to the Mockingbirds, the student-created justice system.

It's a great story and Whitney does a good job of drawing you in. Most of her teen characters feel like real people. Alex has to learn to stand up for herself and for what's right, and it's a hard struggle.

The scenario seems implausible to me--I think most prep schools have figured out by now that even highly talented teens have problems and do bad things--but it's interesting because it forces a situation where the students have to figure out a system themselves. That raises more than a few questions about secret vigilante groups, which I think will be addressed again in the upcoming sequel, The Rivals.

The author did, in fact, have a part in forcing colleges to pay attention to the issue of date-rape when she was a student (back in the early 90s when schools were only just starting to realize that date-rape is a thing that exists and that it's a crime), so I thought that was interesting.

It's the Greek Classics Challenge!

2011-11-12T17:14:00.000-08:00

I'm going to try hosting my own challenge here at Howling Frog Books, and I'd like to invite you all to join me in reading the classics of ancient Greek literature.

Here are the rules:

Challenge runs from January 1, 2012 through December 31, 2012. It doesn't count if you start reading before the 1st! Join at any time during the year, but have your reviews in by December 31.
Books may count towards other challenges.
Write a sign-up post at your blog. Choose a challenge level, but be modest; you can go up a level, but you can't go down. You may post a list of titles you plan to read, or choose as you go along.
Link to your sign-up post (not your blog) at the linky, and grab my lovely owl badge to post on your blog. Be sure to link back here, and tell your friends!
Every month, I'll post about what I'm reading, you can link to your posts, and we can discuss.
Read read read!

There will be three challenge levels:

Sophocles: read 1-4 works
Hesiod: read 5-7 works
Herotodus: read 8-10 works
Thucydides: read 11+ works

Sign up HERE at the challenge homepage, and watch for monthly posts on my progress through Greek literature. I'm aiming for 12 works, which are not all chosen yet, but at the least I want to read the following:

Aeschylus' Oresteia
Sophocles' Oedipus cycle
One or two plays of Euripedes
Aristophanes' The Frogs or another play
Hesiod's Works and Days and Theogony
Herodotus' Histories
Something by Plato
Something by Aristotle

Some of these are re-reads of works I read in college, but nothing that I've read very recently. I might include the Odyssey, but I have read it since college, so maybe I ought to do more that I've never read before. I'm looking forward to expanding my knowledge of the ancient Greeks, and hope you'll enjoy it too.

The Final Challenge

2011-11-10T16:30:00.001-08:00

Amy J at My Overstuffed Bookshelf is upping the stakes this year with a 150+ Books Reading Challenge.

I don't think this one will be hard at all; I'm pretty sure that if I just count everything I read (which I have never done for this blog--I leave out things like mind-candy mysteries and my 13th re-reading of my favorite Diana Wynne Jones book), that it will come out to 150 or more. I'm counting this as a freebie! I'll just keep a running total at the end of this post, which I will turn into a tab when I feel techy, and I'll include the titles I'm not going to blog about officially. Here are the rules:

1. The goal is to read 150 or more books. Anyone can join. You don't need a blog to participate. Posting on GoodReads or wherever you post your reviews is good enough.

2. Allowed are: Audio, Re-reads, eBooks, YA, Manga, Graphic Novels, Library books, Novellas, Young Reader, Nonfiction – as long as the book has an ISBN or equivalent or can be purchased as such, the book counts. What doesn't count: Individual short stories or individual books in the Bible.

3. No need to list your books in advance. You may select books as you go. Even if you list them now, you can change the list if needed.

4. Crossovers from other reading challenges count.

5. Challenge begins January 1st, 2012 thru December 31, 2012. Books started before the 1st do not count. You can join at anytime.

6. When you sign up under Linky, put the direct link to your post where your books will be listed. Include the URL to this post so that other viewers can find this fun challenge. If you’d prefer to put your list in the sidebar of your blog, please leave your viewers the link to the sign up page. Again, so viewers can join the challenge too.

Medieval Literature Challenge

2011-11-10T16:30:00.000-08:00

I'm going to take another shot at a medieval challenge. This one is hosted by JNCL at The Beauty of Eclecticism. Here are the rules:

Join with us in challenging ourselves to read some of those incredibly famous books that few of us have ever actually read, the bright sparks in the midst of the "Dark Ages". Choose 12 books off the approved reading list--an average of one per month for the year, though you can read them in whatever increments you like. Out of the ten genres of books available, your choices must cover at least four. Put the challenge button on your site with the code located in the right sidebar, sign up on the initial link that is located at the bottom of this page, and come back to link up a new review on the last day of each month. The challenge will run from January 1-December 31, 2012, and only books read within that time frame may be counted.

By popular demand, the challenge now has three levels:

Inferno--at least 4 books, to meet the requirement of reading from at least four different genres

Purgatorio--a minimum of 8 books

Paradiso--12 books, an average of one for each month of the year

Whichever level you choose, at least half of your chosen books must come from the master list given below, and all must fall into one of the given genres.

In order to truly challenge ourselves, we are NOT reading fiction set in the Middle Ages, books by modern experts on the Middle Ages, or biographies of major figures from the Middle Ages. Sorry, the latest account of that daring temptress, Eleanor of Aquitaine, will not count for this challenge, nor will a Philippa Gregory novel. We are reading works written between the rather arbitrarily chosen dates of 400-1550 CE (chosen by me, because nobody can really seem to decide what the exact Medieval dates are). We are, however, reading them IN TRANSLATION! Believe me, I won't be tackling any of the originals! Please feel free to double dip this challenge with any others where there is overlap, especially my own "Read Your OWN Library!"

The host has chosen several categories and then selected titles for each category. Below are the ones I've chosen as possibilities, but that doesn't mean that I think I'm actually going to read all of these! I'm going to shoot for the Paradiso level (since no one wants to get stuck in Purgatory!)--but some of these are quite long, so we'll see. I do already own a bunch of them; at least they'll count for Mount TBR.

Allegory

The Romance of the Rose, by Guillaume de Lorris

Biography

The Life of Columba, by St. Adamnan of Iona

History

Ecclesiastical History of the English People, by the Venerable Bede
History of the Franks, by Gregory of Tours
The Muqaddimah, by Ibn Khaldun

Literature
The Decameron, by Giovanni Boccaccio
Piers Plowman, by William Langland

Philosophy
The Consolations of Philosophy, by Boethius
The Prince, by Niccolo Machiavelli

Religion

The Golden Legend, by Jacobus de Voraigne
Pastoral Care, by Pope St. Gregory I the Great

Romance
Troilus and Cresidye, by Geoffrey Chaucer
Yvain: The Knight of the Lion, by Chretien de Troyes

Science
The Book of Beasts
On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres, by Nicolaus Copernicus

Travel
The Travels of Marco Polo, by Rustichello da Pisa

Women

The Alexiad of Anna Comnena

Revelations of Divine Love, by Julian of Norwich

Scivias, by Hildegard of Bingen

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Challenge

2011-11-09T21:50:00.000-08:00

This one is not quite my usual thing, and it looks like a lot of fun. I have never seen the 2003 movie "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen," but evidently it gathers heroes from several novels and pits them against two literary villains. The challenge is to read every character's book. Here are the rules:

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to read the original book featuring each of the main characters and post a review of each between 1st January 2012 and the 31st December.

Every single one of these books is out of copyright (which is how they could be used in the first place) and so are free for download on most e-book readers.

Even if you don't complete the challenge, it's great fun watching the film and knowing a little more about the characters!

The main characters and their books are:

Allan Quatermain from King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard

Mina Harker from Dracula by Bram Stoker

Captain Nemo from 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea by Jules Verne

Tom Sawyer from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain

Dorian Gray from The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde from The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

Rodney Skinner from The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells (kind of)

The Phantom from The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux

James Moriarty from The Final Problem by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

I've read a few of these books, but in most cases it's been years. And I have to say I'm not really looking forward to The Phantom of the Opera. I've been successfully avoiding Phantom-mania since high school! (I went away for a year, and when I came back everyone was raving about it.)

TBR Pile Challenge

2011-11-09T21:38:00.000-08:00

This is one I really need to do. You see, since my literary eyes are far bigger than my actual reading capacity, I always have a large pile to books to read. But I will always pick a library book over a book I own, because there's a deadline attached. The result is that even though I don't buy a lot of books, the pile of books that I own but have not read is much too large. And so I am joining the Mount TBR Challenge at My Reader's Block. Here are the rules:

Challenge Levels

Pike's Peak: Read 12 books from your TBR pile/s
Mt. Vancouver: Read 25 books from your TBR pile/s
Mt. Ararat: Read 40 books from your TBR piles/s
Mt. Kilimanjaro: Read 50 books from your TBR pile/s
El Toro: Read 75 books from your TBR pile/s
Mt. Everest: Read 100+ books from your TBR pile/s

And the rules:
*Once you choose your challenge level, you are locked in for at least that many books. If you find that you're on a mountain-climbing roll and want to tackle a taller mountain, then you are certainly welcome to upgrade.

*Challenge runs from January 1 to December 31, 2012.

*You may sign up anytime from now until November 30th, 2012.

*Books must be owned by you prior to January 1, 2012. No ARCs (none), no library books. No rereads. [To clarify--based on a question raised--the intention is to reduce the stack of books that you have bought for yourself or received as presents {birthday, Christmas, "just because," etc.}. Audiobooks may count if they are yours and they are one of your primary sources of backlogged books.]

*Books may be used to count for other challenges as well.

*Feel free to submit your list in advance (as incentive to really get those books taken care of) or to tally them as you climb.

*A blog and reviews are not necessary to participate. If you have a blog, then please post a challenge sign up and link THAT post into the linky. Non-bloggers, please leave a comment declaring your challenge level.

I will be going for the basic Pike's Peak level, and we'll see how it goes.

Classics Challenge 2012

2011-11-09T21:11:00.000-08:00

It's that time of year again, when we get to sign up for next year's reading challenges! I have gone overboard, again. My first pick is the Back to the Classics Challenge 2012. Here are the rules:

Challenge runs from January 1, 2012 through December 31, 2012. Books started before January 1st do not count, and all links/reviews/comments for each category must be posted in the correct place by December 31st. Feel free to join in at any time, but the end date is December 31.
Please feel free to use books in this Challenge toward any other Challenge you may be participating in. However, you must read a different book for each category of this challenge. Audio and e-books are allowed.
Please sign up for the Challenge using the linky list (or comment section if you do not have a blog/website).
Once the Challenge has begun, you will see a new bar on the left hand side of this blog. This will list the places for you to link/comment your reviews of the book you have read for each category as well as a "wrap up" page.
THERE IS A PRIZE THIS YEAR! People who complete the challenge (and I will check that all categories are completed!) will be entered into a random drawing for $30 worth of books (Book Depository will be used for an International Winner). I may have other prizes as well.

Here are my picks for each category, but don't hold me to it.

Any 19th Century Classic--I'm thinking Doctor Thorne, a Barsetshire novel.
Any 20th Century Classic--maybe Slaughterhouse Five? I've never read that.
Reread a classic of your choice--The Master and Margarita. I loved it in college and remember almost nothing about it.
A Classic Play--I'll pick a Shakespeare, or something. Maybe The Tempest.
Classic Mystery/Horror/Crime Fiction--Dracula. If I've ever read it, I've forgotten.
Classic Romance--Er. I'm going to need suggestions.
Read a Classic that has been translated from its original language to your language - so many to choose from!
Classic Award Winner - To clarify, the book should be a classic which has won any established literary award. -- The Age of Innocence, which won a Pulitzer in 1921.
Read a Classic set in a Country that you (realistically speaking) will not visit during your lifetime - (To clarify, this does not have to be a country that you hope to visit either. Countries that no longer exist or have never existed count.) --Again, it's hard to choose. Also, I really hope to visit a lot of countries, so I might have to pick a made-up one.

Join me for some fun reading! I'll be posting my other challenge picks in short order.

Week 45: Storming the Tulips

2011-11-06T13:03:00.000-08:00

Storming the Tulips, by Ronald Sanders and Hannie J. Voyles

The students of the 1st Montessori School in Amsterdam are the focus of this collective World War II memoir. Those who survived the war tell their stories and remember the many who were lost. There is quite a lot here about how Dutch citizens survived the war and what it was like, which I think many Americans don't know all that much about; we read about Anne Frank and others who were taken away, but not so much about those who stayed.

This would actually make a great companion volume to the story of Anne Frank for a teenager studying it; she was also a Montessori school student nearby and is mentioned a few times here. Storming the Tulips fills in quite a lot of the background and would lend depth to a study of Dutch victims of World War II. It's also a good length and reading level for a teen student.

For local residents, Hannie Voyles will be giving a presentation on the book and her experiences on Wednesday, December 7, 2:30 – 4:30 p.m. in the Center for Excellence, Library 210 at Butte College's main campus. Ms. Voyles is an emeritus faculty member.

Week 45: Ex Libris

2011-11-06T13:00:00.000-08:00

Ex Libris: the Art of Bookplates, by Martin Hopkinson

A nice array of bookplates are collected in this historical survey. Many were executed by famous artists. Others were done for well-known people in all kinds of professions, and they often feature puns or meaningful imagery. I like bookplates (though I rarely actually use them) and this is a good short collection.

Here is my favorite bookplate image, which is actually an illustration by one of my all-time favorite artist/illustrators, Edward Ardizzone. It is in one of my all-time favorite books, Eleanor Farjeon's The Little Bookroom. I was lucky to find a box of these bookplates and even framed one so I could always have it.

Victorian Literature: Lady Audley's Secret

2011-11-05T16:30:00.000-07:00

Lady Audley's Secret, by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

One of the nice things about having an e-reader is that you can get lots of Victorian melodrama--for free! My reader is now packed full of weird old books that are not in any local libraries.

Lady Audley is a beautiful young woman, the belle of the county. She was a penniless governess, but is so lovely and amiable that Lord Audley (an older widower) fell deeply in love with her and raised her to a life of luxury and wealth. But! Lady Audley has a secret! That secret is completely obvious after the third chapter; most of the story is about how the young hero collects his evidence, so it's mainly a mystery story. However, there is more to Lady Audley's secret than we think, and there's another twist at the end.

It's pretty typical Victorian melodrama; mind candy, but fun. And it's not badly written.

Pushkin: Prose Selections

2011-11-03T18:34:00.000-07:00

Alexander Pushkin: The Tales of Belkin, The Queen of Spades, and The Captain's Daughter

Pushkin is generally thought to be Russia's greatest poet, and the father of true Russian literature. He was, mostly, a Romantic, but in a quite different way than Keats or other well-known Romantic poets; he was Russian through and through. He died quite young in 1837, from duelling wounds--Pushkin was constantly embroiled in duels. His zeal for reform made him an inspiration to generations of Russian rebels and reformers. I read a selection of his shorter prose.

The Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin is a collection of very short stories that are anecdotes of life in the country. Some are romantic, others are stories of coincidence, and there is one ghost story. All take place in the country, in small villages or lonely outposts.

The Queen of Spades is a short story about a girl fooled into a romantic intrigue by a young man who only wants to get at her aunt's legendary secret. Tchaikovsky made an opera about it as well, which I've never heard of. The story itself is great.

Finally, I read The Captain's Daughter, a fast-moving short novel about a young soldier (and, of course, his true love) caught up in Pugachev's Rebellion of 1774.

All of these are wonderful, and I'd recommend them if you're looking to learn a bit about Russian literature.

Pushkin was not in the least Victorian but I'm counting him for that challenge anyway, since the rules are pretty fluid and he did at least die in the year of her succession.

This is Halloween...

2011-10-31T06:00:00.000-07:00

Happy Halloween to tender lumplings everywhere! These are a few of my favorite things:

Edward Gorey, of course. Who else would come up with the title "The Helpless Doorknob"? He wore fur coats and Converse sneakers! Gorey said, "My mission in life is to make everybody as uneasy as possible. I think we should all be as uneasy as possible, because that’s what the world is like." If you're lucky, you can find a number of his collected works most easily in the three Amphigorey books.

M. R. James was a late Victorian/early Edwardian scholar who wrote lovely creepy stories for fun. I've recently been lucky enough to get his collected stories in two volumes, so I'll review those soon. They are great stuff.

James and Gorey were both inspirations for John Bellairs, who I've reviewed before here. Spooky, scholarly kids' stories that are a bit heavy on the repetition inherent in series, but much better-written and more interesting than most kids' horror. (Do not even say the name R. L. Stine in the same paragraph! Ptui on R. L. Stine!)

I'm not a big Lovecraft fan, but I do enjoy some of his stories, especially "The Colour Out of Space" (which by the way was lifted by Bellairs for one of his later novels).

The best Halloween event is the Annual Pumpkin Drop at Chico State, where the physics department gets Aristotle, Galileo, and Newton to use pumpkins to test competing theories of gravity. Einstein is the MC² and sees fair play done. The grand finale features pumpkins dropped to the 1812 Overture! If you want to skip to the good part, go to 1:20.

No rock band does (well, did) Halloween like Oingo Boingo! Sadly their videos are difficult to find online, but here's Dead Man's Party. Nice footage of the band, interspersed with dopey footage from a lame movie the song was featured in. My true favorite is Elevator Man, but I haven't ever found a video for that, and anyway this is the Halloweeniest.

And finally, a great Halloween movie!

My very favorite thing about Halloween, though, is how neighborly it is. Everyone is out in their costumes, having fun and seeing their friends and neighbors, and it's all so friendly and fun. It's the only time of year when we all go out and talk with everybody we see. Creative costumes, decorations, and plenty of candy are great too!

Week 44: The Color of Water

2011-10-30T13:00:00.001-07:00

The Color of Water, by James McBride

James McBride's book honoring his mother tells her unusual story. The chapters alternate between her own words explaining her life, and McBride's chapters telling about their family life as he grew up.

McBride's mother never talked about her past and he spent years trying to get her to talk about it. She was white and Jewish, and married a black man in 1942. She became a Christian and together they started a church in the New York housing project where they lived. She had eight children before her husband suddenly died, and after a while she remarried and had four more before she was widowed for a second time. Her entire adult life was spent as the only white woman living in an entirely black area, trying to raise 12 children in poverty, and living out her determination to get all of them to college. She always said that money wasn't important; only education was important.

It's a wonderful book and an amazing story.

Week 44: One of Our Thursdays is Missing

2011-10-30T13:00:00.000-07:00

One of Our Thursdays is Missing, by Jasper Fforde

If you love books, but have never read Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series, you have missed a wonderful treat. This is the sixth book, and is actually told from the point of view of the written Thursday Next, who stars in her own series of books. Written Thursday is a citizen of the BookWorld, and she's hunting for the real Thursday, who is missing. She's doing her best to do what the real Thursday would do, and wild adventure follows.

Quite a lot of this story is given over to world-building. Fforde must have had a whole lot of fun fleshing out the BookWorld, and he spends time showing it off. I know that's something of a no-no for fantasy writers, but it's so great that I think you should read the book just to enjoy all the amazing ideas he came up with. I had to stop about every other page and read a bit aloud to my husband, and I laughed a lot. Yay Thursday Next!

Week 43: Aftermath

2011-10-23T13:13:00.000-07:00

Aftermath: the Remnants of War, by Donovan Webster

I found this book to be absolutely fascinating, and zoomed through it without putting it down much. Cheerful it is not, but it's very valuable reading. Webster tours several different battlefields of the 20th century, looking at what war has done to the landscape and the people.

The first stop is France. It turns out that France is absolutely stuffed with unexploded ordnance from World War I (as are other spots). Trench warfare meant that armies stayed put for long periods of time, lobbying enormous amounts of ammunition at each other. It was fairly new technology, so a good 25% of the shells were duds. And they just stayed where they fell. Large areas of France are still cordoned off because they're full of the stuff--and dud shells can easily explode. Demining teams collect and destroy hundreds of tons every year, but it will take decades or longer to finish the job. I found an online article about it with some good pictures.

Then Webster goes to the steppes of Russia, outside Volgograd. Volgograd was once Stalingrad, and at the Battle of Stalingrad, an enormous chunk of the German Wehrmacht was wiped out (partly through lack of supplies). Afterwards, no one came to clean it up. Hardly anyone outside of the area even knew it was there until the 90's. That was a fascinating chapter.

After that, it's off to the deserts of Nevada to look at the consequences of the nuclear arms race during the Cold War. The Army was doing a lot of nuclear bomb testing, but they weren't too worried about the side effects, like fallout from test shots or nuclear waste. Now people are trying to figure out what to do with the stuff.

Vietnam is the next stop, especially Hanoi. Webster finds that the Vietnamese people rebuilt quickly--they can't afford to leave land alone--but that there are still plenty of live mines in some areas and that the most devastating effects may be from Agent Orange.

The final chapter is about mine clearance in Kuwait. Like many other theaters of war in recent decades, various forces covered large swathes of Kuwait in land mines. The Kuwaiti government can afford to hire companies to clean things up, and Webster accompanies a team to learn about it. This book was written in 1996, so Desert Storm was still a recent memory.

Webster gives you a lot to think about. It's a book well worth reading, and I can think of several friends who would enjoy it.

Week 43: How to Write a Sentence

2011-10-23T13:00:00.000-07:00

How to Write a Sentence, and How to Read One, by Stanley Fish

The sentence is the building block of writing, and Stanley Fish devotes his book to playing with, admiring, analyzing, and imitating the best sentences he knows. What makes a truly great sentence?

Wait, before we get to that, what is a sentence? Fish gives his own definition of what a sentence really is, and in passing he dismisses traditional grammatical teaching--both the usual definitions of a sentence and all the rest of it as well. This is the one part of the book that I take exception to; he repeats the claims (noted in my review of The War on Grammar) that teaching grammar does nothing to improve writing and provides a sophisticated definition of a sentence. The only trouble with his definition is that it's one for adults, not one a child can understand at all. The traditional definition, "A sentence is a group of words that forms a complete thought," is not easily understandable to a young child either, but it can at least be explained and grasped over time. I'd vote for sticking with it until students are older and can start to wrap their minds around "A sentence is a) an organization of items in the world, and b) a structure of logical relationships." That definition then takes several pages of explanation.

Once Fish has defined the essence of sentences to his satisfaction, he continues on to describe and analyze some of the myriad ways to write a good one. There is a lot of very valuable analysis here, for readers (like me) and especially for developing writers. An adult or older high-school student who wants to write can find plenty to learn and practice on in this book, so I would recommend it to anyone with literary ambitions, or for English majors--or, in fact, for those taking college English courses under duress. Impress your instructor with your insight and understanding!

50 Things Every Young Lady Should Know

2011-10-19T20:48:00.001-07:00

50 Things Every Young Lady Should Know, by Kay West, John Bridges, and Bryan Curtis

The young lady's etiquette manual has been updated for modern life in this little book. It's not too short and not too long, very readable, and full of good information for a younger teenage girl. I'd say that this is one step up in maturity from the excellent American Girl books on how to behave, and aimed at girls 11-15. My own 11-year-old daughter is reading and enjoying it. I think she'll be glad to have it to refer to now that she's a little older.

West divides her material into tiny little chapters, one to each topic. Each section gives basic directions, a list of do's and don'ts with reasons, and then two or three rules to sum up. Topics include everything from making introductions and dealing with fancy table settings to cell phone etiquette and rules for Facebook. Those features of modern life are discussed in detail and the rules given are quite good, so I'd recommend it for that alone. I was also pleased to see entries on how to accept a compliment or an apology, the pitfalls of gossip, and how to explain your food allergies to your host. The book covers the basics of dating, but does not address the topic indepth.

A companion book for boys is also available; in fact these are part of the "GentleManners" series by John Bridges on how to behave correctly in every possible situation (mostly for gentlemen; I'm hoping to see more volumes for ladies in the future). The GentleManners series is published by Thomas Nelson, which is a very old Protestant Christian publishing house, but 50 Things Every Young Lady Should Know is addressed to a general audience, so there's no need to worry if you're not Protestant.

I thought this was a very nice manual on behavior for a young teenage girl. If you have one of those, I think it's worth getting. Most girls want to know how to behave and make a good impression, and this covers all the bases.

I received a free copy of this book from Booksneeze in exchange for an honest review.

Feminist Classics: The Beauty Myth

2011-10-17T19:38:00.001-07:00

The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women, by Naomi Wolf

When Naomi Wolf published her diatribe against ridiculously unrealistic standards of beauty in 1991, doing such a thing was kind of new (at least, after the 80's). The Beauty Myth has had a lot of influence over the past 20 years.

Thanks partly to Wolf, books denouncing the objectification and commercialization of women are now pretty common. Many more people are aware that our ideals of beauty are unrealistic and unattainable, and our ideas about beauty have expanded a bit to include some variation. At the same time, the standards have only gotten less realistic; Photoshop means that every image in every publication is fixed up to reflect something that no one could attain, and there is no such thing as being too gaunt. Look back at some 80's models and marvel at their curves!

So this was an important book. But I didn't enjoy reading it, and I didn't finish it. Wolf makes some really great points--and she also makes a lot of assertions that I thought were way over the top. I wanted to argue with her on every page, even though I think her main thesis is valid.

Week 42: Henrietta's War

2011-10-16T13:13:00.001-07:00

Henrietta's War: News from the home front, 1939-1942, by Joyce Dennys

Isn't that front cover lovely? The whole Bloomsbury series makes me want to take them home. They're like candy. Sadly my library doesn't have them and I had to get an older edition of this book that isn't nearly so pretty, so I still haven't seen one in real life.

Anyway, during World War II Joyce Dennys had a humor column in a weekly magazine that consisted of fictional letters from a housewife on the Devon coast to her old friend on the French front. This is the first half of the collection. They are just a lot of fun to read; Henrietta writes about her friends Faith (the village flirt), Lady B (who writes a letter to Hitler every night telling him just exactly what she thinks of him), and everyone else in her village. It's all ordinary life, muddling through wartime difficulties, but made very funny. I peeked into it at work when it arrived, but had to stop because it was making me laugh too much.

I hope to get a chance to read Henrietta's further adventures sometime soon--and some of the rest of those yummy Bloomsbury books.

Week 42: Naked Heat

2011-10-16T13:13:00.000-07:00

Naked Heat, by Richard Castle

It's the second installment in the storybook version of the Castle series on TV! I think this one was better written. Again, it's just like an episode of the TV show, with all the names changed and Nikki Heat written as Castle's fantasy version of Kate Beckett. The mystery is pretty decent--lots of fictional celebrities are involved this time. There are quite a few fun and clever tidbits, and some good digs at the Rook character (he has a secret life!).

Fun candy for the mind, though almost useless to non-fans of the show. I think you used to be able to read Murder She Wrote novels without watching the show; that's not true of this series, which depends heavily on familiarity with the TV characters and the small contrasts between them and the book people.

Victorian Literature: Tales of Mystery and Detection

2011-10-11T13:00:00.000-07:00

Victorian Tales of Mystery and Detection, selected by Michael Cox

For my October reading, I thought it would be fun to read this Oxford collection of Victorian mystery stories that my mother-in-law gave me several years ago. The stories were all published in magazines and few of them are known now, although there are many famous names included. Besides the expected Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle, the table of contents lists Le Fanu, Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Baroness Orzcy, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Mrs. Henry Wood. And, of course, quite a few people I've never heard of.

It's a nice collection, and good reading. This picture is of the original dust cover, which I don't have--the book is 20 years old and there aren't many images of it available.

I just realized that I've read more Victorian literature than I thought (thanks to the Feminist Classics challenge). This is my 12th book, which puts me past the "Great Expectations" level and well into "Hard Times." Goodness, maybe I should aim for the final level of "Desperate Remedies," which calls for 15 or more!