February Reading, Part the First

 Hi ho!  I've been doing a lot of reading, but much of it is pretty heavy-duty long stuff and I won't be done right away.  (And I also indulged in two Barbara Michaels gothics -- fun!)  Here are the books I read in the first half of February:

 

Dark Archives: A Librarian's Investigation Into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin, by Megan Rosenbloom --  a bit macabre, and an interesting read.  Not all books claiming to be bound in human skin actually are, and Rosenbloom's research group is able to do a test that confirms what kind of leather a binding is made from.  (You can't do a DNA test; the tanning process destroys all DNA.)  Most of the books in the English-speaking world were made by 19th-century doctors who were doing autopsies or dissections anyway, and lifted some skin while they were at it.  So Rosenbloom kind of goes all over the place, talking about the development of medical ethics and all sorts of things.  There are also rumors that aren't true; neither the French Revolution nor the Holocaust produced any of these books.  Also, some people want to preserve their tattoos after death and put them on display (maybe a sketch copy would be sufficient?), and the legalities of that are complicated.  My oldest, who works in the funeral industry, would love this book and have lots of opinions about it.

The Origins of the Four Branches of the Mabinogi, by Andrew Breeze -- I was intrigued by this book, and I also didn't know what to expect from it.  It turns out to be, pretty much, a series of academic articles from the early 2000s, all developing the question of whether the writer of the Four Branches (this is not the entire Mabinogion, but specifically four stories: 

    Pwyll Pendefig Dyfed (Pwyll, Prince of Dyfed)
    Branwen ferch Llŷr (Branwen, daughter of Llŷr)
    Manawydan fab Llŷr (Manawydan, son of Llŷr)
    Math fab Mathonwy (Math, son of Mathonwy)) 

can be identified.  Breeze says yes.  His first argument is that the stories were written (more probably told/dictated) by a woman.  It's always been assumed that a man, or men, wrote these stories, but Breeze points out that there's a heck of a lot about women, childbirth, babies, and other things that women think about a lot and men, not so much.  While there is battle in the tales, the author doesn't seem as interested as is typical for the more masculine stories.  And indeed, why shouldn't a woman have composed them?

The stories are also focused on the areas of Gwynedd and Dyved, and are very familiar with the courts and matters of governance.  Combining all this with the probable dates of composition -- somewhere around 1128 -- Breeze argues that the probable author is Gwenllian, the king of Gwynedd's daughter, who married Gruffydd ap Rhys, a prince of Dyfed.  She had four sons and died in 1136 while leading an attack on a Norman military base. 

The articles develop the theme, each focusing on analyzing language use, place names, references to Ireland, and suchlike.  I'm no Welsh scholar, so I'm not in any position to judge, but it seems perfectly reasonable to think that an aristocratic woman wrote the stories, and I had fun learning more about them.

Why We Did It: A Travelogue From the Republican Road to Hell, by Tim Miller -- 

Miller was a PR flack for the GOP for many years, building his career during the Bush and Obama administrations.  His job was to sow discord, win points and pwn the Dems, regardless of niggling concerns like reality, facts, and whether he was actively making the world a worse place.  (His descriptions of professional ethics for this job are pretty interesting: score points for your client, nothing else.  I'm not at all saying, btw, that the Dems don't have PR flacks of their own; the job is similar either way.)  He was working for Jeb Bush for the 2016 election and the Trump machine started to worry him.  He did go along for a while, but eventually decided he had to get out.  He described friends and colleagues who stayed -- saying that after all somebody sane had to be in there to keep it on the rails (a POV I'm sympathetic to, but which never seems to have worked out) -- or just becoming enthusiastic Trump supporters.  Miller tries to analyze various responses and categorizes them, for example those who wanted to be 'in the mix' no matter what, those who wanted to be the sane voice in the room, the winners-at-all-costs and the "LOL nothing matters" crowd who apparently think that the rule of law and American governmental infrastructure are just naturally eternal and can be beaten and undermined with no ill consequences. 

Put everything together -- relationship building with Bannon, Boyle, and Johnson, ghostwriting for conservative websites, creating new-adjacent sites of our own -- we had created a full-service outrage generation machine right at the moment that the right-wing media had become a surround sound of grievance peddling that instructed the audience on how to love hating the right people.

We knew exactly what GOP voters wanted.  We understood who they were angry at, what issues riled them up, and which ones made them glaze over.  We just didn't care.  Except to the extent that it helped us win elections....During campaign season we would make exaggerated promises that were never followed through on -- in some cases because they were never possible to begin with and in others because, deep down, nobody wanted to.

I learned that DC political culture is incredibly poisoned and poisonous, and much of it is more about the competitive urge than about good governance.  Also, outrage is both addictive and a lousy way to make decisions.  It wasn't a lot of fun.

A Message From Ukraine, by Volodymyr Zelensky -- this tiny little book is a collection of speeches from the president of Ukraine, selected by him to tell the story of Ukrainian hopes and the Russian invasion, and to garner international support for Ukraine's fight to not be conquered and obliterated.  Zelensky is not a general; he's letting the generals run the war.  What he is, and what he contributes to the war effort that is consuming all Ukrainians, is a communicator, telling Ukraine's story to the world and doing anything he can to get and keep the support that Ukraine needs to survive.

I found these speeches to be direct, clear, and very affecting.  Every day that I learn more about this conflict (which I'm trying very hard to do), I am more convinced that Ukraine must not fall.  We all need to support this defense effort, because right now Ukraine is acting as a shield for the rest of Europe.  Russia does not plan to stop with Ukraine; they've made it clear that they want Poland too, and as much more as they can get.  The Russian government has every intention of destroying NATO, the EU, and any democratic-ish societies that it can.  Crimea and the Donbas were our Sudentenland.  We're past 1938, as far as that comparison goes.  Ukraine feels far away and irrelevant to Americans, but we're all neighbors now.

The Green Roads of England, by R. Hippesley Cox -- I got a cheap paperback reprint of the original 1914 edition because I am a sucker for books about walking around the neolithic monuments of England.  It turned out not to be terribly appropriate for my reading; it's more of an on-the-spot kind of book.  If I lived in Wiltshire or something that would really help, and I could go find his green roads and landmarks instead of spending lots of time on Google Maps (not that I'm ungrateful for it!).  Cox figured that the neolithic earthworks, barrows, and so on constituted a sort of network loosely centered on Avebury, and spread out along what's called the Ridgeway -- tracks along the higher areas, travel and defense being easier up there because the valleys were pretty swampy back then.  Since he's writing before extensive air surveys spotted many more monuments, I hope he lived long enough to learn more!  

This is not wishful thinking about 'old straight tracks' -- he's following trails that make more sense, and in many cases are still in use today as roads.  Today, the Ridgeway is an 87-mile trail from Avebury to Buckinghamshire that I would love to hike.  Cox's description is more of a network, not just the one trail, but same idea.  He describes lots of earthworks, Roman camps, and so on, and wonders about the pre-Celtic peoples who built those first landmarks. 

I don't know how accurate his theories are, but they're pretty sensible and he mostly sticks to description anyway.  Cox is a believer in King Arthur, and includes Cadbury in his survey (though he's not 100% sure it's Camelot, he likes the idea, and believes that Arthur was buried at Glastonbury), but that's as fanciful as he gets.  I would bet quite a lot of money that Diana Wynne Jones knew this book and used it for her Dalemark books, so it was well worth it just for that.  And hey Mom and sis...want to hike the Ridgeway?  Or, it's bikeable too!