The Skeptical Scotsman:  An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, by David Hume 

When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume, of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance, let us ask: Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.

The Enquiry is a briefer version of the first half of the Treatise on Human Nature (see this February's Bookpost).  It's the Hume I was assigned in Freshman Humanities, and is included as Hume's representative work in both the Great Books and Harvard Classics sets.  Hume wrote a lot--and a lot more interestingly--about moral philosophy and about the history of England, but for armchair philosophy purposes, if you read the Enquiry, you'll have read Hume.

The book is typically presented as a continuation/conclusion of the Empiricism of Locke and Berkley, and a reductio absurdum of the idea that we learn by experience as opposed to via innate knowledge.  His proof that it is impossible to learn through experience has, according to Bertrand Russell, never been satisfactorily refuted, with the distinction that no sane person truly believes it, including Hume. 

Or, at least, Hume gives us a "just kidding" at the end of the book.  But then, he does this right after applying the same skepticism to show that we can similarly know nothing about God, and so his disclaimer and conclusion that we must accept empirical "knowledge" on faith may have been his way of avoiding a Christian death sentence.

The basic "unrefutable' argument is that, just because something has always happened in the past, such as daily sunrise or objects falling when dropped, is not 100% proof that next time it won't be any different, nor can we trust the senses 100%...but we act with confidence because we need to trust in order to function (for the same reason we continue to drive, even though there may well be reckless, very unsafe drivers out there who will not abide by traffic rules, and we have no guarantees of not getting killed in a wreck today).  Only certain mathematical laws are inherently true, and even those must be experienced by us at least once, in order to understand them.

Hume is hard for me to swallow, in part because I believe in learning by experience as opposed to being born with innate knowledge.  Then there's the fact that Hume, as shown in the quoted final paragraph above, is the only non-theological "great author" I've read so far who openly advocates book-burning.

Making Sausage:  The Spirit of the Laws, by Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu

People are more vigorous in cold climates...This superiority of strength must produce various effects: for instance, a greater boldness, more courage, a greater sense of superiority, less desire of revenge, a greater sense of security, more frankness, less suspicion, policy and cunning...I have been at the opera in England and in Italy, where I have seen the same pieces and the same performers, and yet the same music produced such different effects on the two nations; one is so cold and phlegmatic, and the other so lively and enraptured....If we travel toward the north, we meet with people who have few vices, many virtues...If we draw near the south we fancy ourselves entirely removed from the verge of morality; here the strongest passions are productive of all manner of crimes, each man endeavouring, let the means be what they will, to indulge his inordinate desires.

In warm countries the aqueous part of the blood loses itself greatly by perspiration; it must therefore be supplied by a like liquid. Water is there of admirable uses; strong liquors would congeal the globules of the blood which remain after the transcending of the aqueous humour. In cold countries, the aqueous part of the blood is very little evacuated by perspiration.  They must therefore make use of spiritous liquors, without which the blood would congeal...The law of Mohammed, which prohibits the drinking of wine, is therefore fitted to the climate of Arabia...The law which forbade the Carthaginians to drink wine was a law of the climate. Such a law would be improper for cold countries, where the climate seems to force them to a kind of national intemperance...Drunkenness predominates in proportion to the coldness and humidity of the climate.

See February's Bookpost of this year for more Montesquieu. Spirit of Laws is up there on the Great Books lists mostly as a harbinger of the United States Constitution than for being a high quality work. it's poorly organized, and montesquieu kept stopping and coming back to it with the result that he wrote a big muddle of a work that is hard to connect the dots with.

His main points involve the concept of the separation of powers into an executive, legislature and judiciary (possibly the first time this has been proposed, with a system of checks and balances, at least according to my own reading plan through history); and the idea that for a Democracy to work, the people must be educated; for an aristocracy to work, they must be virtuous, and for a tyranny to work, they must be afraid.  Notice which of the three our political leaders in America are trying to cultivate in us today.  It ain't education or virtue.

Then we get to the interesting, if ridiculous, part, the juicy bits of which I've summarized in my quote above:  the bit where Montesquieu asserts that climate affects the national character. It's stupid, and stereotypical, and not worth serious study today (Montesquieu asserts, fore example, that southern warm climates tend toward Catholicism while cold, dreary northern climates tend toward Protestantism, and when there's an inconvenient counterexample like Catholic Ireland in the north, he just doesn't bother mentioning it).  The last third or so is a dull and incomplete history of the evolution of late Roman Empire law into French feudal law, and will only interest serious scholars.

Most people should read the first parts at least once, as amusing climate sociology theory, and as the harbinger of the American constitution.  High recommendations.

4 Weddings and 30,000 Funerals: A Feast For Crows, by George R. R. Martin  

Outside, a cold wind was rising. They stayed up late into the morning, drinking Arbor gold and telling one another tales.  Taena got quite drunk and Cersei pried the name of her secret lover from her.  He was a Myrish sea captain, half a pirate, with black hair to the shoulders and a scar that ran across his face from chin to ear. "A hundred times I told him no and he said yes," the other woman told her, "until finally I was saying yes as well.  He was not the sort of man to be denied."

"I know the sort," the queen said with a wry smile.

"Has your grace ever known a man like that, I wonder?"

"Robert," she said, thinking of Jamie.

Yet when she closed her eyes, it was her other brother that she dreamt of, and the three wretched fools with whom she had begun her day.  In the dream, they had brought her Tyrion's head in their sack. She had it bronzed, and kept it in her chamber pot.

Man, oh man.  The Game of Thrones books (actually called the A Song of Ice and Fire series) is so good that I was inclined to savor it some more, waiting until the next volume was out before reading any more.  Except that I read the previous one, A Storm of Swords, back in 2013, and the TV series has gone way past that point by now with no sign of Book Six, and I figure I have to read the two "parallel timeline" books before I forget what's come before or get spoiled on what is to come.

I re-read the first three, and was struck by backstory and other details that I'd missed the first time around, and by some crucial differences with the TV show's plot--which has, incidentally, slowed down big time to give GRRM time to catch up.  the first two seasons covered the first two books; the next covered most of Storm of Swords, and Season Four stretched itself to cover about 400 pages from the end of Storm of Swords.  I figure they'll milk the remaining books into three or four seasons each, and even then, we're likely to first learn how it all ends from the TV version, before the last book comes out.  As with Babylon 5, the most epic arc plots get bogged down in the realities of production over multiple seasons.

Then again, Feast for Crows is sort of where the plot of the books slows down a little as well.  No Jon Snow. No Daenerys. No Tyrion--the adventures of my three favorite characters during this time are in book five. And while the story within Westeros has hitherto been wall-to-wall (or perhaps, wall-to-Dorne) Starks, Lannisters and Baratheons whaling on one another with the help of Tyrells and Tullys, Feast For Crows adds to an already enormous cast by adding several new subplots featuring entirely new hordes of people marked for early death, in Dorne, the Iron Islands, the Vale, and the free cities of Braavos.  The Sand Sisters of Dorne delighted me, while the Greyjoys tempted me to skim over them entirely.  Except that you can't skim the dull parts.  They all come together eventually. 

Fortunately, there is Arya.  And chapters from the POV of Brienne of Tarth.  I'm mad about Brienne, and find it wonderful to have a warrior woman who for once wears functional armor and is not presented as a sex toy with buttkicking skills.  On the other hand, it got a bit tiresome and distracting to be continually reminded how *ugly* her big, capable, powerful body is supposed to be.  Maybe if she was presented without constant attention to charisma or lack thereof...also taking center stage is Cersei Lannister, who is possibly the nastiest character left standing outside of the Dreadfort and The Twins.

It has its ups and downs, but the series as a whole is one of the best, most highly recommended works I've read this decade, and Feast for Crows is a necessary component of the whole.

Small Wit: Rameau's Nephew, and Thoughts on the Interpretation of Nature, by Denis Diderot 

HE: Everything that lives, man included, seeks his well-being at the expense of whoever withholds it. If I let my little savage grow up without my saying a word to him, he would of his own accord want to be rich, loved by women, and draw to himself all the goods of life.

MYSELF: If your little savage were left to himself, he would strangle his father and sleep with his mother.

I'm having the same problem with Diderot that I have with Voltaire, only more so.  He is considered a giant in the century's thought more for the volume of his work than for the value of any particular piece, and much of what he wrote was innovative at the time but of little value today.  His greatest work was as organizer and principal contributor to one of the first encyclopedias, which is about as useful in the 21st century as the 1978 World Book encyclopedia that used to be in my parents' house when I was in grade school learning to use reference books.  Probably better written and with considerably more emphasis on editorial opinion, but I'm not reading it. Not now.

Diderot's other works are shorter and less notable (see Jacques the Fatalist from last month's Bookpost). Rameau's Nephew, a character study and dialogue between an unnamed narrator and the nephew of Rameau the composer, is included in the revised Great Books set and described as "Diderot's masterpiece" by the Durants.  I'm jaded. 

If you went to a liberal arts college, you have encountered the modern equivalent of Rameaus' Nephew. He was brought up in comfort and rejects modern society, especially the morals and manners, as "phony".  He thinks he's more of a genius than he really is, and manages to erase the line between impressing people with his clever imagination and pissing them off. Not having a practical skill set, he is reduced to dependency on patrons to pay him for meeting their entertainment whims, and yet because he is too proud to grovel, he doesn't succeed at that either.  The more worldly-wise narrator alternates between admiration, pity, and just throwing up his hands and giving up on the wretch.
The dialogue made me uncomfortable because, of course, I was that guy in my sophomoric days, and recognizing my own past mistakes makes me cringe somewhat.  The man is a diamond in the rough who may have real talent, and his personality has a charismatic exuberance, but his focus on pointing out what's wrong with everyone but himself makes him unable to have any friends.  I take comfort; maybe this is the year Rameau's nephew gets his life together.

I also read a short philosophical essay called Thoughts on the Interrpretation of Nature, mostly demonstrating the value of observation and experimental reasoning. It was apparently included to show off Diderot as a well-rounded "Enlightenment Man" with an interest in science, or perhaps to shame the mid-18th Century by reminding us that we still needed to argue that experimental research was even an good idea worth allowing people to practice, much less the basis of most or all knowledge.  I remember in 2004 Teresa Heinz Kerry made a speech in my area that depressed the living shit out of me by anxiously urging people to give science and learning a chance and demonstrating ways in which being smart might benefit one's life.  I walked away disgusted at the need for such a speech; a whole lot of people probably felt condescended to, and the ones who needed to hear the speech shook with rage and longed for the days when smart women could be burned as witches.  Considering that her husband's opponent was maybe the most stupid and proud of it President my country has ever had so far, and that he was declared the winner of that election and allowed to continue tampering with the Federal government, I guess we still do need Diderot's essay, even now.

The 18th Century Murders: Man's Illegal Life; Man's Storm, by Keith Heller; Drums of Autumn, by Diana Gabaldon 

In the first half of the eighteenth century, London was probably the most dangerous city on earth.  Gangs of thieves and beggars, prostitutes and bullies, lunatics and murderers made a battleground of the streets for nobleman and commoner alike. Of London, Samuel Johnson wrote: "Prepare for death, if here at night you roam, and sign your will before you sup from home." Corruption and negligence were the order of the day, and the legal system was more notorious for its brutality than for its effectiveness. In the midst of this chaos, one astounding fact stands clear: there were no police.

--from Man's Illegal Life

The citizens of Westminster could not sleep.  They walked their floors fully dressed, stopping every few minutes to listen with straining ears.  It was the chimneys that frightened them most.  They feared lying in bed, deep asleep, and then waking at the last instant to see a sudden shower of bricks come crashing through the splintering ceiling directly at their faces.  Some had already dreamt it.  they had started up to find shattered stones mixed with dust and paint descending like a pall over their eyes, the awful massive weight flattening the chest and crushing the breath, the fall bearing them downward through bed and floor into the downstairs room and into a circle of shocked faces, and still further down into the quiet stone foundation itself. Then they had woken a second time to a darkened room and a moaning house, their bodies clammy with sweat, the limbs twitching helplessly, to lie awake uncertain which was the nightmare and which was the night.

--from Man's Storm

The incisors and canine on the good side were scarcely worn at all. I turned the skull over, to judge the abrasion on the molars, and stopped cold.

Very cold, in spite of the fire at my back.  As cold as I had been in the lost, fireless dark, alone on the mountain with a dead man's head.  For the late sun now struck sparks from my hands: from the silver band of my wedding ring--and from the silver fillings in my late companion's mouth.  I sat staring for a moment, then turned the skull over and set it gently down on the desk, careful as though it were made of glass.

"My God," I said, all tiredness forgotten. "My God," I said to the empty eyes and the lopsided grin. "Who WERE you?"

--from Drums of Autumn

Keith Heller's historical mystery series set in early 18th Century London has just two volumes in my local library.  they're short, short on clues, and eager to emphasize how historical they are by cramming unnecessary historical detail onto every page. Their mystery style is akin to A Study in Scarlet, in that the culprit is identified early, followed by a lengthy history as to how a more or less sympathertic character came to be a murderer.  The main character is a "watchman" (Heller never passes up an opportunity to remind you that, OMG there were NO POLICE, and how could anyone have felt safe in those barbaric times, yada yada) whose last name is Man, leading to the punnish titles. Man's Illegal Life concerns a corpse found walled up under circumstances that mimic the quarantines of a decades-old plague outbreak (guess who would do that to someone years after the plague, and why), and Man's Storm is chiefly concerned with the foreshadowing, experience, and aftermath of a poorly constructed chimney falling in a storm.  Moderate recommendations to both.

Drums of Autumn (#4 in the Outlander series) is a marked step up from the previous two. It's set largely on the frontier of the American colonies and has Claire and Jamie joined by their amazonian daughter from the 20th century.  The time travel is a fluffy plot device that enables 20th century characters to discover incomplete records of some horrible thing from the past and to go to that era to try to investigate or prevent said thing. Coincidences abound, and there are more pirates, indians and crocodiles than in Peter Pan.. The series walks a tightrope between the desire to show horrible 18th century gender, colonial and racial oppression as it really was, and the need to reflect human values as justice would have them be.  Hence we have scenes that try to skirt the line but that in fact depict spousal abuse, unjustifiable murders and sex crimes in an environment where such things were accepted as the natural order of things, but that temper it somewhat when the time-traveling characters manage to get the native 18th century dwellers to see how horrible the cultural norms are.  And yes, a whole lot of hot erotica.  Recommended for all of the above.

Unhappy in a Way All Its Own: The Man Who Loved Children, by Christina Stead  

 "I wish I had a hundred sons and daughters," sam rejoined with equal excitement, "Then I wouldn't have a stroke of work to do, see. All you kids could work for me. I'd have a CCC camp for the boys and an SSS, spick-and-span settlement for the girls. No work for Mother, Dad, or Bonnie. Yes, the Mornings [Mormons] had the right idea altogether: fifty women and their children, and no work for the old man." 

This 1940s book by an Australian, set in America, left me feeling like i needed to be psychoanalyzed.  for one thing, what does it say that, with an innocent sounding title like The Man Who loved Children, I immediately felt uncomfortable and wondered it it was about a child molestor?   (Turns out it isn't, no worries, at least in that he only harms his kids psychologically).

The world is as seen by children, both playful and scary in a way that is natural when you're surrounded by irrational people bigger than you.  The mother is a vicious horrible woman who is forever spouting cruelty, and the father is the kind of person I've spent my life trying not to be--so busy being amusing and playful that he's never grown up, and calls on his kids to do more adulting than he does;  has a pleasant storyteller aspect to his personality, but is not strong enough to actually impose it on the real world; he merely sticks his head in the sand while the practical needs of the family fail. He does, however, insist on the respect due to him as patriarchal head of the household, even as he shirks the responsibility that a leader should have.

The protagonist is Louie, the eldest daughter, who is maybe a stand-in for the author, and who ends the story (as is usual when the protagonist is an older kid) by leaving home.  Her journal is a masterpiece of creepy innuendo.

Farewell to Voltaire: The Portable Voltaire  

Although young and rich, he knew how to control his passions, was unaffected, did not always want to be in the right, and was considerate to human frailty.  People were astonished to observe that despite his good sense he never derided the loose, scrappy, noisy tittle-tattle, the reckless backbiting, the ignorant conclusions, the coarse quips, the empty tumult of words which in Babylon were called "Conversations" He had learned in the first book of Zarathustra that self esteem is a balloon swollen with wind, whence tempests issue when it is pricked.  Above all, Zadig did not boast of his scorn for and power over women. He was generous and, in accordance with Zarathustra's great precept, "When thou dost eat, give to the dogs even though they bite thee", he did not fear to oblige ingrates. He was as wise a man as can be, for he sought to live with the wise.

This is what I should have done with Voltaire--and Diderot, too--from the beginning.  Not really philosophers so much as "wits" and generalists with more output than can be comfortably read in one year, some of which has lasting value and much of which has none. 

The Portable Voltaire is a collection of his best and most lasting writing, including sections from Candide and the Philosophical Dictionary--which showed me some worthy entries I had skimmed over last month when confronted with the whole thing.  Also included are "Zadig" (a story at least as instructive and witty as "Candide" and other stories and fables; some letters and epigrams, philosophical essays, and a poem lamenting the Lisbon earthquake.  Good stuff, all of it, and most of the Voltaire you need to know.

Detachment Parenting: Emile, by Jean Jacques Rousseau  

How swiftly life passes here below! The first quarter of it is gone before we know how to use it, the last quarter finds us incapable of enjoying life.  At first we do not know how to live, and when we do know how to live, it is too late.  In the interval between these two useless extremes we waste three fourths of our time sleeping, working, sorrowing, enduring restraint and every kind of suffering. Life is short, not so much because of the short time it lasts, but because we are allowed scarcely any time to enjoy it. In vain is there a long interval between the hour of death and that of birth; life is still too short, if this interval is not well spent.

Okay, so the 18th Century has three towering "Giants of philosophy". one English, one French, and one German...and they all wrote a lot and so I've staggered them. Been toughing my way through David Hume for a few months now, and now starting Jean Jacques Rousseau. 

Emile  is his treatise on education, which might as well be subtitled "How to raise your good child not to be corrupted by phony society."  Rousseau's central thesis, from which all his works stem, is the opposite of Hobbes:  Rousseau says that all people are born good, and that the artificial constraints of government, business, manners, private property, you name it, are responsible for evil. THANKS OBAMA!
It's not really a novel, and not really a nonfiction guide.  Emile is a colorless Everychild to be molded into a good, well-adjusted citizen in a one size fits all sort of way that discourages book learning and emphasizes learning by going out into society and doing things.  Probably great for people who learn kinesthetically, and horrible for those who would benefit from seeing or hearing.

The last part of the book, where the parent progresses from leading the child from infancy through childhood through adolescence through learning a trade and finally completes his education by seeing him married off to the right woman of the parent's choice, is mind-bogglingly offensive, as it is here that Rousseau reveals that everything he's been saying has been about boys only, and that girls are to be brought up wholly differently, because of how weak they are, and that nature wouldn't want it any other way.  I could barely read it myself, and I can't even imagine how a modern woman must feel exposed to that garbage.  Hopefully, she'll laugh at it...except that there are Republicans out there trying to bring us back to those days.

As American as Rhubarb Pie:  The autobiography of Benjamin Franklin  

My intention being to acquire the habitude of all these virtues, I judg’d it would be well not to distract my attention by attempting the whole at once, but to fix it on one of them at a time; and, when I should be master of that, then to proceed to another, and so on, till I should have gone thro’ the thirteen; and, as the previous acquisition of some might facilitate the acquisition of certain others, I arrang’d them with that view, as they stand above. Temperance first, as it tends to procure that coolness and clearness of head, which is so necessary where constant vigilance was to be kept up, and guard maintained against the unremitting attraction of ancient habits, and the force of perpetual temptations. This being acquir’d and establish’d, Silence would be more easy; and my desire being to gain knowledge at the same time that I improv’d in virtue, and considering that in conversation it was obtain’d rather by the use of the ears than of the tongue, and therefore wishing to break a habit I was getting into of prattling, punning, and joking, which only made me acceptable to trifling company, I gave Silence the second place. This and the next, Order, I expected would allow me more time for attending to my project and my studies. Resolution, once become habitual, would keep me firm in my endeavors to obtain all the subsequent virtues; Frugality and Industry freeing me from my remaining debt, and producing affluence and independence, would make more easy the practice of Sincerity and Justice, etc., etc. Conceiving then, that, agreeably to the advice of Pythagoras in his Golden Verses, daily examination would be necessary, I contrived the following method for conducting that examination.

           I made a little book, in which I allotted a page for each of the virtues. I rul’d each page with red ink, so as to have seven columns, one for each day of the week, marking each column with a letter for the day. I cross’d these columns with thirteen red lines, marking the beginning of each line with the first letter of one of the virtues, on which line, and in its proper column, I might mark, by a little black spot, every fault I found upon examination to have been committed respecting that virtue upon that day.

The first major American book to come out of what was to be the United States of America is a harbinger and guide for much of what American writing has been known for ever since, especially when it comes to what we tell children about America:  Horatio Alger. Thomas Edison. Walt Whitman.  Dale Carnegie. Page-a-day calendars. The seeds of all of them are in here. Honestly, it's not much of a heavy duty book, and it breaks off in 1757 before all the Revolutionary and Diplomatic events happened; and yet, the Harvard Classics set gives Franklin the place of honor as the first work in the set, ahead of many works that are much more important, or written centuries earlier.  Maybe it's intended to be an introductory, easy to read, work.  The order of the HC set is peculiar.

The most memorable sections are some domestic squabbles; the spectacle of wee Benny arriving in Philadelphia and carrying his three yeasty rolls under his arms; the beginnings of Poor Richard's Almanac and other print jobs; a long section in admiration of a golden-tongued preacher who was able to scam money from anyone who listened to him; and most of all, Franklin's plan for self-improvement via cultivating the values of temperance, thrift, industry, etc.  How fitting that the first lasting American book should be, in part, a self-improvement book. pin the tail on your inner donkey, and all that.

Find all of my previous Bookposts here: admnaismith.livejournal.com/...

"Restraint of Passion: An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, by David Hume  

Had every man sufficient sagacity to perceive at all times the strong interest which binds him to the observations of justice and equity, and strength of mind sufficient to persevere in a steady adherence to a general and a distant interest, in opposition to the allurements of present pleasure and advantage; there had never, in that case, been any such thing as government or political society, but each man, following his natural liberty, had lived in entire peace and harmony with all others.  What need of positive laws, where natural justice is of itself a sufficient restraint.  Why create magistrates, where there never arises any disorder or inequity?  Why abridge our native freedom, when in every instance, the utmost exertion of it is found innocent and beneficial? It is evident that, if government were totally useless, it could never have place, and the sole foundation of the duty of allegiance is the advantage which it procures to society, by preserving peace and order among mankind.

Hume thought this one was his greatest work, and I'm inclined to agree.  Unlike metaphysics and epistemology, ethics is consistently interesting and less likely to get dated.  If there's one thing the old books have taught me, it's that human behavior hasn't changed all that much over the millennia.

The Enquiry is a more easily readable rehash of the last part of the Treatise on human Nature(Bookpost, February 2016), just like the Enquiry Concerning human Understanding (April, 2016) was a distillation of the first part.  The principles are similar: Ethics means subduing one's passions and acting rationally (I'm with Hume there). 

Virtue means behaving in a way that most people around you consider praiseworthy (I'm less comfortable with that part). Self-Love is a dangerous basis for morals  (There's a reason serious academics don't consider Ayn Rand an important philosopher. Her main ideas were asserted and refuted centuries ago).

The actual basis for morals is Utility (We do and don't do certain things because society would not work if people, say, broke their promises with impunity or hoarded all the wealth for themselves) and Sympathy (Imagining ourselves in another's position inspires us to do the right thing by them). Hume finally learned to write with style and not stodginess in his old age. Too bad, by the time he got it right, he was out of ideas.

Voltaire Lite: The Diderot Reader  

Suppose that these bees are so tiny that the thick blade of your scissors always missed their bodies, in fact you can cut some of them up as small as you like without ever killing one, and that the whole mass, composed of bees too small to be seen, will be a real polyp that can be destroyed only by crushing.  The difference between the cluster of continuous bees and the cluster of contiguous ones is precisely the same as that between ordinary animals, such as ourselves or fish, and worms, serpents and polypous creatures.

As with Voltaire, I elected to finish my study of Diderot's writings early by just reading an anthology of what was supposed to be his best work (which turned out to include most or all of the short works I'd previously read).  If the letters, Encyclopedia fragments, epigrams, essays and short stories found herein are his best, I'd hate to see the worst. Diderot was a champion of science as a vehicle toward truth. for someone so obsessed with order, his works contained plenty of chaos.  Stories like "D'alembert's Dream" and "This is not a Story" are right there with "Jacques the Fatalist" (Bookpost, March 2016) in non sequitur and existential nonsense, and the philosophical Pensees are whimsical flights of fancy, not an attempt to create a system of thought.  I am done with him.  

Pinning the Tail on Your Inner Donkey:  The Places  That Scare You (A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times), by Pema Chodron

The Buddha taught that flexibility and openness bring strength and that running from groundlessness weakens us and brings pain.  But do we understand that becoming familiar with the running away is the key?  Openness doesn't come from resisting our fears but from getting to know them well.

Rather than going after those walls and barriers with a sledge hammer, we pay attention to them.

This one was recommended to me by a friend of profound inner strength, who sensed a lot of stress in my life.  I'm not normally one for religion or woo-woo books about "energy", but Buddhist teachings seem to me to be good advice for living well, and the book was short, and so i read it to the end. 

It emphasizes compassion practice and love for all beings, starting with yourself--for some, the hardest part of all--loved ones, friends, neutrals, and finally, "difficult people."  When you have achieved the ability to cuddle a cactus, you have found enlightenment.  An hour or two to learn; a lifetime to master.

She-lock: A Study in Charlotte, by Brittany Cavallaro 

I dreamed about that diamond theft for months.  How i could have been there by her side, her trusted companion. One night, i lowered her down into the Swiss bank from a skylight, my rope the only thing holding her above the booby-trapped floor.  The next, we raced through the cars of a runaway train, chased by black-masked bandits shouting in Russian. when I saw a story about a stolen painting on the front page of the newspaper, I told my mother that Charlotte Holmes and I were going to solve the case.  My mother cut me off, saying "Jamie, if you try to do anything like that before you turn eighteen, I will sell every last one of your books in the night, starting with your autographed Neil Gaiman."

I read this one on the recommendation of a friend, who had led me to expect a Holmes story set in the traditional 1890s, or at least a Steampunk version, in which Holmes is a woman.

In fact, it is a YA book set in a Connecticut prep school in the here and now. "Charlotte Holmes" a compelling combination of Hermione Granger and Wednesday Addams, while "Jamie Watson" is a himbo on a rugby scholarship, who spends much of the book with his jaw on the floor and hearts in his eyes.  the plot and the writing style run the gamut from excellent to unfortunate.

You know those "meet-cute" scenes in abominations like 50 Shades and Twilight where they cap an already heavy power imbalance by having the girl fall down and embarrass herself while trying to impress the all-powerful, impossibly perfect male love interest?  I found it a bit amusing when Cavallaro reversed the genders to have Watson fanboy-squee over Charlotte (they are supposedly great-great grandchildren of the original characters. There are also Moriartys and a brother "Milo" who is high up in some NSA-like agency).  Cavallaro knows her original Sherlock and has several in-jokes in her story.  The mystery, on the other hand, is ridiculous, with both the school and the police nonsensically eager to believe that Holmes and Watson are the guilty parties in a murder that has very feeble evidence against them, yet is so painstakingly and expensively planned that there is no possible motive other than to taunt the protagonists, and no possible ultimate culprit besides the obvious. A fun read, but you don't want to think too hard about it.

Body Politics: Flesh in the Age of Reason, by Roy Porter 

Aesthetic conventions routinely portrayed "lowlife" characters as low of stature and marked by grotesquely inferior bodies that displayed vulgar and disgusting features, such as the buttocks. By contrast, upper-class physiques were classically marked by loftiness, straight noses, high brows and a sense of self-contained, self-assured prepossession, utterly unlike the porous permeability of the bodies of the low with their gaping mouths and anuses, ever gobbling up too much food and drink, and letting off excessively--farting, shitting, pissing, vomiting, sweating and swearing. Everything picturable told its story in moral and artistic world views in which soul endlessly inscribed itself through the soma.  If "high art" standardly affirmed such aesthetics of identity, all could of course be mined and subverted by caricaturists, who exploited the exaggerations of the grotesque for comic and satiric effect.

A moderately scholarly, easily readable book about the waning of church authority in the 17th and 18th centuries, and the way it affected people's perceptions and attitudes about body and soul, possibly exchanging one set of limitations for another.

I liked it, especially in that it referenced many of the period books I've been reading this year, from Swift to Voltaire and Rousseau to Gibbon and Samuel Johnson, with commentaries about the authors themselves.

First and Second Discourse, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau:

Such is the pure motion of nature, anterior to all manner of reflection; such is the force of natural pity, which the most dissolute manners have as yet found it so difficult to extinguish, since we every day see, in our theatrical representation, those men sympathize with the unfortunate and weep at their sufferings, who, if in the tyrant's place, would aggravate the torments of their enemies. Mandeville was very sensible that men, in spite of all their morality, would never have been better than monsters, if nature had not given them pity to assist reason: but he did not perceive that from this quality alone flow all the social virtues, which he would dispute mankind the possession of. In fact, what is generosity, what clemency, what humanity, but pity applied to the weak, to the guilty, or to the human species in general? Even benevolence and friendship, if we judge right, will appear the effects of a constant pity, fixed upon a particular object: for to wish that a person may not suffer, what is it but to wish that he may be happy? Though it were true that commiseration is no more than a sentiment, which puts us in the place of him who suffers, a sentiment obscure but active in the savage, developed but dormant in civilized man, how could this notion affect the truth of what I advance, but to make it more evident. In fact, commiseration must be so much the more energetic, the more intimately the animal, that beholds any kind of distress, identifies himself with the animal that labours under it. Now it is evident that this identification must have been infinitely more perfect in the state of nature than in the state of reason. It is reason that engenders self-love, and reflection that strengthens it; it is reason that makes man shrink into himself; it is reason that makes him keep aloof from everything that can trouble or afflict him: it is philosophy that destroys his connections with other men; it is in consequence of her dictates that he mutters to himself at the sight of another in distress, You may perish for aught I care, nothing can hurt me. Nothing less than those evils, which threaten the whole species, can disturb the calm sleep of the philosopher, and force him from his bed. One man may with impunity murder another under his windows; he has nothing to do but clap his hands to his ears, argue a little with himself to hinder nature, that startles within him, from identifying him with the unhappy sufferer. Savage man wants this admirable talent; and for want of wisdom and reason, is always ready foolishly to obey the first whispers of humanity. In riots and street-brawls the populace flock together, the prudent man sneaks off. They are the dregs of the people, the poor basket and barrow-women, that part the combatants, and hinder gentle folks from cutting one another's throats.

The first Discourse is an argument that the arts and sciences have made most or all people deeply unhappy, while the second Discourse similarly argues that all advances in civilization have imprisoned souls that in happier days gone by were not only bigger and more powerful than feminized civilized man gone soft, but blissfully pranced around like fauns in Arcadia. The central thesis--that all people are born good and have their goodness sucked out of them by society, is the opposite of Hobbes's depiction of brutal savages who can only be tamed by an all-powerful government. Cynical, unhappy me--I vehemently disagree with Hobbes and argue for more freedom, but have never been able to satisfactorily refute him (See my July, 2015 Bookpost for my attempt to do so). Rousseau's opposite thesis i would love to believe, but it's utter nonsense. 

Rousseau pretty much rejects reason as an artificial construct, and urges people to think with their hearts.  His propositions are sounds-good wishful thinking supported by personal bias. His idea of "natural man" is taken directly from Tacitus's Germania (see my November 2012 Bookpost), and never mind that Tacitus was a curmudgeonly  propagandist trying to shame the Romans into stoic virtue (Shorter Tacitus:  “The barbarians are big and strong because they drink less, fuck less and keep their word more than you corrupt maggots! I wish I could be around in another 200 years when they come and beat the shit out of you and burn the city again and again, because you deserve it!”).  Rousseau wants you to accept his argument because it's prettily written and romantic, not because it follows logically from anything he says.

The 18th Century Murders: The Devil in the Marshalsea, by Antonia Hodgson; Lord John and the Hand of Devils, by Diana Gabaldon   

The killers had swept the floor, but they had missed one small thing. A coin had skittered across the room in the struggle, coming to rest in a dark corner beneath the captain's bed. And there it remained as the long months passed, hidden in the dust--a silver crown stained with blood. Waiting to tell its story...Waiting for me to find it.

--from The Devil in the Marshalsea

Her eyes were huge, gleaming in the candlelight, but so dark that they seemed void pools, her face without expression.

"You will never satisfy a woman," she said softly. "Any woman who shares your bed will leave after no more than a single night, cursing you."

Grey rubbed a knucke against his stubbled chin, and nodded.

"Very likey, madam," he said.  "Good night."

--from Lord John and the Succubus

The Devil in the Marshalsea is a fine enrichment entertainment to a study of 18th Century England.The narrator, a gentleman named Tom Hawkins has been robbed of the money with which he would have paid his debts, and is shut in a debtor prison many times worse than the one immortalized by Dickens in the following century.  There has been a murder for him to solve, committed there a couple of weeks before his arrival, but the main point of the book is the vivid description of horrible prison conditions--people gouged out of their money by greedy turnkeys, and then thrown into the "common side" to be packed like sardines and die of plague or starvation when they had no more valuables to fork over; people chained to rotting corpses; other people beaten to death by profiteering wardens; corruption overlooked by wealthy patrons unless there is danger of it being found out, in which case they casually murder any inconvenient mouths.  Republicans will masturbate over these scenes; anyone else will be shocked and indignant, and hopefully motivated to investigate the parallels in modern privatized "jail-for-profit" and "jail-for-debt" schemes presently being pushed and established in our state legislatures.

Having once again run afoul of my library's backlog of people wanting to read the Outlander novels, I turned this month to another one from her inferior but more mysteryish "Lord John" series featuring an English character from the Outlander universe. Lord John kinda grows on you--maybe you can guess without reading it why the above quoted variant on the offensive "gypsy curse" trope is actually screamingly funny because of something the "all-powerful" Rom witch doesn't know, but I won't spoil it here.  Hand of Devils is a collection of three tales of different lengths, involving Lord John solving one or more murders.  They're good on character and atmosphere, but not much on challenging mystery.  Gabaldon gives no clues; she just has the criminal come out from behind a corner or whatever at the end to try to kill Lord John, stopping to explain the crime long enough for John to get the drop on them.  Also, they're the kind of Scooby Doo adventures that play up supernatural forces as possible suspects while the reader knows damn well that the explanation is someone using spookiness as a cover for mundane crime, and who would get away with it if it wasn't for that meddling Lord John.

Redshirts Around the Perimeter: A Dance with Dragons, by George R. R. Martin 

One of the Freys stepped forward, a knight long and lean of limb, clean shaved but for a grey mustache as thin as a Myrish stiletto. "The Red Wedding was the Young Wolf's work. He changed into a beast before our eyes and tore out the throat of my cousin Jinglebell, a harmless simpleton.  He would have slain my lord father too, if Ser Wendel had not put himself in the way.

Lord Wyman blinked back tears. "Wendel was always a brave boy. I am not surprised he died a hero."

The enormity of the lie made Davos gasp. "Is it your claim that ROBB STARK killed Wendel Manderly?", he asked the Frey.

"And many more. Mine own son Tytos was amongst them, and my daughter's husband. When Stark changed into a wolf, his northmen did the same. The mark of the beast was on them all. Wargs birth other wargs with a bite, it is well known.  It was all my brothers and I could do to put them down before they slew us all."

The man was smirking as he told the tale.

Just last month I opined that the Game of Thrones TV franchise would be milking the last two of the five presently published books in the series for another two or three seasons.  I was wrong. the show has already gone beyond it. Please do not put spoilers from the world beyond the books in the comments.  I  don't have HBO and must wait for discs to see the series.

I had underestimated how very little plot there would be in Dance With Dragons.  There are only three or four major events in the whole book; everything else is moving the pieces around to build up to them.  Brann and Arya's chapters are pretty much training montages; Davos gets four chapters, only the last two of which are significant to the action; Jon Snow's scenes are like the part in "The A-Team" where they jerry-rig some apparatus to beat the villains against the odds, with the distinction that he's making alliances instead of machinery, and the outcome (for now) is quite different.  Poor Tyrion is reduced to a lot of reaction shots and banter as he keeps being taken from one place to another, drinking and knowing things with all his might.  And Daenerys agonizes while being a badass until what happens happens.

But, hey. Daenerys, Jon and Tyrion are in the book, which is concentrated in the Northlands beyond and below the wall, and outside of Westeros, with only a few scenes in the heart of the seven kingdoms.  There is ever more death and ever more new characters to take the place of those who die.  And there is justice lying in wait for the Freys and Boltons...maybe. 

And honestly, with this much amazing character, atmosphere and dialogue, you don't really need all that much plot.

Slumming in the City: Last exit to Brooklyn, by Hubert Selby, Jr.  

The line of police had been extended and was pushing as hard as it could against the mob, but the men became more incensed as more cops fought them and the voice threatened them and they felt the power of their numbers and frustration and lost hope of fruitless months on the picket and food lines finally found the release it had been looking for.  Now there was something tangible to strike at. And the police who had been standing, bored, for months as the men walked up and down, telling them to keep moving, envying them because they could at least do something tangible to get more money while all they could do was to put in a request to the mayor and be turned down by the rotten politicians, finally found the outlet they too had been waiting for and soon the line became absorbed by the mass and two and three went down to their knees and then others too, strikers and cops, and a sign swooped through the air and thudded against a head and a white gloved hand went up and then a club thudded and hands, clubs, signs, rocks, bottles were lifted and thrown as if governed by a runaway eccentric rod and the mass spread out, some falling over others and heads popped out of windows and doorways and peered and the mass continued to wallow along and across 2nd Avenue as a galaxy through the heavens with the swooshing of comets and meteors and...

There are smug city people who like to think that country people resemble the supporting cast of Deliverance in body, mind and soul. Last Exit to Brooklyn  is for smug country people who would like to think of city people in an equal and opposite state of decay.  The people in this majority Greek-American neighborhood of South Brooklyn make Ralph Kramden look like an educated man of culture and Archie Bunker like a rich man who welcomes diversity.

No one is likeable, and there is violence everywhere.  Gang-bangers beat up a soldier from the nearby military base.  A prostitute violently robs several men, and is then herself gang-raped in a scene so nasty that I know most of my friends will not want to read it.  Homosexuality and transvestitism are described as if the reader should be shocked at its existence, as if  they are the moral equivalent of pedophilia, which is also in this book.  There is a filthy housing project and a violent labor strike and people cussing and doing drugs and wallowing in physical and moral dirt.  It is hard to identify with anyone unless you are familiar with these neighborhoods, except that you can sense their overwhelming pain and rage.  Readers from outside these neighborhoods are meant to feel like voyeurs, and to pity and despise them.  This was written in 1957.  Modern similar tales are set in barrios and ghettos where everyone is either using or selling drugs and will beat one another senseless because "that's what those people do."  Because of course they do.

Recommended only for people who look for the words "raw", "gritty realism" and "surging with anger" in their book reviews.

Cultivating the Great Garden:  The Age of Voltaire, by Will and Ariel Durant 

We have tried to reflect reality by combining history and biography.  The experiment will legitimately invite criticism, but it carries out the aim of "integral history." Events and personalities go hand in hand through time, regardless of which were the causes and which were effects; history speaks in events, but through individuals.  This volume is not a biography of Voltaire; it uses his wandering and agitated life as connective tissue between nations and generations, and it accepts him as the most significant and illustrative figure between the death of Louis XIV and the fall of the Bastille. Which, of all the men and women of that turbulent era, is more vividly remembered, more often read, more alive in influence today, than Voltaire?

Volume IX of the Durants' thick history of Europe through Napoleon pretty much spans the reign of Louis XV, with considerable overlap as it discusses many notable people whose lifespans did not fit comfortably in that time period.  As with previous volumes, there's a whole lot of material (800 pages), but what there is is light reading, serving as an introduction to the more weighty histories, and to many of the books the Durants discuss in a few pages while I read them in their entirety.   I included Lord Chesterfield's letters (see this March's Bookpost) because the Durants devoted considerable space to him.

The Durants are gentle and dreamy, and have a tendency to look at both the very good and the very bad with the same air of detached affection and bemusement. This can be awkward, as for example, when they shake their heads and smile over silly naive Bonnie Prince Charlie and Culloden at the same time as I'm reading a quite different account by Diana Gabaldon, with all the blood and scorched earth and massacre.  Considerable emphasis is given to the rise of the French philosophes whom I've read separately ver these months--Voltaire, Diderot, La Mettrie, Helvetius, Dhollenbach--who increasingly challenged the power of the church to censor, jail, and even kill people for "heretical writings". This is the era when the church's stranglehold on progress was finally, finally broken, and this is a good thing--and yet the Durants seem to take the view that it was a shame to remove all the sweet consolations that religion supposedly brings to the soul, and that but for the philosophes, all of that nasty revolutionary business later on might have been avoided (and what? the clergy and nobles would continue to live lavishly at the expense of the 97% for all time?).  They even end the book with a very unfortunate imaginary dialogue between Voltaire and a Christian leader in which Voltaire acts like a pompous snoot against the dire warnings of eternity, and his opponent, without a hint of irony, closes with the eternal Tartuffian insult, "I'll pray for you."

After that, the book closes with the Durants' inspirational line: "Courage, Reader. We near the end."  Two thick volumes to go.

The Original Delightful Romp: Tom Jones, by Henry Fielding 

Jones went up to Blifil's room, whom he found in a situation which moved his pity, though it would have raised a less amiable passion in many beholders. He cast himself on his bed, where he lay abandoning himself to despair, and drowned in tears; not in such tears as flow from contrition, and wash away guilt from minds which have been seduced or surprised into it unawares, against the bent of their natural dispositions, as will sometimes happen from human frailty, even to the good; no, these tears were such as the frightened thief sheds in his cart, and are indeed the effects of that concern which the most savage natures are seldom deficient in feeling for themselves.

This is my fourth time reading Fielding's classic.  It is one of my favorite books of all time, and one that I credit with helping to change me over the course of decades from a dorky kid who knew less than Jon Snow into a person with a conscience and empathy as well as a zest for life.  The characters, from the venerable Squire Allworthy to the violent teacher Thwackum, easily walk the tightrope between caricature and believability. There are numerous literary and ethical observations by the author, who manages to jump in and write in the first person from time to time without distracting from the plot, and the life lessons range from after-school special triteness to the most profound truths about the human condition.

I read it once a decade. Each time it tells me something new about human nature and about myself, ranging from reassurance that the world is bigger and funnier than I'd imagined to a warning that I was straying off-path badly.  This time around, in a year that has been marked by more bitterness and depression than I can recall having since the years started beginning with a 2, I was constantly drawn to scenes of gossip and backbiting, and found myself raging at the injustice of casual slander.  Tom Jones spends his youth being presented in a bad light to his adoptive father by everyone in his household.  Later on, there are several scenes in which, for example, he goes to an inn, makes an immediate favorable first impression on the people there, who assume he must be a fine gentleman--and then someone informs them all that he is a base-born scoundrel, and they all instantly revise their opinions, the landlord wants his reckoning up front and feels entitled to cheat him, etc.  This has been done to me, recently. It has been done to some of my friends and my clients and to Bernie Sanders, and it has made me so infuriated as to affect my health.  I was also struck by the whole "base-born" prejudice, and how people in Fielding's day were kicked around or allowed to get away with anything, simply based on who their parents were.  How fortunate that we in modern America have given up such snobbery and instead fawn over and hate on people for sensible reasons like their race, religion or how much money they have.

Fun to read, and very, very wise. Very highest recommendations.

Find all of my previous Bookposts here: admnaismith.livejournal.com/...

Geek SuperGoddess: You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost), by Felicia Day  

I started throwing in other characters from other books into my headspace, and pretty soon I'd built an imaginary town filled with stolen IP. Perry Mason was there (of course), the whole crew from the Trixie Belden children's mystery series (Anne loved to steal Trixie's boyfriend away), Lancelot and Guinivere owned the local garden store, even anthropomorphic pigs and spiders from Charlotte's Web were full residents with voting rights.  It got so complicated I had to start tracking my world in an accounting ledger with everyone's names, addresses and personality traits in neat little rows ("Friendly!""Secret lovers!""Murderer!") My town had it all!

There's an online poll making the rounds asking people what four faces they would choose for a "geek Mount Rushmore"--the giants of fandom.  Patrick Stewart?  George R. R. Marin?  Sir Terry Pratchett?  JK Rowling?  Joss Whedon? Nathan Filion?

Felicia Day is consistently in the top ten.  And this is her memoir. 

We learn that she was homeschooled in the deep south and still ended up getting a 4.0 in college, double-majoring in mathematics and violin (actually, we are merely reminded of this, because in the subculture that admires Felicia Day, we get told this at least once a month in internet memes.  It is the personal factoid people are told about her, like the one about Kant being so regular in his walks that the local merchants set their watches when they saw him coming, or that Ayn Rand was once forced to share her toys and never got over it.  Got it?  Felicia = 4.0 math geek.  Go Felicia! Sapiosexuals everywhere swoon over you.

We learn other things we may not have known, such as her odd combination of shy, awkward kindness and utter, utter badassdom.  The way she more or less invented the webseries with The Guild, which might well have been produced traditionally, had Day put up with the mind-boggling (to men, anyway, who never believe it until they see it firsthand) condescenscion, misogyny and greed inherent in Hollywood producers.  There is a chapter about her experiences among HER PEOPLE  (that's us) at conventions, where her fans run the gamut from totally awesome and rocking the way they dress like her, to sad and in need of an egolift--which she provides--to frighteningly creepy. 

There is a chapter on gamergate that will turn your stomach (again), and which will be surprising only to male readers who have not listened to women (again).  Good God, what is WRONG with these guys?  They collectively suck as human beings. They long for these smart, quirky, wonderful women to keep company with them, and when one comes along, they offer an experience slightly less enjoyable than rolling around naked in a cactus field infested with fire ants and scorpions. Say it with me: "We are GEEKS.  We Don Not do this.  We Do Not allow it to happen around us.  We respect and honor and nurture women as we respect and honor all of our fellow nerds, introverts, geeks, misfits and oddballs.  It's a geek thing. It's what we do."

And then there is a chapter--I suspect one that took the most courage to write--about a period of crippling depression and anxiety she went through that might have ended her  Felicia, if you're online reading my bookpost, thank you for that chapter. It made me feel like I was neither alone nor a specially contemptible excuse for a human being, to have had such episodes myself.  Why, if even Felicia Day, Badass, has been knocked down by emotional demons, then I certainly have nothing to be ashamed of.  And if she can get up again more times than Chumbawamba, then I owe it to the path we walk in fandom, to get up again after just a few smashings.  And I'm pretty damn sure I'm not the only one for whom that chapter did that.

Finally, we --by which I mean, I--learn that, apart from having "made it", and aside from her particular set of quirky traits,  Felicia Day is not all that different from thousands of geek and gamer girls--and guys--out there.  We are all weird individually and together.  This is important because I get a little wistful sometimes knowing that (as happened with George R. R. Martin at the last WorldCon), if she and I are ever at the same con, I would have to stand in lines and jostle many many other fans who want it more, for a bit of attention, when what I'd really like is half an hour of coffee and conversation.  And that isn't likely to happen with most geek celebrities.  And really, I needn't be wistful about that.  Because there are dozens--hundreds--of geeks I know personally who, not yet having "made it", are quite accessible indeed for a bit of conversation over coffee. 
As for Felicia Day---We will always have You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost),

Beasts, Human and Otherwise: The Complete Short Stories of Saki, by H.H. Munro 

“Out through that window, three years ago to a day, her husband and her two young brothers went off for their day’s shooting. They never came back. In crossing the moor to their favourite snipe-shooting ground they were all three engulfed in a treacherous piece of bog. It had been that dreadful wet summer, you know, and places that were safe in other years gave way suddenly without warning. Their bodies were never recovered. That was the dreadful part of it.” Here the child’s voice lost its self-possessed note and became falteringly human. “Poor aunt always thinks that they will come back some day, they and the little brown spaniel that was lost with them, and walk in at that window just as they used to do. That is why the window is kept open every evening till it is quite dusk. Poor dear aunt, she has often told me how they went out, her husband with his white waterproof coat over his arm, and Ronnie, her youngest brother, singing ‘Bertie, why do you bound?’ as he always did to tease her, because she said it got on her nerves. Do you know, sometimes on still, quiet evenings like this, I almost get a creepy feeling that they will all walk in through that window –”

People who learn that my first alphabet book was The Gashlycrumb Tinies often ostentatiously laugh and say, "Ah, NOW I understand", by which they mean, "I've always thought you were a little crazy, and I see now that you must have had your mind warped  by being exposed too early to a grim black-and-white illustrated recounting of 26 small children getting deaded."

These people know less than Jon Snow.  Edward Gorey is nothing.  If there's a book I was traumatized by reading too young, it was a collection of Saki tales.  These are disturbing.

Saki's Edwardian era world is one in which manners are a thin veneer masking cruel, savage impulses in people, and civilization is an equally thin veneer covering natural and supernatural nastiness from our primitive heritage.

The complete set of stories starts out with a limp appetizer of "Reginald" stories that mostly involve an upper class-born brat sitting in a chair, cleverly sneering at hypocrisy and convention while shocking poor old Mrs. Piddle-Widdle or whoever with his offensive frankness.  Eventually, Reginald is replaced with Clovis, who is more likely to be either on the sidelines commenting sardonically or playing a cruel practical joke.  They're what Bertie Wooster would have been if he had more brains and a mean streak.

The better-known stories are stand-alones.  They have twist-endings reminiscent of O. Henry, usually involving a protagonist being made into a fool,  or being squashed like a bug for a small amount of hubris.  Boys at a house party politely ask to be excused to the library, where they beat up the smaller boy.  A hobo is mistaken for a returning prodigal son and welcomed in and fed, but is later also mistaken for the son by a deadly enemy.

And then there are the traumatic ones.  The ones like "Gabriel Ernest", "Sredni Vashtar" and "The Music on the Hill", that involve vengeful primitive gods.  Some hapless city person in the country laughs off an old crone's warning not to meddle in something, and ends up being nastily dealt with in the forest.  A boy in the care of a cruel cousin prays for her to be killed by a wild polecat he keeps as a secret pet.  Feuding neighbors are trapped under a tree and make peace with one another just in time to be eaten by wolves.

Read singly, a Saki story can make one think a little. Taken too many at once, as I did at an impressionable age, they can make one huddle in a corner and whimper.

Wax Fruit for a Starving World: Freedom of the Will, by Jonathan Edwards  

We need not be afraid to affirm that if a wise and good man knew with absolute certainty, it would be best, all things considered, that there should be such a thing as moral evil in the world, it would not be contrary to his wisdom and goodness to choose that it should be so.

I am embarrassed for my country that a Massachusetts neo-Calvinist apparently has the claim to be America's first philosopher.  the introduction says nothing about Edwards participating in witch-burnings, but I'm pretty sure he approved of them.

Freedom of the Will is about what you'd expect it to be about.  being a Calvinist, Edwards is against free will and for strict determinism of our lives, before we are born, by a cruel god.  America being on the cusp of a cry for freedom to be heard 'round the world, he felt the need to make it palatable by explaining that freedom is slavery (and ignorance strength. Orwell would smile knowingly, and Trump eagerly). 

Edwards defines freedom as the ability to do what one pleases, but adds that "the will" is a fiction, not a real thing like a person, but an attribute, a capacity for making choices.  And that the choices we do make are....wait for it...DETERMINED by our considerations at the time.  I see what he did there!  Our ability to do as we please can be limited by physical (like being in jail and unable to go someplace) or moral (like being unwilling to enter a brothel that stands before you) considerations...and it is the same thing.

I am the 99%: Discourse on Political Economy, by Jean Jacques Rousseau  

Another point is that the losses of the poor are far less reparable than those of the rich, and that the difficulty of acquiring always increases in proportion to need.  Money breeds money, and the first gold pistole is sometimes harder to earn than the second million. But it goes even further. All that the poor man pays is forever lost to him, and remains in or returns to the hands of the rich, and since the proceeds of taxes go sooner or later only to those men who take part in the government or are close to it, they have--even in paying their share--a tangible interest in increasing taxes.

Let us summarize in a few words the social compact of the two estates: "You need me, for I am rich and you are poor, so let us come to an agreement between ourselves. I shall permit you to have the honor of serving me on condition that you give me what little you have for the trouble i shall take to command you.

If you ask me, this  short tract is the most fascinating, and the truest, thing Rousseau ever wrote, in part because it is almost the opposite of the "noble savage" claptrap from the First and Second Discourses reviewed in last month's Bookpost.  Here, Rousseau forsees the modern libertarian movement and attacks it as a gang of wolves advising the sheep to get rid of those repressive old big gummint sheepdogs that prevent them from playing with wolves as equals.  Rousseau says that for a state to be economically responsible, it must first obey its own laws, second persuade the people that obedience to said laws is synonymous with virtue (and the best way to do this is to have only laws that make moral sense), and third feed the people and prevent the oligarchic class from concentrating too much wealth into their own hands, for they will then threaten to replace the government while the poor will threaten revolution.

Does that sound like advice that might be as pertinent today as it was in Rousseau's time?

Incidentally, it seems that this, and not The Wealth of Nations (coming to my bookpost some time this year) was the first tract on economics.  At least according to Rousseau, who claims to invent the term "political economy" to mean the economic life of commerce among businesses; between nations; and as planned by statesmen, as opposed to regular "economy" which had previously meant only the running of a household.

The 18th Century Murders: The Return of Dr. Sam Johnson, Detector, by Lillian de la Torre; Hawkwood, by James McGee; The Fiery Cross, by Diana Gabaldon 

After an interminable minute, the lock turned, and we heard someone wrenching at the bolt. It stuck, and with a shriek it grated grudgingly back, and the heavy door swung slowly in.

On the threshold stood Mrs. Oliver, rigid and staring. Her lips moved, but no sound came.

"In God's name, what is it?" cried mrs. Taffety in alarm.

Mrs. Oliver found a hoarse whisper.

"Murder!" she gasped. "Murder lock'd in!"

--from The Return of Dr. Sam Johnson, Detector

St. Giles' Rookery had been Christened the Holy Land by its inhabitants, Irish Catholic immigrants for the most part, though over the years outcasts of a different kind had found sanctuary within its stinking slums.  Murderers, deserters, beggars and whores, along with the poor and the hungry, had all sought to establish some kind of haven for themselves away from the prying eyes and unwelcome attention of the Parish Officers and the police. Free fom the constraints of conventional society, the inhabitants of the Holy Land had set up their own kingdom, their own laws, their own courts, their own form of justice and punishment. Any representatives of officialdom who chose to venture into St Giles Rookery did so at their peril.

--from Hawkwood

"Jamie Roy told him serious like that it was surely luck for the thief-taker that we had done come upon y'all when we did. he give him to understand that if we hadn't, then this lady here would likely have taken him hiome in her wagon, and slaughtered him like a hog, safe out of sight.  Boble said as how he didn't believe it, he thought she was only a-tryin' to scare him with that knife. Bur then Jamie Roy leaned down close, confidential like, and said he mighta thought the same--only that he'd heard so much about Frau McGillivray's reputation as a famous sausage maker, and had had the privilege of bein' served some of it to his breakfast this morning. Right about then, Boble started to lose the color in his face, and when Jamie Roy pulled out a bit of sausage to show him..."

---from The Fiery Cross

The concept of Boswell playing Watson to Dr. Johnson's Holmes a century before Conan Doyle  is appealing.  the "mysteries" are clumsy and ham-fisted, and several of them are not really mysteries so much as problem-solving (how to arrange the escape of a chained slave, or a sane person locked up wrongfully in Bedlam by a greedy heir).  On the other hand, Boswell and Johnson fairly romp through the seven short tales here, with Johnson constantly stepping from the shadows to bellow "Ho, miscreant, halt and go no further! You are detected, and must give account of yourself!"

Jolly good murderous fun, should you chance to be in the proper frame of mind.

Hawkwood, titled after the main character, is the first in a new series by James McGee that gets the atmosphere of Regency London so vivid that you can just about see and hear it.  Hawkwood is a Bow Street runner with a past (as all the brooding, dark detectives are wont to have) whose investigations take him from balls at the mansions of lords who challenge him to duels, to docked ships and slums full of lowlife and stenches, to the halls of government.  There's a highway robbery murder, a disappeared clockmaker, a murdered officer and a plot against the state, all of which wrap together in a combination of thinking and action sequences handled masterfully. Very high recommendations.

The Fiery Cross is the fifth Outlander novel, and marks the point at which the squick factor seriously begins to outweigh the excitement and romance.  At this point in the series, the scene has long since moved away from romantic Scotland and into frontier North Carolina, a not very nice place at all. The Fiery Cross is a "signs and portents" episode in which what has gone before slumbers while the heroine Claire gets to fuss and fret, in 1770 about the coming revolution brewing unseen in Boston and Philadelphia.  There is an "accepted way of doing things" and happy, well-cared-for slaves that make me vomit in my mouth.

Most troubling, perhaps, is the "fiery cross" of the title, which refers to a burning cross that Scottish clans used to carry as a firebrand and signal to summon the clans to war.  The Frasiers and McKenzies use it in an innocent way, but in the South USA, where clans eventually came to be spelled with a K and burning crosses came to have quite a different meaning, the knowledge that my own people had something to do with the origin of such horrors is terrible to contemplate.

Run-On Dreamscape: Austerlitz, by W.G. Sebald  

This is one of a very few books I can't find a representative quote for without making the post too long to read.  It's like reading the final (Molly Bloom) section of Ulysses.  The sentences go on for several pages, each.  And they're surreal.

The general story is a man, transported as an infant to safety out of Holocaust-era Axis lands, telling an unnamed narrator (as in, "Austerlitz told me that...") about his attempts after the war to find evidence of who he and his parents were.

His journey takes him to several buildings and landmarks, the photographs of which (interspersed with the text) remind me of the star pattern recognized by the adult Rapunzel in the Disney Tangled movie.  Austerlitz has several Proust moments looking at such things as distinctively forged stair guardrails.

Eating People is Wrong: On Fiji Islands, by Ronald Wright  

In the fiji Museum there is a curious wooden artifact with a carved handle and four sharp prongs. Beneath it is the short but eloquent inscription: FORK USED IN EATING REVEREND BAKER.

The display also contains dishes used for serving the Wesleyan's cooked flesh, and informs the reader that Mr. Baker was the only missionary eaten in Fiji, and that he passed away (if that's the right expression) in 1867).

Sarah Vowell has spoiled me for historical travel writing.  See her book Unfamiliar Fishes for her account of a trip to Hawaii which, like On Fiji Islands, devotes a lot of energy to the conflict between tribal civilization and the expansion of Europe into the whole world, with much hand-wringing over the damage done by white people and much juxtaposition of historical events with sights and conversations actually experienced by the writer.   Unlike Vowell, Wright's trip to Fiji is written with detached, academic bemusement and deadly earnestness. 

Vowell would have thrown in a reference to episodes of Gilligan's Island involving a tribe from a neighboring island that wants to eat the Skipper. The best Wright can do is point out that Captain Bligh passed through Fiji while getting the officers of the Bounty across the ocean in an open boat, and did not stop there because of reports of cannibals.  As it turns out, the natives would probably have helped him, and the unfortunate Rev. Baker may have been a zealot seeking martyrdom, who angered the Fijian chief on purpose.
Fijians are depicted as a friendly people who believe that the purpose of life is to be happy, and who have kept their civilization largely intact and independent compared to other island civilizations.  Fijians are about half the population of the islands and still own over 80% of the land.  Go Fiji.

Dark Voyage: The Adventures of Roderick Random, by Tobias Smollett  

As the commanding officer had not humanity to order my wounds to be dressed, and I could not use my own hands, I desired one of my fellow-captives who was unfettered, to take a handkerchief out of my pocket and tie it round my head to stop the bleeding. He pulled out my handkerchief ('tis true), but instead of applying it to the use for which I had designed it, went to the grating of the hatchway, and with astonishing composure, sold it before my face to a bum-boatwoman then on board, for a quart of gin, with which he treated his companions, regardless of my circumstances and entreaties.

Coming right on the heels of my re-reading of Tom Jones (see last month's bookpost), this second tier 18th century novel is instructive as to what separates a great work from a merely adequate work. Roderick Random and Tom Jones have a lot in common, and work with the tropes of the then-new art of writing a novel:  There is a protagonist born to misfortune who loses an inheritance and sets off wandering, accompanied by a philosophical comic sidekick (I'm not sure where the rule came from that all pre-Victorian protagonists' sidekicks must be amateur barbers of intermittent courage who encounter several surly donkeys, but the resemblances between Sancho Panza, Partridge, and Strap are striking).  There are stories within stories told by strangers who appear in the work only long enough to tell them; roadside inns with many doors and saucy wenches; and there is one mischance after another before the hero's eventual supreme happiness and the confusion of his enemies.  In Smollett's case, there are also several shipboard adventures. But the styles are as different as can be.

Smollett is not life-affirming. And therein lies all the difference.

Even when Tom Jones is at his most miserable, there is a light touch, a turn of phrase, and a two-dimensional insert at just the right moment, such as when the brutal schoolmaster is named "Thwackum, whose thoughts are full of birch" and who turns beet red and jumps up and down.  There is a brutal schoolmaster for Roderick Random too, but he is simply vicious.  We feel Random's suffering to excess; the mean-spiritedness of the majority of the characters is overwhelming, and the final happiness consists of too few pages.  If the book had been called a tragedy, I would have been prepared, but the setup for a jolly roistering tale followed by a payoff that includes floggings, cheating the innocent, brutal people having authority over the helpless, cold-hearted moralizing old misers, and unrepentant criminal behavior--false advertising.

Memoirs of a Douche-Tweazle: The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Roussseau  

I had my childish faults: I prattled, I was greedy, I sometimes told lies. No doubt I stole fruit, sweets, things to eat; but I never, just for the fun of it, did any harm or damage, got others into trouble, or teased dumb animals. I remember on one occasion, however, peeing into the kettle belonging to one of our neighbors, Mme. Clot, while she was at church. I must confess, too, that this memory still makes me laugh, for Mme. Clot, although otherwise a thoroughly good person, was the grumpiest old woman I ever knew in my life. Such is the true but brief history of my childhood misdemeanors.

Rousseau, for all his moments of genius and thought-provoking writing, was capable of being a real bag of dicks when he put his mind to it.

In snooty, aristocratic 18th century France, where apparently the only thing the privileged classes enjoy more than scandalous behavior is gossiping and shunning others for scandalous behavior, Rousseau seems born to simultaneously fit right in and be cast right out. He begins by getting apprenticed to a tradesman who fails to appreciate his genius, running away to the city, and writing tracts against the tyranny of private property while living off the charity of others.  He has a series of thoughtless, dickheaded romances in which he is so head-over-heels in love that he almost considers the feelings of his partner from time to time.  Later on, he meets, befriends and quarrels with literary and musical figures from Diderot to Rameau to Voltaire to David Hume. Apparently everyone involved in these quarrels wrote volumes about them at the time, explaining that they were all the other party's fault. Rousseau does a passable impression of being amazingly misunderstood, set up and betrayed by those he trusted; however, Rousseau's dramatic flouncing and the sheer number of opponents he has leads me to suspect that he's not as right and innocent as he thinks he is.  for that matter, he might not be as horrible as he pretends to be.

The biographies of the great have much to teach us, either as examples or as warnings.  For all my admiration of some of Rousseau's other writings, there's no denying that his biography serves as a warning, and that he made himself and most people around him unnecessarily miserable at a time when his class of people, at least, enjoyed some of the greatest opportunities mankind had ever hoped for at the time.  Fascinating and readable, but ultimately depressing.

Good Bye to Hume:  The History of England, by David Hume  

But the English carried farther their ill-judged tyranny.  Instead of inviting the Irish to adopt the more civilized customs of their conquerors, they even refused, though earnestly solicited, to communicate to them the privilege of their laws, and every where marked them out as aliens and enemies. Thrown out of the protection of justice, the natives could find no security but in force; and flying the neighborhood of cities, which they could not approach with safety, they sheltered themselves in their marshes and forests from the insolence of their inhuman masters.  Being treated like wild beasts, they became such; and joining the ardor of revenge to their yet untamed barbarity, they grew every day more intractable and more dangerous.

Here, I end six months of David Hume, intelligent but dry as sawdust and inclined to hedge his prognostications so as not to offend.  I read a couple of short essays ("On Taste" and "On The Original Contract"), and the final (out of one a month for six months) volume of a thick, wordy, epic history of England that the Durants (but not I) put in the same category as Gibbon and Rome.

Nope.  Sorry.

Gibbon is fascinating because everything he says seems to have implications, not just for Gibbon's day, but for our own, about how a mighty culture can make a wrong step and inevitably lose it all, and that maybe the mighty culture of the day is doing just that.  Hume, in contrast, recites fact after fact after fact, making even the wars a little dull.

If you're thinking of tackling Hume's history, I suggest skipping the first four books entirely.  It seems to me, he wrote those out of a sense of duty to completeness and that his heart wasn't in it.  What he really wanted to write about, it seems to me, was the period in the 17th Century from the rise of James I through two Charleses, two Jameses, two revolutions, one Commonwealth, and a nasty bag of dicks named Oliver Cromwell.

Oh yes. And the Scots are the heroes of the entire history.

Once again, we see the same conflict that spans civilizations from Athens v. Sparta to Rome v. Gaul, Pope v. LutherLouis v. Robespierre, Confederate v. Union, Eloi v. Morlock, Centauri v. Narn. One side cultured and elegant but decadent, claiming superior civilization and rank, creating innovative art and books, and living the good life--for those at the top, anyhow.  The other side strong, disciplined, unadorned, dour, relatively egalitarian, religious and intensely judgmental, leaving little cultural legacy but many military victories and usually overthrowing the decadent civilization.  The period of Cromwell's Commonwealth was a cultural sinkhole flanked by two fairly magnificent periods, especially where the theater is concerned.

Note also that in America, the "Cavaliers" settled in the South, intending to make a perfect paradise for themselves, where they could live in luxurious leisure while claiming the right to own other people who didn't count and who would do all the hard work, while the "Roundheads" settled in the North and founded stark Puritan communities full of churches and blue laws and witch trials.  Today, things are more mixed up, with the Southerners still decadent and an innovative source of music, cuisine and literature while claiming not only elite status privilege but religious moralism and populism, while the Northerners are more laid back and committed to egalitarian reform while claiming culture/civilization privilege.   Which side is better?  Depends on whether you're rich, and if not, whether you'd rather be crushed by unequal treatment under normally lenient laws, or by across the board oppression under zealously enforced harsh laws. This is why I support reform from within the system, not revolution.  Revolution tends to result in a zealous Cromwell-type taking the place of the decadent oppressor class.

Find all of my previous Bookposts here: admnaismith.livejournal.com/...

Going Overbard: Fool, by Christopher Moore  

"It's true, you git! Your mother was a poxy whore!"

"Beggin' your pardon, sir, but poxiness isn't so bad", said Shanker Mary, shining a ray of optimism on these dark ages. "Unfairly maligned, the poxy are. Methinks a spot o' the pox implies experience. Worldliness, if you will."

"The tart makes an excellent point, Edmund. But for the slow descent into madness and death with your bits dropping off along the way, the pox is a veritable blessing," I said as I skipped just out of blade's reach from the bastard, who stalked me around the great cauldron. "Take Mary here. In fact, there's an idea! Take Mary. Why spend your energy after a long journey murdering a speck of a fool when you can enjoy the pleasures of a lusty wench who is not only ready, but willing and smelling pleasantly of soap?"

"Aye," said Drool, expelling froth as he spoke. "She's a bloody vision of loveliness."

Edmund let his sword point drop  and looked at Drool. "Are you eating soap?"

"Just a wee sliver.  They weren't saving it."

I can't say enough good things about Christopher Moore. I dream of being as good as he is. Lamb (the gospel according to Biff) neared the top of my 100 Books That Rocked My World list, and a couple others have made it into songs.

Fool is one of his best. Narrated by the title character (whose name is Pocket), it rewrites Shakespeare's greatest tragedy as a bawdy comedy complete with lusty serving wenches, MacBeth's witches, and a thoroughly badass Cordelia who, thrown out of Lear's Britain by her senile father, conquers Europe offstage while Pocket engineers a variation of Lear's story like a chaotic-neutral schemer playing the other characters like chess pieces.

There is much backstory that provides or changes motives for some of the odd character choices in Lear.  Edmund and the elder daughters, while treacherous, come across as somewhat less evil than in Shakespeare;  Lear himself is the remnant of a horrible man, and Pocket's story weaves in and out of pathos, tragicomedy, and the supernatural.  the overall effect is---magnificent.  Very highest recommendations.

And I, Milords, Embody the Law: Commentaries on the Laws of England, by William Blackstone  

The doctrine of the law is this: that precedents and rules must be followed, unless flatly absurd or unjust, for though their reason be not obvious at first view, yet we owe such a deference to former times as not to suppose they acted wholly without consideration.  To illustrate this doctrine by examples. It has been determined, time out of mind, that a brother of the half blood (i.e., where they have only one parent the same, and the other different) shall never succeed as heir to the estate of his half brother, but it shall rather escheat to the king, or other superior lord. Now this is a positive law, fixed and established by custom, which custom is evidenced by judicial decisions, and therefore can never be departed from by any modern judge without a breach of his oath and the law.  For herein there is nothing repugnant to natural justice, though the reason of it drawn from the feudal law may not be quite obvious to every body.  And therefore, on account of a supposed hardship upon the half brother, a modern judge might wish it had been otherwise settled, yet it is not in his power to alter it. but if any court were to now determine that an elder brother of the half blood might enter upon and seize any lands that were purchased by his younger half brother, no subsequent judges would scruple to declare that such prior determination was unjust, was unreasonable, and therefore was not law.

Blackstone is maybe the legal equivalent of the scientific treatises (Ptolemy, Newton, Fourier) that I have bemoaned in recent years as being supposedly accessible to layreaders, except that they aren't. Blackstone was supposed to explain law to people who had no legal education; however, I doubt that those who have not gone to law school would make head nor tail of it.  At least it isn't in Latin.  And it may have been the first attempt to do anything like it.  In a world where peasants could not even read and yet "ignorance of the law is no excuse", actually trying to tell people what they were required or forbidden to do and why was a worthy undertaking.

Blackstone's four large tomes have helped to keep the dull times off me for the first six months of the year.  They are divided into "Rights of persons" (which is an odd way to say, defining the structure of the government), "Rights of things" (meaning property law), "wrongs against persons" (meaning circumstances in which you could sue the bum), and "public wrongs" (meaning the criminal law).

Buried in the thick, thick pile of sawdust without butter are principles long outdated ("the king can do no wrong") and still revered today ("Better that ten guilty people go free than that one innocent suffer"--the opposite of how 18th century criminal law in England actually worked, where callous magistrates executed clusters of accused thieves on the overwhelming evidence that they were accused and therefore guilty--but quoting pious principles of justice that one never even thinks about following is possibly the most revered legal tradition of them all).

The 18th Century Murders: A Breath of Snow and Ashes, by Diana Gabaldon; Perfume, by Patrick Suskind; Resurrectionist, by James McGee; The Kingsbridge Plot, by Maan Meyers  

He was not particular about it. He did not differentiate between what is commonly considered a good and a bad smell, not yet. He was greedy. The goal of a hunt was simply to possess everything the world could offer in the way of odors, and his only condition was that the odors be new ones. The smell of a sweating horse meant just as much to him as the tender green bouquet of a bursting rosebud; the acrid stench of a bug was no less worthy than the aroma arising from a larded veal roast in an aristocrat's kitchen. He devoured everything, everything, sucking it up into him. But there were no aesthetic principles governing the olfactory kitchen of his imagination, where he was forever synthesizing and concocting new aromatic combinations.  He fashioned grotesqueries, only to destroy them again immediately, like a child playing with blocks--inventive and destructive, with no apparent norms for his creativity.

--from Perfume

"YOU know what's going on--the war and all. I didn't know it would be this way.  Swear to God, half the people I meet don't know which way is up any more.  I thought it'd be like, you know, redcoats and all, and you just keep away from anybody in a uniform, keep away from the battles, and it'd be fine. But I haven't seen a redcoat anywhere, and people, you know--plain old people--they're shooting each other and running around burning up each other's houses."

--from A Breath of Snow and Ashes

In Philadelphia, the heat was broken by a violent thunderstorm, and the Declaration over which they had debated bitterly for more than three long weeks was agreed to.  Twelve ayes. One abstention.  The sole abstainer was New York.

--from The Kingsbridge Plot

"Indeed, officer Hawkwood, the smell. This place reeks. It reeks of four centuries of human excreta. Bethlem is a midden; it's where London discharges its waste matter. This is the city's dung heap, and it has become my onerous duty to ensure that the reek is contained."

--from Ressurectionist

Perfume, set in 18th Century France is a magic realism story about a grotesque--a man with hyperosmia powers that enable him to recreate complex perfumes without measuring implements, and to detect such things as moral essences from the way things smell.  The murders are because the protagonist himself was born with an evil "moral odor" too subtle to be consciously detected, such that everyone in decent society shuns and bullies him from birth (beginning with his mother, who is executed soon after his birth, for being caught hiding the newborn infant in a heap of offal to die) without articulating why, and so he spends his life murdering and collecting the essence of virgin girls on the cusp of womanhood, hoping to cover his scent with theirs and pass for a good person.  The story itself manages to evoke feelings of appalled revulsion and tender sympathy about the protagonist, sometimes at the same time.

The Outlander books get offensively long for their quality, and the characters aretwo dimensional. But I read them anyway--just two more to go, plus some of the shorter Lord John novels--because OCD.  In A Breath of Snow and Ashes, Claire and Jamie and their family are still in the Colonial North Carolina frontier, and the main suspense comes from time traveller Claire knowing from an old news clipping that their home and everyone in it is to be burned to the ground in January 1976, and omigosh how will they ever manage to live.  I figured about six ways in which the old news article could be written without any Frasers actually getting burned to death, and Gabaldon chose the lamest way out.  But whatever. 

The Kingsbridge Plot is a continuation of the series I started early in the year about Colonial Manhattan, this time beginning in late 1775 and climaxing as war is breaking out.  It involves descendants of the detective in The Dutchman trying to foil a plot to poison (a historically true) General Washington and stop a serial killer.  It's meh.

Finally, i find myself REALLY liking James McGee's Hawkwood series, but it's not for everybody. Resurrectionist, the second in the series, has Hawkwood assigned to a series of grave robberies and a gruesome murder in Bethlem (Bedlam) asylum, the POV shifting from Hawlkwood to the villains such that whodunnit is not an issue so much as what they're up to.  It is exciting and a good read, but requires trigger warnings for the nasty (and historically accurate) depictions of conditions in the asylum, the conditions of decayed corpses, conditions in London's slums, and conditions on the battlefield.  Human bodies are not treated kindly. Murders and rapes are given more graphic detail than necessary, and casually dismissed by characters to show how insensitive and/or evil they are. Hawkwood himself is constantly doing slow burns at the viciousness of it all, but he is a stoic manly man and can handle it. some readers, maybe not so much.

The Rent Is Too Damn High: Evicted, by Matthew Desmond  

When tenants relinquished protections by falling behind in rent or otherwise breaking their rental agreement, landlords could respond by neglecting repairs. Or as sherrena put it to tenants, "If I give you a break, you give me a break." Tenants could trade their dignity and their children's health for a roof over their head. Between 2009 and 2011, nearly half of all renters in Milwaukee experienced a serious and lasting housing problem. More than 1 in 5 lived with a broken window, a busted appliance, or mice, cockroaches and rats for more than three days.  One third experienced clogged plumbing that lasted more than a day. And 1 in 10 spent at least a day without heat. African American households were the most likely to have these problems, as were those where children slept.  Yet the average rent was the same, whether an apartment had housing problems or not. 

Possibly the most gut-wrenching book I've read this year, in large part because it is new, and non-fiction, and provides a look at the lives of the down and out that the privileged American bourgeoisie never ever see unless they go out of their way to look for it.  And usually not even then.

Commas are important.  The title of the review that got me interested was "Evicted by Matthew Desmond", as if Desmond was out there evicting tenants.  in fact, Desmond was out there incognito, living in one of North Milwaukee's filthiest trailer parks and slowly getting people to trust him so that he could tell their stories.  Women who get evicted fpr calling 911 on an abusive spouse because the landlord doesn't like having the cops show up, or because her child is noisy or defaces a wall or something.  Tenants who pay in cash and then the landlord pretends not to have been paid.  Landlords who retaliate by shutting off the utilities or failing to perform needed repairs.  Tenants who complain to the housing board about substandard housing and then the remedy is, the place is deemed uninhabitable and all tenants are thrown out.  Vermin-infested tenements.  Slob-shaming tenants for dirty dishes when they have no running water.  Tenants who buy a trailer and are then unable to move it, and so they abandon it for the landlord to sell to the next sucker.  Crime. Drugs. Violence.  Arbitrary and capricious public housing policies.

The part that surprised me a little was the news that, this low on the food chain, the landlords are often not wealthy slumlords, but are one step above the tenants. Sometimes they went in debt to get a cheap building to rent, and learned that the only people willing to live in such a place can't afford the rent.  Sometimes, they forgive rent for months and months before finally starting the eviction process. sometimes tenants get revenge by trashing the place on the way out and stealing everything from light bulbs and smoke alarms to floorboards.  And then the landlord, not getting any rent, can't afford to fix the place. Sometimes people just seem to be scumbuckets.  Sometimes, extreme poverty drives them to reckless, desperate behavior.  Desmond points out that state and Federal governments could easily provide most or all of the needed housing, but choose instead to reduce rich peoples' taxes or divert money to political favoritist boondoggles.  This book covers a period BEFORE the election of Scott Walker as Governor of Wisconsin and his Make Milwaukee Miserable policy, so you know it's only gotten much worse since then.

Read it. Do something about it.

Steampunk Tropes: The Aeronaut's Windlass, by Jim Butcher  

"To this day, no one is sure what happened on PERILOUS", she told Grimm. "But she came home with heavy losses--and when the dust cleared, Lieutenants Rook and Bayard had been promoted to lieutenant-commander, while Lieutenant Grimm was summarily drummed out of the service for cowardice in the face of the enemy."

Grimm's voice turned dry. "I am somewhat familiar with the tale, miss.

"It gives me serious concerns," Gwen said. "Are you a coward, captain?"

The man stared at her with those shadowed eyes for several moments before he said, his voice very soft, "When needed, miss. When needed."

Meh.  Whatever.

This is Jim Butcher without the appeal of the Dresden files, a hodgepodge of brooding manly men with tarnished pasts who give no fucks and live on by golly their own terms, with no use for you or anyone else.   Also features telepathic cats, royal girls who hit people, steampunk airships that run on technical jargon, magic crystalline macguffins, and a bunch of evil spider thingies that can't decide whether to individually be too deadly for any human to handle or be collectively more doomed than a fleet of Star Trek extras at a Westeros wedding. I read it because it was on the Hugo ballot and found it as dull as nonstop action can get.  Your mileage may vary.

Philosophy of The Feels: Theory of Moral Sentiments, by Adam Smith  

Let us suppose that the great empire of China, with all its myriads of inhabitants, was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake, and let us consider how a man of humanity in europe, who had no sort of connexion with that part of the world, would be affected upon receiving intelligence of this dreadful calamity.  He would, I imagine, first of all, very strongly express his sorrow for the misfortune of that unhappy people, he would make melancholy reflections upon the precariousness of human life, and the vanity of all the labours of man, which could perhaps be annihilated in a moment. He would too, perhaps, if he was a man of speculation, enter into many reasonings concerning the effect which this disaster might produce upon the commerce of Europe, and the trade and business of the world in general.  And when all this philosophy was over, when all these humane sentiments had been fully expressed, he would pursue his business or his pleasure, take his repose or his diversion, with the same ease and tranquility, as if no such accident had happened.

The key thing dividing Smith's book from the ethical treatises of Hume or Kant is the "sentiments" part.  It's not about how people behave so much as about how they feel and seem to feel in front of others.  as such, it seems to me more concerned with manners than with right and wrong.  It's central judgment is that "right" in this context means conformance with what is generally expected in society.

As someone who occasionally gets completely verklempt over small things, or has to fight to keep my temper over other small things, and who is also sometimes too emotionally tired to even react to something very exciting or moving, I have a problem with being morally condemned for feelings that don't conform.  For one thing, it's ethnocentric, assuming that reserved middle class Edinburgh manners are "the way people act and feel" whereas the possibly different displays of emotion and potential for culture shock in, say, a Mediterranean state, or even in the Highlands, or...anywhere else...is not discussed.  For another, it's hard for me to get around the idea of scolding people for their thoughts. 

Smith presupposes that most or all people want, not just to be approved by society, but to be genuinely worthy of approval.  I know many for whom faking it is just fine,  and have found myself  that acting "as if" I was a certain kind of person can in fact be a precursor to actually being that kind of person. "Posing" and "playing" can be relative.

Don't Be That Guy: Men Explain Things To Me, by Rebecca Solnit 

Credibility is a basic survival tool. When I was very young and just beginning to get what feminism was about and why it was necessary, I had a boyfriend whose uncle was a nuclear physicist. One Christmas, he was telling–as though it were a light and amusing subject–how a neighbor’s wife in his suburban bomb-making community had come running out of her house naked in the middle of the night screaming that her husband was trying to kill her. How, I asked, did you know that he wasn’t trying to kill her? He explained, patiently, that they were respectable middle-class people. Therefore, her-husband-trying-to-kill-her was simply not a credible explanation for her fleeing the house yelling that her husband was trying to kill her. That she was crazy, on the other hand….

FOR MEN: This book is about Things Not To Do that aggravate women, from interrupting and condescending to...you know, killing them.  Yes, because of That Guy, we really do need to tell you that.  Don't kill women.   Because according to Solnit, there are over a thousand murders of female intimate partners by men every year, a death toll that surpasses 9/11 every three years.  And a reported rape every 6.2 minutes in the USA alone. Pretty much all the mass shootings we read about are committed by men.

Mind you, that one is just the most serious problem addressed in this book of seven essays.  The most popular one is the title piece, which went viral on the Internet and may have birthed the word "mansplaining"--in which some dude managed to blow his 15 minutes trying to tell Solnit all about a book, not knowing that she had written the book, thereby causing Solnit--and later, women around the globe--to rant about dudes who insist on explaining things to women that the women know about and the men don't. FOR WOMEN:   This book is about----tell you what; why don't you comment and I'll pay attention, ok?

The Emo Letters:  Julie, or the New Heloise, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau 

So you are no longer my Julie?  Ah!  Say not so, worthy and respecatable woman! You are more than ever.  You are she who deserves the tribute of all creation.  You are she whom i worshipped when I was beginning to perceive genuine beauty; you are she whom I will not cease to worship, even after my death, if my soul retains some recollection of the truly heavenly charms that enchanted it when I lived.  That feat of courage that restores you to the fullness of your virtue only makes you more like yourself.

You will need a shot of insulin before reading this.

Diderot (see Bookposts from March through May of this year) was a philosopher who wrote a trashy novel to prove that he could; it made more money than his important works. Rousseau apparently did the same more famously with Julie, a series of letters between lovers that apparently made people all over Europe squee, caused Rousseau to become one of the first celebrity novel writers ever, and that made some philosophers praise it as a Great Work.  I could barely finish it.

There's an unnamed protagonist who may be a stand-in for Rousseau himself, a poor man hired to be teacher (apparently in an age when teachers were second only to actors in being despised and spat on by wealthy society, unlike today when celebrity actors have more status than those who teach our children), who ends up falling in love with her, and in which comic hijinks ensue. The flowery, hand-pressed-to-forehead "romance", complete with offers to leave the country, commit suicide, etc., is insufferable, and the "philosophical" digressions full of contempt for society, advice on rearing children (lifted from Emile, see April's BookPost), and other more meaty matters one would not expect to find in lovers' correspondence, are more interesting, but incongruous.  Possibly the best drawn character is the older gentleman, Wolmar, to whom Julie is married by a father enraged at having his daughter "seduced" by a mere teacher; Wolmar seems content to have an arranged marriage of convenience, and doesn't seem to mind at all being cuckolded.  Of course, Julie dies of a fever over several pages, but not before leaving a long final letter professing the teacher to be her always and forever lover, where Wolmar will be the one to find it.  At least it wasn't quite as long or preachy as Clarissa (Bookpost, June 2008, the month in which that long horror was pretty much the only thing I had time to read).

Antimony, Arsenic, Aluminum, Selenium....Elements of Chemistry, by Antoine Lavoisier 

All that can be said upon the number and nature of elements is, in my opinion, confined to discussions entirely of a metaphysical nature. The subject only furnishes us with indefinite problems, which may be solved in a thousand different ways, not one of which, in all probability, is consistent with nature. I shall therefore only add upon this subject, that if, by the term elements, we mean to express those simple and indivisible atoms of which matter is composed, it is extremely probable we know nothing at all about them; but, if we apply the term elements, or principles of bodies, to express our idea of the last point which analysis is capable of reaching, we must admit, as elements, all the substances into which we are capable, by any means, to reduce bodies by decomposition. Not that we are entitled to affirm, that these substances we consider as simple may not be compounded of two, or even of a greater number of principles; but, since these principles cannot be separated, or rather since we have not hitherto discovered the means of separating them, they act with regard to us as simple substances, and we ought never to suppose them compounded until experiment and observation has proved them to be so.

See earlier bookposts for my furstrations with trying to learn science from Galileo, Newton and Fourier, all of whom are in the Great Books set.  Lavoisier's Elements, on the other hand, is quite brief and readable, and while not an all-encompassing work in chemistry, is an interesting milestone in the transition from "alchemy" to the science as we know it.
The book is in three parts:  The first, and most important, details several experiments in oxygenation and combustion. The second consists mostly of lists of various elements or substances that Lavoisier believed could not be broken down into component substances; and the third describes a multitude of scientific apparatuses of the day, which are illustrated with elaborate woodcuts.  I felt like I actually got some knowledge out of it, which sets it apart from most of the other treatises on "great science though history."  Highly recommended. 

Introduction to Kant:  Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysick of Morals, and Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, by Immanuel Kant 

That an action done from duty derives its moral worth, not from the purpose which is to be attained by it, but from the maxim by which it is determined, and therefore does not depend on the realization of the object of the action, but merely on the principle of volition by which the action has taken place, without regard to any object of desire. It is clear from what precedes that the purposes which we may have in view in our actions, or their effects regarded as ends and springs of the will, cannot give to actions any unconditional or moral worth. In what, then, can their worth lie, if it is not to consist in the will and in reference to its expected effect? It cannot lie anywhere but in the principle of the will without regard to the ends which can be attained by the action. For the will stands between its à priori principle, which is formal, and its à posteriori spring, which is material, as between two roads, and as it must be determined by something, it follows that it must be determined by the formal principle of volition when an action is done from duty, in which case every material principle has been withdrawn from it.

The year being half over, I could no longer procrastinate delving into the third and most intimidating of the three established philosophical giants of the 18th Century.  Kant is frequently listed as history's most important philosopher since the ancient Greeks, and one of the densest.  I was glad to have spent a year and a half digging through the rationalists and empiricists who preceded him, the better to know what all the fuss has been about. 
I began with the shorter works they gave me in Freshman Humanities.  The three Critiques are the major works, but if you read the Fundamentals and the Prolegomena then for the sake of philosophical generalism and conversation with educated hipsters, you will have read Kant and learned what his buzzwords like "a priori" and "categorical imperative" mean.

Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysick of Morals is basic Kantian ethics:  Act as if you want it to be a universal law that all people in your situation will always act as you do; all moral actions must be taken with absolutely no regard to self interest (by which he means, even feeling good because you did the right thing negates any moral value to your behavior, which seems not only a bit harsh to me but also counterproductive, as it removes every possible incentive to behave oneself); and further, a demonstration that "little white lies", such as telling someone it's not so bad as it really is, in order to give comfort, are always immoral.  In other words, an ethical guide that is absolute, easy to understand, and that no one will live by.

The Prolegomena is a summary of the major ideas in the Critique of Pure Reason, which puts together the best parts of the "empirical' and "rational" theories of epistemology--how we can be certain that what we know is the truth.   Metaphysics tends to debate propositions that no one has yet proved for sure, due to paradoxes (such as whether the Universe is finite or infinite, or whether it had an origin), and therefore metaphysics may not be possible at all---which is fine by most people who are not philosophers, and who get by on life just fine without asking these questions.  Things are learned, neither purely from experience nor purely from innate ideas, but from a combination of the two, such that, through experience, one comes to understand what the innate ideas are. How Descartes, Locke, etc., got through entire systems without getting here is somewhat baffling, but there you are.

There's more to Kant than this, but these two books cover the basics.

Find all of my previous Bookposts here: admnaismith.livejournal.com/...

Run, Forest, Run!  Uprooted, by Naomi Novik  

Our dragon doesn't eat the girls he takes, no matter what stories they tell outside our valley.  We hear them sometimes, from travellers passing through. They talk as though we were doing human sacrifice, and he a real dragon.  Of course that's not true. He may be a wizard and immortal, but he's still a man, and our fathers would band together and kill him if he wanted to eat one of us every ten years. He protects us against the Wood, and we're grateful, but not that grateful...He doesn't devour them really; it only feels that way.

Oh, man.  There are so many things I want to say about this wonderful book but will not because it's new, and because the plot goes to unexpected places (unexpected by me, anyhow) so early that talking about what it all means risks spoilers for those lucky people who have yet to read it for the first time. 

I will say this much:  Of the four Hugo-nominated novels I have read as of now (Seveneves still to come), this is easily my favorite of the four.  it woke up an appetite deep in my psyche, that I didn't know was hungry; an appetite for fairy tales that went in a certain direction.  And it bears a second reading in hindsight, after it's washed over you the first time.  Very highest recommendations.

Sweet, Nourishing Mantears: The Women's History of the World, by Rosalind Miles  

"The Age of Queens"--what is the historical truth behind the persistent myths of women holding power over men? Approaches to this question have been dogged by historians' search for societies where women had total control, and where men were downgraded and oppressed as an inevitable consequence--for a mirror image of every patriarchy, in fact. Not surprisingly, this process of going backwards through the looking glass has failed to produce any concrete results. Another will o' the wisp was the conviction of nineteenth century scholars that matriarchy had once been a universal stage in world culture, when, the argument ran, as human society emerged from animal promiscuity, women succeeded in bringing about matriarchy through the defeat of their lustful males. In the social order thus created, women held primacy at every level from human to divine, and the excluded males, uncivilized and violent, lurked about on the fringes of each individual gynocracy plotting furious revenge. For matriarchy was only a stage of the human ascent towards civilization. Ultimately (and quite logically, to the mind of the male historian) the males contrived to overthrow matriarchy and institute patriarchy, the ultimate stage of civilization and its finest flower.

An excellent feminist summary of the War On Women through history.  It's brief for a world history--about half of it is pre-Biblical--but then it's filling in cracks, attempting to tell the stories that haven't been told.

As with most books of this kind, Miles harks back to a golden pre-patriarchal time, largely unrecorded, when men and women were equal, or when women were even honored--not put on a pedestal, but given recognition for their life-giving powers and listened to--which, of course, will come across as "misandrist" by some.  Miles makes no attempt to be "fair"--here; she is responding to entire libraries of misogyny through the ages, books that take it for granted that women are inferior, that giving them rights will disturb their pretty little heads, or unsex them, threatening survival of the species.  You know. Bullshit.  And so she goes a bit in the other direction, making the case for Y chromosomes as a genetic aberration and males not being capable of shouldering the enormous burden put on women from the very first day.  Above all, it highlights the strength women have had to collectively develop over the course of centuries--physical, emotional, spiritual--to the extent that one wonders how on earth men ever managed to subdue them in the first place.

The last of the book's four sections covers advances women have made in the modern era--the right to vote, control over their sexuality, owning their own property--and how much more (as of the 1980s) still needed to be done.  I can't help thinking of the new generation of women today, and how Millennial women seem to be collectively thriving compared to men--how much smarter, more athletic, more organized they are, filling the Universities and the high ends of class rankings.  I think that, if the reaper stays her hand for a few more decades, I will live to see women in charge of the western world--achieving legislative majorities and writing new laws; running businesses on a better model than the crap being done in today's Fortune 500 companies, and obtaining the majority of the country's wealth; thriving in households that are not dominated by a paterfamilias, and that often don't even have a man at all.   I see this day coming, and I feel like passing the torch instead of fighting it, since it seems to me that women may well rescue civilization.   I just hope that men collectively get around to genuine loving before women get around to serious hatred.

Seems to me, The women's History of the World is a book, everyone, especially men, should read. 

Village of the Dead: Pedro Paramo, by Juan Rulfo  

"This is nothing," my companion replied. "Try to take it easy. You'll feel it even more when we get to Comala. That town sits on the coals of the earth, at the very mouth of hell. They say that when people from there die and go to hell, they come back for a blanket."

This very short (120 pages) novel is maybe one of the first examples of Latin American magic realism.  At least, it has the kind of style i associate with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who may have been influenced by Rulfo. 
I'm going to be a little plot-spoilery here, since the book is more about theme and atmosphere than about action.  It has to do with a young man whose mother urges him on her deathbed to seek out his estranged father, Pedro Paramo, in the village of Comala, where Paramo had been a big fish in a small pond.  Comala has become a ghost town--literally--and as the young man comes to understand that the inhabitants are dead, the narrative changes from his perspective to include various deceased characters and the stories of what happened to them during Paramo's life.

By the end of the story, the original narrator has joined the ghosts, leaving a sense that he was always destined to be a part of this place where he had never before been.  Like Jack Torrance in The Shining, he is with his people.

Very Rarely Stable:  Ethical writings, by Immanuel Kant 

I cannot call a Wife, a Child, a Domestic, or, generally, any other Person ‘mine’ merely because I command them at present as belonging to my household, or because I have them under control, and in my power and possession. But I can call them mine, if, although they may have withdrawn themselves from my control and I do not therefore possess them empirically, I can still say ‘I possess them by my mere Will, provided they exist anywhere in space or time; and, consequently, my possession of them is purely juridical.’ They belong, in fact, to my possessions, only when and so far as I can assert this as a matter of Right.

This month's Kant reading consisted of three short works that were included in the Great Books of the Western World volume on Kant: Preface to the Metaphysical Elements of Ethics, with a note on conscience; Introduction to the Metaphysic of Morals; and Science of Right.  (don't you love the catchy, succinct titles?).  The first two are very brief, and puzzle me as to why they were included in the set at all instead of, say, the Prolegomena.  The only thing they add to Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysick of Morals (see last month's Bookpost) is the assertion that the ultimate moral ends/duties are perfection of the self and the happiness of others, and that the morality of an action is judged by whether it promotes these ends.  I can work with that definition.

Science of Right is a law tract concerning the rights and responsibilities of the individual in society, and of the state in relation to the people and other states. Much of it reads like a law school primer on contracts, property and legislative procedure. with several pages winding up to definitions of what constitutes an "action" or appropriation of a thing, as if Kant has more than the usual struggle to get from the astral plane into the real world where interactions with persons and society can affect the rights of others.  Unlike other tracts where, for example, Kant takes absolute literal meanings of words in order to demonstrate that no person can ever wish it right for people to tell a lie in any circumstance, Kant is troublingly different and discursive in his approach as to whether  it is appropriate that the government punish citizens--because when willing it, people are really not willing punishment, so much as willing that all people shall be subject to the laws.  That may be so,  but then it seems to me that persons should have similar leeway in considering their own motives for actions.

Food for thought, as always, anyhow.

The 18th century Murders:  An Echo in the Bone, by Diana Gabaldon; Rapscallion, by James McGee  

She looked at him, not saying anything.  i know what it's like to kill a man, she thought. I know just how easy it is. and you don't. She was not aware of having changed expression, but Campbell lost a bit of his high color and looked away. she wondered for a second whether Roger would look away, if he saw that knowledge in her eyes. But this was no time to think of things like that.

--from An Echo in the Bone

Hawkwood didn't answer.  In his mind's eye he saw again the mob of prisoners rising out of the hatches and the mayhem they had created.  Lasseur had referred to the hulk as a version of Hell. From what Hawkwood had witnessed so far, the privateer's description had been horribly accurate.  In his time as a runner, Hawkwood had visited a good number of London's gaols: Newgate, Bridewell and the Fleet among them.  They were, without exception terrible places. But this black, heartless hulk was something different.  There was true horror at work here, Hawkwood sensed.  He wasn't sure what form it took or if he would be controlled by it, but he knew instinctively that it would be like nothing he'd encountered before.

--from Rapscallion

An Echo in the Bone is a turning point at which Gabaldon's Outlander books, which were starting to bore me, pick up again and go from the middle of nowhere, NC, to the Revolutionary War.  Various characters split up the narrative and view famous events from New York, the high seas, and Fort Ticonderoga, interacting with the likes of Benedict Arnold, General Burgoyne, and Ben Franklin. Even better, Roger, Brianne and their children are back in  20th Century Scotland, keeping track of Claire and Jamie via their Letters To the Future, and giving and receiving culture shock between the centuries, having experienced frontier life and now interacting with people who only think they're tough.

Rapscallion is a variant on the trope where the detective goes undercover into prison disguised as an inmate and is surprised to find that some of the guards are evil and some of the prisoners are good.  Here the prison is "the hulks"--disused colonial era naval ships moored in marshlands and packed with prisoners.  There have been some escapes, and previous investigators who showed up aboveboard have been killed, and so Hawkwood is given an inmate identity and packed onboard to find out about the escapes and deaths before dying of disease, inmate violence, or the myriad petty hanging offenses used as an excuse to make room for more.  Highly recommended for nonstop suspense, and for vivid, possibly triggering descriptions of horrible conditions that really existed at one point.

YES, WE ARE ALL INDIVIDUALS (I'm not!): The Social Contract, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau 

THE strongest is never strong enough to be always the master, unless he transforms strength into right, and obedience into duty. Hence the right of the strongest, which, though to all seeming meant ironically, is really laid down as a fundamental principle. But are we never to have an explanation of this phrase? Force is a physical power, and I fail to see what moral effect it can have. To yield to force is an act of necessity, not of will — at the most, an act of prudence. In what sense can it be a duty?

Suppose for a moment that this so-called "right" exists. I maintain that the sole result is a mass of inexplicable nonsense. For, if force creates right, the effect changes with the cause: every force that is greater than the first succeeds to its right. As soon as it is possible to disobey with impunity, disobedience is legitimate; and, the strongest being always in the right, the only thing that matters is to act so as to become the strongest. But what kind of right is that which perishes when force fails? If we must obey perforce, there is no need to obey because we ought; and if we are not forced to obey, we are under no obligation to do so. Clearly, the word "right" adds nothing to force: in this connection, it means absolutely nothing.

Rousseau's most influential philosophical work completely contradicts his first and second discourses (See Bookpost, May 2016), where his emo gushing over the state of nature prompted Voltaire to accuse him of wantin mankind to go around on all fours.  Rousseau's call for an organized society where we give up liberties to a sovereign calls up images of Hobbes'Leviathan.

In fact, one of the most enduring images from Hobbes is a famous illustration of a gigantic king towering over a city, the king's body being composed of thousands of tiny persons, signifying that the right and power of the sovereign comes from all of the people united.  Where Hobbes asserted the social contract as one in which people surrendered every bit of their autonomy to an all-powerful despot (the only kind of ruler thought to be strong enough to resist the natural will of the individual to oppress and fight all neighbors, all of the time) Rousseau speaks of the "leviathan" as consisting of the general, combined will of the people together, united out of a state of nature that seeks cooperation for mutual survival instead of conquest.  You surrender all your rights to the general good, but most of them are given right back to you because we all agree that a certain amounto f autonomy and private property are good.

Seems to me, The Social Contract has endured better than Rousseau's other works because, unlike them, it makes sense.  Not sure how naturally cooperative people are, but at least when born into a society, most of us seem to have some sense of civic duty.

Infinite Catharsis: Poets Are Not useful, by Gwyndyn T. Alexander  

Once when I was a child

I pricked my finger on that mythical spinning wheel.

That's the story I told myself,

that I was just sleeping here,

and someday a prince would come

and kiss me awake.

I knew better, of course.

That shape bending over my bed

was no prince.

I was pricked, all right,

by there was no fairty godmother

to save me from that curse.

No christening banquet.

No gifts.

That secret kiss in the night

was not my savior.

Now, long years later,

here I am in my armor of thorns.

I can't bear the smell of roses

of honeysuckle

sweet and rancid like my father's breath,

the reek of the satisfied monster.

I live awake, now,

dreading night,

dreading sleep,

that kiss in the darkness,

that prick,

that wound.

My blood on the sheets

red

as a briar rose.

--"Poet as Briar Rose"

My policy is that, if someone cares enough to send me a book, then I care enough to read and review it for my Monthly Bookpost, though I do not promise to say only nice things. Sometimes, i have known to be merciless to a love offering.

This small volume, by a poet who informs me she won accolades when she was published as "G.T. Alexander" but scorned and abandoned by (male) publishers when she insisted on her full name and her own pronouns, is a love offering that was merciless to me.  Every page is autobiographical.  Every page is filled with strength and rage and pain and abuse survival and overcoming. It reveals heavy scar tissue over heavily developed muscle tissue, and says to the reader, "This happened.'
To some, it says, "You are not alone.""To some, it says, You live in a world where this happens.  Is this what you're willing to settle for?"  To some few, it says, "I can survive what you do to me, and then grow."
Alexander was asked whether poets were even useful, and this collection is her answer ("We are not useful. We are essential".)  Poetry like this taps into something bigger than ourselves, reveals meaning behind the mundane, allows healing by via the balm of words, or cleansing via the fire of words.

Very high recommendations.

A Romp Through the Country: Humphrey Clinker, by Tobias Smollett  

The lieutenant told her that while he resided among them, two French missionaries arrived, in order to convert them to the Catholic religion; but when they talked of mysteries and revelations, which they could neither explain nor authenticate, and called in the evidence of miracles which they believed upon hearsay; when they taught that the Supreme Creator of Heaven and Earth had allowed his only son, his own equal in power and glory, to enter the bowels of a woman, to be born as a human creature, to be insulted, flagellated and even executed as a malefactor; when they pretended to create God himself, to swallow, digest, revive and multiply him ad infinitum, by the help of a little flour and water, the Indians were shocked at the impiety of their presumption--They were examined by the assembly of the sachems, who desired them to prove the divinity of their mission by some miracle--They answered that it was not in their power. "If you really were sent by Heaven for our conversion (said one of the sachems), you would certainly have some supernatural endowments, at least you would have the gift of tongues, in order to explain your doctrine to the different nations among which you are employed; but you are so ignorant of our language that you cannot express yourselves even on the most trifling subjects."

In a word, the assembly was convinced of their being cheats, and even suspected them of being spies.  They ordered them a bag of Indian corn apiece, and appointed a guide to conduct them to the frontiers; but the missionaries having more zeal than discretion, refused to quit the vineyard.  They persisted in saying mass, in preaching, baptizing and squabbling with theconjurers, or priests of the country, till they had thrown the whole community into confusion.  Then the assembly proceeded to try them as impious imposters, who represented the Almighty as a trifling, weak, capricious being, and pretended to make, unmake, and reproduce him at pleasure; they were therefore convicted of blasphemy and sedition, and condemned to the stake, where they died singing Salve Regina in a rapture of joy, for the crown of martyrdom which they had thus obtained.

In May, I complained that Smollett's lesser novel Roderick Random was cruel and not life-affirming. Humphrey Clinker, while not great, is a giant leap in the right direction.  although the jokes are often slapstick at the expense of someone more sinned against than sinning, the main characters are basically wholesome, and the comic situations and caricatures are harbingers of Dickens's Pickwick society.

Although the book is titled after the wily, capable manservant Humphrey Clinker, clinker doesn't appear until well into the novel.  The main characters are Matthew Bramble, a surly hypochondriac Moliere father; his shrewish sister, a niece with a secret lover (naturally disapproved of by Uncle Bramble), and a collegiate nephew with more culture than sense, eager to defend his sister's honor.  The group sets out to Gloucester, Bath  and Scotland from their country estate, and comic hijinks ensue.

The story is told in the form of letters between various characters, and some of the best humor results from different people writing about the same event from wildly different and often inaccurate perspectives. highbrow people write with great affectation and their servants write coarsely, with crude spelling errors and malapropisms.  readers will recognize the story as having been imitated in dozens of English farces that came before and after Humphrey Clinker, but that is seldom told as well as this, right down to the constructed "surprise" happy ending that surprises no one today.  High recommendations.

WYSIWYG: Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, by Thomas Reid  

It appears, I think, from what has been said that there is no more reason to account our senses fallacious than our reason, our memory, or any other faculty of judging which nature hath given us.  They are all limited and imperfect, but wisely suited to the present condition of man.  We are liable to error and wrong judgment in the use of them all, but as little in the information of sense as in the deductions of reasoning.  And the errors we fall into with regard to objects of sense are not corrected by reason, but by more accurate attention to the information we may receive from our senses themselves.

Perhaps the pride of philosophers may have given occasion to this error.  Reason is the faculty wherein they assume a superiority to the unlearned.  The informations of sense are common to the philosopher and to the most illiterate; they put all men upon a level, and are therefore apt to be undervalued.  We must, however, be beholden to the informations of sense for the greatest and most interesting parts of our knowledge.  The wisdom of nature has made the most useful things the most common, and they ought not to be despised on that account.  Nature likewise forces our belief in those informations, and all the attempts of philosophy to weaken it are fruitless and vain.

This is the kind of philosophy I might have attempted to write myself, had I lived in the era and had the inclination.  Whereas Berkley and Hume (Bookposts, January through April 2016) ran with Locke's empirical epistemology and "proved' that nothing existed, Reid  ran the other way  and said that, yes, stuff does exist, and that the fact that our perception is sometimes faulty means that one should be mindful of the possibility of error, not that one should assume that All The Things are unknowable.  Reid and I call this common sense.  Berkley and Hume made it into the great books of the western canon. Reid's philosophy is sneered at by philosophers as "naive realism".  This is why farmers and mechanics think philosophy is goddam fucking stupid.

There are eight Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man: one each on sense perception, memory, conception,  abstraction, judgment, reasoning, and taste.  As you might expect, each one builds on the previous ones to form the way we think and know what we know.  It seems good enough to me, but evidently not to serious intellectuals who think too much.

Quaker Against the Slavers: The Journal of John Woolman 

From my early acquaintance with truth I have often felt an inward distress, occasioned by the striving of a spirit in me against the operation of the heavenly principle; and in this state I have been affected with a sense of my own wretchedness, and in a mourning condition have felt earnest longings for that Divine help which brings the soul into true liberty. Sometimes, on retiring into private places, the spirit of supplication hath been given me, and under a heavenly covering I have asked my gracious Father to give me a heart in all things resigned to the direction of his wisdom; in uttering language like this, the thought of my wearing hats and garments dyed with a dye hurtful to them, has made lasting impression on me.

Outside of the Harvard Classics set, which gives him a place of honor in the first volume next to Ben Franklin, I have never heard of John Woolman.  He wasn't taught in any American history course I took, nor mentioned in a history book so's I remembered.   He was a Quaker who lived in and around New Jersey in the 18th century, and who worked for the abolition of slavery.

His journal, which was published posthumously, does not seem particularly notable.  Dr. Elliott assures us in an introduction that "his extreme humility prevents him from making clear the importance of the part he played in the movement against slaveholding among the Quakers.", which would explain the absence of a lot of great-seeming events.  Woolman plods and ponders, recording a moment, for example, when he was asked to make a bill of sale for a slave, and slowly concluded that....his moral scruples...would...not...let him...no...couldn't go through with the....transaction.   Which seems a little odd to me, as the official Quaker position had been against slavery for close to 100 years at that point. 

From then on, the journal consists of Woolman painstakingly traveling the northern colonies and attending Quaker meetings at which he speaks earnestly against slavery (his remarks are rarely quoted; it is just recorded that he spoke against it), and quakers hem and haw and not about it, and eventually Woolman moves to England and dies, and that, yea verily, is how his story ends. 

It is good that Woolman had a role in persuading a part of America against one of its most dishonorable and cruel practices.  I do not mean to make fun of or discount his essential goodness.  It does seem hard, however, for me to feel excited about a "great book" that says so little with such little style.

Ship from Shinola: Ancillary Mercy, by Ann Lackie 

I knew that Ship cared for me.  It couldn't help caring for any captain, to some degree.  But I knew, from when I had been a ship, that there was a difference between a captain you cared for just because she was your captain, and a favorite.  And thinking that, alone here, outside the ship, in utter emptiness, I saw that I had relied on the ship's support and obedience--and yes, its affection--without ever asking what IT wanted.  I had presumed farther than any human captain would have, or could have, unthinkingly demanded to be shown the crew's most intimate moments.  I had behaved, in some ways, as though I were in fact a part of Ship, but had also demanded--expected, it seemed--a level of devotion that I had no right to expect, and that likely Ship could not give me.  And I hadn't realized it until Ship had asked Seivarden to speak for it, and tell me that it liked the idea of being someone who could be a captain, and I had been dismayed to hear it.

The third installment of a trilogy that began with the Hugo-winning Ancillary Justice, told from the point of view of an AI that had once been both a ship and the army on it, now reduced to a single (highly effective) soldier with more of a conscience than those like her are supposed to have.

I rank it third out of the four Hugo-nominated novels I've read this year. It seems to me that the series dropped off markedly after the excellent first volume, which was so great that, even while paling in comparison, Ancillary Mercy is a heck of a good story that gives new meaning to the phrase "a world at war with itself", and that finds time to say a great deal about interpersonal relationship dynamics and a government's duties to the least of its people in a story with cold equations of war.  Well worth the read.

Women Level Up: The Geek Feminist Revolution, by Kameron Hurley

What the organized haters never anticipated was that their abuse would also inspire its own resistance.  I was raised on stories of a grandmother who lived in Nazi-occupied France.  My great-grandfather was part of the resistance.  I studied resistance movements in Southern Africa as part of my master's degree.  When somebody pushes back, I know how to push harder.  I have a lot of perspective on what real state terror looks like, and online abuse pales in comparison.

This book was not what I expected.  I thought it would be about women's increased presence in fandom and their struggles against Gamergaters, Sad Puppies, Berniebros, Ruined Childhoods, Tomato Crushers and other misogynist movements (probably mostly the same network of assholes) that stink up fandom's Internets.  While there are chapters about Gamergate and the Puppies, mostly the book is about writing.

It's about writing the stories that usually aren't told, from the perspectives of people usually not heard, and what a fascinating tool for social change it can be to control or contribute to the cultural narrative that literate people draw on for reference.  The narrative that has made household stories out of Achilles, Falstaff, Faust, and Lazarus Long, and that now include Damaya, Furiosa, Rey, and Jessica Jones. Creating worlds in which white dudes are not the center of the Universe, and in which toxic racial and gender assumptions are not just in the subtext as a given, but are replaced with entirely different given values. This is how the cultural narrative changes, one story at a time.  This is how ideas about who women naturally are transform from accepted dogma to discredited stereotype to idiotic superstition. "Let's be real," says Hurley, "If women were 'naturally' anything, societies wouldn't spend so much time trying to police every aspect of their lives."

One of my favorite parts involved Hurley's dissatisfaction with a character she created by taking all the 80s action hero tropes and putting them on a cussing, brooding, self-medicating, solitary warrior woman who lived by her own code...and how her analysis of why it wasn't working raised questions about the social/emotional health, or lack thereof, of those character tropes. "I realized that Conan would never have a happy ending", nor would Mad Max, Rambo, or John McClane.

The Geek Feminist Revolution tells women and other less-privileged people that they are not alone, and that they have a voice.  It also tells the kind of white guy who has been told from birth that he is the center of the narrative that there are other narratives that he ought to pay some attention to in order to get along in the world.  That Guy may see a lot of anger in Hurley's writing, but if he looks a little deeper, he will see kindness. The kindness of someone who has been ignored or shouted down, over and over again, but who is still willing to make yet one more attempt to get through.  Very high recommendations.

Little Dickens: Amelia, by Henry Fielding 

In fact, if we regard this World only, it is the Interest of every Man to be either completely good, or completely bad.  He had better destroy his Conscience, than gently wound it.  The many bitter Reflections which every bad Action costs a Mind in which there are any Remains of Goodness, are not to be compensated by the highest Pleasures which such an Action can produce.

Henry Fielding's last novel is not his most popular.  It still counts as "life-affirming" to my mind; however it lacks the satire and playfulness of Tom Jones (one of my lifelong favorite novels ever) and Joseph Andrews.  Fielding, who was also a London magistrate, was interested in judicial reform, and Amelia is designed to get 18th century people all fired up about injustice. 

It begins with a scene in the court of the corrupt "Mr. Justice Thrasher", one of the more vividly drawn characters who, after an orgy of jailing the innocent and releasing the bribe-offering guilty, is never seen again in the book.  instead, we follow one of the jailed innocents and his virtuous wife Amelia, through a series of misadventures inviting calls for legal reform, complete with jails, debtor jails, forged wills, poorly written or applied laws, wealthy people getting away with things, poor people hanged for trifles, and so on., before finally sorting out their troubles and living happily ever after.

Along the way are several 20-to-50 page digressions in which characters they meet, who may or may not figure in the actual plot, tell their own backstories at great length, and briefer digressions in which characters discuss moral examples set in the works of Homer, Virgil and other ancients, and give alternate interpretations to the (offensive to Fielding) usual conclusions that were drawn back in the day. It's distracting.  It's as if, in the middle of a modern novel, a liberal writer had a chapter where a couple of characters discussed and refuted the part of the Bible that supposedly forbids same-sex relationships, although no such relationship appeared in the book.

Modest recommendations, especially for fans of Fielding's better known books.

Wit as Thick as Tewksbury Mustard: An Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff., by Maurice Morgann 

We see him, after he had expended his ragamuffins, with sword and target in the midst of battle, in perfect possession of himself, and replete with humor and jocularity. He was, I presume, in some immediate personal danger, in danger also of a general defeat; too corpulent for flight; and to be led a prisoner was probably to be led to execution--yet we see him laughing and easy, offering a bottle of sack to the Prince instead of a pistol, punning, and telling him, "There was that which would sack a city." "What, is it a time" (says the Prince) "to jest and dally now?"  No, a sober character would not jest on such an occasion, but a coward could not; he would neither have the inclination nor the power.

I found this out of curiosity, having been referenced in Boswells autobiography of Samuel Johnson and also in Harold Bloom's list of the western canon.  It's brief, and argues that Falstaff is not a coward, referencing several characters who mention acts of courage in his youth, before the plays begin, and putting a spin on his actions at Gads Hill and Shrewsbury.  As an essay, it's fairly rambling and discursive, and I wouldn't mind seeing a representation of Falstaff portrayed that way.  It's certainly consistent with the text, at least.

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Farewell to Rousseau: Reveries of a Solitary Walker, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau  

Of all the places I have lived (and I have lived in some charming ones), none has made me so genuinely happy nor left me such tender regrets as St. Peter's Island in the middle of Lake Bienne.  This small island, which is called Hillock Island in Neuchatel, is quite unknown, even in Switzerland.  As far as I know, no traveller mentions it.  However, it is very pleasant and singularly placed for the happiness of a man who likes to cut himself off--for although I am perhaps the only one in the world whose destiny has imposed this upon him as a law, I cannot believe myself to be the only one who has so natural a taste--even though I have not found it in anyone else thus far.

Rousseau was better off alone.  He had a gift of pissing people off, which I sympathize with , having been there myself, but nevertheless, it's painful to watch and i want to shake him sometimes.  The Reveries seem to show him happy for once, and not quite so full of his own self-importance.  He lived, as the quoted part says, on an island far from everybody, where he spent his days Thoreau style, living simply and studying plant life.  Then the local Swiss Officials took even that from him and made him leave, since they would not suffer a heretic to so much as mind his own business anywhere near their corner of the world.

During this period, Rousseau was writing despite a vow that he would never write again--which was maybe valid because he didn't submit anything to a publisher---except that he knew quite well that he was going to be published posthumously. The ten short essays that make up the Reveries mingle journal-entry observations and happenings, and elaborations of his artistic and political philosophy.  The better parts are the observations. 
And that completes the second of the three philosophical "giants" of the century that I had vowed to study. At the end of the day, Rousseau is a mass of contradictions (and who isn't?), and neither convinces me nor gets me to trust him.  I do find him likeable, though, at a distance.

First Feminist Rant: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, by Mary Wollstonecraft  

It is vain to expect virtue from women till they are in some degree independent of men; nay, it is vain to expect that strength of natural affection which would make them good wives and mothers.  Whilst they are absolutely dependent on their husbands, they will b ecunning, mean, and selfish, and the men who can be gratified by the fawning fondness of spaniel-like affection have not much delicacy, for love is not to be bought, in any sense of the words; its silken wings are instantly shriveled up when anything beside a return in kind is sought.  Yet while wealth enervates men, and women, as it were, by their personal charms, how can we expect them to discharge these ennobling duties which equally require exertion and self-denial?

After five and a half years in "great works through history", I am finally reaching the point where a significant number of books were actually written by women.  and about women.  I've seen several works that go into discursive tangents in support of women, ranging from putting them on pedestals to exhorting manly men to protect them from harm to guys telling guys, "You know what? They're actually better than us at a lotta shit and we ought to treat them better"...but Wollstonecraft seems to me to be the first actual feminist writer.  If there's an earlier one i might have missed, please let me know. 

And, as with most or all respected "great books", hers goes into discursions as well,  from morality in general to rights and responsibilities between parent and child.  And because Wollstonecraft predated the "first wave" by almost 200 years, it's not surprising that the first arguments for taking the domestic chains off of women boiled down to "so we can better serve men". and "Of course we're not really equal, but..."

Wollstonecraft's daughter grew up to write Frankenstein, the first sci-fi book.  So i guess Wollstonecraft put some ideas into her head.

The 18th Century Murders: Lord John and the Brotherhood of the Blade, by Diana Gabaldon;  Rebellion, by James McGee  

Grey was now the only eyewitness.  Could he stand before the court-martial, swear to tell the truth, and lie? With everyone--including the judges--completely aware that it was a lie?  It would be the ruin of his own career and reputation.  Some might see such an act as misguided loyalty to family; many more would see it as an indication that Grey sympathized with Percy's inclinations--or shared them.  Either way, rumors would follow him.  Discharge from the army was inevitable, and with the odour of such scandal clinging to him, he could not hope to find any reception in English society, or even in the service of a foreign army.

And yet...it was Percy's life. "If there is any kindness left between us...I beg you...Save me."  Could he tell the truth and see Percy go to the gallows, or to prison or indentured servitude--and then simply return to his own life?

---from Lord John and the Brotherhood of the Blade

Squatting, Hawkwood turned the body over.  It wasn't easy. The dead were never cooperative and his fingers were cold and when he saw the state of the face he wished he hadn't bothered.  The waves and the rocks had inflicted a lot of damage, and sea creatures had already taken full advantage of a free meal. Hawkwood doubted the man's own mother would have known him.  Though she might have recognized the tattoos on the left forearm: a Union Jack and an anchor, under which was inscribed the word Dido. The name of a ship, Hawkwood presumed, rather than a wife or sweetheart.

--from Rebellion

Lord John and the Brotherhood of the Blade is hands down better than Gabaldon's previous Lord John tales,  and is even better than most of her Outlander work that I've read so far.  It's more compact (a mere 500 pages instead of the usual 900+), and what seem to be several different plot paths involving a scandal from John's family history, a military adventure, and John's love that dare not speak its name, end up interweaving in satisfying ways, while the solution and the ending are good ones.  Highly recommended.

Rebellion is the most disappointing so far of the four Hawkwood books I've read so far.  It's still a decent read, but becoming formulaic, as if McGee is picturing the big budget movie while making the plot.  No ship in Hawkwood's world can take him from one place to another without a chapter concerning the life-threatening storm they endure.  He cannot impersonate someone doing the "Ah, you've been to Baltimore; I guess you frequented the Pullyou Inn with the green door""It's a red door, and that inn is in Philadelphia.""Why-so it is, silly memory of mine" test.  And so on.  Here, Hawkwood is undercover in France taking part in a plot that apparently really (unsuccessfully) was tried.

Exit The Dame: The Wycherly Woman, by Ross MacDonald  

Mirza had a vision of a bridge which a lot of people were crossing on foot; all the living people in the world. From time to time one of them would step on a kind of trap door and drop out of sight.  The other pedestrians hardly noticed.  Each of them went on walking across the bridge until he hit a trap door of his own, and fell through.

I hit mine, or something like it, at the top of the graceful stairs. It wasn't a trap door, exactly, and it wasn't exactly mine.  It was a body, and it sighed when I stumbled over it. It sighed as if it had fallen the whole distance and lived.

Highly recommended as a mystery.  Very highly recommended for fans of Chandleresque noir hard boiled detective stories.  MacDonald was one of the very best, maybe the very best imitation of Chandler.  I've often felt like having MacDonald is like having more Chandler, only with three or four times the output.

Sometimes hard-boiled writers have a trope of naming characters after 16th century poets--Marlow, Spenser, etc. William Wycherly was a restoration-era playwright who favored risque comedies of manners. The Wycherly Woman is only darkly comic in places, and the title family has about as much manners as a family of sociopathic gila monsters.  But they managed to produce a daughter with a fragile mind and a conscience who heard something the night dad was just leaving on a cruise and divorced mom showed up to holler at him.  Two months later, dad's cruise ended and he came back to find the daughter hadn't been seen since that day.  And so he hired Lew Archer, PI, to pick up the cold trail and find her. 

What archer finds made me weep, both for the Wycherly woman and for humanity in general. we are a sorry lot, as the hard-boiled noir detectives continually discover.

Avenue of the Americas: Southern Cross to Pole Star, by Aime Tschiffely  

People in Bolivia are very fond of eating what they call a "picante" about four o'clock in the afternoon.  This very appetizing dish is prepared with turkey, chicken or different meats, and one day I could not resist the temptation to try one.  When I had taken the first mouthful I had to run outside to rinse my mouth with water, for the "picante" was so "hot" with the most wicked and devilish spices that I felt as if I had taken a mouthful of glowing charcoal.

MMmmmmm, sounds like my kind of dish.  Your mileage may vary.

I envisioned "Tschiffley's Ride" covering the full distance from Tierra del Fuego to Yellowspork; as it turns out, 2 1/2 years and 10,000 miles by horseback is enough to cover some unspecified part of Patagonia as far as Washington DC, which is still kinda mindblowing.  I was smitten as soon as I opened the book and saw the whimsically illustrated map of the two continents, full of tiny illustrations of adobe villages, Ozymandius-ish statue fragments, and arrows pointing to where the jaguars are.

As with Steinbeck's furry friend Charley (see Bookpost, August 2015), you get to know the horses very well.  As with steinbeck, you get to know the author better.  Tschiffley is something of a kook 9in other words, he is of my people), and he has a turn of phrase that frequently made me turn back to confirm that he had just said what, indeed, he had said. 

He went through 12 countries, and the first half of the book is entirely taken up with Argentina, Bolivia, and Peru, which, in fairness, make up about half of the ride's total distance, with a whole lot of Mexico toward the end and Texas to DC included almost as an afterthought.  What? the United States aren't the center of the Universe and deserving of most of the narrative?  Why, knock me over with a peacock feather! Very well told. highly recommended.

Blackstone the Great: Comment on the Commentaries, by Jeremy Bentham  

With our worthy author, merit is the never failing appendage of rank and power: add to which, of profession, if his own.  By knowing that men are Peers and Bishops, he knew that they were pious, wise and valiant and that it was for these qualities that they had their titles.  He knows that they were able, though he knows of nothing that they did.  By knowing that there were such men as Lawyers, he knew that they were wise and able.  For in our author's Poetic Calendar, Lawyers are as sure to be sage or learned as Princesses to be chaste or Homer's hog-feeders to be divine.

See July's Bookpost for Blackstones's Commentaries.  Prior to this year, the main things I knew about Bentham were that he was a Utilitarian; that he was known for speaking truth to power, and that he has or had a fanatical group of followers who, after his death, had his corpse preserved and trundled it out to be seated at the annual dinner of their Jeremy Bentham Society.  Different squids for different kids, I guess.  Bentham must have said some very popular or worthy things to be *that* beloved by people...but whatever it was, it was not in "Comment on the Commentaries", which descends into some delightful snark but otherwise does little more than call for laws to be written down in the form of statutes rather than have a bunch of horse's-ass judges create "common law" by ruling arbitrarily from the bench.
Bentham had read his Swift (" Your honour is to know, that these judges are persons appointed to decide all controversies of property, as well as for the trial of criminals, and picked out from the most dexterous lawyers, who are grown old or lazy; and having been biassed all their lives against truth and equity, lie under such a fatal necessity of favouring fraud, perjury, and oppression, that I have known some of them refuse a large bribe from the side where justice lay, rather than injure the faculty, by doing any thing unbecoming their nature or their office.")  and knew about the dangers of an unaccountable judiciary being bound by nothing more than the precedents set by previous corrupt judiciaries.  If his writing is to be believed, he was the only one of his time who thought so, or at least the only one who dared to denounce it and demand a codification of the rules of law that must be interpreted by the courts.

I needed this after Blackstone.  It may be my own biases, but I found myself nodding in agreement with a great deal of what Blackstone--whose writing may have been the first attempt to write down what the actual laws of England were--wrote, although much of it boiled down to ridiculous appeal to authority, and I didn't even notice until Bentham pulled the rug out from under it.

The Rogue Levels Up: The Magician of Ludlum, by Isaac Bashevis Singer  

He had to decide this very night, choose between his religion and the cross, between Esther and Emilia, between honesty and crime (a single crime for which, with God's help, he would later make restitution). But his mind would resolve nothing. Instead of attacking the main problem, it dallied, went off on tangents, became frivolous.  He could have been the father of grown children by this time, yet he remained the schoolboy who had played with his father's locks and keys and trailed the magicians through the streets of Lublin. He could not even be sure of the extent of his love for Emilia, decide whether the feeling he had was really what is known as love.  Would he be able to remain true to her? Already the devil tempted him with all sorts of speculations about Halina, how she would grow up, become enamored of him, become her mother's rival for his affections.

Yasha, the magician/locksmith/acrobat at the heart of this parable, is a stock character I come across often who doesn't usually tug at my heart this way.  The person going through life without a moral compass, who has dedicated himself to developing several physical skills  (he put his high stat in DEX) without developing depth of character to go with it (low stat in WIS) until he comes to some moments of decision and must reach for whatever may be at his depths. He is full of contradictions.  A Jew who doesn't really practice, except when he does. A married man with several mistresses around town, who doesn't really love anyone, except when he does. Law-abiding, except when he isn't.  Usually stories like this feature an antihero who thoughtlessly betrays his own ideals and never realizes what or who he really values until they're gone forever, and no one is happy, and my depression gets triggered like nobody's business.  Here--it turns out differently.  High recommendations.

The Ultimate Curse, and Other Nonsense: Tristram Shandy, by Laurence Sterne  

May the Father who created man, curse him.---May the Son who suffered for us curse him.-----May the Holy Ghost, who was given to us in baptism, curse him''May the holy cross which Christ, for our salvation triumphing over his enemies, ascended, curse him.

'May the holy and eternal Virgin Mary, mother of God, curse him.---May St. Michael, the advocate of holy souls, curse him.---May all the angels and archangels, principalities and powers, and all the heavenly armies, curse him.'

'May St. John the Prae-cursor, and St. John the Baptist, and St. Peter and St. Paul, and St. Andrew, and all other Christ's apostles, together curse him. And may the rest of his disciples and four evangelists, who by their preaching converted the universal world, and may the holy and wonderful company of martyrs and confessors who by their holy works are found pleasing to God Almighty, curse him'

'May the holy choir of the holy virgins, who for the honour of Christ have despised the things of the world, damn him---May all the saints, who from the beginning of the world to everlasting ages are found to be beloved of God, damn him---May the heavens and earth, and all the holy things remaining therein, damn him,'

'May he be damn'd wherever he be---whether in the house or the stables, the garden or the field, or the highway, or in the path, or in the wood, or in the water, or in the church.---May he be cursed in living, in dying. May he be cursed in eating and drinking, in being hungry, in being thirsty, in fasting, in sleeping, in slumbering, in walking, in standing, in sitting, in lying, in working, in resting, in pissing, in shitting, and in blood-letting!

'May he be cursed in all the faculties of his body!

'May he be cursed inwardly and outwardly!---May he be cursed in the hair of his head!---May he be cursed in his brains, and in his vertex, in his temples, in his forehead, in his ears, in his eye-brows, in his cheeks, in his jaw-bones, in his nostrils, in his fore-teeth and grinders, in his lips, in his throat, in his shoulders, in his wrists, in his arms, in his hands, in his fingers!

'May he be damn'd in his mouth, in his breast, in his heart and purtenance, down to the very stomach!

'May he be cursed in his reins, and in his groin, in his thighs, in his genitals, in his hips, and in his knees, his legs, and feet, and toe-nails!

'May he be cursed in all the joints and articulations of the members, from the top of his head to the sole of his foot! May there be no soundness in him!

'May the son of the living God, with all the glory of his Majesty and the word itself.----By the golden beard of Jupiter---(and of Juno, if her majesty wore one) and by the beards of the rest of your heathen worships, which by the bye was no small number, since what with the beards of your celestial gods, and gods aerial and aquatic---to say nothing of the beards of town-gods and country-gods, or of the celestial goddesses your wives, or of the infernal goddesses your whores and concubines (that is in case they wore 'em)-----all which beards, as Varro tells me, upon his word and honour, when mustered up together, made no less than thirty thousand effective beards upon the pagan establishment;-----every beard of which claimed the rights and privileges of being stroken and sworn by---by all these beards together then----Curse him!' And  may heaven, with all the powers which move therein, rise up against him, curse and damn him unless he repent and make satisfaction! Amen. So be it,---so be it. Amen.'

Tristram Shandy is one of the strangest books ever written, and unfortunately spawned a host of imitations of his style, when it seems to me that once was enough.  The narrator/title character sets out to write his memoirs, and instead writes a nonsensical biographical fragment of over 600 pages, about his father and uncle.  Roughtly two thirds of the book takes place on the day that Tristram is born, with Father and Uncle Toby drinking and having one nonsensical "learned discourse" after another in the main sitting room, with servants and doctors and parsons popping in and out to take part and Mom is in labor in the next room over.  James Joyce was influenced by Sterne when he wrote a passage in Ulysses with similar carousing going on next door to a birth. In that scene, the book, if not the drunk medical students, pays more attention to what that poor woman in labor must be going through.

The rest of the book--all of it, really--is "stream of consciousness" writing, on purpose.  Tristram writes the preface when he realizes that the book is half over and he hasn't done so yet, and then he leaves it write there in the middle.  Same with the dedication later on.  This does not strike me as funny, or educational. It just seems like a good deal of rambling.  His stream of consciousness is also obsessed with a couple of childhood injuries that he has suffered to his "nose", by which he means another part of the male anatomy, which he won't shut up about, and which are only funny if you like slapstick injury "humor" or if you still giggle about "noses". 
One critic called Sterne the English Rabelais.  I adore Rabelais in the proper translation, and Tristram Shandy is nothing like Rabelais.  Or maybe you have to be in the right mood.  I did, after all, see fit to record that long, long curse quoted above, which I may well bring out in its entirety for the purpose of denouncing Internet trolls.

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Shit White Guys Say: The Life of Samuel Johnson, by James Boswell   

He received me very courteously; but, it must be confessed, that his apartment, and furniture, and morning dress, were sufficiently uncouth. His brown suit of cloaths looked very rusty; he had on a little old shrivelled unpowdered wig, which was too small for his head; his shirt-neck and knees of his breeches were loose; his black worsted stockings ill drawn up; and he had a pair of unbuckled shoes by way of slippers. But all these slovenly particularities were forgotten the moment that he began to talk.

"Boswell's Life of Johnson" is praised and lauded as one of the greatest biographies ever written in English.  It contains 1200 pages of letters and conversations in which Johnson is praised and lauded as a great conversationalist. His biographer Boswell, who loved him enough to write the 1200 pages, gushes about everything from his large physique to his tender conscience. Everybody holds this man up as a wonderful role model in opinion, manners and behaviour.  Pity the young man who takes them all at their many, many  words today.
I accepted Samuel Johnson as a great man and role model early in my youth, tried to act like him, and wound up insulting people and driving away potential friends without really understanding what I was doing wrong (the same happened when I was even younger, with John Cleese's Basil Fawlty character, but that's a whole nother embarrassing story).  In fact, Johnson SUCKS.  Boswell sucks too.  Their white-wigged bourgeoisie friend suck.  They spend hours and hours sitting leisurely in parlors and public houses discussing how best to keep the poor from being too idle.  They play devil's advocate for the sake of interesting conversation, one-up one another with cheap shots (Johnson, it seems to me, "wins" more due to his booming Brian Blessed voice than via actually being right), and just when you find yourself appreciating their mastery of rhetoric and the well-turned phrases, Johnson says something like, "Sir, a woman preaching is like a dog walking on its hind legs. One marvels not whether it is done well, but that it is done at all." and you want to unfriend and block the lot of them.
Johnson et al would thrive today in Internet comments sections.  Not the death threats and doxxing, but the guys who show off their wits by saying, "Ah, your comment casts new light on the astonishing depth of your idiocy and your unfamiliarity with reason; might I suggest you cease to waste valuable oxygen and assume room temperature forthwith!"  With the distinction that Johnson had a little guy at his elbow egging him on, trying to get him to spew some more memorable comments so he could write it all down for the big thick book he was planning.

But yes, I admit that there are still things about all that that I like, that tempt me, and that I sometimes, even at this reading, found myself thinking it would be fun to sit with them all at the Mitre and try to hold my own with the Master Baiter himself.  I have All The Privileges.  I would be welcomed and taken as one of them, where hundreds of clever people I know would be scorned and dismissed because gender or race or poverty.  I would be part of influential social networking that became what it did because of the absence of many voices with important things to say.  The Life of Johnson embodies the type of "Great" dead white guy book that inspires modern activists to throw aside the whole canon in disgust and chant "Western civ has got to go." It is offensive, but it is important.  I recommend it to guys like me, who have struggled, and still struggle, with toxic masculinity, as an example of behavior that looks witty and clever among one exclusive subculture, but that in fact is hurtful and exasperating.  Read it, imagining that women, that the economically disadvantaged, people of color, are listening in too, and imagine what they would say.  I say this would be an effective exercise because the style is far enough away from today that you can see the flaws and not identify with them and get defensive.  After that, see if the way you talk around people who look like you has similar flaws.

Precursor to Austen: Camilla, by Fanny Burney  

The dresses were almost equally parsimonious, everyone being obliged to take what would fit him from a wardrobe that did not quite allow two dresses a person for all the plays they had to perform. Othello, therefore, was equipped as King Richard the Third, save that, instead of a regal front he had on a black wig to imitate wool, while his face had been begrimed with smoked cork. Iago wore a suit of cloths originally made for Lord Foppington. Brabantio had borrowed the armor of Hamlet's Ghost; Cassio, the Lieutenant General in the christian army, had only been able to equip himself in Osmyn's Turkish vest, and Roderigo, accoutred in the garment of Shylock, came forth a complete Jew.  Desdemona, attired more suitably to her fate than to her expectations, went through the whole of her part, except for the last scene, in the sable weeds of Isabella. And Amelia was fain to content herself with the habit of the first witch in MacBeth.

See back to my June 2010 and March 2012 for Burney's much more famous and better written novels Evalina and Cecelia, which feature young women without and with fortunes, going into the world to fend off predators of various kinds. Camilla is somewhat more tame, and despite the presence of an irresponsible uncle who ends up disinheriting a favorite niece because of an ill-considered religious promise (Camilla being much too good-hearted to mind), the story mainly has to do with several young siblings and cousins of varying degrees of purported moral worth, seeking to get properly married off despite unfortunate parental meddling. 
Camilla and Edgar, who were of course meant for one another from the beginning, are the "good kids" who triumph despite several avoidable misunderstandings brought on by failure to use common sense.  Most of the others have a prominent flaw, such as selfishness or profligacy, that lead them to the predictable situation from which they learn better.  So it goes.

Big Fat Geek Wording: Shrill (Notes from a Loud Woman), by Lindy West

As a child, I was really more looking for an open position as, say, the burly and truculent woman at arms protecting an exiled queen who's disguised herself as a rag-and-bone man using cinder paste and some light sorcery. Or a flea bitten yet perspicacious motley urchin who hides in plain sight as a harmless one-man band jackanapes in order to infiltrate the Duke's winter festival and assassinate his scheming nephew with the help of my rat army. Is that hiring? Any overweening palace stewards (who are secretly a pumpkin-headed scarecrow transfigured by a witch) want to join my professional network on LinkedIn?

If you're noticing more feminist rant books on my bookposts lately, you can thank a certain candidate for President whose overt, sickening misogyny has driven me further into the Sisterhood, where women have consistently told me that that shit has been happening all their lives, and to another presidential candidate whose ascent signifies that women are claiming their rightful place in the leadership of this world, and that men like me would do well to listen to their concerns.  More importantly, you can thank The Redhead, who has taken to forwarding me lists of Books By Women to make my reading list more inclusive.  The result has been that, right when I'm immersed in the dusty, disjointed pontifications of 18th century white guys like Johnson and Kant, and becoming frustrated with just how poorly organized and meandering the thoughts of "Great Authors of the Past" can be  (Hume, Montesquieu, Diderot, Blackstone, Vico, Sterne, Kant, Bentham and Adam Smith all wrote huge, digressive tomes in dire need of editing, with possibly Fielding, Voltaire and Gibbon as examples of organized writing), they are juxtaposed with new, fresh female voices of today who speak in my vernacular about things going on in the here and now.  Which set of writers do you think I'm more likely to come away from thinking "these are people like me"?

I cheated when I got The Redhead's list of Great Feminist Works, and looked in my local library catalogue for the ones with the most circulation. Shrill stood out as having many copies with many reserve holds, and so I went for it in particular.  It is worth waiting for.

I struggled with whether it was a good idea to caption this one with "Big fat geek wording", before deciding it fit the spirit of the book.  Among other things, Lindy West is a plus-size activist who shouts her weight from the rooftops and does not allow it to be forgotten.  A good part of her memoir details the million microaggressions a fat woman endures daily, from being blamed for taking up space on airplanes that cram five seats where three should be, to assholes who think they're doing a favor by insulting and shaming on the theory that being made to hate your body will inspire them to transform themselves or something (see also: "Let's put Trump in charge so that people will HAVE to get up and vote for change!") to doctors who could be treating you for a gunshot wound and still say, "You should lose some weight.'

West also takes on rape culture in the stand-up comedy industry where she once worked; men who tell women to smile; gamergate and other Internet assholes; and 18 humiliating things that happened to her in life that gradually got her to the point where she became confident because she was out of fucks to give.  At one point, she changes her tone to describe in moving detail her relationship with, and the death of, her father, followed immediately by a chapter about the troll who set up a social media account using her departed father's name in order to send her messages pretending to be her father, come from the grave to insult her for her weight.  The catch is, after West blogged about how this made her feel, the troll--who met all the MRA stereotypes and who apparently had never even considered that there would be something not-OK about doing what he did--apologized and went several extra miles to try to make it right.  Sometimes pigs can be taught to fly.
Lindy West is awesome, funny, clever, outrageous, and if you think she's too angry, she doesn't care.  She has things to say that should be said and heard.  Highest recommendations.

Past the Use-By Date: Staying On, by Paul Scott  

"I used to think how marvelous it was that a letter typed in the office and posted in Chancery Lane just by me would actually find its way to a bank in Bombay and then to wherever Tusker was which wasn't always clear because the postmarks were sometimes smudged and although he used regimental notepaper there was no address on it except the one Tusker filled in himself which was always the bank.  I got to know the insignia of the Mahwar Regiment so well that I could have drawn it by heart--the elephant with the huge tusks and the howdah on its back and the palm tree sprouting from the howdah.  I didn't know it was called a howdah and I didn't know how to pronounce Mahwar properly, neither did Mr. Smith. But not knowing only added to the glamour.  Amid all those dusty boring files and boxes and deeds which were nearly all about dead people it was this unknown young officer serving in India who provided the single element of mystery and romance in my life."

This short novel is sort of a coda to Scott's more famous Raj Quartet.  It explores the culture shock when some snooty English remain in India following its independence from the British empire, and natives and English alike get used to the idea that the English are not masters of a subservient people but guests/tourists residing in a foreign country.  The constant awkward moments range from funny to embarrassing to tragic, as one might have expected.

The 18th Century Murders:  The Exile, by Diana Gabaldon; The Blooding, by James McGee; The Exploits of Dr. Sam Johnson, Detector, by Lillian de la Torre  

"You killed them?"
"Not immediately, no."
Lawrence's mouth went dry.

"We questioned them first..."

Lawrence stared at him.

"...then gave them to the women."

Lawrence didn't dare blink.

"Then we killed them.  I'd never heard men beg before. And I do mean beg, literally.

--from The Blooding

"Free and equal!", growled Dr. Sam Johnson in high dudgeon. "All men, forsooth, created equal! What is to become of our proper order and subordination of society if such frantick leveling doctrines are to prevail? Free and equal! Signed, John Hancock. Mark my words, sir, we shall yet see this fellow's head spiked above Temple Bar!"

--from The Exploits of Dr. Sam Johnson, Detector

The Exile is a graphic novel (hence no quotation) that presents the original Outlander plot as seen by Jamie's godfather, Murtagh.  The big problem with it is that, reading it after seven thick Outlander volumes, I have (as will most readers) a mental picture of what the characters look like, that is nothing like the way they're drawn here.  Also, all the men are drawn with similar faces and hair, and it's hard to tell them apart.

The Blooding is the fifth and last so far in McGee's Hawkwood series, this time in the Adirondack/Lake Champlain area of New York and giving Hawkwood a Fenimore Cooper aspect.  The narrative shifts between things that happen in 1780 during the American Revolution, and 1812 during a different war with the British.  Interestingly, Hawkwood is about the same age in those two years as I was in 1980 and 2012, so it was easy for me to picture the differences in age perspective.  As usual, the focus is not on detection so much as in getting out of scrapes and stopping enemies.

And then there's another Lillian de la Torre collection of short mysteries, with Boswell playing Watson to Johnson's Holmes, and gushing so much about how manly and clever and all Johnson is, that readers will be tempted to think them a couple, as is now fashionable to do with Holmes and Watson. They have adventures with ballooning, with Ben Franklin, and with Bonnie Prince Charlie, though the best story is a theatre murder called "The Banquo Trap", in which the ghost of Banquo turns out to be the corpse of the actor who played him.

Rambling:  Works by Dr. Samuel Johnson 

No passage in the Campaign has been more often mentioned than the simile of the Angel, which is said in the Tatler to be one of the noblest thoughts that ever entered into the heart of man, and is therefore worthy of attentive consideration. Let it be first enquired whether it be a simile. A poetical simile is the discovery of likeness between two actions in their general nature dissimilar, or of causes terminating by different operations in some resemblance of effect. But the mention of another like consequence from a like cause, or of a like performance by a like agency, is not a simile, but an exemplification. It is not a simile to say that the Thames waters fields, as the Po waters fields; or that as Hecla vomits flames in Iceland, so Ætna vomits flames in Sicily. When Horace says of Pindar, that he pours his violence and rapidity of verse, as a river swollen with rain rushes from the mountain; or of himself, that his genius wanders in quest of poetical decorations, as the bee wanders to collect honey; he, in either case, produces a simile; the mind is impressed with the resemblance of things generally unlike, as unlike as intellect and body. But if Pindar had been described as writing with the copiousness and grandeur of Homer, or Horace had told that he reviewed and finished his own poetry with the same care as Isocrates polished his orations, instead of similitude he would have exhibited almost identity; he would have given the same portraits with different names. In the poem now examined, when the English are represented as gaining a fortified pass, by repetition of attack and perseverance of resolution; their obstinacy of courage, and vigour of onset, is well illustrated by the sea that breaks, with incessant battery, the dikes of Holland. This is a simile: but when Addison, having celebrated the beauty of Marlborough’s person, tells us that Achilles thus was formed with every grace, here is no simile, but a mere exemplification. A simile may be compared to lines converging at a point, and is more excellent as the lines approach from greater distance: an exemplification may be considered as two parallel lines which run on together without approximation, never far separated, and never joined.

---from the Life of Addison

Sometimes I wonder how well known Dr. Johnson would be today but for the letters and conversations recorded in his biography.  His most important work was a dictionary--and even I don't just read dictionaries cover to cover--followed by an edition of Shakespeare that was an important collation at the time but that, like the dictionary, has long since been surpassed.  The works of his that I grazed over at the University Library included Rasselas, his only work of prose fiction and a poor imitation of Candide; a collection of "Lives of the poets" that does a lot of quoting other critics; and some of his editorial essays from "The Rambler", the best of which were already gathered and quoted at length in Boswell.
None of it really gripped me, not even as a supplement to the biography.

Cornwallish: Ross Poldark, by Winston Graham

So he found that what he had half despised was not despicable, that what had been for him the satisfaction of an appetite, a pleasant but commonplace adventure in disappointment, owned wayward and elusive depths he had not known before, and carried the knowledge of beauty in its heart.

I would have started this historical novel series a little earlier, except that for some reason it is very popular at our local library right now, and I had to wait over two months for it. I'm similarly on a wait list for Demelza, the second in the series.THANKS OBAMA.

Enforced patience may be a good thing, as otherwise, I might be gobbling up the novels like too many cherries.  It's very quick reading and the characters are vivid.  The brooding hero Poldark, with the battle scar disfiguring an otherwise handsome face, stoically keeps his poker face as he returns from having served in the Revolutionary war to find that his true love thought him dead and is engaged to his cousin, while his father has died and his ancestral estate fallen into disrepair.  Picking up the pieces, Poldark alienates some powerful members of snooty society in his small pond of a county by disdaining their feckless manners and coming to the side of the downtrodden poor, meanwhile finding eventual happiness in a surprising place.  Very much a "to be continued" sort of story, and one which does leave one wanting more.  Highly recommended.

The Blood of Angry Men:  Citizens (A Chronicle of the French Revolution), by Simon Schama  

The deconstruction of Marie Antoinette's image was a pathetic thing.  She had stripped herself of the mask of royalty in the interests of Nature and Humanity (as well as her own predilections) only to end up represented as, of all women, unnatural and inhuman.  When finally the "Widow Capet" was arraigned before the revolutionary tribunal, the conflation of sexual and political crime was made explicit.  Insulted very much in the language of the libeles as "immoral in every respect, a new Agrippina"; accused of being in league with the Emperor and (before the Revolution) secretly smuggling two hundred million livres to him, she was finally accused by the editor of the newspaper Le Pere Duchesne and the President of the Paris revolutionary Commune, Rene Hebert, of sexually abusing her own son, the wretched ex-Dauphin, then about eleven years old.  She and Mme. Elisabeth, her sister-in-law, were said (on the boy's confession) to have made him sleep between them "in which situation he had been accustomed to the most abominable indulgences."  They had taught him to masturbate but not, Hebert thought, simply for their own pleasure but for even more sinister political purposes.  Drawing on the grim prognosis of the effects of masturbation set out in Dr. Tissot's Onania, the accusation was that they meant to "enervate the constitution of the child in order that they might acquire an ascendancy over his mind."

The French Revolution is a staggering period in European history, and a frightening era to study right now. Everyone has an opinion on how it relates to the modern world.  There are assholes who think it was great, and who want to do it all over again in America.  There are even bigger assholes who say it was the natural result of trying to have a welfare state, and the problem was that we need to keep the peasants too hungry to get up and build guillotines.  Others, like Thomas Piketty, illustrate it as one of many examples of what happens all over history when the concentration of wealth gets too high.  Simon Schama focuses on dozens of individual figures and what they did.
It was striking to me that, according to Schama, the Royal Family started out quite popular with the peasantry, and the Aristocracy--the ones in court, anyhow, went to great lengths to introduce reforms to help the poor, that might well have staved off the revolution, but for the unyielding resistance of the NON-court members of the Second Estate (the One Percent), who insisted on retaining privilege and blocked them at every turn.  Similarly, the peasantry mostly just wanted to get fed, and were stirred up, according to Schama, by an ambitious working class just above them in the hierarchy, whose main motive appears to have been to say "fuck you" to the King.  This is an aspect I had not read before.

Marie Antoinette, in particular, appears in this version to have been Richard-the-Thirded by history, a devoted mother to her children, who cast off extravagances when she arrived in Paris, and who dressed mostly in modest linen dresses.  How is it that such a woman ended up known as the spoiled rich "Let them eat cake" lady from Hell?  According to Schama, political enemies just made stuff up, circulating cartoons in which her head was superimposed on the bodies of hideous monsters, and asserting the most malicious, hateful things imaginable (see the quoted part above) about her, with no foundation at all?   Can you imagine anyone doing that to a female leader of today?  Oh. right...

In fact, I had to go back and check that this book was written in 1989.  The parallels between the people in Schama's history and the various political elites, asshole money-grabbers blocking progress, working class Trumpkins out for blood, and down and out people being kicked around like a European football are so striking that, had this been written more recently, I would suspect the author of pulling my leg, or of pointedly warning about what could happen here.  Look--there is the Second Estate, sending their idiots to stop the King's party from saving their asses.  Look--there are the police, taking the side of the ragtag militia occupying government land.  Look--there are the liberals thinking they're going to get what they want when the peasants rise up, and ending up being the first ones whose heads join those of the One Percent in the deplorable basket!  The pattern reaches out and hits the reader over the head.
And then, there are miniature portraits of the likes of King Louis and the Royal family, Lafayette, Talleyrand, Mirabeau, Marat, Danton, Robespierre and all the other Beauxbaton equivalents of House Slytherin, all yelling "Liberty" as they climb up for their turn atop the ladder of ambition, only to drop to the ground again, completely silent. The book concludes with Robespierre ying on his own guilloutine--not the last to do so, but a good stopping point for Schama to cheerfully assert that 1789 was nothing more than 1793 with less blood.  I'm not too sure about that, but I'm definitely unsure enough that I don't want another 1789.

Overthinking: Theory of Fictions, by Jeremy Bentham  

By the priest and the lawyer, in whatsoever shape Fiction has been employed, it has had for its object or effect, or both, to deceive, and by deception, to govern, and by governing, to promote the interest, real or supposed, of the party addressing, at the expense of the party addressed. In the mind of all, Fiction, in the logical sense, has been the coin of necessity--in that of poets, amusement--in that of the priest and the lawyer, of mischievous immorality in the shape of mischievous ambition; and too often both priest and lawyer have framed or made in part this instrument.

I'm not sure why Theory of Fictions made it onto one of the Mortimer Adler lists of Great Works.  It's like chewing gum, going on in brief-but-dense, Francis Bacon style about all the sorts of things people say in society that are not true, that have little to do with one another, from poetry to fable to religious scripture to little white lies.  He saves his biggest scorn for "legal fictions", saying in effect that a magistrate who can't get a particular result without the use of a legal fiction is a dirty rotten scoundrel, and that a magistrate who can get that result without it but uses legal fictions anyway is a stupid one.

I Kant Even: The Critique of Pure Reason, by Immanuel Kant  

When we call into play a faculty of cognition, different conceptions manifest themselves according to the different circumstances, and make known this faculty, and assemble themselves into a more or less extensive collection, according to the time or penetration that has been applied to the consideration of them. Where this process, conducted as it is mechanically, so to speak, will end, cannot be determined with certainty. Besides, the conceptions which we discover in this haphazard manner present themselves by no means in order and systematic unity, but are at last coupled together only according to resemblances to each other, and arranged in series, according to the quantity of their content, from the simpler to the more complex—series which are anything but systematic, though not altogether without a certain kind of method in their construction.

It is said that Kant was "roused from his dogmatic slumbers" by the extreme skepticism in Hume's Treatise on Human Nature (see Bookpost, February 2016), and the Critique of Pure Reason is the soporific he wrote to help him get back to sleep.

Some fog-enshrouded books of philosophy I skimmed over and summarized; this one I gave special effort to because so many Western Canon scholars identify it as the single most significant work of philosophy since Plato and Aristotle.  Unlike Plato and Aristotle, it is extremely rough going, and I found myself having to just STARE at many sentences trying to figure out what the heck Kant was saying.  It seems to me that German philosophers pride themselves on being indecipherable.

I was grateful to have already read two centuries worth of navel gazing on epistemology by the Continental rationalists (Descartes, Liebniz) English empiricists (Locke, Hume) and people on the sidelines (Rousseau, Shaftesbury, La Mettrie), as Kant refers extensively to all of them.  Additionally, an understanding of the debate prior to Kant is necessary to appreciate what all the fuss is about and what an enormous trick it was for Kant to do something that possibly settles it for good. The big question at issue is whether it is possible to know anything other than by experience (what Kant calls "a priori knowledge", and where "transcendental" means "able to be derived a priori".  Kant is full of terms like "transcendental analytic" and transcendental dialectic" used for concepts we might get  more easily if Kant had used plainer words, or if he had been consistent in defining what they meant, which is my biggest issue with Kant). Descartes tried to jump from "I think, therefore I exist" to proof of the existence of God, and from there to the acceptance of thought as rightly guided by a higher power.  Kant asserts the concepts of space and time as things that may be understood a priori, claiming it is impossible to imagine anything existing independently of any space or period at all (and yes, people continue to debate that). he further asserts "categories of understanding" such as divisions of quantity into one, many, and all; or quality into reality, negativity, and limited; as a priori conditions of understanding (and yes, people continue to debate that as well).

The second half of the book is devoted pretty much to "proving" that metaphysical questions (the existence of God; whether the universe is finite or infinite) are impossible to answer. 

It is important stuff as philosophy goes, but barely readable.  Non scholars might prefer a Cliff Notes version.

Find all of my previous Bookposts here: admnaismith.livejournal.com/...

Shit Happens: Bellwether, by Connie Willis  

Mood Rings (1975)--Jewelry fad consisting of a ring set with a large "stone"  that was actually a temperature-sensitive liquid crystal/ Mood rings supposedly reflected the wearer's mood and revealed his or her thoughts.  Blue meant tranquility; red meant crabbiness; black meant depression and doom. Since the ring actually responded to temperature, and after a while not even that, no one achieved the ideal "bliss" purple without a high fever, and everyone eventually sank into gloom and despair as their rings went permanently black. Superseded by Pet Rocks, which didn't respond to anything.

Omigosh, what a wonderful, funny, thought provoking novel about chaos as applied to what we do in our day to day life, the behavior of crowds, and mighty butterflies devastating the coasts of Florida with a flap of their wings.
SHE is a scientist researching the origin of fads (and every chapter opens with a little blurb like the one quoted above, about a historical fad from Dutch "tulipmania" to knights wearing impractically long shoes to Rubik's cube and bobbed hair and horoscopes and specialty Barbie dolls) who is forever being interrupted at the worst possible moment and made to drop her work to go to management affinity group meetings, rescue childrens' parties or cope with the depressing trends set by her truculent office assistant (had the book been written now instead of the 1990s, said assistant would be cringeworthily denouncable as a "typical Millennial brat"; here, she is cringeworthily denounced as a "typical Generation X brat".  Some fads never go away).

HE is a biologist with a pronounced way of self-presentation that avoids any of the packaged stereotypical identities of the day and thus subconsciously offends everyone, trying to study group behaviour in animals.

THEY are stuck in a hellhole of a relentlessly PR-pursuing research corporation.  Do romantic hijinks ensue?  Our market research says YES!

And everything in the book points at the silly, mundane fads and group behaviours going on in society, even as the scientists discuss how and why these things happen.  Management leadership fads. Consumer fads. Menu fads and social networking fads and exercise fads and what kind of people are going to be ostracized this season and what everybody is doing solely because everybody else is doing it, from the laugh out loud funny to the frightening.

Bellwether was sent to me by a friend to get me through a depressive episode. It worked.  Just read it; you'll be glad you did.

Bye Bye Love: Bonjour, Tristesse, by Francoise Sagan 

A strange melancholy pervades me to which I hesitate to give the grave and beautiful name of sorrow.  The idea of sorrow has always appealed to me, but now I am almost ashamed of its complete egoism.  I have known boredom, regret, and occasionally remorse, but never sorrow. Today it envelops me like a silken web, enervating and soft, and sets me apart from everybody else.

Francoise Sagan's first book is a novelette-length narrative about a teenage girl who doesn't know what an Electra complex is (though Sagan certainly does), but boy does she ever have issues about her widowed father who is beginning to date again.

The book isn't quite a journal, but the chapters are short, and the narrator writes with simultaneous innocence and sophistication, talking in depth about her feelings about her dad, her boyfriend, and her dad's mistress, while managing not to be emo about it.  Eventually, she does The Stupid Thing to try to break up her dad's relationship, and tragic mayhem ensues.

Harvard Classics: Minor works of Edmund Burke 

THE PASSION caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it. Hence arises the great power of the sublime, that, far from being produced by them, it anticipates our reasonings, and hurries us on by an irresistible force. Astonishment, as I have said, is the effect of the sublime in its highest degree; the inferior effects are admiration, reverence, and respect.

Edmund Burke is a second-tier intellect of the Eighteenth century (who probably would have been first tier in the Seventeenth, but was outshone by some much greater lights in his own era).  I'm surprised that the Harvard Classics (which I've taken to calling "Doctor Elliott's Fifty Volumes of Odd Choices") would devote an entire volume to Burke while Swift, Voltaire, Rousseau, Johnson, The Federalist and Kant get representative snippets, and Diderot, Gibbon, Bentham and Walpole aren't there at all.

Burke is most remembered for Reflections on the Revolution in France (which takes up most of the HC volume, and is probably to be reviewed next month), and is therefore classified as a "conservative' for having scolded the Revolutionaries about throwing away revered old traditions.  In fact, Burke was a bourgeoisie liberal like me, who was very much in favor of reform but wanted to do it through government rather than overthrow, since he wisely knew what happens to the bourgeoisie as well as the aristocrats when guillotines are built.  Burke spent most of his career in parliament advocating for the civil rights of the Irish and getting laughed at because everyone knew the Irish were just a bunch of dirty, smelly, illiterate, impoverished subhumans unworthy of equality, after over a century of English rule in which all of their money and property was stolen and they were forbidden to educate their children or even have access to sanitation.

The shorter works in the HC volume include "A Letter to a Noble Lord", which is a short gem of political snark, "On Taste" (an introduction to "On the Sublime and the Beautiful", and "On the Sublime and the Beautiful", which is a fairly lengthy list of one-size-fits-all categorizations as to what makes a particular thing "sublime" or "beautiful". I was struck by Burke's definition of "sublime", which seemed so different from what I had meant whenever i said it, that I needed to go look up the word for myself.  I had thought of sublime things as being worthy of very serious reverence, love and awe, like one would give to God and angels.  Burke, for all the quoted definition above, seems to give "the sublime' qualities that are pointedly the opposite of beautiful, and more calculated to inspire horror, revulsion and dread than reverence, thereby defining the devil as more sublime than God, which, it seems to me, can't be right.  As contrasted with "the beautiful', which is always small, dainty, mild, smooth and fragile---wait for it---like a woman.  Always the proverbial ideal woman as the example of every simpering "beautiful" quality there is.

This is the moment at which I threw the Harvard Classice Burke volume across the room and resolved to pick it up and read about his thoughts on the French Revolution next month.

Kant Get No Satisfaction: The Critique of Practical Reason, by Immanuel Kant

A man can return unread an instructive book which he cannot again obtain, in order not to miss the hunt; he can go away in the middle of a fine speech, in order to not be late for a meal; he can leave an intellectual conversation, which he otherwise enjoys, in order to take his place at the gambling table; he can even repulse a poor man, whom it is usually a joy to aid, because he has only enough money in his pocket for a ticket to the theater. If the determination of the will rests on the feelings of agreeableness or disagreeableness which he expects from any cause, it is all the same to him through what kind of representation he is affected.

Thankfully, much shorter than the Critique of Pure Reason, which kept me occupied for the better part of three months. Practical Reason can be read in full during a seven hour airplane flight, with enough time left over to begin a Nero Wolfe story.  Really, the bottom line of Kantian ethics is the "What if EVERYBODY did that?" principle (called "categorical imperative") where your duty is to govern all your actions as if you willed that they should be universal laws of behavior.  Also, you should perfect yourself as much as possible and help others as much as possible.  Because duty, not because you get rewards in Heaven or on earth, or even because you might feel better about yourself.  Compare and contrast with Bentham, below, who has us all seek pleasure and avoid pain as only natural.

It's somewhat longer than the Fundamental principles of the Metaphysick of Morals (Bookpost, July 2016), in that it is more "scholarly" (dense) and raises comparisons and critiques of other ethical systems, such as the Epicureans, who (wrongly, according to Kant) sought pleasure as the highest good and declared that virtue was good because it led to enlightened well-being, or the Stoics, who rightly accepted virtue as the highest good  but (wrongly, according to Kant) ignored the drive toward happiness as irrelevant.
One more critique to go.

I'm old! Gimme, Gimme, Gimme!  How to Make Your Money Last, by Jane Bryant Quinn 

Sorry--risk tolerance questionnaires are generally bunk.  You'll lean toward more risk if stocks are going up, you've had a good day at the office, and your shoes don't pinch.  If you've had a bad day because stocks went down and your unemployed child is moving in, you'll suddenly feel more conservative.  In either case, the risk questionnaire will probably steer you toward "income and growth", which covers just about any investment option on the planet.

Sometimes a retirement planning book jumps out at me from the special promotional shelf at the library, and I snap it up in the hopes that it will say something useful.  someday, I will learn.

I'll give Quinn points for not telling me that I could put away a bundle towards retirement by skipping a latte every day.  I have already calculated that I can become a billionaire by age 70 by skipping ONE HUNDRED lattes every day.  So far, it hasn't been very effective.  And I can't think why not.
Quinn does, however, provide a whole lot of other vague advice so useless I had to go back and confirm that this was really written in 2016. Hey, kids--you should match your employer's 401(k) contribution!  You should keep your employer's health plan as long as possible before retiring!   You should put at least 20% of your earnings from your unpaid internship or the gig you're performing for the exposure or even your minimum wage part time position at WankerMart and put half of that into an emergency fund and the rest into a tax-deferred index fund matched by your employer contributions!   Just let me simplify it--take the expendable part of the gobs and gobs of money you're being paid, and SAVE it, you slacker! Otherwise you're a "grasshopper" who deserves to have rich old people point and laugh at you while you starve in the gutter in Trump's America!

Good golly, why didn't *I* think of such a strategy?  Oh, right. I did.  I skimmed through all the parts about what your wonderful, generous employer's pension/health/slavings plan would do for you if you weren't too stupid and immediate-gratification oriented to take advantage of it, and all the reverse mortgage/tax shelter/AirBnB gold mines you can create with the spare rooms in the house you own free and clear....and pretty much finished the book in half an hour.
Bottom line: If you have money, you can make more. Otherwise, you are shit.  Just in case you needed a well-dressed financial expert like Jane Bryant Quinn or Suze Orman to tell you that.

Weighty Problems: The Rubber Band and The Red Box, by Rex Stout  

"Wolfe settled back in his chair. "There are three things I like about you, sir, but you have several bad habits. One is your assumption that words are brickbats to be hurled at people in an effort to stun them.  You must learn to stop that.  Another is your childish readiness to rush into action without stopping to consider the consequences. Before you definitely hired me to undertake an investigation you should have scrutinized the possibilities.  But the point is that you hired me; and let me tell you, you burned all bridges when you goaded me into that mad sortie to Fifty-second street. That will have to be paid for."

Nero Wolfe mysteries.  Really good ones featuring the stock stocky detective who never leaves home and who divides his attention between cuisine and orchids while solving crimes as an afterthought and being mostly a pompous jerk with some tender moments.  He's fun to read once in a long while, in small doses, and his mysteries are very clever.  I solved The Rubber Band in full while getting most of The Red Box but being completely fooled as to the main fact that reveals the motive behind the crime. 

Crime and Punishment: Introduction to the Principles of Morals & Legislation, by Jeremy Bentham 

A man with a numerous family of children, on the point of starving, goes into a baker's shop, steals a loaf, divides it all among the children, reserving none of it for himself.  It will be hard to infer that that man's disposition is a mischievous one upon the whole.  Alter the case, give him but one child, and that hungry perhaps but in no imminent danger of starving, and now let the man set fire to a house full of people, for the sake of stealing money out of it to buy the bread with.  The disposition here indicated will hardly be looked upon as a good one.

Bentham's best known work reads like the commentary in my old criminal law textbook, with a heavy emphasis on the mens rea.  Bentham wrote a book of ethics as a way of drafting a sensible penal code in which acts were deemed "crimes" and subject to punishment only when some good to the greater society would ensue from said punishment, such as restitution, the rehabilitation of a criminal, or prevention of other crimes
And so, again and again, we see hypothetical situations stated, conclusions drawn, and then elements of the hypothetical changed:  Lord so-and-so shoots the king with an arrow during a stag hunt.  Was he trying to shoot the stag, and missed?  Did he ignore a substantial risk that the shot might hit the king?  Did he intend to assassinate? Different states of mind would require different outcomes in order for justice to prevail.  This is an old, old principle of English and American law, but Bentham may have been the first to articulate it--as well as the first to formulate "utilitarianism"--the ideas that all people seek to gain pleasure and avoid pain and that justice (or moral duty) involves giving the greatest pleasure to the greatest number of people.
Reading so many "great books", I've been struck by the number of them that are very sloppily written.  This book by Bentham is an uncharacteristic clear line of argument with a beginning, middle and end.  Highly recommended.

Bechdel's Test: Fun Home (A Family Tragicomic) by Alison Bechdel

Daedelus, too, was indifferent to the human cost of his projects.  He blithely betrayed the King, for example, when the Queen asked him to build her a cow disguise so she could seduce the white bull.  Indeed , the result of that scheme--a half-bull, half-man monster--inspired Daedelus's greatest creation yet...he hid the Minotaur in the Labyrinth, a maze of passages and rooms opening endlessly into one another, and from which, as stray youths and maidens discovered to their peril, escape was impossible.  Then there are those famous wings. Was Daedelus really stricken with grief when Icarus fell into the sea?  Or just disappointed by the design failure?

Alison Bechdel is the creator of the long-running strip Dykes to Watch Out For, as well as the "Bechdel Test" in which movies are evaluated based on whether they have ANY scenes in which female characters interact with each other about something besides male love interests.  I'm not her target market--or at least, I had assumed (my bad0 that a lesbian writer wouldn't have anything to say to me--and why should she?  Everyone else is already telling people who look and desire like me the stuff they think we want to hear, over and over.

HOLY SHIT IS THIS BOOK GOOD

Seriously,  I've been reading what passes for "Great Literature" of the past on purpose for the past six years.  I should have waited and put Fun Home toward the end of the list.  It is all about literature applied to her autobiography, from ancient myths to Fitzgerald and Proust and Joyce and eventually Kate Millet and Colette, and how the themes of those works speak to her own life growing up in middle Pennsylvania in the mansion her father restored by hand, having issues with parents and siblings, discovering her sexuality, and reacting to the confusing and mean world on the unsteady child and adolescent legs we have all tottered around on once upon a time.  Intense feelings about her father. Intense everything.

And yes, dyke child or no dyke child, I found myself relating to most or all of it, at a het cis male age of 49, and wishing I could be friends or at least have a conversation with her.  Mostly for the literary references; other people will relate to different parts.
It's a graphic novel.  Pictures and descriptions of the formative books, with references to translated terms and supplemental material that made it clear that--yes, I HAD READ THE EXACT SAME EDITIONS of those books. Which should not have thrilled and surprised me, since she grew up something like six to ten years before me at a time when the northeast was filled with secondhand copies of the same books.  I found it unnerving, to get such a strong "you're not alone" vibe from a "growing up lesbian" book, but...yeah.  Very highest recommendations, and I'm glad I read it.

Duckling Into Swan: Demelza, by Winston Graham  

"I am that grieved. I thought I would show 'em that I was a fit wife for you, that I could wear fine clothes and behave genteel an' not disgrace you. An' instead they will all ride home snickering behind their hands. 'Have you not heard about Captain Poldark's wife, the kitchen wench?' Oh, I could die!"

Which would displease us all much more than a brush with John Treneglos." He put his hand on her ankle. "This is but the first fence, child. We have had a check. Well, we can try again. Only a faint heart would give up the race so soon."

"So you think I am a faint heart..."

Speaking of odd stories where I would feel personally involved in the protagonists' story, the second in Graham's Poldark series is all about a waif rescued from a poverty-stricken, abusive peasant/mineworker house by a member of the landed gentry, and how she, through a strong depth of character that transcends upbringing, manages to become the kind of fashionable lady who puts to shame the ladies who were born into society (where "society" is closer to Squire Western than to Lord Piddle-Widdle of London).  There are so many cringe-worthy gender and classist issues, but the overall story is a thrilling one that has its heart in the right place.  In addition to the main "coming into her own" plot, there are breathtaking depictions of industrial strife and jail conditions. High recommendations here too.

The 18th Century Murders: The Eight, by Katherine Neville; The Scottish Prisoner, by Diana Gabaldon; The Master Puppeteer and Of Nightingales that Weep, by Katherine Paterson 

"Thank you," he said, coming even with Fraser again. "For not allowing the Irishman to kill me."
Fraser nodded, not turning his head. "You're welcome."

"May I expect this courtesy to continue?"

He could have sworn that the corner of Fraser's mouth twitched. "You may."

--from The Scottish Prisoner

The Abbess smiled.  "I have told you already that our lives are in great danger if we remain in this abbey.  I have told you that the soldiers of France seek to confiscate the treasures of the Church and are, in fact, abroad in that mission even now.  I have told you further that a treasure of great value and perhaps great evil was once buried within the walls of this abbey.  So it should come as no surprise to you if I reveal that the secret I was sworn to hold in my bosom when I first took this office was the secret of the Montglane Service.  It is still buried within the walls and floor of this room, and I alone know the precise location of each piece.  It is our mission, my daughters, to remove this tool of evil, to scatter it as far and wide as possible, that it may never again be assembled into the hands of one seeking power.  For it contains a force that transcends the law of nature and the understanding of man."

--from The Eight

Then she sang other songs--of Momotaro, the boy who was born out of a peach and who with his companions, a dog, a monkey, and a pheasant conquered a whole island of giants; of the day the Gods teased the Sun Goddess out of hiding to return light to the world; and of Urashima, the fisherman, who married the Dragon King's daughter and lived for four hundred years under the Deep sea.

--from Of Nightingales That Weep

One September evening, soon after dusk, a small group of Komuso monks approached the entrance of the rice brokerage of Yamamoto and begged for alms. They wore the traditional basketlike hats from under which they played their flutes so plaintively that the gatekeeper, an emotional man, it was said later, could hardly keep from weeping.  He opened the door for them, though he couldn't explain afterward why he had done such a foolish thing, but they were holy men and hungry.  Perhaps anyone would have done the same.  At any rate, the monks appeared in a few minutes and made their way out of the city.  When the clerks found the gatekeeper the next day trussed up like a chicken on a spit, he told how the basket priests, who had seemed so gentle outside his door, had roughly overpowered him once they were within. Inside the baskets were secret compartments into which they stuffed rice and money, and then they put the baskets back upon their heads, bowed deeply, and left him there. He swore he could hear their flutes for an hour or more after they departed.

--from The Master Puppeteer

The Scottish Prisoner is a stand-alone Outlander book set in England and Ireland between the first two books in the series, during the time when Jamie is a prisoner of war under Lord Grey's parole in the Lake District. Jamie, under Lord Grey's orders, is required to accompany him on a frenemy road trip across Ireland to catch a traitor to the English cause. Jamie, who would just as soon remain out of the conflict, has divided loyalties between the Jacobite rebels and his duty to keep parole, while Lord Grey is bitterly aware of said divided loyalties.  Tragic hijinks ensue.

The other books were recommended by friends in response to my call for "18th century mysteries". The Eight fits the bill distinctly.  The action alternates between French Revolution era Europe and the 20th Century, with some digressions as far in the past as Charlemagne as it traces first the dispersal, and then the macguffin hunt for, the pieces of a large jewelled chess set, the pieces and board of which might be cursed and might contain secrets to ruling the world.  A cast of historical characters including Marat, Talleyrand, Jacques-Louis Davide, Mme. de Stael, Catherine the Great, Voltaire and Rousseau contribute to the story.

The Katherine Paterson books are neither mysteries nor set in the 18th century, and I'm puzzled as to why someone would suggest them as books that are.  Both are YA or younger fiction about kids growing up in Feudal Japan, and I read them anyway because they're brief and add a little diversity to my reading list. The Master puppeteer, about a boy who apprentices himself at a puppet theatre that has a connection with a notorious outlaw who robs the rich and gives to the poor, could be considered a "thriller" if you squint hard enough, while Of Nightingales that Weep, named for the girl protagonist with a beautiful singing voice who serves at the Emperor's Court during a time of civil war, is considerably less so.  Both children flee abusive families and can be considered to be wanderers cruelly torn from their roots.  Well written and recommended for younger readers.

Why They Built Guillotines: Les Liaisons Dangereuses, by Choderlos De Laclos 

How I blame myself, my tender friend, for having spoken to you of my passing troubles too much and too soon! It is because of me that you are now in distress, the grief which came to you from me still lasts when I am happy. Yes, all is forgotten, forgiven; let me express it better, all is retrieved. Calm and bliss have succeded grief and anguish. O joy of my heart, how can I express you! Valmont is innocent--a man who loves so much cannot be guilty. He has not done me the heavy, offensive injuries for which I blamed him with such bitterness; and if I needed to be indulgent in one point, had I not my own injustices to repair?

This epistolary novel about a complicated evil love pentagram was adapted into a 20th century movie in which Glenn Close and John Malkovich managed to redeem the main antagonists Mertueil and Valmont, with some major on-screen charisma.  That charisma is mostly absent from the original novel, which is supposed to be light and humorous, with the tragic consequences of their actions brought in at the end as an afterthought, the polar opposite of the redemption and goodness at the end of a De Sade novel full of cruelty and misery.  Mertueil and Valmont are a couple of one-percenter people of leisure and boredom who break hearts and wreck homes out of boredom, or our of extreme revenge for petty slights.  They seduce and ruin three innocent people and eventually destroy each other and themselves.  How very witty.  I wanted to reach into the book and throttle them.  Again, the movie adaptation gave a much different impression, squeezing some actual lightness into it.   Or maybe it's just that in my current state of mind (Holy Shit This Is Not a Dream Horny Boo Boo Is Really Going To Be President We Are So Fucked), it is impossible for me to see humor or lightness in, oh, anything.

More of the Same Old Garbage: A View on the Evidences of Christianity, by William Paley 

I desire that in judging of Christianity, it be remembered that the question lies between this religion and none, for if the Christian religion be not credible, no one with whom we have to do will support the pretensions of any other...Suppose, then, the world we live in to have had a creator; suppose it to appear from the predominant aim and tendency of the provisions and contrivances observable in the universe, that the Deity, when he formed it, consulted for the happiness of his sensitive creation. Suppose the disposition, which dictated this counsel, to continue; suppose a part of the creation to have received faculties from their Maker, by which they are capable of rendering a moral obedience to his will, and of voluntarily pursuing any end for which he has designed them; suppose the creator to intend for these, his rational and accountable agents, a second state of existence, in which their situation will be regulated by their behaviour in the first state...under these circumstances, is it improbable that a revelation should be made?  Is it incredible that God should interpose for such a purpose?

Unfortunately, there was still theology even in the Age of Reason, and Paley 's attempt to prove the "truth" of the New Testament is one of the more laughable .  I should have put it down at page one, where the above quoted passage appears, beginning the argument with the assertion that, if Christianity is not true, then neither is any other religion because Christianity is just superior is why...and then asserts as axiomatic the existence of a benevolent God who wants to communicate with its creations.  Deny the axioms, and the rest of the text is not worth reading and is as practical as the old joke about the economist trapped on an island with many cases of canned food and no opener, and solves the dilemma by assuming the existence of a can opener.

The major argument for Christianity, according to Paley, is the historically verifiable record of very zealous followers who abandoned their friends, families and prior faiths, and who were willing to endure torture and death by Romans rather than deny Christ as Lord.  They would not have done this had they not received revelations, says Paley.  I wonder how Paley would respond to the present day existence of millions who would willingly martyr themselves on the belief that Allah is Lord and Mohammed his prophet, or of the Hare Krishnas and other cultists and true believers who endure "deprogramming torture" for the goodness of some charismatic leader who seems like a charlatan to most other people.
The rest of the book consists of "ancillary proofs" such as the good character of Jesus (as written) and the clearly superior teachings (again, just asserted, not proved nor compared with other teachings), and a few dismissals of the contradictions between the four Gospels as unimportant.  None of it has any credibility for those who do not begin by acknowledging Chritianity as the One True Religion, and of course, those who already do do not need to read Paley.  Therefore, the book is a waste. Quod Erat Demonstrandum.

Dollars and Sense: The Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith 

To restrain private people, it may be said, from receiving in payment the promissory notes of a banker, for any sum whether great or small, when they themselves are willing to receive them; or, to restrain a banker from issuing such notes, when all his neighbours are willing to accept of them, is a manifest violation of that natural liberty which it is the proper business of law, not to infringe, but to support. Such regulations may, no doubt, be considered as in some respect a violation of natural liberty. But those exertions of the natural liberty of a few individuals, which might endanger the security of the whole society, are, and ought to be, restrained by the laws of all governments; of the most free, as well as of the most despotical. The obligation of building party walls, in order to prevent the communication of fire, is a violation of natural liberty, exactly of the same kind with the regulations of the banking trade which are here proposed.

The revenue of an individual may be spent, either in things which are consumed immediately, and in which one day’s expence can neither alleviate nor support that of another; or it may be spent in things more durable, which can therefore be accumulated, and in which every day’s expence may, as he chuses either alleviate or support and heighten the effect of that of the following day. A man of fortune, for example, may either spend his revenue in a profuse and sumptuous table, and in maintaining a great number of menial servants, and a multitude of dogs and horse; or contenting himself with a frugal table and few attendants, he may lay out the greater part of it in adorning his house or his country villa, in useful or ornamental buildings, in useful or ornamental furniture, in collecting books, statues, pictures; or in things more frivolous, jewels baubles, ingenious trinkets of different kinds; or, what is most trifling of all, in amassing a great wardrobe of fine clothes, like the favourite and minister of a great prince who died a few years ago. Were two men of equal fortune to spend their revenue, the one chiefly in the one way, the other in the other, the magnificence of the person whose expence had been chiefly in durable commodities, would be continually increasing, every day’s expence contributing something to support and heighten the effect of that of the following day: that of the other, on the contrary, would be no greater at the end of the period than at the beginning. The former too would, at the end of the period, be the richer man of the two. He would have a stock of goods of some kind or other, which, though it might not be worth all that it cost, would always be worth something. No trace or vestige of the expence of the latter would remain, and the effects of ten or twenty years profusion would be as completely annihilated as if they had never existed.

Earlier writers wrote about commerce, or about economics as a matter of philosophy or ethics, with governmental economic policy called "political economy", but Adam Smith was apparently the first to write abour economics as a 'science', with laws of supply and demand, and assertions of what peoples and businesses would do if certain things happen (bad crop harvest = food prices go up; high profits from ironworking = more iron foundries built until market is oversupplied and profits go down again, at which time people stop entering the field), with the analogy of an "invisible hand" directing markets toward inevitable outcomes as if it were the will of God.
Predators and other assholes who have read Readers' Digest summaries of The Wealth of Nations have cited the invisible hand ever since as a basis to assert that the absence of any and all economic regulation is best for everybody, and that any attempt to relieve the misery of the poor or to prevent corporate evil will hurt the very people supposed to be protected (usually because the mansion-dwelling corporate overlords will have no choice but to starve the poor into submission, otherwise they would be reduced to beggar status themselves), and that all problems are solved by laissez-faire neglect (if a bad doctor or drug kills patients, why, leave it alone--word will get out and then people will stop using said doctor or drug, and the problem will go out of business, No problem!  Except for those patients who died, or in the case of small charlatans who make a fortune ripping people off by moving quickly from place to place, or of those Big Pharmas, Leagues of Catholic Hospitals, and other monopolies that can either cover up the harm they do, buy and pay for the government, or eliminate all other choices).  Smith DID speak of laissez-faire as a better alternative to the ridiculous tariffs and artificial state monopolies attempted under the European mercantile system, which were excessive enough that they really did have the effect of depressing local markets.  However, Smith also advocated for some government interventions (see the first quoted part above) as a matter of common sense; it never occurred to him that citizens of a civilized nation would be unwilling to pool some of their means in the service of infrastructure and relief that would clearly be to the benefit of the nation as a whole.  How far we have fallen.

Smith also had an almost religious faith in human predictability and knowledge of their self-interest. If your favorite food is pizza, you will always choose pizza if it is available, no matter how often.  And if collecting valuables is a more profitable means of using your disposable income (see the second quoted part above) than meals, servants and a stable, then you will logically choose one over the other, regardless of personal taste.  This is not how human minds work.  On the concept of division of labor, which is maybe the most famous part of the book, he is spot on.

Like most "great books", the structure is sloppy, but the digressions are often interesting and cover vast areas of the humanities, even those that have little to do with the subject matter.  Under the guise of a chapter on "the expenses of education of the young", for example, he launches into a discourse on education in general. Another chapter on "the expenses of the education of the public", he goes into religion (because education for adults who have finished school is what going to church is.  Really, Adam?). "The expenses of a standing army" is all about war theory, and every economic argument is backed up by digressions into history from Persia, Greece, Rome, Feudal Europe, contemporary Europe, and all the "savages" not in Europe who stand to benefit from Europe's wise colonial policies.  Smith even has advice for King George as to what changes should be made in dealing with the North American colonies to prevent a rebellion that seems likely if drastic steps are not taken. The Wealth of Nations was published in 1776.  Oops.

As with most first attempts to describe a vast new field, The Wealth of Nations comes across as clunky and sometimes misguided, but it is thought provoking. Seems to me the first three "books" of it (not necessarily including the long final chapters of Book 1 unless you're very into herring) are worth serious study by most people; later sections can be grazed depending on where your interest lies.

Find all of my previous Bookposts here: admnaismith.livejournal.com/...

HAMILTON: THE BOOK!  The Federalist Papers, by Alexander Hamilton feat. James Madison & John Jay

 It has often given me pleasure to observe, that Independent America was not composed of detached and distant territories, but that one connected, fertile, wide—spreading country was the portion of our western sons of liberty. Providence has in a particular manner blessed it with a variety of soils and productions and watered it with innumerable streams, for the delight and accommodation of its inhabitants. A succession of navigable waters forms a kind of chain round its borders, as if to bind it together; while the most noble rivers in the world, running at convenient distances, present them with highways for the easy communication of friendly aids, and the mutual transportation and exchange of their various commodities.

With equal pleasure I have as often taken notice, that Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country, to one united people; a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established their general Liberty and Independence.

This country and this people seem to have been made for each other, and it appears as if it was the design of Providence, that an inheritance so proper and convenient for a band of brethren, united to each other by the strongest ties, should never be split into a number of unsocial, jealous, and alien sovereignties.

Did you think these old 18th Century books I've been reading all year don't have relevance today?  Well, cue Lin-Manuel Miranda... How in tarnation does a nation, stationed in a new
Location, patiently make a new administration In a new configuration from the Articles of Confederation? The creation takes some explanation.

The word-whooshing, contribution of elocution Made the revolution proposing solutions Proposing resolutions, preventing dissolutions

Three men making the case for the Constitution

And every day, the public was suspicious and dubious The Confederation, naive, defenseless and n00bious They looked in the papers for something salubrious And found 85 articles, all signed "Publius"

Thirteen states strained between Florida and Maine They saw their independence drip-dripping down to Spain To the French, to the English and the Germans and the Dutch

If they got us in their clutches, they wouldn't leave very much

With the Constitution up, only four states could blackball it

Told to turn their backs and keep one hand on their wallet But these essays in collection for all those who would eyeball it They said, this here whatchamacallit--

What you call it? The Papers of the Federalist
They wrote the Papers of the Federalist  It was well revered by centralists And just you read, just you read---

There are checks and balances, they're everywhere, essential

Legislative, the executive, the jurisprudential Do you think the public would let it beat 'em and cheat 'em A people that would stand for that would never stand freedom

There is a demonstration of the separation of powers

A warning to let the nation flower before it sours A voice saying, leaders leave your ivory towers Give this government document to the people it empowers

There would have been nothing left to do for a system more vanilla
It might have been trapped between Charybdis and the Scylla Of anarchy or seizure by a latter day Atilla Divisiveness between the States, if only a scintilla

Cited by John Marshall in McCulloch versus Maryland Don't leave it to majorities, a mob rule ain't no fairyland

Mightier than swords, their feathered pens make a stand The New World going to have a new plan

The New World going to have a new plan

(The New World going to have a new plan)

The New World going to have a new plan

(The New World going to have a new plan)

Just you read it

Alexander Hamilton (Alexander Hamilton)

James Madison and John Jay too (John Jay too) They didn't back down But they didn't back the Bill of Rights

The Papers of the Federalist (Papers of the Federalist)
With borrowings from Montesquieu
Their writings were mostly wise But we have to apologize For that slave state three-fifths compromise

Our nation's threatened once again With one foot in the grave Its enemies in charge of the whole Federal enclave Can the Founding Fathers show us how we can be saved?

JAY--wrote four of it MADISON--more of it

HAMILTON--the core of it WE--adore it And TRUMP--he's the sick fuck who tore it!

They were a statecraft supplement for us So just you read-- (What they call it?)

The Papers of the Federalist!

Frexit:  Rousseau and Revolution, by Will and Ariel Durant

It is hard to define morality, for each age makes its own definition to suit its temper and sins.  Frenchmen had through centuries relieved monogamy with adultery, as America relieves it with divorce; and in the Gallic view judicious adultery does less hurt to the family--or at least to the children--than divorce. In any case, adultery flourished in eighteenth century France, and was generally condoned.  When Diderot, in his Encyclopedie, wished to distinguish "bind" and "attach", he gave as example, "One is bound to one's wife, attached to one's mistress." To have a mistress was as necessary to status as to have money.

Of the Durants' enormous eleven-volume history of western civilization through Waterloo, Rousseau and Revolution, at 965 pages (not counting notes, bibliography and index in the back), is the second thickest volume in the set.  it covers 35 years.  The only volume that's thicker, The Age of Faith, covers 1,000 years.  As I've learned over the course of six years of historical reading, civilization expands exponentially.

Most of the 18th Century books I read this year will be found here and in the previous volume, as will summaries of the major events of the period.  The Durants wrote an eleventh volume, on the Napoleonic era, but at the time, they thought they were finishing up, and marking the fall of the Bastille as a decent milestone to use as a jumping-off spot.  And so they do a lot of unnecessary wrapping-up and making notes on people and events, like Goethe, that were still to come.

The series is big on Europe, and its defects become more noticeable when "The West" no longer is confined to Europe.  The colonies of North America, and their war for independence, are barely mentioned. Meanwhile, there are so many advances in government, economics, philosophy, science, music, literature and art that, in addition to referencing Diderot and the encyclopediasts of the age, the book becomes something of an encyclopedia itself.  Still, it served as a springboard and introduction to many books i might not otherwise have included in this year's reading, and gave an outline of what to expect from them, for which I am grateful.

The 18th Century Murders:  Written in My Own heart's Blood, by Diana Gabaldon; The High Constable, by Maan Meyers; The Prince Lost to Time, by Anne Dukthas  

"Um...that gentleman is James Fraser, my...er...my--""First husband wasn't accurate, and neither was "last husband" or even, unfortunately, "most recent husband."  I settled for the simplest alternative. "My husband. And, er, William's father."

Mrs. Figg's mouth opened, soundless for an instant. She backed up slowly and sat down on a needlework ottoman with a soft *phumph*. "William know that?", she asked after a moment's contemplation.
"He does now," I said, with a brief gesture toward the devastation in the stairwell, clearly visible through the door of the parlor where we were sitting.
"Merde on--I mean, Holy Lamb of God preserve us."  Mrs. Figg's second husband was a Methodist preacher, and she strove to be a credit to him, but her first had been a French gambler.

--from Written in My Own Heart's Blood

Somewhere in the darkness a dog howled.  Betrancourt remembered how, years earlier, a soothsayer had told him that would be the last sound he would ever hear on Earth.  Why did it happen, he thought. The men who had followed him from the tavern had, before old Betrancourt broke free and fled, mentioned Monsieur de Paris.  If Monsieur de Paris wanted him, then sentence of death had already been passed.

--from The Prince Lost to Time

Hays leaned over to get a better look.  Adhering to the back of the body, its teeth caught on the dead man's coat, looking for all the world as if it were biting the dead man's arse, was a human skull.

--from The High Constable

Written in My Own Heart's Blood is the last, so far, of the very thick Outlander novels, and one of the best.  There's clearly more to come, but the plots have spread out to several times and places, from 1739 to 1980, and from Scotland to Boston to Savannah, with cameos from historical characters like General Washington, Nathan Hale and the Marquis de Lafayette, and a front row seat for the Battle of Monmouth.  The viewpoint changes, Game of thrones style, between various characters, and Gabaldon's writing has improved greatly from the first book to the last. 

The Prince Lost to Time  is the only one of Ann Dukthas's works (in which the ageless detective Segalla investigates actual historical conundrums and comes up with quirky solutions consistent with the actual historical record) set in the 18th Century.  The mystery is clunky; the point is to hypothesize a way in which the Dauphin did not die in the tower, that is consistent with the known facts.

Finally, rounding out a century of period mysteries is The High Constable of post-Colonial Manhattan, which is mainly recommended for people who like tales in which the mystery is secondary to personal development of the main characters.  The central family has plenty of issues, not the least of which is the alcoholic son who is failing at work and life and accused of theft and murder, and who uses the experience to grow up and find his true calling amid a wealth of information about the family's Dutch/Quaker/Jewish heritage and the customs and newspaper clippings of the time, and not much mystery.

Rantin Rovin Robin: Poems and Songs of Robert Burns  

WEE, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous beastie,

O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!

Thou need na start awa sae hasty,

                    Wi’ bickering brattle!

I wad be laith to rin an’ chase thee,

                    Wi’ murd’ring pattle!

I’m truly sorry man’s dominion,

Has broken nature’s social union,

An’ justifies that ill opinion,

                    Which makes thee startle

At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,

                    An’ fellow-mortal!

I doubt na, whiles, but thou may thieve;

What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!

A daimen icker in a thrave

                    ’S a sma’ request;

I’ll get a blessin wi’ the lave,

                    An’ never miss’t!

Thy wee bit housie, too, in ruin!

It’s silly wa’s the win’s are strewin!

An’ naething, now, to big a new ane,

                    O’ foggage green!

An’ bleak December’s winds ensuin,

                    Baith snell an’ keen!

Thou saw the fields laid bare an’ waste,

An’ weary winter comin fast,

An’ cozie here, beneath the blast,

                    Thou thought to dwell—

Till crash! the cruel coulter past

                    Out thro’ thy cell.

That wee bit heap o’ leaves an’ stibble,

Has cost thee mony a weary nibble!

Now thou’s turn’d out, for a’ thy trouble,

                    But house or hald,

To thole the winter’s sleety dribble,

                    An’ cranreuch cauld!

But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane,

In proving foresight may be vain;

The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men

                    Gang aft agley,

An’lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,

                    For promis’d joy!

Still thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me

The present only toucheth thee:

But, Och! I backward cast my e’e.

                    On prospects drear!

An’ forward, tho’ I canna see,

                    I guess an’ fear!

I have a surprisingly hard time commenting on poetry, given all the lyrics I write, but I felt obligated to tackle Burns, who is the only poet in the Harvard Classics set  besides Milton to have an entire volume given to only his work.  The Scots have elevated him to near sainthood, and the celebration of "Burns Day" on his birthday of January 25 is a ritual like America's Thanksgiving dinner...only with haggis.  Different salutes for different galoots!

There are hundreds of them, ranging from the satirical to the poignant to stuff that's hard to even understand without trying to sing it out loud, because of the thick Scots-English, as in "Och aye mi bonny laddie y'are a wee dumb shytte".  Many are verses written to a particular neighbor or lover, or epigrams and epitaphs originally scrawled casually on napkins, or political screeds in verse that probably had a lot more punch back when everyone was talking about Alderman MacArgus who tuk wynd amang the praesentin  o'th' statue or about Graidy Donald wha had a comely doter-o.

And then among those, you'll find the famous ones you've heard, or at least recognize lines from, like Auld Lang Syne, "To a Louse", or "A Man's A Man For a' That".  I grew up with more of these than some did, having a da' who was part Scot, and it made for awkward moments at camp where they'd start a round of "Green Grow the Rushes-o" and I would start singing "There's naught but care in every hand" while everyone else went "I'll sing you one-o". I started the collection on or about January 25, and finished it in December.  These need to be read a few at a time.

Pop'nfresh Gender Roles: On the Black Hill, by Bruce Chatwin  

But Benjamin did not cry.  He simply pursed his mouth and turned his sad grey eyes on his brother.  For it was Lewis, not he, who was whimpering with pain, and stroking his own left hand as if it were a wounded bird.  He went on snivelling till bedtime.  Only when they were locked in each other's arms did the twins doze off--and from then on, they associated eggs with wasps and mistrusted anything yellow.  This was the first time Lewis demonstrated his power to draw the pain from his brother, and take it on himself.  He was the stronger twin, and the firstborn.

A very strange tale, almost but not quite magic realism, about 80 years in the life of a pair of identical twins born near the Welsh border in 1900.

Things change slowly, but they do change, from a long, rural idyll of a pair of childhoods, through two world wars, a depression, faint stirrings of technology, and ultimately a flood of new things.  The boys share a bond so strong that when one of them is drafted and the other stays behind, the one at home feels the pain of the other's boot camp tortures.

And the gender roles are quirky.  The farm where the boys live is called "The Vision", and, while being described as intensely masculine, is misty and poetic. Nearby is the feminine "The Rock", where the energy is wild and feral and described as "feminine"  (untamed?). This seemed to me distracting from an otherwise touching, Dylan Thomas-esque story where characters are drawn full-fleshed with but a few words.  High recommendations.

Dead Poetess Society:  The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, by Muriel Spark

"This is Stanley Baldwin, who got in as Prime Minister and got out again ere long," said Miss Brodie. "Miss Mackay retains him on the wall because she believes in the slogan "Safety First." But safety does not come first. Follow me."

This was the first intimation to the girls of an odds between Miss Brodie and the rest of the teaching staff. Indeed, to some of them, it was the first time they had realized it was possible for people glued together in grown-up authority to differ at all.  Taking inward note of this, and with the exhilaration of being in on the faint smell of row, without being endangered by it, they followed dangerous Miss Brodie into the secure shade of the elm.

Seems to me, the Peter Wier movie Dead Poets' Society was an all male reboot of Muriel Spark, who did it better in this novella about a teacher adopting half a dozen students in a strict private school/academy and attempting to awaken their imaginations and souls, thereby making enemies in the authoritarian faculty and ultimately being railroaded into dismissal. 

There are differences.  No suicide, although a minor character is killed in the Spanish civil war and some of the girls' eventual deaths years later are foreshadowed (the story, centered around the girls' senior year in 1931, flashbacks and flash-forwards extensively, gradually giving meaning to certain details and referencing both World Wars and beyond.  The school is in Scotland, not New England, and has heavier Calvinist overtones that even the supposedly free-spirited Miss Jean bows to.  And, of course, the "awakenings" of girls in a world where girls more than boys are forever being told to stay obedient and half-asleep and where any expression of passion is presumed to be sexual, has extra significance.
Mostly, the quality is in the language.  It is a riveting story, expertly plotted, in which one cares deeply about the characters and dreads the sense of impending doom that looms over them like a gothic cathedral.  Highest recommendations.

Point/Counterpoint: Reflections on the Revolution in France, by Edmund Burke; The Rights of Man, by Thomas Paine 

In France you are now in the crisis of a revolution, and in the transit from one form of government to another—you cannot see that character of men exactly in the same situation in which we see it in this country. With us it is militant; with you it is triumphant; and you know how it can act when its power is commensurate to its will. I would not be supposed to confine those observations to any description of men, or to comprehend all men of any description within them—No! far from it. I am as incapable of that injustice, as I am of keeping terms with those who profess principles of extremities; and who, under the name of religion, teach little else than wild and dangerous politics. The worst of these politics of revolution is this: they temper and harden the breast, in order to prepare it for the desperate strokes which are sometimes used in extreme occasions. But as these occasions may never arrive, the mind receives a gratuitous taint; and the moral sentiments suffer not a little, when no political purpose is served by the depravation. This sort of people are so taken up with their theories about the rights of man, that they have totally forgotten his nature. Without opening one new avenue to the understanding, they have succeeded in stopping up those that lead to the heart. They have perverted in themselves, and in those that attend to them, all the well-placed sympathies of the human breast.

--from Reflections on the Revolution in France

No man is prejudiced in favour of a thing, knowing it to be wrong. He is attached to it on the belief of its being right; and when he sees it is not so, the prejudice will be gone.  We have but a defective idea of what prejudice is. It might be said, that until men think for themselves the whole is prejudice and not opinion, for that only is opinion which is the result of reason and reflection. I offer this remark, that Mr. Burke may not confide too much in what has been the customary prejudices of the country.

--from The Rights of Man

The more I read about the French Revolution, the more alarmed I become about this day and age.  It's as if---and yes, the comparisons will fail unless you squint pretty hard, but work with me here--a President for Life Romney, married to Hillary Clinton, tried to do the right thing by the starving people in hard economic times, but was persuaded by competing factions within the party.  First he listened to a Mormon adviser, who urged that food stored be appropriated to feed the hungry, but then another Republican adviser screamed that this was socialism, and had the Mormon replaced with someone who urged laissez-faire market solutions and snatched the food back from the hungry, and eventually a mob of Occupiers and Black Lives Matter activists led by Sanders and Warren rose up and threw Romney out of office, while both they and the Tea Party spewed endless hate about Clinton being a Wall Street tool even as she had been trying to overcome past mistakes and was a liberal at heart.   This is the point at which Burke and Paine had their famous exchange of ideas.  What they didn't know, and what Burke correctly predicted, was that while the Bernie people were trying to get a wonderful Utopia established in which everyone had both rights and food, the Tea Party would seize on the new anarchy and kill the Bernie people, and everyone else who looked liberal to them, and then the Trump people would kill the Tea Partiers and set up a directorate and then Petraeus or Colin Powell or some other popular general would kill Trump and set up a military empire.

Sort of.

As I said last month, Burke was a Bourgeois liberal for most of his life, urging liberal reforms in England to stave off revolution.   When revolution happened, he did what I probably would do and foresaw the ruin of the good as well as the bad, and was not happy about it.  I expected to agree a lot more with Burke, but he did like Orson Scott Card after 9/11 and went full on flatline. He is not an Obama urging caution and wanting the down and out to be content with modest reforms so as not to risk throwing the bathroom out with the bathwater; he is Giuliani screaming at the ignorant rabble (of color) to shut up, go home, and stop talking uppity to their betters. In today's time, his arguments read like idiotic superstitions and blatant appeals to prejudice.  True, we should hesitate before throwing down custom and tradition, and make sure that what we have to replace it is really better, but Burke takes it as a given that the old is better just because it is old.  Kings can do no wrong. Churches speak for God above, and the very concept of civil rights for all people--including, you know, those smelly (Millennial) peasants who think the mere capacity to inflate their lungs entitles them to participation trophies--is an abomination against civilization. His prediction of chaos and blood proved right, but for all the wrong reasons.

In response, Thomas Paine comes back with the American ideal of Democracy and praises the Constitution (that revered three-year-old document at the time) as if he lived in 1967 and such ideals were taken for granted.  Remember, he was writing during the brief period when the Bernie movement of the day was in charge, there was some semblance of order and at least the attempt to create a good government, before the mob took over and made blood flow through the streets. 

Burke is supported by what happened in the short term; he was specific.  Paine is supported by the results over centuries; he was talking about ideals.  Most of their arguments flew right over each others' heads because they were taking about different things.  There is a great deal of food for thought, and a bunch of rhetorical chicanery, in both of them, and both should be read together. 

Especially right now, when it seems ready to happen all over again, here.

What am I doing here?  The Vocation of Man, by Johann Gottlieb Fichte 

I can never become conscious either of the external powers, by which, in the system of universal necessity, I am determined; nor of my own power, by which, on the system of freedom, I determine myself. Thus, whichsoever of the two opinions I may accept, I still accept it, not upon evidence, but merely by arbitrary choice.

Has there yet been a satisfactory reconciliation of determinism versus free will that does not wholly reject determinism?  If there is, I'd like to see it, because Fichte's mercifully short attempt is nit it.
Fichte assumes that people have a more insistent need for an orderly universe than people (me, anyhow) really do.  He rejects free will mostly on the basis that we are to small to know much on a cosmic scale, that happiness leads inevitably to a desire for the existence of God (so that we can express thanks to it); but also (rightly, it seems to me) rejects determinism on the grounds that it deprives us of worthiness because of our right choices, or makes it unjust to blame us for our wrong ones--though, of course, the argument fails that because something is not fair, that means it cannot be the case.

The reconciliation, that we are free-willed tiny parts within a self-directed much larger whole, like self-aware white blood cells in a human body, is neither convincing nor spiritually/philosophically comforting.  If that which really matters is too large to even be meaningfully perceived much less affected by our actions, and if we are guided pretty much by instinct, that does not seem to me to promote my well-being or that of anyone else. Your mileage may vary.

Fichte writes in a weird first/third person narrative as if the first person narrator is you the reader, passing from despair to rejoicing as I/you receive Fichte's wisdom, that the "vocation of man" is obedience to one's conscience as the voice of God.  The technique is offensively presumptuous; he literally tells you what you are thinking as you read, and in my case at least, he is laughably wrong.
Also, German philosophers are certainly a stodgy lot.

Curmudgeon's Guide to Europe: A Tramp Abroad, by Mark Twain  

There are some unaccountable reputations in the world. Saint Nicholas's is an instance.  He has ranked for ages as the peculiar friend of children, yet it appears that he was not much of a friend to his own. He had ten of them, and when fifty years old he left them and sought out as dismal a refuge from the world as possible and became a hermit in order that he might reflect upon pious themes without being disturbed by the joyous and other noises from the nursery, doubtless....there apparently exists no rule for the construction of hermits; St. Nicholas will probably have to go on climbing down sooty chimneys on Christmas Eve forever, conferring kindness on other people's children to make up for deserting his own.

Twain is, of course, a national treasure in America. A Tramp Abroad, his account of a real trip through Germany, Switzerland and Italy, is presented as "nonfiction" but sprinkled with so many tall tales and other yarns as to make it unclear what part is fact and what fiction. He claims to have tried to ride a glacier down the mountain, become perturbed after a day of attempting, at the discovery of the actual speed at which glaciers move, and said "Fiddlesticks! I can walk it faster than that!"

Elsewhere, Twain describes Alpine farms that are vertical, such that people die from falling off their farms; German "folk legends" that lengthen the reader's leg in translation; French duelists who approach a bout with what amounts to peashooters at 500 paces with all the tears and melodrama of a pair of operatic patriots dying for their country; and meals designed by the more vicious members of the Borgia family to be eaten by their enemies.

The style alternates. Twain can slip from the highly educated man he was to writing in the "Them city people sure do confound me with their foolish ways and fancy talk" country drawl his characters were famous for.  Similarly, the book's lavish illustrations include impressive, accurate drawings of vistas and ancient castles, as well as cartoonish line drawings of fools.  The overall effect, as you'd expect, is wonderful.

Oh, and don't skip the appendixes. They're as awesome as the main book.  Very high recommendations.

We're All Fucked: On Population, by Thomas Malthus

We will suppose the means of subsistence in any country just equal to the easy support of its inhabitants. The constant effort towards population, which is found to act even in the most vicious societies, increases the number of people before the means of subsistence are increased. The food therefore which before supported seven millions must now be divided among seven millions and a half or eight millions. The poor consequently must live much worse, and many of them be reduced to severe distress. The number of labourers also being above the proportion of the work in the market, the price of labour must tend toward a decrease, while the price of provisions would at the same time tend to rise. The labourer therefore must work harder to earn the same as he did before. During this season of distress, the discouragements to marriage, and the difficulty of rearing a family are so great that population is at a stand. In the mean time the cheapness of labour, the plenty of labourers, and the necessity of an increased industry amongst them, encourage cultivators to employ more labour upon their land, to turn up fresh soil, and to manure and improve more completely what is already in tillage, till ultimately the means of subsistence become in the same proportion to the population as at the period from which we set out. The situation of the labourer being then again tolerably comfortable, the restraints to population are in some degree loosened, and the same retrograde and progressive movements with respect to happiness are repeated.

The big thing to know about Malthus is that poverty and famine are features not bugs.  According to Malthus, the population grows faster than the food supply, and will keep doing so until it hits critical mass and there isn't enough food to go around, at which point the population will stabilize again (due to cannibalism?).  Any -and he does mean ANY- increase in the quality of life will be offset by people making babies until that quality of life cannot be sustained and falls back again.  You can't win. You can't break even. You can't quit the game.
If you thought assholes had seized on Adam Smith (see last month's bookpost) as an excuse to be cruel to the poor, wait till you see what they extrapolated from Malthus in an age before they had Social Darwinism as their excuse.  Attempts at welfare and other relief for the poor were viciously attacked as threatening to bring about a malthusian population bomb. Ebeneezer Scrooge, when he urged the poor to die quickly, and reduce the surplus population,  had read his Malthus with approval  Let famine run its course for the greater good, said the Trumpkins of the day, while they pointed and laughed and gorged themselves on delicacies withheld from the poor.

Slightly more humanely, Malthus urged population control, an influence that stayed with society through such groups as Zero Population Growth, which shames people for having babies  (though of course, people are also shamed for having abortions, or really, for having sex at all.  If it gives pleasure for free, the capitalists will discourage it and the Puritans will punish it.  Depriving a puritan moralist of the opportunity to shame someone is like tearing the guitar out of Eric Clapton's hands.  But I digress).
Malthusianism, like Libertarianism or Communism, is one of those economic theories that looks logical, even inevitable, on paper, but that has rarely or never appeared in practice, even in an economy planned around it.  Malthus wrote in 1798 as if the earth was about to exceed maximum sustainable population any day now. Here we are over two centuries later, 7 billion earthlings and counting, and we still have farmers destroying surplus food to keep prices artificially high.  I saw a map once that featured a middling circle centered in the South China Sea and including Japan, Southeast China, IndoChina, Indonesia, most of the Indian subcontinent and a few other islands, and asserting that half of the world's population lived within that circle.  I don't know how they manage, but if THEY are continuing to reproduce without vast constant famine, it would seem that North America and Europe have quite a ways to go.

The Handgentleman's Tale: The Gate to Womens' Country, by Sherri S. Tepper 

Everyone agreed that it was dishonorable to return through the Gate to Women's Country. Only cowards did it.  Cowards and physical weaklings, though even they could be put to work in the garrison kitchens or doing maintenance of some kind if they confessed their weakness to the Commander.  Beyond being the butt of a bit of rough teasing or donkey play, they got on well enough.

Sherri S. Tepper was one of the victims of 2016, and so I felt like reading one of hers as we say goodbye to a horrible year.  I've enjoyed some of her other work: The Family Tree; The Visitor; The Fresco, all of which have things happen in what is more or less our world.

The Gate To Women's Country is not "our world". It is a dystopian post-nuke future in which the women have taken over and set up an Atwood-in-reverse ecofeminist society where they keep knowledge a secret for themselves and boys are brought up in military garrisons outside the gates.  At age 15, they are required to choose to Enter Women's Country and be servants to women, or to stay outside as warriors and become not much more than rutting beasts with Klingon values.  

There are also nomads (called by an offensive name, unfortunately) who run away from all of it and are considered fair game to kill; and (of course, because this is a Tepper novel) a disgusting religious patriarchy where they eagerly beat and rape women to "chastise" them for arousing sinful desires in men:  "Ooh, look at that one! I would love to chastise her!"
The main character is named Stavia. The action alternates between the "present", in which she rehearses her role in a traditional Greek tragedy rewritten such that the Trojan Women get the upper hand over the Greeks and the ghosts of fallen warriors; and flashbacks to when she was a girl and had a relationship with a boy in the warriors' camp.  So infatuated is she that she does the unthinkable and allows him to read books.

The Saga Continues: Jeremy Poldark, by Winston Graham 

The two women were vagrants. They had been caught flagrantly begging.  They had no visible means of support.  It was a plain case and the jury speedily found them guilty.  But this was a crime on which the Hon. Justice Lister felt rather strongly and he delivered a long and damning homily on the evils of such a life.  Looking at him, Demelza realized there was no mercy here. His diction was beautiful, his phrases as elegantly rounded as if they had been written out the night before.  But the substance was to condemn.  Abruptly, without any raising of the voice or change of expression, he sentenced the two women to be whipped and the case was over.

I had intended to have this 12-volume series read this year.  The books are quite short.  However, I only made it through three because I have to wait so long for them at the library.  It's nice to see a resurgence of interest in Winston Graham (just as it was touching to see on social media the renewed interest in Krampus among the young this holiday season), but they might have waited a bit.  Most of the third book is concerned with a WTF trial in which it is a hanging offense to do something that isn't even illegal in our time and country, though there are plenty of instructive examples on Parliamentary elections,  the descent of honorable professions into profit-centric savagery, developments in medicine, and working class funerals.  The title character is Poldark's son, who isn't born until the final chapter.   

Guns Don't Kill---Trolls Do!  Men At Arms, by Terry Pratchett

To understand why dwarfs and trolls don't like each other, you have to go back a long way.  They get along like chalk and cheese. Very like chalk and cheese, really.  One is organic; the other isn't, and also smells a bit cheesy. Dwarfs make a living by smashing up rocks with valuable minerals in them, and the silicon-based life form known as trolls are, basically, rocks with valuable minerals in them.  In the wild, they also spend most of the daylight hours dormant, and that's not a situation a rock containing valuable minerals needs to be in when there are dwarfs around.  And dwarfs hate trolls because, after you've just found an interesting seam of valuable minerals, you don't like rocks that suddenly stand up and tear your arm off because you've just stuck a pickaxe in their ear.

I traditionally spend much of Christmas reading a Discworld novel, on the theory that they contribute to a day of joy, and that I want to make the series last for me.  Men At Arms is focused on Ankh Morporks city watch (Carrot; Vimes, et al), and has everything  want in a Discworld book (other than Rincewind and Granny Weatherwxax): a disaster to be averted, an increasingly twisty plot, laugh-out-loud humor, and social commentary on issues appropriate to our world.

In this adventure, the watch has recently hired new Affirmative Action recruits, including a dwarf and a troll who are of course paired up in the most hilarious frenemy law enforcement duo I've yet seen, and a woman named Angua who is more than she seems and who feeds my heroine addiction to surfeit.  Together with the regulars of the watch, they must avert civil unrest between the trolls and dwarfs, avert similar unrest among the various guilds, solve a series of murders involving a mysterious never before seen weapon despite orders from the City Patrician not to investigate, and keep Vimes from getting killed immediately before retirement so that he may marry his Very Superior Fiancee and live in luxury after a life of grime.
The fun is incredible.  So is the food for thought.  Highest recommendations.

Kant Touch This: The Critique of Judgment, by Immanuel Kant 

Suppose this story to be told: An Indian at the table of an Englishman in Surat, when he saw a bottle of ale opened and all the beer turned into froth and overflowing, testified his great astonishment with many exclamations. When the Englishman asked him, “What is there in this to astonish you so much?” he answered, “I am not at all astonished that it should flow out, but I do wonder how you ever got it in.” At this story we laugh, and it gives us hearty pleasure; not because we deem ourselves cleverer than this ignorant man, or because of anything else in it that we note as satisfactory to the Understanding, but because our expectation was strained [for a time] and then was suddenly dissipated into nothing. Again: The heir of a rich relative wished to arrange for an imposing funeral, but he lamented that he could not properly succeed; “for” (said he) “the more money I give my mourners to look sad, the more cheerful they look!” When we hear this story we laugh loud, and the reason is that an expectation is suddenly transformed into nothing. We must note well that it does not transform itself into the positive opposite of an expected object—for then there would still be something, which might even be a cause of grief—but it must be transformed into nothing. For if a man arouses great expectations in us when telling a story, and at the end we see its falsehood immediately, it displeases us; e.g. the story of the people whose hair in consequence of great grief turned gray in one night. But if a wag, to repair the effect of this story, describes very circumstantially the grief of the merchant returning from India to Europe with all his wealth in merchandise who was forced to throw it overboard in a heavy storm, and who grieved thereat so much that his wig turned gray the same night—we laugh and it gives us gratification. For we treat our own mistake in the case of an object otherwise indifferent to us, or rather the Idea which we are following out, as we treat a ball which we knock to and fro for a time, though our only serious intention is to seize it and hold it fast. It is not the mere rebuff of a liar or a simpleton that arouses our gratification; for the latter story told with assumed seriousness would set a whole company in a roar of laughter, while the former would ordinarily not be regarded as worth attending to.

It may be that Werner S. Pluhar is a much better translator than the translators of the other Critiques that I read, but The Critique of Judgment was by far the easiest to read of any of Kan'ts works (see Bookposts from July through November this year) that I read so far, notwithstanding that it built on ideas from the first two Critiques in order to resolve the conflict between asserting objective standards for judging beauty and the idea that all taste is personal.

The ideas are simple and comparable to Burke's On the Sublime and the Beautiful, which Kant cites, and which I read and commented on last month, except that Kant speaks of "aesthetic judgment" (standards of beauty; ie those things that are self-justifying because they give pleasure just by existing and being beheld) and "teleological judgment" (which alternately means respect for something because of its size, and an attempt to use practical reason to pass judgment by moral/religious standards/establishing a logical purpose to the universe).
I was glad that Kant's definition of sublime involved the evocation of respect and not (as Burke said) fear.  It was easier for me to go along with.  Kant's full meaning of "sublime" is closer to "evoking a sense of boundlessness that is still comprehensible within the mind", such that for the philosopher, what many see as contemplating "God" is closer to contemplating infinity, complete with those paradoxes where the set of all numbers and the set of even numbers are equal because infinity.

Kant further divides judgments into "determinant" judgments that classify a particular as fitting a preconceived standard, and "reflective" judgments that identify a standard by contemplating one or more particulars.

Epic Epicures: The Physiology of Taste (or, Transcendental Gastronomy, by Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

I. The universe would be nothing were it not for life and all that lives must be fed.

II. Animals fill themselves; man eats. The man of mind alone knows how to eat.

III. The destiny of nations depends on the manner in which they are fed.

IV. Tell me what kind of food you eat, and I will tell you what kind of man you are.

V. The Creator, when he obliges man to eat, invites him to do so by appetite, and rewards him by pleasure.

VI. Gourmandise is an act of our judgment, in obedience to which, we grant a preference to things which are agreeable, over those which nave not that quality.

VII. The pleasure of the table belongs to all ages, to all conditions, to all countries, and to all aeras; it mingles with all other pleasures, and remains at last to console us for their departure.

VIII. The table is the only place where one does not suffer, from ennui during the first hour.

IX. The discovery of a new dish confers more happiness on humanity, than the discovery of a new star.

X. Those persons who suffer from indigestion, or who become drunk, are utterly ignorant of the true principles of eating and drinking.

XI. The order of food is from the most substantial to the lightest.

XII. The order of drinking is from the mildest to the most foamy and perfumed.

XIII. To say that we should not change our drinks is a heresy; the tongue becomes saturated, and after the third glass yields but an obtuse sensation.

XIV. A dessert without cheese is like a beautiful woman who has lost an eye.

XV. A cook may be taught, but a man who can roast, is born with the faculty.

XVI. The most indispensable quality of a good cook is promptness. It should also be that of the guests.

XVII. To wait too long for a dilatory guest, shows disrespect to those who are punctual.

XVIII. He who receives friends and pays no attention to the repast prepared for them, is not fit to have friends.

XIX. The mistress of the house should always be certain that the coffee be excellent; the master that his liquors be of the first quality.

XX. To invite a person to your house is to take charge of his happiness as long as he be beneath your roof.

I'm guessing a whole lot of people know of Brillat-Savarin mostly from the "Show me what you eat and I will show you who you are" quote that opened the Japanese episodes of Iron chef.  Looking at The Physiology of Taste, it's not hard to see why Kaga liked Brillat-Savarin.  The two would have gotten along famously, had they lived together.

Nowadays, you can find entire sections of mega bookstores devoted to culinary essays and food criticism, from H.L. Mencken to Claiborne, Beard, Child, etc.  Brillat-Savarin is to them what Anaxagoras and Socrates were to philosophy: Trail-blazing, rambling, doing something completely new and therefore not familiar with any of the existing rules.  He's all over the map, segueing from recipes to manners and culture to discourses on the end of the world to folksy anecdotes.  Most of it is just plain wonderful, in a "listen to your eccentric grandpa tell stories about the old days and never mind the rambling because he's funny and you might learn something" sort of way.

there are some useful sections about diets maybe, many more things, especially about cooking techniques, that are too archaic to be useful, and much about people and the things they put inside them that alternate between a snapshot of a bygone era and commentary on the universal human condition.  Everywhere are diners saying "Oh, this is good"; "Ah, most excellently good"; and "Oh Sir! Never but here do we receive such delights!"  Just say it along with them, and you'll be in the first "foodies club".  Very high recommendations.

Poor William Says: Fruits of Solitude, by William Penn  

To this a spare Diet contributes much. Eat therefore to live, and do not live to eat. That’s like a Man, but this below a Beast

Have wholesome, but not costly Food, and be rather cleanly than dainty in ordering it.

The Receipts of Cookery are swell’d to a Volume, but a good Stomach excels them all; to which nothing contributes more than Industry and Temperance.

It is a cruel Folly to offer up to Ostentation so many Lives of Creatures, as make up the State of our Treats; as it is a prodigal one to spend more in Sawce than in Meat.

The Proverb says, That enough is as good as a Feast: But it is certainly better, if Superfluity be a Fault, which never fails to be at Festivals.

If thou rise with an Appetite, thou art sure never to sit down without one.

 Rarely drink but when thou art dry; nor then, between Meals, if it can be avoided.

The smaller the Drink, the clearer the Head, and the cooler the Blood; which are great Benefits in Temper and Business.

Strong Liquors are good at some Times, and in small Proportions; being better for Physick than Food, for Cordials than common Use.

The most common things are the most useful; which shews both the Wisdom and Goodness of the great Lord of the Family of the World.

What therefore he has made rare, don’t thou use too commonly: Lest thou shouldest invert the Use and Order of things; become Wanton and Voluptuous; and thy Blessings prove a Curse.

 Let nothing be lost, said our Saviour. But that is lost that is misused.

Neither urge another to that thou wouldst be unwilling to do thy self, nor do thy self what looks to thee unseemly, and intemperate in another.

 All Excess is ill: But Drunkenness is of the worst Sort. It spoils Health, dismounts the Mind, and unmans Men: It reveals Secrets, is Quarrelsome, Lascivious, Impudent, Dangerous and Mad. In fine, he that is drunk is not a Man: Because he is so long void of Reason, that distinguishes a Man from a Beast.

In the tradition of such tracts as Proverbs and The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, the first Harvard Classics volume supplements Ben Franklin (see Bookpost, April 2016) and John Woolman (August 2016) with a short work of maxims of the "Alcohol in the middle of the day, washes a healthy liver away" variety.  The three works in the volume are united mainly be being Colonial-era American writers.

This was the book I carried around while holiday shopping, to pull out and graze in on line. 80 pages of separate sentences and paragraphs similar to the more famous sayings in Poor Richard's Almanac.  They're a little prudish maybe, but mostly sensible aside from their appeal to "because "God" says so, and I can't say as any of it was really offensive.  Worth a look, anyway.

*pause* Well...that's my year in books, I guess.  Join me next year for Jane Austen, Balzac, Schopenhauer, Tocqueville, Faraday, Kierkegaard, the Brontes, Patrick O'Brien, Flashman, and a whole lot of others centered around the next era. 

Find all of my previous Bookposts here: admnaismith.livejournal.com/...

2017 is my tenth year of writing monthly book posts, and my seventh in going through Great Books Through History.  This year will focus on the first part of the 19th century, with literature by Jane austen, the Brontes and Balzac; the philosophy of Schopenhauer and Hegel (both out-consumed by hume); the history of Guizot and Tocqueville; science by Faraday and Lobachevsky (the greatest who ever got chalk on his coat); economics of Ricardo and Saint-Simon; and enrichment in the form of period whodunnits by Barbara Hambly, Emily Brightwell and Anne Perry, and other historical novels by Patrick O'Brien and George MacDonald Fraser.  It's the year the Durants finally peter out as historical guides and the Harvard Classics and Great Books sets start to thin out. This is also the year I realize I'm going to be at this project beyond 2020.  The books agreed on by scholars as "great" may diminish, but the volume of output just keeps growing with every year covered.  I figure it will take me three more years to get to around 1920, and at least three more before I'm close enough to the end of the 20th Century to have crossed the line from "historical books" into just "reading books".  Are Norman Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut and Margaret Atwood considered "historical"?  I'll figure that out l;ater...anyhow, here are the books for January 2017.

Dancing with the Devil: Faust, Part 1, by JW von Goethe 

’Tis writ, “In the beginning was the Word!”

Thus should it stand: yet, while the line I trace,

Each year since 2013, my reading plan has begun with a volume that some scholar claims "ushered in the modern era" (Machiavelli, Descartes, Swift and now Goethe).  I've passed through many plays without even including them in the book posts, but Faust seems more like a stand-alone work of dramatic poetry than a "play"; Part 2, at least, seems impossible to produce for the stage.

Part One is relatively tame: Faust, the scholar-magician, has sought the meaning of life in theology, philosophy, science, sorcery and etc;, to no avail. Mephistopholes, having received Bok-of-Job permission from God, offers pleasure and knowledge in return for Faust's soul; Faust agrees that his soul is forfeit if the devil can produce anything so wonderful that Faust would ask for time to stop so that he can enjoy it longer. 

Every time I've read this, it has seemed to me that the Devil is the bigger fool to make this bargain, as Faust is so old and jaded that clearly nothing really excites him any more, if it ever  did.  He is a hermit, shut up with books all his life; the fool who would lose to the devil would be a sensualist youth.  And sure enough, Faust follows along with a "yeah, so?" attitude towards everything that follows, from tavern debauchery to a love affair in which he treats the woman shabbily by any standard, to views of the cosmos.

I've had trouble reconciling Faust's lack of excitement with the apparently central message that the meaning of life is not in knowing or having, but in constantly being in a state of flux, doing and working toward a goal that is never fully attained, but there we are.

Truth Universally Acknowledged: Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen 

"How despicably I have acted!" she cried.--"I, who have prided myself on my discernment! I, who have valued myself on my abilities! who have often disdained the generous candour of my sister, and gratified my vanity, in useless or blameable distrust.  How humiliating is this discovery! Yet, how just a humiliation! Had I been in love, I could not have been more wretchedly blind. But vanity, not love, has been my folly.  Pleased with the preference of one, and offended by the neglect of the other, on the very beginning of our acquaintance, I have courted prepossession and ignorance, and driven reason away, where either were concerned. Till this moment, I never knew myself."

Passing directly from 18th Century books (including the ones by her predecessors Fanny Burney and Ann Radcliffe) to Jane Austen, one realizes that she wrote in a way that hadn't been done before.  Today, our palates have been coarsened, and it is easy to dismiss Austen as fluffy, the way one might fail to appreciate a perfectly broiled, unseasoned fish if one had been accustomed to have it heavily laden with condiments.  People today speak of someone as "a regular Mr. Darcy" when they mean a dashing, handsome romantic mysterious gentleman and heartthrob to younger ladies, and never mind that the impression of the actual Mr. Darcy for most of the book is one of an impolite, insufferably supercilious iceberg.

I was in the right mood for it this time around.  Austen fans have long since known this, but if you're new to her, I envy you because you're going to have a ball. The conversation, if you open up to it, is wonderfully funny, the lessons in manners pointed, the verbal duelling between Elizabeth and Darcy expert and thrilling. Supporting characters--the hideous Lady Catherine; the boorish Collins; the imperturable Mr. Bennett-- people who seem at first like caricatures of humanity--seem much more human on a closer look, or maybe with experience.  Very high recommendations.

Threes Rev. 4898: The Science of Logic, by Georg WTF Hegel 

Logic is easy, because its facts are nothing but our own thought and its familiar forms or terms; and these are the acme of simplicity, the A B C of everything else.  They are also what we are best acquainted with, such as "is", and "is niot", quality and magnitude; being potential and being actual; one, many, and so on.  But such an acquaintance only adds to the difficulties of the study, for while on the one hand we naturally think it is not worth our trouble to occupy ourselves any longer with things so familiar, on the other hand, the problem is to become acquainted with them in a new way, quite opposite to that in which we know them already.

Hegel was put on earth so that we might appreciate the light Cartesian readability of Immanuel Kant. Pity anyone who tries to include works of philosophy in a study of the early 19th century--Kant not only took away philosophy from the conversational Brits and French, but he spawned a legion of horrible Germans who vied with each other to produce the heaviest, densest, least readable thought one could ever hope to avoid.  Hegel, by acclamation, won the prize.

Hegel is the last philosopher included in the original Great Books set (the second edition added more, and some philosophers, like Marx and James, are slotted in other categories), and the Logic was not included in that volume.  It stands on its own, like a mountain, telling philosophers that they have been bad and require punishment. 

He's very into trinities:  Thesis, antithesis, synthesis; Abstract, dialectical, and speculative stages of thought; Being, essence, and idea.  I would be lying if I told you I understood it all on a casual reading; it is not meant to be understood and, it seems to me, not worth the trouble.  The best I can manage is the thesis-antithesis-synthesis progression of a dialectic, in which truth consists of a proposition ("Do not eat poison"), contrasted with its opposite ("DO eat poison! It clears the sinuses!") and then joined together into a proposition that has more real truth than the first two parts ("You should eat only moderate amounts of poison, preferably mixed with good wholesome food so that it does not harm you").  Hegel did not discuss poison; he applied the dialectic to more debatable concepts, such as whether the Universe is one or many, or whether it is bounded or infinite, but I lost interest long before he even got really going.

In the first ("abstract") stage of thought, all thoughts are considered separately; in the dialectic, one considers that nothing really exists separately (it doesn't?) but in relation to other things (I see this with comparative terms like size and quantity; but not with mere things existing not in comparison); and speculation is the part where you're supposed to learn to love opposites unified in their opposition. 

Just shoot me.

The Regency Murders:  A Free Man of Color, by Barbara Hambly; Mrs Jeffries Learns the Trade, by Emily Brightwell; The Face of a Stranger, by Anne Perry 

Paris had been bad enough, knowing that he was a fully qualified surgeon who would never have his own practice--or never a paying one--sheerly because of the color of his skin.  Even as a musician his size and color had made him something of a curiosity, but at least people on the streets of Paris did not treat him like an idiot or a potentially dangerous savage.  At least he didn't have to alter his manner and his speech in the interests of making a living, of not running afoul of the Black Code.  At least he could look any man in the eyes.  In the few months he had been back, he had found himself keeping almost exclusively to the French town, among the Creoles, who had not been brought up with the assumption that all those not of pure European descent were or should be slaves.

--from A Free Man of Color

The butler's eyes narrowed suspiciously. "Are you from Scotland Yard too? Never heard of a woman peeler before. What do you want? Are you a neighbor? Some nosy parker that thinks she knows something? "

"No, no, no," Mrs Jeffries said quickly. She leaned closer and caught the distinct smell of brandy on the man's breath. Holding up the pocket watch she said, "I've only come to return the inspector's watch. I'm his housekeeper. He left this morning without it, and if I don't give it to him, he'll miss some very important appointments."

--from Mrs Jeffries Learns the Trade

"You make far too many assumptions, madame. You are arrogant, domineering, ill-tempered and condescending. And you leap to conclusions for which you have no foundation. God! I hate clever women!"

She froze for an instant before the reply aws on her lips. "I love clever men!" Her eyes raked him up and down.  "It seems we are both to be disappointed."

--from The Face of a Stranger

This year's set of mysteries set during the period I'm studying is weighted towards the middle of the century.  There is apparently a glut of Victorian-era crime novels and not very much from the Napoleonic and regency period. I don't mind.  I'll read ahead to the earlier Victorian era works and will still have plenty to keep me occupied next year and the year after that.

Barbara Hambly's hero Benjamin January is the "free man of color" referenced in the title of the first in her series set in and around New Orleans during the time when shitty white Americans were flocking to Louisiana and displacing the moderate racism (if you can call racism "moderate") of the French with the absolute horror that came to define the American south and which continues among Trump people to this day. January was born here, lived for much of his adulthood in Paris, and has returned, educated, cultured and in his 40s, to a land where he is considered less of a human than the dirtiest, smelliest, most ignorant and most morally bankrupt white river trash one can imagine.  Hambly has to devote a whole lot of ink to defining New Orleans as "home" just to explain why any self-respecting person who looks like January would choose to remain there when it is possible to leave, and further ink describing the tension between blacks, white Americans and the mixed-race Creoles.  In the midst of this is a "murder at the masked ball" plot that fooled me.  CW for frequent, probably unavoidable, use of period racial slurs and casual dehumanizing violence.

Emily Brightwell will keep me busy for most of the year with about 40 Murder She Wrote episodes, at least the first several of which are three-in-one volumes about a woman maneuvering behind the scenes to solve crimes such that a dumb man can get the credit, and working twice as hard as necessary just to make sure the dumb man doesn't realize she's helping.  (I checked; this series began in the 1990s. It reads like something from much earlier, and not just because it's set in the 19th century).  Imagine Inspector Lestrade has Angela Lansbury for a housekeeper, hiding his glasses so that she has to read coroners' reports to him; hiding his watch to have an excuse to visit crime scenes to return it to him; steering him to certain lines of inquiry with statements beginning, "I'm sure you've already thought of this, but..." and so on.  And so goes the doctor murder, the lost-brooch murder, and the seance murder, each of which can be read in under two hours, is easily solvable by the reader, and is quickly forgotten except for the gimmick of the servants  (because Mrs. Jeffries naturally sends the footman on errands and consults the cook for social gossip) keeping things running in spite of the bungling masters.

Finally, Anne Perry has the other long series for this period, and after going through The Face of a Stranger, I don't know the where the series is going, but I definitely want more.  This is GOOD stuff.  The book begins with a man recovering in a hospital after a severe head injury that has wiped out his memory; discovering that he is Scotland Yard inspector William Monk; discovering further that his previous personality had been horrible; and being assigned to investigate a murder that happened (telegraph, telegraph), oh, right about the time he had been injured, several weeks ago.  Oh, and the rest of the force, including his superior, hate him and want him to either fail or have to arrest someone in high society who can end his career for causing a scandal.  Very suspenseful, very well-written, and very highly recommended.

Trading Spouses: Couples, by John Updike 

The adventure was easy to imagine. Ruth, feeling that her pet needed more room for running, suspecting cruelty in the endless strenuousness of the wheel, not believing with her growing mind that any creature might have wits too dim to resent such captivity, had improvised around his tiny cage a larger cage of window screens she had found stacked in the attic waiting for summer.  She had tied the frames together with string, and Piet had never kept his promise to make her a stronger cage.  Several times the hamster had nosed his way out and had gone exploring in her room. Last night he had made it downstairs, discovering in the moon-soaked darkness undreamed-of continents, forests of furniture legs, vast rugs heaving with oceanic odors; toward morning an innocent giant in a nightgown had admitted a lion with a mildewed eye.  The hamster had never been given cause for fear and must have felt none until claws sprang from a sudden heaven fragrant with the just-discovered odors of cat and cow and dew.

So...this is my introduction to Updike.  The Rabbit books are an undertaking for some other year. Couples is, as far as I know, a stand-alone book, and weird.  The depiction of a circle of middle class, educated friends in a small New England town in 1963 (we know what year it is because the Kennedy assassination and the Profumo scandal are discussed by characters who, e.g., are bummed out that the President's death will cast a pall over the delightful cocktail party they'd planned, with the booze already paid for!) is simultaneously archaic, close enough to the middle class, educated adults I knew when I was a kid (full of parlor games and discussions of scholarly subjects), and extremely distant from said friends (their casual sexual affairs and neurotic Protestant guilt about them, plus steamy discussions about one another's bodies---at least I HOPE that's not what was going on with the grownups in my life when I'd gone to bed and stuff). The effect is at once comfortable and jarring. The characters are jaded. They are in Paradise and are bored by it. Their promiscuousness is both shocking and meaningless to them, and everybody else is doing it, and they all know it even though they keep it hush-hush.  I don't get these people, except when I do (yes, except then), and I envy their opportunities that my generation didn't get, and pity the waste they made out of them. 

It seemed to me like a straightforward novel about neurotic people, but maybe I shouldn't have taken it at face value.  After I'd read it, i saw that the cover blurb described the couples as a "magic circle" that included a "priest" (the dentist character) and a "scapegoat" (the cynical builder).  If they say so, I guess.

Sturm und Emo: The Sorrows of Young Werther, by JW von Goethe

And why should I be ashamed in the terrible moment when my entire being trembles between being and nothingness, since the past flashes like lightning above the dark abyss of the future and everything around me is swallowed up , and the world perishes with me? Is that not the voice of the creature thrown back on itself, failing, trapped, lost, and inexorably tumbling downward, the voice groaning in the inner depths of its vainly upwards-struggling energies: My God! My God! Why hast thou forsaken me? And if I should be ashamed of the expression, should I be afraid when facing that moment, since it did not escape Him who rolls up heaven like a carpet?

Goethe's first masterpiece is a novella that pained and bored me; it was designed for me to have read when I was much younger.  Then again, maybe it's best I didn't read it then; I'm told there were a significant number of tragic young romantics in Goethe's day who read it and romantically followed the title character's example into tragic romantic suicide.  Oops, SPOILER.  I'm old enough and cynical enough to be inspired to make fun of Stupid Emo Kids--but it isn't fair.  I remember being a silly young Romeo myself, certain that the world either revolved around my all-important feelings or was criminally indifferent to my suffering when it did not; obsessing over things that I could not have, because I could not have them, and swooning with melancholy pain at the results.  In retrospect, I feel like I fucked up my life needlessly, that I caused pain to others, and I take some comfort in persuading myself that everyone was stupid Drama Royalty when they were teenagers. Maybe I'm still fooling myself.

In woo-woo books about the enneagram and "personality types", Werther and the past self I try to hide from are the "four", and are said to be at their best when seeking reform; at their worst when they waste themselves trying to help others (who, in their case, probably resent them and want more space, and end up sending the "four" into  a shame spiral or resentment).   Werther takes a government job and hates it for its mundanity; falls in love with a married woman, mopes, writes emo letters, threatens suicide for the last third of the book (Oh woe! I go to see the forests and the fields for the last time! Woe!), and eventually does it.  Not a dry eye on the page.  Except mine.  I just felt really, really uncomfortable and wondered, if I had been there, whether I would have patiently, nurturingly tried to talk him out of it, or just slapped him and told him to get off the cross 'cuz we need the wood.   Seems to me, as we grow up, we lose something valuable in the tendency to feel intense emotions, but we get something that is necessary for sanity too.  What do YOU think? 

If i's nae Scottish, i's CRAP! Rob Roy, by Sir Walter Scott  

"O Lud! On what a strand you are wrecked!" replied the young lady. "A poor forlorn and ignorant stranger, unacquainted with the Alcoran of the savage tribe whom you are come to reside among--never to have heard of Markham, the most celebrated author on farriery! Then I fear you are equally a stranger to the more modern names of Gibson and Bartlett?"
"I am indeed, Miss Vernon."
"And do you not blush to own it?" said Miss Vernon. "Why, we must forswear your alliance. Then, I suppose, you can neither give a ball nor a mash nor a horn?"

"I confess I trust all these matters to an ostler, or to my groom."
"Incredible carelessness!"

I probably should have read Scott's novels last year, when I was deep into the 18th Century. Rob Roy takes place much earlier than the Bonnie Prince Charlie rebellion central to the Waverly novels and the Outlander plot, when the Hanoverian Kings were just established and the son of James II appeared to have a better claim to the throne.  All of which is mere background to a coming of age novel.

The plot is similar to that of Waverly.  A sensitive, cultured London youth heads north and experiences culture shock at the gruff, sturdy, less book learning but more noble savage manliness manners of Clan McHearty, where they say things to the effect of "Och, ye have a woman's hand!  I'll wager ye never once ploughed a stony frozen field full of thistles with your fingers!" (at least I assume that's what they say; after a year of Robbie Burns poetry, you'd think I'd have a knack for Scots dialect writing, but it's different when most of the text is in English, except for Scottish characters whose indecipherable brogue is suddenly set down jarringly on the page.  The effect is especially unfortunate in the narrator=protagonist's conversations with a rustic Scot servant who is supposed to be comic but whose jokes are utterly spoiled by the language barrier with an English-speaking reader. Any comic timing is lost, and (as with a modern reader tackling a Shakespeare text for the first time) by the time one figures out what the character has said, the opportunity to be amused by it has long passed)...the protagonist eventually discovers his own latent Scot manliness, performs a few tentative acts of heroism, wins the respect, approval, and eventually the love of the Scottish love interest (the courtship of whom offensively resembles the challenge of breaking a wild horse) and goes back to confound scoundrels and take charge of his life in England.  I give it a hall pass for being an early novel that was original at the time, though it seems cliche-ridden today.

The title character, the historical outlaw Rob Roy MacGregor, has only a peripheral role in the novel, showing up obligingly from time to time as Rogue Ex Machina to extricate the protagonist from a tight spot. His presence is the only thing the book has in common with the  Lism Neeson movie, which tells a completely different story.

Irish Twits: The Absentee, by Maria Edgeworth 

In Dublin, there is positively good company, and positively bad, but not, as in London, many degrees of comparison; not innumerable luminaries of the polite world moving in different orbits of fashion, but all the bright planets of note and name move and revolve in the same narrow limits. Lord Colambre did not find that either his father's or his mother's representations of society resembled the reality which he now beheld.  Lady Clonbrony had, in terms of detestation, described Dublin as it had appeared to her soon after the Union; Lord Clonbrony had painted it with convivial enthusiasm, such as he saw it long before the Union, when first he drank claret at the fashionable clubs.

PG Wodehouse was one of the first writers for "grown-ups" that I ever read.  I found them hilarious at the time, and only much later realized that there was a dark side to a society in which twittish drones of leisure wot-wotted their way through wealthy society, doing nothing useful, displaying no character development and learning nothing new for novel after novel while their hypercompetent butlers wiped their asses for them and women of strength and intelligence were depicted as horrors, romances with whom the male must be extricated from quickly, lest she ruin his life of pleasure by insisting he make something of himself. I mention this in the context of Maria Edgeworth, who predates Wodehouse by over a century, because I am quite familiar with the conditions of the Irish under English lords who were given Irish land grants like American frontier people were "given" land that had been cleared of the pesky, not-considered-people natives who had been there first, and so the "amusing" story of the dopey absentee landlord and his wife, trying to make it in London society without manners is no longer the slightest bit amusing to me.  Not at the expense of the oppressed Irish, and not when America has a trashy rich twit in chief trying to win over DC society without morals or manners.

There are scenes in Ireland where the downtrodden peasants exist, in a spirit later copied by Dances With Wolves and Avatar, to give the white, privileged son and heir a learning experience about how they are people too. The kid has a lot of bad upbringing to overcome, and I'd have felt more sympathetic to him if he didn't abandon the woman he loves upon hearing the news that she was (gasp!)  born out of wedlock, and therefore an unsuitable match for one such as he.  This dilemma is resolved at the end by the revelation that she is in fact not only "legitimate" but a heiress, and instead of booting him down the stairs, she gives herself straight to him.  Without a butler to extricate him, they are married and live in a lifestyle and mindset foreign to me ever after.

Poldark:  Warleggan and The Black Moon, by Winston Graham  

Ross had always been one step more than a husband to her. From the moment when, a little over nine years ago, he had taken her into his kitchen as a starving miner's brat, he had represented a kind of nobility, not of birth but of character, a person whose standards of behaviour were always, and would always be, slightly better, surer than her own.  Often she argued with him, lightly, flippantly, disagreeing with his views and his judgments, but underneath and on fundamental matters she gave him best.

Warleggan and The Black moon are volumes 4 and 5 in the Poldark saga.  This far into the series, it is difficult to discuss the plot (which is very suspenseful and full of twists, including the deaths of major characters)  without spoiling it for people who have not read the earlier books.

I will say that the series continues to have my highest recommendations, both for character development and for historical details, in which period mining, smuggling, medicine, the conflict between Methodism and the church of England, and the French wars on the continent and the English peasantry's attitude thereto (including a daring raid on a prisoner of war camp near Brest), are discussed in detail without taking from the story. I continue to be affected by the major characters:  the stubborn Ross, the scheming Warleggan, the feckless Elizabeth, the self-sacrificing Dr. Enys, the spirited Caroline (who gets faulted for thinking for herself and whose horrible father and uncle say she needs a stern male hand to control her (*cough* MikePence *cough*), a new focus on Aunt Agatha, and Demelza's brothers. CW: There are rapes, one by a supposedly "good guy", the wrongness of which is completely glossed over by the author.

Gothic Awful: The Albigenses, by Charles Robert Maturin  

"Blasphemer--wizard--sacrilegious!" uttered a thousand voices, and a hundred lances were raised against the offender. One of these chanced to raise the thick veil that covered the figure; it fell back, and discovered the form of a woman. The uproar increased. "A female, and within cloistered walls! A female! Shame for thy sex and insult to these walls!" cried the ecclesiastics, "What makest thou here?" The military followers soon caught the example of indignity and outrage, and the wretched female was hurried to the gate----Breaking from them she exclaimed, in a voice that made the rudest pause:--"A woman! Yes, did not a woman bear ye? Did not a woman nurse ye? Did not a woman love ye? Ay, or ye had never grown to that pitch of lustihood, and manly and grateful use ye make of it, to thrust and throng a woman thus!"

UGH!  This book is way too long and way too clunky--an attempt to do to The Faerie Queene what Sir Walter Scott did for the Jacobite risings and for Medieval legend.  It's one of those works that tries to combine heavy duty Christian doctrine with folk legends about faeries and werewolves and knights on quests.  There are endless factions of religious orders fleeing persecution from different religious orders, and alternately sheltering or being abducted into a series of gloomy Gormenghastish Gothic castles indistinguishable from one another due to the presence of so many dungeons.

It's as dense as Spenser without the poetry, and lacks the characterization and wit of Scott. Even the scenes with fights and abductions and werewolf attacks are boring.  Not recommended.

Find all of my previous Bookposts here: admnaismith.livejournal.com/...

The 19th Century Murders:  A Dangerous Mourning and Defend and Betray, by Anne Perry; Mrs. Jeffries Takes a Second Look, by Emily Brightwell; Fever Season, by Barbara Hambly  

"If you don't know the difference between a lady and a parlor maid, Monk, that says more about your ignorance than you would like...It shows that for all your arrogance and ambition, you're just the uncouth provincial clod you always were. Your fine clothes and your assumed accent don't make a gentleman of you--the boor is still underneath and it will always come out. " His eyes shone with a kind of wild, bitter triumph.  He had said at last what had been seething inside him for years, and there was an uncontrollable joy in its release.

--from A Dangerous Mourning

"I have heard terrible things, Monsieur, terrible things.  In the dead of night, when I am unable to sleep--and I have never slept well, even as a child, never.  Groans and cries come from the attic of that house; the sound of whips, and the clanking of chains. That woman--I've heard she keeps her slaves chained, and tortures them nightly! No one will admit to it. That woman is too powerful, her precious family too prominent--No, no, she can do no wrong, everyone says. But me...I know."

--from Fever Season

Anne Perry's Inspector Monk series may well be the most gripping, arc-changing set of mysteries I'll have read this year, even this decade, if the first few books are an indication.  The first book had him awaken in a state of amnesia and solve a crime starting from the middle of the investigation.  The second has him again walking a tightrope in a situation where the murder took place in the home of an upper class family, and so it is assumed and expected that the police will obligingly frame one of the servants, and Monk faces dismissal from his job for refusing to arrest an innocent person just for having conveniently low social standing.  Meanwhile, the nurse who assists him (and who in a typical series will eventually be his lover) faces similar repercussions for daring to diagnose patients and to know what she's doing, as if she were a man or something. The outrage!  Very suspenseful, with the entire nature of the crime turned upside down in the final chapter.

Defend and Betray is a courtroom preparation-and-trial book in which the lawyer Oliver Rathbone takes a main-cast role alongside Hester and William, in a case in which nobody but the defendant had the opportunity to do it, and she's confessed to the crime although her claimed motive makes no sense.  Sorry, but I have to include a SPOILER for a mid-novel plot twist because the reader deserves a CW for child sex abuse, the act and consequences of which are analyzed in detail, emphasizing the lasting trauma to the victim.  In fact, Perry's style can be counted on to emphasize emotional pain associated with not just crime but with the oppressive morals and manners of 19th century England as well, to an extent not usually found in crime novels that emphasize clues and detection.

Emily Brightwell's Murder-She-Wrote style books do not emphasize pain.  Second Look is another omnibus of three short Mrs. Jeffries mysteries, in which the housekeeper leads the Don't-squeeze-the-Sharman-ish inspector's household servants in solving crimes for him while seeing to it that no one, including the inspector, realizes that they've done it, and he gets the credit despite being a booby.  It's a long series, and I'm not sure how many more I'm going to read.  All six so far have been ridiculously easy to solve, and the running gag of the undeserving high-status white guy confusedly getting credit for what the neglected people lower on the totem pole did is getting old already.

Finally this month, the second in Barbara Hambly's Benjamin January series set in pre-Civil War New Orleans requires (as evidently the whole series necessarily will) a content warning for the extreme racism and cruelty that existed then (and that the current Republican Administration appears eager to return to) as well as a plot spoiler regarding the climax, which rivals the liberation of WWII camps in the revelation of the depths to which human objectification and degradation can sink.  I have a strong stomach for fiction that pushes the envelope on nastiness, but this one made me throw up in my mouth and have the shivers for hours after, contemplating the human trafficking that happened in this country and a rich person's "comfortable" home that makes Candyland seem like a happy vacation spot in comparison.  And yes--the author's note informs us that this is based on an actual historical incident.  You have been warned.

The Metaphysical Basis for Tyranny: The Phenomenology of Spirit, by Georg WTF Hegel

Now, because the systematic statement of the mind’s experience embraces merely its ways of appearing, it may well seem that the advance from that to the science of ultimate truth in the form of truth is merely negative; and we might readily be content to dispense with the negative process as something altogether false, and might ask to be taken straight to the truth at once: why meddle with what is false at all? The point formerly raised, that we should have begun with science at once, may be answered here by considering the character of negativity in general regarded as something false. The usual ideas on this subject particularly obstruct the approach to the truth. The consideration of this point will give us an opportunity to speak about mathematical knowledge, which non-philosophical knowledge looks upon as the ideal which philosophy ought to try to attain, but has so far striven in vain to reach. Truth and falsehood as commonly understood belong to those sharply defined ideas which claim a completely fixed nature of their own, one standing in solid isolation on this side, the other on that, without any community between them. Against that view it must be pointed out, that truth is not like stamped coin that is issued ready from the mint and so can be taken up and used.

I won't pretend to have understood it all. This is almost as difficult as last month's attempt to read the Logic, and is supposedly Hegel's most important work, described as a "coming of age" philosophical journey of the mind, from primitive "being" to "idea" (hence the definition of 18-19th century Germans as a movement of "idealists" as opposed to "materialists" or "empiricists."

There's some appeal in the framing of truth as a struggle between opposites moving towards synthesis.  We see this in political debates between left and right, liberty and equality, order and freedom, centralized and decentralize government. Hegel wrote at a time when Germany was being conquered by Napoleon.  Hegel admired Napoleon's tactics at Bowling Green in Bavaria at the time, and claimed Germany deserved what it got; in later life, he became more nationalistic.  His ideas were co-opted by Marxists and fascists both, by atheists and Protestant zealots. Having claimed both sides of their dichotomies and declared that perpetual movement, and not actual facts, were what mattered, he paved the way for authoritarians to declare that there is no objective truth, and that therefore we should believe what it suits authority (God or the State) to order you to believe from one day to another, whether we have officially always been at war with Eurasia or Eastasia.

This I find very dangerous in these interesting times. You can see the Trumpkins now, with their "alternative facts", mounting an attack on truth, science, and education. A part of their PLAN is to cause people to doubt whether there is truth, and to leave us with nothing to hold on to except the pronouncements of those claiming the right to force you into submission.  Funny how no one questions how they, and only they, have access to truth.  In this sense, Hegel was one of the original gaslighters.

 Building Character through Torture: The Time of the Hero, by Mario Vargas Llosa

They stripped him and the voice ordered him to lie down and "swim" on his back around the soccer field.  Later they took him into one of the barracks of the Fourth, where he made up a lot of bunks, sang and danced on a locker, imitated movie stars, polished many pairs of boots, cleaned a floor tile with his tongue, screwed a pillow, drank piss, but all that took place in a feverish dream and suddenl;y he found himself backin his own section, stretched out on his bunk, thinking: I swear I'll run away from here. Tomorrow morning.  The barracks was silent. The boys looked at each other, and in spite of having been beaten and spit on, smeared and pissed on, they were solemn, even ceremonious.

Severe content warning for bullying, sex abuse, dog torture, and other cruel and violent behavior in this novel about boys at a Peruvian military academy where the boy who follows the rules is tortured and eventually killed by the other kids, who turn military discipline into lawless gang culture under the approving eye of the so-called "grown ups", and the one officer who follows the rules is kicked out for following rules instead of direct orders.  If you can stomach it, it has a lot to say about how impressionable young minds can be made to do horrible things, which is especially relevant as we watch the American holocaust take form and prepare to resist tyranny and bigotry, or to embrace it.

Because when the authorities--the teachers and principals and the military--are all backing up the bullies, or actively instigating them, or are themselves the bullies---then who do you go to for help?

Roald Dahl wrote a few stories about growing up in an early 20th Century English School where younger students were virtually enslaved to older students, who were allowed to physically beat them, and those who resisted were beaten by the masters.  That happens tenfold at the military academy here.  The "circle' that becomes a gang begins as a group of new students desperately banding together to defend themselves against the Fourth Years, and being threatened with expulsion for not submitting to them (as supposedly all good soldiers must learn to do, or something).  Compare and contrast with former Senator Jim Webb's military academy book A Sense of honor, in which hazing and milder forms of bullying are presented as good for their victims, if you understand it the way soldiers do).

This book, apparently partly autobiographical, was attempted to be suppressed by the Peruvian Government for making the military look bad, so it must be doing something right.  

Poetry and Truth: The Autobiography of Goethe :

I should certainly have passed a tedious evening if an unexpected apparition had not revived me. On our arrival we found the table already neatly down and orderly set, and sufficient wine served on it: we sat down and remained alone, without requiring further service. As there was, however, a scarcity of wine at last, one of them called for the maid; but, instead of the maid, there came in a girl of uncommon, and when one saw her with all around her, of incredible beauty. “What do you desire?”, she asked after cordially having wished us a good evening. “The maid is ill in bed. Can I serve you?”“The wine is out”, said one. “If you would fetch us a few bottles, it would be very kind.”“Do it, Gretchen”, said another: it is but a cat’s leap from here.”“Why not?”, she answered; and taking a few empty bottles from the table, she hastened out. Her form, as seen from behind, was almost more elegant. The little cap sat so neatly upon her little head, which a slender throat united very gracefully to her neck and shoulders. Every thing about her seemed choice; and one could survey her whole form the more at ease, as one’s attention was no more exclusively attracted and fettered by the quiet, honest eyes and lovely mouth. I reproved my comrades for sending the girl out alone at night, but they only laughed at me; and I was soon consoled by her return, as the publican lived only just across the way. “Sit down with us, in return”, said one. She did so; but, alas! She did not come near me. She drank a glass to our health, and speedily departed, advising us not to stay very long together, and not to be so noisy, as her mother was just going to bed. It was not, however, her own mother, but the mother of our hosts.

...and thus the female lead in Faust was conceived.

I like writers’ autobiographies when they share the moments they got the idea for something that ended up rocking the world, like the candy Roald Dahl bought that inspired Willy Wonka, or Mark Twain’s adventures as a Mississippi riverboat pilot that hold a funhouse mirror to Huck and Jim’s raft.

Goethe is a long-winded guy whose work, like Glen Beck’s speeches, probably sound much better in the original German, but he has his moments of charm, and his life encompassed a lot more than writing heavy philosophical novels and plays (his youth, however, was nowhere near as dramatic as that of Wilhelm or Werther; in his own account, he was always young Faust, forever thirsting after knowledge and directed action).  I had no idea he had delved so deeply into science and politics, for example—a lot of these 18^th-to-19^th Century Renaissance men did a bit of everything. But where Byron and Shelley had fun, or at least high drama, in the process, Goethe remained earnest and serious throughout.  As a result, his autobiography, especially in translation, is very, very dry, if good for you. Recommended with caution, and best read in a dark attic by the light of a whale-oil lamp.

Emma And Eminence: Emma, by Jane Austen  

Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.

So begins what is maybe the best and intellectually deepest of the Jane Austen novels (the Harvard Classics chose to represent her with Pride and Prejudice, and the Great Books second edition added Emma.  It's probably not a good idea to overthink these books, which are designed to delight and divert with sparkling language and light plots that get everyone suitably married in due time....but in these times, i find myself brooding about everything anyhow.

Much is made about how the shippings of various characters as candidates for marriage is or is not "suitable".  This, on the heel of my reading of one of the Poldark novels, in which, with bitter irony, the very best that can be said of a truly horrible marriage is that it was suitable.  Someone's social position is said to make her good enough to marry a gentleman farmer, but downright uppity and presumptuous to set her sights on a well-to-do clergyman.  So-and-so is wealthy enough for this person, but not for that person, and for a gentleman to marry *this* particular wench would make him the butt of jokes and shunned by civil society--which doesn't seem to me all that civil.

There are plot points--the humorously cringeworthy denouments of Emma's various attempts to ship people; the excursion to Box Hill; the sorting out of people into "suitable" couples.  Once one knows the plot, the delight is in dramatic irony as one sees the little hints of where people's true feelings and intentions lie as Emma tries to herd them elsewhere.

I found myself comparing the conversations between Emma and Knightly with those of Miss Bennett and Mr. Darcy, and finding both men to be irritable and overly bossy.  Knightly, at least, is generally proven right by circumstance, so i guess he's not quite a mansplainer, and I wouldn't necessarily mind having some advice from him in an unfamiliar social situation, but...I guess one has to be in the right mood.  This is my third reading of Emma, and I recall being much more impressed with his apparent authority when i was a much younger reader.  Go figure.  

Irish Tom Jones: Ormond, by Maria Edgeworth  
Closing the book, Harry Ormond resolved to be what he admired--and if possible, to shine forth an irish Tom Jones. For this purpose, he was not at all bound to be a moral gentleman, nor as he conceived it, to be a gentleman at all.  Not, at least, in the commencement of his career. He might become accomplished at any convenient period of his life, and become moral at the end of it, but he might begin by becoming an accomplished blackguard.

This is by far my favorite of the three Edgeworth novels I have read, and never mind that it is maybe the most ham-fisted morality stories, that never fails to remind you that rank and class are bullshit compared to actually having virtue. It's done well, and the humor is uniquely Irish.

Ormond is of low birth, his mother dead and his father off adventuring in India (Will dad turn up at the end having made his fortune? Our market research says YES!).  His uncle loves and admires him, but does not hesitate to throw him out of the castle when the youth looks to be a threat to his plans to marry off his own son, Ormond's cousin  (Will the cousin turn out to be a jerk such that Ormond can have the sophisticated girl after all, who wll tame and civilize him by her example?  Our market research says YES!).  His other uncle, who lives in a different castle out on the Black Islands and keeps to the traditional Irish ways while the first uncle is a social climber seeking a seat in Parliament. Uncle #2 loves Ormond, though he thinks of him as a bit of a prig for refusing to drink to excess, and for all the other moral resolutions our hero makes to be a good person. (Will he suffer for his adherence to virtue, even be thought to be the most amoral villain of all, before finally being vindicated and loved by all decent folk?  Our market research says YES!)

Poldark: The Four Swans and the Angry Tide, by Winston Graham  

When men were ill, they did not want the pragmatical approach of a Dr. Dwight Enys, who used his eyes and saw how often his remedies failed and therefore was tentative in his decisions.  They did not want someone who came in and sat and talked pleasantly and had an unassuming word for the children, even a pat for the dog. They liked the importance, the confidence, the attack of a demi-god, whose voice was already echoing through the house as he mounted the stairs, who had the maids scurrying for water or blankets and the patient's relatives hanging on every word.  Dr. Behenna was such a man. His very appearance made the heart beat faster, even if, as often happened, it later stopped beating altogether.  Failure did not depress him.  When one of his patients died it was not the fault of his remedies, it was the fault of the patient.

The sixth and seventh Poldark books are gripping page-turners with impressive character development, suspenseful plots, and enlightening historical detail, just like the earlier ones--not much of which I can get into without spoiling the arc plot for people who haven't read the first ones.  The plot has expanded by now to go into several households, such that the "four swans" of the sixth book are the major female characters, each with a marriage of varying challenge and happiness or lack thereof, who don't interact with each other much but have several chapters each to themselves.  CW for marital rape that, however much Graham euphemizes it as "enjoying his husbandly prerogative" is unmistakably rape without (in this time period) legal redress.  In fact, the casual arrogance of rich or noble white guys concerning the "impudence" of people who dare defend themselves against abuse and therefore must be chastised, makes the blood boil as Graham intends. Very high recommendations.

 Maxims--German:  The Lichtenberg Reader (Georg Christoph Lichtenberg)

I must not forget that I once put the question "What are the Northern Lights?" addressed to an angel, on the floor of Graupner's attic, and the next morning sneaked up there, most shyly, for the note.  Oh, if only some practical joker had answered the note!

I cannot deny it--When I saw for the first time that people in my country began to know the meaning of the radical sign in mathematics, tears of joy came to my eyes.

"How did you like it at this party?" Answer: Just fine. Almost as well as being in my room by myself.

In a sea of incomprehensible philosophers and thick preachy literary writers, Lichtenberg stands out as a rare kind of 19th century German author who is fun to read, and who seems like my kind of guy, someone I would like to have a conversation with, just like Goethe and Hegel aren't.  His maxims, short essays, and almanac entries cover all sorts of whimsical subjects and make me smile (but not laugh) because I "get it" with him the way I think some readers just won't.  Seems to me, only an introvert, for example, would appreciate the part about a party being almost as much fun as being home alone, while an extrovert might interpret it as a snide insult.  Very satisfying.

 Maxims--French:  Selected writings of Sébastien-Roch Nicolas Chamfort 

A man aged forty who is not a misanthrope has never loved mankind.

The public! The public! How many idiots does it take to make up a public?

Love as we know it in society is only the exchange of two fantasies and the contact of two surfaces of skin.

Chamfort, on the other hand, is an asshole who reminds me of Dr. Johnson without the memorable zing.  Most of what he has to say denounces the populace as a bunch of contemptible fools (which, living in post 11/9 America, I feel some sympathy for, but he is more of a right wing authoritarian than a disillusioned liberal). Considering he was writing in the thick of the French Revolution, I'm amazed he wasn't executed. Then again, for all I know, he was.

Stories, by Nikolai Gogol

The young officials laughed at and made fun of him, so far as their official wit permitted; told in his presence various stories concocted about him, and about his landlady, an old woman of seventy; declared that she beat him; asked when the wedding was to be; and strewed bits of paper over his head, calling them snow. But Akakiy Akakievitch answered not a word, any more than if there had been no one there besides himself. It even had no effect upon his work: amid all these annoyances he never made a single mistake in a letter. But if the joking became wholly unbearable, as when they jogged his hand and prevented his attending to his work, he would exclaim, “Leave me alone! Why do you insult me?” And there was something strange in the words and the voice in which they were uttered. There was in it something which moved to pity; so much that one young man, a new-comer, who, taking pattern by the others, had permitted himself to make sport of Akakiy, suddenly stopped short, as though all about him had undergone a transformation, and presented itself in a different aspect. Some unseen force repelled him from the comrades whose acquaintance he had made, on the supposition that they were well-bred and polite men. Long afterwards, in his gayest moments, there recurred to his mind the little official with the bald forehead, with his heart-rending words, “Leave me alone! Why do you insult me?” In these moving words, other words resounded—“I am thy brother.” And the young man covered his face with his hand; and many a time afterwards, in the course of his life, shuddered at seeing how much inhumanity there is in man, how much savage coarseness is concealed beneath delicate, refined worldliness, and even, O God! in that man whom the world acknowledges as honourable and noble.

Except for Pushkin, Gogol seems to have marked the dawn of Russian literature. His stories, like Checkhov's, run the gamut from nonsense to irritating pathos to genuinely moving, with the kind of "humor" that feels sour, because it punches down and invites you to join in kicking some weak person to whose back a "kick me" sign has been taped.  With the distinction that sometimes, having done so, Gogol then scolds you for having joined in.

The quoted part is from "The Overcoat".  Where Western Europe had knights and barons and serfs, Russia had officials of various ranks, among the lowest of whom is Akaky Akakiovich, who cried at his baptism as if he knew he was going to be a titular clerk, and whom everyone dutifully despises.  Akakyovich endures financial sacrifice saving to buy a new coat the way some people today save for the down payment on a home, and when he finally gets his precious coat, triggering things happen.

My other favorites from this collection are "The Portrait", a moral tale about the conflict between wealth and talent, and "The Nose", an absurdist piece in which a minor official's nose disappears, leaving a Voldemort-like blank surface. The nose is later seen disguised as another official who refuses to recognize him, and is later handed back to him, giving rise to the dilemma of how to stick it back on his face.

Elegant Goethic Lolita: Elective Affinities, by JW von Goethe  

In ordinary life we are often confronted with something which, in an epic poem, we are accustomed to admire as a poetic device, namely that after the principal characters have left the scene or have withdrawn into inactivity, a second and even a third person, until then hardly noticed, comes forward at once to fill their places.  These persons, as they display their whole activity, then seem to us also worthy of our attention, our sympathy, and even of our praise and admiration.

The more 19th century German literature and philosophy I read, the more it seems connected, as if a region that, prior to Kant, was not known for much in the way of writings, suddenly developed a common train of thought involving spirit and struggle.  Goethe seems to draw on Hegel, and the other way around.

Elective Affinities is a very serious philosophical novel without much characterization, except in that the various people are all symbolic o man's mind, heart, soul, willpower, etc., and their attraction to one another is described as chemical catalytic reactions as opposed to actual feelings, giving rise to unkind stereotypes about Teutonic courtship rituals.  ("Ah, I must bond with you, for I am a flourine ion in human form!" #GeekLove )

The stodgy, scholarly presentation obfuscates the implications of the central character, a married man, carrying on an affair with his wife's niece, a minor.  His wife is dallying with a handsome captain.  How festive!  So--recommended for very serious fans of statutory rape being justified as an excusable, even inevitable, result of "chemistry". #Eww.

Fanny and Fanciness: Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen  

"You have disappointed every expectation I had formed, and have proved yourself a character the very reverse of what I had supposed. For I HAD, Fanny, as I think my behaviour must have shewn, formed a very favorable opinion of you from the period of my return to England. I had thought you peculiarly free from willfulness of temper, self-conceit, and every tendency to that independence of spirit which prevails so much in modern days, even in young women, and which in young women is offensive and disgusting beyond all common offense. But you have now shewn me that you can and will be willful and perverse, that you can and will decide for yourself, without any consideration or deference for those who have surely some right to guide you--without even asking their advice."

This was the last and only Austen novel I could have the pleasure of reading for the first time this year, and it seems to me I saved the best for last.

Fanny Price is alone among the Austen ladies in being an introvert.  While she doesn't have much of the amusing, witty verbal swordplay of Elizabeth Bennett or Emma Woodhouse, Fanny has hidden steel and a depth of character beyond the others.  She is brought at age ten from a poor family to be raised by wealthy relatives who never fail to remind her that her station is below theirs and that she ought to be grateful that they deign to notice her  (I wondered how familiar JK Rowling is with Mansfield Park, as the most snooty and catty of said relatives is named Mrs. Norris.  Coincidence?).  As it turns out--and no one could possibly have predicted this--the snooty rich relatives mostly turn out to have not much of value on the inside, while Fanny and her values prove to be proper again and again--despite the diatribe quoted above, which is from an otherwise well-meaning uncle upon her refusal of an arranged marriage, said uncle soon having cause to bitterly regret his words.  Very highest recommendations.

Aubrey/Maturin:  Master and Commander, by Patrick O'Brian  

"We do have a physician aboard--an amazing hand with a saw or a clyster.  He was with me a pint or so ago. Opened our gunner's skull, roused out his brains, set them to rights, stuffed them back in again--I could not bear to look, I assure you gentlemen--bade the armourer take a crown piece, hammer it out thin into a little dome and so clapped it on, screwed it down and sewed up his scalp as neatly as a sailmaker. Now that's what I call real physic--none of your damned pills and delay."

Also this month, I eagerly began a second reading of one of the most delightful "buddy road trip" (at sea) stories I've ever encountered, one that to my knowledge EVERY member of my diverse family, including the ones that don't read, lapped up vigorously as it was published.

Captain Jack Aubrey, the golden-haired exuberant commander whose career is hobbled by his unfortunate tendency to cuckold his superior officers, and Stephen Maturin, the perpetually astonished surgeon with a secret life and unseen depths to him, together make up a legendary friendship during the Napoleonic wars. The first of the 20 1/2 novels is easily the worst, as it falls to it to include explanations of all the frigate-era nautical terms and Naval rankings you have to  know as the series progresses, with many passages devoted to the landlubber Stephen having them explained to him in the "You may not know this, Bob, but--" trope. Never mind. It is still exciting.

If you haven't read the Aubrey/Maturin series, I envy you. Because you are going to have a BALL.

Protestants and Protestations: The Monastery, by Walter Scott

In such a situation, his rigour might have relented in favour of the criminal, whom it was his pleasure to crush or to place at freedom.  But in Scotland, during this crisis, the case was entirely different. The question was, whether one of  the spirituality dared, at the hazard of his own life, step forward to assert and exercise the rights of the church.  Was there any one who would venture to wield the thunder in her cause, or must it remain like that in the hand of painted Jupiter, the object of derision instead of terror?

Meh.

See my comments on Maturin's The Albigenses in January.  At the time, I called that book a midpoint between Spenser and Scott, with the worst aspects of both.  Scott's gothic church-tower book is only twice as interesting.  The plot itself, with murders and flights from justice, and a white apparition that appears from time to time to sing riddles and rescue some sort of holy book from unclean hands because something something haggis, ought to be exciting, but since they're all doing what they do over a boring motive about which is the One true religion, I could barely keep my eyes open.  YMMV.

Exploring the American Holocaust:  Kindred, by Octavia Butler  

The slave's body jerked and strained against its ropes. I watched the whip for a moment wondering if it was like the one Weylin had used on Rufus years before. If it was, I understood completely why Margaret Weylin had taken the boy and fled.  The whip was heavy and at least six feet long, and i wouldn't have used it on anything living. It drew blood and screams at every blow.

I am grateful for "time travel" books to engage my appetite for speculative fiction while trying to read about past times.  Last year it was the Outlander series; this year I found a jewel of a tale by the late, great Octavia Butler, in which the WOC partner in a 1970s mixed-race marriage (which has its own difficulties at the time)  is several times yanked back to the pre-war South (you know, the days when today's Republicans say America was "great") at times when her white ancestor the shitty plantation heir and her black ancestor the slave (what some of today's Republicans call "foreign workers" or "immigrants") are in mortal peril. Either she needs to save them in order to eventually be born, or something something garbanzo.

Like Hambly's book Fever Season, reviewed last month, Kindred makes the argument that the American South  had a holocaust similar to Hitler's, with the distinction that it lasted over 200 years.  So much degradation, non-personing, casual violence accepted as the natural way of things.  And our country has failed to read and study this ugly history, and has especially failed to vow "Never Again.".  The Federal government is continuing to gloss it all over as I type this, and there are justifiable fears that at least some in the President's cabinet are trying to push the envelope as far back to these conditions as they can possibly get away with..  Very high recommendations.

The pre-Victorian Murders: A Sudden Fearful Death, by Anne Perry. The Jannisary Tree, by Jason Goodwin. Mrs. Jeffries Takes Tea at Three, by Emily Brightwell  

Her idealism had been betrayed, the only thing that had made her precious, given her dignity and belief, had been destroyed. He had mocked the very best in her. She was an ugly woman, coarse and unloved, and she knew it. She had had one value, and now it was gone. Perhaps to have robbed her of it was a sin like murder too.

--from A Sudden Fearful Death

Yashim had many things--innate charm, a gift for languages, and the ability to open those gray eyes suddenly wide. Both men and women had found themselves strangely hypnotized by his voice, before they had even noticed who was speaking. But he lacked balls.

Not in the vulgar sense. Yashim was reasonably brave. But he was that creature rare even in nineteenth-century Istanbul. Yashim was a eunnuch.

--from The Janissary Tree

I am going to do what I don't normally do here and SPOILER the plot of A Sudden Fearful Death, because it isn't worth reading, especially given the very high quality of the first three books in Perry's Monk series.  The big reveal is that the murderer, a very respected and capable doctor with a wife and family, on trial and represented by the "good guy" lawyer Rathbone, did not have the improbable motive of sex-blackmail as accused by the crown, but was really being blackmailed because he performed abortions on impregnated rape victims who would otherwise have risked death or disfigurement in the back-alley proceedings of the day, which are also described in CW detail.  And rather than have subtext about how crazy it is that a procedure that in the reader's time is completely legal and aboveboard should be grounds for blackmail in backward begone times (and Perry is not shy of commenting on the more loathsome sexist and classist aspects of 19th Century England), all three regular sleuthing characters are shocked and appalled as if, not the murder, but the abortions, are the most slimy criminal act ever done.  Considering that one of the previous books involved incestuous child-abuse, this is offensive to me.  Also offensive is the worst use I've ever seen of the tired old trope in which a defendant says to the lawyer, "Yes, I'm guilty--Ha-Ha-Ha-and you can't do a thing about it! You are obligated by law to defend me!", and then the lawyer for the defense finds a way to get the guy convicted on purpose--in this case delaying the end of the trial for days until Monk finds a witness that the defense brings in to convict him at the last minute.  This is considered a good thing.  Not by me.  If the life-saving doctor is to orphan his seven children and the hospital lose its most able practitioner, then that lawyer should be disbarred and imprisoned himself for the grossest breach of duty.

The Mrs. Jeffries novels (inspector's housekeeper and the rest of the staff solve the police inspector's crimes for him, trying real hard to make sure he doesn't even suspect their help as he gets all the credit) continue to be trash, but they're tasty trash, and I read another three-tale omnibus this month.  It's maybe what I can best handle these days, as Sweet Potato Saddam's administration continues to eat away at my mental health.

The last historical mystery I read this month is the start of a new series that does NOT take place in England or America. Yashim the Eunnuch works for the sultan of the Ottoman Empire ten years after the "Auspicious Incident" (a massacre of the Jannisaries, a military group that had devolved over the centuries from the Turks' elite shock troops into a decadent caste of bullies who asserted a military veto-or-else-we-kill-you power over the government before the Sultan finally ambushed, slaughtered and disbanded them.  I had had no idea that this event happened, and had to go look it up) and at a time when remnants of the Jannisaries appear to be hatching vengeful plots behind the scenes, with the soldiers of the new, more modern army turning up killed in creative ways. The plot becomes appropriately Byzantine. I will read more by Goodwin.

Theater Majors: Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, by JW von Goethe

“Should not we too go as strictly and as ingeniously to work, seeing we practise an art far more delicate than that of music; seeing we are called on to express the commonest and the strangest emotions of human nature, with elegance, and so as to delight? Can anything be more shocking than to slur over our rehearsal, and in our acting to depend on good luck, or the capricious chance of the moment? We ought to place our highest happiness and satisfaction in mutually desiring to gain each other’s approbation; we should even value the applauses of the public only in so far as we have previously sanctioned them among ourselves. Why is the master of the band more secure about his music than the manager about his play? Because, in the orchestra, each individual would feel ashamed of his mistakes, which offend the outward ear; but how seldom have I found an actor disposed to acknowledge or feel ashamed of mistakes, pardonable or the contrary, by which the inward ear is so outrageously offended!"

I could barely keep my eyes open.   I am getting SO sick of old German writing, both the philosophy and the novels make my head swim.  

Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship is apparently responsible for the word "Bildungsroman" (story in which the young protagonist grows up during a journey of discovery) #TheGermansHaveAWordForEverything.  You'd think I would be intrigued by a story of a young man going off to find himself among a traveling theater company full of geeks and misfits with something to teach him, and that later gets all spooky and metaphysical, with a secret society showing him that his life is already written down in a book.  But the style is so thick and serious as to be off-putting. It is also offensively long, at 600 pages between the eight sections.  If you've read it and liked it--and Goethe is still read today, often by young folks who find Meister's story inspirational--then please tell me what I've missed.  I am more than capable of having my hair parted by the clue plane as it whooshes right over my head.  Maybe this is one of those times.

Poldark Next Gen:  The Stranger from the Sea;  The Miller's Dance, by Winston Graham

Dear life--it seems a long time since--are we the same people, you and I, Ross?  All that experience since, of striving and living and loving...all the stress and the strain and the joy and the pleasure. So many people dead...so much has happened. Two of our children grown up and having love affairs of their own. Dwight and Caroline married. Geoffrey Charles, then a tiny infant, now a gallant captain, so much, so much. Can we two be the same?  Would you know yourself if you saw yourself coming across the beach as you were then?  Would I? I doubt it. If I am not cleverer, I must be wiser. But do you not love me still? Did you not lst night? Are we not somehow, somehow the same?

The eighth and ninth of the Poldark books take up a decade after the seventh leaves off (so far, each book has covered about two consecutive years, and this is a big leap), and some of the characters who we watched get born earlier in the series now take center stage with their young romances, educations, ambitions and mischiefs.  The "stranger from the sea" is a new character, Stephen Carrington, who brings good and bad changes to the area, while the miller's dance is performed at a local fair at which several new plot twists ensue.

The characters continue to be well-drawn and cared for, and the historical background--including now the regency, Luddite riots, the Iberian war, the assassination of Percival, the 1812 conflict with America, and news of Napoleon's defeat in Russia--as well as steam engine developments, economic depression in war time, the perils of coach travel, and privateering--enriches the plot and one's understanding of the times.  As always with this series, highest recommendations.

More Unreliable Narrators: The Confessions of Zeno, by Italo Svevo  

But spectacled man invents implements outside his body, and if there was any health or nobbility in the inventor there is none in the user.  Implements are bought or sold or stolen, and man goes on getting weaker and more cunning. It is natural that his cunning should increase in proportion to his weakness. The earliest implements only added to the length of his arm, and could not be employed except by the exercise of his own strength.  But a machine bears no relation to the body.  The machine creates disease because it denies what has been the law of creation throughout the ages.  The law of the strongest disappeared and we have abandoned natural selection. We need something more than psychoanalysis to help us.

Meh.  This novel is told from the point of view of a man undergoing psychoanalysis, whose therapist has asked him to write his autobiography as part of the treatment (said therapist apparently having published the private manuscript without permission as revenge for the patient having discontinued therapy sessions, in violation of all psychotherapy privilege yadda yadda, see my rage at Perry's A Sudden Fearful Death, above.

The "autobiography" dutifully records the narrator's life milestones: the death of his father; courtship, marriage and adultery; failed and successful business ventures; and several times he had his "last cigarette" before attempting to quit smoking.  Until we get to the end, he doesn't seem particularly more mentally ill than anyone else; however, because he is identified as "insane" and his writings therefore to be distrusted, it's hard to see what parts of the narrative should be trusted and which should not.  If there are clues as to what 'really" happened that differ from Zeno's account, they went right over my head.

 Slavery Is Freedom: Philosophy of Right, by Georg WTF Hegel

The idea which people most commonly have of freedom is that it is arbitrariness--the mean, chosen by abstract reflection, between the will wholly determined by natural impulses, and the will free absolutely. If we hear it said that the definition of freedom is the ability to do what we please, such an idea can only be taken to reveal an utter immaturity of thought, for it contains not even an inkling of the absolutely free will, of right ethical life, and so forth.

This Hegel book actually is in the Great Books series, and while dense, is short enough to be more understandable than the Logic and the Phenomenology of Spirit.  It's also just readable enough to see the flim flam, starting with the smug assertion that by freedom we of course, OF COURSE do not mean license, oh no no no, that would be silly and immature.  No, by freedom. we ultimately mean OBEDIENCE to the State!  That is--Hegel passes from freedom to "enlightened" freedom (the wisdom to bind oneself to reasonable social limits) to the need for contracts to be enforceable so that we may trust enough to enter contracts, to the need for government to enforce said contracts, to the need of all to bow to government without reserve.  Truly, slavery is freedom!

In fact, Hegel can laugh at my "utter immaturity of thought", but I will agree with Hobbes that freedom means not NEEDING any stinking licence, and that it DOES mean the extreme end of being able to do whatever you want.  I say further that ethics or "philosophy of right" is the study of what internal or external restraints should be put on our absolute freedom in the best possible society and government.(It may be semantic differences in getting to similar places: "no restraint is not desirable, therefore that is not what we call freedom" versus "freedom means no restraint, and therefore pure freedom is not desirable", but words matter in philosophy).  Better to be like Hobbes and openly say that you are urging people to give up some or all freedom out of the self-interest of living in an ordered society that protects you than to pretend that subjection of the will to a master is freedom itself. A government that confuses people as to what freedom is is less trustworthy and causes more harm.

Hegel ultimately doesn't go quite as far as Hobbes in that he postulates written laws, not a king, as "sovereign", and represents these laws as being the collective will of the people--which is maybe better than one king claiming to be the voice and sword of an entire population--but as any victim of the teahad Congress may have noticed, just because some asshole gets on the throne doesn't mean he represents the people.

CILL Mah Landlord: The principles of Political Economy and Taxation, by David Ricardo  

Taxes on wages will raise wages, and therefore will diminish the rate of the profits of stock.  We have already seen that a tax on necessaries will raise their prices, and will be followed by a rise of wages. The only difference between a tax on necessaries and a tax on wages is that the former will necessarily be accompanied by a rise in the price of necessaries, but the latter will not; towards a tax on wages, consequently, neither the stockholder, the landlord, nor any other class but the employers of labour will contribute.

Ricardo reads like  a modern economics text (thereby raising the question whether their style or theories have changed much in 200 years):  wordy, dusty, and filled with assertions that pushing on market forces in one direction will produce an equal and opposite result in a different direction. Hence the beginning of the age-old assertion made by the paid lickspittles of the wealthy, that any attempt to rein in the excesses of the wealthy will simply "cause" the wealthy to do some underhanded trick to fuck over the people supposed to be helped, and so government is urged to give up and not even try.

To me, the most interesting aspect of Ricardo's (thankfully short) treatise is the picture it paints of a world in which the landlord, manufacturing, and proletariat interests are having a three way struggle, such that the manufacturers--the main employers of labour--are aligned with the workers against landowners to keep the price of food from rising, because a rise in the price of necessaries will cause wages to go up, since it will cost more to pay a laborer enough to feed himself and his family.  Today's employer class, of course, has solved that problem by blatantly paying only starvation wages and scolding the hungry workers for 'being too lazy to earn enough to feed themselves."

Harvard Classics: the Goethe Volume

Old friend! Ever faithful sleep, dost thou too forsake me, like my other friends? How wert thou wont of yore to descend unsought upon my free brow, cooling my temples as with a myrtle wreath of love! Amidst the din of battle, on the waves of life, I rested in the thine arms, breathing lightly as a growing boy. When tempests whistled through the leaves and boughs, when the summits of the lofty trees swung creaking in the blast, the inmost core of my heart remained unmoved. What agitates thee now? What shakes thy firm and steadfast mind? I feel it, ’tis the sound of the murderous axe, gnawing at thy root. Yet I stand erect, but an inward shudder runs through my frame. Yes, it prevails, this treacherous power; it undermines the firm, the lofty stem, and ere the bark withers, thy verdant crown falls crashing to the earth.

The Harvard Classics (Doctor Elliott's Five Foot Shelf of Weird Choices) decided to represent Goethe with a volume that is mostly Faust Part 1 (see this January's post), with Marlowe's much lesser work Doctor Faustus for, I presume, comparison purposes; Egmont, a pretty forgettable play about a regent who was martyred by the Duke of Alva as part of the 17th century Dutch war with Spain; and an even more forgettable poem, Hermann and Dorothea, about star crossed lovers who make it.  He's the son of a wealthy Huguenot refugee from France; she is a lovely peasant girl on the German side of the river; both sets of parents disapprove of their love, but eventually get reconciled.  Each section of the poem is named after one of the nine Muses, but not in a way that appeared to me to fit a theme appropriate to each section.   Meh.

Find all of my previous Bookposts here: http://admnaismith.livejournal.com/tag/bookposts

Towards a Socialist America: Our Revolution, by Bernie Sanders  

Today, it would take a minimum-wage worker an entire year to earn enough to cover the average annual in-state tuition at a public university--if that worker had no other expenses at all for that year.  But we all know that a person cannot live on, much less save any money, on a minimum-wage job.  

It is no wonder many students from low-income families are forced to work while attending college, sometimes holding down more than one job in addition to attending classes, studying, and working unpaid internships. Try working the late shift at McDonalds while you are preparing for finals. Not easy.  I have talked to too many students who are trying hard to focus on their education while working thirty to forty hours a week.  Some students concoct elaborate cost-saving schemes, taking courses at less expensive schools and transferring credits, only to find that not all schools will accept the credits.  And as we've seen, most take on unsustainable amounts of debt.

Why do we put them through this? Why are we making it so difficult for these students to succeed?

I was enthusiastically for Sanders in the Democratic primary because he was the candidate who most represented my values, and i was enthusiastically for Clinton in the general for the same reason.  Either would have been a fantastic president, and would have been downright incredible compared to what we ended up with. I'll thank you to refrain from using the comments on my book post to take one more shit on  Bernie Sanders, or on Hillary Clinton.  That ship sailed and got torpedoed long ago, and America's real enemies are in Washington DC fucking us over and destroying everything we love as I type this.  Because we failed to unite against them.

Sander's manifesto is in two parts. The first, and least interesting, is a summary autobiography, devoted half to his Presidential run, and ending with his speech endosring Clinton at the convention.  Nothing about the assholes (Russian trolls as much as Republicans) who hijacked his campaign and poisoned the well against his wishes, and nothing about America's national suicide or anything he wishes he'd done differently that might have prevented it.  but a great deal about ordinary struggling Americans he met along the way, people in need of help, crying out desperately for liberal programs to help them thrive and make America a better place, and instead watching the rich get tax cut after tax cut, followed by bipartisan cuts to badly needed programs on the grounds that "we can't afford it".

Which segues into the more interesting part 2, which makes the case for the Sanders agenda--the plans that he pushed as part of his campaign, partially managed to insert into the Clinton platform, and that he continues to push today from the Senate floor. that agenda includes:

1. Overturning the Citizens United law that allows unlimited bribing of politicians under the guise of "campaign contributions" and that is unquestionably the biggest, maybe fatal, threat to having a government that works.

2. Substantial economic reforms, including an increase in Social Security benefits, higher income taxes on people who get paid more than $500,000 in a single year; gender and racial pay equity; unionization of workers; paid family and sick leave; investment in infrastructure, housing, child and elder care,  and clean energy (which will create jobs).

3. Universal health care.

4. Affordable higher education for all, and better secondary education, especially in the poorest parts of America.

5. Combatting climate change

6. Criminal justice reform, including the abolition of private, for-profit prisons that get paid every time someone you love gets incarcerated; an end to the militarization of the police and the racial disparities in sentences and deaths in police custody; and programs to help prisoners transition back into society after their sentences

7. Immigration reform to make it easier for people to become US citizens

8. Breaking up the big media empires that control what people are told about the state of the country; and

9. Programs to help the most vulnerable Americans, including the homeless, Native Americans, the elderly and the young; veterans, people with disabilities, marginalized groups all over the country.

It's embarrassing to me that any of this is considered "controversial" within my own political party, and it seems to me that if Democrats loudly and consistently push for these goals--all of which, sanders cites statistics showing them to be popular with large majorities of Americans--and especially if they keep pushing for them after they are elected--then democrats would win large majorities all over America, and would deserve them.

Makin' Bacon Again:  Positive Philosophy, by Auguste Comte  

The human mind, by its nature, employs in its progress three methods of philosophizing, the character of which is essentially different, and even radically opposed: the theological method, the metaphysical, and the positive.  Hence arise three philosophies, or general systems of conceptions on the aggregate of phenomena, each of which excludes the others. The first is the necessary point of departure of the human understanding; and the third is its fixed and definitive state.  The second is merely a state of transition.

The refreshing part of Comte's major book, which apparently invented a new branch of philosophy (where other philosophers have been grouped into, e.g., the rationalists, the empiricists, and the idealists, Comte stands alone), and the only part that seems to me to count as "philosophy" the way we understand it, is in the first few pages, where he divides the progress of civilization into theology (being guided by idiotic superstitions on the grounds that they are comforting) to "positivism" or rule by reason and the way things really are, as opposed to what feels good; with metaphysics as a bridge between.

The whole rest of the book is devoted to what they then called "natural philosophy" and what we now call "science", with the last section trying to present government and the process from theology to reason in the form of a science, which he calls "social physics".  I make comparisons with Francis Bacon because both men, two centuries apart, attempted to classify and rank various sciences and branches of knowledge in comprehensive ways that seem clumsy and primitive when looking back to them across the centuries.  The whole classification system, from mathematics to chemistry and biology, seems to me to have primary historical value, as a measure of where scientific thought of the day lay. It does not seem of practical modern use.  But it is nice to see religious dogma put in its place.

Fair Fortune: Guy Mannering, or the Astrologer, by Walter Scott

Mars having dignity in the cusp of the twelfth house, threatened captivity, or sudden and violent death, to the native; and Mannering, having recourse to those further rules by which diviners pretend to ascertain the vehemency of this evil direction, observed, from the result, that three periods would be particularly hazardous--hit fifth, his tenth, his twenty first year.

I returned to Walter Scott upon noticing that Guy Mannering (an odd choice0 was included in the Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction (along with much better-known English works by Fielding, Austen, Thackeray and Dickens).  I'm not sure if anyone not a Scott fan in particular, has even heard of it.

It has much that I've come to expect from a Scott plot:  A title character peripheral to the story, a stranger from England who happens to get caught up in something close and personal among the natives. Intimations of the supernatural without actually going all the way there.  The "astrologer" part of the title refers to the title character's hobby of drawing horoscopes, which touches the plot exactly once, when he is present at the birth of a boy and tells his fortune (All together, now--He will go on a long journey frought with perils before achieving eventual success and live happily ever after at the end).  There are traveling people (referred to unfortunately as Gy**ies throughout the text), and they tell a fortune about him too.

Naturally enough, the boy is kidnapped and disappears, and naturally enough, the travelers are blamed for it.  Even more naturally enough, sixteen years later, a young man "told he had been born in Scotland, but ignorant as to his parentage" happens to come wandering by right about the time the ancestral estate is being sold to the greedy unscrupulous cousin.

Have a bottle of good Scotch handy when you read this, and take only small sips when the tropes happen, or they'll have to roll you home.

Aubrey/Maturin: The Mauritius Command; Desolation Island; The Fortune of War, by Patrick O'Brian  

"Not hang the lad for cowardice?  But surely, Sir", said Captain Pym, "Surely a medical man will cut off a gangrened limb to save the rest of the body?"

"A medical man does not cut off the limb in any spirit of corporate revenge, nor in terrorem; he does not make a solemn show of the amputation, nor is the peccant limb attended by all the marks of ignominy. No, sir. Your analogy may be specious, but it is not sound. furthermore, sir, you are to consider that in making it you liken the surgeon to a common hangman, an infamous character held in universal contempt and detestation. And the infamy attaching to the executioner arises from what he does: the language of all nations condemns the man and a fortiori his act, which helps to make my point more forcibly."

--from The Mauritius Command

"To be very sure, I shall be glad to get my collection home as soon as possible; the giant squid is already in an advanced state of decomposition, while my kangaroos below deck grow fractious for want of a proper diet. but I did so long to see a cassowary."

"I am sorry for it, indeed, but the exigencies of the service..." said Jack, who dreaded a fresh influx of Sumatran rhinoceroses, orang-utangs, and infant rocs.

---from The Fortune of War

Desolation Island, for me, is the point at which the series breaks away from exposition and stand-alone adventures, and into the main arc plot. Before that, years and major plot devices happen between books. After that, it's just about seamless until near the end of the series.

Here, have a song about it (tune = "High Barbary")

I'll tell you a story, if you listen unto me
Blow high, blow low, and so sailed we
Of the most unlucky warship that was ever put to sea
With Dr. Stephen Maturin and Jack Aubrey!

'Twas after Bounty's mutiny, with tempers running high
Blow high, blow low, and so sailed we
We were sent out in the Leopard for to pick up Captain Bligh
Awaiting down in New South Wales for Jack Aubrey

We were stranded off of Africa, with not a breeze in view
Blow high, blow low, and so sailed we
Gaol fever epidemics killed three quarters of the crew
Though Stephen did his best for Captain Jack Aubrey

Now, what's that ship that's drawing near, and are you English too?
Blow high, blow low, and so sailed we
"We're a 74-gun Dutchman, and we're coming after you!
"May the Lord make us true thankful now", says Jack Aubrey

(What do all the little Dutchmen say?  "Aar, Aar, Aar...")
(What does Captain Jack say?  "Oh shit....")

The thunderclouds broke open as the Dutchman gave us chase
Blow high, blow low, and so sailed we
In rain so thick you couldn't see the nose upon your face
The ocean rose, the Dutchman closed on Jack aubrey

(What do all the little Dutchmen say?  "Aar, Aar, aar...")
(What does Dr. Stephen say?  "Oh! I spy a petrel! Pray do not let the guns harm it!")

The storm blew solid water and the cannonballs did roar
Blow high, blow low, and so sailed we
A giant wave came crashing, and the Dutchman was no more!
600 men went down in front of Jack Aubrey

In triumph, we went south and neared completion of our trip
Blow high, blow low, and so sailed we
When a sunken reef of ice tore out the bottom of the ship
A desolation island home for Jack Aubrey

(What does Captain Jack say?  "Oooops...")
Now we're stuck in the Antarctic and it's much worse than it looks
Blow high, blow low, and so sailed we
If you're wanting any more, you'll have to read O'Brian's books
Of Dr. Stephen Maturin and Jack Aubrey!

Towards an Abuse-Free World: Why Does He Do That? (Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men), by Lundy Bancroft  

When a woman tells me of her concerns about her partner's potential for violence, I first encourage her to pay close attention to her feelings. If he's scaring her, she should take her intuitive sense seriously, even if she doesn't believe his frightening behavior is intentional. Next, I want to learn more about what's already happened. Has he ever trapped her in a room and not let her out? Has he ever raised a fist as if he were going to hit her? Has he ever thrown an object that hit her or nearly did? Has he ever held her down or grabbed her to restrain her? Has he ever shoved, poked, or grabbed her? Has he ever threatened to hurt her?  If the answer to any of these questions is yes, then we can stop wondering whether he'll ever be violent. HE ALREADY HAS BEEN.

This one was recommended to me by Joreth Inkeeper, whose blog posts are among the most thought provoking that I've found on the Internet.  My line of work brings me in constant contact with abusive men whose behavior I attempt to change, with varying success rates.

Bancroft runs an abuser treatment program. It is for abusers but designed primarily to help their victims (it is understood that nothing said by the abusers will be kept confidential from the abused, as accountability and amends are important), and most  of the book is directly addressed to an abused woman as the reader. nevertheless, it spoke to me.   Everything about it--the sections on abuser behavior, the excuses and myths frequently given, the real motivations behind it, and what can be done to change him--rang distinct bells, confirming things I have noticed and helping me to clarify my thoughts.  soon after reading it, I interviewed a man with a restraining order against him, and EVERYTHING he initially said was straight out of case histories in Why Does He do That?. I was able to smash his excuses so effectively that he looked at me dazed and a little frightened.  And then, with the illusions knocked away, we were able to get down to doing something useful.

Also--I read in public a lot, and most of the time, I am left to it by passers by.  Why Does He Do That? is my first book in a long time that had several people start conversations with me when they saw the cover.  One was a woman who had read the book and was quite affected to see a man reading it, too.  Another was a successful-seeming man in a suit who wanted to know what it was about, and proceeded to challenge every premise I mentioned, and when I pointed out how, funny, he was saying a lot of the things the abusive men Bancroft works with say, he bitterly complained that I had maneuvered him into a catch-22 thing where he couldn't WIN.  I said it's not about winning and reminded him that he had started making it into an argument.  He stormed off.  I hope I do not meet him professionally.

This is a book about a toxicity in certain relationships that needs to be addressed. It stretches beyond domestic abuse in residences to how people are portrayed in media tropes, how we talk to each other, and, yes, what we put up with from politicians *cough*TRUMP*cough*  Very highest recommendations.

Have the Kel Stopped Screaming, Clarice? The Ninefox Gambit, by Yoon Ha Lee  

Over one million people died at Hellspin fortress. Survivors were numbered in the hundreds.  Kel Command chose to preserve Jedao for future use. the histories said he didn't resist arrest, that they found him digging bullets out of the dead and arranging them in patterns. So Kel Command put Jedao into the black cradle, making him their immortal prisoner.

Cheris's best move, which was also a desperation maneuver, wasn't to choose a weapon or an army. Everyone would be thinking of weapons and armies. Her best move would be to choose a general.  The problem was that any swarm sent against the fortress would have to contend with the fact that its exotic weapons wouldn't function properly.  She didn't need ordnance; she needed someone who could work around the problem. And that left her the single undead general in the Kel arsenal, the madman who slept in the black cradle until the Nirai technicians could discover what had triggered his madness and how to cure him. Shuos Jedao, the Immolation Fox: genius, arch-traitor, and mass murderer.

This is the second of the six Hugo-nominated novels for me to read this year, and it is quite different from Too Like the Lightning (see last month's Bookpost).  It is not "Literature", but it is intensely thought provoking.

The closest comparison reference I've come up with is a sci-fi variation on The Silence of the Lambs, in that a government worker (Cheris, a military officer for a hive government called the "hexarchate") is given a mission (in this case, the taking of an impregnable planetary fortress) and seeks the aid of a notorious, evil madman (in this case, the aforementioned genius tactician General Jedao)...with the distinction that, instead of visiting the madman in a safe confined area, Cheris has Jedao's soul/ghost/something planted in her head so that they converse.  Jedao can't read Cheris's thoughts, but he is an expert at reading her body language.

And so they go on the mission, with Cheris not only concerned about whether the military tactics (all sorts of strange weapons are used here) will work, but whether Jedao will support the mission or betray it, and whether he's going to go insane again mid-mission.   Revelations about who Jedao is, why he did what he did back then, and how it relates to the current mission, ensue.  Gripping, and highly recommended.

Outback Stake House: Voss, by Patrick White  

If he had but known--there was a great deal that Colonel Hebden did not know; it was almost as if there had been a conspiracy against him--if he had but known, Death had just apprehended Jackie, crossing a swamp, during a thunderstorm at dusk. The boy had not attempted to resist.  He lay down, and was persuaded to melt at last into the accommodating earth, all but his smile, which his tight, white, excellent teeth showed every sign of perpetuating.

This is a mid-20th century novel about a 19th century Big Important White Man who leads an expedition to "discover" inland Australia  (SPOILER:  This time, Australia wins).  It's churchy and White Man's Burden-y and we're supposed to like the title character because he is a VISIONARY (literally, he has visions which let him commune with his girlfriend in Sydney while he's stuck in a cave in the middle of the continent) and a martyr.  I, unfortunately, read it in the midst of books by the actual literary giants of the era, and found it quite wanting.

Postmodern Prometheus: A Closed and Common Orbit, by Becky Chambers  

Owl had said it was important to know how swearing worked, and it was okay under the right circumstances, but that Jane shouldn't swear ALL the time. Jane definitely swore all the time. She didn't know why, but swearing felt fucking great.  Owl only had eleven adult sims in storage, but Jane didn't mind playing them again and again.  Her favorite was Scorch Squad VI: Eternal Inferno. The best character was Combusto, who used to work for the Oil Prince but was a good guy now, and he also used to be a pyromancer in a previous life, so he had visions of the past sometimes and his eyes caught fire when he got mad, which was all the time, and his ultimate attack was called Plasma Fist, which made bad guys explode.

This is the third of the 2017 Hugo-nominated novels I've read.  It involves a consciousness that comes into existence in a robot body, and meeting other...sentiences...in a strange world in which stuff happens.  the consciousness learns things about living and the way things work on this world.  That makes one of us.  It works well during certain playful vignettes, such as where she maps her values based on a video game, or the time where she's out in the desert being menaced by starving dogs.  Unlike Ada Palmer's and Yoon Ha Lee's offerings, chambers does not have a central character with a past full of brutal murders to be psychoanalyzed, so there's that.

I am surrounded by geeky friends who LOVE sci-fi at their favorite book genre, and who write songs about it, and whose conventions are about science fiction and not about mysteries or literature, and so I read things like the Hugo nominees to keep up. Sometimes I find a series that makes my heart sing.  In general, though...I often get lost.  This is one of those times.

The 19th Century Murders: Sold Down the River, by Barbara Hambly; Cain His Brother, by Anne Perry; Mrs. Jeffries Pleads the Fifth, by Emily Brightwell  

"Angus's brother Caleb is everything he is not--violent, brutal, dangerous, an outcast even among the underworld along the river beyond Limehouse, where he lives....I used to beg Angus not to keep seeing him, but in spite of everything Caleb did, he felt that he could not abandon him." A shadow crossed her face.  "There is something very special about being a twin, I suppose..."

--from Cain his Brother

When he looked back later on that chilly glittering afternoon by the river, he reflected that not only was his trust betrayed on all four counts--a good round average for a black man relying on Fate's good will in Louisiana--but he missed even cosidering the biggest catastrophe of all, lying hidden under the calm surface of the next forty eight hours like a snag in the river that rips the heart out of a boat and slaughters all on board.  The worst was that it was one he should have foreseen.

--from Sold Down the River

Another three-pack of Murder She Housekept episodes that keep going downward.  The first of  these reveals early on that the killer, who shared some cake with the victim before killing him, had picked all the walnuts out of his own slice of cake and left them on the plate.   then the climax involves the cook presented as going batty because she makes a bunch of walnut scones and insists on bringing them round to give one to all the suspects, and everyone else is like Omigosh, what could she possibly be doing?!?  but note that I'm still reading them.

Cain his Brother, a variation on the trope of an identical twin accused of killing the other, is absolutely riveting---well, no it isn't, except that it becomes so, late in the book, because of a plot device I've seen before, but which completely took me by surprise this time, and I had to go back and read most of it again.  the SECOND time was riveting.  Yes, it's short, so stick to it if it seems to bore you at first.  It's worth it.

Graveyard dust, the third Benjamin January book, has been lost by another library patron, and so I skipped ahead to Sold Down the River, the fourth mystery set in the horrors of the pre-Civil War South. for reasons you'll have to read about, January is persuaded to "go undercover" as a field slave to find out "which n****r" is behind the vandalism, sabotage, voodoo veves and murder attempts at a particularly horrible plantation.  The owner is so vicious to everyone that the culprit is as likely to be a family member or a rival plantation owner...but if January dares to suggest that a white person might be responsible--or if he otherwise says some truth that the white man who hired him doesn't want to hear, he gets threatened with flogging or killing or being sold down the river by people who know that he is free, because in this environment where people are deemed to be things, actual communication is impossible.

Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Generation of Sociopaths (How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America) by Bruce Cannon Gibney  
As economy and education faltered under the Boomers, a parallel system rose to contain the factory seconds, kept company by whatever portions of society Boomers found it expedient to impound. That parallel system is history's largest penal regime, and it extends well beyond the needs of deterrence and containment. Erected at enormous cost to the fisc (as usual, mostly debt financed), the corrections system has become a state within a state.  Many of its charges could have been saved by the schools the Boomers failed, by social programs the Boomers let decay, or by the exercise of empathetic clemency instead of automatic punishments that appealed to the Boomers' crudest Old Testament instincts.  Instead, boomer policy created a conveyor belt that leads from school detention to its lifetime equivalent.

Disclaimer:  I am Generation-X, and I have been railing against the BaBoo generation as a plague of locusts since I was in high school.  I was lucky to have been born to silent-Gen parents who had me late. My peers were latchkey children, born to BaBoos who considered them annoying hobbles to their quests for fun, given horror movies in which small children were Satan, of age sexually just in time for new and frightening STDs, out of high school just in time to watch financial aid dry up, out of college just in time for Desert Storm, the end of affordable housing, the end of the job market, and in time to be branded lazy slackers who wanted our butts wiped for us and who wore underwear on our heads.

I thought I was going to fucking CHEERLEAD this big dump on the generation that fucked up everything, and which is fucking it up even more for the Millennials who don't even get the gleanings from the picked-clean garden.  They have squandered a nation's wealth, done nothing with it, and are viciously stomping the new young, who are smart, ready, raring to go and more deserving of a hand up than me or anyone who came before them but after WWII.

But, as we know, it's never that simple.

Bruce Cannon Gibney (born in 1979, so also Gen-X, but more than a decade younger than me) points out a lot of what I complained of, and a few more things besides (I had not noticed that the BaBoos had given us the fastest Constitutional Amendment ever passed, to secure them voting rights at age 18, AND had lowered the drinking age to 18 just long enough to be the only mass group of 18 year olds to get to vote while drunk).  But there are problems.

For one thing, BaBoos, cannot simultaneously all be sitting, dragon-like, on great hordes of America's money and facing huge financial hardship "requiring" the young to break their backs supporting their old age because they never saved a dime.   They cannot all be influential old white men (Gibney does occasionally exempt most PoC from his analysis, right down to President Obama who he faint-praises as not really Boomer, not really typical American in a way I find discomforting). they cannot be both religious, moralistic, faith-based judgment passers and devoid of temperance, chastity, frugality, etc.

And he diagnoses them with mental health disorders, collectively.  Because of mass behavior.  To Gibney, sociopaths' symptoms are their behavior--irresponsibility, lack of empathy, aggression, disregard for healthy societal norms...and he goes back and forth defining people by policies pushed by their governments, mostly while BaBoos have controlled legislatures.  Meanwhile, many people struggle with actually diagnosed mental illnesses and DO restrain themselves from behaving badly.

Gibney indulges in false equivalences, failing to distinguish between Democratic policies that have failed to go far enough in problem solving, and Republican ones that eagerly seek to tear it all down.  So, for example, Reagan and the Bushes are to blame for endless tax cuts, cuts to education funding abandonment of the Kyoto treaty, etc., while Clinton and Obama's loud advocacy for reversal of such policies are denounced as laughable slaps in the face to our intelligence, because they supposedly knew full well that Republicans would never allow it.  So a pox on all their houses.  Al Gore, the environmentalist crusader, is no different from Republicans who actively resist addressing climate change, because Gore is a hypocrite for not living in a mud hut.

Boomers hate science because nukes and the military-industrial complex made them distrustful of all technology, or because STEM is hard and Boomers don't like schoolwork, or because they all got religion, or something something garbanzo.

Worst of all, Gibney (a venture capitalist with his fingers in such great socialist projects as AirBnB and Uber) devotes a substantial part of the book to hating on the one big "entitlement program" that Boomers are still enjoying: Social Security, which they supposedly intend to drain and abandon to be destroyed just as they die (at which point it will be the large population of Millennials working to pay the social Security of a smaller population of Generation-X, the opposite of the huge glut of Boomer seniors currently on the backs of a smaller younger crowd).  Gibney's proposed solution is to destroy Social Security NOW and hand it over to venture capitalists like himself, cheering as we sock it to those undeserving BaBoos!

Fuck that.  Holy Cow,  one of the big milestones in which i felt I had "arrived" was the day when the annual Republican proposals to get rid of Social Security and turn it over to the banksters and money lendering operations started to propose phase-outs for people born AFTER my birth date.  Now I have to worry about people like Gibney YOUNGER than me trying to take the benefits I've already paid, for their own purposes.

So maybe the BaBoos are not the only ones showing antisocial behavior that the ableist can categorize as a pathology.  Maybe there's an extent to which politics itself is self-interest behavior at its worst, and the big imbalance we're suffering under right now happened only because one core bulge in the population had the number of voters sufficient to have everything favor their own particular interests at the expense of ours, for the last 40 years.  Maybe this too shall pass.

Generation of Sociopaths does seem to be right on many fronts, but not on all of them.  Tellingly, the jacket touts the book in several places with promises that it will be CONTROVERSIAL, not that it will be RIGHT.

Sorrel and Sore Losers: The Red and the Black, by Stendahl  

Well, good! he said to himself, laughing like Mephistopheles.  I am cleverer than they are; I know how to choose the uniform of my century.  And he felt his ambition and his affection for the ecclesiastical habit increase vastly.  How many cardinals, who have been baser born than me, have been in government!  Little by little, Julien's agitation calmed down; prudence resurfaced.  Like his master Tartuffe, whose role he knew by heart, he said to himself: "I may see in these words a plain pretence. I'll put no trust in these flattering remarks until a few of her favours for whom I repine arrive to confirm what they tell me is mine."

I find Julien Sorrel, whose character is one of two main reasons for The Red and the Black's place on the "great books" shelf (the other is the portrayal of French society as Sorrel's ultimate antagonist) to be an enigma wrapped up in a can of worms and stuffed into Pandora's Box.  The book's blurb, and passages in the novel itself, make Sorrel out to be a villain, a bad guy, and people today speak of unscrupulous social-climbers as "a regular Julien Sorrel", but I'm not seeing it.

Sorrel is born into poor circumstances in post-Napoleonic France, too late to do what the generation before him did and win praise and honors as a soldier, and so he is steered into the church instead, although he is not religious (the military and secular world contrasted with the clergy are the "red and black" of the title).  He wants to get ahead in the world, and the world happens to be toxic. They don't have academic professions, and so for learned people, it's the clergy or become rich by any means necessary.

Several times during the course of the book, Sorrel fails because, given the chance to "win" by being a hypocrite, by seducing a wealthy woman, by cheating at business or by pretending faith--his conscience or sense of self won't let him follow through.  He does much internal wrestling between the good person he feels himself to be and the dirty climber who will be valued for what he appears to be but condemned as soon as the mask falls off.  In today's world, he would be given an MBA and told to make something of himself by embellishing his resume, kissing asses and aggressively "marketing" himself while gagging all the way and losing promotion because he doesn't strike some middle manager as enough of a team player.

And then finally, his behaviour at the climax comes from being denounced by someone he trusted as being everything he was told to be and failed to be, at which point he gives up on life. The show trial frought with bribery and presented as a dramatic spectacle for the fun of the public, is every bit the window dressing in the novel that it is supposed to be in the society of the day.

Compare and contrast with Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy, in which an actual villain who commits murder for social/financial gain is presented as a "victim of society" who should be redeemed because Remorseful.  Sorrel is, at least partly, arguably very much guided by conscience at his own expense; he does not kill anyone, and far from presenting as a "victim who has suffered enough", he goes out of his way to condemn himself, resisting the best efforts of the people he has harmed the most to forgive and rescue him. And so I'm going with Not a Villain here.  

Baw-aww-lzac: The Wild Ass's Skin; Gobseck; Pierre Grassou, by Honore de Balzac

Possessing me, thou shalt possess all things

But thy life is mine, for God has so willed it
Wish, and thy wishes shall be fulfilled
But measure thy desires, according
To the life that is in thee.
This is thy life
With each wish I must shrink
Even as thy own days
Wilt thou have me? Take me.
God will hearken unto thee.
So be it.

--from The Wild Ass's Skin

Like Stendahl, Balzac seems to be developing a pattern involving post-Napoleonic French society as a sewer of hypocrisy that breaks the souls of innocent young people afflicted with youthful folly and idealism.  "Gobseck" and "Pierre Grassou" are stories of young artists drawn by necessity to compromise their art, in one case resorting to forgery.

The Wild Ass's Skin, one of Balzac's first, and by far the longest of the three for this month, is a variation on the monkey's paw/sell your soul to get wishes parable, in which the protagonist can have whatever he wants (for real, not with ironically horrible outcomes), the price of which is that every wish causes the magic patch of skin to shrink a little, and when it's all used up, he will die.

Balzac's twist is that we do not get the usual progression of debauchery and repentance.  The protagonist, Valentin, is shown in the last extremity of desperation, being given the talisman and wishing for a fortune, which he instantly inherits from some distant relative, and has a banquet that night with the boon companions who come to tell him the news.  About half of the entire story then ensues during said banquet, as Valentin relates his backstory of hard luck, poverty (which he has refused to dishonorably escape from) and unrequited love.  The episode ends with everyone around him demanding that he sacrifice his life making wishes for them--just one little wish each--oh, such a cad, who can make anything happen, and denying his friends this one little thing!  The remainder of the tale has Valentin in self-imposed exile, living as if he is Dorian Gray's portrait in the attic, shunning the world in order to avoid making any more wishes.  There is more, but I won't spoil the entire plot here.  Well-written and moving.

Poldark Next-Gen Epilogue: Bella Poldark, by Winston Graham  

Demelza said, "Do not, I pray, claim too much for me.  I am--just me.  I am just happy to be myself...and to be your father's wife.  I have no wish to be anywhere else than at his side.  I also believe that he has no wish to be anywhere except at my side.  That will be the way it will be, until I die---until we die.  I have only one regret, and that is that time just goes too fast."

The final Poldark book, set about five years after The Twisted Sword, is almost an afterthought, or an epilogue.  Graham had called The Twisted Sword the conclusion to the series, but apparently got bored and kept going.

The result is comparable to the final season of Babylon 5--we have the same characters going on after the major events of the series have been wrapped up, but sudden new and somewhat related conflicts are brought up.  Graham introduces new characters who come and go before we can care about them, introduces for the first time a serial killer mystery with neon blinking arrows pointing to one unlikely suspect (who is either going to be a boring big reveal or a surprise red herring); more weddings; a tragic climax involving a custody fight, a pet ape and a burning house; and it all concludes with a production of Romeo and Juliet where the star-crossed lovers are both played by women.

It's a bit of a muddle compared to most of the other Poldark books, but it is ultimately satisfying, and Ross and Demelza's 30 years of marriage are a charming role model for how to make relationships last through ups, downs, and creamy middles.   Highly recommended, as is the whole series.

Rot and Rochester:  Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte  

Bessie, when she heard this narrative, sighed and said, "Poor Miss Jane is to be pitied too, Abbot."
"Yes," responded Abbot, "if she were a nice, pretty child, one might compassionate her forlornness; but one really cannot care for such a little toad as that."

"Not a great deal, to be sure," agreed Bessie. "At any rate, a beauty like Miss Georgiana would be more moving in the same condition."
"Yes, I dote on Miss Georgiana!" cried the fervent Abbot. "Little darling!--with her long curls and her blue eyes, and such a sweet colour as she has; just as if she were painted!"

I identified more with Jane Eyre than boys were generally supposed to, but her experience sang to my heart.  A childhood of abuse, bullied by other children and called a failure-for-life by the adults in her world, then sent off to school with instructions to be treated as a bad child, further bullied, but loved and encouraged by servants or teachers who don't follow orders.  What would i know about that?

Nevertheless, Jane Eyre persists.

I admire Jane for being her own person under pressure to be, first a victim, then someone else's inferior. She does not bow to society people who think her beneath them.  She refuses a financially advantageous offer of marriage and goes off alone to find herself, which she does after a long period of being incognito, coming back to the main love interest only after circumstances have changed substantially for both of them.  

I'm told by my sister-in-law that there is such a thing as a "Jane Eyre fistbump", shared under "Reader, I married him" circumstances, or perhaps when sharing a moment with someone who, like you, has overcome hardship and/or expectations to find fulfillment and success on one's own terms.  I do not presume to walk with that particular sisterhood, but I find at least some familiarity there.   This is a book everyone should read at least once, and some will find sustenance in for a lifetime.  Very high recommendations.

The 19th Century Murders:  Weighed in the Balance & The Silent Cry, by Anne Perry;  Cut to the Quick, by Kate Ross; Die Upon a Kiss; Wet Grave, by Barbara Hambly

There was a young woman lying there, fully dressed, with the bedclothes pulled up almost to her shoulders. Her red-gold hair was half undone and spread on the pillow. Her head was turned away from him. She appeared to be asleep. He stood blinking at her for a moment or two. Then he closed te door behind him and went to the bed.

--from Cut to the Quick

"Charging into the enemy's guns may make you a name in history," he said acidly, "but it is an idiotic sacrifice of life.  It is all very poetic, but the reality is death, agony, crippled bodies and widows weeping at home.  Mothers who never see their sons again. It is more than time you stopped dreaming and looked at life as it is." He heard his voice growing higher and louder and he could not help it. He was clenching his fists until his muscles ached, and without being aware of it he chopped his hand up and down in the air. "Did you not hear that letter? Didn't you look at the jurors' faces? Gisela is a heroine, the ideal of their romantic imagination! You have attacked her with a charge you cannot prove, and that makes you a villain.  Nothing I say is going to change that. If I counterattack, I make it worse."

--from Weighed in the Balance

Which of those men, thought January as the final grace notes of d'Isola's simple fioritura climbed into silence, agreed with Iago? It was all very well for them to have mistresses of color--as Henri Viellard, mammoth and solemn in his gray coat and flowered waistcoat had Dominique--girls who they would bull for years without ever considering them good enough to marry...But a black man bedding a white woman? Marrying her? Loving her so desperately that the thought of her betrayal drove him literally mad?

Unthinkable.
---from Die Upon a Kiss

Started yet another series of Regency mysteries this week, and it's a good one.  Cut to the Quick introduces us to the dandy Julian Kestral, and his sidekick servant Dipper the Reformed Pickpocket Who Means Well But Can't Resist The Shiny Things Wot-Wot.  You can probably guess where my affections lie. Kestral saves a young fool from being fleeced at a London casino and in return is invited by said fool to be in the wedding party in one of those English manors full of Baronets, colonels, Ladies, fops, and other Downton people who hate each other and have Deep Dark Secrets One Would Kill To Protect.  And then Kestal finds a corpse in his bed, and he and Dipper dig for clues while the manorial family is properly horrified.  You know exactly what you're signing up for with this book, and if cozies are your cuppa, you'll be well satisfied.

Weighed in the Balance, while still good, is not one of Perry's best. It concerns a royal family in exile from one of the small German nations of the era, a prince of which has died under circumstances such that a Countess has accused the princess of murder, and been sued for slander for her temerity. The stakes are high, but the big reveal made me shrug.  Silent Cry is devastatingly realistic and gripping, but requires a content warning for graphic descriptions of sexual violence and the psychological effects it has on its victims.  The book begins with two men found in the streets of a nasty neighborhood, the father beaten to death and his son almost dead and traumatized to the point where he cannot speak.  Meanwhile, Monk undertakes to help some women from an equally seedy neighborhood nearby--they have been sexually assaulted, and the police shrug and say meh because slut-shaming. The secret of why the barely alive young man spends much of the book opening his mouth to scream but emitting no sound lands like a hammer blow and is not for people who are easily triggered.

Barbara Hambly requires more concentration than the other mystery writers I'm currently binge-reading, but the work is culturally worth it, if usually deeply disturbing for its exploration of the most horrific aspect of American history.  Die Upon a Kiss, for instance, is about the implications of producing Othello (as a fictional sensational opera, lauded in Europe), in 1930s New Orleans, where a bunch of shitty white people are prepared to kill to prevent anything from rocking their way of life based on the premise that POC are things to be owned by white people.  Wet Grave, which centers around the death of an old, drunk, black harlot who no one but January will even bother to notice much less investigate and avenge, and which segues into buried treasure legend, slave revolt, and deadly flood, would under different treatment be styled as an exciting adventure, but in Hambly's hands serves to further denounce antebellum America's lack of humanity in an uncomfortable way that most of us need to face.

The Greatest that Ever Got Chalk on His Coat: Geometrical Researches on the Theory of Parallels, by Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevski  

If to the line AB, two perpendiculars AC = BD are erected, and their end points C and D joined by a straight line, then the resulting quadrilateral ABCD will have two right angles at A and B, but two acute angles at C and D, which are equal to one another, as we can easily see by thinking the quadrilateral superimposed on itself so that the line BD falls upon AC and AC upon BD.

Halve AB and erect at the midpoint E the line EF perpendicular to AB. This line must also be perpendicular to CE, since the quadrilaterals CAEF and FDBE fit one another if we so place one on the other that the line EF remains in the same position.  Hence the line CD can not be parallel to AB, but the parallel to AB for the point C, namely CG, must incline toward AB and cut from the perpendicular BD a part BG < CA.  Since C is a random point in the line CG, it follows that CG itself nears AB the more, the farther it is prolonged.  

I still have a note that was passed to me in college math by Victoria Landgraf:  "If we were Bolyai/Lobachevski perceivers, we would be on a government list of potential troublemakers."  So there's that.

TheGreat Books of the Western World set, which claims that "anyone" can and should read everything in the set, has humiliated me for parts of the last six and a half years with its science/math selections.  All of Euclid, Ptolemy, Copernicus, Cartesian geometry, and Newton, full of equation after equation.  I am considered an intelligent man, but all of them defeated me to some extent.

They should have included Lobachevski.  Just 50 pages including the introduction; 37 theorems (the equivalent of one book of Euclid, and the first 15 are axioms anyhow),  fairly easy to understand, and kind of mind-blowing in a way that draws one to consider mathematical thought as a potentially beautiful art form.

The main point, given clearly in Theorem 22, where it breaks off from "ordinary geometry" into "imaginary geometry" (non-Euclidean, that is), is to assume for the sake of argument that parallel lines will eventually, eventually meet  ("But aren't parallel lines DEFINED as a set of lines that will not meet?" "Yabbut what if they DID?  Shaddup."), and run with it.   The result includes a lot of curved triangles, like they were drawn on the surface of a sphere, and what looks like portals into another dimension.   Do not attempt at home without 24 hours of fasting and prayer, and do not attempt to play pool for money while under the influence of Lobachevski.  #SoWhoDeservesTheCredit? #AndWhoDeservesTheFame?  

Are There No Workhouses? Oliver Twist, by Charles Dickens  

For a week after the commission of the impious and profane offense of asking for more, Oliver remained a close prisoner in the dark and solitary room to which he had been consigned by the wisdom and mercy of the board...The board took counsel together on the expediency of shipping off Oliver Twist, in some small trading vessel bound to a good unhealthy port. This suggested itself as the very best thing that could possibly be done with him: the probability being, that the skipper would flog him to death, in a playful mood, some time after dinner, or would knock his brains out with an iron bar; both pastimes being, as is pretty generally known, very favourite and common recreations among gentlemen of that class.

--from the original Dickens

"Seconds? Gee thanks, Mr. Bumble!"

--alternative ending, the very short version

Like many, I am most familiar with the Oliver story from the musical adaptation, full of  jolly, dancing ragamuffins and sassy, maternal harlots, where Fagin is a lovable rogue and even Mr. Bumble, somber child-trafficking song notwithstanding, is usually played for laughs as a fat, dimwitted buffoon in the style of Sergeant Schultz, goofy Nazi guard.  Only Bill Sikes is an irredeemable villain through and through.  Possibly Noah Claypole too, though most versions I've seen have left out the funeral parlor sequence entirely.

Yah, Dickens's novel isn't that story.

For one thing, Bumble and the work-house matron aren't alone. Every act of cruelty and deprivation is backed up by the town council, and the decision to sell the boy Oliver is made and approved by all the local officials as a savings to the "decent" public's taxes, and this is Dickens's main point.

For another, Fagin's underworld is painted with all the nastiness you would expect in a tale where urchins are forced into crime.  Fagin is a greasy, chortling, offensively anti-Semitic stereotype  loved by neither child nor adult, whose poky jesting manner is as sincere as that of the ironically polite mafia gangster preparing to rub out a victim.  Dodger, far from the boon "consider yourself one of us" companion, betrays Oliver at the first opportunity.  In fact, for reasons made clear in the book that are left out of the musical, the Fagin gang's objective is to get Oliver arrested and jailed on purpose.  There are MANY dark plots and subplots that the musical doesn't even scratch the surface of.

In fact, everyone Oliver meets in the large, unfamiliar city, turns out to be, by bizarre coincidence, familiar with some aspect of his birth and vital to the plot.  Two separate crime victims coincidentally turn out to be exactly the people that those who steer him into the crimes, completely obliviously, LEAST want him to encounter.

So--it's also one of the master's first novels, and he's still learning the style that would eventually make him famous.  Is it melodramatic and clumsy?   Very much so.  Is it a gripping read?  Also, very much so.  It is large. It contains multitudes.   Very much recommended, but not so much for children as the musical would suggest.  

Philosophers' War: Seven Surrenders, by Ada Palmer  

Tyrants and assassins have a great symbiosis. Assassins are always evil and despised (even when our effects are good, we're still a bad means to a good end) until tyrants crop up. Then suddenly, assassins are heroes, lifelines, suddenly we alone have the power to save the world without a revolution and the destruction revolutions bring. You admit you need us. But, between tyrants, you forget that assassins will only be here, ready, when you want us if we've been here, ready, the whole time.  You feel dirty keeping such a weapon in the house, but somebody has to keep one or it won't be there when the bad wolf comes to huff and puff.

This is the sequel to Palmer's Hugo-nominated Too Like the Lightning (see this April's Bookpost), and is still impressively scholarly but has more of a balance between the heavy philosophy and being entertaining.   By now, we know a bit about the characters and the world--a world that has been at peace for generations, and is divided not into nations but into "hives", each based on different values and models of government.  It reminded me a bit of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri game, where your objective and winning strategy differs based on which of several philosophically opposed characters you play.

The plot becomes almost soap opera-ish (which is not a bad thing; some of the greatest novels and dramas ever written do the same), with Mycroft or one of the other occasional narrators having to stop and explain what just happened (So-and-so is a witch! yes, I forgot to tell you before that there's witchcraft here; so and so has been the offspring of so-and-so the whole time! so-and-so just did what someone else, like me, maybe, was trying to manipulate them into doing the whole time!), and sometimes the reveals come so quickly on top of each other that one forgets what was originally the given circumstance, and a lot of people, me included, may have to read both books twice.   It will be worth it.  Very well constructed.

Cold Equations: The Dark Forest & Death's End, by Cixin Liu  

I don't have much to say except a warning: Life reached an evolutionary milestone when it climbed onto land from the ocean, but those first fish that climbed onto land ceased to be fish.

Similarly, when humans truly enter space and are freed from the Earth, they cease to be human. So, to all of you I say this: When you think about heading into outer space without looking back, please reconsider. The cost you must pay is far greater than you could imagine.

Death's End is the fourth Hugo-nominated novel I've read this year, and one that instantly vaulted to the top of my list so far, both for readability and for value as great literature (a modern contribution to the Great Books of the Eastern World).  Three Body Problem, the first in a trilogy won in 2015 (It was my second choice), and Dark Forest is the second book.

Holy crap.  I don't quite know where to begin with something so epic, and I don't want to spoil the feeling you will get as various things happen.  A comparison with Clarke's Childhood's End and Stapledon's Last and First Men is appropriate, just for the scale of time and the breadth of fascinating ideas presented, from the end of Constantinople to the end of the Universe, and containing original concepts in hard science, political theory, psychology, philosophy, and the interpretation of fairy tales.

If you're a geek at all, there will be parts that fascinate you, and probably some parts that bore or bother you, just because there is so very much to grasp.  Very highest recommendations.

Aubrey/Maturin: The Surgeon's Mate, The Ionian Mission; Treason's Harbor, by Patrick O'Brian  

He had pursued his strikingly beautiful, spirited, fashionable wife for years and years before marrying her in mid-Channel aboard a man-of-war: for so many years indeed that he had become a confirmed bachelor at last, too old a dog to give up his tricks of smoking tobacco in bed, playing his cello at odd untimely moments, dissecting anything that interested him, even in the drawing room; to old to be taught to shave regularly, to change his linen, or to wash when he did not feel the need--an impossible husband.  He was not house-trained; and although he made earnest attempts at the beginning of their marriage, he soon perceived that in time the strain must damage their relationship, all the more so since Diana was as intransigent as himself and far more apt to fly into a passion about such things as a pancreas in the drawer of the bedside table or orange marmalade ground into the Aubusson.

--from The Ionian Mission

Volumes 7 through 9 of the delightful romp that is O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series continues with fun and excitement in the Atlantic, the Baltic, the Mediterranean and the Red Sea.  Wonderful conversations, romances, epic sea adventures, spycraft and espionage, behind-the-scenes plots, botany and biology--it's all there in glorious regency color and, as usual, has my highest recommendations.

On the Shoulders of Particles:  A New System of Chemical Philosophy, by John Dalton

The following general rules may be adopted as guides in all our investigations regarding chemical synthesis:

1. When only one combination of two bodies can be obtained, it must be presumed to be a binary one, unless some cause appear to the contrary.

2. When two combinations are observed, they must be presumed to be a binary and a ternary.

3. When three combinations are obtained, we may expect one to be a binary and the other two ternary.

4. When four combinations are observed, we should expect one binary, two ternary, and one quaternary, &c.

5. A binary compound should always be specifically heavier than the mere mixture of its two ingredients.

6. A ternary compound should be specifically heavier than the mixture of a binary and a simple, which would, if combined, constitute it, &c.

7. The above rules and observations equally apply when two bodies, such as C and D, D and E, &c. are combined.

See my thoughts on Lobachevski, above, and on Ptolemeic astronomy, March 2013.  It seems to me, Dalton's readable tract on chemistry, warts and all, is a better fit for the "Great Books" series than some of the great but indecipherable works actually selected, especially if, as with Ptolemy, it is considered worthwhile to study "great mistakes" as a bridge to the thought process that got there and the missed data or measuring ability that led both there and to what we believe today.

Dalton came up with modern atomic theory, and though his classification of elements does not fit the periodic table, I found it fascinating and comprehensible why he concluded what he did. If I'd read it earlier, I might have found it easier to understand the earlier scientists.  Recommended as an intellectual exercise.

Booga-Booga, kiddies--it's the World Spirit!  The Philosophy of History, by Georg WTF Hegel  

The Thersites of Homer who abuses the kings is a standing figure for all times.

blows--that is, beating with a solid cudgel--he does not get in every age, as in the Homeric one; but his envy, his egotism, is the thorn which he has to carry in his flesh; and the undying worm which gnaws him is the tormenting consideration that his excellent views and vituperations remain absolutely without result in the world. But our satisfaction at the fate of Thersitism also, may have its sinister side.

See bookposts from January through March this year for more Hegel.  His last book is quite different from the others (a note indicates it was published posthumously, after being compiled from lecture notes) in that it's more readable and more thought provoking to the likes of me, who careth more about world events than about the process of thinking.

There's a lot going on here.  for one, there's the hypothesis that "history is moving westward", meaning Hegel begins with ancient China and then traces what he considers the important phases of history through Sumeria and Babylon, to Palestine and Egypt, to Greece and Rome, and so on.  I've felt a sense of modern western history having a distinct Italian era, a French era, a British era, a transatlantic UK/USA era, an American era, and now a transpacific era shared between the west coast and the Pacific rim, with China and/or India poised to dominate in a coming era.  Spain, Germany, Russia and Texas have been major players, but did not occupy the #1 spot for a consistent period.

Or at least that's my take.  Hegel, a German, chooses to define all of the northern-origin peoples who sacked the Roman empire as "Germans", and therefore defines all of post-Roman history as "the German Era".  This definition was a major basis for the Third Reich, a century later, to classify the people of Europe as "French-Germans", "British-Germans", etc., and to assert that it was only right for all "Germans" to be one nation under the rule of--you guessed it--"Germany".

Also used as Hitler's philosophical basis was Hegel's major thesis that history is caused by a "world spirit" that manifests itself through those "great men"--Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, etc.--who alone make history, blaze with the World Spirit briefly, and then die young, or get Swiss-cheesed in the Senate or are shipped off to Elba.  Hitler's self-identification as one of those "great men", above petty laws and rules of humanity that are beneath the notice of the World Spirit directly brought about the worst atrocities of modern times and illustrate how very dangerous a philosophical concept can be in the wrong hands.  Tolstoy's epic docufictiondrama about Napoleon's Moscow campaign was written as a refutation of the Hegelian "great man" theory of history.

Somewhere today there is an Internet troll, steeped in Hegel, Nietzche, Ayn Rand and other hero-fetish philosophies, who imagines himself to be a "great man", above the rules, and who will in our times, attempt to assert dominance in a way that causes unimaginable harm.  (I'd suggest that that man might be in the White House as I type this, except that I'm pretty sure that that guy thinks Hegel is something you buy with cream cheese and lox at a New York deli.  So we're safe from that philosophical theory, although the "I'm rubber, you're glue" doctrine remains a big, big problem to be reckoned with).

Baw-awwl-zac:  The Quest for the Absolute; Melmoth Reconciled; Seraphita, by Honore de Balzac  

You can sell everything, even your children. We will all obey you without a murmur, but I must point out to you that we have no money left, that we have scarcely enough to live upon this year, and that Felice and I have to work night and day to earn the money to pay for Jean's school expenses by the lace dress which we are making.  Father dear, give up your researches, I implore you."

"You are right, dear child. In six weeks they will come to an end. I shall have discovered the Absolute, or the Absolute will be proved to be undiscoverable.  You will have millions---"

"But leave us bread to eat meanwhile", pleaded Marguerite.

--from "The Quest of the Absolute."

Three fables by Balzac, none of them his best work, but all interesting to some degree.  the longest one, "The Quest of the Absolute" centers around a scientist who wastes his fortune and his whole life doing experiments to create the "philosopher's stone", always on the verge of what surely will be the amazing breakthrough if only he can borrow yet more money, while his loyal but anguished family weeps.  I imagined Mitt Romney's heirs having similar thoughts a few years back, as they watched their inheritance wasted on the most expensive mid-life crisis in modern history.  "Melmouth" is a coda to RP Maturin's tale of a man doomed to wander after selling his soul; in Balzac's version, the unholy contract ends up being bought and sold on the stock exchange; while "Seraphita" is more of a churchy sermon about a saintly Swedish woman preparing to ascend, that will tell you more than you ever wanted to know about Emmanuel Swedenborg.

Backstabbed in Baltimore: The Accidental Tourist, by Anne Tyler  

"If you really think that, then you're fooling yourself. You're not holding steady; you're ossified. You're encased. You're like something in a capsule. You're a dried up kernel of a man that nothing really penetrates.  Oh, Macon, it's not by chance you write those silly books telling people how to take trips without a jolt. That traveling armchair isn't just your logo; it's you."

The statement quoted above is said to a grieving man who cannot be consoled over the completely random shooting death of his son a full year after the event, who cannot bring himself to part with the child's destructive dog because it reminds him of the boy.  It is said to him by his wife, who wants a divorce rather than stay married to someone who doesn't adjust to gut-wrenching change easily.  It is one of the cruelest moments in a book full of cruel moments, and yet the book jacket describes The Accidental Tourist as a comedy, a tribute to the wonderful nuttiness in the human condition.   The man breaks his leg in a weird accident, and the laugh track goes wild. the dog bites people, threatens to cost the man his job, and it's supposed to be funny.

I found it ableist and making fun of neurodivergent pain, the more painful the supposedly funnier.

The supposedly silly foibles of the protagonist are exemplified in the "accidental tourist" travel series the protagonist writes--with a winged armchair on the cover, and pointing out places around the world that most recreate American culture, for American travelers on business and so on, who didn't want to leave home and who want to eat Chef Boy Ar Dee in Italy.  This is supposed to be humorously pathetic, an invitation to the reader to point and laugh at the philistines.  I find it...understandable, and I find the way the protagonist and other "lovably crazy" people are treated by the "normals" infuriatingly condescending.  Your mileage may vary, naturally, but it seems to me that if creature comforts give one pleasure, there's no shame in it, and there is shame in mocking it.

Star-Crossed Geniuses: All the Birds in the Sky, by Charlie Jane Anders  

"You never learned the secret," said Roberta. "How to be a crazy motherfucker and get away with it. Everybody else does it. What, you didn't think they were all sane, did you? Not a one of them. They're all crazier than you and me put together. They just know how to fake it. You could too, but you've chosen to torture all of us instead. That's the definition of evil right there: not faking it like everybody else.  Because all of us crazy fuckers can't stand it when somebody else lets their crazy show. It's like bugs under the skin. We have to destroy you. It's nothing personal."

This is the fifth Hugo-nominated novel of 2017 that I have read, and right after Cixin liu's masterwork described above was rocketed to the top of my list.

And then, Anders's book surpassed Liu and IT became my number one pick.  We'll see later whether the sixth book, which is by last year's winner, will top even Anders.  Honestly, this year's Hugo winners are the readers who get to go through such a varied and amazing feast of books.

Seems to me, while Cixin and Palmer have written heavy-duty intellectual books with fascinating original concepts, All the Birds in the Sky is not so much intellectual as smart, and very very playful. The story is--yes, there are dire consequences to the planet, but it is simple and centered around two people, Patricia and Laurence, who begin the tale as alienated children.   HE is a science geek!  SHE is a witch!  THEY will huddle for comfort against the mundanes, will become opponents, maybe lovers, maybe save the world or end it---AND SOLVE CRIMES!

Anders writes sentences and plot situations that bring to my mind Tom Robbins, Sarah Vowell and Christopher Moore--three of my very favorite modern writers. Early situations involving Patricia and Laurence made me hurt in sympathy with my own adolescent baggage.  Later buildup made me gasp, and the climax and resolution made me happycry.

Which is why I'm calling All the Birds in the Sky the best of the five hugo books i've read so far.  Some of the others beat it out in some aspects, but it holds its own on just about all criteria...and it made me happycry.  Books that make you happycry get to win, right?

Unspeakable Melodrama: Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, by Mary Shelley  

"I expected this reception," said the daemon. "All men hate the wretched; how, then, must I be hated, who am miserable beyond all living things! Yet you, my creator, detest and spurn me, thy creature, to whom thou art bound by ties only dissoulable by the annihilation of one of us. You purpose to kill me. How dare you sport thus with life? Do your duty towards me and I will do mine towards you and the rest of mankind. If you will comply with my conditions, I will leave them and you at peace, but if you refuse, I will glut the maw of death until it be satiated with the blood of your remaining friends."

Frankenstein is frequently listed as the first science fiction novel, and is probably the first work since Genesis to depict human life being created only to rise and fuck up everything. The story has been re-told and adapted so many times that reading it today seems both cliched ("Oh, i have created a MONSTER!") and deficient in tropes.   There is no wild-eyed scientist, no Igor, no gothic castle full of Erlinmeyer flasks and lightning rods, no mob of peasants with torches and pitchforks.   Victor Frankenstein is a misguided, educated gentleman who acts alone, and whose hellish experiment is here and over in a couple of pages so that we can get to the real story, which revolves around the consequences and emo fee-fees of both being a hideous thing hated by civilization and being Daddy to an out of control killing machine.

The story levels up and down from the narrative of a ship's captain who rescues Frankenstein off of an ice floe in the Northern Sea; Frankenstein's story told to the captain, and the creature's story as told to Frankenstein as told to the captain.   The most touching and memorable part of the book is the creature's narrative, learning from books and hidden observation about the human world he longs to join but that rejects him at every turn, the subplot of the remote cottagers that the creature wants to help, the transition from an instinctive urge to love to the thirst to destroy it all out of revenge for rejection.  Frankenstein, even by his own account, does very shabbily by his creation, and the dialogues between creator and created, the episodes of chasing and plotting against one another, are not the part that will stay with you long after reading.

And from that story, root and branch have gone forth into multiple genres, culminating so far in this year's amazing books by Cixin Liu and Charlie Jane Anders, and promising to go farther yet.  From tiny acorns and all that.

Cathy and Catharsis: Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte  

I had a peep at a dirty, ragged, black-haired child, big enough to both walk and talk--indeed, its face looked older than Catherine's--yet, when it was set on its feet, it only stared round, and repeated over and over again some gibberish that nobody could understand. I was frightened, and Mrs. Earnshaw was ready to fling it out of doors; she did fly up, asking how could he fashion to bring that gipsy brat into the house, when they had their own bairns to feed and fend for? What he meant to do with it, and whether he were mad?

It's been years since I was forced to read Wuthering Heights in high school and hated every page.  Obviously there is plenty I missed the first time around, but yeas...the location and most of the players are toxic to my soul.

It's a mystery to me why there's a cultural assessment of Heathcliff as some sort of tragic, charismatic, romantic hero--which is how he was presented by the teacher during my first reading. My hypothesis is that the old movie starring a very young Laurence Olivier had something to do with that.  The plain text of the book emphasizes Heathcliff as a savage, feral monster who grows up half-blind with rage against his foster family and the neighbors, abuses the woman he supposedly loves, and ends up seizing and destroying everything including himself. He is a Morlock to the Eloi presented by the Earnshaws and Lintons.

Mind you, the Lintons are snoots, and Hindley Earnshaw is both a snoot and a lout, whose anger as the heir displaced for a stranger is understandable but ugly nonetheless.  Probably the most sympathetic character is Lockwood, the astonished narrator who bookends the long story of how the grange and the heights came to be such miserable places. when disagreeable people do mean and petty things to each other in revenge for previous mean and petty things, it's hard to get too excited.  Fortunately, Charlotte and Anne are the Brontes who wrote more than one.

Aubrey/Maturin: The Far Side of the World; The Reverse of the Medal; The Letter of Marque, by Patrick O'Brian

"I beg your pardon for bursting in upon your beetle," said Mowett," but the Captain would like to know whether the human frame can support this." He passed a mug of rainwater collected long ago, north of the Line.

Stephen smelt to it, poured a little into a phial and looked at it with a lens. Delight dawned upon his grave, considering face and spread wide. "Will you look at this, now!" he said, passing it to Martin. "Perhaps the finest conferva soup I have ever seen, and I believe I make out several African forms."
"There are also some ill-looking polyps, and several creatures no doubt close in kin to the hydroblabs," said Martin. "I should not drink it for a Deanery."

--from The Far Side of the World

Men who are accustomed over a long series of years to supposing that whatever can somehow be squared with the law is right--or if not right, then allowable--are not useful members of society; and when they reach positions of power in the state, they are noxious. they are people for whom ethics can be summed up by the collected statutes.
--from The Reverse of the Medal

You may have inferred from the rate at which I'm going through my second reading of Aubrey/Maturin that I am having the time of my life, and you would be right.  These three books, it seems to me, are the zenith of the story arc.  

The Far Side of the World is so magnificent that, when they tried to do a big budget Aubrey/Maturin movie, they skipped right to the middle and started off with this story.  Sea battles and spycraft, mutinous crew members and people pressed into the service out of a lunatic asylum by a desperately understaffed navy; murderous love triangles and shipwrecks and piracy, protagonists lost overboard in the middle of the ocean and found by hostile amazons, all culminating in a look at how Lord of the Flies would have played out among adult castaways.  After that gourmet literary feast, The Reverse of the Medal takes Captain Aubrey to his lowest point in the entire series, while The Letter of Marque features Stephen beginning with Jack the long climb up from the bottom.  All three books, I read in a day of failing to put them down.  You might, too.   Very highest recommendations.

Monsieur Hulot's Folly Days: Cousin Bette, by Honore de Balzac  

In one moment, Lisbeth Fischer had become the Mohican whose snares none can escape, whose dissimulation is inscrutable, whose swift decisiveness is the outcome of the incredible perfection of every organ of sense. she was Hatred and Revenge, as implacable as they are in Italy, Spain, and the East. These two feelings, the obverse of friendship and love carried to the utmost, are known only in lands scorched by the sun.  But Lisbeth was also a daughter of Lorraine, bent on deceit.

This month's Balzac is a peculiar one.  It is presented by the translator as an equal and opposite novel to Cousin Pons (about a poor relation treated horribly by rich relatives), as if it was about Bette, the poor relation, treating rich people horribly....and yet, the 'poor relation' is a seamstress who has frugally saved up a substantial sum, while the family of "rich relatives", from the beginning, are at the edge of ruin behind a veneer of threadbare once-new carpets and tarnished heirloom silver.  The daughter of the houshold thoughtlessly steals Bette's boyfriend (thereby triggering a revenge plot worthy of Edmond Dantes), but other than that, the family is quite good and respectful to her, and trusts her to the point where she can do them serious harm.  The main instrument of Bette's revenge is her friend the beautiful Madame Marneffe, who gets the paterfamilias to throw away family money he can't afford on a "comic" extramarital affair bordering on farce.  Marneffe at one point is having a jolly time collecting presents from no less than four silly male suitors, not counting her actual husband; and the adultery of these men with women half their age is presented as human folly in a "old men will be old men, what can you do?" sort of way.  In fact, the story appears to be more about the lecherous comic/tragic flaw of the weak patriarch Hulot, whose helplessness against feminine wiles is summed up by his son in what may well be the true theme of the book: Parents may hinder their children's marriage; but children cannot interfere with the insane acts of their parents in their second childhood

The 19th Century Murders:  The Bride of Newgate, by John Dickson Carr; Breach of Promise; The Twisted Root, by Anne Perry; Snake Stone, by Jason Goodwin; Days of the Dead, by Barbara Hambly; Broken Vessel, by Kate Ross 

"Why can't we allow people to break a betrothal if they realize it was a mistake," he went on passionately, "without assuming there must be some fearful sin on the part of one or the other of them? Why do we care so much if a woman is pretty or not? If all we want is something lovely to look at, we can buy a picture and hang it on the wall. We do this!" He flung out his arms. "We create a society where people go to law instead of saying to each other the simple truth. And now, instead of a broken romance--which, God knows, hurts enough, but we all experience it--we have scandal, disgrace, shame, and worst of all, we have destroyed one of the brightest talents of our generation. And over what? A misunderstanding."

--from Breach of Promise

"Yes, I've solved a lot of murders....Some I understood, and might have done the same myself.  Others were so cold-blooded, so consumed in self, it frightened me that another human being I had talked with, soot beside, could have hidden that evil behind a face which looked to me like any other."

--from The Twisted Root

"Under your precious law, the husband has still another right. Everything I own becomes his property, even to the house we stand in at this moment. And what, pray, do I get in exchange? I receive a boorish lout who will stamp home smelling of the stables, rattle out his oaths, and be hopelessly drunk by three o'clock in the afternoon.  Or an empty-pated dandy (praise heaven the breed is passing!) who pays fabulous compliments, has a sour temper, and gambles away every farthing at Watier's or White's.  And for THIS, we are taught to simper, and swoon, and tap coquettishly with a fan, and cry 'Fie' at some mildly bawdy jest.  For what purpose? To 'catch', dear me, a husband who is not worth the trouble to catch!"

--from The Bride of Newgate

It was the hour of the evening prayer, when you could no longer distinguish between a black thread and a white thread in ordinary light. George pulled the paring knife from his belt and sliced it through the air as he turned.  All over Istanbul, muezzins in their minarets threw back their heads and began to chant.

It was a good time to kick a man to death in the street.

--from The Snake Stone

Toby lived on the first floor above the public house and let out the second-floor rooms to ladybirds and their flats.  There was not much danger that the authorities would take notice; the parish constables were too indolent, and the Bow Street Runners preferred bigger game. Throat them a bottle of spirits now and again, and they would turn a blind eye. God knew, such accommodation houses were common enough round the Haymarket, where girls like Sally were as numerous as the paving stones they trod each night.

--from The Broken Vessel

"Hope is something the living do." The fiddler coughed, switching the bow into his other hand so that he could press his hand to his side.  "...to hope till Hope creates / from its own wreck the thing it contemplates...it's too silly an occupation for the dead."

January took a sip of the gin--which was cheap and unspeakably bad--and said, "You may be right about that."

--from Days of the Dead

Breach of Promise has TWO novel-alteringbig reveals, the first of which made me mad because I did not see itcoming. I am usually good at seeingthese things coming, but Anne Perry has fooled me quite a few times this year(Well played, Ms. Perry. Very well played). As usual, almost as wonderful as the gripping mystery is the socialcommentary about the days when men who did not see an engagement through tomarriage could be sued for "breach of promise" (see also, the Gilbert & Sullivanmini-opera Trial By Jury), and sometimes the lawsuit wasrequired even if the ex-fiancee didn't want it, because without it, busybodysociety would gossip and chin-wag about how she must have been rejected assomehow damaged goods, and then no one else would want to marry hereither. Anne Perry will not fail toremind you about how sucky traditional gender roles were and are. The Twisted Root is enigmatic for along time, but needs a trigger warning for turning unbearably ugly in the finalchapters with a tale of abuse strong enough that it may be too painful forthose who don't see it coming.  Perry does not pull punches when depictingpsychological pain.

The Bride of Newgate is one of therarest treats in historical detective fiction; a dabbling in the genre by a20th century grand master of locked room and other 'impossible crime'stories. John Dickson Carr's (apparentlyonly) foray into history is a delightful regency romp as well as a devilishlyclever whodunnit. SHE is the spirited,independent, Strong Female Protagonist who, in order to inherit a fortune undera will that stipulates that she MUST get married, determines to marry aconvicted murderer and be widowed by the hangman the next day.  HE (Dick Derwint) is the condemnedrapscallion whose conviction is miraculously overturned after the wedding butbefore the execution, giving him a do-over chance to prove his innocence. meanwhile,the improbable couple has been joined in matrimony, and the hijinks thatensue---OH HOLY SHIT, JUST READ IT! VeryHighest Recommendations.

The Snake Stoneis the second in Jason Goodwin's series about Yashim the Eunnuch, investigatorin the 1830s  Ottoman Empire. The series is very well written, and adds an exotic change of localeto a historical genre where most crimes are in England or America. It does require a content note, in thatmany of the murders involve unusual or nasty ways to die, and the bodies aredescribed in more detail than many will want to know.  This book relatesthe last days of Constantinople to a book written two centuries later, arecent Greek popular uprising, and a search for hidden treasures in whichsomeone who knows too much (several people, actually, but the French collectoris considered the important one) is deaded, and Yashim himself is the onlysuspect.   High recommendations.

 

Kate Ross's series about the dandy Julian Kestrel and his reformed pickpocket-turned-valet "Dipper" continues to add joy to my reading, for word use, for character building, and for sleuthing. Compared to Anne Perry, Ross's London is the musical Oliver as compared to the darkness of the original Dickens.  Sally, the sassy, seductive strumpet who teams up with Kestrel in The Broken Vessel might as well be Nancy Sykes singing "Oom-Pah-Pah" in a busker-filled streetside tavern like the one that opens the book. Sally lifts the handkerchiefs of three very different customers of the night, discovers an alarming note that must have been hidden in one of them, and goes on an investigative romp that includes the homes of the rich "gentry-coves" as well as to a "home for the reclamation of reduced females" that gives a feel for the indignities and abuses of the age with enough distance (in part due to the use of words like "strumpet", "taradiddle" and "jackanapes" that convey the rich upper and lower class slang of the time) to avoid serious triggering.  The Broken Vessel won the Gargoyle Award for best historical mystery of the year, and it shows. Very high recommendations.

Last is another Benjamin January mystery, which I've come to read more for historical and cultural value about a nasty time in my nation's past than for the challenge of "whodunnit".  My experience is, the mystery is either not solvable or just makes sense from the beginning, but the plots are gripping and make one burn with indignation about the horrific levels of racism that continue in parts of the region to this day, with or without the backing of law.  Days of the Dead has January take a trip to Mexico City to maybe clear a man accused of murder, in a land where he need not continually prove his credentials as a free man, and where the superstitions of indigenous Mexico, Voodoun and white Christianity clash as potential solutions for the death.  Also valuable for an appearance by General Santa Anna as a larger than life character.

Sigma Xi Lectures: The Forces of Matter; The Chemical History of a Candle, by Michael Faraday  

Last month, I read 19th Century papers by Dalton and Lobachevski, and piped up that it would be nice if the Great Books set had included them as part of a western canon that Mortimer Adler and his editorial board believed any person could read.  Most actual scientists I know have re-assured me that lay people Do Not learn science from the original Newton, etc.  But too late.  My OCD has kicked in, and I'm in for the long haul.  as of this writing, I am hopelessly bogged down in Faraday's mammoth Experimental Researches in Electricity , which thankfully, appears to be the last of the huge technical jargon books in the Great Books set.  how much happier I would be if, like the Harvard Classics, Faraday had been represented with <b> The Forces of Matter and The chemical History of a Candle.

These two sets of six brief "lecture" chapters each are easy to read and, while basic, taught or reminded me of something new.  When i was young, my father used to take me to an evening lecture series with guests who ran the gamut from Richard Feynman on physics to The Amazing Randi on debunking claims of the supernatural.  They did demonstrations on How Shit Works that you could learn from by watching, just like they never did at my actual high school.   Faraday's "lectures' are like that.  Heavily illustrated, in plain English, and using toys like fire-balloons to demonstrate chemical reactions and energy.   As far as I'm concerned, these should be studied and demonstrated as part of high school science.

The Adventures of Emo and Straight Man: Either/Or, by Soren Kierkegaard

If one were to ask for a divorce because his wife was tiresome, or demand the abdication of a king because he was boring to look at, or the banishment of a preacher because he was tiresome to listen to, or the dismissal of a prime minister, or the execution of a journalist because he was terribly tiresome, one would find it impossible to force through.  What wonder, then, that the world goes from bad to worse, and that its evils increase more and more, as boredom increases, and boredom is the root of all evil.

My goodness, but this is a weird piece of work. Kierkegaard, a Dane, is said to have invented existentialism a century before Sartre, and to have had his work sit neglected until the 20th Century, when he was declared to have been a tortured genius. As usual with philosophers who talk about a universal human condition, I immediately suspect that Kierkegaard attributes to all people a case history that is really more about himself than about humanity (right after the quote above about boredom, he famously asserts that God created a woman because Adam was bored; then had them produce offspring because the two of them were bored, and eventually that all of the being fruitful and multiplying was so that we could all form society and be bored together!

On the other hand, a good deal of what he says about human experience and feeling is in fact consistent with my own memories of younger life compared to how I am today, so I can't discard him out of hand. Your mileage may vary.

Kierkegaard pretends that Either/Or is a bunch of papers he found in a desk, that were written by two other people, one a young epicure, the other a middle-aged judge.  The epicure's contribution includes several literary critiques of the psychology behind Don Giovanni and Faust, particularly as they apply to rogue protagonists who toy with the affections of women; and concludes with "The Diary of a Seducer", a commitmentphobic account about wooing a young woman, awakening her love, and then abandoning her. The second part of Either/Or consists of the judge, who has apparently read the seducer's diary, telling the epicure what's wrong with him and urging him to choose different.

The central philosophical concept is that we are all (even the women) the epicure and the judge, and that life and maturing consists of passing through an "aesthetic" stage of life devoted to sensual pleasures and scholarly pursuits in studies that enhance pleasure (such as refined appreciation of art, music, wine, etc.)...and into a more mature "ethical" stage guided by empathy and conscience.  The judge writes a lot about the Emperor Nero, who was a talented musician and artist, but an epic failure at governing because, says the judge, Nero became bored and used the supreme power to provide ever-increasing thrills for himself.

So, yeah. Got it?  Don't be Nero.   Next book…

Orogen Story:  The Obelisk Gate, byNK Jemisin

You focus on the drunk woman and it isalmost instinctual, the urge to begin squeezing the movement and life out ofher and replacing that with whatever the by-product of magical reactions reallyis, this stuff that looks like stone.  This stuff that is killingAlabaster, the father of your other dead child, NOT ONE MORE RUSTING CHILD. Forhow many centuries has the world killed rogga children so that everyone else'schildren could sleep easy?...and you turn with the obelisk torrenting its powerthrough you to begin killing everyone within and beyond your sight.

The sixth and last of the Hugo-nominated novels I have readis by the woman who won last year for The Fifth Season, towhich The Obelisk Gate is a strong sequel.  I won't spoil the plot of two books by goinginto detail, but i hope that the story arc is building to something uplifting,because this particular dystopia, especially as applied to climate change andhatred of (in our world, scientists; in Jemisin's world, orogenes withsupernatural abilities) . They kill thepeople who have the power to save them, and in this age of In-Yo-Face TrumpismVictorious and 'religious freedom" for people whose religions give themexcuses to be vicious, we are watching a parallel to the Broken Earth seriesgoing on right now. 

I wonder how many other writers of dystopian fiction work long and hard ontheir masterpiece only to discover that their nightmare is no longer entirelyfiction.

So, here is my ranking of the six Hugo nominated novels for 2017:

1. Charlie Jane Anders, All the Birds in the Sky

2. Cixin Liu, Death's End

3. Ada Palmer, Too Like the Lightning

4. NK Jemisin, The Obelisk Gate

5. Yoon Ha Lee, The Ninefox Gambit

6. Becky Chambers, A Closed and Common Orbit

Your mileage may vary as to the order, but all of them arewell worth the read, and this may well be the finest overall collection to beoffered since I first started seeking out and reading the Hugo novel list.  Based on my track record, the smart money ison Death's End, which would make my sixth straight year ofranking the eventual winning novel second by my personal taste.

What the Dickens:  The Adventures of Chartin Mhuzzlewit, by Charles Dikkens, the well known Dutch author  

Perhaps there never was a more moral man than Mr. Pecksniff: especially in his conversation and correspondence.  It was once said of him by a homely admirer that he had a Fortunatus's purse of good sentiments in his inside.  In this particular, he was like the girl in the fairy tale, except that if they were not actual diamonds which fell from his lips, they were the very brightest paste, and shone prodigiously.  He was a most exemplary man, fuller of virtuous precept than a copybook. Some people likened him to a direction post, which is always telling the way to a place, but never goes there; but these were his enemies, the shadows cast by his brightness, that was all.  His very throat was moral.

You know what you've signed up for when you read a Dickens book:  Masterful, memorable characters, improbable plots that take a backseat to the characters and atmosphere, a whole lot of extraneous words, and among the dross, some of the finest writing to be found in English prose.  Martin Chuzzlewit was new to me this month, but familiar nonetheless.   Young Chuzzlewit is interchangeable with Nicholas Nickleby, or Charles Darnay, or grown-up David Copperfield, or any other colorless, earnest young romantic in his novels.  But in spite of the title, this isn't really Martin's story.

With many Martin- and non-Martin digressions, the real protagonist is Tom Pinch, the golden-hearted servant and only friend to Wicked Uncle Pecksniff, whose goodness he believes in and defends against all the world.  Indeed, Dickens at his best shows through in his capacity to damn with faint praise and praise with faint damns.  Pinch is always described as a wretch and a fool in a way that really emphasizes depth of character, while Pecksniff is continually lauded as a philanthropist and a paragon of morals in a way that reveals him as a hypocritical asshole.

Martin Chuzzlewit is also notable as the only Dickens that involves characters who go to America.  I do not know whether Dickens ever visited America, but he is no Tocqueville, and his characterization is a blend of massive fail with spot-on satire.  In DickensLand, New York is populated almost entirely with blustering Colonels who bellow like foghorn Leghorn and Yosemite Sam,   One blusterer has a multi-page monologue about how America is the land of freedom and equality, and how he just came back from a trip to snooty old England with their titles and their royalty and their social rank distinctions and how, by gum, it's great to be back where a person is a person like any other.  At the end of this rant, he learns that the gentleman he was addressing, far from being a gentleman, took the boat to New York by--gasp--steerage class, and reached for his sword. How DARE that man so much as speak to him!  Another man waxes eloquently about having just joined a good, wonderful Christian organization dedicated to the all-American principles of equality of all peoples, until he is horrified to discover that the organization is all about freeing the n*****s!  Lather, rinse, repeat.

There's a reason Martin Chuzzlewit is not as well known as some of the other novels,  but it is a wonderful secondary read in the style you expect.

A Dish Served Frozen: The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas

"And now," said the unknown man, "farewell kindness, humanity, and gratitude! Farewell to all the feelings that expand the heart! I have been Heaven's Substitute to recompense the good--now the God of Vengeance yields to me his power to punish the wicked!" At these words, he gave a signal and, as if only awaiting this signal, the yacht instantly put out to sea.

He had everything....until THEY took it from him!

(dramatic stab)

NOW  he's back--and shit is about to get real!

*explosions*  *cries of despair* *blood* *plot, plot* "NOOOO!  I'm ruined!" *more explosions*

173 YEARS LATER.....

I read this once before, and it must have been an abridged version.  This book, fortunately a fast-paced thriller, is HUGE.  It takes 75 pages for the villains to do protagonist Edmond Dantes mortal wrong; 200 more pages for him to suffer 14 years in a dungeon for a crime he didn't commit; escape daringly, and unearth buried treasure enough to grant him everything that money can buy....and then a further NINE HUNDRED FORTY FIVE pages before the first of the four baddies from the beginning finally collapses under the ruin of everything he has ever loved, crying "You!  Omigod, NOOOOOOOOO....", and then even more while he polishes off the other three.

That middle 940 pages is the most muddled tapestry of plotting, supernatural foresight, characters who have coincidentally multiple contacts with other characters (even the original villains do not all know each other in the beginning, but by the middle there are 20 or so people currently in Paris who intersect in a 20-circle Venn diagram that is probably impossible to actually construct.

After 15 years in a dungeon and 15 more years establishing groundwork before he surfaces, it's been 30 years since the original crime against Dantes; the villains have all married and have grown up children innocent of wrongdoing, who are part of the set of "everything they've ever loved" which must be destroyed.  Dantes, the protagonist we are supposed to identify with, for 945 pages is a machine, ostensibly charming but lying in every word he says, while the other characters have their emotions laid bare for the reader.  And the villains are not the same people they were 30 years ago; Dumas has the reader run with the hare for a lot more of the book than we chase with the hounds, and I, at least, found myself screaming along with them at the denouments rather than triumphing along with the mysterious "Count".

But then, I overthought it.  I could not stop obsessing about Albert Moncref, the grown son of one of Edmond's targets, who has loved his father all his life---and yet, when the Count revenges himself by exposing an ancient scandal (the old soldier had once betrayed a Sultan in Turkey and taken a castle for the French by treachery, decades earlier), the son does an about face and abandonds the old man without so much as speaking to him.  Leaves all of his belongings, down to his pocket change, pointedly on the front table for the father he had loved from birth until two days earlier, to see so that he might suffer the tortures of the damned.  This, it seems to me, says more about Albert than about the man with the checkered past.  Just as it may be that me dwelling on plot points in a book more than most people would says more about me than about Dumas.

But you'll notice I read the whole thing, had trouble putting it down, over the course of a week. Dumas is correctly credited as a master storyteller, and with a revenge story like this, you know exactly what you're signing up for.

Epilogue to the Durants:  The Age of Napoleon, by Will and Ariel Durant

He was an exhausting force, a phenomenon of energy contained and explosive, a rising, burning, waning flame that consumed those who touched him intimately. We have not found in history another soul that burned so intensely and so long. That will, at first so hesitant, fearful, and morose, discovered its weapons and resources in a piercing mind and eye; it became confident, rash, imperious, rioting in grasp and power; until the gods, seeing no measure in him, bound lesser wills in union to pursue him, corner him, seize him, and chain him to a rock until his  fire should burn out. This was one of the great dramas of history, and still awaits its Aeschylus.

Here ends the first of several literary lists that, when I started in 2011, were to bring me from the earliest times to something close to the present. The Durants thought they would write world history in four volumes, and ended up writing ten and limiting themselves, other than in Vol. I, to Western Europe.  The Age of Napoleon, which begins with the fall of the Bastille in 1789 and ends with Napoleon's death on St. Helena in 1821, was volume 11, written as the Durants' retirement continued longer than expected.

For six and a half years, I've had one of the thick books by the side of my bathtub, to be grazed in on weekends, a chapter at a time.  They're easily read--what used to be considered a high school reading level, and cover the general things an intelligent person ought to be familiar with about the major events, governments, philosophy, literature, morals, manners, art and music, religious and scientific and economic developments in the various stages of Western European history, told in an affectionate, sometimes witty manner.

The main thing I'll miss about it is the illustrations--portraits of famous people and buildings, and paintings and sculptures from various times.  Most of the other "great works" are just words on paper.

On the other hand, most of what is said is said better, and with more insight than narrative, in other works you will find in these book posts.  The Durants are an excellent introduction to European history, but they are just a surface-scratching introduction.

Toxic Boyhood: Tom Brown's School Days, by Thomas Hughes  

After all, what would life be like without fighting, I should like to know? From the cradle to the grave, fighting, rightly understood, is the business, the real, highest, honestest business of every son of man. Everyone who is worth his salt has his enemies, who must be beaten, be they evil thoughts and habits in himself or spiritual wickednesses in high places, or Russians, or border-ruffians, or Bill, Tom, or Harry, who will not let him live his life in quiet until he has thrashed them.

It is no good for Quakers, or any other body of men, to uplift their voices against fighting. Human nature is too strong for them, and they don't follow their own precepts.

I remember seeing episodic adaptations of this story of an English Boys' School under the direction of Matthew Arnold on TV when I was little. Young Tom Brown was abused by Flashman, the school bully, and threatened with expulsion and disgrace for things he didn't do, before right always triumphed in the end. There was a little sneak of a Fauntleroy named Cuthbertson, and...and, this is not the same story at all.  There is no Cuthbertson, no threat of expulsion, and Flashman is gone midway through the story.  Tom's parents who, on TV, were always punishing him, here are pleased with their big stalwart son, the pride of all England.

Because that's what Tom Brown, the book is.  A propaganda piece for the battle of Waterloo having been won on the playing fields of Eton. I picture Hughes as a hearty man with a handlebar mustache and a striped full-body swimsuit, vigorously inhaling great lungfuls of nourishing fresh air and performing deep knee bends as he prepares for a round of fisticuffs. Hughes calls to life a slice of history in which boys were Real Boys, girls were Real Girls, and small furry creatures from the school fields were caught and squished for sport, because builds character, eh?

Boys fight.  Boys do Christian worship. They drink at the pub, and poach fish out of the river Avon, and do a healthy spot of betting on the horses.  All of these but the worship are strictly forbidden, but encouraged by the unwritten code of manly boys, and the prefects are charged with turning a blind eye unless it is going to get out of hand.  Upperclass boys are given lowerclass boys as slaves for the year (which is called "fagging"), and are allowed to beat them with canes.  For a "fag" to defend himself against an older boy who tries to beat him with a cane is a disciplinary infraction subject to being beaten by the master.  

Hughes reminisces fondly about "Tom's" healthy upbringing here, and how it taught him to be a man, the pride of England. Tom stands up for the weaker kids against bullies, is keen on his spiritual development, and is full of pluck and beans.  I found it an absolute horror.

Paleo Fandom: the antiquity of Man, by Charles Lyell  

The slowness of the progress of the arts of savage life is manifested by the fact that the earlier instruments of bronze were modeled on the exact plan of the stone tools of the preceding age, although such shapes would never have been chosen had metals been known from the first.  The reluctance or incapacity of savage tribes to adopt the new inventions has been shown in the East by their continuing to this day to use the same stone implements as their ancestors, after that mighty empires, where the use of metals in the arts was well known, had flourished for three thousand years in their neighborhood.

Lyell, a contemporary of Darwin, was maybe the greatest geologist of the nineteenth century.  He evidently didn't think too much for evolutionary theory, but did find evidence that ancestors of the human race walked the earth as far back as two million years ago, and asserted an infinite age of the earth itself.  This alone was enough, in his day, to cause a bunch of assholes to assert that he should be killed for having found science that contradicted a mythology text that put man as no older than a few thousand years. As recently as when I was born, these things were not considered issues, and people respected scientific theories.  Now we have a frightening number of people old enough to know better chanting that their unsupported superstitions should be given more weight than actual scientific evidence when deciding public policy, and they are voting for the willfully incompetent to ssert dominance over others once again. Why do people do this shit?

Socrates v. Jesus Steel Cage Match:  Philosophical Fragments, by Soren Kierkegaard  

The projected hypothesis indisputably makes an advance upon Socrates, which is apparent at every point.  Whether it is therefore more true than the Socratic doctrine is an entirely different question, which cannot be decided in the same breath, since we have here assumed a new organ, Faith; a new presupposition, the consequences of Sin; a new decision, the Moment; and a new teacher, the God in time.  Without these, I should never have dared present myself for inspection before that master of Irony, admired through the centuries, whom I approach with a palpitating enthusiasm that yields to none.  But to make an advance upon Socrates and yet say essentially the same things as he, only not nearly so well--that at least is not Socratic.

This is presented as the core of Kierkegaard's philosophy, as Monadology is considered the core of Liebniz.  Both books are short and dense.

Unfortunately, Kierkegaard went beyond the aesthetic and ethical stages of life postulated in Either/Or, above, and also assumed that "everybody" also goes through a highest "religious" phase.  Maybe a lot of people get old and start thinking about their own mortality and begin hedging their bets about life after death.

Kierkegaard pretty much begins by assuming the truth of religion and therefore goes where reasonable people need not follow.  He urges people to forget all about learning by experience and instead accept the authority of human charlatans who wrote words in a book thousands of years ago, which are now used to scam people. he calls this "learning by revelation", and never mind that it is humans, not a supernatural being, that wrote the things presented as "revelation." If you don't start with the premise, then the argument is not worth looking at, and the "paradoxes" are not worth the effort to study.  As always, any fans of an author I pan, are invited to tell me what I'm missing.

Ale and Alienation: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, by Anne Bronte  

‘I beg your pardon, Mrs. Graham—but you get on too fast.  I have not yet said that a boy should be taught to rush into the snares of life,—or even wilfully to seek temptation for the sake of exercising his virtue by overcoming it;—I only say that it is better to arm and strengthen your hero, than to disarm and enfeeble the foe;—and if you were to rear an oak sapling in a hothouse, tending it carefully night and day, and shielding it from every breath of wind, you could not expect it to become a hardy tree, like that which has grown up on the mountain-side, exposed to all the action of the elements, and not even sheltered from the shock of the tempest.’

Granted;—but would you use the same argument with regard to a girl?’

‘Certainly not.’

‘No; you would have her to be tenderly and delicately nurtured, like a hot-house plant—taught to cling to others for direction and support, and guarded, as much as possible, from the very knowledge of evil.  But will you be so good as to inform me why you make this distinction?  Is it that you think she has no virtue?’

‘Assuredly not.’

‘Well, but you affirm that virtue is only elicited by temptation;—and you think that a woman cannot be too little exposed to temptation, or too little acquainted with vice, or anything connected therewith.  It must be either that you think she is essentially so vicious, or so feeble-minded, that she cannot withstand temptation,—and though she may be pure and innocent as long as she is kept in ignorance and restraint, yet, being destitute of real virtue, to teach her how to sin is at once to make her a sinner, and the greater her knowledge, the wider her liberty, the deeper will be her depravity,—whereas, in the nobler sex, there is a natural tendency to goodness, guarded by a superior fortitude, which, the more it is exercised by trials and dangers, is only the further developed—’

‘Heaven forbid that I should think so!’ I interrupted her at last.

‘Well, then, it must be that you think they are both weak and prone to err, and the slightest error, the merest shadow of pollution, will ruin the one, while the character of the other will be strengthened and embellished—his education properly finished by a little practical acquaintance with forbidden things.  Such experience, to him (to use a trite simile), will be like the storm to the oak, which, though it may scatter the leaves, and snap the smaller branches, serves but to rivet the roots, and to harden and condense the fibres of the tree.  You would have us encourage our sons to prove all things by their own experience, while our daughters must not even profit by the experience of others.  Now I would have both so to benefit by the experience of others, and the precepts of a higher authority, that they should know beforehand to refuse the evil and choose the good, and require no experimental proofs to teach them the evil of transgression.  I would not send a poor girl into the world, unarmed against her foes, and ignorant of the snares that beset her path; nor would I watch and guard her, till, deprived of self-respect and self-reliance, she lost the power or the will to watch and guard herself;—and as for my son—if I thought he would grow up to be what you call a man of the world—one that has “seen life,” and glories in his experience, even though he should so far profit by it as to sober down, at length, into a useful and respected member of society—I would rather that he died to-morrow!—rather a thousand times!’ she earnestly repeated, pressing her darling to her side and kissing his forehead with intense affection.  He had already left his new companion, and been standing for some time beside his mother’s knee, looking up into her face, and listening in silent wonder to her incomprehensible discourse.

Anne Bronte was the third, and least known of the writing Bronte Sisters, and yet I was much more gripped by The Tenant of Wildfell Hall than by either WutheringHeights (see last month's Book post) or Jane Eyre (see the month before that).  Heathcliff and Rochester are gripping characters, but hard to relate to, with weird personal histories and boxes in their closets that you don't want to see opened.  Anne Bronte's protagonist "Mrs. Graham" is as real and relatable as they come.

Over the past few years, I have heard both on line and in my professional life, countless true accounts of women fleeing abusive relationships and terrified that their dangerous partner will find them.  Wildfell Hall's mysterious new tenant could be any of them, with the distinction that she lives in a time when wives were chattels and husbands were allowed to rape them, abuse them, have them confined for "willfulness" and take custody of minor children without so much as a court order.

Further, the story is narrated by a well-meaning man who doesn't know Mrs. Graham or her backstory, wants to court her like a true gentleman, and is hurt and bewildered at her understandable reluctance to be involved with a man ever again. And so we get to see a mostly positive role model in a man who respects a woman's boundaries whether he understands them or not.  It is too bad that the rest of the village is not the same.

Later chapters about the husband and his horrible friends blame alcoholism for his descent into abuse and the destruction of his marriage to someone he claims to love.  Seems to me, if the toxic sense of entitlement wasn't there to begin with, alcohol would not bring it out.  The tale gets a little bit preachy about temperance, but when it also preaches feminist ideas that we take for granted today, it makes up for it.  Mrs. Graham is a badass, and someone I would have wanted to be friends with. Very high recommendations.  

Cheerful Stuff: Fear and Trembling, and The Sickness Unto Death, by Soren Kierkegaard

Silently he laid the wood in order, he bound Isaac, in silence he drew the knife---then he saw the ram which God had prepared. Then he offered that and went home...From that time on, Abraham became old; he could not forget that God had required this of him. Isaac throve as before, but Abraham's eyes were darkened, and he knew joy no more.

--from Fear and Trembling

These are probably Kierkegaard's most popular works among English-speaking readers.  They are stand-alone, brief, and easily understood.  Fear and Trembling was included in the second edition of the Great Books set. What is hard to understand is how these books can be called an exhortation by a religious man to a religious life; they did a great deal to convince me that taking religion seriously would make anyone miserable.  Far better to think of death as like going to sleep and never waking up, nor being conscious enough to agonize about eternal voids; or possibly reincarnation as a new life form due to the conservation of life-energy.  Much better than being at the eternal mercy of a being so powerful that it has never once been unable to gratify its every whim, and that is capable of infinite cruelty to the helpless.

Fear and Trembling is an emo consideration of the biblical myth where Abraham, getting on in years, finally has the son he has longed for; God commands him to kill the child; Abraham prepares to do so with barely a murmur, and then God goes "Just kidding.  I was testing your faith."  The myth  is horrible on many levels; it is hard to find a decent ethical lesson or role model anywhere in it, and Kierkegaard knows this.  He tells us that it raises a philosophical question as to whether there is a "teleological suspension of the ethical" (fancy philosopher-speak for "What if God tells you to do something monstrous?"), and whether one has an absolute duty to "God".  Kierkegaard rightly concludes that the answer is no, and that the legendary patriarch of the Jews was a monster at that moment, especially as he did not so much as talk it over with friends or family first.

The sickness Unto Death is even less cheerful, and I'm afraid I was completely unable to take the theological/emotional message seriously, as I read it in Sam the Eagle's voice: "Class, we are now going to discuss a very important topic at length, and that topic is DESPAIR." You are in the despair of weakness if you do not will to be who you are. You are in the despair of defiance if you do will to be who you are.  You cannot win nor break even nor quit.  (fortunately, the third way of being in despair, which is to reject the Bible-based dichotomy in the first place, which is my option, is dismissed in a few paragraphs as the most contemptible, least worthy option of all, comparable to a filthy peasant asserting that the King does not exist, and is not really mentioned otherwise, and so it was easy for me to just roll my eyes at the despairs that came after, because none of them seemed to apply to me, not at all.

Worth the read if you're at all interested in Kierkegaard; otherwise, if you're an atheo skeptic like me, it won't have much to offer.

The 19th Century Murders: Slaves of Obsession; Funeral in Blue; Death of a Stranger, by Anne Perry. Dead Water, by Barbara Hambly. The Twisted Wire, by Richard Falkirk. Whom the Gods Love, by Kate Ross

The tailor measured him for some sporting garments for the autumn and made yet another attempt to persuade him to pad his coats. "The very latesst fashions, Mr. Kestrel!" he pleaded.

"My dear man, if I followed the fashions, I should lose my power to lead them. And not for you nor anyone else will I consent to look like a pincushion with legs."

"Of course I didn't mean to imply you need it, sir. Not like that Mr. DeWitt." The tailor was not above disparaging one dandy to another. "He's the one that would benefit from some padding here and there."

"DeWitt's thinness suits him. He looks like an elongated sneer."

--from Whom the Gods Love

Her voice rose even more shrilly as her outrage drove her on. "Yes, it is! You are selling guns to people who keep slaves, and they are at war with their countrymen who want to prevent that and set the slaves free." She flung her arm out furiously. "Money! It's all about money, and it's pure evil! I don't know how you, my own father, can even try to justify it, let alone be part of it. You are selling death to people who will use it in the worst possible cause!"

--from Slaves of Obsession

"Perhaps," the customs official said, "you would be good enough to open your suitcase for me."

Bartlett said, "Very well." He found his keys in his trouser pocket and opened the suitcase that was even older than his briefcase. He looked at his shirts and underclothes, his papers and his geologists' tools. "I don't think you need examine them too closely," he said. "Someone already has."

--from The Twisted Wire

January watched Granville's eyes, counting the seconds of silence before the banker replied.  An immediate "Of course, that goes without saying" would have been his signal to renege at once and to get Hubert Granville the hell out of his parlor as quickly as he could.  A reply that unthinking meant that Granville had no intention of laying out as much as ten cents to purchase his freedom, much less the fourteen hundred dollars a prime cotton-hand, six feet three inches tall and massively built, would fetch on the open market.

--from Dead Water

Kate Ross, who I just discovered this year, is now my favorite regency mystery writer, and Whom the Gods Love hits it out of the park once again.  In this one, Kestrel (who after two previous mysteries has a sleuthing reputation) is hired by the grieving father of a golden only son, whom everybody loved, who was tragically found bludgeoned to death in his study.  The father begs Kestrel for answers and, unfortunately for the father, Kestrel finds them. Many mysteries lose the tragic, human element in favor of the puzzle.  Ross's third novel has all of the puzzle but is heart-wrenchingly emotional as well.  Very highest recommendations.

Anne Perry is emotional too, and comes with the usual warnings, since so many of her books involve torture or child sex abuse or something equally disturbing as a motive for murder.  Also, I usually find myself clamoring for reform right along with Perry, but by God, when I don't, it's almost impossible to read.  Slaves of Obsession, for example, is about American slavers vs. abolitionists, and the main characters we are to identify with take the position that the Civil War is an unfortunate business but that the Union is a bunch of hypocrites to talk about valuing freedom when they're not willing to let white slave-holders be "free" to do their own thing and keep people as things. (I mean, WTF?). The victim is an English arms dealer who of course will sell guns to the South so that they can "defend themselves" against the oppressive northerners who won't give them the freedom to own people, and the abolitionist who is the main suspect is of course portrayed as a wild-eyed fanatic and a coward at heart.  Very disappointing.  Funeral in Blue treats gambling addiction as a much more serious problem than the keeping of slaves, and Death of a Stranger requires content warnings about the abuse of sex workers in the seedy neighborhoods of Victorian London, as well as a gruesome railroad accident that uses the arc plot of Monk's lost memory as a plot device in the best way since the first book in the series.  Well recommended for people who can handle stories with a lot of emotional pain.

I was told that Richard Falkirk wrote regency mysteries featuring a Bow Street Runner named Blackstone.  However, the only novel by Falkirk available in either library in my area was The Twisted Wire, a poorly written impression of an Eric Ambler thriller set not long after the 1967 Israeli war, involving an inoffensive geologist who finds spies from four nations shooting at him because of some crossed wires during the President's phone call, and has no idea why.  not 19th century, and not easy to take seriously.

This month's Barbara Hambly/Benjamin January mystery involves Ben going undercover once again and facing the danger of being stolen and sold as property should the mission go "down the river".  The main murder takes place on a passenger river boat where the map of the staterooms and who was in position to see what at crucial times is important.

A is for Awesome: The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne

On the breast of her gown, in fine red cloth, surrounded by an elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold thread, appeared the letter A. It was so artistically done, and with so much fertility and luxuriance of fancy, that it had all the effect of a last and fitting decoration to the apparel which she wore; and which was of a splendor in accordance with the taste of the age, but greatly beyond what was allowed by the sumptuary regulations of the colony.

Like a lot of Americans, I was assigned to read in school Hawthorne's richly thematic morality tale about the unperturbed woman who wears her red badge of slut-shaming as a glorious honorific, and thrives, and of partner in "sin" who hides his equal and opposite mark out of sight, and shrivels.   Like many, I had the bright rose blooming among the dead weeds by the jailhouse door, and dozens of other ham-fisted symbols, thrust to my attention, and didn't think highly of them at the time.

Seems to me, The Scarlet Letter is worth a second look as an adult, at which time it may have things to say that people missed when they were 16.

For one thing, Hester Prynne is not the protagonist.  For all the author's clear sympathy for her over the puritan busybodies who try to ostracize her, she is clearly "the other", seen through other's eyes, never illuminated from within.  Because she wears her letter proudly for all to see, she is reduced to a plot device to be experienced by others, as a thriving and unbroken challenge to others, who looks social and divine convention in the eye and takes it at face value, leaving the reader to detect the subtle sarcasm.  Her fae child, Pearl, is similarly seen from without.

As is usual, the main men get the attention.  Dimmesdale, pursued by the vengeful giant hedgehog of his conscience because he hasn't been man enough to stand up next to the woman he wronged, has palpable inner torment you can feel.  Similarly, Chillingworth in the ambiguous role of judgmental angel who is also the devil, has a single-minded hatred one can feel as if his famously burning eyes are looking into you.  But what of Hester? she may be closer to whatever higher power there may be than any of her pious countryfolk, but she isn't saying.

Sometimes it seems to me that America has been a sick society from the very first day, torn between the spirit of independence and the Calvinistic craving to thrust one's nose into other people's conduct and pass judgment.  Almost all of Hawthorne's work, some of the first long fiction ever written in America, personifies that tendency.

Pink Freud: The White Hotel, by DM Thomas

There is a saying that "Love is a homesickness"; and whenever a man dreams of a place or a country and says to himself, while he is still dreaming: "This place is familiar to me, I've been here before", we may interpret the place as being his mothers genitals or her body.  All who have hitherto, in a learning capacity, had the opportunity to read Frau Anna's journal have had that feeling. The "white hotel" is known to them, it is the body of their mother.

CN for sexual content and for graphic descriptions of holocaust horrors.  Thomas apparently took an existing case history from Freud's files, and extrapolated a fictional life, complete with childhood trauma, of the patient.

The story is told in the form of the protagonist's journal and erotic poetry, Freud's real and fictional treatment notes, and third person narrative.  The effect is sexually shocking, moving, and ultimately horrifying.  The abrupt shattering of the characters' lives by Nazism shows up--as it likely did for most of the real victims--in a "rocks fall out of the sky and everyone dies" sort of way.

Dirty Rotten Scoundrel: Flashman, by George MacDonald Fraser

Let me say that when I talk of disasters I speak with authority. I have served at Balaclava, Cawnpore, and Little Big Horn. Name the biggest fools who wore uniform in the nineteenth century--Cardigan, Sale, Custer, Raglan, Lucan--I knew them all. Think of all the conceivable misfortunes that can arise from combinations of folly, cowardice, and sheer bad luck, and I'll give you chapter and verse. But I still state unhesitatingly that for pure, vacillating stupidity, for superb incompetence to command, for ignorance combined with bad judgment--in short, for the true talent for catastrophe--Elphy Bey stood alone. Others abide our question, but Elphy outshines them all as the greatest military idiot of our own or any other day.  Only he could have permitted the First Afghan War and let it develop to such a ruinous defeat.  It was not easy; he started with a good army, a secure position, some excellent officers, a disorganised enemy, and repeated opportunities to save the situation. But Elphy, with the touch of true genius, swept aside these obstacles with unerring precision and out of order wrought complete chaos.

This is why I read Tom Brown's School Days last month: Fraser took the school bully from a famous childrens' novel, and ran with it over the course of a dozen or so volumes to give the military history of the Victorian era as seen by a swaggering English bully, cheater, rapist and coward, who somehow manages to come through a thousand deadly situations, quaking and farting with terror the whole time, not only alive but covered with unearned praise and honors, the pride of all England.

This is not for everybody.  He bullies lower classes and ranks, especially those with more merit than himself.  He rapes. He is unrepentant and partly redeemed only by his honesty in writing his memoirs, and a few skills like languages and horsemanship. And you are meant to grudgingly admire him, in a Dallas/House of Cards sort of way.  If that description makes you reach for your ass-kicking boots, then you will hate this series.

Me, I read and mostly enjoy it for the same reasons I read and mostly enjoy Game of Thrones, with the distinction that I am reading about real battles in real parts of the world, and while Flashman is a first-class rotter, he is not the only one, and is not shy about revealing what is likely true about real first-class rotters from history.   Highly recommended for some, but not for all.

The Ethics of Physics: Force and Matter, by Ludwig Buchner

The oldest human bones and human skulls, dug out of the very bowels of the earth, exhibit for the most part rough and undeveloped forms, far exceeding, in their resemblance to the brute, the most brute-like of existing races of men, and yet it must be remembered that these fossils belong to periods much further removed from the real genesis of man than the time in which they were deposited or buried is from the age we live in.

I was glad to see a major work of philosophy by a natural scientist who does not concentrate on weird metaphysical theories, but who begins with a scientific hypothesis--"There is no matter with out force, and no force without matter", and springs that into an attempt to disprove the existence of a God (by denying that there could have been an initial creation); many examples of biology around the world (including CN for racist assumptions about the biological superiority of white European people), a denial of differences between organic and inorganic matter, and a denial of the existence of innate ideas.

Meanwhile, in Java: Max Havelaar, by "Multatuli"

The Resident of Bantam introduced the Regent and the Controleur to the new Assistant Resident.  Havelaar greeted both officials courteously. With a few cordial words he put the Controleur at his ease--there is always something painful in meeting a new chief--as though he wanted at once to establish a kind of intimacy which would make subsequent relations between them easier, His meeting with the Regent wassuch as was befitting in the case of one entitled to the golden payong, but who was at the same time his 'younger brother.'

Uncle tom's Cabin and The Jungle are famous American novels that changed public policy by their depiction via fictionalization of conditions that needed changing (slavery, labor abuse in the meat packing industry), did their job, and are less well-read today.  Max Havelaar is a novel in that category, except that it is 19th Century, Dutch, and set in Colonial Java.  If it rings familiar, it is because 19th century Colonial  India under the British was presented similarly. Java was more isolated, and suffered more under such conditions as when Colonial overlords displaced staple cropland to set up coffee and sugar plantations such that the native peoples starved.  The main narrator is satirically styled and frequently digresses into such things as satiric poetry or a wildly varied table of contents for a fictional series of essays similar to those written in the era.  Primarily recommended for historical reasons.

The Climax of Aubrey/Maturin: The Thirteen Gun Salute; The Nutmeg of Consolation; The Truelove, by Patrick O'Brian

"Jack, I cannot tell you how i long to see a platypus."

"I remember you spoke of it last time we were there."

"A damnable, hellish time it was too, upon my soul. frowned upon by the soldiers, scarcely allowed to set a foot on land, hurried away with almost no stores and nothing but a well-known and commonplace little parakeet--oh, it was shameful. New Holland is gravely in my debt."

"Never mind. It will be much better this time. You shall watch great flights of platypuses at your leisure."

"My dear, they are mammals, furry animals."

"I thought you said they laid eggs."

"So they do. That is what is so delightful. They also have bills like a duck."

"No wonder you long to see one."

--from The Nutmeg of Consolation

Patrick O'Brian's series continues to get better as the main arc plot begins to curve towards the end, with the issues of Jack's reinstatement and the fates of the major villains decided, as well as the usual naval battles, exotic locations, delightful blending of erudite conversation and coarse sailor language, and other culture shock.  I've been gushing about this wonderful, wonderful series for months now, and there are arc plot spoilers this late in the series, so I'm brief now.  Just read it. If you have yet to have a first reading, you're as lucky as Jack Aubrey.

Words' worth: The Story of English, by Robert McCrumb, William Cran, and Robert MacNeil

A decline in American power might encourage a country like Singapore, whose children are bilingual in Mandarin and English, to switch its support to Mandarin as the medium of Far East Asian business.  And then there is the "x factor" of technological change. Will computerized translation machines finally overthrow the myth of Babel? When we look into the dark crystal of predictions about language, we find the words of TS Eliot: "For last year's words belong to last year's language, and next year's words await another voice."

This little gem, that looks and reads like a school textbook, complete with maps and a large number of photos and illustrations, is apparently a book version of a TV series from the 1980s, about the development of the English language and its spread from a once insignificant island northwest of Europe to cover the world. It deals with many parts of the world and many portions of history, from Chaucer and Shakespeare to the dialects of the British Isles, class differences, the American frontier, the Australian frontier, India, south Africa, and contributions from indigenous cultures around the world, culminating in questions as to  what may happen when various peoples adopt new and different languages out of English.

Since the theme of the book is the fluid way in which English constantly changes, I found it amusing that the book takes us from early Anglo-Norman all the way to the "present" of the mid 1980s, when Valley Girl speak and Bob Marley's "Island English" were considered the cutting edge.  A good, easy and thought provoking read; high recommendations. And yes, that's the same Robert MacNeil who hosted the News hour on PBS at the time.

Baw-awl-zac: The Country Doctor; Albert Savarus; A Passion in the Desert, by Honore de Balzac

Childhood in its simplicity knows nothing of the perils of life; youth sees both its vastness and its difficulties, and at the prospect the courage of youth sometimes flags.  We are still serving our apprenticeship to life; we are new to the business, a kind of faint-heartedness overpowers us, and leaves us in an almost dazed condition of mind. We feel that we are helpless aliens in a strange country. At all ages we shrink back involuntarily from the unknown.  And a young man is very much like the soldier who will walk up to the cannon's mouth, and is put to flight by a ghost.  He hesitates among the maxims of the world.  The rules of attack and self-defense are unknown to him; he can neither give nor take; he is attracted by women and stands in awe of them; his very good qualities tell against him, he is generosity and modesty and completely innocent of mercenary designs.  Pleasure and not interest is his object when he tells a lie; and among many dubious courses, the conscience, with which he as yet has not juggled, points out to him the right way, which he is slow to take.

--from The Country Doctor

Sure, Chaucer and Rabelais are occasionally bawdy, but deep into the major works of Balzac, I have yet to find anything of comparable prurience with the wife of Bath or Panurge.  Seems to me, Balzac was given a raw deal by the ladies of River City.

"The Country Doctor", for example, is almost pastoral in its rustic goodness, in which a forgotten hero from the Napoleonic wars spends much time making rounds and hearing stories and philosophy from a doctor who is the most loved person in the provinces for his care to the less fortunate. "Albert Saverus" is a similar story about a good lawyer who is caught up in politics and refuses to do the unethical thing to get elected.

"A Passion in the Desert", however, I can see how uptight people might find problems with its sensual (not bestial) tale of the odd understanding and companionship that develop between a man lost in the desert and the desert panther that saves his live.  She is wild. She is a "man eater." She could tear his heart to pieces if she wanted to, and yet she chooses to purr and to let him scritch her belly.  A small masterpiece, and very highly recommended.

Very 'Umble Persons: David Coperfield, by Charles Dikkens

I saw a cadaverous face appear at a small window on the ground floor(in a little round tower that formed one side of the house), and quickly disappear. The low arched door then opened, and the face came out. It was quite as cadaverous as it had looked in the window, though in the grain of it there was that tinge of red which is sometimes to be observed in the skins of red-haired people. It belonged to a red-haired person--a youth of fifteen, as I take it now, but looking much older--whose hair was cropped as close as the closest stubble, who had hardly any eyebrows and no eyelashes, and eyes of a red-brown, so unsheltered and unshaded, that I remember wondering how he went to sleep. He was high-shouldered and bony; dressed in decent black, with a white wisp of a neckcloth; buttoned up to the throat, and had a long, lank skeleton hand, which particularly attracted my attention, as he stood at the pony's head, rubbing his chin with it, and looking up at us in the chaise.
"Is Mr. Wickfield at home, Uriah Heep?" said my aunt.

Ah, Dickens! A man on everybody's top ten list of greatest British 19th century authors, number one on a lot of lists, and frequently listed among the top ten authors of all time. And David Copperfield is on all the top ten lists of Dickens novels, often vying with Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities for the number one spot, and therefore guaranteeing that the three together are the most likely Dickens books to be thrust on American school children too young to appreciate them and therefore making them despised by people who grow up to love Lawyers Suck (Bleak House). Business Sucks (Hard Times) The Royal Shakespeare Company is an International Treasure (Nicholas Nickleby) and Wait--You Mean Fagin ISN'T A Lovable Old Buffoon After All? (Oliver Twist). I hated the Dickens "Big Three" in my youth too, and then went back later to give them a second look and found they were better than I remembered.

The genius of Dickens novels is the supporting cast. All of the plots meander into and out of strange places; most or all of the protagonists are colorless everymen who are used mainly as devices to connect the secondary characters (and Copperfield is no exception, even though he in particular is supposed to be a stand-in for the youthful Dickens himself), and the themes and morals are about as controversial these days as those of the average Disney movie, despite the existence of Republican assholes who will insist on calling Dickens "controversial" and argue that, for example, Ebeneezer Scrooge is a good guy until the rotten old Socialist ghosts turn him into a woolly liberal.

But oh, those supporting characters! In David Copperfield, we get such household names as the odious Murdstones, the formidable Aunt Betsy, the willing Barkis, the delightful Tommy Traddles, the insipid Dora, and the practical, awesome Agnes Wickfield. But even they pale beside three characters who utterly, utterly dominate the novel: Steerforth, Micawber and Uriah Heep.

Steerforth is Copperfield's morally ambiguous childhood friend. He is very witty and charming, but turns out to have feet of clay, thoughtlessly causing harm to others. Micawber is also witty and charming while obliviously unworldly and optimistic, letting his dependents become endangered by his mounting debts as he hopes that "something will turn up", and yet is portrayed as unambiguously a good man.

And then there's Uriah Heep, whose first appearance I chose for my representative quote. Heep is a prime example of Dickens's talent for creating epic characters. Look closely at his actions for most of the book, and there's not much to find fault with. He simply does what modern Americans who read Horatio Alger are taught to do. He comes from humble origins, knows his place, and strives to better himself by becoming indispensible to his employer. And yet, everything about him is creepy, from his intense stares to his oily handshake to the cringing servility and contemptible smallness under which he hides his ambition. The ability to make something larger than life out of one so small is what makes Dickens deservedly one of the great authors of western civilization. Highly recommended.

Blacklegs and Bluestockings: Shirley, by Charlotte Bronte

"You name me leopardess; remember, the leopardess is tameless," said she.

"Tame or fierce, wild or subdued, you are MINE."

"I am glad I know my keeper, and am used to him. Only his voice will I follow; only his hand shall manage me; only at his feet will I repose."

This is the sort of novel Jane Austen might have written, had she been concerned with industrial strife.  It takes place in a factory town in Yorkshire at a time when Luddites are protesting and destroying labor-saving machinery that threatens to put them out of work.  Robert Moore, the factory owner, is problematic.  He inherited the place after irresponsible relatives drove it into near-insolvency, and has to cut costs in order to stay open at all (the same way modern capitalists ALWAYS pretend that they can't afford to treat workers well, except that Moore really does live a Spartan life out of necessity); on the other hand, he still acts as if the working class is some sort of lower life form that should be 'kept out of idleness" by punitive social engineering.

Meanwhile, his main love interest--not the woman he actually loves, mind you, but the one who will be a "suitable match" because she is a wealthy heiress--is the title character, Shirley: spirited, educated, and what passes for a "radical feminist" in those days--women should have their own property, but should not take jobs from men; they can be firece and independent, but when all is said and done, they will find that one special man who is worthy of them, and will choose to surrender themselves.  Weak tea, and even aggravating by modern standards, but comforting perhaps in a "look how far we've come' sort of way.  See also Anne Bronte's Tenant of Wildfell Hall, reviewed last month, featuring another "spirited" heroine who speaks out for some degree of equality before being voluntarily "tamed".

Charlotte lost both of her literary sisters and her brother while writing this novel, and some of the gloom shows.

As Seen Through Civilized Eyes: Democracy in America, by Alexis de Tocqueville  

Many people in Europe are apt to believe that a great advantage of universal suffrage is that it trusts the direction of affairs to men who are worthy of the public confidence.  They admit that the people are unworthy to govern themselves, but they aver that the people always wish the welfare of the state and instinctively designate those who are animated by the same good will and who are most fit to wield the supreme authority.  I confess that the observations I made in America by no means coincide with these opinions. On my arrival in the United States I was surprised to find so much distinguished talent among the citizens and so little among the heads of government.  It is a constant fact that at present the ablest men in the United States are rarely placed at the head of affairs, and it must be acknowledged that such has been the result in proportion as democracy has exceeded all its former limits.  The race of American statesmen has evidently dwindled most remarkably  in the course of the last fifty years.

Holy crap, this commentary on American society almost 200 years ago is almost more relevant today, 2017 in particular, than it was when Tocquiville first visited North America and wrote about the new nation, celebrated for its innovative new Constitutional government and its commitment to equality, and views it with a mind steeped in European tradition (the opposite of what happens in The Marble Faun, below, or in Henry James novels).

There are flaws.  Toqueville has an extensive section on "the three races", but otherwise pays lip service to slavery and native American genocide, and treats the USA as a nation without titles and rank, in which all people are equal.  He has a few spectacular misses, as when he predicts (in a passage quoted frequently by conservatives) that the politically powerful poor will exploit the wealthy minority, making it impossible for large fortunes to be made in this country--presented as having both positive and negative aspects.

But then--the accuracy with which he predicts other American trends is astonishing.  The noninvolvement, compared to the French and English, of the common people in civic life and the electoral process--done out of inertia rather than lack of civil rights.  The increasing fecklessness and incompetence of successive generations of politicians.  The disdain for education, as if understanding a subject made one snooty and not worthy of consideration.  The race to the bottom in wages.

There was a time, in the 1970s, when I was much younger, when it seemed as if the country had evolved past these tendencies.  That time has passed, and what Toqueville saw has reasserted itself frighteningly.   He did not specifically predict, as HL Mencken did a century later, that the USA would one day proudly elevate an utter, utter fucktwit to the office of the Presidency, but the recipe for doing so, and the warnings that were not heeded, are there for those with eyes to read.  Very highest recommendations.

The 19th Century Murders: The Shifting Tide; Dark Assassin, by Anne Perry; Dead & Buried; The Shirt on His Back, by Barbara Hambly; The Devil in Music, by Kate Ross

Louvain leaned forward over the railing of the witness box: "You have no idea of life at sea. You dress in smart suits and eat food brought you by a servant, and you've never fought anything except with words. One day on the river and you'd heave your guts with fear. I got the thief and I got back my cargo and I did it without anyone getting hurt or spending money on police time. What else do you want?"

--from The Shifting Tide

The pall bearers bent, lifted the coffin to slide it into the tomb, and Felix--who had spent the interval alternately sobbing and reviving his spirits from a silver flask--staggered in the slicked mud, failed to catch his balance, and, to everyone's horror, fell headlong, still clinging stubbornly to his corner of the coffin.

It struck the wall of the Delacroix family tomb with the force of a battering ram. The polished cherrywood split from end to end and precipitated to the muddy ground not the body of Rameses Ramilles, but the corpse of a white man with close cropped greying red curls, a ruffled white shirt, and a bright green silk vest that was covered with dark, dried blood.  Mademoiselle Glasson, evidently forgetting that she'd been fainting with grief moments before, seized the undertaker boy by the arm, jabbed a finger at the corpse, and yelled at the top of her lungs, "Who the hell is THAT?"

--from Dead and Buried

"I meant to ask if you'd be willing to play--Do you play anything besides the piano?"
"You didn't bring one?"

Stewart smote his forehead theatrically, making all the long fringes of his buckskin jacket flutter. "Dagnabbit, I KNEW I forgot to pack something!"

"I'm sure if you ask around the camp, someone will have brought one."

--from The Shirt Off his Back

"I don't know if you've ever had charge of a rich young man with little sense and less discipline, let loose in a country where the wine runs too fast, and the women not fast enough.  Perhaps you've tried to carry a swarm of bees about in your pocket--it's much the same thing."

--from The Devil In Music

More mysteries.....

Anne Perry has William Monk among the river police now, as a vehicle to write in depth about the Thames and the docks (an entirely different environment, and more dangerous by far than the rest of London, even St. Giles and the other savage slums), including wharf rats, urchins, hulking sailors, ships with dirty secrets, and (in the case of Dark Assassin) the sewers, being newly built containing structural flaws leaving the city vulnerable to flooding and gas explosions.

Benjamin January, Barbara Hambly's free protagonist of color, twice leaves the relative safety of New Orleans in search of clues, first to a plantation near the Texas border in search of clues to someone's past, and then (in by far the superior book, although the plantation trip is more dangerous) to the western frontier in what would eventually be Idaho, among trappers, natives, American and British Indian agents and others.  One of the more poignant aspects of the series is the part highlighting the way in which January is far more easily accepted and better treated out in the so-called lawless, savage frontier where there's no legal recourse for crimes up to and including murder, than he is in an American civilization where any white criminal could have him hanged without trial, no questions asked, just by riding into town and saying he misbehaved with a white woman.

And then there's Kate Ross, by far my favorite mystery writer who chose this period.  Like another favorite of mine, Sarah Cauldwell, she produced four masterpieces and died too young..  I am crushed.  The Devil in Music is not the best of the four, but it is stunning nonetheless, and brings the "dandy as detective" Julian Kestrel to an Italian villa where a marquis died five years previously, and his protege, a young tenor (who the author has ingeniously arranged for no one to be able to identify by sight) disappeared, thereby being considered the primary suspect.  Of the marquis, it was said that great music "made him forget that he was human"....very highest recommendations for character and atmosphere, for excellent wit, and for an ingenious puzzle that fooled me until just a couple of pages before the first big reveal...and right up until the final one.   I definitely wish there were more Julian Kestrel.

Whole Lotze Nothing:  Microcosmus, by Hermann Lotze

It is a strange and yet an intelligible pride that our scientific illuminati take in requiring for the explanatory reconstruction of reality in thought no other postulates than an original store of matter and force, and the unshaken authority of a group of universal and immutable laws of nature.  Strange, because after all these are no trifling postulates, and because it might be expected to be more in accordance with the comprehensive spirit of the human reason to acknowledge the unity of a creative cause than to have imposed on it as the starting point of all explanation the promiscuous variety of merely actually existent things and notions.

It may be that I have been reading thick books in order for too long.  I got through Aquinas, I got through Kant and Hegel, but the third-tier 19th century philosopher Lotze was one thick, poorly-translated German work too much for me.  I took an instant visceral loathing to the man the moment I saw on the library shelf the thickness of the great fat mass of words he was arrogant enough to expect us to swallow in search of wisdom.   This was over two thousand pages by someone most people have never heard of. You write that much, you asshole, you better be good.

And then he went and duplicated Liebniz's theory of monads, in which atoms are living, sentient  beings that influence one another, and humans are a larger version thereof, and we are the expression of the will of God and man's mind is unique in its capacity to mentally something something garbanzo and we are the one and the unity and we bring unity into existence via the ideal--I'm done.

I find three reasons to study a particular work of philosophy.  Might it be true?  No.  Is it entertaining? No.  Does it inspire one to think?  No.  then I see no reason to torture myself any further with yet another mass of dull, lifeless prose that convinces me of nothing.   Buchner, last month, was dull to read, but at least he was scientific, made empirical sense, and provided a stepping stone from German idealism to Darwin. Lotze just made me feel offended that he thought so much of himself as to expect one to pay attention for so long.  TL:DNF.

Like Watching Paint Dry:  The Marble Faun, by Nathaniel Hawthorne

While the sculptor sat listlessly gazing at it, there was a sound of small hoofs, clumsily galloping on the campagna, and soon, his frisky acquaintance, the buffalo calf, came and peeped over the edge of the excavation.  Almost at the same moment, he heard voices, which approached nearer and nearer; a man's voice and a feminine one, talking the musical tongues of Italy.  Besides the hairy visage of his four footed friend, Kenyon now saw the figures of a peasant and a contadina, making gestures of salutation to him, on the opposite verge of the hollow space.

There's a reason Hawthorne is remembered for The Scarlet Letter (see last month's book post), several short stories, and House of the Seven Gables, and only rarely for this one, which I read so that you don't have to.  Hawthorne was a master at depicting America's central conflict of identity between neo-Calvinist churchy pseudo-morality and "heathen" free-spirited naturalism in an as-yet unspoiled continent.  He should have stuck to writing what he knew.

The Marble Faun blazed a trail toward a genre I have found unbearably tedious, the story, written by an American, about Americans in Europe being overwhelmed by all the history and tradition and veneer, and in which things happen so subtly that you don't notice they even happen.   I had to turn back a few pages at one point to realize that the flowery prose-poetry had actually described a homicide that will go on and haunt the four central characters (the virginal woman on a pedestal and her tepid lover, and the woman who has something of a character and is therefore hinted at as being dangerous maybe, and her satyr-like Italian lover) who have one snooze-worthy conversation after another.

I'm pretty sure Henry James read this book and thought to himself, "I can be more boring than this!", and proved himself right.

Bye, Felicia:  Felicia's Journey, by William Trevor

There is no arrogance among the people of the streets, no insistent pride in their sleeping features, no lingering telltale of a past's corruption.  They have passed the stage of desperation, and on their downward path some among the women have sold themselves; faces chapped, fingernails ingrained, they are beyond that now.  Men, in threes and fours, have offered the three-card trick on these same streets. Beards unkempt, hair matted, skin darkened with filth, they would not now attract the wagers of their passing trade. In their dreams there is occasionally the fantasy that they may be cured, that they may be loved, that all voices and visions will cease, that tomorrow they will discover the strength to resist oblivion.

Another not-for-everybody novel for people who like Hitchcock-like suspense and are okay with stories about vulnerable women being targeted by creepy, icky men.  Felicia has left her native Ireland for central England in search of the man who left her pregnant.  He's nowhere to be found, but she does attract the attention of a much older man whose interest in her is obsessive, and who keeps reminiscing about other such women from his past in ways that imply he may have done them in.

Almost everybody in the book is some kind of misfit, and Trevor has a way of simply describing food in a way that puts one off one's appetite. A good suspenseful read, but potentially triggering.

Nothing Like a Dane: Concluding Unscientific Postscript, by Soren Kierkegaard

I shall be as willing as the next man to fall down in worship before the system, if only I can manage to set eyes on it. Hitherto, I have had no success, and though I have young legs, I am almost weary from running back and forth between Herod and Pilate. Once or twice I have been on the verge of bending the knee, but at the last moment, when I already had my handkerchief spread on the ground to avoid soiling my trousers, and I made a trusting appeal to one of the initiated who stood by: "Tell me now sincerely, is it entirely finished, for if so I will kneel down before it, even at the risk of ruining a pair of trousers (for on account of the heavy traffic to and fro, the road has become quite muddy)', I always received the same answer, 'No, it is not yet quite finished.' And so, there was another postponement, of the system and of my homage.

Wow. Trust Kierkegaard to write his longest, thickest work yet and call it a "postscript".

Like his other long work, Either/Or, it is badly fragmented, full of observations that attribute to the human condition aspects--mostly painful--that he actually feels himself (and yet, with just enough of them ringing true to my own experience--your mileage may vary--to make me deeply uncomfortable).  As in his other books, he emphasizes three possible stages of evolution, from aesthetic (sensual, but more Epicurian than hedonistic); to ethical (directed by a set of moral principles), to religious (surrendering one's will wholly to some higher power; by which he means Christianity, proven to be true because things written by humans say it is, as opposed to different things written by other humans).  Not everyone goes through all stages; I, for example, have so far lived a life that transitioned from aesthetic to ethical (in that I grew up and learned a little impulse control and delayed gratification) and am not likely to make religion a significant part of my life; this makes me inferior, in Kierkegaard's eyes. I don't mind. He seems like he was the kind of person I might have found interesting to listen to at a social gathering involving lots of marijuana or alcohol, but who would not earn my real respect, nor would it matter to me whether I had his.

Bottom line: people who find the likes of Sartre and Camus to be either profound or depressing but accurate, will also enjoy Kierkegaard, who I think influenced both.  Humanists and other philosophers who crave real understanding and a truth that empowers them, will want to look elsewhere.

Sticky Wickets: Flashman's Lady (Flashman #6), by George MacDonald Fraser

I suppose if Fuller pilch had got his bat down just a split second sooner, it would all have turned out different. The Skrang pirates wouldn't have been burned out of their hellish nest, the black queen of Madagascar would have had one lover fewer (not that she'd have missed a mere one, I dare say, the insatiable great bitch), the French and the British wouldn't have bombarded Tamitave, and I'd have been spared kidnapping, slavery, blowpipes, and the risk of death and torture in unimaginable places--aye, old Fuller's got a lot to answer for, God rest him.

The Flashman books are chronologically in a wildly different order than the order in which they were written, spanning roughly 60 years of the 19th century.  I'm reading them according to timeline, and Flashman's Lady, taking place in the early 1840s, is the sixth novel but the second chronological episode of Flashman's adventures.

It's also one of my favorites in the series, encompassing three distinct adventures mostly on large islands adjoining three continents (England, Borneo, and Madagascar, respectively).  The first part involves playing cricket and dropping names like Felix and Mynne, who were apparently famous players and remembered the way basketball fans remember Magic Johnson and Dr. J...The final hundred pages, which are referenced extensively in future volumes, involve Flashman's captivity and enforced servitude as aide and courtesan to the monstrous Queen Ranavalona, who tortured more people to death every day than most people speak to. Given Flashman's life as a misogynist cad and abuser, I had to continually remind myself that his sufferings under the evil Queen are not "karma" and that no one has it coming.  Also, no one who wears the SJW label proudly should read Flashman unless they're in the mood to vent steam at an unrepentant racist, colonialist, imperialist swine who gets unearned honor everywhere he goes (it has occurred to me during this second reading, that Flashman is likely not a historical outlier but that many Victorian-era Englishmen revered as soldier-heroes in real life were every bit as personally obnoxious as Flashy).  CN also because he calls all the African characters by the usual racial slurs.

To me, the best part of the book is in the middle, in Singapore and Borneo.  I was once called on to write and perform a "historical character" monologue (think "Hal Holbrook as Mark Twain"), and while everyone else in the class picked household names, I chose to "be" James Brooke, the White Rajah of Sarawak, largely on the strength of his exuberant portrayal in Flashman's Lady: boyish slayer of pirates, radiator of positive belief in England and picked from central casting to be a sea adventurer with the distinction that he actually existed with his motley crew of fiercely loyal fighters from around the world.  The virtuous Brooke is Flashman's moral opposite, and I found the spectacle of the two of them flung together for a frenemy shipping-road trip an absolute delight, warts and all.  

The Resolution of Aubrey/Maturin: The Wine Dark Sea; The commodore; The Yellow Admiral, by Patrick O'Brian

"This asafedita is imported for me by a Turkey merchant; and as you perhaps have noticed in spite of the sturgeon's bladder in which it is enclosed, it is by far the most pungent, the most truly fetid variety known to man. For you must know, gentlemen, that when the mariner is dosed, he likes to know that he has been well and truly dosed; with fifteen grains or even less of this valuable substance scenting him and the very air about him there can be no doubt of the matter; and such is the nature of the human mind that he experiences a far greater benefit than the drug itself would provide, were it deprived of its stench."

"Pray, sir, may I ask, where are we to stow it?"

"Why, Mr. Smith," said Stephen, "I had thought it would scarcely be noticed in the midshipmens' berth."

--from The Commodore

The delights of O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series approach nearer to the end with volumes 16 through 18, and are as wonderful as ever, though the series begins to get the sense of an ending.  Captain Jack makes Admiral; both he and Stephen have their families and fortunes in hand, and the last of the long-term antagonists exit the stage, right down to Napoleon's first abdication.   The final volumes, like the Hundred Days, are like an extended epilogue.

As always, the humorously jarring juxtaposition of absent-minded professorial fancy, Austenesque manners of speech, and coarse sea life pervades. One of those moments that personifies the tone: Jack regretfully informs a captured naive adventurer that, without the requisite letter of marque, his private military actions must be considered piracy, and the Naval regulations require that he be hanged; the adventurer replies, "I am concerned to hear it." Very highest recommendations, as always.

Eating People Is Wrong: Typee, by Herman Melville

Among the islands of Polynesia, no sooner are the images overturned, the temples demolished, and the idolaters converted into nominal Christians, than disease, vice, and premature death make their appearance. The depopulated land is then recruited from the rapacious hordes of enlightened individuals who settle themselves within its borders and clamorously announce the progress of the Truth. Neat villas, trim gardens, shaven lawns, spires and cupolas arise, while the poor savage soon finds himself an interloper in the country of his fathers, and that too on the site of the very hut where he was born.  The spontaneous fruits of the earth, which God in his wisdom had ordained for the support of the indolent natives, remorselessly seized upon and appropriated by the stranger, are devoured before the eyes of the starving inhabitants, or sent on board the numerous vessels which now touch at their shores.

When the famished wretches are cut off in this manner from their natural supplies, they are told by their benefactors to work and earn their support by the sweat of their brows.  But no fine gentleman born to hereditary opulence does manual labor come more unkindly than to the luxurious Indian when thus robbed of the bounty of Heaven.  Habituated to a life of indolence, he cannot and will not exert himself; and want, disease, and vice, all evils of foreign growth, soon terminate his miserable existence.

My, what a lot of books about voyages there are in my library this year.  It's as if white Europeans and Americans suddenly discovered everything and were just now setting out to fuck it all up.  Although there was plenty of exploration going on during and since the Middle Ages, my historical reading has been very Eurocentric.  Now, between Richard Henry Dana, Melville, the Flashman books and the Aubrey/Maturin books, we're really poking around in every corner of the globe, mostly by sea.

Typeee, the possibly autobiographical precursor to Moby Dick (coming later this year) is narrated by a sailor who abandons ship in the South Pacific and ends up on a lush, bountiful island that would be paradise except that he can't leave, and the otherwise friendly, happy natives are probably planning to eat him.  Without fava beans.

There's a good deal of anthropology, weighted towards the annoying sort of "noble savage" philosophy that simultaneously looks down on indigenous peoples and puts them on a pedestal; accurate indictments of what the Christians and other white colonialists do to ruin societies that had never harmed them; and suspense about how the heck the narrator will ever escape.  It's a good, brief read, and highly recommended.

Bankruptcy for Dummies:  Cesar Birotteau, by Honore de Balzac

Every life has its apogee; there is a time in every existence when active causes bring about exactly proportionate results.  This high noon of life, when the vital forces are evenly balanced and put forth in all the glory of their strength, is common not only to organic life; you will find it even in the history of cities and nations and institutions and ideas, in commerce, and in every kind of human effort, for, like noble families and dynasties, these too have their birth and rise and fall.

Cesar Birotteau is not one of Balzac's best known works; Mortimer Adler put it on one of his "western canon for the education of serious people" lists, and I believe he selected it because of the fascinating (to me, anyway, but I'm strange) and satirical description toward the end, of how bankruptcy proceedings were conducted in 19th century Paris: a combination of witch-burning, financial hocus pocus, doubletalk and greedy debtors and creditors making spectacles out of themselves.  In Balzac's day, bankrupts frequently suicided (leaving grieving family dependents destitute and shamed) rather than face the personal dishonor and moralistic shunning that came with being unable to meet one's debts; nonetheless, if Balzac's novels are an indication, fiduciaries embezzled, speculated recklessly, and absconded on a regular basis, leaving depositors suddenly without funds, and made to feel at fault for it.

Birotteau is bankrupted on purpose by a scheming enemy who traps him in financial snares over a period of time; he begins the story as a prosperous middle class perfume merchant and deputy mayor and member of the Legion of Honor; slowly over the course of 300 pages he is faced with insurmountable crisis, and though indisputably seen as the victim of bad luck, is scorned and shamed and berated as if he were a bad person despite the good reputation built over years. Balzac was a frequent abuser of good, deep-souled protagonists whose long descents into misery and poverty were due to the tragic flaw of naivete.  

 Mary and Marriageability:  Mary Barton, by Elizabeth Gaskell  

"If my child lies dying (as poor Tom lay, with his white wan lips quivering, for want of better food than I could give him), does the rich man bring the wine or broth that might save his life?  If I am out of work for weeks in the bad times, and winter comes, with black frost, and keen east wind, and there is no coal for the grate, and no clothes for the bes, and the thin bones are seen through the ragged clothes, does the rich man share his plenty with me, as he ought to do, if his religion wasn't a humbug?  When I lie on my death-bed, and Mary (bless her) stands fretting, as I know she will fret, will a rich lady come and take her to her own home, if need be, till she can look round and see what best to do? No, I tell you, it's the poor, and the poor only, as does such things for the poor.  Don't think to come over me with the old tale, that the rich know nothing of the trials of the poor.  I say, if they don't know, they ought to know. We're their slaves as long as we can work, we pile up their fortunes with the sweat of our brows, and yet we are to live as separate as if we were in two worlds; ay, as separate as Dives and Lazarus, with a great gulf between us, but I know who was best off then."

Gaskell was a contemporary of Charlotte Bronte, and their friendship shows.  Compare and contrast Bronte's novel Shirley (last month's bookpost) with the more melodramatic Mary Barton.  Both deal with industrial strife and the degradation of the working class by manufacturers.  Mary Barton is both more preachy--she said she wrote it to teach one social class about another--and more personal, as it is more or less a love story.

Mary, the sole living relative of a father, the rest of whose family died of preventable conditions that privileged people encouraged, is sought after by both a poor worker and the son of the local mill boss, who wants to flog workers like animals and blacklist laborers for union activity.  Much of the second half of the book consists of Mary's efforts to get the worker acquitted of a murder he did not commit, but that everyone assumes him guilty of because "those people"..   It's about as subtle as a brick between the eyes, but suspenseful and moving nonetheless. High recommendations.

And Yet More Voyages: Two Years Before the Mast, by Richard Henry Dana

When he was made fast, he turned to the captain, who stood turning up his sleeves and getting ready for the blow, and asked him what he was to be flogged for. “Have I ever refused my duty, sir? Have you ever known me to hang back, or to be insolent, or not to know my work?”

 “No,” said the captain, “it is not that I flog you for; I flog you for your interference—for asking questions.”

 “Can’t a man ask a question here without being flogged?”

“No,” shouted the captain; “nobody shall open his mouth aboard this vessel, but myself;” and began laying the blows upon his back, swinging half round between each blow, to give it full effect. As he went on, his passion increased, and he danced about the deck, calling out as he swung the rope;—“If you want to know what I flog you for, I’ll tell you. It’s because I like to do it!—because I like to do it!—It suits me! That’s what I do it for!”

The man writhed under the pain, until he could endure it no longer, when he called out, with an exclamation more common among foreigners than with us-”Oh, Jesus Christ! Oh, Jesus Christ!”

“Don’t call on Jesus Christ,” shouted the captain; “he can’t help you. Call on Captain T——, he’s the man! He can help you! Jesus Christ can’t help you now!”

Poor RH Dana!  An attorney and abolitionist who defended those who defied the abominable Fugitive Slave Act (a document that tells you all you need to know about what southern slave holders thought of 'States' rights") and who resigned from practice rather than put up with the coddling of the South under Reconstruction, he is today best known for his account of a period when, his eyes too weak to study law as he recovered from an illness, hey journeyed to the North American Pacific as a common sailor, at a time when the west coast was still Mexican.

The result is a historically interesting account--one of the earliest--of life in pre-California California, and some Pacific islands.  It is probably best read while NOT saturated (as I was) in the fanciful sea voyage tales of Melville, Patrick O'Brian and George MacDonald Fraser.  Dana seems like weak tea next to white whales, Napoleonic battles, and fictionalizations of Skrang Pirates and African female Caligulas---unless you make the effort to remember that Dana's experiences actually happened.

Two Years Before The Mast was yet another odd choice for Dr. Elliott's "Harvard Classics" collection. It joins Homer, Virgil, Dante, Cervantes, Adam Smith, Darwin and Allesandro Manzoni (another odd choice) as being the only authors to get a full volume of the five foot shelf to themselves for a single work. I mean, it's good, but it's not what I would have called the best of the best.  Recommended as a light and salty read anyway.  

The Conclusion of Aubrey/Maturin:  The Hundred Days; Blue at the Mizzen; 21, by Patrick O'Brian

"Listen, Amos: did you ever read an author who said, 'Never underestimate a woman's capacity for jealousy, however illogical or inconsistent or indeed self-defeating'?"

"I do not think so, but the notion is fairly wide spread among those who think of men and women as belonging to two different nations, and who wish to be profound."

--from The Hundred Days

And here I say farewell to another long series that gave me comfort during much of this long and dreadful year.

Patrick O'Brian reportedly planned a series of 21 novels (I have some doubts as to how early he may have set forth this plan, as some of the later books had to introduce brand new villains, at least one wonderful new supporting character, and situations as other matters were resolved); he died after the 20th was published.  Honestly, Blue at the Mizzen has a decent enough sense of an ending; the chapter fragments for the intended final book, that O'Brian's estate gathered from his notes and published as 21, depressed me.

Nevertheless, as I've said all year, the series has my very highest recommendations.  Most of my extended family, including the ones who normally don't read, went through this in the 1990s as new volumes were coming out, and it helped a little as a family bonding series of moments.  Start with Master and Commander if you haven't read it already, and you'll know why I gush so about it.

Putz in the Punjab: Flashman and the Mountain of Light (Flashman #9), by George MacDonald Fraser
Broadfoot had the conscience of his time, you see, Bible-reared and shunning sin, and the thought that my success in Lahore might depend on fornication set him a fine ethical problem.  He couldn't solve it--I doubt if Dr. Arnold and Cardinal Newman could, either ("I say, your eminence, what price Flashy's salvation if he breaks the seventh commandment for his country's sake?""That depends, doctor, on whether the randy young pig enjoyed it."). Of course, if it had been slaughter, not adultery, that was necessary, none of my pious generation would have even blinked--soldier's duty, and all that.

I'm getting used to the idea that Fraser's entire point was that his great revolting antihero Flashman was, from Fraser's view, typical of his generation rather than a significant secret disgrace to it.  They ALL rode unearned reputations for virtue straight through their racist, misogynist, imperialist, colonialist, hypocritical do-as-I-say cesspools of moral failure and came to be held up to later generations as the pride of the British Empire as either a massive cover up or because people in those days actually believed the bullshit of Victorian codes.

Flashy here, in the ninth book in the series but the third chronological episode in his career, has a rare self-contained adventure (They usually go all over the globe, as in from England to India to Afghanistan, or England to Africa to Louisiana) under cover in identity and bedclothes during the first Sikh uprising of 1845, in which a well-trained army of overwhelming force really did manage to get wiped out by apparent ineptitude.  Fraser presents a thesis that attempts to explain the historical facts; believe it or don't.  

the usual CN about toxic privileged rich white guy behavior presented comically in a "jolly villain" sort of way applies, and will apply throughout the series. It is likely to be a lot more amusing to the descendents of the white rotten scoundrels of the era than to those descended from their victims.

Solving for X: Laws of Thought, by George Boole

It will not be necessary to enter into the discussion of that famous question of the schools, whether Language is to be regarded as an essential instrument of reasoning, or whether on the other hand, it is possible for us to reason without its aid.  I suppose the question to be beside the design of the present treatise, for the following reason: that it is the business of science to investigate laws and that, whether we regard signs as the representatives of things and their relations, or as the representatives of the conceptions and operations of the human intellect, in studying the laws of signs, we are in effect studying the manifested laws of reasoning.

Mathematical logic was my favorite part of high school math; I could grasp it just the way i could not with trigonometry and calculus.  Various propositions were represented by letters, and their relations by symbols such as an arrow for "If...then" or an arch for "and'.  As with a whole lot of other math, i never encountered it afterwards, except in my own independent general study, where there was no teacher to help me when, say, the page in Descartes' logic looked like absolute gibberish to me.

Boolean logic  (this book was on yet another Mortimer Adler list of great books that teach one how to think) was an early attempt to take Aristoteleain syllogisms to the next level  through the use of symbols.  Unfortunately, his symbols weren't the ones I was used to, and transmogrified sentences into what looked like algebraic equations to the point where it gave me headaches and I found myself wondering why they didn't just use the sentences to avoid so much confusion.  I'm more verbal than mathematical, and it seems to me Boole was speaking to people whose minds worked differently from mine, and who would be happy reading poetry in the form of equations.   I was proud that, with concentration, I was able to get through the logical chapters without giving up, though the later parts about probability took my understanding to the edge.  Recommended, but not as light reading.

Odd Juxtapositions: Eugenie Grandet and A Woman of Thirty, by Honore de Balzac

La Grande Nanon was perhaps the only human being capable of accepting willingly the despotism of her master. The whole town envied Monsieur and Madame Grandet the possession of her. La Grande Nanon, so called on account of her height, which was five feet eight inches, had lived with Monsieur Grandet for thirty-five years. Though she received only sixty francs a year in wages, she was supposed to be one of the richest serving-women in Saumur. Those sixty francs, accumulating through thirty-five years, had recently enabled her to invest four thousand francs in an annuity with Maitre Cruchot. This result of her long and persistent economy seemed gigantic. Every servant in the town, seeing that the poor sexagenarian was sure of bread for her old age, was jealous of her, and never thought of the hard slavery through which it had been won.

At twenty-two years of age the poor girl had been unable to find a situation, so repulsive was her face to almost every one. Yet the feeling was certainly unjust: the face would have been much admired on the shoulders of a grenadier of the guard; but all things, so they say, should be in keeping. Forced to leave a farm where she kept the cows, because the dwelling-house was burned down, she came to Saumur to find a place, full of the robust courage that shrinks from no labor. Le Pere Grandet was at that time thinking of marriage and about to set up his household. He espied the girl, rejected as she was from door to door. A good judge of corporeal strength in his trade as a cooper, he guessed the work that might be got out of a female creature shaped like a Hercules, as firm on her feet as an oak sixty years old on its roots, strong in the hips, square in the back, with the hands of a cartman and an honesty as sound as her unblemished virtue. Neither the warts which adorned her martial visage, nor the red-brick tints of her skin, nor the sinewy arms, nor the ragged garments of la Grande Nanon, dismayed the cooper, who was at that time still of an age when the heart shudders. He fed, shod, and clothed the poor girl, gave her wages, and put her to work without treating her too roughly. Seeing herself thus welcomed, la Grande Nanon wept secretly tears of joy, and attached herself in all sincerity to her master, who from that day ruled her and worked her with feudal authority. Nanon did everything. She cooked, she made the lye, she washed the linen in the Loire and brought it home on her shoulders; she got up early, she went to bed late; she prepared the food of the vine-dressers during the harvest, kept watch upon the market-people, protected the property of her master like a faithful dog, and even, full of blind confidence, obeyed without a murmur his most absurd exactions.

The set of Balzac I've been grazing in included in one volume one of Balzac's best stories and one of his worst.  No figuring out why.

Eugenie Grandet, an achingly emotional short novel that shows rather than telling, is usually on the top five Balzac lists.  The long-suffering daughter of a miser has been happily and dutifully doing without until she falls in love at first sight with a young distant relation who comes to visit, wants to do nice things for him, and runs afoul of her father's monstrous and dishonest "spend nothing; keep acquiring" obsession, with gut-wrenchingly emotional results.  Very highest recommendations.

A Woman of Thirty, on the other hand, is utterly disjointed and can't seem to make up its mind whether the heroine is good or bad, loving to her children or not, etc.  It begins with a foolish marriage against her good father's wishes, continues with a lot of regret, the clinging to the firstborn child as her reason for existence, the rejection of the same child; the rejection of a truly worthy suitor because adultery, the acceptance of a poor choice of adulterous suitor later on; a shocking death out of the blue, a plot from thin air regarding the daughter running away with a scoundrel; more melodramatic deaths; and preventable heartbreak from a whole new plot direction.  I was like....okay, but why?   diamonds are to be found, but in a lot of dirt.

The 19th Century Murders: Execution Dock; Acceptable Loss; Sunless Sea, by Anne Perry; Ran Away; Good Man Friday, by Barbara Hambly
Until last month, Scruff had come and gone as he'd pleased, spending only the occasional night at Monk's house in Paradise Place.  However, since his kidnapping and the atrocity on the boat at Execution Dock, he had come to live with them, going out only for short periods during the day, and tossing and turning at night, plagued by nightmares. He would not talk about them, and his pride would not let him admit to Hester that he was frightened of the dark, of closed doors, and above all, of sleep.
--from Acceptable Loss

They stood in silence, hidden, as the wagon creaked by. In his years in New orleans, January had several times gone to voodoo dances, seen the gods take the bodies of the celebrants, speak in their voices, handle fire in their bare hands or summon the dead...

And nothing he had seen raised the hair on the back of his neck as did the sight of that half-glimpsed wagon in the fog, the sound of creaking harnesses. There could be a man in the hollow beneath the wagon bed, thought January. A free man, drugged, beaten, tied, gagged, and maybe awake enough to know what is happening to him.

--from Good Man Friday

Anne Perry's William Monk series took a sharp turn away from stand-alone whodunnits and surprise reveals with these next books.  they're closer to police procedurals where the culprit is known early or at least mid-book, and the suspenseful part is how they prove it.  These ones in particular need content notes because they center around Monk's efforts to break up a crime operation in which certain wealthy, powerful people induce other wealthy powerful people to participate in pornographic activities...on Thames river boats, and involving children...and then blackmail the rich participants.  The books raise excellent criminal justice issues contrasting the relative treatment of the slum-dwelling sleazy criminals who operate the boats, the privileged pedophiles who are blackmailed, and the very high socially-ranked "gentleman" who does the blackmailing, who is able to threaten Monk and the entire division of River Police with ruin in retaliation for having even been implied to be guilty.  It also, as is the case with most of Perry, does not pull punches in the description of the effects the crimes have on the victims. Take heed.

Barbara Hambly's series about Benjamin January, the free man of color solving crimes in 1830s Dixie keeps getting better and looking into new territory.  Ran Away, which involves a Turkish merchant accused of murdering some of his harem girls and assumed to be guilty because "that's what those heathen Arabs do", has interesting moments of affinity between two different "exotic" cultures (three if you count the French), juxtaposed with the utterly xenophobic shittiness of Southern white people.  Good Man Friday, even better, sends January on a mission to Washington DC, in search of a missing white man, who is missed, while POC are disappeared by human traffickers into the cotton fields without anybody so much as shrugging.   Cameos by the likes of Edgar Allen Poe, John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay add to the historical enrichment.  High recommendations.

Unfinished Progress: The Philosophy of the Unconscious, by Eduard von Hartmann

Nature and history, or the origin of organisms and the development of the human race, are two parallel problems.  In both cases the question runs: particular contingency or universal necessity, dead causality or living conformity to an end; mere sport of atoms and individuals or a single plan and general superintendence?  He who has decided the question with respect to nature in favor of design will have no difficulty in doing the same in regard to history. The only thing likely to mislead in the latter case is the semblance of personal freedom.

Hartmann was listed as the last of the 19th century German idealists, the culmination of a trend that began with Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer, and so I skipped ahead a little--he wrote in the last half of the century--with the goal of getting a disagreeable task over with.  I admired Kant when I could understand him, but the trends seemed to get progressively gloomier and more dense until I came at last to Hartmann, staring with wild hair and wilder eyes and an enormous Rasputinish beard from the frontsipiece as if warning me that exposure to his ideas would drive a man mad--MAD, I TELL YOU!!!  HAHAHA!  Read on, if you dare!

Hartmann begins with the less-than-refutable or provable concept that most things that happen are willed unconsciously, thereby predating Freud and "The Secret".  He says that atoms are invisible particles of will (force), not matter, and that most of history was caused deterministically by random atom configurations.  

Further, that philosophy (or directed consciousness) is the enemy (antithesis) of will, which would explain why many philosophers are known for sitting there philosplaining things while the world goes on around them.

Unlike Hegel, who asserted that the world had culminated with the German-Barbarian conquest of the Roman Empire and was as great as society could be ever since, Hartmann's theory was that his day was only the second of three great periods of history, of which the Unconscious was the first and immaturity (Christian-based obsession with an afterlife, followed by a secular focus on making a better future for generations yet to come) the second.  Maturity will be when we actually live in "Heaven" or "Nirvana" or whatever perfection of our own making is possible.

Such are the secrets Humankind was evidently not meant to know.   I am always cautious of maps of thought that present philosophers as gatekeepers to actual knowledge, but this was entertaining to read, at least. Good thing, too.  It is longer than fuck.

Here's to You, Mrs. Robinson:  In Praise of Older Women, by Stephen Vizinczey

In all likelihood, the boy had gone to considerable trouble and expense to bring his little friend to the theatre. He didn't necessarily expect gratitude, but he must have hoped that taking her to see a famous star, in the company of an elegant theatre audience, would make him more impressive in her eyes.  Now, since he couldn't disappear, he attempted to laugh off the incident with a foolish grin, with a nervous twist of his shoulders, looking around at us with an expression which said, "Isn't she silly, but isn't she cute?" As he turned his head in my direction, I caught his eyes for a second. They were the eyes of a maimed dog.

I found this one highly problematic. It is presented as the fictional memoirs of a Canadian professor who spent part of his youth in Eastern Europe.   Vizinczey is a Canadian professor who spent part of his youth in Eastern Europe.  (see, also, Stephen King novels in which the protagonist is a horror novel writer).  His pronounced "wisdom" about what all men are supposedly like, and what younger women are supposedly like, and what older women are supposedly like, either fail or (speaking only for myself), when they strike a familiar chord that relates to my own experience, poke at something about myself that makes me ashamed, that I would rather not admit to even thinking of as part of what I want out of love or life.

"Andras Vajda", the unreliable narrator, relates his youth, and his initiation into sexuality at the skilled hands of experienced women, with all the single-mindedness of a goal-directed sperm competing with all other males to get at the treasure, absorb himself into his successes, and then die and get reborn to do it all over again, as many times as possible.  He has one sexual-emotional adventure after another, each one of which takes on cosmic importance at the time, and fades into nothing upon completion.  all people, including himself, are fickle and without meaning. I felt like an unwilling voyeur at times, wanting to ask "Vadja" why he insists on sharing this information about himself that I find vaguely and not-so-vaguely creepy.

Sparky McWirepants:  Experimental Researches in Electricity, by Michael Faraday

An atom by itself might be conceived of as spherical, or spheroidical, or where many were touching in all directions, the form might be thought of as a dodecahedron, for any one would be surrounded by and bear against twelve others, on different sides.  But if an atom be conceived to be a centre of power, that which is ordinarily referred to under the term 'shape' would now be referred to the disposition and relative intensity of the forces.  The power arranged in and around a centre might be uniform in arrangement and intensity in every direction outwards from that centre, and then a section of equal intensity of force through the radii would be a sphere; or the law of decrease of force from the centre outwards might vary in different directions, and then the section of equal intensity might be an oblate or oblong spheroid, or have other forms; or the forces might be disposed so as to make the atom polar; or they might circulate around it equatorially or otherwise, after the manner of imagined magnetic atoms.

Long time followers of my Great Books reading project are familiar with my angst at being humbled by the likes of Newton and other scientists whose works are included in their complete form in the Great Books set with the admonition that "Anyone can read and understand this." I have failed frequently, and been comforted by scientist friends who assure me that no one is expected to learn physics by reading the original Newton.

Experimental Researches in Electricity was the single major science work I read this year, beginning in February and grazing through the short chapters gradually until late October.  I was grateful for Faraday.  This book is much harder than his lecture on "The Chemical History of a Candle", but it is not impossible, and for the first time, it had me making connections between various concepts that I had been taught separately such as magnetism, atomic structure, and electrical force itself--bridging the gap between electricity formulas from high school chemistry and what actually goes on inside a battery.  Highly recommended.  And also, Faraday was quite easy on the eyes.

Shake it down, Shake it down now:  Bleak....House, by Charles Dickens

Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. This scarecrow of a suit has, in course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means. The parties to it understand it least, but it has been observed that no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it for five minutes without coming to a total disagreement as to all the premises. Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old people have died out of it. Scores of persons have deliriously found themselves made parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce without knowing how or why; whole families have inherited legendary hatreds with the suit. The little plaintiff or defendant who was promised a new rocking-horse when Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be settled has grown up, possessed himself of a real horse, and trotted away into the other world. Fair wards of court have faded into mothers and grandmothers; a long procession of Chancellors has come in and gone out; the legion of bills in the suit have been transformed into mere bills of mortality; there are not three Jarndyces left upon the earth perhaps since old Tom Jarndyce in despair blew his brains out at a coffee-house in Chancery Lane; but Jarndyce and Jarndyce still drags its dreary length before the court, perennially hopeless.

"M'lud," says Mr. Tangle. Mr. Tangle knows more of Jarndyce and Jarndyce than anybody. He is famous for it—supposed never to have read anything else since he left school.

"Have you nearly concluded your argument?"

"M'lud, no—variety of points—feel it me duty to submit—ludship," is the reply that slides out of Mr. Tangle.

"Several members of the bar are still to be heard, I believe?" says the Chancellor with a slight smile.

Eighteen of Mr. Tangle's learned friends, each armed with a little summary of eighteen hundred sheets, bob up like eighteen hammers in a pianoforte, make eighteen bows, and drop into their eighteen places of obscurity.

"We will proceed with the hearing on Wednesday fortnight," says the Chancellor. For the question at issue is only a question of costs, a mere bud on the forest tree of the parent suit, and really will come to a settlement one of these days.

Dickens wrote a number of novels attacking the debtors' prisons that existed in his day (and that, thanks to people voting Republican, are on their way to being established in America as I write this); Bleak House is centrally an attack on the British legal system, and chancery court in particular, as a mass of sludge clogging the arteries of society.  At its center is a will contest that has been dragging on for decades, ruining lives and bankrupting participants so that the solicitors may provide for their families, until ultimately the entire estate is consumed in legal fees.  The other plot, revolving around the narrator Esther Summerson's parentage, is secondary.

As is usual in Dickens, charactarization is the meat of the book.  The noble, long-suffering Esther and her even more noble and long-suffering guardian Jarndyce are models of generosity, while the male ward Richard, who ruins himself through litigation, is the central warning.  Surrounding them are Jo the plucky street urchin, Mr. George the hearty shooting gallery owner, Krook the mysterious victim of spontaneous combustion, Guppy the eager law clerk, Vholes the lawyer  who matter-of-factly justifies his practice as a means to provide for his family, the Dedlocks whose devotion to one another is shadowed by the secrets they keep from one another.

By far the character who made the greatest impression on me, however, is the human leech Skimpole, who has almost no connection with the main plot, and who exists as a dark flip side to the jolly, helpless Micawber from David Copperfield Skimpole is a delightfully charming and radiant companion who takes no pains to understand worldly concerns nor any responsibility for his own upkeep.  He proudly self-identifies as a man-boy who needs looking after, and graciously accepts the support of others as his due; a "heartless" bailiff who duns him for his extravagant debts, and who is denounced as a monster seizing from the poor, is shown as the sole support of a needy family, doing the only job he can get.

Skimpole makes me grateful that conservative Republicans consider any books more imaginative than Who Moved My Cheese as wasteful; otherwise the character of Skimpole would be as universally held up in conservative circles as Scrooge and Tiny Tim are in the rest of society; Dickens did what Ayn Rand failed to do and breathed life into an unforgettable straw man ; the parasite and taker who styles himself an "altruist."

Begorrah, the Girl is Mine!  Castle Richmond, by Anthony Trollope

"They will be beggars!" she said to herself--"Beggars!"--when the door of her own room closed upon her. And there are few people in the whole world who held such beggary in less esteem than did the Countess of Desmond. It may almost be said that she hated herself on account of her own poverty.

A 400-page short story about two Irishmen competing over the affections of a woman, and all three parties subjecting themselves to unnecessary unhappiness out of misguided notions of honor.  There are families with titles and no money, and families with money and no title, posturing as better than one another, while around them people with neither money nor title fall victim to the Irish famine and die.  True love is thwarted by considerations of the relative stations of the lovers making matches "impossible", and parents who forbid worthy matches live to regret their folly.

A major plot twist arises about a quarter of the way into the book and is resolved, negating itself, about a quarter of the way from the end.  Seems to me, everything between could have been eliminated while subtracting nothing of value from the story.   Drink whenever someone refuses to do the sensible thing because nobility of self-sacrifice.

Literary Leviathan: Moby Dick, by Herman Melville

Is it not a saying in every one's mouth, Possession is half of the law: that is, regardless of how the thing came into possession? But often possession is the whole of the law. What are the sinews and souls of Russian serfs and Republican slaves but Fast-Fish, whereof possession is the whole of the law? What to the rapacious landlord is the widow's last mite but a Fast-Fish? What is yonder undetected villain's marble mansion with a doorplate for a waif; what is that but a Fast-Fish? What is the ruinous discount which Mordecai, the broker, gets from the poor Woebegone, the bankrupt, on a loan to keep Woebegone's family from starvation; what is that ruinous discount but a Fast-Fish? What is the Archbishop of Savesoul's income of L100,000 seized from the scant bread and cheese of hundreds of thousands of broken-backed laborers (all sure of heaven without any of Savesoul's help) what is that globular 100,000 but a Fast-Fish. What are the Duke of Dunder's hereditary towns and hamlets but Fast-Fish? What to that redoubted harpooneer, John Bull, is poor Ireland, but a Fast-Fish? What to that apostolic lancer, Brother Jonathan, is Texas but a Fast-Fish? And concerning all these, is not Possession the whole of the law?

But if the doctrine of Fast-Fish be pretty generally applicable, the kindred doctrine of Loose-Fish is still more widely so. That is internationally and universally applicable.

What was America in 1492 but a Loose-Fish, in which Columbus struck the Spanish standard by way of wailing it for his royal master and mistress? What was Poland to the Czar? What Greece to the Turk? What India to England? What at last will Mexico be to the United States? All Loose-Fish.

What are the Rights of Man and the Liberties of the World but Loose-Fish? What all men's minds and opinions but Loose-Fish? What is the principle of religious belief in them but a Loose-Fish? What to the ostentatious smuggling verbalists are the thoughts of thinkers but Loose-Fish? What is the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish? And what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too?

Everyone should read Moby Dick at least once, and you book lovers probably mostly already have.  It's one of the top ten great American literary achievements, and gets the number one spot on a lot of lists. It's the only American novel included in the Great Books of the Western World set (and the only American work at all besides The Federalist, some Founding Fathers documents like the Constitution, and William James on psychology.  The second edition added Huckleberry Finn, The Great Gatsby, A Lost Lady, some O'Neill, Dewey, and Veblen.).

As a novel, its plot structure is horrible. It starts nicely enough, with the episodes of Ishmael, Queequeg the harpoonist, Father Mapple's pulpit and sermon, the Pequod and its crew, and the eventual appearance of Captain Ahab, an embodiment of the line that divides courage and daring from foolhardy stubbornness.  Its ending is also epic, from Fedallah's prophecies to the inexorable final fight with the great white whale.  In the middle are chapter after chapter detailing everything connected historically, scientifically and philosophically with whales and 19th century (and earlier) whale hunting. Students assigned to read it recoil in bored horror and most readers skip right through it and literally "cut to the chase" to get back to Ahab's quest for the whale.

My advice: don't skip those parts. They're there for a reason. They may not advance the plot, but they're a large part of the reason why Moby Dick is "great". It's not just a novel.  It's a philosophic tract that springboards whales and whaling into life, the universe, and everything.  (And yes, it seems to me that Douglas Adams's ill-fated traveling companion to a bowl of petunias was a distant relative of the Great White One. But I digress.)

The part I quoted above is the end of the chapter that begins detailing the laws of "fast fish" (physically connected in some way to a fishing boat) and "loose fish" (those not so connected, and therefore fair game for seizure by anyone).  It starts out looking like a boring legal digression, and ends up being postulated as applicable to Columbus vs. the First Nations; intellectual property rights, and we the people.

And also, things would have worked out quite differently for Ahab if instead of Fedallah and Starbuck, he had had a Tough Lesbian Pal for a confidante.

Don't read it for pleasure and adventure. Read it at a time when you're in the mood to think.  Very high recommendations.

Pride and Petticoats:  Cranford, by Elizabeth Gaskell

In the first place, Cranford is in possession of the Amazons; all the holders of houses above a certain rent are women.  If a married couple come to settle in the town, somehow the gentleman disappears; he is either fairly frightened to death by being the only man in the Cranford evening parties, or he is accounted for by being with his regiment, his ship, or closely engaged in business all the week in the great neighbouring commercial town of Drumble, distant only twenty miles on a railroad.  In short, whatever does become of the gentlemen, they are not at Cranford.  What could they do if they were there?  The surgeon has his round of thirty miles, and sleeps at Cranford; but every man cannot be a surgeon.  For keeping the trim gardens full of choice flowers without a weed to speck them; for frightening away little boys who look wistfully at the said flowers through the railings; for rushing out at the geese p. 2that occasionally venture in to the gardens if the gates are left open; for deciding all questions of literature and politics without troubling themselves with unnecessary reasons or arguments; for obtaining clear and correct knowledge of everybody’s affairs in the parish; for keeping their neat maid-servants in admirable order; for kindness (somewhat dictatorial) to the poor, and real tender good offices to each other whenever they are in distress, the ladies of Cranford are quite sufficient.  “A man,” as one of them observed to me once, “is so in the way in the house!” Although the ladies of Cranford know all each other’s proceedings, they are exceedingly indifferent to each other’s opinions.  Indeed, as each has her own individuality, not to say eccentricity, pretty strongly developed, nothing is so easy as verbal retaliation; but, somehow, good-will reigns among them to a considerable degree.

Cranford is not a novel so much as a loosely connected series of vignettes about life in a town where everyone knows everyone else.  An equivalent American book would be Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio.  The characters and environment are similar to those found in Jane Austen, though somewhat more eccentric, and presented, roughly 50 years after Austen, as anachronisms on their way out.  Pause to appreciate this bygone era, but let it pass and be gone, is the theme.  Not so much lamenting lost youth as lost age; by Gaskell's time, things were moving faster and being displaced for newer things more quickly.

Shark Tank: Cousin Pons, by Honore de Balzac

To indicate how much heroism was contained in this phrase "ve vill go pric-a-prackink togezzer", it must be made plain that Schmucke was crassly ignorant in the knowledge of bric-a-brac. It needed all the motive force of his friendship for him to avoid breakages in the drawing room and study given over to Pons for his art collection. Schmucke was wholly devoted to music; he composed it for his own pleasure, and he gazed at all his friend's baubles as a fish supplied with a complimentary ticket would gaze at a flower-show in the Luxembourg gardens.

I do not know if anyone has read the entire "Human Comedy" series of Balzac; I know that the dozen or so works over the course of eight months has exhausted me. Balzac is too melodramatic, too given to digressions on minor characters, too steeped in one time and place that is too different from my own, and above all too painful in his themes of good but vulnerable fools ruined by treacherous society-approved self-interest and snobbishness and gossip, to be sustained for long at once.

Cousin Pons is presented as a mirror image of Cousin Bette (July 2017 bookpost) on the theme of "poor relations", with the "poor" title characters being presented as the aggressor (Bette) and as victim (Pons). The culture shock is odd today; Bette is by no means down and out, and her "rich" antagonists present well in society but are on the edge of ruin even without Bette's machinations, due mostly to the paterfamilias's over the top foolishness.  Pons, meanwhile, is presented as a good and innocent poor man whose problems stem from a longing to have good dinners and from his painstakingly collected set of objects d'art. The collection is worth a fortune; an old man in Pons's situation today could easily sell a few items and dine well in restaurants for the rest of his days. In 19th Century France, one apparently had to be invited to dinners at the homes of high society; and Pons's mean, rich relatives savagely arrange to get Pons shunned and un-invited by everyone, solely out of spite, and in a way that presents pretty much everybody as mind-bogglingly callous.

Pons in turn spends so much of the book slowly dying of psychologically induced sickness, surrounded by greedy people trying to get the art collection that he had previously been giving away piecemeal to those who fed him well, that one either rejects it as unrealistic or suffers unbearably along with him.  Only Clarissa Harlowe takes longer to die.  No more.

Cost-Benefit Analysis: The Methods of Ethics, by Henry Sidgwick

The aim of Ethics is to render scientific--i.e., true, and as far as possible, systematic--the apparent cognitions that most men have of the rightness or reasonableness of conduct, whether the conduct be considered as right in itself, or as the means to some end considered as ultimately reasonable.  These cognitions are normally accompanied by emotions of various kinds, known as "moral sentiments", but an ethical judgment cannot be explained as affirming merely the existence of such a sentiment; indeed, it is an essential characteristic of a moral feeling that it is bound up with an apparent cognition of something more than mere feeling.

In a period when the representative philosophy is long on heavy duty German metaphysicians who pride themselves on their incomprehensibility, it is nice to find a mostly simple Englishman talking about the much more interesting (to me, anyhow) study of learning right from wrong., without even begging the question by invoking "God".

Sidgwick compares and contrasts three popular ethical theories of the day:  There is hedonism (the epicurean kind which we call "enlightened self interest" today), which presupposes capacity for impulse control and delayed gratification, and that society will remember what you do--and so the problem is not so much unbridled lust and gluttony as not understanding where true self-interest lies.  For example, practitioners of ascetic religions (say that they) experience ecstasies that most people cannot even contemplate without first undergoing severe disciplines. Same with the feelings of pride and honor that come with following Bushido or other warrior codes.

Second, there is "intuitive" or Kantian ethics, that follow a priori (written in advance) principles of duty--with the difficulty that moral "laws" need qualification or exceptions.  hence books of statutes that attempt to codify moral law and end up running to several volumes under most or all governments as legislatures are confronted with the need for exceptions, and exceptions to the exceptions, and so on.

Finally, we have Benthamite Utilitarianism ("the greatest good for the greatest number", and clearly Sidgwick's personal choice) which bases ethics on the practical consequences to society, and which is hard to reconcile with egoism.

Sidgwick is big on impartiality as a virtue, and on benevolence towards humans in general.  Although he loves Utilitarianism, his stated conclusion is more of an agreement to disagree with egoists than a full argument against them.  A good book for students of ethics, dabblers, and serious scholars alike.

Libertarian Paradise: Hard Times, by Charles Dickens

The wonder was, it was there at all.  It had been ruined so often, that it was amazing how it had borne so many shocks.  Surely there never was such fragile china-ware as that of which the millers of Coketown were made.  Handle them never so lightly, and they fell to pieces with such ease that you might suspect them of having been flawed before.  They were ruined, when they were required to send labouring children to school; they were ruined when inspectors were appointed to look into their works; they were ruined, when such inspectors considered it doubtful whether they were quite justified in chopping people up with their machinery; they were utterly undone, when it was hinted that perhaps they need not always make quite so much smoke.  Besides Mr. Bounderby’s gold spoon which was generally received in Coketown, another prevalent fiction was very popular there.  It took the form of a threat.  Whenever a Coketowner felt he was ill-used—that is to say, whenever he was not left entirely alone, and it was proposed to hold him accountable for the consequences of any of his acts—he was sure to come out with the awful menace, that he would ‘sooner pitch his property into the Atlantic.’ This had terrified the Home Secretary within an inch of his life, on several occasions...However, the Coketowners were so patriotic after all, that they never had pitched their property into the Atlantic yet, but, on the contrary, had been kind enough to take mighty good care of it.  So there it was, in the haze yonder; and it increased and multiplied.

Hard Times is one of Dickens's shortest novels, quite short enough to be part of a standard high school curriculum; and it's maybe the most relevant of his novels to the present day.  It has a factory where laborers are treated like crap, by a boss who pretends that treating them well would put the whole factory out of work, that unionization would horribly impair their freedom to make desperate bargains for sub-subsistence existence, and that he himself was born penniless and cast out into the gutter with nothing, and raised himself by his bootstraps.  And people are still saying these things today.

It has a school that is run like a practical business (with a teacher named M'Choakumchild), priding itself on teaching practical facts in fields that will make them Useful, and in killing imagination in the bud.   We get to see prime examples of how children who do brilliantly in this environment turn out, and how those who are considered failures turn out, with all the biting satire you might expect.   And people still want schools like this today, when they want schools at all and do not wish instead for children to get unpaid internships at the School Of Hard Knocks.

It has a good man trapped in an unhappy marriage to a horrible woman, who is unable to have happiness with the good woman who can and would give it, because morals.  And there is an equal and opposite wonderful woman trapped in a marriage to a beastly man, whose temptation to look for something better is seen as a descent down a staircase to damnation, and the other man treated by Dickens himself as a cad.  And today, although there is easy divorce, poly communities are still savagely derided by the monogamous, and many kinds of healthy relationships are scorned, and NeoCalvinists in religion and government try to make them unavailable to all.

These are very relevant topics for a young mind to explore, in a book of under 300 pages, with lively, if occasionally two-dimensional characters to be held up as very needed examples and warnings to people in danger of suffering through the belief in nonsense.   And yet, I am not aware of this book being taught in any secondary school.

And I can't think why.

Jerk in Germany: Royal Flash (Flashman #2), by George MacDonald Fraser

If I wasn't an Englishman, I would want to be a German. They say what they think, which isn't much as a rule, and they are admirably well-ordered. Everyone in Germany knows his place and stays in it, and grovels to those above him, which makes it an excellent country for gentlemen and bullies. In England, even in my young day, if you took liberties with a working man, you would be as likely as not to get a fist in your face, but the lower-class Germans were as docile as [n-word deleted] with white skins. The whole country is splendidly disciplined and organized, and with all their docility the inhabitants are still among the finest soldiers and workers on earth--as my old friend Bismarck has shown.  The basis of all this, of course, is stupidity, which you must have in people before you can make them fight or work successfully. Well, the Germans will trouble the world yet, but since they are closer to us than anyone else, we may live to profit by it.

The second book written but the fourth in the chronology is a short one taking place mostly in continental Europe.   Frasier's MO is to find historical events that happened not too far from each other, and to send Flashman so that he manages to encounter them all.  Hence, an adventure that combines the adventuress Lola Montez in Munich with young Otto von Bismarck in Saxony, and an arrangement of The Prisoner of Zenda.

As always, CN because the protagonist is an utter asshole, a rapist and an English chauvinist who uses offensive words on almost every page. In other words, typical Victorian English white dude.

Meanwhile, in Australia: The Fatal Shore, by Robert Hughes

It is a quarter century since the Australian in London risked hearing languid sneers directed at his criminal ancestry. This colonial vestige was already dying a generation ago. Nevertheless, it was part of English attitudes to Australians before 1960, and especially before World War II. When it appeared, it would send upper middle class Australians into paroxysms of social embarrassment.  None wanted to have convict ancestors, and few could be perfectly sure that some felon did not perch like a crow in their family tree.  Fifty years ago, convict ancestry was a stain to be hidden.

Holy fucking shit, this history of how white men fucked up Australia is AMAZING.  I found the book referenced in a foreword to one of Patrick o'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin books, and made a note to read it. I was glad I did.  First, as part of the tapestry emerging from the Early 19th Century Canon as THE age of exploration in works from that age and from modern works (Dana, Melville, O'Brian, Fraser; prior to the 19th century there was Hakluyt and Marco Polo. after that, there was more to the world than just Europe.).  Second because the popular mind, considering australia, never gets beyond "Australia was settled by convicts."

The Fatal Shore is a work about the simultaneous oppression of indigenous peoples and the lower classes of a "privileged" nation, and about the ways in which oppression of the marginalized unnecessarily fucks up life even for the privileged.  Australia was governed by the USA Republicans of England, with predictably horrible results. Everybody suffered, as we suffer today, simply because of dogma that certain people were "naturally predisposed" as better than others, and that there is such a thing as "just deserts" (always punitive). There are chapters on climate and flora and fauna of the new (to white people) land, and chapters about criminal justice, and about the ways in which innocent people were ancestry-shamed for things people long-dead had done; chapters on resistance to authority and chapters on the savagery to which people descend in the utmost extremity.

Just read it. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Very highest recommendations.

The Art of the Essay: Winterslow, by William Hazlitt
On the question being started, Ayrton said, “I suppose the two first persons you would choose to see would be the two greatest names in English literature, Sir Isaac Newton and Mr. Locke?” In this Ayrton, as usual, reckoned without his host. Everyone burst out a-laughing at the expression on Lamb’s face, in which impatience was restrained by courtesy. “Yes, the greatest names,” he stammered out hastily; “but they were not persons—not persons.”“Not persons,” said Ayrton, looking wise and foolish at the same time, afraid his triumph might be premature. “That is,” rejoined Lamb, “not characters, you know. By Mr. Locke and Sir Isaac Newton, you mean the ‘Essay on the Human Understanding,’ and the ‘Principia,’ which we have to this day. Beyond their contents there is nothing personally interesting in the men. But what we want to see anyone bodilyfor, is when there is something peculiar, striking in the individuals, more than we can learn from their writings, and yet are curious to know. I dare say Locke and Newton were very like Kneller’s portraits of them. But who could paint Shakespeare?”

--from "Of Persons One Would Wish to Have Seen

Jacques Barzun highlights Hazlitt as a great writer of the times and urges Winterslow as an introduction to his work.

I wasn't convinced.  These lit-crit essays just made me go "Meh". fortunately the book was short.  There are many other Hazlitt collections, and I intend to try at least one more, that may be more representative of the whole of his work.

The First Crypt Keeper: Uncle Silas, by J. Sheridan Le Fanu

Next day was the funeral, that appalling necessity, smuggled away in whispers, by black familiars, unresisting, the loved one leaves home, without a farewell, to darken those doors no more, henceforward to lie outside, far away and forsaken, through the drowsy heats of summer, through days of snow and nights of tempest, without light or warmth, without a voice near. Oh, death, king of terrors! The body quakes and the spirit faints before thee. It is vain, with hands clasped over our eyes, to scream our reclamation; the horrible image will not be excluded.

One of the great classic gothic horror stories.  I'd never read it before, and found it surprisingly tame, probably because I imagined it in Edward Gorey animation the whole time I was reading it.  Other than a few prophecies, there is nothing supernatural about it, and unless you're reading The Lovely bones, a first person narrator is probably going to live through her ordeal.

There are, however, plenty of every-day horrible people.  The heroine's moody, lugubrious father knows or should know that his brother Silas is an Evil man.  YES--religious, and, YES--very fond of money and has none, and YES--his enemies tend to die, leaving poor, oppressed Silas under the shadow of suspicion. And so, what does Daddy do for his daughter, the one charm and love of his life?  He decides to prove Silas's goodness and redeem him by putting it in his will that the girl must live with her Uncle Silas for three years "until she comes of age" (never mind that she's already 18 to begin with) AND makes Silas next of kin to the vast fortune she is to inherit if she lives.  that way, her survival will PROVE that silas is an innocent man, since a villain would take advantage of the opportunity to do her in or something something garbanzo.

Mayhem ensues, and no one could possibly have predicted it.  More along the lines of "creepy delight" than "gonna make you whimper all night just thinking about it", and you get credit for reading "literature". good recommendations.

The 19th Century Murders: Blind Justice; Blood on the Water, by Anne Perry; The Bellini Card; The Evil Eye; The Baklava Club, by Jason Goodwin; Crimson Angel, by Barbara Hambly

Brother in law or not--advocate of 'eradicating' the 'disgrace of slavery' or not--Jefferson Vitrack was a white man, and so January refrained from saying, "That's the stupidest idea I've ever heard."

Instead he simply said, "No"

"Your journey would not go unremunerated", Vitrack hastened to assure him. "Whatever we find, you will be entitled to half of it for your trouble, as you would be going into Haiti alone. As a whit man, it would be impossible for me--"

"And as a black man, finished January gently, "the moment I set foot in Cuba, I would be at extreme risk of being kidnapped and shipped as a slave back to the United States, where I promise you, NOBODY is going to ask if I've been enslaved illegally or not--or more likely, to Brazil."

--from Crimson Angel

Monk had anticipated this news from the moment Hooper had told him Lord Ossett wished to see him.  The whole issue was poisoned beyond any possibility of finding evidence uncontaminated by time, interference, emotion or confusion.  And--worse than that--when they failed, as they certainly would, the blame would rest with them, not the Metropolitan Police who had actually mishandled it. People would remember only that it was the River Police who had ended it in disaster, confusion and injustice.

--from Blood on the Water

The dead, in Yashim's experience, could never wait.  The shock of murder penetrated glass, and betrayal shattered stone.  And death brought Yashim across the border of men's lives.

Right now, he thought savagely, a murder would suit him very well.

--from The Baklava club

Anne Perry continues to preach contemporary social justice issues wrapped up in a Victorian-era setting that shows that things rarely change.  Blind Justice has Oliver Rathbone facing charges for doing a mind-bogglingly stupid thing in the course of a case, raising issues of legal and judicial ethics versus actual justice, while Blood on the Water, written in 2014, involves a Middle Eastern man scapegoated for an act of terrorism by a government that wants a fast closure of the case, and then turns to Monk and the river police to bail them out when their fuckup becomes apparent.  There is suspense, but not as to whodunnit so much as what will happen next.

Barbara Hambly's tales of Benjamin January, a free man in a land where people who look like him are presumed to be things, get better and more instructive the farther abroad they go.  Crimson Angel is an emotionally nasty but historically rich narrative that goes from NO to Cuba to Haiti and provides much detail about the differences between those lands in the 1830s, with particular detail given to the Hatian Revolution of the 1790s, often overlooked in American historical accounts by a nation that would prefer not to explain that a nation governed by black people existed in the western hemisphere while the Slave States were proudly asserting as fact that the people they enslaved were animals incapable of self-determination.

Goodwin's Yashim the eunuch series, set in early 19th century Istanbul and presiding over the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, is rich in Middle Eastern atmosphere, but the corrupt and decadent government and skullduggery involving collaboration with hostile Russians hits too close to home for me, at a time when I'm trying to escape into murder fiction.  These are the last three in the series, and I read them out of duty, since they are supposed to be for historical enrichment and almost all of the others are set in England, always England.

Ayamase Before Bedtime: The Palm Wine Drinkard, by Amos Tutuola

To my surprise, when I helped the lady to stand up from the frog on which she sat, the cowrie that was tied on her neck made a curious noise at once, and when the Skull who was watching her heard the noise, he woke up and blew the whistle to the rest, then the whole of them rushed to the place and surrounded the lady and me, but at the same time that they saw me there, one of them ran to a pit which was not so far from that spot; the pit was filled with cowries. He picked one cowrie out of the pit, after that he was running towards me, and the whole crowd wanted to tie the cowrie on my neck too.  But before they could do that, I had changed myself into air, they could not trace me out again, but I was looking at them. I believed that the cowries in that pit were their power and to reduce the power of any human being whenever tied on his or her neck and also to make a person dumb.

This short Nigerian novel is in the form of a Yoruba folk tale.  It makes little sense, has no moral, and meanders all over the place like a weird dream without rhyme nor reason.  It reminded me of one of the narratives from the Arabian Nights, stretched out and full of digressions and fantasy.

The basic plot is that the narrator, a gentleman of leisure whose sole pastime is to snorfle down palm wine by the barrel, suffers when his tapster, the only man who can procure him so much palm wine, dies; he goes on a quest to bring the tapster back from the dead, to continue to serve him--and the quest takes him from one weird land to another, encountering talking skulls, witches, giant snakes, you name it, and eventually acquiring a magic egg that will produce all the palm wine he needs.  Its main value, it seems to me, is its atmosphere, savage and evocative of times long past, and as a voice from outside the western literary world.   Highly recommended.

Drinking from the Finger Bowl: Good Behavior, by Harold Nicolson

It is unnecessary to dwell on the great advantages that can be conferred on a community during the stage of growth and consolidation, by the existence of a hereditary governing class.  Such a class restrains despotism, provides continuity of experience, and furnishes the State with a supply of potentially able, responsible and honest administrators.  Yet if a governing class is to be of durable value, it must not degenerate into a stew pond for the culture of large carp with extended bellies and protruding eyes; it must be a lake, fed with clear freshets, with its inlets and outlets unencumbered and its waters constantly renewed.

A fun and well-written survey of the evolution of morals and manners throughout civilization, from the Chinese dynasties to Greeks, Roman and barbarians, French fops, English courtiers and "gentlemen", the German gemutlichkeit, and--dissected with withering sarcasm--the Victorian era school system and the moral lessons of respectability that would be laughable had they not inflicted such real horrors on impressionable children.  See, also, Jesus Camp and other programs to kill moral thought in the young.  Highly recommended.