Book Review: The Fault in our Stars

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I just got back from a quick weekend get-away to Amsterdam, my first time in the city. Before we left, I handed my 13 year old this book.

I had read it myself, years ago, but didn't remember much about it. But I love John Green's voice and see much of that style in my own son's writing. Plus, Amsterdam! We love reading books that take place in the places we currently are.

My kid read it on the flight from Africa to Amsterdam. He reads quickly so he finished it in the Schiphol Airport while we were trying to figure out how to buy train tickets. He did not cry. He already knew the ending. He knows all the endings. The internet and his natural curiosity have created endless moments for us to say, a la River Song, "Spoilers!"

Then, as we were traipsing along the canals and bridges, we stumbled across the now-famous "Fault In Our Stars" bench, where in the movie adaptation, Gus tells Hazel he's sick again.

Then we went to the Anne Frank house and I suddenly vividly recalled Hazel's struggle with the stairs.

Currently, the last room you go to in the museum is a space where they have filmed people, regular people and famous people, discussing the impact of Anne Frank.

And there was John Green on the screen, reading from The Fault In Our Stars "At the end of the hallway, a huge book, bigger than a dictionary, contained the names of the 103,000 dead from the Netherlands in the Holocaust. The book was turned to the page with Anne Frank's name, but what got me was the fact that right beneath her name there were four Aron Franks. Four. Four Aron Franks without museums, without historical markers, without anyone to mourn them."

So when I got home, I borrowed the book back from my son. I'm a quick reader, too, apparently. I just read it in one sitting.

And then I read some of the reviews; the anger of some people who think that teenagers don't talk like that and the whole book is pretentious.

But, see, some teens do talk like that. And the whole point of Gus WAS that he was pretentious. Hazel loved him most in those moments when he wasn't, but she was charmed when he was. "When surprised and excited and innocent Gus emerged from Grand Gesture Metaphorically Inclined Augustus, I literally could not resist."

And I loved the conversations they had about scrambled eggs.

Frankly, one of the reasons I love John Green is that I see my son in so many of Green's characters; too clever by half, gloriously nerdy, and awkwardly kind and generous.

So all ye who think these characters were not typical, shush. There is no typical. And just because the world likes to present all teens as vapid consumers of media and junk food, some teens defy that generalization.

Yes, the book is a little over-wrought. It's like watching the movie Titanic, which I have never done, because who wants to get attached to a bunch of characters who you know are just going to die in the end?

But isn't that was life actually is? Getting attached to characters who are just going to die in the end? "I am in love with you, and I'm not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things. I'm in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we're all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we'll ever have, and I'm in love with you."

Hazel and Gus are philosophical in a way that I find totally believable. They are smart, thoughtful kids who have been in the brink. When you have been to the brink and somehow survive, the way you approach the world changes entirely.

When Hazel veers off into cynical philosophy, the wisdom doesn't seem out of place in a 16 year-old's body. Because that 16 year-old has tasted the end and remembers what it tastes like:
"Without Pain, How Could We Know Joy? (This is an old argument in the field of Thinking About Suffering, and its stupidity and lack of sophistication could be plumbed for centuries, but suffice it to say that the existence of broccoli does not in any way affect the taste of chocolate.)"

Or when Gus is desperately (though we don't yet know it's desperate) trying to make a mark, even while playing a video game, we understand that he understands what it's like to look death in the face and wonder if you've done enough with your life:
"All salvation is temporary. I bought them a minute. Maybe that's the minute that buys them an hour, which is the hour that buys them a year. No one's gonna buy them forever, Hazel Grace, but my life bought them a minute. And that's not nothing."

The character of Peter Van Houten was a stretch, but in a book laced with metaphor, he fit perfectly:
"My response is being written with ink and paper in the glorious tradition of our ancestors and then transcribed by Ms. Vliegenthart into a series of 1s and 0s to travel through the insipid web which has lately ensnared our species, so I apologize for any errors or omissions that may result."

The process of healing:
"Each sleep ended to reveal a person who seemed a bit more like me."

The revelation of seeing yourself through someone else's eyes:
"You are so busy being you that you have no idea how utterly unprecedented you are."

And the knowledge, that must be relearned on every bad day, that every day you are alive is, literally, a chance in of lifetime:
"I was thinking about the universe wanting to be noticed, and how I had to notice it as best I could. I felt that I owed a debt to the universe that only my attention could repay, and also that I owed a debt to everybody who didn't get to be a person anymore and everyone who hadn't gotten to be a person yet."


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Book Review: The Medici

The Medici: Godfathers of the Renaissance by Paul Strathern
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

We are living overseas in a place where books in English are not easy to find.

We bought book this at a train station in Florence after we had been traveling in Tuscany and Rome. We also bought The Agony and the Ecstasy. We looked at SPQR and passed it up this time; it was too thick and heavy to fit in our luggage.

I have always been intrigued by the Medici family. My degrees in music have encouraged more than a passing interest in these patrons of the arts.

However, this book didn't do very much to enlighten me further. It DID re-emphasize why the family is important, but I found the whole thing an oxymoronic combination of tedious and vague.

The family tree at the beginning was useful; putting all the Cosimos and Lorenzos and Pietros into some semblance of era.

There were a couple of anecdotes I hadn't heard before. Like when Brunelleschi was being hounded to reveal how he was going to build the dome, he refused to reveal his plan. Instead, I took out an egg and asked the committee how they could make it stand up on its end. When no one could come up with an answer, he slammed the egg on the table so that the end was crushed flat, making it able to stand. The committee rolled their eyes and said that anyone could have done that. Brunelleschi replied, "Yes, but you would say the same if I told you how I intended to build the dome."

I also had never made the connection between the Medici fortune and the alum trade; before alum was discovered in Italy, Europe was beholden to the Muslim Ottoman empire for alum (which was used for dying clothes beautiful colors). Europe hated being beholden to the Ottomans. When alum was discovered in Italy, the pope made it illegal to buy alum from the Turks, thus giving whoever had rights to the Italian alum a monopoly. Who had the rights? The Medici.

Strathern's perhaps over-simplified explanation of the conflict between Da Vinci and Michelangelo may not be accurate, but made the concept of how much having the "Renaissance" mindset made one an outlier; "Leonardo simply detested Michelangelo, and made no secret of it. He saw himself as a cool-headed scientist with no need for God; Michelangelo, on the other hand, was obsessed with God. Leonardo wished to record the precise and subtle nature of what he saw and understood, while Michelangelo sought to record humanity's spiritual struggle. To Leonardo, Michelangelo had a medieval mind; others have seen his work as the epitome of the Renaissance spirit--the embodiment of the humanist ideal struggling and suffering in its attempt to realise itself."

The Machiavellian concept of virtu and fortuna means not virtue and fortune but power and destiny. Kind of like that concept I've seen best described in Eat, Pray, Love; "We gallop through our lives like circus performers balancing on two speeding side-by-side horses--one foot is on the horse called "fate," the other on the horse called "free will." And the question you have to ask every day is--which horse is which? Which horse do I need to stop worrying about because it's not under my control, and which do I need to steer with concentrated effort?"

About 3/4ths of the way through the book, it became useful to me. It solidified certain concepts of history that had only been rattling around before. Like the fact that Leo X was a Medici pope and he was trying to finance the building of St. Peter's so he increased the selling of indulgences, which finally pushed Martin Luther over the edge and led Europe into the Reformation and, eventually, the Counter Reformation.

Luther wasn't against the church. He was against the power of the papacy. More specifically, the power of the current Medici pope, Leo, who may not have even believed in God, his position in the church being more of a political move for his family. Luther was also protected from the wrath of the powerful church by the politics of the Holy Roman Empire and the rest of Europe. And, behold, there are now a myriad of Protestant denominations. Because Leo X was an agnostic Medic and Luther, who found powerful friends, got mad.

Of course, the papacy didn't work if it wasn't political. After Leo X died, his cousin Guilio, also a Medici, tried to ascend to the power. In the attempt, he put forth a name, Adrian Dedel, a deeply spiritual man. His assumption was that no one would want that and Guilio would be elected without competition. It backfired. Pope Adrian VI was in power for two years. He lived on a florin a day, ate only thin gruel, and ordered all the cardinals and archbishops to leave Rome and go serve the dioceses they represented directly (many of them had never laid eyes on their dioceses before). Arts patronage dried up. Rome sunk into a fiscal depression. Then Adrian died unexpectedly (likely poison) and the world welcomed a Medici pope, Guilio, who became Clement VII, with open arms.

Though this book was tedious, I had a little a-ha moment whilst reading it. It's amazing to me that, despite how well-read I am, and despite the fact that I've taught history for several years, there are some things I just have never really understood; words I hear bandied about that I don't fully comprehend. Concepts that are fuzzy. This is one that was made clear in a moment by Strathern's words; "Galileo's ideas on the close relationship between mathematics and physics led him to make a distinction between two different qualities of objects. First there were those physical qualities that could be measured, such as length, weight and so forth; these belonged to the objects themselves. Then there were qualities that could not be measured, such as the small of an object, its colour and its taste; these did not belong to the objects themselves, but were the impressions caused by the objects on the people who observed them. This crucial distinction would later be taken up by the English philosopher John Locke, and would form the basis of his philosophy of empiricism, the first genuinely scientific philosophy, which stated that all truth must be based on experience."

Also, a page later, this; "With hindsight, the conflict between the Church and science can be seen in context: it was both historically inevitable and in an intellectual sense utterly unnecessary. Its origins lay in the part Christianity had played in preserving Western civilization. During the Dark Ages after the collapse of the Roman Empire, ancient knowledge had survived only in remote Christian communities. With the coming of more settled times in the medieval era, this knowledge had spread throughout the countries of western Europe, but had remained the preserve of the Church. This process had reached its apotheosis in the comparative intellectual stasis of the high medieval era, when the Church had still regarded all philosophy, all knowledge, all learning as its own: knowledge and the teachings of the Church were one. With the revival of intellectual enquiry prompted by the Renaissance, the Church found itself in a difficult position. Unwilling to relinquish its monopoly on knowledge, the Church decreed that any new knowledge must agree with its teachings, which meant paradoxically that the new discoveries of science were acceptable to the Church only when they were the same as what was already known."













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Book Review: The Rest of Us Just Live Here

The Rest of Us Just Live Here by Patrick Ness
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What was everyone else doing while Harry Potter saved the world? While Katniss was kicking ass and taking names?

So much YA fiction now is about an alternate universe; a dystopian world; a magical realm. As if the trials and tribulations of teens aren't enough to fill a book, we have to add saving the world and aliens and magic and evil and superpowers to make it interesting and readable and best-seller-y.

This book takes place in a dystopian world. One that has been wracked by zombies and soul-eating ghosts and vampires. And now a new threat; the Immortals. But the book doesn't talk about the kids who are fighting the Immortals. It imagines what life is like for the bystanders.

Each chapter opens with a short synopsis on what the "indie kids," the chosen ones, are doing. Chapter by chapter, we follow the magical story but only in summary. Only in parody.

"Chapter the tenth, in which indie kids Joffrey and Earth disappear from their homes, their bodies found miles away; Satchel goes into hiding at an abandoned drive-in with fellow indie kids Finn, Dylan, Finn, Finn, Lincoln, Archie, Wisconsin, Finn, Aquamarine, and Finn; seeing a blue light in the night, Satchel meets the boy from the amulet, the handsomest one she's ever seen; he tells her this isn't a safe place for her or the others and that they should run; then he tells her she's beautiful in her own special way and that's when she knows she can trust him; the indie kids go back to their homes."

Then the chapter continues on with the everyday lives, worries, and loves of the not chosen.

I have never read Patrick Ness before, so I had no preconceived expectations in diving into this book (which my kid read in a record 2 hours)

And I liked it. A heck of a lot. Maybe because I'm so tired of wading through all the YA fiction that buys into the idea that you aren't special unless you are tragic. Or magic. Or tragic and magic.

**Warning: A "Back in MY Day...!" old-person rant to follow**

When I was a kid I read Narnia and Tolkien. But I also read Blume and Hinton. And, usually, I liked Blume and Hinton better. One of my most favorite books as a pre-teen was some book about a girl who got a part-time job in a bakery. I don't even remember what it was called. Or who wrote it. But I read and re-read and re-read. Because that girl, that character, gave me a template for what I wanted to try to turn my teenage life into. I'd never go save the world. But maybe I could find a cool part-time job, two supportive adults-who-are-not-my-parents who believe in me and, bonus!, a cute, shy, brilliant boyfriend with great hair.

I don't think enough of those types of books exist today. And reading the reviews of THIS book, I understand why; so many people thought this book was sooooo boring. "Who wants to read about normal people?" the reviews say.

We've trained ourselves not to be interested in ourselves. We are not special unless we pretend to be more than we are on social media. Unless we're keeping some deep, dark, traumatic secret. Unless we are secretly a god or a superhero or a spy. The criteria for what makes someone special has increased; the bar is set too high.

Ness lowers the bar a bit (though he cannot take it all the way back down; his cast of characters includes a recovering anorexic, a kid with OCD, and the god of cats, though, to be fair, the god of cats is only a quarter god and he wants nothing more than to be normal, going as far as to using his boring, milquetoast middle name instead of his unique and powerful first name) and gives us a book about people. "Normal" people. Bystanders in the midst of typical YA-fare strife and adventure, but carrying on with their trivial lives, trying their best not to be touched by the burden of saving the world.

And I thought the concept was brilliant. I enjoyed the characters. I enjoyed the writing, too. Things like, "It's not the answer to everything but it's the one thing that's going to make the questions bearable." Or a girl who has that "combination of total self-belief and utter self-doubt that is more common than people think." Or "I wonder if realizing you're not sure about stuff is what makes you a grown-up?"

Or this; "Pity is an insult. Kindness is a miracle."

"Most people just have to live their lives the best they can, doing the things that are great for them, having great friends, trying to make their lives better, loving people properly. All the while knowing that the world makes no sense but trying to find a way to be happy anyway."


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Book Review: Nemesis

Nemesis by Agatha Christie
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

For me, 1970s Agatha Christie is just not as good as 1930s-50s Agatha Christie. Since I was alive in the 70s, the romance of the era is gone. Christie's books are much more fun when they are also describing a world that no longer exists.

This one is kind of a shattered cozy; limited set of characters but not limited enough. Limited locations but not limited enough. Miss Marple is front-and-center finally, but I found myself actually wishing she was back in St. Mary Mead being visited by flummoxed investigators and dispensing seemingly non-sequitur wisdom.

But I do admire her pluck. When I am old, I shall wear a pink shawl and call myself "Nemesis."


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Book Review: At Bertram's Hotel

At Bertram's Hotel by Agatha Christie
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

*** Spoiler Alert ***






It broke my heart that Bertram's Hotel was just a front for a crime syndicate because I really wanted to go stay there. And eat "well-buttered muffins," whatever those are since what I know as muffins are derided as a "kind of tea-cake with raisins in them. Why call them muffins?"



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Book Review; Library of Souls

Library of Souls by Ransom Riggs
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Though it had about four different denouments at the end, I'm glad the real ending is the one that sticks. We have time

And though I was, at best, a lukewarm fan of the series, the whole thing was made worth my while with this beautiful little snippet of writing;

"She had a heart the size of France, and the lucky few whom she loved with it were loved with every square inch--but its size made it dangerous, too. If she let it feel everything, she'd be wrecked. So she had to tame it, shush it, shut it up. Float the worst pains off to an island that was quickly filling with them, where she would go and live one day."


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Book Review: A Caribbean Mystery

A Caribbean Mystery by Agatha Christie
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Miss Marple is IN this one! Like an actual character! Not an afterthought!

AND she is confused! Not sure of herself! Not the magical all-seeing crone she usually is!

AND I figured it out! I feel smart!


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Book Review; Hollow City

Hollow City by Ransom Riggs
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I really don't like creepy vintage photos. They give me an unexplainable whiff of anxiety and disquiet.

So I shouldn't like these books.

But I do. Kind of.

The first one I read without knowing that it was partly inspired by the photos contained therein. Though Riggs has said that, this time, he wrote the plot and then chose the photos, the book still felt mechanized, as if forced to rally around the collection of pictorial oddities.

Or maybe it was that it was just a publisher-forced sequel (why do publishers make everything trilogies now?) that made it feel a little forced and mechanical.

Regardless, I enjoyed it enough to want to read the third one. So off I go.



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Book Review: Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

As I was reading, I thought to myself, "If these creepy pictures weren't in here, I would be enjoying this book so much more!"

Then I read the interview with the author that is in the back of the edition I read and discovered that the creepy pictures were actually the inspiration for the whole story. So I guess I'm ok with the creepy pictures, since it inspired a story I enjoyed reading (but, really, I'm not ok with them). But, also, the story isn't nearly as creepy as the pictures make you think it's going to be which, for me, was a good thing.

What I enjoyed most about this book was the whole-book nod to legacy and how tragedy can indeed taint, or inspire, the generations that come after you.

"I thought about how my great-grandparents had starved to death. I thought about their wasted bodies being fed to incinerators because people they didn't know hated them. I thought about how the children who lived in this house had been burned up and blown apart because a pilot who didn't care pushed a button. I thought about how my grandfather's family had been taken from him, and how because of that my dad grew up feeling like he didn't have a dad, and now I had acute stress nightmares and was sitting alone in a falling-down house and crying hot, stupid tears all over my shirt. All because of a seventy-year-old hurt that had somehow been passed down to me like a poisonous heirloom, and monsters I couldn't fight because they were all dead, beyond punishing or any kind of reckoning."


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Book Review: The Moving Finger

The Moving Finger by Agatha Christie
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Miss Marple doesn't even show up until page 175! How can you call this a Miss Marple Mystery, I ask you?

But the narrator, Jerry Burton and his sister Joanna are charming lead characters in a mystery that didn't really intrigue me or entice me much at all.

Jerry has been in a horrible flying accident and is sent to the country to slow down and recover. When he first arrives, he gets a letter. He turns it over "in the idle way one does when time goes slowly and every event must be spun out to its full extent."

Yes, life was slower in 1943, when this book was originally published. Consider this; "The human mind prefers to be spoon-fed with the thoughts of others, but deprived of such nourishment it will, reluctantly, begin to think for itself--and such thinking, remember, is original thinking and may have valuable results." One imagines if staying away from being spoon-fed was difficult in a small village in 1943, it is nearly impossible now with talking heads and social media screaming at us all the time.

At one point, a character says, "God doesn't really need to punish us, Miss Barton. We're so very busy punishing ourselves," which was about the only allusion to the fact that this was written during WWII.

And, finally, describing a character as speaking "with that maddeningly complacent confidence in herself which was her chief characteristic," Christie finally gave me the vocabulary to describe a type of person who I find extraordinarily tedious and annoying. I could never quite give that feeling that certain people give me, that annoyance and eye-roll-inducing tedium, accurate description. Until now.


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Book Review: Murder at the Vicarage

Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is the first full-length Marple mystery, but she's almost a secondary character. The narrator is the local Vicar, who initially judges Miss Marple to be just like the other old biddies in the village, who would fit very nicely into the "Pick-a-Little, Talk-a-Little" scene in The Music Man. The Vicar thinks about one of them, "It is difficult with Miss Hartnell to know where narrative ends and vituperation begins."

But Miss Marple, while an inveterate gossip, also is the "type to notice things." So wisdom and truth come because she putters in her garden not only because she loves flowers but also loves watching the comings and goings in the neighborhood. Because she watches birds through binoculars and, if she also sees the activities of her friends and neighbors, so be it. What makes her charming, though, is that she is aware of her predilection for over-reaching inquisitiveness. It's her hobby. And she makes no apologies.

And thank goodness. Because these bumbling inspectors and constables would never have figured it out without her help.

"I wish you'd solve the case, Miss Marple, like you did the way Miss Wetherby's gill of pickled shrimps disappeared. And all because it reminded you of something quite different about a sack of coals."

"You're laughing, my dear," said Miss Marple. "But, after all, that is a very sound way of arriving at the truth. It's really what people call intuition and make such a fuss about. Intuition is like reading a word without having to spell it out. A child can't do that, because it has had so little experience. But a grown-up person knows the word because he's seen it often before."

Later, Miss Marple says, "I remember a saying of my Great Aunt Fanny's. I was sixteen at the time and thought it particularly foolish. She used to say, 'The young people think the old people are fools--but the old people know the young people are fools!"


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Book Review: The Basque History of the World

The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation by Mark Kurlansky
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Ugh.

Couldn't get through this one, even though I have a hearty desire to know more about Basques and Spanish/French history.

Tedious.

Before I quit reading, right in the middle of a convoluted section that started several pages earlier declaring it would explain the Basque beret but getting bogged down in so much poorly-told history that I threw the book down in disgust, I did learn a couple of things.

Basques have the highest percentage of Rh negative blood in the world. Other places originally occupied by Cro-Magnon man, like the Atlas Mountains in Morocco and the Canary Islands, also have high percentages of Rh negative.

The Basque language, Euskera, is not related to any other language. It has no Indo-European roots. At all. Which is remarkable because once those Indo-Europeans started spreading, they left virtually no European language untouched.

The only defeat Charlemagne ever suffered was at the hands of the Basques in 778. The story is told in the Song of Roland.

I wish I could hang in and keep learning. But I just can't read this darn book any more.



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Book Review: Murder in Mesopotamia

Murder in Mesopotamia by Agatha Christie
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I scrolled WAY down the list of editions to find this edition because when I pulled this book off the shelf to take on vacation, I realized that I bought it for 25 cents at the used bookstore that benefitted the Manchester Cancer Society in Mandeville, Jamaica. There's even a date stamp; 09 March 1982.

I don't remember reading it. Though I'm sure I did. There were moments in the text that I remembered. But I didn't remember whodunit.

I DO remember, as a young teenager, being enthralled with the setting; an archeological dig in the middle east. As an adult, I saw the disdain Christie had for the non-British vagaries of that society; the imperial sense of superiority. But I didn't see that as a kid; I superimposed Raiders of the Lost Ark over Christie's setting and, for a while, I wanted to be an archeologist. It's rather disappointing to re-read this as an adult and think "no running water?" "oh, how tedious!" "that sounds hot and miserable!" instead.



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Book Review: The Labors of Hercules

The Labors of Hercules by Agatha Christie
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read a 1964 Dell edition that was originally 45 cents and truly fit in my pocked. Back when we didn't have phones to keep us occupied on trains and buses.

Enjoyable set of stories, wherein Poirot decides to take 12 cases that will parallel the 12 labors of Hercules. Since his name is Hercule (and his brother's name is Achille, though he only shows up here in a mention).

I don't, as a rule, enjoy short stories as much as full-length novels because once I get to know the characters, boom, the story is over.

For example, in "The Horses of Diomedes" Poirot is in a small town, gently pumping an old hen for information. He asks if she is acquainted with the classics and then reveals that the case he's working on emulates his namesake, Hercules and his taming of the wild horses of Diomedes.
"Don't tell me you came down here to train horses--at your age--and always wearing patent leather shoes! You don't look to me as though you'd ever been on a horse in your life!"
"The horses, Madame, are symbolic. They were wild horses who ate human flesh."
"How very unpleasant of them. I always so think these ancient Greeks and Romans are very unpleasant. I can't think why clergymen are so fond of quoting from the classics--for one thing one never understands what they mean and it always seems to me that the whole subject matter of the classics is unsuitable for clergymen. So much incest, and all those statues with nothing on--not that I mind that myself, but you know what clergymen are--quite upset if girls come to church with no stockings on--let me see, where was I?"

I would like Poirot to have 100 more conversations with this gal.


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Book Review: The Ivy Tree

The Ivy Tree by Mary  Stewart
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I didn't like this book at first because I didn't like the main character. At all.

Then plot happened, things were revealed, and I DID like her.

So now I need to read it again, because I think I'll like it better the second time knowing about her what I know now.

Good training for life, really. Try not to pass judgement; everyone has a story but you wandered in in the middle of the 3rd act and don't know it yet.

Also, this, when one character asks another to give her advice.

"Why in blazes should you imagine I could be of any help to you? I made a pretty fair mess of my own life, you know."
I half expected the routine and automatic response of kindness and reassurance, but it didn't come. She said immediately:
"That's why. It isn't the people who've had things their own way who--well, who get wisdom. And they haven't the time to think about what life does to other people, either. But if you've been hurt yourself, you can imagine it. You come alive to it. It's the only use I can ever see that pain has. All that stuff about welcoming suffering because it lifts up the soul is rot. People ought to avoid pain, if they can, like disease...but if they have to stand it, its best use might be that it makes them kinder. Being kind's the main thing, isn't it?"


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Book Review: The Secret of Chimneys

The Secret of Chimneys by Agatha Christie
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I visited my elderly uncle two summers ago and he implored me to take some of his collection of old paperback mysteries off his hands. I gladly absconded with several Ngaio Marsh, G.K. Chesterton, Earl Derr Biggers and Agatha Christie.

This was one of them. The edition I read doesn't exist on Goodreads. It's tiny. Pocketsize, truly, from when we carried books around to entertain us instead of smartphones. Dell. 1959. 35 cents.

It wasn't typical Christie. No Poirot. No Marple. Superintendent Battle appears (in fact, it is now listed as Battle #1 on many lists) but he is not the main sleuth. There IS no main, sleuth, really. The story revolves less around a central figure-out-er and more around a delicious cast of characters.

Originally written in 1925, the between-the-wars intrigue is palpable. A Balkan country called Herzoslovakia. Deposed monarchs. A group called the Red Hand. British imperialism in Africa.

Patently dated but completely enjoyable along the lines of one of my top five favorite Christie novels Man in the Brown Suit and Mary Stewart's Madam, Will You Talk?.


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Book Review: American Gods

American Gods by Neil Gaiman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Eh.

That one word review will either get me lynched or make me a hero of the anti-alternative-not-so-indie intellectuals.

I have this thing that if characters in books don't ask enough questions and instead wander through set-pieces as overly-malleable creatures who function to further the action rather than being personalities that mold or reroute the action I soon tire of the book and want it all to stop.

I like characters who take control, even of uncontrollable situations.

None of these characters really do that. They are all passive results of other people's actions and thoughts.

Which makes this a very difficult book for me to enjoy.

Add to that the fact that I am a simpleton who enjoys modern takes on mythology more in the realm of Rick Riordan, then you understand my three-star rating and dismiss it as the ravings of a cretinous know-nothing.

HOWEVER...

There were still moments that resonated. Not enough for four stars, but enough that I kept reading even when I wanted to put it down and move on. These moments, interspersed with a few of Gaiman's impish slaps at humor, made the book worth the two days I spent on it.

But I wouldn't spend more than two days, frankly.

"The bird turned, head tipped, suspiciously, on one side, and it stared at him with bright eyes.
"Say 'Nevermore,'" said Shadow.
"Fuck you," said the raven."

"Back in my day, we had it all set up. You lined up when you died, and you'd answer for your evil deeds and for yoru good deeds, and if your evil deeds outweighed a feather, we'd feed your soul and your heart to Ammet, the Eater of Souls."
"He must have eaten a lot of people."
"Not as many as you'd think. It was a really heavy feather."

Then there is the moment when one of the gods short-changes a waitress. Shadow, the main character, rectifies it, telling the god the waitress hadn't done anything wrong.

"No? When she was seven years old she shut a kitten in a closet. She listened to it mew for several days. When it ceased to mew, she took it out of the closet, put it into a shoebox, and buried it in the backyard. She wanted to bury something. She consistently steals from everywhere she works. Small amounts, usually. Last year she visited her grandmother in the nursing home to which the old woman is confined. She took an antique gold watch from her grandmother's bedside table, and then went prowling through several other rooms, stealing small quantities of money and personal effects from the twilight fold in their golden years. When she got home she did not know what to do with her spoils, scared someone would come after her, so she threw everything away except the cash. She also has asymptomatic gonorrhea. She suspects she might be infected but does nothing about it. When her last boyfriend accused her of having given him a disease she was hurt, offended, and refused to see him again. They all do the same things. They may think their sins are original, but for the most part they are petty and repetitive."

Then there's Sam's off-the-cuff creed, which is amazing and several pages long, but includes;
"I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies."

But I suppose the book was made completely worthwhile with this little nugget.

"There was a girl, and her uncle sold her, wrote Mr. Ibis in his perfect copperplate handwriting. . That is the tale. The rest is detail."

Detail is the tale. Telling the story.


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Book Review - Gaudy Night

Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I mean, was there a mystery here?

Don't get me wrong. It was fun to read along while Harriet finally falls for Lord Peter, but the pace was ponderous and the clues few and far between.

I also found myself wishing for a cast of characters to refer back to, like one finds in certain editions of Agatha Christie books. I couldn't keep all those learned ladies apart.

Written in 1936, this book spends quite some time thrusting forth early feminism, the world wherein it is preferable to stay single and study than get married and procreate.

"It would have been such a bore to be the mother of morons, and it's an absolute toss-up, to be the mother of morons, and it's an absolute toss-up, isn't it? If one could only invent them, like characters in books, it would be much more satisfactory to a well-regulated mind."

Not that Sayers looks too fondly on some of the female scholars; "...that curious little creature dressed in unbecoming pink, who looked as thought she had been carelessly packed away in a drawer all winter and put into circulation again without being ironed..." It's as if she is judging them for not being feminine, though she judges for being feminine, too.

And the men? Well, the men are mostly treated kindly; "He had the appeal of a very young dog of a very large breed--a kind of amiable absurdity."

But Sayers is still stuck; a product of her time. Trying to walk that tightrope of having a bevy of strong, independent female characters who, in the end, still rather want to get married.

"I once got engaged to somebody," one of the female scholars expounds. "But I found I was always blundering--hurting his feelings, doing stupid things, making quite elementary mistakes about him. In the end I realized that I simply wasn't taking as much trouble with him as I should have done over a disputed reading. So I decided he wasn't my job."
"I suppose one oughtn't marry anybody, unless one's prepared to make him a full-time job," another character replies.

Enter Lord Peter, with his cosmopolitan description of the political state in Europe in the 1930s, "The old bus wobbles one way, and you think, 'That's done it!' and then it wobbles the other way and you think, 'All serene;' and then, one day, it wobbles over too far and you're in the soup and you can't remember how you got there," but, in the next breath, wishing to trade his role as a diplomat for the simpler life of the scholar; "Here's where real things are done, Harriet--if only those bunglers out there will keep quiet and let me go on. God! how I loathe haste and violence and all that ghastly, slippery cleverness. Unsound, unscholarly, insincere--nothing but propaganda and special pleading and 'what do we get of this?' No time, no peace, no silence; nothing but conferences and newspapers and public speeches till one can't hear one's self think. If only one could root one's self in here among the grass and stones and do something worth doing, even it it was only restoring a lost breathing for the love of the job and nothing else."

And, of course, Lord Peter is an enlightened man. At one point, when asked if he approves of education for women, he replies, "You should not imply that I have the right to either approve or disapprove." We should all remember that little tidbit as we are navigating the comment threads of various social networking sites.

"Lord, teach us to take our hearts and look them in the face, however difficult it may be."


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Book Review: Have His Carcase

Have His Carcase by Dorothy L. Sayers


Dammit. I figured this one out. But it was still a good read.

It would have been fun to know Sayers, I think. Not that she probably would have enjoyed knowing me, if her condescension to the reader is any indication of her attitude towards mere mortals. Here, just as in Five Red Herrings, Sayers makes several side comments that indicate just what she thinks of you.

At the same time, I understand why she despises me. She's a hermit. A judgmental hermit. A brilliant, judgmental hermit. So, sometimes, when she throws off-hand comments that level judgment on the masses, I nod and say, yes, you truly understand the human condition. Or, more specifically, MY human condition.

"A solitary rock is always attractive. All right-minded people feel an overwhelming desire to scale and sit upon it."

"You know what people are. The minute they see anyone having a peaceful feed they gather in from the four points of the compass and sit down beside one, and the place is like the Corner House in the rush hour."

And then, superior to me or no, she has the capacity to make me laugh. Take this exchange, during which Wimsey shows both his charm, his knowledge of literature, and his grasp of science.

"We believe in you, Miss Kohn," said Wimsey, solemnly, "as devoutly as in the second law of thermodynamics."
"What are you getting at?" said Mr. Simons, suspiciously.
"The second law of thermo-dynamics," explained Wimsey, helpfully, "which holds the universe in its path, and without which time would run backwards like a cinema film wound the wrong way."
"No, would it?" exclaimed Miss Kohn, rather pleased.
"Altars may reel," said Wimsey, "Mr. Thomas may abandon is dress suit and Mr. Snowden renounce free trade, but the second law of thermodynamics will endure while memory holds her seat in this distracted globe, by which Hamlet meant his head but which I, with a wider intellectual range, apply to the planet which we have the rapture of inhabiting. Inspector Umpelty appears shocked, but I assure you that I know no more impressive way of affirming my entire belief in your absolute integrity." He grinned. "What I like about your evidence, Miss Kohn, is that it adds the final touch of utter and impenetrable obscurity to the problem which the Inspector and I have undertaken to solve. It reduces it to the complete quintescence of incomprehensible nonsense. Therefore, by the second law of thermo-dynamics, which lays down that we are hourly and momently progressing to a state of more and more randomness, we receive positive assurance that we are moving happily and securely in the right direction. You may not believe me," added Wimsey, now merrily launched on a flight of fantasy, "but I have got to the point now at which the slightest glimmer of common sense imported into this preposterous case would not merely disconcert me but cut me to the heart. I have seen unpleasant cases, difficult cases, complicated cases and even contradictory cases, but a case founded on stark unreason I have never met before. It is a new experience and, blase as I am, I confess that I am thrilled to the marrow."

And THEN she makes me feel like I might be superior, too, when I catch that her well-meaning but plebian and gruff police inspector keeps mixing up Congreve quotes, Biblical quotes, and Shakespeare quotes.

Or understand exactly what the theater agent is talking about when he goes on a discourse about the problems of character construction in Shakespeare's Richard III.

"Inconsistent to my mind. You mightn't think it, but I do a bit of reading and thinking now and again, and what I say is, I don't believe W. Shakespeare had his mind on the job when he wrote that part. Too slimy at the beginning and too tough at the end. It ain't nature. Not but what the play always acts well. Plenty of pep in it, that's why. Keeps moving. But he's made Richard two men in one, that's what I complain of. One of 'em's a wormy, plotting sort of fellow and the other's a bold, bustling sort of chap who chops people's heads off and flies into tempers. It don't seem to fit somehow, eh?"
"I always think," said Wimsey, "that Shakespeare meant Richard to be one of those men who are always acting a part--dramatising things, so to speak. I don't believe his furies are any more real than his lovemaking."

But in the pages where she tediously has Harriet and Wimsey figuring out a code, which she walks the reader through, step by step, she has a helpful footnote explaining that the most obvious solution eventually "proved to be untenable, so the calculations relating to this supposition are omitted." I laughed out loud. Then skipped the next four pages of discussion and diagrams. I had no need for that footnote, nor for the in-depth explanation of the code so, obviously, I don't even reach the lowest rung of her expectations of her readers.

I didn't even know who Ninon de l'Enclos was, for pete's sake. Thank heavens for Google.

I am likely not worthy of her constructed world. But I enjoy inhabiting it for a few days at a time anyway.



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Book Review: Strong Poison

Strong Poison: Lord Peter Wimsey Book 6 by Dorothy L. Sayers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Reading through the Harriet Vane/Lord Peter trilogy.

Damn, he falls in love fast. Whirlwind. I would have loved a little more insight into his head-over-heels-ness with the reticent accused murderess.

But in love he falls. So clear her name he must.

And he does, because there is another book. Then another. Then another, with the word "Honeymoon" in the title, so we all know where it's going. We just have to wait until they get there.

Sayers is at her sarcastic peak in this short novel. And, yes, I call it a novel because the mystery was so thin I actually figured it out quickly, so I just read for the love story and the banter.

Like this conversation between two unnamed observers at her trial;
"And how do you know what a murderess looks like? Have you ever met one?"
"Well, I've seen them at Madame Tussaud's."
"Oh, waxworks. Everybody looks like a murderer in waxworks."
"Well, p'raps they do. Have a choc."

Harriet Vane herself has a very dry sense of humor. Lord Peter visits her in jail, fawns, proposes marriage and then, upon his leaving and promising to come again, Harriet says, "I will give my footman orders to admit you. You will always find me at home."

Lord Peter's investigations take him to a smoky club filled with pretentious artists. Lord Peter gleefully eggs one fellow on.
"Well, what can you do with the wretched and antiquated instruments of our orchestra? A diatonic scale, bah! Thirteen miserable, bourgeois semi-tones, pooh! To express the infinite complexity of modern emotion, you need a scale of thirty-two notes to the octave."
"Buy why cling to the octave?" said the fat man. "Till you can cast away the octave and its sentimental associations, you walk in fetters of convention."
"That's the spirit!" said Wimsey. "I would dispense with all definite notes. After all, the cat does not need them for his midnight melodies, powerful and expressive as they are..."

The murder victim, an author, is judged as a "perfectly foul blighter" because he "has his photograph on the dust-cover of his books, you know--that's the sort of squit he was."

I was terribly pleased the Miss Climpson made an appearance in this book and laughed all the way through her adventures finding a will in a week. Lord Peter, quite impressed with her work, signs off a conversation with her by trilling, "Bless you, may your shadow never grow bulkier."

Indeed.


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Book Review: Inferno

Inferno by Dan Brown
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Hmmm.

I am glad Brown aimed in a different direction than the Catholic Church and the Masons, but, still, this one was a little annoying.

But, still, one moment of clarity that summarizes a lot of what I've learned over the past eight months living in a Muslim majority country; "Both Christianity and Islam are logocentric, meaning they are focused on The Word. In Christian tradition, the Word became flesh in the book of John: 'And the Word was made flesh, and He dwelt among us.' Therefore, it was acceptable to depict the Word as having a human form. In Islamic tradition, however, the Word did not become flesh, and therefore the Word needs to remain in the form of a word...in most cases, calligraphic renderings of the names of the holy figures of Islam."



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Book Review: The Lost Symbol

The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

My kid went on a Robert Langdon binge during a week's vacation. This book was the first one he read. He then slammed through the other three, also in the wrong order. He didn't seem to care.

I've said in other reviews that Dan Brown takes a lot of flak for his work. And though he is a one-trick pony (or, rather, a 50 trick pony) his tricks are intriguing. And, with this book, new to me.

I'm living in north Africa right now for a couple of years, mostly so my kid can experience a non-US frame of mind. We live near all the amazing must-see European places; Rome, Venice, Florence, London, Paris, Madrid, Barcelona, etc.

But now I'm trying to figure out how I can get my kid to Washington D.C. before he's too old to want to travel with us anymore. Maybe next summer? Maybe not as much history as those other great European capitals, but certainly as much symbolism.

Things I learned reading this book;

ABC - the three prerequisites for an ideology to be considered a religion; Assure, Believe, Convert. Assure salvation, believe in a precise theology, and convert non-believers.

Magic squares.

All spiritual rituals can be frightening when taken out of context; "crucifixion reenactments, Jewish circumcisions, Mormon baptisms of the dead, Catholic exorcisms, Islamic niqab, shamanic trance healing, the Jewish Kaparot ceremony, even the eating of the figurative body and blood of Christ."



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Book Review: The Da Vinci Code

The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Revisiting Dan Brown in the wake of my 13 year old plowing through all four Robert Langdon books in less than a week.

This one was, of course, less of a page-turner the second time through. What seems crazy-clever 15 years ago now seems old-news and old-school.

And the mystery is thin. Thinner than it was before I knew Brown's style and the fact that he has 25 points of interesting trivia that he's spun into several best-selling books.

But there were still trivia tidbits that made me raise my eyebrows and think, "Hmmm!" Even on second reading. One imagines 15 years ago, I raised my eyebrows at the same thing. Old age is a wonder. Everything old is new again because we can't remember learning it the first time.

Pagans were originally simple country folk who kept their tradition of nature worship but the church was so fearful of their faith that anyone who lived in a ville or village, was worthy the church's disdain. Hence, our current term "villain."

The planet Venus traces a pentagram in the night sky every eight years. A pentagram used to be a symbol of perfection and was almost a part of the Olympic seal (the Olympics every four years followed the half-cycle of Venus) but, at the last minute, they exchanged the symbol for the rings. Five rings. Hmmm.

PHI. 1.68. The Divine Proportion.

Yeah. We can make fun of Dan Brown. But he's smarter than I am. He's figured out how to make 100 points of arcane trivia into millions of dollars.


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Book Review: Angels and Demons

Angels & Demons by Dan Brown
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I just revisited this book after having read it in the early 2000s, before my son was born.

Now my son is 13. We live in Morocco, where there aren't very many available books for purchase. No one in the family likes to read on a screen, so whenever we travel, we hunt down English language bookstores and stock up.

My husband picked up Lost Symbol, oddly on sale at our own Virgin store in Casablanca. My son read it quickly and devotedly. So when we went to Barcelona for a vacation, we found a great used bookstore and snapped up the other three Robert Langdon mysteries.

My son read them out of order. But as I noticed how intrigued he was by the adventures, I thought I ought to re-read and give myself a refresher course.

On second reading, the flaws are more apparent. But Brown, despite all the derogatory opinions about him, is a good story-teller. He uses the same 12 tricks, cliches and ideas over and over and over, but they are pretty darn good ones, especially for someone who grew up not questioning organized religion. The young me thought, "Holy shit! Really?!?!?!" The older me thinks, "Yeah. Prt. Dammit."


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Book Review: A Short History of England

A Short History of England by Simon Jenkins


One of the blurbs on the back of my paperback edition calls this a "wry gallop through English history." Gallop is the key word.

For the history I already had more intimate knowledge of, the gallop made sense; driving by Henry VIII and the Tudors and the Stuarts and Charles I and William and Mary at 90 miles an hour was easy to do because I had the background information.

But for the many, MANY, eras of English history with which I'm not so familiar, the gallop became a blur. Often I would turn my horse around, canter back, and gallop by again, just to see if I could gather any more insight the second time. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn't.

But what I did gain was a better understanding of the breadth and depth of English history. I also gained several points of poignant trivia:

Parliament comes from when England was more French than English; "parlement" means "talk about it;" a discussion. A conversation.

All English monarchs are descended from the wives of a man named John of Gaunt. Ever heard of him? Me either. He was the third son of Edward III. A nobody, really. But imagine the world had he, and his seed via several wives, not existed.

If Shakespeare had been writing in any other country, we might not have his plays. Anywhere else in Europe, his work would only have been shared with the elite. In Elizabethan England, his work was shared with everyone who could get to a theater.

Roundheads (Civil War era parliamentarians) were called such because they had dumbass haircuts.

Royal Oak, the ubiquitous name of pubs and American suburbs, derives from the Civil War era when Charles II hid for a night in an oak tree in Staffordshire before escaping to France, dressed as a servant.

The word "cabal" comes from the initials of a group of high-ranking men who supported Charles II during the Restoration; Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley, and Lauderdale.

The Seven Years War (1765-1763) was the first true "world" war.

The word "jingoism" comes from the late 19th century, during the age of imperialism and colonization, at which time there was a popular music hall song with the lyrics, "We don't want to fight but by jingo if we do, We've got the ships, we've got the men, and we've got the money too."

In 1910, when King Edward VII, the son of Queen Victoria, died, his funeral was a moment in history that Barbara Tuchman, the famous historian, described as "...the greatest assemblage of royalty and rank ever gathered in one place and, of its kind, the last." Soon all of those gathered would be at war with one another.

And regarding WWI, the historian A.J.P. Taylor wrote, "Great armies, accumulated to provide security and preserve peace, carried nations to war by their own weight."










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Book Review: Sarum

Sarum: The Novel of England by Edward Rutherfurd
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Rutherfurd writes grand-perspective historical novels that center around a particular place. So it's like watching a timelapse video; from 6000 BC to 1985 AD in 1000 pages.

I love books like these; where normal people are placed in an important place with important people as almost secondary characters. These characters are all that matters in that moment in time.

But, at the same time, books like this highlight the futility of it all. Because the characters that were so important in 60 AD, no on knows about in 1066 AD. The place remains. The meadows. The hillforts. The henge. The cathedral. People are like so many ants, swarming around the behemoths that operate on a different, slower time scale.

So what's the point? In 100 years, no one will remember me. Or what I worked so hard to accomplish. So I might as well take it easy, have a beer, and read a book. Hell yeah.

This was a re-read, because I finally visited Old Sarum, Salisbury and Stonehenge. I remembered very little detail from my first read (and, truth be told, once I got to the end of the book, I remembered very little about what had happened at the beginning...) but I enjoyed it as much, if not more, than the first time I read it. Maybe it's my age and wisdom. Or maybe it's that I had finally laid my own eyes on the landscape and could envision a real reality from Rutherfurd's descriptions. The landscape is the main character, after all.

But besides making me feel small and insignificant, this book is steeped in history. I cannot say how complete Rutherfurd's scholarship is; there are no footnotes, but it's the little details like one finds in Sarum that make history come alive.

Things like;

In Roman times, one would often see this on walls;
ROTAS
OPERA
TENET
AREPO
SATOR

These words form a palindrome, yes. But they can also be rearranged to form
.................P
.................A
.................T
.................E
.................R
P A T E R N O S T E R
.................O
.................S
.................T
.................E
.................R

Or that Pelagius, in Roman times, had the gall to suggest that men had free will and needed to choose God. "For were it to be true that a man could really make such a choice for himself, then that man would be a separate being, an individual entity with absolute power to choose to embrace God or the Devil as he liked. How could any right-thinking Christian suggest such a thing when the Church taught that man, like everything in the universe, was created by God and belonged to Him?"
Such thinking makes Absolute Rule and the power of the church so much clearer. And also highlights how revolutionary ideas of education and self-determination actually were.

Or the theory that the legends of King Arthur likely originated only two generations after the Romans; "They were probably Christian; they won a great battle against the Saxons at a place, still not identified, called Mons Badonicus; and it is quite likely that they had a general named Artorius. Behind the legend of Arthur and the knights of the Round Table lie several elements of historical reality, however. The world of Arthur, though it is chivalric and romanticised in a way that belongs to a later era, is nonetheless a Celtic, Christian world, with ties not only to Wales and the west country but also across the English Channel to Brittany, to which, in the century that followed the end of Roman Britain, a number of British families emigrated."

Or the fact that in the 800s and 900s, Saxon justice turned not on truth or falsehoods, but on how many people you could get to swear to your side of the story and what rank they were.

Or the messy mixture of cultures and religions as humanity is developing; "Although many generations of Anglo-Saxons had been Christian, the memory of the pagan past was alive, an accepted part of everyday life which no church could attempt to stifle. Were not the gods still celebrated in the days of the week, like Wodensday? Did not the code of honour that made a man loyal to his lord, the law of blood feud and wergild, and the songs and poetry they loved all come from pagan times? Aelfwald the thane did not try to cudgel his brains over the fact that the Saxon culture he loved and the Christian religion he believed in were logically incompatible. He was an Anglo-Saxon Christian and he was content."

Or that Europe wasn't Europe in 1066; "No people claimed a single country as their nation state: Europe was a huge patchwork of estates to be bought, sold, fought for, or obtained by marriage."

Or that the extension of the 1215 Magna Carta in 1258 was authored by Simon Montfort, who had no interest in democracy. He didn't even like the English. But he couldn't resist a challenge and swooped in to fix messes that Henry III kept getting himself into.

Or that Charing Cross derives its name from 1290 when Edward I lost his great love, Eleanor of Castile. The king accompanied the queen's body from Lincoln to London and every place the party stopped for the night, a cross was installed in the dead queen's honor. The last one was at Charing.

Or that our weird and confusing language, with all its inconsistencies, was created when a fellow named Caxton started printing books with a printing press. "Caxton had, as most men did, his own views about how English words were to be pronounced and had chosen to spell them accordingly. The result on the newly printed page was a curious mixture of dialects from several parts of the island. 'See--he writes 'plough' like a northerner,' the merchant-turned-gentleman complained: for as written, the word would have sounded more like 'pluff' or 'rough.' Robert said nothing. He was not interested. But his father was right, and the confused and illogical spelling chosen by Caxton's whim was to be the hallmark of written English from then on."

Or a moment after the English Civil War when a group of Protestant radicals called the "Diggers" foreshadowed practical communism.

Or how much our polite societal manners, and the words we use to refer to them, have changed; "The clergyman said several kind words about his valour in the American campaign; and the company in general did him the honor of speaking to him as if they had known him all their lives. In short, they practiced the art known then as condescension--which meant not at all what is meant by the word today, but rather the art of letting a man know, through perfect politeness, that you do not seek to patronise him"

So much learning. So much history. So much life that the trees and the meadows and the hills quietly watch from their stately perch, amused to be considered the background for our tiny lives. So I'll close with a quote Rutherfurd puts on an 18th century gentleman's sundial; "Life is but a walking shadow."


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Book Review: Galieo - AntiChrist

Galileo Antichrist: A Biography by Michael  White
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Michael White used to be a Thompson Twin, apparently.

This has nothing to do with the book, of course, but when I first read that, I hoped he was the lead singer. He wasn't. That's Tom Bailey. But I really enjoyed thinking of that guy sitting down to write a pseudo-intellectual biography of Galileo.

Perhaps "pseudo-intellectual" is too harsh. But what I mean by that is "accessible" and "readable." A popular history.

I thoroughly enjoyed the first several chapters, which set up the world Galileo lived in. White describes the era as a time when, "a small group of well-heeled Europeans seeking novelty, knowledge, and (it must not be ignored) coveting prestige and social kudos, actively sought out the literary and philosophical treasures of the ancients."

These well-heeled seekers had a thirst for knowledge that made them early humanists. They were also Catholic and deeply religious. But they "held the view that an alternative thought system such as humanism could offer new ways to understand the human condition."

Not so, said the Catholic church. Thought and logic and faith were poor bedfellows back then. Still are, frankly.

The Renaissance, and the Reformation, was made possible by Gutenberg's printing press, which allowed ideas to be spread at a more rapid, egalitarian way than was possible previously. The Catholic church was caught sleeping and found themselves fighting a battle that wasn't previously necessary; convincing an ever-growing educated populace to continue to view the declarations of the Catholic church as the only truth.

But the funny thing about that truth is that, scientifically, it relied on Aristotle, a heathen Greek. His ideas were "...placed above all others by future generations and his philosophies were hijacked by theologians for their own ends. Dogma turned to absolutism, and his teachings were passed on virtually unquestioned. This led astray later thinkers and pushed science towards a dead end."

So any attack on Aristotle became an attack on Christianity. And Aristotle was wrong about a lot. Aristotle's Unmoved Mover becomes God. Aristotle's four elements theory of matter became sacrosanct, negating theories like atoms or even the idea that what something tastes like or looks like is very open to human interpretation.

This was a time when you just believed because someone told you to believe. The idea of coming up with a new idea, then testing out that idea with experiments designed to prove, or disprove, the theory was foreign. And, if that idea ran counter to the truth the Catholic church espoused, heretical.

This is where Galileo ran into trouble. Which is well-known.

But White also trots forth the conspiracy theory that the thesis for which Galileo was punished, his book presenting the Copernican model of of the universe, with the sun in the center, was NOT the real reason he was convicted of heresy. The true reason was science he espoused which stood in direct opposition to the Catholic church's dogma about transubstantiation.

Transubstantiation. I didn't lead a completely sheltered childhood, but the first memory I have of realizing the eccentricity of the concept was as a young adult, when I read Maupin's Tales of the City, wherein a murderer confuses transubstantiation with cannibalism.

Galileo didn't go that far, of course. But he had the temerity to question Aristotle's four element substance theory of matter. Which led to questioning transubstantiation.

You see, transubstantiation depended on Aristotelian substance theory, which states that when we strip away the accidents of a particular thing we are left with its substance, which cannot be observed. Thomas Aquinas used this theory to support the idea that the accidents of our senses' perception of the bread and wine don't change, but God changes the substance of those things to be the actual body and blood of Christ. After the elements are blessed by the priest, they cease being bread and wine, transforming into flesh and blood. The substance has been transformed (hence the term transubstantiation) but the accidents of the bread and wine remain as they were. Those accidents include all the ways our senses (touch, taste, etc.) interact with the elements.

In The Assayer, Galileo dipped his toe into what looks like early atomic theory, which would make Aristotle's theories invalid.

According to White, this is the real problem the church had with Galileo. Not Copernicus. But transubstantiation.

He doesn't make his argument very thoroughly. And the book suffers for it. But it sure wet my whistle to read more about this.

And, to me, that's the mark of a good book.


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Book Review: The Documents in the Case

The Documents in the Case by Dorothy L. Sayers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A mystery told only in correspondence. Kind of like an adult version of Kate Klise. Or, I guess, Kate Klise is a young adult version of this (with more puns and plays on words, of course)

Mystery aside (and I solved this one on a hunch about 20 pages in) I most enjoyed the letters John Munting wrote to Elizabeth Drake. If fleshed out, they strike me as a couple that could hang out with Lord Peter and Harriet Vane. Strong individuals, luckily and messily in love. Frankly, I could have done without the mystery at all and just read Munting's letters.

Munting is a writer by trade, so his letters are full of great description, deep-yet-shallow philosophy, and, of course, whining about having to write;

"...he wears his forehead well over the top of his head..."

"I am increasingly not clear whether I am a mess of oddly-assorted chemicals (chiefly salt and water), or a kind of hyper-trophied fish egg, or an enormous, all-inclusive cosmos of solar-systematically revolving atoms, each one supporting planetfuls of solemn imbeciles like myself."

"Only a fortnight now and I shall be seeing you. Praise God (or whatever it is) from (if direction exists) whom (if personality exists) all blessings (if that word corresponds to any percept of objective reality) flow (if Heraclitus and Bergson and Einstein are correct in stating that everything is more or less flowing about)."

"...I am enjoying a magnificent illusion of importance and busy-ness."

Late in the book, a charwoman bribing someone else with the existence of written incriminating evidence says, "I was never one for writin' letters myself. A word's as good and leaves nothin' but air be'ind it, that's wot I say."

Wink and a nod from Sayers; thank heavens for letters. And books. The keepers of our history.


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