August, 2023 Readings: "Breathe the sweetness that hovers in August." (Denise Levertov)

Been focussing primarily on non-fic of late, but this month I've got a couple of smart, literary novels I'm eyeing.

How about you?

Probably by now, anyone who reads my posts will have discerned that I have a soft spot for many books, obscurities and older classics, that probably not many people are drawn to nowadays (and that is putting it mildly). No matter, they have an enthusiast in me.

The historian James Bryce (1838-1922) first published his history of the Holy Roman Empire in 1864, and revised it several times over the coming decades. When I taught World History, of course I could not resist using Voltaire’s quip (“Neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire”); it is the sort of thing that students remember. But there is a lot more to the story, and although this Bryce treatment is demanding, it is not at all musty. Catch this tart comment:

“Men were wont in those days to interpret Scripture in a singular fashion. Not only did it not occur to them to ask what meaning words had to those to whom they were originally addressed; they were quite as careless whether the sense they discovered was one which the language used would naturally and rationally bear to any reader at any time. No analogy was too faint, no allegory too fanciful, to be drawn out of a simple text.”

When is a Western not a Western? When it’s a Northern!

The Wikipedia article on this subject is quite good:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_(genre)

“The Northern or Northwestern is a genre in various arts that tell stories set primarily in the late 19th or early 20th century in the north of North America, primarily in western Canada but also in Alaska. It is similar to the Western genre, but many elements are different, as appropriate to its setting. It is common for the central character to be a Mountie instead of a cowboy or sheriff. Other common characters include fur trappers and traders, lumberjacks, prospectors, First Nations people, settlers, and townsfolk.”

Some authors that are associated with this genre are Jack London, Rex Beach, Robert Service, Ralph Connor, and James Oliver Curwood. I am reading Beach’s The Spoilers at the moment, famously filmed five times (1914, 1923, 1930, 1942, 1955), the highlight always being an epic fist-fight towards the climax. The novel is rousing good fun, based on an actual incident of corruption during the Yukon Gold Rush * , which Beach had witnessed first-hand.

* The key malfeasor was Alexander McKenzie (1851-1922), whom I encountered in my recent reading in North Dakota history. A very nasty guy and machine politician who served prison time for corruption. He conspired, in collaboration with officials he helped place in office, to cheat Alaska gold miners of their winnings by fraudulently claiming title to their mines.

The Beat Generation is one of my “things”. I just love reading about them. But between the Lucien Carr manslaughter situation, and William S. Burroughs killing Joan Vollmer, and Bill Cannastra getting himself decapitated, and Neal Cassady being Neal Cassady, I am thinking that JUST MAYBE it wouldn’t have been such a great idea to hang out with these people. Reading John Clellon Holmes’ Beat roman à clef Go just now, really entertaining - from a distance.

Holmes was the cautious guy, the observer in the group. Probably for every thousand people who have read Kerouac’s On the Road, one has looked at Go - but in its way it is just as good, and it came out a good five years earlier.

Anyone with a serious interest in literature and literary history should get a total kick out of Richard Altick’s 1950 study The Scholar Adventurers. Immensely informative and entertaining look at the byways of literary scholarship.

One of the delights of the Altick volume is a 13-page section of Bibliographic Notes. Any non-fiction book that contains especially good (end or foot)notes, (preferably annotated) bibliography, bibliographic notes or essay, etc, has my everlasting gratitude, because I really will comb through those for other materials I want to follow up on. Books are findable most of the time; journal articles are a bear (American colloquial for “difficult situation”). Fortunately I have JSTOR access through being a Yale alumni, that helps with some articles. I would like to collect old scholarly journals and such, but my financial resources are not unlimited. 😏

I am certain that I will order at least a dozen books mentioned in the Altick notes, not all immediately but eventually. Two other books I have recently found a wealth of follow-up in are Lewis Mumford’s The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (which has an impressive annotated Bibliography) and Rodman W. Paul’s Mining Frontiers of the Far West 1848-1880 (killer endnotes).

Reading today in The Decameron, Third Day, in the excellent Penguin edition. Man, no one told us in high school how sexual certain classics were - Chaucer, Boccaccio, many Ancient Greek and Latin authors, and that’s not even getting into Asian texts. Decorous literature is very much a 19th Century thing; it’s not characteristic of literary history in general.

Read another good one by Paul Beatty--WHITE BOY SHUFFLE.

Hilarious and very barbed; writing the way I like it. More occasions when I laughed out loud; the guy has an intimate acquaintance with the human funny bone.

Recommended.

After Vineland I did a couple of short rereads: The Summer Book by Tove Jansson, and Narrow Road to the Interior by Basho. Lovely little books both. The later included a text called Hojoki by Kamo No Chomei, which I did not know. Very moving text read wonderfully by an actor called Togo Igawa.

Currently listening to Laughable Loves, short stories by Kundera.

Time for another catch-up:

Spin, Patricia Cornwell - the second of the Captain Chase series, following Quantum, and I was hoping it was just the two books, but this one ends on a cliffhanger, so now I have to wait for the next book. Chase continues to hunt whoever has hacked Nasa, fights off several hitmen, has a whole bunch of experimental electronics implanted into her, including a link to a quantum computer, and ends up piloting an experimental spacecraft into orbit to destroy a satellite killer being operated by an unknown party. I can't decided how serious these books are - there's a lots of acronyms but most of them seem like jokes, the villain is called Neva Rong, and every vehicle Chase uses is... well, Chase Car, Chase Plane, etc. Some good technical detail, but the central cast feel too over-powered. We shall see what happens in book three, whenever it appears.

Space Men, William Barton - the first book in a trilogy, although to date no further books have appeared, even though this was self-published in 2015. The novel covers an alternate US space programme during the early 2000. In the world of the novel, both the US and USSR pulled out of space after various disasters. But a forward-thinking president sets up a secret space programme at a navy shipyard, using submarine engineers and mechanics - partly based on the author's own experience working at a navy shipyard. It's an interesting take on alternate space history, but the protagonist is perhaps too unlikeable to really carry the story, and some parts of it are just a little too easy.

Childhood’s End, Arthur C Clarke - I last read this back in the late 1970s or early 1980s, and remember only the opening of the novel - you know, giant spaceships appear in the sky over cities, a trope that's been used repeatedly in film and tv since, aliens refuse to show themselves, and when they do 50 years later, they look just like the Christian Devil. They're there to save humanity, of course - but more than that, they're ushering in the next step in humanity's evolution, some sort of woo-woo mental powers transcendent race. The novel has not aged well, despite Clarke rewriting chunks of it in the 1970s, and his extrapolation of science, geopolitics and society for the latter half of the 20th century is woefully off in most places. I found myself really not liking this novel - parts of the narrative I found actually implied Clarke was not a very nice person (there was, for example, an instance of completely egregious racism). I'm going to write a longer piece on it, I think.

Plutoshine, Lucy Kissick - and speaking of Clarke, this novel is on this year's Clarke Award shortlist. I'm not a big fan of debuts on award shortlists, as I find it unlikely an author's best novel is the first one they've written. But Plutoshine, I admit, is very good. The Clarke has nominated some piss-poor novels in the past few years, but Kissick's way better than they were. A terraforming team arrives on Pluto to kick off a project to raise the planet's surface temperature and make it sort of habitable. But someone keeps on sabotaging the project, and there are concerns that if native life is discovered the project will be halted. But then a young member of the Pluto colony discovers alien life... but she hasn't spoken since an accident which left her father in a coma... Kissick creates an interesting society on Pluto, throws in lots of convincing science about the planet - she's a nuclear chemist, with a doctorate in planetary geochemistry - and a plot that manages to keep several mysteries on the go throughout its length. I've not read the other books on the shortlist, and may never do so, but Plutoshine would be an acceptable Clarke Award winner.

The End of the Day, Claire North - I wrote a long piece on this on medium: https://medium.com/p/the-end-of-the-day-claire-north-817ac327816b

The Legend of Luther Arkwright, Bryan Talbot - a new graphic novel featuring multiverse-travelling hero Arkwright, who this time finds himself going up against the extremely powerful first instance of the next step in human evolution - and who intends to kill every human in every alternate world and create a utopian world to their own design. A superior science fiction comic.

The Players of Null-A, AE Van Vogt - I wrote a long piece on this on medium: https://medium.com/p/the-players-of-null-a-ae-van-vogt-cf982040da32

Hunter of Worlds, CJ Cherryh - an early Cherryh, but not one of her better ones. Again, humans are only peripheral in the story - it mainly involves three alien races, the iduve, the kalli and the amaut. The latter two are subject races of the iduve, who vanished centuries before and have only just returned. A kalli is co-opted by an iduve ship, and it's all part of a plan to track down a rogue iduve and have revenge on him - the iduve follow strange rules on face and revenge and relations. There's a lot of invented alien vocabulary, which confuses as often as it explains, and once you've pictured the iduve as Finnish vampires it's impossible to see them as anything else. Disappointingly dull.

Pieces of Light, Adam Thorpe - Thorpe's debut, Ulverton, blew me away when I read it many years ago, and I've intermittently kept up with his novels over the years. This was one of the better ones so far. A young boy grows up in West Africa in the 1920s, but at age 11 is left in England to attend school. His parents return to what is modern-day Cameroon, and the mother disappears soon after. The narrative then leaps ahead to the 1970s. The boy is now a retired theatre director, famous in his field, but is apparently under treatment for... something. The story is then told through letters he is writing to his long-lost mother, as some sort of therapy, mostly involving his uncle's house (his guardians when his parents returned to Africa), and various events that took place there during the 1930s and 1940s. The novel sets itself up as a mystery, but only really resolves a side-issue, never quite getting to grips with the central premise. But the evocation of time and place is excellent, and the writing is extremely good throughout.

>7 CliffBurns: LOVED that one. I think it still tops Beatty's admittedly also excellent The Sellout, but my judgment may be hazy, since it's been at least 10 years since I've read White Boy Shuffle.

>10 KatrinkaV: Personally, I prefer THE SELLOUT, but that could be due to my savage sense of humor.

Stayed up late last night finishing THE MOUNTAIN IN THE SEA, an impressive work of speculative fiction authored by Ray Naylor.

A small, intrepid group is trying to save an intelligent species of octopus discovered in a south Pacific archipelago. The creatures aren't merely tool-makers, they have evolved even further, to the extent that powerful forces in the human world seek to exploit them, in one way or another (trying not to give away spoilers). A convincing tale of the near future, a page-turner that turns out to be very smart and very well-crafted.

Recommended.

ON WRITING AND FAILURE by Stephen Marche.

A short volume, more like an extended essay, but one I found immensely meaningful--at times, it felt like Marche was addressing his remarks to me directly.

Inspirational, in its way, but also a reminder to anyone engaged in a creative endeavor that nothing is guaranteed, fame is elusive and compensation nonexistent. Only those with a true calling should seek a life in the arts. There's no affirmation, little possibility of success and many, many cautionary tales of those who gave it all and were rewarded with a handful of dust.

THE SOCIALIST MANIFESTO by Bhaskar Sunkara, one of the founders of JACOBIN magazine.

A thorough analysis of the history of socialism (and its difficult bedfellow communism), but I think the conclusion of the book, where Sunkara provides a recipe for reviving the Left and eventually bringing it to power, is a wee bit pie-in-the-sky. I'm not convinced ANYTHING can unite our atomized population, including our shared interests, child poverty and gaping income inequality. As long as folks have their Netflix fired up and packages of crap from Amazon en route, they're not likely to rise up in revolution.

Is that cynical? Am I being too cynical?

MUD RIDE, a memoir by Mudhoney founder Steve Turner.

Intermittently interesting, but there's a depressing sameness to memoirs these days--most of them co-authored or ghostwritten with someone who manages to remove all traces of the subject's true, unique voice.

Know what I mean?

Catch-up time:

Scary Monsters, Michelle de Kretser - this is actually two short novels published tête-bêche, like those old Ace doubles, you remember them, and in most reviews the format was treated like it was some amazing new invention. It's not, of course, it's over 100 years old. But, like many of those Ace doubles, the two novels are of varying quality, despite being by the same author. 'Lili', set in France in 1980, about a young Australian working as a teaching assistant before attending Oxford, is excellent, with a real feel for the place and its cast. 'Lyle', on the other hand, is set in a near-future Australia, under a repressive government which has adopted fascist policies in order to stifle dissent about its refusal to tackle the climate crisis. The narrator is an immigrant who works for part of the security services, is both upwardly mobile and yet determined to remain invisible. Nothing is likeable in 'Lyle' - the narrator is a worm, the people he interacts with are either over-privileged or irony-free social climbers. The link between the two novellas, which is I suppose the whole point of the format, is nothing - throwaway mentions that the two narrators are related. I wanted to give this lots of stars, and 'Lili' certainly deserves it, but 'Lyle' let it down. A shame.

Assignment in Eternity, Robert A Heinlein - three early short novels/novellas and a short story, and this is poor stuff, even for anyone who's a fan of Heinlein. 'Gulf', in which a spy is captured returning from a mission on the Moon, only to be rescued by a secret organisation of superhumans who apparently have embraced General Semantics - I had not thought Heinlein dumb enough to subscribe to it, not to mention the complete nonsense Heinlein spouts about linguistics. Everything in this story is pretty much complete bollocks. And that's an equally good description of 'Lost Legacy', with its Shangri-La mental powers and ancient civilisations and hidden mystics in the Sierra Nevadas, the sort of egregious white supremacist bullshit the Thule Society advocated in the 1930s (this novel was published in 1941). In 'Elsewhen', a professor hypnotises a group of students into alternate universes, where they appear to live out lives inspired by the fantasy fiction of the time. I would not be surprised if some of it led to Glory Road. In 'Jerry was a Man', Heinlein uses the Scopes Monkey Trial to put slavery in the dock, and the end result is crass and tin-eared. The subject of the trial - a genetically-modified chimpanzee - even finishes the story singing 'Old Folks at Home', the 'Swanee River' song... I've never doubted Heinlein's craft, and while I've often had issues with his politics and his views, this is the first book by him I would encourage people to actively avoid.

Frontera Lewis Shiner - his first novel, and his only one that can be classified as heartland genre. In a corporatist near-future, Pulsystems uses old Nasa hardware to send a mission to Mars, ostensibly to discover what happened to the Mars colony abandoned ten years earlier. It's still there, of course, and some of the children born in the colony have suffered genetic damage... but are also geniuses. And one has discovered a "gate" that can send a person at FTL speeds over interstellar distances. Plus some form of antimatter power generation too. Which is why Pulsystems sent a mission to Mars. And why the USSR has followed them. There's some stuff in here that's weathered the decades since publication reasonably well, but a lot that hasn't. The writing is a cut above what was typical for the time, even if a lot of it these days sounds somewhat clichéd. Shiner, of course, went on to write much better books, both within and with out the genre. A writer worth reading, but perhaps this novel is for completists.

Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett - one of the most popular books of the Discworld series, this is the one that introduces Captain Vimes and the City Watch. Someone thinks it's time Ankh-Morpork was a monarchy again, with themselves as the power behind the throne, of course. But that needs a king, and who better than someone who has saved the city from an epic threat? Like a dragon. A dragon appears and attacks certain buildings in the city. A hero then turns up and defeats the dragon. And is crowned king. Nothing about this seems entirely legit to Vimes or the members of the City Watch, but they are way down on the totem pole. And yet still they manage to figure out what's going on, defeat the dragon (for real), release the Patriarch, and return Ankh-Morpork to its previous state of chaos. There's a lot of good stuff in this Discworld instalment. It's perhaps not as clever as Wyrd Sisters or Pyramids, but it has a more obviously comic cast and Pratchett wrings every last drop of humour out of them. I can understand why some people think this is when Discworld really found its feet.

Finished Laughable Loves by Milan Kundera. The intelligence and narrative skill are evident. The stories however are not terribly interesting. The male characters in particular are not very likeable. Sorry to say that the gender politics in this book are not aging well.

Also finished The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin. Very entertaining. It was a hard story to tell and the author did a good job. I'm sure by now the loopholes in the story have been pointed out, but overall it was entertaining.

Highest possible praise for Colson Whitehead's latest, CROOK MANIFESTO.

A worthy follow-up to his award-winning NICKEL BOYS. A crime novel set in New York in the 1970s, everything grimy, the corruption endemic.

Great atmosphere, appealing characters, solid writing.

This one will be on my "Year's Best..." list, like all his other books.

I do love fat history books and I just finished Beverly Gage's Pulitzer Prize winning G-MAN, a biography of J. Edgar Hoover.

Amazing level of research, well-structured and informative.

Deserving of all the plaudits it received.

>4 PatrickMurtha: Reminds me of what Joan Didion wrote about the hippie generation, namely that it was brutal and stunk (my words), yet we remain fascinated by the 60s somehow.