The Good Earth - Pearl S. Buck A poor Chinese farmer sets off to meet his bride-to-be, a slave in the local rich family's house. His life thereafter is filled with ups and downs, flood and famine, family and fortune, and the occasional empathic prickings of a conscience he doesn't understand. It's a very human saga, with events largely driven by external forces but their effects shaped by the personalities of those involved. Wang Lung, the main character, averages out to "sympathetic, tragic, even likable at times, but still typically a jerk".
Nomad by Alan Partridge A follow-up of sorts to the fictional autobiography of the fictional radio DJ released a few years back, this is ostensibly an account of a walking tour of Britain that Partridge has undertaken to honour his late father. In reality it's a desperate attempt to restart his stalled career and to get back on TV and takes many tangents into Alan's various preoccupations. Partridge is a frustrated, conceited narcisicst with closeted homosexual urges. He harbours delusions of celebrity and good taste but is in reality a regional nobody viewed with contempt by his colleagues. It's probably one that is suited best to existing fans of Partridge, filled as it is with in-jokes and references to his previous appearances across various media. As a fan myself I found it frequently hilarious, at its best moments illuminating something of the soullessness of modern society - Partridge's Britain is one of corporate chain stores, industrial parks and crippling alienation.
Just finished The Swamp Fox by John Oller. A bio of South Carolina Revolutionary War hero Francis Marion. Relatively well known, Disney did a TV show featuring a highly romanticized version of Marion's exploits in the early 60s. He started out with a Continental Army commission but wound up leading militia troops in South Carolina. A constant thorn in the British Army's side, Marion was one of the most successful American field commanders of the war. The book deals almost entirely with his war service, tho his early life and postwar career as a planter and legislator is briefly covered.
The Round House - Louise Erdrich The narrator, Joe, is at the time of the events narrated a teenager living on a Native American reservation in the '80s. When his mother is savagely attacked, he finds himself distracted from his aunt's boobs and Marina Sirtis's hair long enough to try to help bring her attacker to justice. (Justice being one of the chapter titles, along with many other TNG episodes. I noticed each time, honest, but it took a while for me to catch on to the deliberateness of the pattern.) There's a lot of anguish, a lot of familial interrelations, some Scooby-Dooing, some Indian law, some teenage shenanigans, a looming Marine-turned-priest, and increasing amounts of people living lives of quiet desperation. It's kind of an unpleasant book, is what I'm getting at, and understandably so for the most part . . . but I could have done without the pubescent boys ragging on each others' naughty bits and the octagenarians spending half their time talking about sexual adventures of the past. Sometimes realism (or titillation, but for whom?) is not a sufficient justification. Anyway, it's well-written, well-plotted, well-realized, it's just not entirely my cup of tea.
Pavement by Richard Butchins This was a fairly short one - set somewhere in the near future, a disabled and impoverished Londoner who has become alienated by society to the extent that he wonders if he's invisible to those around him recounts in the first person the process of his becoming a serial killer. Drawing heavily from the likes of Crime and Punishment and from American Psycho, it nonetheless gives its own twist by connecting the activities of the anti-hero to the growing inequality and atomisation of our culture. His angry rationalisations and varying mental stability lend things a realistic tone - even if it isn't as disturbing as it would like as often as it would like. If it weren't for a series of cryptic dream sequences breaking the flow between the chapters, this would have been an impressive debut from the writer.
Past Time: Baseball As History - Jules Tygiel Something a little lighter. It's been a while since I read a book about the history of baseball. This is a collection of nine short essays, objective without being dry, that traces the interplay between baseball and American society, and how each reflects the other. It starts with the unification of various stick-ball games into a single "national" game intended to promote manliness, science, and morality; continues through the advents of radio and TV and white and black politicians alike showing up at Negro Baseball games to court the black vote; and ends with rotisseries and the Baby Boomer romanticization of baseball in the '80s and '90s. With so much ground to cover in so thin a spine (about 220 pages), the essays rarely delve deep and occasionally resort to lists without calling out the importance of individual items. However, I found it an enjoyable, if not amazing, read.
The Night the Bear Ate Goombaw - Patrick McManus Something even lighter. A collection of humorous articles of mostly an outdoorsy nature, talking about the author's exploits. Fishing, hunting, camping, getting lost while hunting for a friend you were supposed to go fishing with, that sort of thing. It's written in a normal sort of voice, with the only "backwoods" inflections occurring when the author makes up a name (I hope) to protect the innocent, or trots out a euphemism for a less family-friendly exclamation that obviously was spoken. There's also a lot of deadpan bald-faced lying to save one's dignity, like when the author finds excuses for repeatedly missing the dumbest antelope in the world ("Oh, that was just a warning shot"). My favorites were the chapters about knot-tying and about Man's relationship to Boat, where the author's wife gets upset when she catches her husband and a newlywed making lewd remarks about a girl's name, only to apologize when they claim they're talking about a woman, not a boat . . . and then it turns out they were actually talking about a boat after all. The title chapter is probably the most underwhelming of the lot. It's a fun, light read overall. Nice Guys Finish Last - Leo Durocher This is my book of the year so far. I will have to keep an eye out for it on Amazon etc. It's an autobiography, one yarn leading to another about Durocher's experiences and run-ins with players, executives, league presidents, and sportswriters. I read much of it picturing an old, gruff man sitting across from me, just rattling off all the stories he's practiced telling over the years, leaning forward and shaking a finger for emphasis. Babe Ruth, the Gashouse Gang, Branch Rickey, Jackie Robinson, Willie Mays, Frank Sinatra, and many other big names make substantial appearances. Unsurprisingly, a lot of the book involves "The Lip" shooting off his mouth or getting taken out of context or clashing with management or umpires, and naturally the narrator usually sees more merit in Durocher's side of things, being eager to set the record straight. But it's a fascinating, enthralling look at personalities and culture during a rich part of baseball's history, and through it all Durocher projects enough of a sense of sincerity that I feel content to largely take him at his word about his view of events.
Having OD'd on Transmetropolitan, I decided to read some actual Hunter S Thompson and picked up Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, F&L On The Campaign Trail, The Rum Diaries and whatever the one is about the Hells Angels, can't recall right now. Have flipped through a bit of each but there's a distinct lack of bowel disruptors (I guess thr real Thompson's equivalent was mace as he seems to mention wanting to hose people down with it a few times). As always, the shift from fiction to the real world makes the story grubbier (yes, even than the excellent "Business" side story in Transmet about child prostitutes) and Thompson doesn't come across even as an anti-hero like Spider Jerusalem, but maybe that's the point. The drug and gonzo sections are the best, naturally - when Thompson is actually giving proper background on a topic the books are a bit dry - it's when he's off his gourd, throwing himself into the story in first-person, getting stomped or stomping on someone that they are most engaging for the rawness of it.
Look at the Birdie - Kurt Vonnegut Fourteen short stories that Vonnegut never published, plus a letter and an editorial foreword, both of which are very welcome. A few of the stories, like "F U B A R", are charming or heartwarming; some, like "Ed Luby's Key Club", get downright brutal; some have twist endings; and they're all pretty good, to the point of reminding me just how much a good writer can pack into a short story. "Key Club" and "King and Queen of the Universe" might be the ones that stick with me the longest, as well as "Confido" just for its premise. A wide range of premises, although psychologists and a couple of other ideas pop up repeatedly, but I was surprised by the lack of science fiction. Nevertheless, Vonnegut is going on my list of authors to read again soon, with his imagination, writing style, and very agreeable viewpoint.
Beyond the Far Side - Gary Larson Contains a disproportionate amount of rhinoceros. Watership Down - Richard Adams Given how much I read Brian Jacques growing up, it's silly that I never got around to this book by now. But I am silly. This book is not silly, although it is less brutal than I expected it to be. Despite all the Bad Things happening in it, somehow the prose style . . . I'm not sure how to say it . . . there's always a feeling that, even if it looks like someone is about to die, the main thread will just keep on going. Like, you're going to be sad when it happens but not hit in the gut? It's not a bad thing necessarily, just the style, but worth noting. The only other time I've encountered this are with <i>Ender's Game</i>, which the feel of the flow of this book's plot kinda resembles. Anyway. This is a story about several rabbits who, based on a Bad Feeling from the local seer, leave their home warren and strike out for new territory. They run into one difficulty and danger after another that force them to surpass their latent rabbitness and find new ways of living, which is all the more striking because the author makes a point of keeping their anthropomorphism at a bare minimum -- in fact, he breaks into the narrative from time to time to tell us how what's going on is perfectly standard lapine behavior, even if it isn't what a sensible human would do in that situation. They also meet other rabbits who have anthropomorpized their way into dystopias. It's a good story, well told, and would probably have been a favorite of my childhood. I enjoyed the legends about El-ahrairah, their trickster uber-rabbit ideal, and I enjoyed the learned quotations for themselves even if they didn't always contribute to my appreciation of the chapter that followed. My only complaint is that occasionally Adams tells when it would have been better to show.
John Hancock: Merchant King and American Patriot by Harlow Giles Unger. Excellent bio of John Hancock, extensively footnoted. Hancock's story from his adoption by his wealthy uncle thru to his death. Had George Washington not been our first President it's possible that Hancock would have been. He was hugely popular in his time, a highly successful merchant who built a commercial empire and yet practiced tremendous philanthropy all his life. First Governor of Massachusetts after the Royal Governors were kicked out. Basically he ran the Continental Congress during the Revolution and held that body together almost by sheer force of personality. Then he did the same for the Constitutional Convention. An amazing and I think under appreciated Founding Father.
A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years by Diarmaid MacCulloch This is an ambitious undertaking, charting the entire history of Christianity from its dual origins in Jewish and Greek culture through to the present day. The author has a background in Anglicanism, and while one can always find quibbles (I had some with his assessment of the Enlightenment) on the whole it was remarkably balanced, maintaining a respect for Christianity while not shying away from its controversies. He keeps it engaging despite the subject matter necessarily veering into the obscure at times, and manages for the most part to avoid the danger of rushing past important events (the aforementioned origins are a bit of an exception). I certainly learned a lot - the towering influence of Augustine, the importance of the Chalcedonian settlement, the evolution of the papacy (and how late it achieved its eminent status), the recent conflicts within Catholicism and so forth. A really good overview for the non-specialist.
A Year at the Movies: One Man's Filmgoing Odyssey - Kevin Murphy I picked this up for a buck at a charity sale and I admit, it looks like fluff. A guy who got his fame by playing a robot who pokes fun at cheesy movies, and he parlays it into a book about watching at least one movie in a theater every day for a year. Yeah, sure, whatever. It's really not fluff. Kevin Murphy is serious about movies, to the point of calling himself a snob, although he demonstrates that that means more "I have my own particular standards" and less "I'm not allowed to like anything the hoi palloi like." The focus of the book is ultimately not about the individual movies, but more about seeking to recapture the magic of going to the movies, and about the state of the movie industry. The book is divided into fifty-two chapters. Each chapter starts off with a title and the list of movies Murphy watched that week. It's not guaranteed that Murphy will actually critique any of those movies. Instead, he will talk about at least one of the moviegoing experiences he had that week, and often expand that into a general idea. Experiences range from multiplexes to a theater made entirely of snow, from Cannes to a Finnish film festival, from Hollywood's grand cinemas to the last theater left on Rarotonga in the Cook Islands to the tiniest public theater Murphy could find (in the Australian outback). Along the way, Murphy encounters a number of people devoted to the cinema and sharing it with others. The "take seven different women to Serendipity so I can understand date movies" experiment, in which everyone involved was already married, makes for the funniest chapter in the book. Along the way Murphy sees current releases, classics, and silents in a broad range of genre and quality. And he does go into at least a little detail about why he likes or dislikes many of the movies and theaters, without coming off as any worse than a curmudgeon. It really is a fun and educational read.
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein Widely regarded as one of the most prominent writers of science fiction in the 20th century, it's always been an oversight that I hadn't read Heinlein. Of his works I had been told that variously that this is the best and most accessible. It depicts a future uprising on the moon against its colonial earth-based authorities. Our main characters, with the aid of a sentient computer (the most interesting personality in the book) begin a conspiracy to overthrow these authorities and establish their own state. I didn't agree with the politics, which are a little idiosyncratic, based mostly on libertarian capitalism but which also seem to legitimise such things as rigging elections, terrorism, summary execution and so forth. That said, the prose is quirky and interesting, and the unfolding revolution is quite thrilling to observe. Heinlein's quality is such that one finds oneself rooting for the participants despite the above, and also despite a couple of plot contrivances that are used along the way.
Until Victory Always by Jim McGuinness Jim McGuinness is a former player and manager of Donegal Gaelic Football team. As manager, he led them to great success in the 2010's, taking them from relative obscurity to win three Ulster titles and one All-Ireland title in a four year spell. This chronicles that period and parts of his previous life. The latter parts are extremely personal, focusing much on the deaths of two of his brothers by way of illness and a road crash. His tenure as manager was an astonishing achievement yet there have been many criticisms of his methods (some of which I share) including the effect his negative tactics have had on the game as a spectacle. So perhaps inevitably there is quite a lot of controversy - some biting back at the media criticism of his team, some criticism of the county administrators for their approach (which notably scuttled the teams prospects in 2013), and accounts of how he parted company with a player for providing inside information to a journalist and with his assistant, both of which have been the subject of high profile disputes. I found some of his focus on the psychological approach to the game to be a bit overbearing - defeats are always chalked up to this being lacking. But the account is frequently exhilarating, engendering a lot of respect for both McGuinness and his players.
^^ Good to know, I was actually looking for The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress when I picked up Stranger, and came away from the latter worried maybe Moon would be just as bad. But if there's no slogging through like in Stranger I'll give it a try too. Dune - Frank Herbert The story of how Paul Atreides overcomes the evil of the Harkonnens and the brutality of the planet Arrakis to fulfill his destiny as Guy With More TItles Than Aragorn. My first impression, formed very quickly, was that the prose was much less dense than I expected. But the world-building is there, and done well, and the journey feels epic even if much of it was spoiled by what I knew about the story going in. I would have enjoyed it more without the spoilers, but still quite a good read.
Our Mathematical Universe by Max Tegmark I had reacted with much skepticism when previously physicists raised the notion of parallel universes. If this is anything to go by, the idea is gaining at least some traction in the scientific world. After the usual primer on both relativity and quantum physics, Tegmark launches into the core of his book - that our current theories imply several levels of parallel universes - those that are beyond our cosmic horizon, those that are in separate inflationary universes and those arising from the quantum wavefunction (the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics is increasingly being disregarded). Finally and most speculatively he asserts that these nested universes (and thus reality itself) rather than just being described by mathematics are in fact a mathematical structure, and that other such structures could also exist. In effect this means that everything that can be conceived does in fact exist. Exploring the implications, Tegmark also runs into what's known as the "measure problem", concerning the calculation of probability when dealing with infinite universes - leading him to suspect that spacetime may not be a continuum (and thus may be granular at some level). It remains very speculative but I was willing to give it more of a hearing this time. Tegmark writes well and leaves the reader with the suggestion that progress is being made on this stuff - which is probably why it's worth reading books like this every year or so even if a lot of the material is the same.
Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the new Millennium by Bart Ehrman I'd missed this one when reading a couple of Ehrman's books at the start of the year. Whereas the ground covered in those concerned how Jesus became to be regarded as God and how the Bible has been changed as it has been passed down to us, this explores who Jesus actually was in a historical context. Though there is a lot of debate about this stuff, Ehrman propounds pretty much the mainstream historical view. This amounts to his being an apocalyptic preacher, expecting the imminent end of the world. After limited local success in Galilee, his message that their rule is coming to an end runs afoul of the authorities in Jerusalem and they have him executed. Having explored this subject in moderate detail now, I'm still not sure what to think of it. The various criteria used to examine historical sources are applied differently by Ehrman than the "Jesus mythicists". Chiefly in dispute is the criteria of dissimilarity. While he quickly eliminates obvious embellishment such as the nativity stories and the resurrection (despite repeated tiresome reassurances to believers who might be reading that historical investigations shouldn't affect their faith) Ehrman seems to grant most gospel traditions historical status to some extent - the faith healing, the twelve, the betrayal by Judas and so forth. All of this can be disputed - and Ehrman fails to much consider the writings of Paul (probably the earliest) in his reconstructions. To me it sticks out a mile that Paul's ideas are very different to that in other writings, so there's a piece of the puzzle missing somewhere. This probably sounds critical - it's an enjoyable read but probably pitched too low for me at this stage - I don't need a paragraph explaining to me what a pagan is. My mind isn't made up on the historicity question. I suspect that the answer may lie somewhere in between the various approaches but given the difficulties it is probably best to keep an open mind.
I read this one a while back, too. For the most part, I'm convinced of the following: 1. Jesus was a real, historical person, but very little can be said of him as all of the (near) contemporary writings about him are theological in nature. 2. Jesus did preach that a wholesale change of the world was coming, a re-ordering of things by God. In other words, Jesus was an apocalyptic. 3. Jesus (probably) imagined himself as the king of this new world order. 4. Jesus was charged by the Romans with sedition, was put on trial (probably nothing so dramatic as in the Gospels), and was given the standard punishment: crucifixion. Ehrman repeats a point made by someone else, which I paraphrase here: if what came before Jesus (John the Baptist) was apocalyptic, and what came after Jesus was apocalyptic, then Jesus was most likely...an apocalyptic.
The Man in the Iron Mask - Alexandre Dumas Turns out this is (part of) a direct sequel to The Three Musketeers, which I have not read. Whoops! Anyway, there's a lot more politicking and less fighting than I expected. A lot of people trying to out-noble each other, which can be traced to most of the story involving Louis XIV and his court. Our four heroes are admirable and lofty in their speech and chivalrous and all that, but not especially heroic, and the antagonists aren't treated as villains either -- also a thing it took me a while to get used to. Aramis's motivations and actions in particular made much more sense when I stopped trying to read him as a Hero. A lot of using Madame and Monsieur and the like as pronouns for unclear antecedent individuals. I did enjoy it once I took it on its own terms, but the plot would take a much different shape if written nowadays.
Silas Marner by George Eliot As a prominent 19th century English writer, George Eliot is often compared to Dickens and so seems like someone whose work is worth the time. This is a short novel and seems like an easy way in, before hopefully tackling something like Middlemarch at a later point. The story concerns the eponymous Silas Marner, an ageing miser expelled from a religious order and his new life in an unfamiliar village. It's a pleasurable read, and has a fable-like quality, perhaps deceptively so since it touches on themes ranging from religion to industrialisation to social class. The characters are arguably more rounded and realistic than in Dickens, their backgrounds and experiences determining their characters to a larger extent. I was impressed in particular as to how it convincingly portrays another place and time, a pre-industrial England that was rapidly disappearing.
The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien Flann O'Brien is a renowned Irish novelist, albeit someone I didn't know much about. I went into this expecting some gritty realism about 20th century Ireland in the vein of Joyce or Kavanagh. I was wrong. The story concerns a young man who has committed murder for money with a colleague. Upon attempting to retrieve the loot, he begins a surreal journey - meeting characters including three policemen who (besides planning to hang him) show him all manner of miraculous things including a lift to eternity, a series of infinitely small boxes and bicycles that merge with their owners. Throughout our protagonist also holds forth on the works of de Selby, a philosopher/scientist with similarly bizarre beliefs. It ends with a twist of sorts, demanding a re-interpretation of some of what has gone on. I didn't enjoy it. It's obviously aiming at absurdism, something like Kafka. But while the latter seems to have satirised life and the human condition, O'Brien seems to be making (among others) a special point about the uselessness of scientific enquiry. Or perhaps I'm not getting it fully. It is a complex and challenging work which others may have taken more from.
The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence by Paul Davies This is essentially an update on the progress of SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) in light of latest science, 50 years since it started scanning the skies for radio signals. It examines the steps needed for intelligent life to form (the Drake Equation) and concludes that the two main hurdles are those that remain dimly understood - biogenesis and evolution of intelligence from lower forms. It also reviews the searches performed by SETI thus far and concludes that while we've only scanned a small portion of the sky, our capabilities to do so are accelerating and the longer we go without detection the more rare it appears that life is. More radically, he suggests that the field has been hampered by anthropomorphism and that even the focus on radio may be misguided, as it's possible that this is a technology that will have peaked in the late 20th century. Instead Davies suggests that we conduct our search more widely to include such things as lasers and directed neutrinos. In general, Davies implies that things are looking somewhat more pessimistic than they were and as a scientist (even one at the forefront of such activity) his tentative opinion is that we are perhaps the only intelligent life in the observable universe. It's an interesting read and a welcome update to the topic for someone who read much of Carl Sagan's output a couple of decades back.
That is explored too. If we are the only intelligent life, then there is some "filter" that is preventing development. If we're past the filter (e.g. if it's that intelligence doesn't arise, or that progression beyond single-cells is difficult) then we can breath easily. But if it's the filter is that intelligence is self-limiting in a short timespan, then we're screwed.
1. If it turned out we were the only intelligent species in our galaxy, that would be as amazing as if there were many intelligent species. 2. It's entirely possible that we're just not looking in the right places for alien signals (that is, we expect radio waves, but maybe aliens have other means unknown to us). 3. A dark prospect is THE GREAT FILTER, something that weeds out civilizations before they get too far advanced.
Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff This one hardly needs an introduction, being the inside story of the first year of Donald Trump's presidency. It led to much controversy upon release. The book appears to be derived from direct access that Wolff had to meetings in the White House as well as accounts from participants. He has taken the material collected and edited it into a form something like a novel, narrating the story. There are a couple of problems with this. Firstly that this narration is presented as omniscient when it ought to be a lot more tentative and call attention to its sources and biases much more often. Secondly that it tends towards the gossipy and the salacious. There is very little serious politics here. Unsurprisingly Wolff portrays Trump as a shallow narcissistic blowhard, uninterested in and incapable of performing his duties. What's more interesting is the picture presented of his staff - how chaotic it all is, with various factions competing with each other. Those factions are represented by Steve Bannon (the fascistic outsider), Rince Preibus (nominally the chief of staff and representing the Republican mainstream) and "Jarvanka", consisting of the presidents daughter and son-in law. It's a bizarre and deeply shocking spectacle, the small mercy being that even the participants seem to recognise how unstable it all is, and that it may end before long. Misgivings about how any of the particulars are open to questions aside, it does present a picture that rings true in general and is essential reading in our current historical moment.
This Changes Everything: Capitalism versus the Climate by Naomi Klein This is a worrying book, documenting how we are in the process of changing the climate of our planet in dangerous ways and how our current economic system is incapable of accommodating the substantial changes required to mitigate this. Klein first notes the behaviour of energy companies, environmental groups and the effect that "free trade" agreements have had on them over the past three decades. This has been to prevent alternative energy sources from being developed and will at present lead to five times more carbon being dumped into the atmosphere by 2050 (including from such technologies as fracking and oil extraction from tar sands) than can be accommodated while keeping temperature rises to 2 degrees. She then moves on to calling out green billionaires such as Richard Branson, environmentalist organisations that are (or have become) essentially fronts for polluters, and debunking "magical thinking" - proposals to fix the problems through geoengineering - suggesting that all of these things serve to delude the public and stall any real change. Finally she turns to activists (including native Americans) who are making progress through court challenges and other activism. Throughout, Klein ties all of this to her left-wing political perspective. While the dangers are real, the book is too long and a bit too preachy, reading quite a lot like a manifesto. This is a shame because this kind of thing needs to be read much more widely than it is.
Alone in the Universe by John Gribbin This is another speculation on the possibilities of alien life, albeit from a different angle. Gribbin examines the Fermi paradox and the lack of evidence for life and concludes as a result that we are alone. He then criticises the Drake Equation as insufficient, obscuring as it does many of the factors required for the development of intelligent life and spends the rest of the book examining these. Such factors range from the availability of heavy elements, safety from cosmic radiation (only a small region of our galaxy meets these two criteria and no region of many other galaxies do) to some unusual features of our Sun, the arrangement of our Solar System and the Earth itself. For the earth, those further include our large moon, our magnetic field, the existence of plate tectonics, the dimly understood events of the Cambrian Explosion, and a set of remarkable climactic and geological events that transformed "monkey into man" in the recent past. The conclusion is that while life may arise rarely, intelligent life requires a series of confluences so vanishingly unlikely that they will not have been repeated within our galaxy at least, and perhaps anywhere. It ends with the warning that our species seems unlikely to last and that even without our deleterious impact, our planet is unlikely to remain hospitable for life for much longer. It's powerfully argued and persuasive, at once presenting a picture that is gloomy and yet starkly beautiful.
