What Are You Reading?

Afghanistan: A Cultural & Political History by Thomas Barfield

Motivated by recent events in the country, I decided to brush up on my understanding of Afghanistan.

I found this work quite dense and challenging in terms of following all of the tribal groups and subgroups, but also valuable.

What emerges is something of a refutation of common myths about the place. It is often portrayed as a perennially failed state, impossible to govern and in a constant state of warfare. But that's an image that does not stand up to scrutiny if one goes back more than 40 years.
It is true that in modern memory, Afghanistan has always been very poor and relied on external subventions to keep its economy afloat.
However from ancient times, passing between several multicultural empires, Afghanistan was actually relatively easy to govern. People typically viewed the ability to hold power as synonymous with the right to hold it, and participation in politics was limited only to the elite classes.
Starting with the British intervention in the 19th century, there began a trend that has increased since - whereby elites have mobilised the population to make things difficult for outsiders. The upshot of this has been increasingly to make things difficult for themselves as well. The monarchy which ruled for much of the 20th century governed via a paradox - by declaring its rule to be absolute, yet not attempting to exercise it in practice, they left local tribal structures to take care of themselves outside of the main cities. Following the collapse of the monarchy those vying for power have found it more difficult to establish any legitimacy.

Tribal complexities aside, decades of warfare have in recent times led to people supporting whoever can best provide a degree of law and order. It is this phenomenon (alongside the malign influence of Islamists in Pakistan) which explains the Taliban. As such the American intervention was initially welcomed, but serious mistakes were made with that - its footprint initially being far too light and the model of governance imposed far too centralised that by the time the Obama Administration took a different direction, much damage had already been done. The book ends around 2010 and I will look out for commentary from Barfield on recent events. His book certainly help to illustrate why such a collapse would happen - Afghan tribal allegiances being endlessly pragmatic, it is virtually a repeat of what has happened more than once in the past.

The Mystery of the Yellow Room - Gaston Leroux

This is one of the detective stories mentioned positively by Agatha Christie via Hercule Poirot in that one where the guy is doing the detecting thing and the gal is doing her thing and it turns out the murderer was doing the other thing and meanwhile Poirot was doing the retirement thing again and reading detective stories to pass the time. Don't remember the title, but umm it wasn't The Clocks. No, wait, maybe it was The Clocks. It wasn't the Seven Dials, is what I'm trying to say. I think it probably was The Clocks actually.

Anyway, this having a distinctive title, and being singled out by Christie-through-Poirot as being a commendable story, led me to eventually look it up on Gutenberg, where I found that it is indeed a spectacularly good example of a "locked room" mystery. It goes out of its way to make it clear that it upstages "The Murder in the Rue Morgue", whose solution it spoils, incidentally, so read that first if you're into the genre, that's the granddaddy of detective fiction if you didn't know.

The main detective in this one is a teenage journalist known as Joseph "Rouletabille" because of having a red face and a round head. An attempt is made upon the life of the daughter of a visionary scientist in her yellow bedroom, while her father works in his laboratory on the other side of her door. When she screams for help and good people force their way in, she is found near death, but her attacker is gone and there seems no way he could have escaped. This drives everybody nuts, and events eventuate in mysterious fashion until (as promised in the beginning) Rouletabille barges into open court at the end to propose his solution that will save an innocent man from being hanged.

Rouletabille prides himself on clear reasoning and method, rather than on recognizing twenty-five types of cigarette ash, but the story produces its effects much like a Sherlock Holmes story, with the detective making a lot of seemingly inconsequential remarks or unsupportable leaps of logic for shock effect. This is what genre readers know as "fun". There are also plenty of clues, false trails, things that get explained immediately, things that take a while to get explained, drama, human interests, and a range of smaller points that can be deduced or guessed by the reader without spoiling the final solution. The full solution is fair and worth the wait, although you might have to be a Poirot to get full points. This really should be considered a classic of the genre. I see several sequels by Leroux on Gutenberg, plus a ghost story about an opera, so I guess I have more reading to do in this direction.

Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe

Written in the early 18th century, this has been suggested by some as having been the first proper novel written in the English language. It's certainly one of the most famous, everyone being familiar in outline with the tale of a man shipwrecked for decades on an uninhabited island.

Defoe was part of the emerging capitalist class in England at the time - the "middle type" whose existence would later cause Napoleon to refer to the English as "a nation of shopkeepers". He's dissenting Protestant, cosmopolitan, valuing reason and hard work, and interested in spreading "Christian" civilisation.
He imbues Crusoe with these same qualities and the gulf of three centuries thus renders him highly unsympathetic to the reader. Primary among these are his attitudes towards slavery and towards the natives of the America's.
In one of his adventures near the start of the book he's actually in slavery himself. When he escapes with a friend the first thing he does is to sell the friend back into it. Subsequently he uses slaves on his plantation in Brazil, is on an expedition to capture slaves in Africa when he is shipwrecked, and his reaction to meeting "Friday" on his island is to enlist him as a slave, also converting him to Christianity for good measure.
On the island he lives in constant fear of "savages", whose sole characteristic is their rampant cannabilism (a complete invention, having no anthropological basis) and frequently imagines massacring scores of them. There is also some animal cruelty from time to time, and all of this is entirely without any self consciousness.

The writing itself is a little uneven, with some jarring changes in tone. It is to Defoe's credit that the story remains appealing despite this. But all in all, it is more interesting as a literary and cultural artifact than for its own sake, particularly as an education about "enlightened" attitudes of the time.

Not that I'm going to defend all the attitudes from Defoe's time, but his use of cannibalism as a story device is not wholly unfounded. Certainly, people from Defoe's time were aware that tribal peoples in various places did practice cannibalism.

Your book reviews here have inspired me to read more lately. You read like I want to.

I had a great run of Agatha Christie novels last year, and I still read topical books every now and again, but I need to set aside the time for some genuinely worthwhile reading.

Not in that part of the world.

Before I tackle this one, does it matter which English translation I read? It seems like there are an awful lot out there.

I'd imagine it does matter, but I've honestly no idea which one I read or which is best, sorry.

The Golden Triangle: The Return of Arsène Lupin - Maurice Le Blanc

Another detective novel via our good friends at Gutenberg. The main character in this one is actually a WWI French army captain, with Lupin only showing up over halfway into the story. The story begins with a seemingly senseless attack on a nurse and from there we tumble into a world of love affairs, hatred, revenge, gruesome murder, shocking twists, villainous villains, high-stakes international intrigue, and peonies. The captain treats his black companion very rudely for comic effect, using him as a sounding board while blaming him for all his own weaknesses and mistakes, but it comes across maybe 40% comic and 60% poor taste for a modern reader. Other than that, Le Blanc writes to great effect, and it's a memorable read with a lot of close calls and sudden turns of plot. Another writer I want to come back to.

Fun fact, the "leftist" position in Sweden in the seventies was that cannibalism had literally never existed. Anywhere.

A Wolf Called Romeo - Nick Jans

The tale of a huge, black wolf named Romeo who for some years was a regular visitor, even resident, of the area around Mendenhall Lake just outside Juneau. Jans, a hunter/trapper turned photographer and Mendenhall Lake resident, had a front row seat for much of what happened and conducted several interviews with those who saw what he did not. Romeo was a statistical improbability: a solitary wolf living off of a small territory much of the year, who was wild but tolerated humans for the sake of socializing with their dogs. Not mating or forming packs, just socializing, and willing to put up with human and canine aggressions and blunders that would have driven you or me mad in his place. Also probably half of the people living in the area wanted Romeo dead on principle. The other half made him into a local celebrity. Jans, with direct expertise regarding Alaskan wildlife, relates his own experiences, reports others', tracks state and local politics, and hedges educationally about what the wolf was doing out of human sight. It's a light read, honest, instructive, and moving, and worth one's time.

The Aleph and other Stories 1933 - 1969 - Jorge Luis Borges

I had a few minutes before work and dropped by the library, only to be met by a book sale. I got out safely and on time with this as a prize of war.

This is one volume of a series in which Borges worked directly with the translator, one Norman Thomas Di Giovanni, to rewrite his works in English -- to make them read naturally, Borges says, as if they had been written in English in the first place. I'd say they succeeded in that. The stories are sometimes about a strange, high-concept idea, like a man who decided he wanted to dream another man into existence. Sometimes they're about the rough-and-tumble culture of the Northside of Buenos Aires where Borges grew up, kinda like Jim Croce with South American cowboys. Often there is a thought-provoking stinger in the end of the tale.

The only two of these I've read before are, surprise, "Death and the Compass" and "Ibn Hakkan al-Bokhari, Dead in His Labyrinth". I am prejudiced toward the former as being the best in this collection, but there are several others that could claim the title and I don't think there's a worst at all.

Appropriately enough, several phrases for how I feel about this collection, beyond "is it good" (it is), have come and gone as I read through, none quite satisfactory, all but the last gone from memory. But the one with me now is that it feels like Borges thinks of a huge idea or an intense situation he wants to experience, and then he writes it out with us along for the ride. For whatever reason, he has to experience it with someone else as an intermediary, and so the main character in even his briefest short stories always has a history to give him character. And then, having written enough to sate his curiosity or live in the situation, he ties it off and is done, leaving the reader to think about what has been said and left unsaid, and sometimes to choose for oneself how to fill in the blanks.

For example, the full experience of encountering "The Aleph" is so strong that Borges cannot even give it to his narrator: it must be filtered through a poet whom the narrator does not like or sympathize with. The narrator only gets one brief glimpse and is overwhelmed. After reading the autobiographical essay at the end, in which Borges relates his family history, his upbringing and travels, his reading and writing, his friends and brushes with Argentinian politics, "The Aleph" feels very autobiographical itself. (There are also authorial commentaries on each story at the furthest end, evidently written for this volume.) Another example is the man who lives in his unfurnished cellar for years to avoid being drafted into a dictator's army, while his wife gallantly carries on with life over his head. What must that have been like? Borges asks at the end, offering several phrases but refusing to commit his story to a single answer.

For reference, I've also read "The Library of Babel" and "The Garden of Forking Paths" though neither were able to be included in this volume. One of the pleasures of reading through this collection is noticing or sensing other ideas in these stories that undoubtedly influenced Eco as he wrote The Name of the Rose, so many of them that naturally, as Eco said, he gave Borges the honor of being librarian of his abbey. Books speak of other books.

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

In an alternate version of our present, a group of children are brought up in a boarding-school type environment. Their lives seem pleasant enough, albeit filled with the kind of cliquishness and angst typical for their ages. But it's apparent from the start that something is not quite right and as the novel proceeds more and more is revealed of the outside world and their unenviable place in it.
The story is told in the first person, at a distance of some years. It uses a conversational tone with heavy emphasis on personal relationship and remembrance of detail. The narrator doesn't appear to hold any resentment about her situation and obsequiously repeats the euphemisms that society has come up with for the horrifying things that her group is forced to endure. This casts a veneer of civilisation over everything. And as a reader I was not sure what to make of it. A satire on the English school system, perhaps? But it's nothing as mild as that and by the end I was quite disturbed. It's not quite science fiction, since it isn't interested in that angle. Ultimately I think it's a dystopian horror and it's about death and what we do to avoid letting go - ignoring it, hiding from it, bargaining with it, living in the past.
There's apparently a not-so-good film version which I've never watched.

I saw the film and absolutely hated it. It's one thing to accept death, it's quite another to passively accept being murdered and, since it felt like the latter was what the main characters were doing, it was hard for me to have much respect for them.

In fairness, it's been a long time since I saw the film (and only saw it that one time) and may not have "gotten it."

Windy Day at Kabekona - Thomas R. Smith

The back cover assures us that Smith "has become one of the masters of the midwestern prose poem." The prose poems in this collection are short, only two lasting more than a page.

The book is structured into six sections, but I experienced it as three. The first section covers a fair range of experiences: a killing frost ("Soldiers occupy the village -- there are stabbings in windowboxes, sudden death in the leaves"), Strauss ("So many [grapes] not tasted, paintings never seen, cities that waited for us and we did not come"), sails on Lake Michigan ("Our lives are an old ring, still shining where the black is scraped away"), an old photograph. This is where the figures of speech are densest, I think, forcing slow reading for contemplation's sake, but not becoming tiresome or too full of themselves.

The second part is the collection of poetry concerning one Everland. I seem to have a high bar for considering an experience to be "surreal", but this was surreal. Page after page of nothing but a title and a short paragraph describing the narrator's experience at a place called Everland, run by a visionary mad scientist type named Dr. Evermor, who fills the grounds with gigantic animals made from scrap metal. It felt like a dream state crossed with a text adventure that didn't wait for your verb choices crossed with a Choose Your Own Adventure that forgot to put in the branching choice scenes, with no idea where this might be headed. (The nearness of "Evermor" to "Evenmorn" from MM7 didn't help.) I had to look up Everland to find out whether it was real or not, and it is real.

After that we are back to more standard matters, with less concentrated metaphor than in the beginning -- a car covered in dolls, wasps, a dream of an unreleased Beatles album, an old waitress -- but Everland had heightened my appreciation and I read more avidly as a result. A favorite is "A Gull's Feather", comparing the soul to a discarded feather. "Feather, did you fly differently as one of that brotherhood, that sisterhood, that union? What amazements did you experience on your travels? At what point did you separate to loft away on your own? Was that what you wanted from the beginning?"

Anyway, I enjoyed this, and I guess he's a local son because there are plenty of his books at the library. I'd consider returning to Smith next time I get the poetry urge.

The Eyre Affair - Jasper Fforde

This is the first book in the Tuesday Next series, one installment of which you may remember I read a few years back. Here we meet Thursday Next and her cracked world. She's a Crimean War veteran (England and Russia are still fighting over there in the 1980s) who works as a Special Operative, Literary Division for the English government. Normally she leads a quiet but busy life of identifying fake manuscripts and such, a full-time job with the literary arts being the super-important, lucrative part of culture that they are. In this book, however, she has to deal with her ex-boyfriend's betrayal, her rogue time-travelling father, her mad inventor uncle, Halloween monsters, shootouts, asteroid fanatics, and more as she seeks to stop the second- and third-most evil men on the planet (one of whom is an actual supervillain) from getting people killed and destroying English literature forever. Oh, and she has to remember to keep her pet dodo fed.

This is all very entertaining and somehow the prose is just my size. Fforde keeps a completely straight face through all this as if he were writing a completely normal novel, no winks at the reader or even "let's pause for a moment to appreciate how brilliantly absurd this is". It's like he's the other side of the coin from Pratchett. He bends or breaks several rules, letting the reader know exactly what will happen ahead of time, or stopping the action several times to let inconsequential characters debate Thursday about their theories of who actually wrote Shakespeare's plays. And he pulls it off every time. It's just a very satisfying, entertaining, twisty read and I plan to read the rest of the series before returning to the Invisible Library series next year.

The Janus Point by Julian Barber

This is my periodic return to the check out what's new under popular physics - but to call it a challenging read for the layman would be an understatement. Barber starts off with several chapters designed to ground the reader in thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, dynamics and so forth - touching on Poincaire's Recurrence Theorem, Boltzmann Brains and other interesting concepts. At times he gets into some heavy lifting with mathematics. All good so far.

From there, he gets into the meat of things. There's a lot to unpack here but some of the central components are as follows:

• The second law of thermodynamics - usually regarded as the most inviolable of physical laws - is based on the behaviour of particles inside a box. But the universe as a whole isn't in a box and is free to expand, so how we think of entropy should be modified when we consider the universe at large. If I understand correctly (which is not certain) Barber is saying that given the expansion both overall entropy and local complexity (he names this new concept entaxy) can increase indefinitely.
• He uses the N-Body problem and its associated "shape space" to illustrate how a collection of particles (a model universe) originating at or near a single point (The Janus Point, identified with the Big Bang) can create their own "clock" and "ruler" as they travel away from that point. This happens on either "side" of the point - implying the existence of a twin for our universe where time runs in the opposite direction.

The complexity of both the concepts and mathematics got the better of me by the end, I fear - where I was following the train of the argument only in very broad strokes. It might perhaps be more understandable were I to commit to a degree course, but I'm doing some casual reading here. Fortunately Barber tries to lighten things up, not unsuccessfully, by drawing parallels to Shakespeare and indulging in some philosophical speculation - he is more of an optimist than most.

It's a worthwhile read for anyone with the interest and persistence to get through it. Whether the ideas presented have anything to do with reality is a different question. The difficulty in obtaining experimental data to test the ideas at the fringes of physics continues to be a problem and we'll have to hope that something like the new space telescope can help with this.

We Don't Know Ourselves by Fintan O'Toole

Fintan O'Toole is a journalist, arguably the most prominent Irish public intellectual in the recent past. He was born in 1958 and he identifies that as the year that Ireland begun its process of modernisation. In this work he skirts the line between memoir and history in telling how that modernisation has unfolded throughout his life.
It's not that long since I read Ferriter's History of 20th Century Ireland. In some ways O'Toole's effort compliments and updates that.

Ireland enters the period (as one will be aware) as a backwater and an irrelevance, entirely in thrall to the Catholic Church. Much of the book charts the fall of that institution whose stranglehold over culture seemed to be going strong until the 1990's. Side by side are its political partners in Fianna Fáil, retaining their power only about a decade longer. O'Toole excoriates both for their cruelty and corruption. A recurring theme and a denunciation of the culture concerns the many things that were known about these organisations - but in a kind of strange collective dissonance, also not known and not talked about. Widespread child abuse, persecution of women and gigantic levels of political corruption were abound.
Official Ireland tried to modernise economically while keeping a lid on new forms of culture - including with regard to TV and so forth. And they appeared to be successful in this - until they weren't. Successive scandals in the 1990's revealed the cesspit and people turned their backs on their old masters, realising that their own hypocrocies had been more moral all along.

There are a couple of blind spots. Often identified as the third leg of the Irish establishment (and the only one still standing) the GAA is barely mentioned. Rock band U2 gets one line and other artists might feel similarly short-changed.
But O'Toole does find time to chart the drug problems that arose in the 1980s and the laughable response to these. Then in the latter parts of the book, he deals with how Ireland did finally become wealthy over the last 20 years. Although the astronomical GDP figures are a mirage and the handling of the banking crisis has caused untold damage, a complicated picture emerges and there have been real gains. The country now stands as one of the more liberal in the world, as recent referenda on abortion and gay rights show. But he ends with the fascinating insight that this was not just a generational shift. Polls show that the very same people who voted for crushing theocracy in decades past voted for these things in large numbers.

The Masked City - Genevieve Cogman

Well, when in Rome, grab whichever series the libraries have. This is the second Invisible Library book, about the woman with a dragon assistant who collects books from across a multiverse that's dominated by orderly dragons at one end and chaotic Fae at the other. In this one, her assistant Kai gets kidnapped and Irene must travel to the farthest reaches of Fae-controlled reality, to a romanticized version of Venice, where everything's a story and the fabric of space itself is hostile to humanity, to rescue him and prevent a war that would devastate many Earths. It's a desperate, near-suicidal mission, with only a dragon trinket and the doubtful assistance of Lord Silver to supplement her wits and her ability to affect the world around her using the Library language. The tension never lets up, the writing is smart as always, it's a great read.

So, uh, this series ended abruptly this month with issue #77. I expected it to keep going for several years, because it's the kind of plot-a-week fluff you can keep going indefinitely and because a lot of plot threads had only just been properly introduced and others were only in the middle, but I guess the creator called it quits for whatever reason. The last of the old gods was introduced, which turned out to be the final final boss battle even if it didn't feel like it at the time, and then the young humans are all off to senior high together. And then we got a satisfactory epilogue chapter to see what happened with the rest of Ruru's life and tie things off for Magu-chan.

It was silly fluff but I'll miss it when I'm hiding in the heated entryway after work, waiting for my car's engine to warm up. It got a little unwieldy toward the end, with the author apparently determined to give as many characters as possible an appearance in every single chapter, but other than that it kept entertaining me with every installment. Shoutout to the Ten Holy Knights who actually number, like, four because nobody seems to want to go into the holy knight business these days.



Lost in a Good Book - Jasper Fforde

Literary Special Operative Thursday Next is having a rough time right now. Married life is nice, but she's tormented by the fallout from her adventures in The Eyre Affair: she's been on a whirlwind PR tour for SpecOps in which her story is neatly santized to avoid angering her superiors, the British government, or Goliath, the happy fun omnicorporation that could blink Mom's Friendly Robots out of existence without breaking a sweat. Just when that seems to be over, her husband goes missing . . . and a lost Shakespeare play turns up . . . and a mysterious voice starts warning her in footnotes about being put on trial . . . and someone keeps trying to kill her in ridiculous ways . . . and Goliath promises to find ways of making her go back into books for their benefit . . . and a resurrected Neanderthal tries to kill himself . . . and her rogue time-travelling father drops by to tell her that all life on Earth will shortly turn into pink slime. Also her dodo is pregnant. And she is introduced to Jurisfiction, the means by which fictional characters protect their worlds from parasites, real-world intruders, and each other. And on and on. All this in 399 pages.

These are all B-plots. Some are given more space than others, some are obviously more important to Thursday than others, but there is no sense of an A-plot that is the main focus, for which the other threads serve as merely backdrops or comic relief. Thursday, in a very realistic way, is just living her life and having all these things happen to her as she tries to deal with her most important problems. And it works great, because Fforde is skilled and entertaining enough to get away with it.

I appreciate the way that Fforde keeps the literary characters true to their source literature while giving them inner lives to round them out. Miss Havisham genuinely hates all men and wears her ruined wedding dress as a matter of course when necessary for the readers, but she keeps a radio tucked away and she drives a mean automatic. I also appreciate Fforde's webpage where a fan annotates all the more subtle puns, aeronautical references, and British in-jokes to enliven the experience.

Someone's on some good drugs.

I do think Thursday Next is a pretty great name.

Heroic Failure: The Delusions of Brexit by Fintan O'Toole

Continuing with O'Toole, this one is from a couple of years back and is already a little dated. Less of a history than a deconstruction, it analyses the ideology behind the Brexit project, including the historical, social and economic dimensions. O'Toole unsurprisingly considers it a great act of self-harm.
A lot of it he attributes to a post-imperial hangover. National identity became conflated with the concerns of empire - but following World War II this was no more. The British failed to reap many benefits of their victory in the conflict, leaving them without an obvious place in the world.
National mythology has for a long time lionised the "heroic failure" - Captain Scott in the Arctic, the Charge of the Light Brigade, Dunkirk and so forth. Brexit has become an attempt for many people to capture a type of "glory" by emulating this stoical go-it-alone resolve.
Mixed up in all of it as well are many ideas about consumption - the right to eat British sausages and set ones own food standards - even when dangerously unsafe. Much of this is nonsense and invention, but it doesn't matter to characters such as Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage and Jacob Reese-Mogg. These are predictably excoriated.
At times O'Toole seems to be reaching. Analysing a national consciousness will inevitably lead to cherry-picking and generalisation. But he ends by suggesting that a positive way needs to be found for the expression of English nationalism, and it's an interesting thought.

The Burning Page - Genevieve Cogman

Back to the Invisible Library. Just about anything after the Venice adventure was going to be a bit of a letdown, even if it's the supreme supervillain (Alberich) demanding that the Library surrender or be destroyed. But this is kind of a slow burn, with less action and more mopping up the personal plot threads from the last book (hurray for more Zayanna, but we don't get to watch Irene on trial?) until the last half of the last act. There are a couple of obvious plot twists that are, well, left to be obvious to only the reader as well. It's a fun, engrossing ride as usual, and we get to plumb some characters' depths along the way, but the weakest of the four installments I've read so far.

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

It's been more than twenty-five years since I read Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men" at school, and I remember being quite affected by it. I'm not sure why it took me so long but I always intended to go back and read more of his output. This one and "East of Eden" - which I will also get to at some point - seem to be his most admired.
And it's a powerful, angry work - a a furious denunciation of the emerging depersonalised corporate capitalism, openly socialist and suggestive of revolution - that I was deeply struck by.
The story is of the Joad family, small farmers from Oklohoma who - affected by the dust bowl and the Great Depression - lose their livelihood and make the long trek west to California in search of a better life. The hardships that they experience both on the road and on arrival make up the bulk of the novel.
It's an ode to human perseverance and dignity, even as the family splinters and teeters on the edge of starvation. I can't remember a work of fiction making me this angry in a long time. The characters are well drawn and evoke both admiration and pathos - from the father who is broken by the experience, the good-natured practical son to the mother who displays awesome, heartbreaking resolve to hold things together. At the same time they are not idealised proles. Pointing perhaps to still-relevant flaws in the culture of the American working class, they have become disconnected from nature (see how they casually run over animals) and also at one point work as scab labour.
There are biblical allusions throughout - both in terms of the "journey to the promised land" trope and in terms of Christ-parallels that two different characters adopt at various stages. Some of the speeches by the preacher Casy are especially memorable.
Controversial since it's release for many reasons, a controversy that has only served to make it more widely read, I think it's one that is well-worth it's prominent place in discussions of the "Great American Novel".

The Mortal Word - Genevieve Cogman

Skipping the fourth book in the series because that's the first one I read way back when. Fortunately this one starts with a letter from Kai that reminds us that he broke ties with the Library at the end of book 4. Irene hopes the end of their professional relationship will allow the start of a physical one, but before they can get down to business Vale is summoned to Khitomer a neutral Earth to solve the murder of a dragon at a super-secret peace conference in Paris between the fae and dragons that could save lots of Earths from getting blown up in their metauniversal wars. Tensions are high, some of the most powerful figures on each side are present, and one wrong move -- or the wrong discovery -- could end the conference and ruin the Library's neutrality and thereby its safety as a disinterested third party. There's also the rumor that a powerful Fae who's convinced she's Lady Bathory might be on the loose . . .

This one is back to the standards of the series, with lots of action and plot developments. The dragon investigator, Mu Shen, is an interesting character, but she doesn't get much to deduce. I would have liked to see a contrast between her and Vale's approaches, but this is already packed full of so much that something has to be left out I guess. This volume really hammers home just how little the dragons or Fae truly care about humanity as anything more than something to project their ways of existence onto. I haven't watched Babylon 5 but I gather the Vorlons and Shadow aren't a completely wrong parallel to draw.

Whose Body? - Dorothy Sayers

A man lies dead in the bathtub of another man's apartment. Meanwhile, an important man of finance, Sir Reuben Levy, has gone missing. Are the two cases connected?

This is the first of the Lord Peter Wimsey books, and he has a lot going against him from the start. His own author, on the very first page of his existence, compares his face with white maggots. He has little to suggest himself as a rootable underdog, being the son of a Dowager Duchess with enough money and social standing to do whatever he pleases. And the artist's rendition on this paperback depicts him as exactly the college nerd you laugh to watch as bullies take his wallet and shove him into the mud in front of all the girls. But he has a few likable qualities, including being genial with his valet/butler, Mr. Bunting, who enjoys photography and shares his employer's passion for the parts of amateur sleuthing that don't feel like hard work.

He also likes to prattle on at length, quoting whatever poetry and literature crosses his mind, and this is visibly part of Sayers's strategy in this book. There's a lot of fluff to hide the real clues in, and a lot of names dropped early on for the reader to note as potential suspects. She even admits to this method towards the end, which always amuses me when a detective novelist tells you exactly what she or he is up to. But then she lists off the important clues when it's winding-up time.

This was published 1923, so the same time period Christie was establishing Poirot, but it is a Sherlockian approach with an emphasis on physical clues and logic. Inspector Sugg is a far more aggressive idiot than Lestrade ever was. Watson's role is split between Mr. Bunting and Parker, a police investigator who spends much of the book with his only personality being the possession of the absolute mundanest of intellects. There is a good deal of dry, understated humor in the proceedings, the crime is twisted, and Wimsey is entertaining enough that I want to read a later book as well to see Sayers's progression in writing skill.

Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich by Harold Jähner

Some German history for a change - not an area I've read much about outside of the world wars and the period in between. This ended up being not quite what I expected. Not a political history - or even a narrative history at all - the book focuses on the dominant social issues in the ten years or so after the collapse of the Nazi state. Each of it's chapters focuses on one such issue in particular. These include the rebuilding of cities from the ruins, the enormous numbers of displaced persons, rationing and the black market, re-education, denazification and cultural output generally.

It came highly recommended but I have to admit that it never really gripped me. Some of the discussion seemed obscure and a bit of a slog - the finer points of German art and architecture feature and there's a full chapter about dancing.
Nevertheless I did learn a lot. That the German population (despite large-scale support for the Nazi's) viewed themselves as victims after the war and that they generally didn't properly confront their past until the 1960s came as a bit of an eye-opener. It's fascinating that most of them simply "flicked a switch" and moved from support from one polity to another. There was not any large-scale social unrest or reprisals as were expected by the occupying powers. Nevertheless only a small layer of the population was subject to proper denazification, and much of that was reversed by the FRG after its formation. The huge role played by the CIA in sponsoring forms of culture at odds with those promoted by the Soviets was also surprising.

The Plague by Albert Camus

It may seem a little masochistic to read a story about a plague just as we emerge from two years of a pandemic, but I have a lot of time for Camus's worldview. He deals with existential questions but is not properly an existentialist. Absurdism leads him to a much less dark place than it does Kafka.
This is about an outbreak of the bubonic plague in a French colony in north Africa. Written in the 1940s it is nonetheless striking how similar the psychological and social reactions portrayed are to what we have recently observed ourselves. These include various attempts at denial, resistance to rules being imposed, varying levels of observance of those rules and the normalisation of large-scale mortality figures. The lead character is a doctor but we also get the perspective of a journalist, clerk and priest - amongst others. One scene concerning the death of a child is particularly harrowing.
What emerges is a strange sort of story about a quiet heroism. There is nothing glorious in any of this and any "victory" is qualified and partial. This amounts to a renunciation of the "hero" archetype in favour of a more realistic portrayal of ordinary people making simple moral choices in the face of great peril in order to protect each other and make the world a better place.

Reminiscences of the Civil War - Cora Mitchel

Just a brief account of the author's experience of the Civil War as a young girl living in a tiny town in Florida at the time. She was sent to Georgia so her education could continue, but while she was there her brother was conscripted and nearly died of sickness several times. Rather than let him go back to the army and let illness finish the job, their father (a Northern businessman to begin with) smuggled him out of the state and back up north. At which point her mother, knowing the local opinion would turn ugly against her family, went and fetched Cora herself, leaving the younger children with their nurse and braving various vehicles, politics, and flooding. relying on others' kindnesses and her own sheer willpower to do so. Then, again through the kindness of strangers, she smuggled the rest of the family (except a married daughter) to a different part of Florida and up to the North to join the menfolk.

The voice is that of a grandparent for whom many of the in-the-moment details have dimmed over the years, but this is a striking account of what the war did to one particular family.

Fearless - Max Lucado

I don't generally read non-Bible Jesus books outside of Sunday School because *gestures vaguely in several directions*, but Max Lucado has been on my list of authors to read as someone who genuinely gets the message of Christ, so here we are. This is a very "popular religion" book, but consistently well-grounded in the Word, as Lucado addresses fourteen categories of fear and how to deal with them. Fear of insignificance, fear of failure, fear of violence and calamity, and at the end a very real fear that doubtless lurks in the hearts of so many loud people today, the fear that Jesus will get out of the neatly labeled boxes we want to keep him in and be greater than our brains know how to deal with. Lucado writes fast-paced, short chapters but feels like he covers everything he wants to cover without needing to delve into deep arguments to do it.

I feel that God spent the first ~30 years of my life trying to get me to calm down and stop being afraid of life, and finally I calmed down and started to listen, but some of these categories are still very relevant to my daily mindset, and this book helped strengthen me further. This was ultimately a very soothing read, but not in a "false prophet lulling you to sleep" way, instead in a "reaffirmation of God's qualities so you can stop worrying needlessly" way. There's a discussion guide at the end for people who want to use this in a study group.

The Character of Physical Law by Richard Feynman

This is a short book, recording the content of a series of lectures given by Feynman in 1964. In it he attempts to identify and explain some of the common characteristics of the laws of physics, with a view to illuminating how new laws might be discovered. These include conservation principles, symmetry, locality and a handful of other features. Eventually however he concludes that one of these must be done away with if we are ever to obtain a quantum theory of gravity!

Feynman has a very eloquent manner of explaining some quite subtle things and it's an enjoyable read. It's a little dated in places, lacking reference to things like the standard model - but it is striking and somewhat depressing how relevant most of it still is 60 years later.