Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol Written in the 1840's and set in Russia some 20 years earlier, Dead Souls is an early work in the golden period of Russian literature, predating both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and written before such major social changes as the freeing of the serfs in 1861. As such it explores an unreformed society not long after the Napoleonic Wars with unfree labour and a constant threat of famine. The main character Chichikov is initially something of a mystery as he arrives in an unnamed town, ingratiates himself with the local elites and travels between nearby estates, convincing their owners to sell him the serfs who have died since the last census, who are still taxed but can also be mortgaged and so forth. This peculiar device allows for a satirical exploration of the institutions and people who inhabit them, who include many larger-than-life types. The overall impression is of ubiquitous corruption, which the narrator rails against. The other main focus is the character of Chichikov. Something of a conman looking for a get-rich-quick scheme, the novel ponders to what extent he can reform himself and despite statements to that effect, whether he really wants to. Unfortunately the structure of the book is such that while Part 1 remains intact, Part 2 was never finished and contains gaps so some of these questions are left hanging. It's an interesting read, particularly for an admirer of this whole era. One can see the influence of what came before it and the seeds of what came next.
Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro A fairly recent release from the award-winning novelist and much acclaimed in its own right, this one is about Klara. She is an "artificial friend", an android designed to be a companion for children in a world somewhat removed from our own where genetic enhancement and societal breakdown are significant factors. She's acquired by Josie, a sick child - but all is not what it seems. Despite the sci-fi trappings, it's not exactly new territory for Ishiguro. Many of his works focus on classes of beings who are servile, whose narration is unreliable not out of deceit but because of their perspective. And genre fiction has obviously extensively explored this territory. But what Ishiguro does with it elevates it. There are explorations of religious faith, memory, sentience and childhood. I found myself becoming horrified at times - the "Mother" character makes choices that I consider monstrous - and the plot seemed to me like it might descend into Lovecraftian abomination. Fortunately this didn't happen - the characters (see also Rick, Josie's friend) are too likeable for that to have been bearable. Instead, not everything is neatly tidied up and questions remain, which will spark debate.
The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson. It's the year kajillion; the sun has burned out; and knights who live in a Bladerunner pyramid go out and fight Lovecraftian monsters with glowing sawblade weed-whackers. Written in 1912 before weed-whackers, Bladerunner, or Lovecraft. Haven't read it yet, but it's on order, and I'm so excited, I could bust.
Read a couple of Ian McEwan novels recently: Cement Garden: Really good. I'd read Atonement years ago, so I had some idea of where McEwan could go, but this was like Flowers in the Attic run through The People Under The Stairs. Suitably disturbing. The Comfort of Strangers: A little harder to follow. The locale is clearly Venice, though McEwan goes out of his way to not identify it. Interesting idea, but some of the motivations confounded me. It was a short novel, and I think it would have benefited from a few more chapters to more strongly establish the character relations. Still, it was unsettling in a good way.
I recently read Richard Laymon's Beast House trilogy and... Hoo boy. They were fun, but they were Trash with a capital T. It gave me the same feeling I get watching something like Humanoids From The Deep. Nothing to really say about them, except what a product of the time. Clearly written by a man. And a man with zero input from ANY women about how women would really react and respond to things. The idea, for instance, that women would purposely strip down knowing some creeper is probably in the bushes watching? Nah. Read it for free on Kindle Unlimited, but for God's sake don't spend any money on it.
Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before - Tony Horowitz Alistair MacLean wrote, "We know all about Captain Cook and we know nothing about him." His voyages, first to find a great terra australis and later to find a Northwest Passage from the other end, were heavily journaled, sketched, and specimened by his crew and himself. But the man's biographical details are scarce and his personality is largely only reflected in his painstaking mapping and plain, no-nonsense, practical approach to discoveries. Horowitz takes a friend (Roger, a reprobate much less interested in Cook than in local diversions) and does his level best to follow in Cook's footsteps. The result is a very good read. The first step is to spend a dreadful week as crew aboard an Endeavour replica to live the sailor's life. Afterwards comes the globe-trotting: Tahiti, Bora Bora, New Zealand, Australia, Polynesia, Yorkshire, Alaska, and finally Hawaii (skipping Antarctic waters). What did Cook find? What did he and his crew (including the romantic botanist Banks, who became a good friend, and many horny sailors) think of what they found? What did the natives think of them? And what is it like to live there today? How much has changed since Cook? And what do the locals think of Cook, if they think of him at all? Cook, a product of the Enlightenment who preferred observation over received opinion, would have approved of this approach. Horowitz is, on the balance, an admirer of Cook, his bravery and questing spirit, his accomplishments and perhaps surprising peaceable attitude toward natives that aren't actively trying to steal from or kill his crew. But he gives space and attention to those who can speak to the damage done by Cook's expeditions as well. There is a lot of local color, from a drunken reenactment in Australia to Tonga's history nerd king to modern Tahitians preferring the Old Testament or Greek or Egyptian history over Western Europe. Australia seems to soft-peddle Cook's encounters with aborigines, with vague ideas about a meeting of cultures rather than a collision, and singing songs and mourning the lives lost in that first meeting (only one person died, of illness) with any actual details increasingly elided. New Zealanders have probably the most interesting range of opinion, with a lot of concern for bringing whites and aborigines together. The tiny Niue has its own story, and also red bananas. Cook comes off as a practical-minded man who preferred assessing resources over beauty but had his own point of view, partly from growing up a nobody in Yorkshire. He was modest but knew how to flatter his superiors. He could appreciate the aborigines' lack of materialistic interest in the gifts the ships' crews offered them. And he always appreciated it when a new culture was peaceful. At the same time, he relied on shows of force to keep things going the way he wanted them to and was very touchy about natives "stealing" things. Open-minded in some ways compared to our notions of British captains of our time, but still a product of his time and place. New words: biggin (home), meadowsweet, marae, bougainvillea, frangipani, fearnought, ta'ovala, holua, kiawe, vog, wahanui (local chatterbox who tells visiting interviewers whatever they want to hear)
Acquired! But, I have to burn through Stephen King's "From a Buick 8" and "Revival" first. Long story as to why. Stay tuned.
Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke It's a damning indictment of contemporary social media and how it's warped society. The story is told from the perspective of a social media influencer, Natalie, who was raised on "traditional" Christian values. I actually didn't find her to be a very likeable character in the least, but the story was engaging enough to keep me interested. In a nutshell, and without any spoilers, Natalie is a "tradwife" with millions of social media followers. She lives a "Martha Stewart"-like life on a ranch in Idaho and is married to a man from a powerful political family. Her social media is all about living naturally and off the land. Of course, behind the scenes she has a bunch of staff who help her. One day, she wakes up on a ranch in 1855 and actually has to live the life she was selling. Things don't go well, obviously. My take: I don't understand the hype around this book. It's well-written and engaging enough, but I found it ultimately unsatisfying with a relatively predictable ending. The fact that it's told from Natalie's viewpoint also somewhat hurts the novel's theme and narrative, in my opinion, because there's not really a foil for Natalie's narcissism. (There are characters who are clearly living "normal" lives who Natalie despises, but they aren't fully fleshed out). Anyway, worth a read for its biting criticism but, as I said, it didn't blow me away like some reviewers.
Closing the Ring - Winston Churchill Volume 5 focuses roughly on June 1943 up to the eve of D-Day. Germany and Japan are still determined and powerful, but the tide has turned with key Allied victories, power, and ingenuity forcing the Axis onto the defensive. Importantly, Churchill marks April - May 1943 as the point at which the U-boat menace was largely mastered. That year, Allied ships began to be built faster than they were sunk, U-boats were being sunk faster than they could be built, and after one last fierce onslaught in March, the U-boats retreated to the southern hemisphere, their crews losing confidence. Thanks in part to Allied planes switching to short-wave radar so the U-boats could no longer hear them coming. The Scharnhorst and Tirpitz are also eliminated this year. Meanwhile, the Japanese have suffered massive losses at Guadalcanal and the Americans have gained a foothold on New Guinea. The Americans become so dominant that they can begin ignoring little knots of Japanese forces as they press onward. All this, plus the African victories covered in the last volume, sets the stage for an Italian campaign, which is the center of most of this volume's military action. Throughout, there is a lot of debate and disagreement among British and American staff about the course of this part of the war. Americans tend to view the Mediterranean as a very distant second to Overlord (and Anvil) considerations, considering that nothing they can accomplish through Italy will do much to defeat Hitler. Churchill wants to make the most out of Italian opportunities and is constantly fighting to get or keep the resources necessary to make headway there. Churchill remains sensitive to the apparent balance of power between Britain and America, always willing to contribute to the fullest extent but mindful of politics or policies that could result from one nation having too much or too little power in any given operation. His people argue strenuously for a full role against Japan once Germany is beaten, Churchill not wanting Britain to look like she excused herself from the war once Europe was secured. Anyway, Eisenhower prefers to start against Italy by taking Sardinia and Corsica, but Sicily is instead made the target of the then-largest amphibious operaion in history, with the British largely in charge. This operation saw the first use of the "Landing Ship, Tank" vessel, or LST, the shortage of which became a bottleneck in simultaneously fighting in Italy and preparing for D-Day. Sicily falls in a little over a month, going so well (helped by the Sicilians not being fond of the Germans) that everyone wants to skip to Naples next. Mussolini is overthrown, later to be rescued and set up by the Nazis in a government in northern Italy. (Mussolini disappoints Hitler with his disinterest in carrying out a campaign of bloody vengeance against his own people.) Churchill expresses respect for Mussolini's accomplishments while still highlighting his errors. Churchill then criticizes Hitler for trying to hold Italy and the Balkans instead of saving his forces for the decisive battles. The new Italian government makes nice with the Allies and gets support while giving what they can to "work their passage." Unfortunately there's a lot of armed Germans still in the country, internal Italian politics are distracting, Overlord preparations are a drain on Allied resources, and it's not until the end of the volume that Allied forces get as far as Rome, Churchill's bare-minimum Italian objective. In a speech before the House defending the negotiations with Italy, Churchill talks a little, well, politically incorrectly, when he says "we war not against races, but against tyranny" while repeatedly targeting Nazi tyranny and Prussian militarism as evils that need to be rooted out so that the rest of the world can finally be safe from "the Teutonic urge for domination" in Germans, who do not value freedom for themselves and hate the sight of it in others. de Gaulle and the Soviets both continue to be occasionally tetchy. de Gaulle gets FDR's back up with his demands. The Russians suspect a Polish corps is being saved to use against them. An October meeting of secretaries in Moscow sees America and Britain now ready to talk about postwar concerns, but Russia is focused on the war. The Soviets want an invasion of France ASAP as always and are unwilling to talk about Finland so that Sweden will come in with the Allies. Churchill writes in a minute that it's pointless to argue with Soviets, just do what you want to do and await their reaction. There is also a meeting in Cairo between Churchill, FDR, and Kai-shek, where Churchill is frustrated by the dominance of Chinese matters and later makes FDR retract a promise of support that would interfere with Overlord, but is impressed with Kai-shek and his wife. A Stalin-FDR-Churchill meeting in Teheran is so poorly arranged that FDR sleeps in the Russian embassy to avoid external assassination attempts. Stalin and Churchill are particularly interested in preventing Germany from making war again for a good long time, all three discussing how to split Germany up. Stalin wants to be friendly with Poland, but not with its government currently in exile. The Curzon Line comes up, Stalin says he doesn't want to annex any actual Polish population, and Churchill is quite willing to cede Lvov to the Soviets. Stalin gets a sword. Writing in 1951, Churchill looks at the unhappiness of Germany and Poland and declares that it cannot last. Churchill has another sketchy flight while sick. Yugoslavia and its messy politics get some attention. The Cetnik guerillas are compromised by the German willingness to execute hundreds of citizens in retaliation against Mihailovic. Churchill shows the Cetnik commanders grace for holding back in the face of such atrocities, but Tito's Partisans aren't deterred and they're getting results, so they eventually get British support transferred to them. Greece has its own internal political turmoil, with communists and royalists squabbling and resistance groups insisting on elections immediately. Churchill, as elsewhere, wants to win the war first, fearing bad decisions in the unstable environment and even a Communist coup. Bombing against Germany reaches its potential in 1943. The Americans insist on joining in with day bombing, but have to modify their strategy after unacceptable losses. In Asia, the Americans want the British to retake north Burma. Churchill doesn't like this, preferring to contain the Japanese there while fighting for the West Indies. Alas, Americans are more wholehearted and obstinate the bigger the Idea is. Churchill claims the strategy against Japan now was his only big disagreement with his chiefs of staff: he and the War Cabinet want to go from India through Sumatra and Malaysia, while the chiefs want to base on Australia with the US. Churchill, as is his wont, looks at the massive forces sitting in India and wants them put to offensive use. Japan moving ships to Singapore upsets his plans. Various concerns Churchill addresses include keeping up with German technological advances real and rumored, including jet aircraft and aluminum in bombs; designing a new House of Commons (oblong, with not enough chairs); weeding out the wrong kinds of operational code names; advocating the use of "cinema" in schools for students who might learn better from it than from other methods; Americans driving recklessly in Britain; purging Communists from privileged government positions; and supplying decks of cards to the troops. He also begins to set postwar planning in motion for Europe. Churchill is at pains repeatedly to make it clear he never opposed Overlord, but that he was cautious about casualties and making sure of success. It's an intricate operation. Besides direct military resources, 350 minesweeper craft and thousands of clerks will be involved. Other preparations for Overlord include artificial harbors full of mulberries and waterproofing tanks only as much as needed. Despite all the obvious work toward Something happening imminently, Germany was deceived as to the target. I feel like there have been a lot more "incoming" communications since Churchill wrote that he regretted not being able to print them a volume or two ago. Their increased inclusion helps considerably to round out the view of the war as it proceeds. New words: massif, Basic English
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy - Okay, ready for my hot take? It's alright. I found my mind wandering quite a bit as I read. McCarthy made it difficult by not following basic grammar rules. Punctuation is inconsistent. Quotation marks are nonexistent. If there was an artistic reason for that, I can't fathom it. It just made the book harder to read, which is the opposite of what you normally want to accomplish as a writer. It's incredibly dense, with a lot of characters, but barely any of them get any actual characterization. The ostensible protagonist, The Kid, doesn't even get a name. We don't really see him do anything much on his own, we don't get any interiority to him really even though it's pretty much exclusively from his point of view. I never felt like the Kid was a real person. I felt that way about others (Glanton, Toadvine, the priest), but not the Kid, which hampered my enjoyment of the book. The antagonist, Judge Holden, was a let-down. Maybe he'd been too hyped up for me. I'd seen all kinds of descriptions of him as the most frightening, most depraved villain in literature. But when I read it, I found him to be less frightening than the real historical figure he was based on. In real life, Holden is suspected of raping and mutilating a ten-year-old Mexican girl, due to the evidence of the massive handprint he left on her throat. He's never charged for it, though. In the novel, he does some awful things, but they seem antiseptic, nothing at glaringly depraved as that particular crime. Not to mention that I found it off-putting that McCarthy took a real, despicable person and in his telling transformed him into a supernatural Devil character. Holden is far scarier, to me at least, when he's a real human. And that's maybe the other thing that threw me off. Everywhere I looked I saw people saying "This book will haunt you, it's so dark, it's so violent" and on and on. But it's told so distantly and clinically that I didn't even feel the visceral horror of it. I felt more like I was reading a dry history book. And the moments of violence and brutality were well spaced between reams of description of empty, barren desert land. I've read American Psycho. I've read pretty much all of Jack Ketchum's stuff, including The Girl Next Door. I've read the Wasp Factory. I read a Dean Koontz book where a 10-year-old boy who'd been a primary character was suddenly, brutally, graphically killed just before the climax. THAT has stuck with me for decades. There was one sentence devoted to Holden scalping an infant, the literary equivalent of blink and you'll miss it. None of the people who died were anyone the book bothered to build up any legitimate audience sympathy for. Honestly? Most of it felt like violence for the sake of violence. Was it well-written? Sure, from a technical point. But man, it was so pretentious. And slow. And, honestly, pretty dull for long stretches of it. I had high expectations for this novel, and man did it miss that mark.
So, all that snapping on the pee-pee with an elastic I got over that shit in school doesn't matter. Great. Thanks, Cormac McCarthy.
Lots of people hold Cormac McCarthy in high regard as one of the greatest American writers. But if you can’t follow basic grammar rules I think you are a bit pretentious.
Red Storm Rising by Tom Clancy This was Clancy’s second novel, published in 1986. There’s a co-author by the name of Larry Bond who wasn’t billed (but received royalties) and helped plan out the war games that appear in the novel. It starts off with a bang - three Muslim extremists ready to meet Allah infiltrate and take down a large Soviet oil refinery. Quite literally burning the entire thing to the ground. Instead of taking the time to rebuild it, the Politburo decides it would be easier to just invade the Persian Gulf and take the oil rather than risk harm to the Soviet economy and their hold on power. So you know this is headed to WWIII from the point of view of NATO and the US military. In The Hunt For Red October I thought Clancy did a good job explaining all the acronyms and the military speak. He didn’t really do that this time around. If you’re a Navy or Air Force vet you could probably keep up but a regular civilian isn’t going to know the features of all the aircraft, destroyers, frigates, submarines, and their payloads. I intentionally limited how many times I Googled something and instead just plowed ahead. I kept thinking Clancy was auditioning for a DoD job. This was a good war story, but with uneven pacing and essentially no character development outside of a meteorologist named Edwards and a skipper named Morris. I understand Clancy was a stickler for details and authenticity in his writing, but Tom you could have written this story in 350 pages versus 750.
It sounds like you're missing a lot of the subtext, which admittedly isn't easy to get. I read it twice. Like, who do you think the Judge actually is? And what happened to the Kid at the end? Or, what did the epilogue mean?
Clearly, the Judge is a Satan archetype. Which would be fine with me if Judge Holden wasn't a real historical person who committed real atrocities. I get the subtext of what McCarthy is saying or a good bit of it at least. I'd be a fool to call myself an expert. But I feel that McCarthy undercuts his message by making Holden a satanical figure of pure evil. That makes the corruption of the Kid feel like a cheat. To me, it's like if someone wrote a novel that posits Adolf Hitler was literally Satan. As for what happened to the kid? Intentionally left vague,but likely brutally murdered. Wages of sin age that sort of thing. And the epilogue is a demonstration of how America profited from the spoils of its violence. Like I said, it's not bad per se. Maybe my expectations were too high. But when I compare it to works like American Psycho or A Game of Thrones, I think the violence in those books is both more visceral and better utilized than in this book. And that is a weakness for a novel whose reputation leans heavily on its nihilistic brutality.
Holden is not Satan in the sense that you mean. There's a good case that he's a gnostic Archon and that the philosophy of the novel is a kind of reverse theodicy whereby malevolence is the norm and the emergence of any spark of "good" is the exception. It runs throughout McCarthy's work, most clearly here. More when I'm on a keyboard, if you're interested.
I'm very interested. I took Holden to be Satan (Or at least Satan-adjacent) due to his fiddling, his penchant for lies and manipulation, and his seeming immortality. I see what you mean about the idea of "Malevolence is the norm", that was pretty evident in The Road and No Country For Old Men as well (Both of which, actually, I thought were better novels too). It's evident here because the Kid can not escape it, no matter what group he finds himself with, all of them are pretty awful.
It appears that The Kid did escape it. That's why he stands up to Holden and why Holden murders him (or whatever indescribable thing happens, a horrible perversion of the gospel story). He's a failed pneumatic.
So, @Crosis36, to expand... There's obviously a lot going on but this is what some people take from some of it. A lot of time and effort are expended by philosophers and theologians to solve the problem of evil - the existence of evil in a world governed by a benevolent deity. McCarthy reverses the problem, posits "evil" as the natural state of the world and asks how "good" can exist. (This is why he includes the three epigraphs at the start.) As such, the implied ontology of Blood Meridian aligns with that of the gnostics. They held that human beings were created by a higher divinity and contain a spark of the divine (the fire contains "something of men themselves"). But the world was created by a lesser, nefarious entities - and we are trapped under their dominion. These are called "Archons". The Judge is one of those. He's a mass murderer and a pedophile but also exceptionally erudite. Free will and autonomy disgust him: "The flight of the birds offends me. I'd have them all in cages." "Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent." He seeks to bring everything under his control, to conquer and subject. His philosophy is appalling - but it's also western colonialism and related trends taken to a logical conclusion. The book begins with the story of The Kid, and it's a kind of perversion of the New Testament (The language and structure are of the Bible.) But the Judge shows up and essentially consumes the text from within. The Kid joins up with the Glanton Gang and participates in the same depravity that is portrayed as universal. Eventually the gang, other than the Judge are killed or executed and the Kid leaves. When he meets the Judge years later, he rejects him - and astonishingly for this setting - demonstrates a higher morality. The Judge calls out his "corner of clemency" and reacts by whatever unspeakable act occurred in the Jakes (some inversion of Christ's atonement perhaps) and then dances his victory dance. The implication is that the Kid, however briefly and falteringly, refuted the Judge's worldview. And then the epigram shows sparks of fire being released all over the landscape. Literally these are the railroads being built. Figuratively, it's more, answering the question posed at the start: "His origins are become remote as is his destiny and not again in all the world’s turnings will there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man’s will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay." It goes without saying that I don't hold to any of these perspectives myself, but it's fascinating to consider new things. And McCarthy's prose is fucking awesome.
Unfollow by Megan Phelps-Roper Most will have heard of the notorious Westboro Baptist Church, and I personally have found their cartoonishly provocative nonsense darkly entertaining over the years. Louis Theroux's documentaries are a central reason for that. They consist almost entirely of the extended family of Fred Phelps and they protest "sinners", particularly homosexuals in offensive ways. This is the memoir of an ex-member. Some time is spent on the background of Fred Phelps, the family patriarch. It's more complex than one might imagine. He became a pastor and a lawyer quite young and spent a lot of time doing admirable work for civil rights - before his ministry of WBC begun to veer in unorthodox directions. It is revealed that he subjected his family to horrific mental and physical abuse. Megan, one of his grandchildren, recounts what it was like growing up in this environment. One can see that she's conflicted. There's the bad stuff but her family is "normal" in so many other ways, and she loves them. She sees the ridicule and hatred showered on them as unwarranted and unproductive. Your mileage may vary, it's psychologically fascinating. Her decision to leave comes after a lengthy period of questioning where she was outwardly compliant but increasingly uncomfortable, stimulated by online conversations with various outsiders. Things come to a head when a coup within the church (led by Steve Drain) sidelines her mother and takes things in an ever more extreme direction - oppressing women, picketing funerals and creating dishonest material. She leaves with her sister and finds much sympathy in the outside world. Intriguingly, she falls in with some Jehovah's Witnesses for a time - concluding that their views share many of the flaws of the WBC, though their approach is humble rather than aggressive. She ends up, as far as one can tell, as an agnostic. Eventually the interlopers kick a sick Fred Phelps out of his own church. Megan gets to visit him before he dies. (It appears that internal tumult continued after the book was published. Steve Drain was also expelled, and apologised for his actions.) An admirable testament - one admires the strength of the human spirit demonstrated here.
The New China Playbook: Beyond Socialism and Capitalism by Keyu Jin The author is a Chinese expat now living in America. She examines the development of the Chinese economy since Deng Xiaoping's initial reforms and explains how its tremendous growth has occurred through successive waves of reform, carefully controlled from the center. As I started reading it, I discovered that it was endorsed by Tony Blair. That tracks. Whilst I learned quite a bit about the Chinese economy (including the role of SOE's, mayor economies, the impact of the one child policy, the obsession with education, the paternalistic attitude) the authors' prescriptions for how China can develop further uniformly align (despite the books title) with adopting capitalist policies. Open up to foreign investment. Liberalise finance. Privatise stuff. Little or no thought is given to how the west can learn from China given our problems, nor any consideration of how China's case might demonstrate how hybrid economic models are superior to market-centric ones. On the flipside, the darker side of Chinese authoritarianism is mostly unaddressed as well. Together this gives a curious impression of a book that doesn't want to tackle contentious questions, written for a technocratic audience.
