Cool. I’ll have to add that to my list. I was not much of a science fiction reader, but a friend of mine turned me on to Rocannon’s World and I’ve been steadily reading all the Hainish novels. The Dispossessed still feels so relevant today. Maybe even more relevant.
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My husband has been prodding me to read Yukio Mishima’s The Temple of the Golden Pavilion for ages now. I finally got around to starting it yesterday, and it’s fascinating. I’m curious if any of you have read it (or would be interested in reading it. Book club anyone?)
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I have not read that one, but I liked the two Mishima novels I have read: The Sound of Waves and Spring Snow. He is not a high priority for me, but if I ran across a title at a used book sale, I would probably buy it and read it.
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I’m vaguely interested as I read some Mishima years ago in school but don’t remember anything, and am looking for something to read anyway. I’ll try to get it from the library
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The Temple of the Golden Pavilion has been on my radar for some years now. I’ve never been able to find a copy, but I expect I’ll try again sometime.
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Current reading (yeah, I’m that kind of crazy):
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James Lovelock: Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence
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James Lovelock: Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth
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Arik Kershenbaum: The Zoologist’s Guide to the Galaxy: What Animals on Earth Reveal about Aliens – and Ourselves
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Before publication of The Fatal Shore in 1986, Robert Hughes was best known as an art critic, seemingly an unlikely person to produce an acclaimed history of Australia. But the book was indeed very well received and for good reason. It has all the elements readers look for in a compelling narrative, and it’s presented in language that’s accessible and expertly crafted. It really is an excellent book.
That being said, it took me over thirty years to work up enough nerve to read it again. Australia in its prison colony phase was a proper hellhole for the convict population, most of whom were not hardened criminals, many of them having drawn a seven year sentence for petty theft. Nor was life any picnic for anyone else not atop the food chain. Resentful soldiers hadn’t entered military service to become permanent jailkeepers and chain gang overseers. Farmers struggled to raise crops from obstinate soil in regions subject to catastrophic bush fires. And the aborigines, of course, were accorded about as much standing as vermin.
Robert Hughes focuses primarily on convict life, and to say that he does so unflinchingly would be quite an understatement. If you like your narratives with intense sensory detail, consider the following:
----- A ship’s bilge so foul and nauseating that the fumes were said to blacken the buttons on the officers’ tunics.
-----A convict who’d been flogged so many times that his back appeared permanently stripped of flesh, with portions of his collarbone standing out “like two Ivory Polished horns.”
Female convicts assembled in a soldiers barracks, stripped naked with numbers painted on them, performing the “dances of the Mermaids.”
-----Various corpses strewn across the Tasmanian wilderness with hunks of flesh cut away to feed their desperate fellow escapees.
-----Ants carrying off pieces of flesh scattered by the cat-o’-nine-tails.
-----The skeletal remains of Trucanini, “Queen of the Aborigines” displayed in a glass case at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery.
I should emphasize here that The Fatal Shore has no shortage of compassion, outrage, and even humour. If my recommendation seems lukewarm, it’s because I want potential readers to understand that this is about as far from light reading as you can get. There are six hundred densely worded pages, few of them failing to address something horrific. If you’re going to take the plunge, take a deep breath first. Come to think of it, take several.
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I am still slowly progressing with my rereading of Montaigne (the Elizabethan translation by Florio is a challenge). I am approaching the halfway point as I am in the middle of “An Apologie of Raymond Sebond,” an essay of some 85,000 words that is the greatest compilation of ancient animal folklore that I know of.
I have broken this up with several other books. Final Reckonings, Volume 1 of the Selected Stories of Robert Bloch is delightful. Bloch was a superb storyteller. I wish I had the other four volumes, but I could not afford them when they were new, and now they are unfindable in used book stores. Also read The Early Pohl, which has some pioneering ideas in its novice stories, and A. Conan Doyle’s The Horror of the Heights and Other Tales of Suspense, a reminder that Doyle was a very good writer.
A reading of two late Clifford Simak stories, “The Marathon Photograph” and “Grotto of the Dancing Bear” (a Hugo winner), has prodded me into undertaking a project I have long contemplated: reading or rereading all of Simak’s novels in order. Obviously I am a big fan of Simak, the most underrated of the Golden Age writers. So far I have reread three: Cosmic Engineers (1939), Time and Again (aka Time Quarry, 1950), and Empire (1951). Cosmic Engineers is nostalgically attractive—with flights between galaxies, God-like aliens, and saved universes (yes, plural); from this first novel, we see Simak’s strong belief in the brotherhood of all life. Time and Again did not hold up so well, I am sorry to say. The philosophical musings in it drag, and the rather sedate time war has been much better done by Leiber’s Destiny Times Three and Change War stories and by Barrington J. Bayley’s The Fall of Chronopolis. In contrast, Empire rose in my estimation. It gives a fine description of the overthrow of a space-age energy monopoly that dominates the colonized planets.
Currently reading, for my SF book group, A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe by Alex White, a very well-written space adventure, but I am afraid that this will end up being only an adventure story.
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I’m a big Dune fan so I’ve been re-reading the series, and generally jumping up and down and getting excited for the movie.
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Dick Harrison, De Dertigjarige Oorlog
Deals with the 30 years war in Europe from 1618-1648.
Subtitle of this book: The very first world war.
(And also the first war in which printed media played a significant part).
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Someone drew my attention to an author known for (and screening) “The Martian”. Project Hail Mary-Andy Weir
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In the last two days, I finished two nonfiction books that had been in progress for a while. The American Plague by Molly Caldwell Crosby is an excellent history of yellow fever in the United States (focusing on the 1878 Memphis outbreak) and of the research effort to identify the vector and the causative virus and to develop preventive measures. The book is, however, about a third too long, the curse of so many modern histories and biographies, which always seem to be trying to be the definitive work.
No such problem mars the superlative quality of David Grann’s The Lost City of Z, which was made into a movie some years ago (I never saw it). It succeeds in being a definitive history of Colonel Percy Fawcett, who is tragically more famous for his obsession and disappearance than for his significant early exploration work. On six expeditions before WW I, he surveyed the Amazon boundaries for the governments of Brazil, Bolivia, and Peru, probably averting at least one war. In my youth, when I read a lot of exploration literature, I was particularly enthralled by Fawcett’s story. Among the books I read were Exploration Fawcett, by his son, and Peter Fleming’s first book, Brazilian Adventure (about his search for Fawcett), in addition to numerous historical newspaper articles. I always wanted to hear about those early expeditions, which no one detailed until this book.
Grann’s book was also an eye-opener regarding the revolution in Amazonian archeology that has occurred in the last 25 years. I used to read a lot of archeology and visit sites all over the U.S., but I have been out of touch for a long time. It turns out that Amazonia appears to have had a surprisingly large population in ancient times (decimated by the diseases brought by the colonists) with a culture having several points of similarity to the mound-building culture in the U.S. I plan to find and read a couple of the academic books about this.
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Two books for the dark days at the end of this year.
History of the book dealers and printers in the 17th century, when Holland (mainly Amsterdam and Leiden) was dominating the international book scene.
500 pages.
Autobiography of Geert Mak’s family in the 20th century.
640 pages.
Both are - as far as I know - not (yet?) translated into english.
Very interesting books. Having these two companions for these dark days feels good, don’t even mind too much that we are locked down again for a month.
Correction: The first book was published as The Bookshop of the world. Making and trading books in the Dutch Golden Age.
And later translated into Dutch.
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Joan Didion, an excellent writer from Sacramento California, died yesterday at age 87. She’s remembered primarily as an essayist, especially for two outstanding collections, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, which I’ve read, and The White Album, which I haven’t. There’s much more to her body of work. In particular I’d like to read The Year of Magical Thinking, reflections on personal loss and managing grief.
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Umberto Eco on the look for a book in his library
https://twitter.com/paul_vacca/status/1479109231571726344?t=dUr-IdcujFFGvYa5WM2G9w&s=19
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Just finished: James E. Lovelock – “Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth”
Now: Erwin Schrödinger – “What is Life?”
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I read the Schrödinger book ages ago and was actually a bit disappointed by it. That may have been because of the huge reputation it had; to me it seemed somewhat dated, even then.
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