Closing in on a Millennium (The Reading List)

So, so far this week has been a good week for reading. I've finished three books in the last three days, one per night. I'll see if I can't get around to making posts on all three, but quite apart from enjoying them for their own sake, they've also made me v. aware of the passage of time. That's because they're numbers II.2984, II.2985, and II.2986 respectively of my Reading List. So, just another fourteen books to go before I reach the three thousandth book I've read all the way through since beginning the list in August 1981. I keep going back and forth over whether I shd pick out some special book --say, LotR--to mark the occasion, or simply let the count fall where it may, like an odometer rolling over. Guess we'll soon see, prob. sometime this summer.

By the way, the 'II' is to indicate that this is the start of a new count, there having been a break in the continuity when I lost the notebook containing the original list of some six hundred titles which I'd started in August 1975 (I accidently left it on the Underground during my first visit to England). I was able to re-construct all but the last twenty or so entries, but still decided it was better to start over than to never get the tally right again. So, like the Mayan Long Count calendar will do this winter, I simply started over from a new number 1. One of these days I'm going to get the whole thing typed up; it'll be interesting to see how often I re-read some old favorites, how long it's been since I read some things, and how long ago some books became important to me.

The count does not include audiobooks, or any book I don't finish, though occasionally I'll group several short items into a single entry. I've recently (Jan.2010) started keeping a more informal list of audiobooks, which now stands at 35 entries --though to be fair, one of those entries is the entire FAERIE QUEENE (or rather as much as of it as Spenser wrote), and another the OLD TESTAMENT, both of wh. kept me going for months. It also leaves out manga, most rpg material, and almost everything I read on the computer -- so even at 2986 the tally only represents a selective portion of what all I read.

--JDR

Just read: DISSECTING CTHULHU: ESSAYS ON THE CTHULHU MYTHOS, ed. Joshi (finished Tuesday); THE LACQUER SCREEN, a Judge Dee novel by Rbt van Gulik (finished Wednesday); MY FIVE TIGERS, by Lloyd Alexander (finished last night).

Currently reading: Arne Zettersten's memoir/biography of Tolkien (begun Wend.), GKC's ORTHODOXY (begun last night, on the Kindle), and JUDGE DEE AT WORK (this morning over breakfast)

Dirda on Doyle (and Dunsany)

So, quite by chance on Monday* we learned that the author of a new book on Arthur Conan Doyle (called ON CONAN DOYLE) wd be giving a talk or reading Tuesday night up at Elliott Bay Books, one of our favorite (but rarely visited, due to location) Seattle bookstores. We made plans to attend, if all went well, but in the event weren't able to make it -- not surprising, considering the workday schedule, traffic, early darkness, &c. A pity, but so it goes.

Curiously enough, my attention had been drawn to Dirda just a few days before in a post to the MythSoc list by Wendell Wagner, who included the quote:

"What Conan Doyle is to the detective story, Dunsany is to the modern fantasy: the Master"

That's a statement I agree with completely. There were detective stories before Doyle (e.g., Poe's Dupin), and there was fantasy fiction before Dunsany (cf. Wm Morris). But each man remade the genre, so that everyone who came after was influenced by their achievement.** It's rare to come upon a right-minded individual who feels as I do on this point, so I'm naturally am curious to find out more, being both a Dunsany scholar (one of the few people who can claim that, I suspect) and a longtime admirer of the Holmes stories.

I haven't been able to find a copy of Dirda's book yet, but thanks to Google Books I've now discovered that most of his discussion of Lord D. focuses on the Jorkens stories. This is rare; most people who know Dunsany at all know him through his so-so novel THE KING OF ELFLAND'S DAUGHTER; those who really like him know of his early short stories (the ones written between 1905 and 1916), which are superb,*** and perhaps a few of his plays like A NIGHT AT AN INN. But, on further reflection, Dirda's praise of the Jorkens tales makes sense; they're club stories, and probably the most Holmesian of Dunsany's work (in the 22B Baker Street sense, not in the content)**** In this he's in agreement with S. T. Joshi, who also admires the later Dunsany and once chided me for my agreeing with Dunsany himself (and Lovecraft, for that matter) that Dunsany's later work marked a significant falling off. Dunsany is one of those people who kept on writing long after he'd run out of things to say, and his lesser later works damaged his reputation and got in the way of folks rediscovering his earlier masterpieces.

Still, I'm glad to see Dirda give praise where praise is due, and look forward to reading his book about Doyle -- a fascinating, talented, and gullible man who created a character more memorable than himself.

--John R.

*as in I saw part of the Seattle newspaper lying abandoned at a table when I stopped in a coffee shop at Kent Station to have some tea while I waited for Janice to get off work, and glancing through it saw a piece about Dirda's pending presentation.

**one might extend the example to include Wells for science fiction, though there the match is not quite so tight (there's Verne to consider).

***the best body of fantasy short stories in English, by far; perhaps Borges and Kafka are his peers if you go multilingual.

****Dunsany did write some fair detective stories himself, the most famous of which, TWO BOTTLES OF RELISH, Alfred Hitchcock declared the story he'd most wanted to do for ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS, but been unable to because the mores of the time wdn't have stood for it (e.g., the murderer getting off scot-free, quite aside from other unpleasant details we need not go into).

And The WInner Is . . . (NPR Fantasy List)

So, turns out the winner of the '100 Best' Sci-Fi and Fantasy books is none other than our old friend THE LORD OF THE RINGS -- the very book I'd have picked as the all-time best myself.

And it won by a huge landslide, as had been the case with the millennium polls, the old LOCUS polls (1987, I think it was), &c. -- in this case receiving about half of all votes cast. And there's an odd symmetry to see Tolkien and Lewis as far apart as possible and still be on the same list, holding the top and bottom positions, respectively, with Tolkien's masterpiece coming in #1 (with 29,701 votes) and CSL at #100 (with 1452). Or, to put it another way, twenty people voted for Tolkien for every one who voted for Lewis (with THE SILMARILLION mid-way between them at #46*).

Partly these results may have been skewed by the exclusions the judges put on the contest: no young adult books (which left out THE HOBBIT, Pullman, &c) explicitly so as to exclude Rowling fans, and no horror to keep Steven King out. They've taken down the list of nominees, unfortunately, but here's more about the rules:**

http://www.npr.org/2011/06/24/137249678/best-science-fiction-fantasy-books-you-tell-us

And for the actual votes and some observations about who won and perhaps why,

http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2011/08/11/139346998/nprs-top-100-science-fiction-and-fantasy-novels-parsing-the-results

Overall I have to say that my top ten didn't fare too well. Here's the full list of all 100 winners:

http://www.npr.org/2011/08/11/139085843/your-picks-top-100-science-fiction-fantasy-books

Of the books I voted for, LotR won at #1 (as is right and proper), but only five of my other top-ten even made the final 100.

#1 THE LORD OF THE RINGS (Tolkien)

#2 HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE (D. Adams)

#27 THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES (Bradbury)

#29 THE SANDMAN (Gaiman)

#32 WATERSHIP DOWN (R.Adams)

#91 THE ILLUSTRATED MAN (Bradbury)

This means that the brilliant BRIDGE OF BIRDS, which I'd unhesitatingly put in the top ten fantasy novels ever written, doesn't even make their top 100. LUD-IN-THE-MIST doesn't surprise me as much, and good as the FAFHRD & THE GRAY MOUSER stories are they've never had the audience of lesser writers like Howard (in a sense, Leiber is to Howard as Clark Ashton Smith is to Lovecraft). TIGANA's absence doesn't surprise me, but I'd have at least expected Kay's most famous work, THE FIONAVAR TAPESTRY, to have ranked.

As for the books that won, it's enheartening to see that four of the top ten went to living writers; a good sign that the genre's still going strong. I've read fifty-six of the books listed (counting at least one book out of a series, not necessarily every sequel).*** Interestingly, while I'd read nine of the top ten, I've only read eleven of the bottom thirty. Does this mean there's more shared experience towards the top of the list and less towards the other end, or is my experience atypical?

--John R.

*Itself a pretty good rejoinder to those who still claim that no-one ever reads it (e.g., folks like those who posted comments at npr's site about 'Tolkein', too ill-informed about his work to even know his name).

**If you click on one of the links at that page, you can get the results of an earlier (2009) poll in which interestingly enough THE HOBBIT beat out THE LORD OF THE RINGS, ranking at #14 and #18 respectively.

***Speaking of which, I'm sure Terry Pratchett wd have ranked much higher had they not picked two of his books at random and instead listed THE DISCWORLD SERIES as a single entry.

NPR's Top Ten

So, a few days back I learned from Jeff's blog (http://grubbstreet.blogspot.com/2011/08/embarrassment-of-riches.html)

about the current poll on NPR for people to vote for their top ten science fiction and fantasy books. And not long after, the MythSoc list started up several threads about the list, most of which revolved around definitions of what was (and was not) 'science fiction' or puzzlement where all the newcomers (books published within just the past few years) came from.

My first thought, when I skimmed through the books listed, was that half of my own top ten weren't even available as options. That's when I went back and adjusted my expectations: this wasn't the ten best books ever, it was ten best out of the pre-selected pool, as adjusted by Wolfe, Mendlesohn, & Clute. I'd completely missed the original round, but that didn't mean it wdn't be interesting to see what I thought was the best out of what remained.

Here are the ten I wound up voting for:

Bridge of Birds by Barry Hughart

Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser by Fritz Leiber

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury

The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien

Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees

The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury

The Sandman series by Neil Gaiman

Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay

Watership Down by Richard Adams.

of these, the only iffy one for me is the Hitchhiker's Guide, which I chose not for the novelizations but the original radio programs for which he wrote the scripts; that sort of puts it in a different medium from the rest.*

As for Bradbury being on my list twice: if you're going to pick a top ten among writers of science fiction and fantasy, you might as well include the best writer of science fiction of them all among your choices. And I suppose they can stand respectively for his work in science fiction (THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES) and fantasy (THE ILLUSTRATED MAN), more or less.

Jeff mentioned how he had trouble trimming his list down; in contrast, my runner-ups were relatively few:

The Deeds of Paksennarion by Eliz. Moon

The Doomsday Book by Connie Willis

The Fionavar Tapestry by Guy Gavriel Kay

The Silmarillion by J. R. R. Tolkien

of these, Fionavar got edged out by Kay's TIGANA, while THE SILMARILLION got edged out (in my mind anyway) by THE HOBBIT, wh. shd have been on the list. Whereas the first and last book in Moon's series and the Willis wd have made it into my top dozen.

As for books that SHOULD have been on the list, had its compilers's judgment aligned more with my own, here are the ones I think they really missed the boat by not including:

The Book of Three Dragons by Kenneth Morris

The Books of Wonder by Lord Dunsany

The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath by H. P. Lovecraft

The Forgotten Beasts of Eld by Patricia McKillip

The Golden Compass by Phillip Pullman

Hobberdy-Dick by Katharine Briggs

The Hobbit by JRRT

The Land of Laughs by Jonathan Carroll

The Night Land by Wm Hope Hodgson

The Well at the World's End by Wm Morris

Of these, I suspect THE HOBBIT and the Pullman got bumped as 'young adult', but there's really no excuse for the others not being better known and more highly valued, alas. Those of us who know and appreciate them really need to spread the word better.**

--John R.

*Gaiman's SANDMAN doesn't post the same problem for me; here I think the impact comes almost entirely from the literary quality of its scripts, not their 'performance' by various illustrators. And it's a masterful working out of a whole new mythology, which is pretty impressive all by itself.

**the same goes for Clark Ashton Smith's TALES OF AVEROIGNE -- if anyone had ever actually published such a book (i.e., collected his 'Averoigne' stories into a single volume).

The New Arrivals

So, while we were on Whidbey Island (on Tues. the 19th), I got to stop by Kingfisher Books in Coupeville and renew acquaintance with their delightful bookstore cat Miss Broadway Billie, a pastel grey-orange longhair with long, soft fur and a placid, winning disposition (i.e., she purrs vigorously and licks your hand and her shoulder alternately when stroked).* I also took advantage of the brief visit to see if they still had a book I'd looked at and decided against when there two years ago: they did, so I picked it up this time.

That was a mistake, as it turns out. I'm glad to have supported an independent bookstore and all, but the book, despite its interesting premise, was seriously lacking. Called SEVERANCE PACKAGE (by Duane Swierczynski, 2008), it sounded more interesting than it is. Basically a company's staff is assembled for a meeting at which the boss announces there's good news and bad news. The company is being shut down, effective immediately, and they're all out of a job. That's the good news. The bad news is that they're secretly a front for an intelligence agency and they're all being terminated the lethal way: either drink the poisoned champaign or get shot dead; sarin bombs trap the exits for those inclined to make a run for it. What follows is a free for all in which various surviving employees hunt each other down one by one within the sealed-off building. That sounded like it had the potential to be THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR (the old Robert Redford movie) mixed with BATTLE ROYALE (by Koushun Takami, 1999, tr. 2003**), but instead it turned out to be filled with long, lingering descriptions of slow, painful deaths, with multiple characters surviving horrific injuries for improbable durations. It's rare that I definitely abandon a book unfinished (as opposed to putting it down and just never getting back to it, which happens quite frequently), but this one is an exception: back on the shelf it goes, for good.

Later that day, we returned home to find not one but two new books had arrived in the mail in our absence: the first a new biography of J. R. R. Tolkien, the other translations from the Old English.

The first of these, simply titled J. R. R. Tolkien, by Mark Horne [2011], is a new (young adult?) bio in the 'Christian Encounters' series from Th. Nelson -- a series that includes figures you might expect (Jn Bunyan), those who are rather unexpected but who you can easily make a case for being included (Jane Austen, daughter of a minister and sister to two more) or Isaac Newton (who spent a lot of his time trying to rediscover mystical Old Testament measurements), to those whose presence makes me scratch my head and wonder what they were thinking (Winston Churchill? really?). The Tolkien book comes out the same month as the one on one of my personal heroes, George Washington Carver, the man who invented peanut butter to solve a problem in sustainable agriculture practices.***

I'm currently about two-thirds of the way through the Horne book, so I'll hold off on any detailed critique, other than to observe that he does more fictionalizing than I'd like, seems to consider The Silmarillion of little importance to Tolkien's life or career, and has

done relatively little research. Rather than a bibliography, he recommends five books as particularly "important, helpful, and enjoyable": Carpenter's biography (which he paraphrases throughout) and LETTERS OF JRRT (ibid), Garth's GREAT WAR (his source for his account of the TCBS and Tolkien's War service), Leslie Ellen Jones's Greenwood biography (which he often cites for facts which Jones herself derives directly from Carpenter), and Michael White (seemingly unaware of how controversial White's book was). You'd have thought a biography published in 2011 would have taken into account the masses of biographical information published five years earlier in Scull & Hammond's massive J. R. R. TOLKIEN COMPANION & GUIDE: CHRONOLOGY. But you'd be wrong; Horne doesn't even seem to be aware of its existence.

There also something strange going on with his citations: he often credits information readily available in Carpenter or LETTERS to some abstruse source -- as when he claims he found a quote from a JRRT letter not from Carpenter (who includes that exact passage to open a chapter which Horne synopsizes in his v. next paragraph) but in a book called THE MANY FACES OF VIRTUE by one Donald De Marco (Ch.2, Nt9). Similarly, he claims that the information about Tolkien requesting the names 'Beren' and 'Luthien' be carved on his tombstone came from Donald Clark Measels' MUSIC MINISTRY: A GUIDEBOOK, rather than Carpenter (whom he quotes in the following paragraph) (Ch 4, Nt28). I don't have Measels and De Marco's books to see if they in fact contain these quotes, but I find it incredulous to think Horne was forced to learn that information from such out-of-the-way sources when it's easily found in standard works he's paraphrasing immediately before and after.

As one additional oddity, Horne has an odd reluctance to name people. He thus refers on four separate occasions to "Edith's cousin" but never once tells us her name (Jenny Grove). And did Christopher Wiseman really help Tolkien co-create his invented languages, as Horne claims (p. 23)? I'd like to see a source for that.

Finally, the third book to arrive is the last of those I ordered at Kalamazoo back in May, being Craig Williamson's BEOWULF AND OTHER OLD ENGLISH POEMS, w. a Foreword by Tom Shippey (which frankly is what attracted me to the book and, after a quick skim, convinced me to buy it). Having several BEOWULF translations (including Tolkien's) but only a smattering of other OE poetry in translation -- e.g. Pope's SEVEN OLD ENGLISH POEMS and Kennedy's AN ANTHOLOGY OF OLD ENGLISH POETRY--I'm pleased to have a more extensive collection here. Williamson's volume includes "The Battle of Maldon", "Deor", "The Wanderer", "The Seafarer", The Wife's Lament, some Exeter Book riddles, Caedmon's Hymn, two Beastiary poems (including the one JRRT turned into "Fastitocalon"), and a smattering of other pieces, ending on the exceptionally high note of "The Dream of the Rood" (a work more read about than read, unfortunately; it was worth learning a little Old English just to have been able to read this in the original). More later when I get a chance to actually read Shippey's Foreword and Williamson's translations; I have high hopes for this one.

--JDR

current reading: J. R. R. Tolkien (Xian Encounters series) by Mark Horne [2011]

....................................

*all characteristics she shares with another store cat I got to revisit yesterday (Saturday), Miss Millie, the cat-in-chief at Wild Birds Unlimited in Burien, who looks enough like Billie to be her sister.

**itself the subject of the most pug-ugly manga adaptation I've ever seen.

***here's the full list given in the back of the Tolkien book of their "Close Encounters of the Christian Kind" (their header, not mine): Jane Austen, Anne Bradstreet, Wm F. Buckley, Jn Bunyan, Winston Churchill, Isaac Newton, St. Francis, St. Patrick, D. L. Moody, Sergeant York, Galileo, Geo. Washington Carver, & JRRT.

After Deadline

So, no posts this past week because I've been on deadline, which always soaks up all my time and mental energy. Finished it up yesterday and so got to spend the evening decompressing, first with having some friends over for an Anime Night* and then staying up late reading. Today we went for a walk and then had book group; tonight I got together some notes for the project flagging potential concerns --details that might still need changed, bits of missing information, and the like. Tomorrow's the official turnover (wd have been last night, but it's too big to email as an attachment, even when broken into multiple pieces. So tomorrow it's get this project off my desk, straighten up and put away papers and reference books associated with it, and clear the deck for my next project -- in this case, resumption of work on my Kalamazoo piece (abruptly broken off about five weeks ago).

Anime Night

The offerings: KURAU PHANTOM MEMORY (first two episodes), STARSHIP OPERATORS (first episode), NEON GENESIS EVANGELION (random episode from the original 1995 series), and GUNSMITH CATS (first episode). We wd have watched SUMMER WARS but cdn't find a way to play the blueray disk which was all we had available.

Of these, I'd say KURAU went over the best -- that in a hundred years we'll have both flying cars and bicycles sounds more like a believable future than most depictions. But while I find the idea behind STARSHIP OPERATOR a hoot, the depiction of a war sponsored by a news network as a reality-show seemed too bizarre for most. With EVANGELION what struck us was the poor quality of the dub and also how badly the animation held up; with GUNSMITH CATS the photorealism of some elements (e.g., the city streets of Chicago) was what mainly caught our eye.

Reading

Although I stayed up late (1.40am) I didn't quite finish my current Kindle book, THE SPHINX OF THE ICE FIELD by Jules Verne -- although the new waterproof cover for the Kindle helped. This is a book I looked for in vain when I first learned about it in the late seventies, read a chapter from in a Chaosium collection about a decade ago, and now easily found for 99 cents for the Kindle (although unfortunately full of typographical glitches, either badly scanned or incompetently typed-in).

For those who haven't read it (which is, frankly, practically everybody), this is Verne's sequel to Edgar Poe's only novel, THE NARRATIVE OF A. GORDON PYM OF NANTUCKET. I'm a great admirer of Poe's original, which I view as a long nightmare the narrator finally wakes up from at the end. Verne's take on it is an odd mix -- at one point he summarizes Poe's tale (a summary which takes up 10% of the length of Verne's whole novel!) and in the main seems to be trying to follow Poe's story closely while trying to make it a little more believable -- but his own portrayal of the antarctic is just as impossible as Poe's despite being written sixty years later when he shd have been able to draw on a lot more real-world discoveries. The idea of a sequel to Poe is an interesting one; too bad it's undone by bad story-telling and bad science.

This is the first time I've read one of Verne's late, lesser-known, works, and the experiment doesn't encourage me to explore more. In fact, having gone to a good deal of trouble to find a faithful modern translation of the last two Verne's I re-read, THE MYSTERIOUS ISLAND and JOURNEY TO THE CENTRE OF THE EARTH, as opposed to a standard out-of-copyright translation of FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON, I think I'll opt for the old-fashioned translations henceforth -- I've concluded Verne's appeal comes entirely from the ideas rather than the quality of his prose. That is, he's a Clarke, where the idea is everything, rather than a Bradbury, who actually writes well.

The Beavers of Kent

During our walk, we saw two bald eagles, a flicker, some shy ducks, a bird I mistook for a jay which turned out to be neither jay nor woodpecker, several tiny bushtits (who seem to be back -- perhaps another sign of spring's being on the verge of being here?), and of course crows. We saw more signs of the beaver who seems to have taken up residence in the little creek/drainage ditch that runs alongside our complex. Last week we noticed several small trees that had been chopped down along the creek's sloping bank, which on closer examination turned out to look just like the work of a beaver. Then a few blocks further down towards the Kent wetlands Janice spotted the dam -- a small dam, true, befitting a small creek, but a little too regular to be an accidental jam. We haven't seen the beaver yet,* but it's amazing to think there's one living just a few blocks from here in the narrow space on the creek's gully that runs between 64th street (a four-lane highway) on the one side and a bunch of warehouses. I guess like the raccoons and possums, the crows and the coyote, urban wildlife lives alongside us because there isn't anyplace else left to live.

Book Group

Our Mithlond meeting went really well: a lively discussion both of the book itself (JOHANNES CABAL, DETECTIVE) -- e.g. how nice it is to read a story where the protagonist is smart and well-motivated to do what he does, rather than someone who keeps doing stupid things because the book wd end if he did the obvious and natural thing. The discussion was far-ranging, as usual, but kept coming back (more or less) to the topic at hand. A good session. Plus, of course, the host cat (Max) was his usual delightful self.

--John R.

*actually, now that we've seen the little dam and chewed-down trees, I remember that not long after we moved in here we once or twice spotted something in that part of the creek which I thought was a muskrat (there having been plenty of these in Whitnel Park back in Hales Corners) -- but that was the better part of a decade ago, so I suspect this must be a newcomer looking to establish his or her territory. Here's wishing him luck.

THE VOYNICH MANUSCRIPT

So, Janice pointed out to me a news story Friday (thanks, Janice!) which included some news about THE VOYNICH MANUSCRIPT and a link to a somewhat more detailed story (see link to the latter, below).

Sometimes called 'the most mysterious book in the world', this is a unique volume now in the Beinecke at Yale about which almost nothing is known: not its author, or when it was written, or the alphabet it uses, or even what language it's written in. No other example of this writing has ever been found, so there's nothing to compare it with.

Since the manuscript re-surfaced in 1912 (having first turned up in the 1630s, only to vanish again in the 1660s), there have been many attempts to crack the code and translate the text, all to no avail. One school of thought held that it'd been written by Friar Roger Bacon* [d.1294] and later owned by Dr. John Dee** and, possibly, the notorious Edward Kelley, but there was no proof of any of this.

Now, at last, we have something more-or-less definite: carbon-14 dating that shows the paper it's written on dates from the early 1400s -- that is, a little after Chaucer's time, and more than a century after Bacon's death. And it looks like the ink and coloring for the many illustrations and illuminations and decorations are also from the first half of the same century. So that gives us a good idea of the time period, but brings us no closer to knowing who wrote it and what it says.

It's my private belief that it's not only an invented script but also an invented language (like a Sindarin text in tengwar), probably only ever known by one person. I doubt it'll ever be translated, unless another, more accessible, piece in the same script shows up (and after ninety-nine years of searching, and two World Wars devastating Europe, that seems pretty unlikely). Still, it's a tantalizing possibility . . .

Here's the link:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1355978/Is-real-life-Da-Vinci-Code-decoded-Scientists-finally-work-age-mystery-manuscript.html?ito=feeds-newsxml

For anyone who wants to know more, I'd recommend M. E. D'Imperio's THE VOYNICH MANUSCRIPT -- AN ELEGANT ENIGMA (Aegean Park Press, n.d. [circa 1976]), which surveys all that's known and much that's speculated about the manuscript, summarizing the major arguments that have been put forth in favor of this or that theory (including several purported translations). Too bad there's no proper facsimile edition: a few pages are available online, but they're only a fraction of the whole. Not that I cd read it, of course, but it'd be nice to get a sense of the whole for once. And it'd be an interesting thing to have around -- after all, though I've only barely skimmed it, I prize my big facsimile of Casaubon's 1659 edition of A TRUE & FAITHFUL REVELATION OF WHAT PASSED FOR MANY YEARS BETWEEN DR. JOHN DEE . . . AND SOME SPIRITS, this being a transcription of Dee's sessions with Edward Kelley, who claimed to be receiving messages (sometimes in Enochian) from angels.

--John R.

*one of the two heroes of one of my favorite novels, John Bellairs' THE FACE IN THE FROST, as well as the main character of Roger Greene's famous but little-read old play FRIAR BACON & FRIAR BUNGAY [1592?], which tells the story of The Brass Head. In real life, he wrote a wonderful little tract called ON THE NULLITY OF MAGIC, which anticipates Reginald Scot by more than three hundred years.

**one of the two most gullible men who ever lived.

The Most Depressing Book I've Ever Read

So, yesterday I finally finished the audiobook of HUMAN SMOKE by Nicholas Baker, a book I tried to read several months back and had to give up on; it was simply too depressing. A few weeks back I gave it another go, this time as an audiobook, which I've been finding a good way to get through long or difficult books. Even so I had to put it aside twice for weeks at a time.

Why so depressing? Essentially this is the story of the people who saw World War II coming years ahead of time and did everything they could to head it off -- unsuccessfully. Then, once the war starts, it documents the opposing viewpoints of those who want to protect civilian populations and bring the war to an early conclusion vs. those who target civilians for bombing campaigns and death camps and insist on an all-out unconditional-surrender total war. It concludes on December 31st, 1941, when the death camps were just getting started; Baker observes in his Afterword that "Most of the people who died in the Second World War were at that moment still alive."

There are plenty of surprises here, such as the phrase 'The Iron Curtain' being coined by Goebbels to describe English censorship of Britain's newspapers. Or that it was the British, not the Luftwaffe, that started the bombing of non-military targets early in the war. Or that a year and a half before Pearl Harbor FDR had already drawn up plans for the Chinese to firebomb Tokyo, using bombers bought from the Americans, flown by an American pilot, and with an American in charge of releasing the payload.

One thing I wd never have suspected is that Herbert Hoover, of all people, comes across favorably (something I never thought I'd hear myself say): essentially the famine-relief work Truman appointed him to lead in 1945/46 was something he'd been trying to do since the fall of France and the Low Countries in 1940: send food to prevent starvation, especially of children, especially of civilian populations in occupied territories. Churchill had prevented the aid from getting through the Naval Blockade he'd instigated early in the war, on the theory that (a) it might be diverted to feed Germans and (b) the more desperate people became, the more likely they were to rise up and drive out the Germans.

By the same logic, Churchill claimed* that the bombing of civilians in Germany itself would eventually lead to a coup or revolution that wd topple the Nazi regime. Perhaps one of the most heartbreaking bits was the conclusion by the British, about two years into the war, that saturation bombing of German cities wd have no appreciable contribution towards winning the war (since on average they only killed .75 people and wounded 1.25 more per bomber per raid) but decided to keep it up anyway, since they thought it was good for morale. It was particularly disheartening how some people who said they were opposed to the war suddenly reversed themselves -- e.g. Dashiell Hammett after Russia entered the war and Charles Lindberg after Pearl Harbor -- while the Quakers and a few others (e.g. Jeanette Rankin) carried on both opposing the war and trying to mitigate the damage.

What makes this book interesting stylistically is that Baker didn't write it: he assembled and edited it. Its text is made up entirely of quotes or summaries from letters, diaries, newspaper articles, memos, memoirs, speeches, propaganda leaflets, and the like, all arranged in chronological order. He lets the people who caused the chaos and those who had to live through it speak for themselves.

I found his dedication in the Afterword at the very back of the book particularly eloquent:

"I dedicate this book to the memory of Clarence Pickett & other American & British pacifists. They've never really gotten their due. They tried to save Jewish refugees, feed Europe, reconcile the United States & Japan, & stop the war from happening. They failed, but they were right." [emphasis mine]

--and now, on to some lighter, or at least less grueling, fare.

--JDR

current reading: JOURNEY TO THE CENTRE OF THE EARTH by Verne

current audiobook: THE MAN WHO WD BE KING by Kipling.

*in general, Churchill comes across quite poorly; it's hard not to conclude that he did everything he cd to bring about the war, then everything he could to expand the war, and finally everything he cd to extend the war as long as possible. Quite a legacy!

The New Arrivals

So, things having been v. busy here of late; with a deadline three weeks away and a handful of do-this-right-away smaller projects having clustered round demanding immediate attention, posts have been light on the ground. I shd have a string of posts up starting tomorrow -- but in case I get delayed again, in lieu of waiting till I have time to complete a proper post, here's a quick list of the sudden onslaught of books and Tolkien-related journals that have arrived here within the past week.

(1) THE RING & THE CROSS: CHRISTIANITY & THE LORD OF THE RINGS, from Fairleigh-Dickinson Press, ed. Paul Kerry. [2011]

(2) CATALHOYUK by Ian Hodder [2006]

(3) BOOK GIRL & THE FAMISHED SPIRIT by Mizuki Nomura [2006; tr. 2011]

(4) PARMA ELDALAMBERON Vol. XIX: Quenya Philology [2010]

(5) FINGAL: AN ANCIENT EPIC POEM IN SIX BOOKS by "Ossian" (=James MacPherson) [facsimile of 1762 edition]

(6) THE TOLKIEN COLLECTOR, issue thirty-one. [December 2010]

(7) MIRKWOOD: A NOVEL by Steve Hillard [2010]

—some of these I've known about and had on order for a long time (e.g., the Fairleigh-Dickinson book) or made previously unsuccessful attempts to get (Catalhoyuk, Fingal), while others are recent orders (Mirkwood) and still others arrived unexpectedly though v. welcome (Tolkien Collector).

More later.

--John R.

current song: "Beautiful World" from EVANGELION 2.0

What I've Been Reading (Part One)

So, after reading so many books from the Bad Old Days -- Haggard's "Long Odds", Doyle's "MARACOT DEEP", Alexander Macdonald's THE LOST EXPLORERS -- I thought I needed to take a break and read a few things written on this side of the great Politically Correct divide, where racist thought and race-bating words occur only in the mouths of unregenerate villains and Tea-Party types.

Just before my recent trip started I finished up YSABEL [2007], a Guy Gavriel Kay book I'd tried several times before but always failed to get beyond the first chapter; this (fourth?) time I finally made it beyond the opening and all the way through to the end. A new Kay book is always good news, but this was a curious one for three reasons: it was the first to reuse characters who had appeared in a previous novel, it's the first to re-visit a geographical/cultural area he's used before, and it's the first to be completely set in the modern-day. Well worth reading, but not his best (that, I'd say, is still TIGANA), though I loved the portrait of the eccentric English writer who'd settled in Provence. Ironically, it took me so long to read this that he's now got a new one out -- this time I think calqued on ancient China.

On the trip itself, I read Anthony Bourdain's MEDIUM RAW [Kindle edition], in which in keeping with his persona he swears up a blue streak but carefully avoids racist slurs (proudly taking the part of Guatemalan line-cooks over the James Beard folks any day). Not his best -- he seems to be ambivalent throughout, devoting half of each essay to countering the previous half -- though it gets better towards the end, particularly when he's naming people he considers heroes & villains in the cooking world, and why (hint: writing a review trashing a restaurant he once worked for as a way to get back at him over a slight makes you an uber-villain in Bourdain's book, as does dissing the people who actually cook yr food).

Next up was a young-adult novel that'd caught my eye at the Federal Way Borders a week earlier, THE MYSTERIOUS BENEDICT SOCIETY by Trenton Lee Stewart [2007]. The first in a series about four orphans/semi-orphans/runaways brought together by an eccentric narcoleptic to undertake an undercover mission. Good fun, esp. for showing how each has a v. different approach to a problem. They're rather like a fledgling superhero team without any actual super powers; recommended.

After that came another Kindle book, this time THE WEED THAT STRIPS THE HANGMAN'S BAG by Alan Bradley [2010], the follow-up to his excellent first book featuring 11-yr-old chemist/detective/future poisoner Flavia de Luce, THE SWEETNESS AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PIE. This one didn't quite recapture the impact of the first but was enjoyable enough that I'm looking forward to the third in the series, already in the works.

Finally, on the flights back and on the recovery day after my midnight touchdown, I zipped through JOHANNES CABAL, THE DETECTIVE by Jonathan L. Howard [2010], about a necromancer fleeing on a zeppelin who's forced to assume the role of detective after an unexpected string of disappearances and murders break out on board. The writing of this one is a delight, full of phrases you want to underline or quote. Or maybe it just somehow punched all my buttons. Kind of a mix of Randall Garrett's breeziness and Clark Ashton Smith's cold-bloodedness (though without Smith's vocabularic exuberance). I know I'll want to read the first book in the series, and will be keeping an eye out to see if there's a third.

(continued next post)

--John R.

What I've Been Reading

So, since re-reading Gaiman's CORALINE (II.2774) and finally finishing up Graham Hancock's FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS (II.2775), the books I've been reading have been a miscellaneous lot.

First was XxxHolic: ANOTHER HOLIC (II.2776), a novelization of the 'CLAMP' manga that turns out to be three short stories, not an actual novel. The first is directly derived from a chapter in the manga and episode of the anime (the woman with self-destructive behavior). The second is v. much in the spirit of the manga (a woman gets a cellphone call from her dead friend at the same time every day). And the third ventures far afield (one day Watanuki wakes up and finds he can no longer see spirits -- or Yuko's shop). Interesting, but less so than either the manga (which seems to be building to a climax) or the anime deriving from it.

Next was a book about ex-presidents I'd spotted in Borders but decided it was better to wait and get from the library, CITIZEN-IN-CHIEF: THE SECOND LIVES OF THE AMERICAN PRESIDENTS by Leonard Benardo & Jennifer Weiss (II.2777). It's full of fascinating trivia roughly divided into several topics: the growth of the 'ex-presidency' as a quasi-official institution (they get budget and a staff*), the development of the Presidental Library from FDR & Truman's modest establishments to the bloated policy centers of recent presidents; ex-presidents' fiscal woes (Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Grant, Truman) vs. cashing in (Ford, Reagan, Clinton, &c); attempts by ex-presidents to advise or criticize their successors (something few of them have refrained from trying at one time or another); ex-presidents who re-entered politics (JQ Adams in the House, Tyler in the Confederate Congress, A. Johnson in the Senate); and those who devoted themselves to good works (Carter is the shining example here, but also Hayes,** who devoted himself to black education. Who knew?). An interesting book, but not to be relied upon in its details -- there are a fair number of factual errors and other gaffs, most involving dates and generalizations (i.e., the claim that Tyler and Buchanan were distressed by Lincoln's re-election in 1864 -- Tyler*** having in fact died in 1861).

As for my current book, yesterday I started in on UNCHRISTIAN: WHAT A NEW GENERATION REALLY THINKS ABOUT CHRISTIANITY by David King w. Gabe Lyons, a Xian pollster's attempt to convince his fellow evangelicals just how unpopular they've become over the past decade or two (of the fifteen-to-thirty year-olds he polled, 91% considered Xians anti-gay, 87% considered them judgmental, 85% thought them hypocritical) and why. It's a sincere and well-intentioned effort, but it's mildly troubling that (a) a bunch of creationists tracts turned up on amazon when I clicked on this (as in 'readers who liked this book also liked . . .') and (b) the writer himself displays a lot more of the attitudes he deplores than he realizes -- for example, in his assertion that Xians should be anti-gay ("identify homosexual behavior as morally unacceptable"), or his apparent inclusion of Mormans among the unchurched/nonXians he's polling. And of course it's hard to take seriously anyone who praises Charles Colson -- but to be fair, that's Lyons, in his Afterword, not King himself.


And there's no lack of other books still waiting to be read: the Fimi, the Kane, a book on the Black Sea/Noah's Flood theory, &c. Just today the mail brought TOLKIEN'S HEROIC QUEST, by Robert Rorabeck. Although published in the UK, this slim book (128 pages, plus about another twenty pages of notes and bibliography) seems to have originated as a thesis at Florida State University. A quick glance at the mini-biography of JRRT shows up two errors in a page and a half (why on earth did he use Crabbe as his source rather than Carpenter?), and the bibliography is full of odd little gaffs (for example, the author of the Oak Knoll bibliography is given under W as "Waye, Hammond", rather than under H as "Hammond, Wayne"). This does not mean the book itself won't be insightful and interesting; we'll see.

And after that -- FOUCAULT'S PENDULUM, perhaps?

We'll see.

--JDR

...........................
*Before 1958 they didn't even get a pension. Truman, for example, not only didn't get flown home on Air Force One but had to buy his own train ticket, arriving back in Independence more or less broke, & had to move into his mother-in-law's house.

**who I only knew as the "winner" who set the example for Bush v. Gore way back in the stolen election of 1876.

***the only ex-president known to have committed high treason.

The New Arrival: Hilary's book

So, today's mail brought my copy of BLACK AND WHITE OGRE COUNTRY: THE LOST TALES OF HILARY TOLKIEN, edited by Angela Gardner and illustrated by Jef Murray. It's a slim little book, only seventy-three pages, but in addition to some reminiscences of early days cast into semi-fictional form like bedtime stories it has a brief biographical section in the end which publishes for the first time several wonderful photographs of not just Hilary but also Mabel Tolkien (looking like she was going grey early), the two brothers Hilary and JRRT together, and a family shot (circa 1955) that includes both brothers and Aunt Jane. And one real little treasure: two snippets from a previously unpublished Tolkien letter written in 1971.
More later.

--JDR

The New Arrival: Dimitra Fimi

So, yesterday (Tuesday the 27th) the newest book for the Tolkienist's bookshelf arrived: Dimitra Fimi's TOLKIEN, RACE AND CULTURAL HISTORY: FROM FAIRIES TO HOBBITS, just out from Palgrave/Macmillan. I've been hearing good things about Fimi's work from all sides for a while now, but haven't read any of it before. Not having known much about what her topic would be, I'm glad to see there's considerable overlap with a topic I'm interested in: Tolkien's drawing on folklore tradition. Even better, so far as I can tell so far, she draws on different sources than I did in my discussion of the folklore roots of hobbits and Tolkien's other faerie folk -- for instance, she makes no mention of Denham, or hobyahs, or SIR ORFEO, or the MABINOGI. This is all to the good, so far as I am concerned; I'm certain to learn something new by reading her book since she approached the topic by a different route, drawing on different sources, than I did. And although it's a relatively slim volume at 240 pages (roughly two hundred pages of text plus notes, extensive bibliography, and index), the type is small enough that they're relatively dense pages: there's a lot packed into the available space.

I shd also point out that it has a striking cover of a nice Tolkienian green, made by processing a photograph of Mosley Boy through a kaleidoscope.

More to come when I have a chance to do more than dip into it. In the meantime, I shd just observe that Fimi, who's based at the Cardiff University, teaches an online Tolkien class: for more information about that, see http://www.dimitrafimi.com/


--JDR

..................
current reading: MAKING MONEY by Terry Pratchett [2007]

Alan Parson Project

So, I've been a longtime fan of the Alan Parsons Project since discovering their second (and still best) album during my summer at Fayetteville in 1978. Recently I've been trying to track down various odds and ends that I hadn't been able to find before, and thanks to the wonders of the Internet just over the last week or so I've finally gotten three new things.

The first was KEATS, which I first heard of about five years back. A friend (hi Rich) had loaned me a tape of Eric Woolfson's FREUDIANA, which I'd liked v. much and was trying to find a copy of for myself. Woolfson was Parson's partner in all of the albums they made together up through about 1987 or so, after which the two split (which is why there hasn't been an 'Alan Parsons PROJECT' album since, although there have been four 'Alan Parsons' albums, three of wh. have been good, one of them a match for the Project itself in its glory days.

Anyway, I first heard of KEATS as a second Woolfson solo project, in which it (and, puzzlingly, FREUDIANA) was described as a 'soundtrack'. After years of hoping I'd come across it somewhere, even taxing the expertise of the good folks at Silver Platter Records, a renewed search showed it was (a) not by Woolfson, and (b) not a soundtrack. Instead, it was Alan Parsons' studio musicians joining up with a singer to put out an album by themselves.

The results, regrettably, sound like content-free Alan Parsons Project: the sound is there but no concept; song flows into song without leaving an impression behind. You know you're in trouble when the best thing on yr album are the two commentary tracks added years later to the cd in which a member of the group and Alan Parsons himself reminisce about the attempt. So, pleasant enough background noise but only for completists.


The second recent purchase was a newer [2003] album I'd completely missed: a sequel by Woolfson (without Parsons) to their first album together (TALES OF MYSTERY AND IMAGINATION, aka the Poe album) and still one of their three or four bests. Woolfson's follow-up (unimaginatively titled POE: MORE TALES OF MYSTERY AND IMAGINATION) sounds much more like FREUDIANA than it does any Alan Parsons Project album. The main problem is that, while some of the songs are good or at least interesting or amusing, most of them have nothing to do with Poe. Whereas the original Parsons album had all its songs based on Poe stories and poems, that's the case with only four of the twelve songs here. The rest are filled with songs Woolfson somehow feels appropriate to Poe's life and times, like a lullabye his mother might have sung to him as a small child ("Tiny Star". The best song on the album, "Train to Freedom", about building the railroad, has nothing whatsoever to do with Poe, so far as I can tell (other than that they DID build railroads in his lifetime), but is a sort of John Henry spiritual with hints at the underground railroad (wh. Poe, I'm sorry to say, wd probably not have supported). "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" is Poe-based, but gimmicky (it rather resembles the much better "It's Funny You Shd Say That" from FREUDIANA) and sounds like a production number from some musical; "Goodbye to All That", which seems to be inspired by Dunsany* rather than Poe, wouldn't be out of place as an out-take from EVITA. So mark this one down as interesting but not really good; perfect for a completist who enjoys both the musician and his topic (as I do).


The third purchase, and best of all, came courtesy of Itunes. In the course of poking around to find out what Alan Parsons material might be out there that I didn't know about, I came across two songs included in recent deluxe re-releases of classic Alan Parsons Project albums: "Edgar", a song by Woolfson that predates TALES OF MYSTERY AND IMAGINATION (the first Parsons Project album), and "No Answers Only Questions", a Parsons Project song that didn't make the cut for some album, now released as part of a greatest hits package (one of the group's many). Neither is so outstanding that you'd feel robbed not to have had them all these years, but both are unmistakably the real thing, and v. welcome.

And, best of all, all this new music has had me listening to my old Parson Project/Alan Parsons albums more than usual.

--JDR

----------------------
*I'm thinking of the devastating little story "In the Twilight", a first-person account by a drowning man, from THE SWORD OF WELLERAN [1908].

UPDATE (W.10/8): A closer listen and a look at the lyrics shows I was wrong about "Goodbye to All That", which is more a cynical counterpoint to Paul Stookey's "Wedding Song" than anything else. The liner notes for the cd claim it's about Poe's marriage to Virginia, but nothing in the lyrics supports that. --JDR

Crows Show Brand Loyalty

Having now finished IN THE COMPANY OF CROWS AND RAVENS by Jn M. Marzluff & Tony Angell,* have to say I don't think they succeeded in proving their thesis, which was that just as crows adjust their behavior over time to take into account changes in human culture, so too human culture has been influenced in major ways by crows.

Even so, the book is still well worth reading. The best anecdote was an experiment thought up and carried out by one of the authors' eight-year-old daughter. As is well known, crows love french fries. So she put some french fries in a McDonald's bag, and some in a plain brown paper bag. The crows went for the McDonald's bag first every time (IN THE COMPANY, page 225). It's probably not so much that they recognize the logo as that they understand the significance of the whole ensemble -- logo, color of the bag, &c.

For those interested in the topic, Candice Savage's BIRD BRAINS: THE INTELLIGENCE OF CROWS, RAVENS, MAGPIES, AND JAYS [1995; pb. 1997] is not just highly readable but full of beautiful photos (as one would expect from a Sierra Club book). I don't think it's seeped into our consciousness yet that corvids are the smartest of all birds, but this book makes a good case for it. Visually, my favorite image was of a crow scolding a bald eagle from only a foot or so away (page 73); the eagle looks astonished, as if it can't quite believe what it's seeing. I can relate to this one from personal experience; once in a long while I'll see a bald eagle in this area, and most of those times it's being harassed by a number of crows. There's also a bald eagle who likes to perch in a tall tree by the shore in Des Moines, and it always has a cohort of crows in the branches above and behind it fussing at it.

A much deeper look into corvid behavior can be found in Bernd Heinrich's MIND OF THE RAVEN [1999], which carefully documents raven behavior, both from his captive birds and observation in the wild (e.g., on trips to Yellowstone, Greenland, &c). You have to feel sorry for the ravens who went through some of his experiments (like the time he put on a bear suit and went into their cage on all four to see if they'd recognize him. He says they showed great distress, which would pretty much be my reaction if the person who fed me started crawling around on all fours and growling). Still, a fascinating read.

I've not yet been able to bring myself to read SEEKING THE SACRED RAVEN: POLITICS AND EXTINCTION ON A HAWAIIAN ISLAND by Mark Jerome Walters [2006], which I picked up in a bookstore in Hilo last September -- a detailed account of the failed attempt over a decade or so to save the last few Hawaiian Crows from extinction in the wild. While we were on the island I tried to visit the aviary/sanctuary where the last survivors of the species (fifty or so birds) are being bred in captivity, but apparently it's not open to the public. More on this one later.

--JDR


*book #2660 in my ongoing reading list.


current reading: THE BLACK CAMEL by Earl Derr Biggers [1929], one of the Charlie Chan series.