What I read this month, with an emphasis on the 17th Century. In this edition:
The Ornament of the World, by Maria Rosa Menocal
Rules for Direction of the Mind; Principles of Philosophy; The Passions of the Soul, by Rene Descartes
The Law of War and Peace, by Hugo Grotius
The Anatomy of Melancholy, by Robert Burton
Table Talk, by John Selden
Letters and Minor Works, by Blaise Pascal
Barney's Version, by Mordecai Richler
The Goblin Emperor, by Katherine Addison
The Dark Between The Stars, by Kevin J. Anderson
...and the usual assortment of history-based murder mysteries. Enjoy!
We Are The Crazy People: The Anatomy of Melancholy, by Robert Burton
How much altered from that he was! Before blessed and happy, now miserable and accursed; "he must eat his meat in sorrow, subject to death and all manner of infirmities, all kind of calamities. Great travail is created for all men, and an heavy yoke on the sons of Adam, from the day that they go out of their mothers' womb, unto the day that they return to the mother of all things. Namely, their thoughts and fear of their hearts, and their imagination of things they wait for, and the day of death; from him that sitteth in the glorious throne, to him that sitteth beneath in the earth and ashes; from him that is clothed in blue silk and weareth a crown, to him that is clothed in simple linen. Wrath, envy, trouble, and unquietness, and fear of death, and rigour and strife, and such things come to both man and beast, but sevenfold to the ungodly. All this befalls him in this life, and peradventure eternal misery in the life to come.
This is the first of several Huge Motherfracking Tomes I have on my list for the year, and so far the most enjoyable 17th century work I've read this year. But I'm crazy; it's not for everybody. If you're familiar with it at all, it may be from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, in which it is one of three books discovered and read by the creature, from which he gains an understanding --and envy--of humanity.
I've occasionally wondered what Rabelais would be like if he'd left out the romping plot with the giants, and had just stuck with pontificating merrily about every topic under the sun. Now, I have been answered. I expect the work would look a lot like Anatomy of Melancholy. Under the very broad theme of human happiness, Burton discusses All The Things that make a person happy, and All The Things that make her sad, complete with exhaustive catalogues of ways people throughout history have attempted to add to their happiness and subtract from their misery, from weird superstitions to religious consolations to diet and exercise to attitude and behavior and changing the way they feel about things.
It was an odd juxtaposition, reading this alongside Tony Robbins' Mastering the Game (see last month's Bookpost); both are essentially self-help books, five centuries apart, with big differences in "learnedness" and attitude, but in many places giving the same advice.
I Drink, Therefore I Am: Rules for Direction of the Mind; Principles of Philosophy; The Passions of the Soul, by Rene Descartes
From the same consideration of good and evil arise all the passions, but to rank them in order, I distinguish of the time, and considering that they incline us more to look after the future than the present or past, I begin with desire. For not only than when a man desires to acquire a good which he yet has not, or eschew an evil which he conceives may befall him, but when he desires only the conservation of a good, or the absence of an evil, which is as far as this passion can extend itself, it is evident that it always reflects upon the future.
Here, I part company with Descartes and move on to other 17th Century philosophers, of whom there are many. Of these three lesser-read treatises, the first two are further elaboration and demonstration of the principles from Discourse on Method and Meditations (see Bookpost this January). Rules for Direction of the Mind is an early attempt to define the scientific method: Begin with matters we already understand clearly; reduce all things to their simplest components; use matter obtained through our own conclusions, not those of others; etc. Principles of Philosophy, a much longer work, begins with once again telling the reader how to think, then applies this method to learning things about astronomy and earth science. I found it much easier to follow than the Geometry (last month's Bookpost), that utterly daunted me.
Passions of the Soul (my alternative title; "Captain, this is Most Illogical") stands apart from the rest of Descartes. Like Robert Burton ( only much shorter and more organized), it is one of the first things I'm aware of in the "self-help" genre. It claims to locate the source of emotions in a gland within the brain, and, after listing said emotions, gives suggestions as to how one might control with the will one's impulses to fear, hatred, jealousy, and other limiting emotional conditions.
None of these works were actually finished, and so they are naturally rough. All three are worth reading anyway.
War (Huh!) What is it good for?: The Law of War and Peace, by Hugo Grotius
The death of an enemy may proceed either from an accidental calamity, or from the fixed purpose of his destruction. No one can be justly killed by design, except by way of legal punishment, or to defend our lives, and preserve our property, when it cannot be effected without his destruction. For although in sacrificing the life of the man to the preservation of perishable possessions, there may be nothing repugnant to strict justice, it is by no means consonant to the law of charity.
But to justify a punishment of that kind, the person put to death must have committed a crime, and such a crime too, as every equitable judge would deem worthy of death. Points, which it is unnecessary to discuss any further in this chapter, as they have been so fully explained in the chapter on punishments.
Grotius was a Dutchman, writing at a time when the Dutch were nearing final independent nation status and celebrating their new financial and military power by throwing it around. The Law of War and Peace is the first work I know of that attempts to establish in writing a set of principles of international law. The principles range from things that look silly today to things that look self-evident. Some of them made it to the Geneva Convention. Hobbes was clearly influenced by it.
Grotius begins with individual rights of self defense and defense of property, moves on to civil law regarding crimes, property and contracts, and the necessity of being able to enforce these laws within one nation, and finally extrapolates that into relations and contracts between nations. His considerations range from appeals to basic humanity to practical logic to religious considerations and appeals to self-interest on the theory that if we limit our own ability to escalate, the enemy will also be bound by those and then the quality of life in wartime will improve for all. As with most "great books", a great deal of space is devoted to recounting incidents described in Great Books Past as authority. High recommendations.
The Elizabethan Murders: Black Lotus, by Laura Joh Rowland. Queen of Ambition, & A Pawn for a Queen by Fiona Buckley The Silent Woman by Edward Marston
In a pedantic tone, Dr. Miwa explained, "Haru has too much yin, the active aspect. She is excessively influenced by han and huo, external and internal heat. Her dominant emotions are nu and chang, anger and surprise. Although Haru is physically well, her spirit is unhealthy. I've been administering treatment in an effort to cure her symptoms."
"What are her symptoms?" Reiko said, realizing with dismay that Dr. Miwa's statement wasn't going to help Haru.
"Willfulness, selfishness, dishonesty and delusions," Dr. Miwa said. "Sexual promiscuity, disregard for duty and a lack of respect for authority."
--from Black Lotus
I shook my head. "You and I haven't spoken together for some time, Rob. There is something you don't know. I was going to meet Thomas at three o'clock this afternoon, about now, in fact. He couldn't get away from his tutor and I couldn't get away from the pie shop any sooner. Thomas was worried and he wanted to talk to me about it. And now he never will." My voice was grim. From the beginning, Sir William Cecil, the Secretary of State, had sensed that there was something amiss in Cambridge. He had known it in the marrow of his bones, and now I knew that he was right.
--from Queen of Ambition
Barnaby Gill charged around the stage in wild agitation as he tried to rid himself of his burning apparel. His plight earned him no sympathy from the audience. They rocked with laughter and cheered with delight. This act of spontaneous combustion was the funniest thing they had ever seen, and they marvelled at Gill's expertise. When the hapless clown blundered against the backcloth that hung from the gallery above the stage, however, all humour was instantly extinguished. The painted flames of hell were now horrendously real. The playgoers were not, in fact, seeing a remarkable feat by an accomplished comedian. A human being was, literally, on fire in front of them.
--from The Silent Woman
I had first stolen his daughter's betrothed and then sent my uncle himself to jail. It was hardly surprising that he detested me. Nevertheless, it was through the episode of the Tower that he and my aunt had learned of my secret other life. Now I sat sipping their wine and thinking that all this had an ironic side to it. In this hall, I had been shouted at and bullied and even beaten; in this hall I had wept with pain, trembled with fear, and seethed with rage that I dared not express. Now I was the one with the power. Today, they were in such desperation that they wanted to call on my services themselves.
--from A Pawn for a Queen
Laura Joh Roland's Sano Ichiro series keeps getting better, and more feminist, especially given the Feudal Japanese setting, where women are supposedly dainty and obedient. Each book brings more tradition-defying female characters, the most prominent of which is Sano's clever, sword-wielding spouse Reiko.Black Lotus sets aside the rivalry with the chamberlain that set the tone for all but the first book, and centers around a cult of monks with terrifying power and influence over the Shogun himself.
Fiona Buckley's series about Queen Elizabeth's court lady turned spy continues with a rustic adventure in Cambridge, where--shades of the last act of A Midsummer Night's Dream--some locals have planned a playlet to honor the queen's procession through town--a playlet involving swordplay and kidnapping--and Sir William sends Ursula to investigate whether some sort of plot is afoot. Ursula is working undercover in a pie shop owned by an asshole, and must suffer verbal and physical abuse. Most possibilities of foul play are eliminated, and yet there are letters that must be some sort of cipher, and too many dead bodies to be a real coincidence. The actual plot is far-fetched, but the character and atmosphere are excellent. A Pawn for a Queen begins with Ursula headed to Scotland in an unsuccessful attempt to get her cousin back to England before he does something stupid and treasonous, and ends with her avenging his murder. The background has Mary Queen of Scots romancing Lord Darnley, but not getting to the point where Darnley's death throws Scotland into turmoil--that must be reserved for a later book. Also, trigger warnings for the apparent Scottish custom of abducting lasses to far-off castles and forcing them into marriages.
The Silent Woman, Edward Marston's sixth adventure of Lord Westfield's Elizabethan theater company, is a feast of tropes combining a mysterious messenger who dies with the message undelivered, a hidden will, a master highwayman and his spunky femme fatale henchwoman, a cross-dressing female, and secrets from bookholder Nick Bracewell's backstory. As usual, it's more of a romp of an adventure than a whodunnit, but is delightful nonetheless.
Filler: Letters and Minor Works, by Blaise Pascal
A man was cast by a tempest upon an unknown island, the inhabitants of which were in trouble to find their king, who was lost; and having a strong resemblance both in form and face to this king, he was taken for him, and acknowledged in this capacity by all the people. At first he knew not what course to take; but finally he resolved to give himself up to his good fortune. He received all the homage that they chose to render him, and suffered himself to be treated as a king.
But as he could not forget his real condition, he was conscious, at the same time that he was receiving this homage, that he was not the king whom this people had sought, and that this kingdom did not belong to him. Thus he had a double thought: the one by which he acted as king, the other by which he recognized his true state, and that it was accident alone that had placed him in his present condition. He concealed the latter thought, and revealed the other. It was by the former that he treated with the people, and by the latter that he treated with himself.
Do not imagine that it is less an accident by which you find yourself master of the wealth which you possess, than that by which this man found himself king. You have no right to it of yourself and by your own nature any more than he: and not only do you find yourself the son of a duke, but also do you find yourself in the world at all, only through an infinity of chances. Your birth depends on a marriage, or rather on the marriages of all those from whom you descend. But upon what do these marriages depend? A visit made by chance, and idle word, a thousand unforeseen occasions.
Both the Harvard classics set and the Great Books set include a full volume on Pascal centered around the Pensees, which I intend to read later this year. While the Great Books volume also includes several scientific treatises (see last month's Bookpost) and the satirical Provincial Letters, Charles Elliott of the Harvard Classics, again possibly revealing himself as arbitrary and eccentric (see my comments on the "Voyages and Travels" volume last month) apparently just decided that Pensees was too short for one volume, and Provincial Letters would make it too long, so he just threw in 120 pages at the end of correspondence and fragments, which I read this month.
The letters are standard letters, the more interesting of which are preaching a creepy kind of Christianity. Pascal is big on the theory that people need to be made to see themselves as depraved and disgusting by nature, utterly beyond hope and worthy to despair--so that they may then be presented with the saving grace of the One True Religion, the only possible path to any sort of redemption whatsoever, and the path that leads to infinite exaltation. It's a technique that has been adopted by countless infomercials and abusive parents and spouses ever since.
The Pensees were collected from fragments found after Pascal's death and published by heirs. I'm not sure why the "Minor works" included here were not simply a portion of the Pensees; they're about as random, with a few well-written nuggets and thoughts surrounded by rough-draft-ish writing, like you might find in any intelligent person's journal. Elliott also includes some minor scientific writing; not the Treatise on the Vacuum, for example, but the preface to it, and a fragmentary paragraph not included in the final treatise.
No rhyme nor reason that I see.
Google Him: Barney's Version, by Mordecai Richler
You simply can't trust the British. With Americans (or Canadians, for that matter) what you see is what you get. But settle into your seat on a 749 flying out of Heathrow next to an ostensibly boring old Englishman with wobbly chins, the acquired stammer, obviously something in the City, intent on his Times crossword puzzle, and don't you dare patronize him. Mr. Milquetoast, actually a judo black belt, was probably parachuted into the Dordogne in 1943, blew up a train or two, and survived the Gestapo cells by concentrating on what would become the definitive translation of Gilgamesh from the Sin-Leqi-Inninni; and now--his garment bag stuffed with his wife's most alluring cocktail dresses and lingerie--he is no doubt bound for the annual convention of cross-dressers in Saskatoon.
Witty, but depressing. I remember Mordecai Richler from the Jacob Two-Two books that delighted me in my childhood. I wasn't sure what to expect from him in a "grown up" book, but it wasn't this.
The story is the unreliable-narrator (because he's coming down with dementia in his old age) memoir of an entertainment tycoon who has partly succeeded, partly been victimized, and partly made a train wreck out of his life, with the subtext that what happened to him and those around him is a microcosm of the human condition in general. He was molested by the teacher he had a crush on. He was tried and acquitted for the murder of his best friend, who has disappeared under incriminating circumstances but isn't necessarily even dead (Barney says he didn't do it, but you never know because Unrelaiable Narrator). After two awful marriages, he finally settled into the good one, but managed to ruin it.
It's darkly comic, down to the afterword by the son, who also includes footnotes correcting the various malapropisms of dementia sprinkled throughout the book. The humor is the kind used by Woody Allen in a poignant story, casting character flaws and other foibles in an absurd what-can-you-do sort of way. I feel for it. I work out a lot, and I get through the routines in part by laughing at the indignities of the human body. why not laugh at the human soul the same way? It's even more ridiculous, after all.
Also, The Malapropisms of Dementia is the new name of my Robin Hitchcock/Warren Zevon cover band.
Elvish Impersonator: The Goblin Emperor, by Katherine Addison
"The late Emperor said--and this occasionally in public--that the Barizheisei were degenerate, given to inbreeding. In private, so the rumors go, he said that the Empress Chenelo was mad, and that you had inherited her bad blood. He frequently used the word 'unnatural', although the stories differed on what he meant by it."
"How much credence has been given to these stories?"
"Serenity, everyone knows how much the emperor loved the Empress Pazhiro. And it is common knowledge that marriage with the Empress Chenelo was pressed upon him by the Corazhas and was not of his own choosing. But it is also true tat your--isolation at Edonomee has caused comment, and more so in recent years."
"For all the Untheileneise Court knows, we ARE an inbred lunatic cretin." He could not bite back a laugh bitter enough to make Csevet wince.
"Serenity, they have only to look at you to see that you are not."
"The question being," Cala murmured, "how many of them will look."
This one is on the Hugo ballot, and it's not hard to see why. If you liked Dune for its strange world, belief system and court gamesmanship, you'll like The Goblin Emperor.
The main character is half goblin, half elf, the son of an elvish Emperor who regrets his arranged marriage and has the boy sent to a backwater to be forgotten. Still a youth, the bot is suddenly summoned back to the big city as the Emperor and all the intervening heirs are killed in an airship crash. Now Maia is Emperor/Leviathan in a strange kingdom where the Emperor can do no wrong, the Emperor has ultimate power, and the emperor has no friends. Or privacy, since the bodyguards must be around him at all times.
The crown is a heavy burden to bear.
It turns out that the airship crash was not an accident, and that someone is trying to kill Maia too--with this kind of plot, it will probably turn out to be one of the two or three characters who seem most trustworthy and who give him the best advice, at the beginning, but you'll see. Maia learns also that it is surprising and unseemly for the Emperor to care what happens to the peasants as the result of his decisions, which is a big part of why Emperors in this land are obeyed but not liked. We watch him grow into who he must be, out of necessity, and become a ruler rather than a puppet.
Highest recommendations. If there is a fault in the book, it is the complicated vocabulary one must learn to enjoy it. A character dump occurs early on, and many characters have names spelled similarly enough that it's hard to keep track of them. Fortunately, there's a handy glossary in the back.
Space Ghosts: The Dark Between The Stars, by Kevin J. Anderson
He spent hours getting details from them, using intimidation when possible, pain when necessary. Baffled and terrified, the researchers tried to lie to him, but Tom rom was not merely a thug--he understood their work from first principles.
Soon, it became quite clear that even if he dragged them to Vaconda and forced them to treat Adam Alakis, their work was only at a preliminary stage. Any possible cure was still years away.
"There were promising avenues," admitted one of the researchers, a stocky, square-jawed woman. "But Heidegger's is an orphan disease. The cure wouldn't benefit enough people. It's not worth the time and effort--"
So Tom Rom killed them all....as he looked down at their silent, cooling bodies, he muttered, "What do you think of the cost now?"
This is the second book on the Hugo "Best Novel" ballot. It was put there as part of the "Sad Puppy" scandal, to be considered, by God, as the CONSERVATIVE candidate for best book! Reading the thing, I'm not sure if the people who nominated it actually read it. Politically, there's not much right wing about it.
It's one of those books told from the perspective of many characters spread out across the galaxy, with several plot lines that come together gradually. One of the main plots involves a greedy industrialist who cuts corners on safety standards and ignores warnings about (no, really) global warming, then watches 1500 loyal workers die in the inevitable disaster, and his main thought is about the bad public relations that will ensue. His assistant is initially presented as an Ayn Rand overachiever who feels justified in abandoning her underperforming family, but who is later revealed as a fool and a failure at being a mother.
The Bechdel test is passed. women are presented in high status roles, and a good deal of the emotional roles, especially as parents, are played by men. The primary religion consists of environmentalist "green priests" who can communicate with plants. Private, for-profit Big Pharma is taken to task for letting economic considerations determine who lives and dies. And then the bulk of the book consists of the usual killer robots, exploding space jelly-fish, warrior babes kicking ass, royal backstabbing, endless warships, and the Evil Darkness from beyond space, come to destroy all. So--partly apolitical, partly left wing. Either the "puppies" really meant, as they sometimes claim, that they were diversifying the ballot. Or maybe they failed. Draw your own conclusions.
If you feel obligated to read it in order to fairly evaluate the Hugos, The Dark Between the Stars won't ruin your day. The writing style is clunky, but don't let the book's thickness daunt you. it's a very fast read, like watching an action-adventure movie. Some of the subplots are forgettable, some fascinating. I particularly liked the relationship between Garrison Reeves, his son Seth, and his curmudgeonly father Olaf. the "Roamer clans" have a distinct shade of brown, similar to the coats worn on Firefly.
Stuff Your Dad Says: Table Talk, by John Selden
To preach long, loud and damnation, is the way to be cried up. We love a man that damns us, and we run after him again to save us. If a man had a sore leg, and he should go to an honest, judicious surgeon, and he should only bid him keep it warm, and annoint with such an oil (an oil well known), that would do the cure, haply he would not much regard him, because he knew the medicine beforehand an ordinary medicine. But if he should go to a surgeon who should tell him, your leg will gangrene within three days, and it must be cut off, and you will die, unless you do something that I could tell you--what listening there would be to this man! Oh for the Lord's sake, tell me what this is! I will give you any content for your pains.
John Selden was a reformist member of parliament and a member of the Long Parliament preceding the English Civil War. His Table Talk was an influential book of epigrams on morals and manners of the day, most of them unfortunately religious in nature, some few of them wise and memorable like proverbs, too many of them dripping with self-importance. The style and title gave the impression of some bombastic family patriarch at an extended family dinner, going on and on about the nation losing its moral compass while members of the younger generation are kicked under the table to stop them from contradicting him. Today it would be a series of single paragraph blog entries.
The topics are in alphabetical order, and the longest entry is five pages, including the footnotes. Although it's short, you don't need to read the whole thing; just find a topic of interest and graze. It will either interest you enough to go further or be too annoying to bother with.
Hallelujah Andalusia: The Ornament of the World, by Maria Rosa Menocal
Rather than retell the history of the Middle Ages, or even of Medieval Spain, I have strung together a series of miniature portraits that range widely in time and place, and that are focused on cultural rather than political events. They will, I hope, lay bare the vast distance between what the conventional histories and other general prejudices would have us expect (that, for example, Christians saw the Muslim infidels as their mortal enemy and spent seven hundred years trying to drive them from Spain) and what we can learn from the many testimonies that survive in the songs people really sang or the buildings they really put up. These vignettes and profiles highlight stories that in and of themselves seem to me worth knowing and worth retelling as part of our common history. Beyond that, together, they point to some of the unknown depths of cultural tolerance and symbiosis in our heritage, and they may begin to suggest a very different overall portrait of this "middle age."
Going back a bit earlier than the history I'm supposed to be reading this year, this one focuses on the wonderful period of Spanish history where Christians, Muslims and Jews shared the Iberian peninsula without killing each other (much), and managed to create some beautiful additions to civilization in the process.
The most fascinating part, to me, were the chapters on Averroes and Maimonides, and the inevitable clash when Arabic culture divulged the surviving works of Aristotle that they had preserved for centuries to a Christian Europe that had thrown them (and most of the ancient polytheistic world) away, and wanted to denounce it all as heresy but couldn't. The theological machinations that culminated in Aquinas (see Bookpost, December 2013) amused me, as did the perverse reflection that we are now more barbaric in our intolerance than people were back then.
Find all of my previous Bookposts here: http://admnaismith.livejournal.com/...