Murder, What Fun! Whose Body; Clouds of Witness; Unnatural Death, by Dorothy Sayers
“Well,” said Peter, “I thought of payin' a little friendly call on Mr.—on the owner of this farm, that is to say. Country neighbours, and all that. Lonely kind of country, don't you see. Is he in, d'ye think?”
The man grunted.
“I'm glad to hear it,” said Peter; “it's so uncommonly jolly findin' all you Yorkshire people so kind and hospitable, what? Never mind who you are, always a seat at the fireside and that kind of thing. Excuse me, but do you know you're leanin' on the gate so as I can't open it? I'm sure it's a pure oversight, only you mayn't realise that just where you're standin' you get the maximum of leverage. What an awfully charmin' house this is, isn't it? All so jolly stark and grim and all the rest of it. No creepers or little rose-grown porches or anything suburban of that sort. Who lives in it?”
The man surveyed him up and down for some moments, and replied, “Mester Grimethorpe.”
“No, does he now?” said Lord Peter. “To think of that. Just the fellow I want to see. Model farmer, what? Wherever I go throughout the length and breadth of the North Riding I hear of Mr. Grimethorpe. 'Grimethorpe's butter is the best'; 'Grimethorpe's fleeces Never go to pieces'; 'Grimethorpe's pork Melts on the fork'; 'For Irish stews Take Grimethorpe's ewes'; 'A tummy lined with Grimethorpe's beef, Never, never comes to grief.' It has been my life's ambition to see Mr. Grimethorpe in the flesh. And you no doubt are his sturdy henchman and right-hand man. You leap from bed before the breaking day, To milk the kine amid the scented hay. You, when the shades of evening gather deep, Home from the mountain lead the mild-eyed sheep. You, by the ingle's red and welcoming blaze, Tell your sweet infants tales of olden days! A wonderful life, though a trifle monotonous p'raps in the winter. Allow me to clasp your honest hand.”
Whether the man was moved by this lyric outburst, or whether the failing light was not too dim to strike a pale sheen from the metal in Lord Peter's palm, at any rate he moved a trifle back from the gate.
I've come to the point in my history of books reading where the enrichment mysteries are not really classified as "historical", but were written during the periods when they happened. After WWI, the interest in detective fiction took off, and where there were once only Doyle and Poe, there were dozens. Sayers was considered a grandmaster, right up there with Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr, and her Peter Wimsey novels....must have improved with practice, because these, the first three in the set, are clever and intellectual, but are clunkers in terms of the challenge of whodunnit.
Whose Body is a novel approach to how a crime can be committed in a certain way by a certain improbable character (it begins with a naked John Doe discovered in someone's bathtub), but in order to eventually explain WHY that improbable character would do such a thing, Sayers has to resort to making the culprit secretly be an insane genius. Plus, the big reveal happens only halfway in. The second is obvious and a groaner once the red herrings are cleared away, and the third tells you who almost immediately and has Lord Peter Wimsey spend the novel deducing the how and why, while we watch the killer, who completely got away with the original crime, is eventually caught up in an impossibly complex set of plots to cover her tracks and tie up potential loose ends that ultimately would have proved nothing compared to the risks taken in committing further murders against, e.g., the maid who *might* have seen something.
Additionally, Lord Peter is a legendary pompous asshole compared to even Sherlock Holmes. "Well done, Buntley", he says to his weirdly loyal servant who has just knocked out the henchman from behind, "We've just time now. Still, we can't have this fellow following us, so if you'll kindly hand me that rope..."
See also the quoted part above from Clouds of Witness, where he garrulously chats up an illiterate farmer in a wot-wot, say no more sort of way. This is supposed to be the comic relief, but I found it two dimensional and irritating. If your mileage varies, that's cool.
Quantum Salad: Atomic Theory & Description of Nature; Discussions with Einstein on Epistomological Problems, by Niels Bohr
In the following years, during which the atomic problems attracted the attention of rapidly increasing circles of physicists, the apparent contradictions inherent in quantum theory were felt ever more acutely. Illustrative of this situation is the discussion raised by the discovery of the Stern-Gerlach effect in 1922. On the one hand, this effect gave striking support to the idea of stationary states and in particular to the quantum theory of the Zeeman effect developed by Sommerfeld, on the other hand, as exposed so clearly by Einstein and Ehrenfest, it presented with unsurmountable difficulties any attempt at forming a picture of the behaviour of atoms in a magnetic field. Similar paradoxes were raised by the discovery by Compton (1924) of the change in wave-length accompanying the scattering of X-rays by electrons. This phenomenon afforded, as is well known, a most direct proof of the adequacy of Einstein's view regarding the transfer of energy and momentum in radiative processes; at the same time, it was equally clear that no simple picture of a corpuscular collision could offer an exhaustive description of the phenomenon. Under the impact of such difficulties, doubts were for a time entertained even regarding the conservation of energy and momentum in the individual radiation processes; a view, however, which very soon had to be abandoned in face of more refined experiments bringing out the correlation between the deflection of the photon and the corresponding electron recoil.
I'm finishing the Great Books set because I'm so close to the end, but I reiterate that the science volumes, in particular, are not the "means to a liberal education" that Mortimer Adler insists they are. These are highly technical books that the lay reader needs other references to understand. One does not learn physics by reading Newton, and one does not learn atomic theory by reading Niels Bohr, who casually mentions the importance of the Stern-Gerlach effect and its implications on the Zeeman effect and the Compton effect, without ever once saying what those things are. He was addressing his droogs Einstein, Schrodinger and Heisenberg, who already knew.
So I "read" Bohr, in the sense that my eyes passed across every word, but what he meant is easier gotten from my high school chemistry texts, which at least got me to temporarily understand these things.
Human Macavity: Fantomas, by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain
In imagination Charles Rambert[11] saw all manner of sinister and dramatic scenes, crimes and murders: hugely interested, intensely curious, craving for knowledge, he was ever trying to concoct plots and unravel mysteries. If for an instant he dozed off, the image of Fantômas took shape in his mind, but never twice the same: sometimes he saw a colossal figure with bestial face and muscular shoulders; sometimes a wan, thin creature, with strange and piercing eyes; sometimes a vague form, a phantom—Fantômas!
Oddly enough, I'd never heard of this original master criminal series until now. Fantomas is apparently as famous as Moriarty, Blofeld, or Fu Manchu, only French. He is a master of disguise and athletic like a cat burglar, and prefers deadly snakes and plague rats as accomplices to human henchmen...and yet, I found his stories a bit dull compared to the more familiar British thrillers. YMMV.
Trash Books: Die Trying; Tripwire, Running Blind by Lee Child
--from Die Trying
Lee Child is a commercial success, as you can tell from the fact that I come back for more even though I feel unclean, for the same reasons I drink too much. They are compelling junk stories where bad guys get theirs from a righteous vengeance machine.
The problem with the trope of the indestructible, superhuman Chuck Norris/Rambo/ Die Hard hero is that, since he can take anyone, the story is not interesting unless you make the villains so over the top EEEEEVIL that you want to see them pulped. Otherwise, they're underdogs. And so, the Jack Reacher villains are psychotically, sociopathically cruel beyond rhyme or reason. Their eyes are frighteningly blank, unless they are enjoying themselves by hurting others. They would just as soon kill you as look at you. They like it when you try to run. They will motivate you by torturing your partner while you are forced to watch. They're bigger than anyone except Reacher, and they like to taunt their victim by letting him think they made a mistake that will let him get away. Ha-Ha, NOPE! And their cruelty is graphically, sickeningly described, so that you know just how superlatively, impossibly, embodiment of EEEEEVIL they are. So that when Reacher comes to make them regret their life choices, you're DOWN for it. Unless you threw the book away in disgust before that part.
And also, when trying to impress you about how muscular Reacher is, Child describes him as resembling "a condom filled with walnuts."
Die Trying is about a Nazi separatist terror sect that catches Reacher when he just happens to be walking by their kidnapping heist, and who have opportunity after opportunity to just shoot this big threatening guy they don't even want, but they don't. Because it's only chapter two or five or twelve, and they need to take him someplace else to kill him, or use him as an extra hostage or try to win him over to their side. Big boss unnecessarily tortures and kills people for fun and is paranoid about leaving loose ends, but THIS guy he spares over and over until he can finally get away and clear the entire armed compound, because something something garbanzo. Tripwire has only four (not particularly competent) villains, and so they have to arrange the plot so that Reacher doesn't know who they are for a long time, while they slowly ruin a couple of innocents and kill others for pleasure. Running Blind has Reacher assisting the FBI in stopping a serial killer whose method of killing the victims is unknown and the Big Reveal is presented as if Child knows he fooled you. I can smugly let you know that I identified the murderer by name and the motive within the first eight chapters, but didn't get the method until one chapter before the reveal.
Sick Books: The Magic Mountain; Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man, by Thomas Mann
Joachim, as the expert, gave him lessons in the art of wrapping himself the way they all did it up here, something every novice had to learn right off. You spread the blankets, first one, then the other, over the frame of the lounge chair, but so that a long piece was left dangling to the floor at the foot. Then you sat down and began to wrap the top one around you, first flinging it lengthwise all the way up to your armpit, then tucking the bottom up over the feet—and for that you had to sit up, bend forward, and grab the fold with both hands—and finally tugging the other side over, making sure that the double foot-tuck fit tight against both sides to form the smoothest and most regular package possible. And then you followed the same proceedure with the second blanket—but it was more difficult to handle, and as a bungling beginner Hans Castorp groaned quite a bit when he bent forward and reached out to practice the moves as he was taught them. Only a very few old veterans, Joachim said, were able to fling both blankets around them at once in three deft motions, but that was a rare and coveted skill, which demanded not only years of practice, but also a natural predisposition. And Hans Castorp had to laugh at that word as he leaned back with aching muscles.
--from The Magic Mountain
The above is a description of the daily rest cure at The Berghorf Institute, where characters go to relax from the stress of having to symbolize entire pre-WWI European nations and philosophical schools of thought, all vying for the young protagonist Castorp’s allegiance in Mann’s thick magnum opus.
My father used to tell me that he and my uncle used to pass the time at Barrayar University by wrapping themselves in blankets and sitting on the rooftop gardens, pretending to be the tubercular patients in this book. I don’t think I could have been more horrified if he’d told me their idea of a good time had been to go to the supermarket and play with the electric doors. As it turns out, the rest cure isn’t nearly as uberdorky as it sounds—the lounge chairs are the most luxuriant seats one could hope for, and the experience is like relaxing on a luxury deck chair on an arctic cruise ship, watching the ocean go by, except that you’re up in the alps, watching the view and thinking deep thoughts. That’s what the patients do all day. They navel-gaze, and think deep thoughts, and attend lectures and discussions about death and medicine and the scientific meaning of love and life with their heads in the clouds, while the silly frenetic people down below do all the mundane boring stuff like keeping the world running. People tend to go up there to visit a friend, and end up spending the best years of their lives there.
The philosophers tended to be ridiculous. One man would declare that the best government is the one that smiles and pats people on the head, and another would declare that no, the government must HIT people on the head, hit them hard, make them obey—and by the way, how elitist and patronizing and offensive the first man must be to talk of patting people on the head (Gosh, where have I heard THAT dialogue before?). Not until very late in the book when the old Dutch satyr Mynheer Peeperkorn showed up and put everyone to shame by simply living with passion did I find someone truly likable. Besides, it’s fun to say “Mynheer Peeperkorn”.
Definitely the accommodations and the food would make the Institute (and hopefully, the rooftop gardens at Barrayar U) a nice place to visit, but I’d much rather spend the best years of my life on a meandering cruise ship without all the death and illness and things.
Felix Krull is much less well known, but seemed like it might be interesting. Nope. It is perhaps the most boring "confessions of a master criminal" book I have ever seen. Krull starts out as the son of an overburdened wine merchant who sells nasty wine, explaining to angry customers that he has to keep the price down by skimping on quality. By the time he goes bankrupt and shoots himself, the kid has graduated from shoplifting sweets to scamming kisses from girls, and eventually performs cheap grifts on random people for a less-than charming, less-than-roguish existence. The main tone is about Krull deriving no satisfaction and existing as a cheerless dilettante. Meh.
Towards a Fabulous Sobriety: Quit Like a Woman, by Holly Whitaker
One time on Instagram, when I was no longer using drugs but was using men and social media and coffee in deep excess, I read a post from a man I was following. It said, "Don't call yourself sober if you're still using drugs. You are not sober." I wondered about him and that post, about what would make someone say such a thing. I worte back to him that I had used drugs to help me stop using drugs. I used pot, Chipotle, nicotine, cocaine, a very unfortunate man named Justin, and half the coffee Starbucks produced in 2013 to stop drinking. But that shouldn't matter to him, should it? Unless he owned the word 'sober' and I was missing something.
I read this sobriety book because I had seen a good review of it, and because my own relationship to alcohol is spotty enough for me to check in about these things. The biggest take-away I got from it is that random people aren't as likely to hate and despise and pity others for their fuck-ups as one might think. Holly Whitaker is kinda brutal about her own life story and what was done to her growing up and what she did to herself while hitting bottom--and yet all of it, warts and all, came across as fabulous and my overwhelming urge was to reach out and nurture and thank and congratulate her for her pain, honesty, and ultimate triumph, respectfully. I have fucked up, and so have you, and we can relate to that and bond. The details are just details. I went looking for her on FB and sent an as-yet unrequited friend req, just as I would have done for that other fucked-up genius Thorstein Veblen, except that he died decades before getting the chance to cast a cynical told-ya wink at social media.
And also, I learned some confirmation that I "think like a woman" to the extent that this is a book written for women, geared toward the "woman's" way of coping with this weird world, and I related to it a lot more than I relate to "masculine" self-help. Among her advice: The 12 steps are made for dudes and don't work for people like Whitaker or me; you get better results by pampering and validating yourself than by punishing yourself; people will help you if you ask; and the "sobriety illuminati" are to be avoided like plague rats.
The Future is Fierce: AOC: Fighter, Phenom, Change Maker, by Prachi Gupta
Republicans were scandalized when they discovered that the "girl from the Bronx" grew up in the more affluent Westchester County. In 2018, Newsmax host John Cardillo tweeted a Google street view photo of Ocasio-Cortez's modest childhood home, arguing it was located in a "very nice area", and calling it "a far cry from the Bronx hood upbringing she's selling." Ocasio-Cortez snapped back on Twitter, "It is nice. Growing up, it was a good town for working people. My mom scrubbed toilets so I could live here & I grew up seeing how the zip code on is born in determines much of their opportunity. Your attempt to strip me of my family, my story, my home and my identity is exemplary of how scared you are of the power of all four of those things."
A celebratory biography of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who got elected to the House of Representatives at age 12 and singlehandedly lowered the average age of Congress to 90. Some of the new members flipped Republican districts; some broker legislative deals; AOC is shaping public opinion, moving the Overton window to the middle, and resetting the agenda to a new New Deal, a green New Deal, and a place where everyone, not just the privileged few, can have a place at the table.
AOC's Puerto Rican mother and Bronx small business owner father pooled money from relatives to get a house in Yorktown Heights so that their daughter could have an education and a shot at the American Dream. Had they not, she wouldn't be where she is now. Zip codes determine one's destiny.
The media is afraid of her and determined to bring her down at any price. I've seen hit piece after hit piece trying to foment friction between AOC's "squad" of liberal spokeswomen of color and the more pragmatic women from red-to-blue districts, like Sharice Davids and Katie Porter. To their credit, neither side is taking the bait. They realize that we need both quiet effectiveness and visible outspokenness to make overall changes happen. We should, too. High recommendations.
Feminist Economics: Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner?, by Katrine Marcal
If you want to be part of the story of economics, you have to be like Economic Man. You have to accept his version of masculinity. At the same time, what we call economics is always built on another story. Everything that is excluded so the Economic Man can be who he is.
So he can be able to say that there isn't anything else.
Somebody has to be emotion, so he can be reason. Somebody has to be body, so he doesn't have to be. Somebody has to be dependent, so he can be independent. Somebody has to be tender, so he can conquer the world. Somebody has to be self-sacrificing, so he can be selfish. Somebody has to prepare that steak so Adam Smith can say their labour doesn't matter.
Over the past four years, I've read weighty tomes on economics by Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus, Marx, JS Mill, Henry George, Thorstein Veblen and RH Tawney. Katrine Marcel puts them all to shame and is easier to read besides, in part because she identifies one thing that the old dead white guys didn't: Economic Man, as described by old white guys, is a FUCKING ASSHOLE, and we don't have to put up with him, and also he doesn't really exist.
"Economic Man" never does anything out of love, but only acts if there's something in it for him. If he prefers ribs to chicken, he will ALWAYS choose ribs over chicken if they're available, no matter how many times he's had them this week so far. His relationships are based on abstract profit and loss, and conveniently, the emotional labor of his partner doesn't count. It never has.
Also, I learned that those breathtaking photos of fetuses in the womb that first appeared in Time/Life periodicals in the 50s were really photos of dead tissue photographed outside the mother's body following miscarriages or the equivalent, and the framing of them--really, the most dependent life forms in existence--as if they were in a bubble in space was one manifestation of the fiction of "Economic Man" as a lone, self-contained individual with as much power as any other individual.
Fortunately, Marcal removes these comforting (to some) illusions gently, and shows us a better way based on cooperation, a good human nature, and the recognition that society is able to overcome even the most ingrained habits of "our savannah ancestors", and that greed and sociopathic individual struggle against all was never natural law and should not be worshipped or accepted as such.
Very highest recommendations.
There Ain' Na' Butter in Hell!: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce
The horror of this strait and dark prison is increased by its awful stench. All the filth of the world, all the offal and scum of the world, we are told, shall run there as to a vast and reeking sewer when the terrible conflagration of the last day has purged the world. The brimstone, too, which burns there in such prodigious quantity fills all Hell with its intolerable stench; and the bodies of the damned themselves exhale such a pestilential odor that, as Saint Bonaventure says, one of them alone would suffice to infect the whole world. The very air of this world, that pure element, becomes foul and unbreathable when it has been long enclosed. Consider then what must be the foulness of the air of Hell! Imagine some foul and putrid corpse that has lain rotting and decomposing in the grave, a jellylike mass of liquid corruption. Imagine such a corpse a prey to flames, devoured by the fire of burning brimstone and giving off dense choking fumes of nauseous loathsome decomposition. And then imagine this sickening stench, multiplied a millionfold and a millionfold again from the millions upon millions of fetid carcasses massed together in the reeking darkness, a huge and rotting human fungus. Imagine all this and you will have some idea of the horror of the stench of Hell.
Reminds me of the dorm room of a guy named Phil I once knew, and the camp bunk of another kid who was so pungent that his very name was "Grody". Not to mention my impressions of a certain movie that starred Adam Sandler...but I digress.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is supposed to be the quintessential Kunstlerroman (a Bildungsroman specifically about the coming of age of a young Art Fart), in which the protagonist, Stephen Daedalus, is supposed to be a stand-in for Joyce himself.
And yes, there are mentions of the birth of a passion for writing in there. There are scenes in the beginning among Daedalus's family, where between bouts of drunken fighting over whether Charles Parnell was a superpatriot or a shameless philanderer, they sing of drinking and rebellion. There's Daedelus in school, respected as the top of the class and taunted as a nerd, on the same day, by the same people. By the end, we're treated to excerpts from his journal.
All of that fades in comparison to the central part of the book, which consists of the single most sadistic Catholic sermon I've ever failed to avoid. It dominates Portrait of the Artist the way John Galt's 100-page Jeremiad dominates Atlas Shrugged. It triggered flashbacks to child abuses I didn't even suffer. All about Hell, and about every possible physical and spiritual torment one could ever suffer there, and about how just and fair and right it is that the embodiment of all goodness should cast YOU, boy, to endure such torments forever and ever and ever (complete with further disquisition on the vastly, hugely long duration of infinite time) for such things as a lustful thought not confessed to the priest. Followed by the torments and nightmares and fantasies that plague poor Stephen (and, presumably, every other kid in the school) after the sermon. I wanted to reach into the book and grab him out of there and hold him and tell him he was safe, now. In fact, everything after that is just sort of a blur of relief, as he turns down the offer to join the priesthood (go figure), takes up weird stream of consciousness writing, and eventually flees Ireland entirely. Go Stephen. Nothing I hadn't learned already from the histories of the Magdalene Laundries and the Papal shielding of child-molester priests, but deeply disturbing nonetheless.
One of my friends has a big hate-on for Joyce and mocks people who mention him in literary criticism. Now I have an idea why. Actually, I have found Ulysses to be one of my favorites, that I come back to to graze from time to time. To the extent that there's a redeeming quality to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, it's that I recognized and appreciated some cameos by characters, besides the Daedalus family, who go on to appear in Ulysses.
Also, for completeness's sake, I'll mention that I read Veblen's The Place of Science in Modern Civilization (a collection of essays spanning Marx, socialist theory, evolution, and racist eugenics doctrines, which almost comes to conclusions similar to Katrine Marcal, only much more verbosely and with an attitude of detached bemusement at those fools out there, without real caring for others), and John Dewey's Human Nature and Conduct (a pragmatic theory of ethics that wants society to engineer human behavior in a BF Skinner sort of way so that we all want what's best), but I found both so deadly dull that I don't care to say more about either than this.