Murder, What Fun! The unpleasantness at the Bellona Club; Strong poison, by Dorothy Sayers
Bunter thanked him gravely for hi good opinion, and proffered a box of that equally nauseating mess called Turkish Delight, which not only gluts the palate and glues the teeth, but also smothers the consumer in a floury cloud of white sugar. Mr. Urquhart immediately plugged his mouth with a large lump of it, murmuring indistinctly that it was the genuine Eastern variety.
--from Strong Poison
So--I was a bit harsh on Lord Peter's exuberant approach to detection and the hackneyed plots last month, before I stopped objecting to the unbelievable situations and just ran with it. The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club begins with the discovery that one of the older members sitting in the smoking room has been dead for no one can tell how long, and no one noticed, and moves on to one or more impossible plot twists, and---ok, it's just delightful, on a surreal level. So is Strong poison, where I guessed the trick behind how it was done very early, and watching it and the motive get gradually drawn out was amusing. Pretty sure Sayers had read Narnia, and wrote the passages about Turkish Delight specifically to make future generations wonder how Edmund could become ensorcelled by something so gross.
Seafaring Writer: Martin Eden, by Jack London
“I hope I am learning to talk,” he stammered. “There seems to be so much in me I want to say. But it is all so big. I can’t find ways to say what is really in me. Sometimes it seems to me that all the world, all life, everything, had taken up residence inside of me and was clamoring for me to be the spokesman. I feel—oh, I can’t describe it—I feel the bigness of it, but when I speak, I babble like a little child. It is a great task to transmute feeling and sensation into speech, written or spoken, that will, in turn, in him who reads or listens, transmute itself back into the selfsame feeling and sensation. It is a lordly task. See, I bury my face in the grass, and the breath I draw in through my nostrils sets me quivering with a thousand thoughts and fancies. It is a breath of the universe I have breathed. I know song and laughter, and success and pain, and struggle and death; and I see visions that arise in my brain somehow out of the scent of the grass, and I would like to tell them to you, to the world. But how can I? My tongue is tied.
Jack London's accurate autobiographical novel about a robust, muscular working class man who wants to write for a living in turn of the (20th) century San Francisco. He lurches with a sailor gait through the homes of the rich and mighty, confused by their manners, rejected as a tramp, dumped by his society girlfriend, and they all want him back when he's finally successful and rich. Flashbacks of street fighting. pawning and redeeming and pawning again his clothes and other possessions while publishers cheat him out of payment for his work. Eventually successful, but too late to enjoy it, disgusted with hypocrisy, and--eerily autobiographical, he dies too young.
London's last novel. And it is a bitter one.
The Philosopher's Story: Autobiography of Bertrand Russell
This book is to be published while the great issues that now divide the world remain undecided. As yet, and for some time to come, the world must be one of doubt. It must as yet be suspended equally between hope and fear.
It is likely that I shall die before the issue is decided.
I do not know whether my last words should be:
The bright day is done
And we are for the dark,
or, as I sometimes allow myself to hope,
The world's great age begins anew
The golden years return
Heaven smiles, and faiths, and empires gleam,
Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.
I have done what I could to add my small weight in an attempt to tip the balance on the side of hope, but it has been a puny effort against vast forces.
May others succeed where my generation failed.
I've spent a decade reading "great philosophy", found some few very useful tracts that changed my thinking, found a lot of navel gazing and a whole lot of barely comprehensible gibberish...Bertrand Russell has been one of the few who is both easy to read and, to me, full of almost self-evident common sense while still adding food for thought that I hadn't considered. And this is just his life story, from the 1880s to the 1960s.
Don't let the three thick volumes intimidate you. More than half consists of collected letters to and from him, including many great names in government, philosophy and science, yet easily skimmed.
Russell started out as a mathematical philosopher, attempting to analyze the universe as an embodiment of perfect logic--and during this period, he personally behaved problematically. The horrors of two world wars proved to him the absurdity of pure reason, and he spent the remainder of his life as, it seems to me, one of the more good men of his time (which means that he was naturally hated and reviled and persecuted by the power structures of both Britain and America), trying to create a new rhyme and reason with which to view a cruel world and to find comfort and hope without resorting to religion or other magic thinking.
As with Justice William Douglas (another great mind who did great professional work and was great at writing in gentle, encouraging style while occasionally being an asshole in private life), I found myself longing to have a conversation with him while suspecting that, if the occasion arrived, he might dismiss me as a fool early on and break my heart.
Who's Afraid? To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf
The sea without a stain on it, thought Lily Briscoe, still standing and looking out over the bay. The sea is stretched like silk across the bay. Distance had an extraordinary power; they had been swallowed up in it, they felt, they were gone forever, they had become part of the nature of things. It was so calm; it was so quiet. The steamer itself had vanished, but the great scroll of smoke still hung in the air and drooped like a flag mournfully in valediction.
The revised Great Books set has four works by women. Austen, Eliot and Cather I enjoyed very much and read more of their work than just the included novels. Woolf is fog-enshrouded to me, maybe because I am a man. The male characters are linear, patriarchal and disagreeable, but understandable. The women think in poetry and big-picture feelings in a way that draws me but is hard for me to understand. Entire chapters of narrative go by without me retaining more than a vague sense of what they're thinking, and I feel that if I were there, I would commit faux pas and earn eyerolls and thoughts about why are men?
Not much happens. A six year old boy, part of a large family vacationing in the Hebrides, wants to take a day trip to the lighthouse on a nearby island, and becomes semipermanently enraged against his father for saying they can't go because weather. Years later, they come back to the same island, and the father drags the unwilling now-teens off to the lighthouse, where they have a good time despite their long term resentment and maybe come to an understanding. Looking on are the mother/wife who sees all and tries to comfort the boy, and the visiting artist Briscoe, who sees all in a different light, trying to make a pretty picture of it.
I invite thoughts from readers who like Woolf. I'm missing something that may be vital here.
Pulp Fiction: Echo burning; No Middle Name, by Lee Child
"You just killed two people. Then saw a third die and a house burn down...You comparing those people to cockroaches?"
He shook his head. "Not really. I like cockroaches better. They're just little packets of DNA scuttling around, doing what they have to do. Those people didn't have to do what they did. They had a choice. They could have been upstanding human beings. But they chose not to be. Then they chose to mess with me, which was the final straw, and they got what they got. So I'm not going to lose any sleep over it. I'm not even going to give it another thought. And if you do, I think you're wrong.""You're a hard man, Reacher."
"I think I'm a realistic man. And a decent enough guy, all told."
"You may find normal people don't agree."
He nodded.
"A lot of you don't," he said.
Another novel and a story collection from big name author Lee Child in a series I feel a little guilty about reading, because it's such junk food, but it does scratch an itch and requires little thought to gobble down. The plot of Echo Burning was one where I saw all the twists coming about two chapters ahead, but not the whole thing at once, from the beginning, so I get to feel a little clever for having figured out the big bad and the reasons why before being told.
Reacher has so much testosterone that he leaves oily trails of hair on the floor as he drags the knuckles of his extra-long arms across it. And his ethics are, when someone needs killing, it's no different from squishing a roach. Not for everybody. But definitely for some people.
Those Meddling Kids: Middlegame, by Seanan McGuire
Summer kings and snow queens. Jacks in the green and corn Jennies: he knows the names, knows the secret stories whispered about them in the dark places of the world. He knows better than to try for the naturally incarnate concepts. That will come later. When he controls the doctrine, when cause and consequence dance to his commands, then he'll be able to reach out and collect the other things that should be his by right. He'll hold the universe in his hands, and woe betide any who question what he chooses to do with it.
As far as I know, this is a stand-alone book, not part of a series, and it is one of the best books by a very prolific writer whose work is consistently awesome. If you like the trendy trope most prominent in The Magicians where a children's series about an alternate universe turns out to have a basis in reality that the characters in the main story have to puzzle through to reach the climax, you'll have a fine time with Middlegame.
The fictional children's book is Over the Woodward Wall, by beloved 19th century author Asphodel Baker who was also an alchemist who created something nasty, which in turn created something else nasty...with the end result being our protagonists, a girl math genius and a boy word prodigy, separated at birth but with a psychic connection that lets them talk to each other as imaginary friends, across a continent.
And then it gets weird. THEN it gets weird.
What I've just told you is what's in the first few chapters. Discover the rest for yourself. Very highest recommendations.
God is Not Yet Dead: The Word of God and the Word of Man, by Karl Barth
God himself, the real, the living God, and his love which comes in glory! These provide the solution. We have not yet begun to listen quietly to what the conscience asks when it reminds us, in our need and anxiety, of the righteousness of God. We have been much too eager to do something ourselves. Much too quickly have we made ourselves comfortable in temporary structures. We have mistaken our tent for our home; the moratorium for the normal course of things.
One work of 20th century theology was included in the revised Great Books edition, and now I've read it and can move on.
Barth is credited by Calvinist sects for "rescuing Protestantism from the dustbin of history" after over a century of Kant and liberal theology had discredited it. If so, it seems to me he has some 'splaining to do, because the book here (which admittedly is presented as a sample, like most of the 20th century 'appendix' to the Great Books; Barth is more famous for a huge five volume dissertation that someone else can read if they want to) offers little that I hadn't seen in previous works. It just pretends to be a bit more warm and kind than classical Calvinism.
Also, he begins with the relatively acceptable premise that, by "God", we mean the voice of the human conscience speaking within us. I could roll with that. I have heard it convincingly argued that success is achieved by doing the things you already know you should be doing, and not doing the things you already know you shouldn't be doing. Further, those people I am fortunate to know who strike me as "strong souls" and "living saints" are those who remain steadfast to their inner compass.
But then Barth baits and switches to the more dubious reverse view that the human conscience is communication from an external higher power; further, that said higher power is necessarily the Christian God. And, of course, the problem with most or all theologies is that they cannot 'prove' their rightness compared to any other religion without presupposing the cosmic truth of assertions written by questionable human beings who knew no more as fact than we do.
As Calvin before him, Barth's attempt to "prove'" Christian scripture as true above all other scripture springs entirely from the assertion that this ancient human writing is so much more beautiful and compelling than any other literature ever written (no it isn't) that one cannot help but be convinced of its divinity just from the words themselves...and if one fails to be transported by THESE words, then one is truly lost to sin and the Devil. And also, the emperor's clothes are such that those who fail to see them are stupid or unfit for their office. Oldest checkmate their is.
And there we are.
Epic German Bible: Joseph and his Brothers, by Thomas Mann
Cain answered, “To be sure, I slew my brother, and that is sad enough. But Who created me as I am, jealous to the point that on occasion my conduct becomes so dissembling that I no longer know what I am doing? Are You not a jealous God, and did You not create me after Your likeness? Who put the evil impulse in me to do the deed that I have undeniably done? You say that You alone bear the burden of the whole world, and will You not also bear our sins?” Not bad, that. Exactly as if Cain, or Kayin, had taken counsel with Sammael beforehand, though perhaps the crafty hothead had no need to do so. Any rebuttal would have been difficult, which left only a crushing blow or indignant amusement.
I read a lot of the other books on this month’s list in 24 hours or less. This one made up for the quickies by keeping me busy for the rest of the month, and part of February, too. It’s longer than Moby Dick and only twice as funny. Ye Gods! I hired a Sherpa guide at the outset to help me through the thick Teutonic prose, and he quit halfway in, accusing me of a deliberate plot to bore him to death.
The theme of this retelling of the last half of Genesis is, appropriately enough, descents into Hell, from which one emerges laden with treasures after the ordeal. And it happens in cycles: Jacob in Laban’s service; Joseph in the pit; Joseph in prison; the brothers during the famine. Always finding redemption and promotion through selfless service to a paternal master—a father, a Potiphar, a Pharaoh, who sees that you are good and uplifts you. Except when he or the jealous people he lifted you over get capricious and throw you down. Yes, except then. And when that happens, you stoically bear your fate until you get uplifted, or seasick, whichever lasts longer.
I enjoyed the way the book weaves Old Testament theology with the Egyptian, Babylonian and Sumerian religions, as well as foreshadowing the events of the New Testament. I enjoyed some of the scholarly discourses on the patterns that get repeated over and over. And yes, it hadn’t escaped me what a useful message it was for the Ultimate Ruler to spread, how unflinching service to masters was the path to redemption. I approved of the way Mann refused to gloss over the acts of utter cruelty and arrogance committed by the ones who are supposed to be otherwise “good guys”, and makes the stories a war of ambiguity against ambiguity, instead of light against dark. I could have done without the entire chapters claiming to prove logically, eg, how many years Joseph must have spent among the Ishmaelites, in Potiphar’s household, in jail, when Mann might as well have pulled different sets of numbers out of thin air. And if there had been a chapter on “the multi-coloredness of the coat”, I probably would have put it down unfinished.
But I got through it. Where’s my ticker-tape parade?