Right Quarantine Reading: Sweet Secrets and Road to Chaos, by Stephanie L. Weippert
"Transportal chocolate." He shrugged. "Whatever." Just because he hadn't heard of any candy with such a funny name didn't mean it wasn't good. The label confirmed what his nose told him, and that was all that mattered. He ripped the back of the brown paper wrapped around the shiny silver and tossed it away, then tore the foil down the length to reveal the milk chocolate goodness.
Brad returned just in time to watch Michael, with the end of a chocolate bar in his mouth and a shocked look on his face, fade away.
Two short fantasy books involving culture shock and transportation to magic new worlds.
Imagine if Vernon Dursley had been a good guy who treated his orphaned nephew Harry well, and who knew nothing about magic or Hogwarts. Imagine further that, instead of notification by owl post, they just teleported Harry away without telling the Dursleys anything, and a terrified Uncle Vernon rushed out to rescue him. That, if you squint a bit, is the outline of Sweet Secrets, where food recipes are incantations, master chefs are powerful wizards, and children with aptitude are trafficked to Magic Culinary School. The plot alternates between the fascinated child and the stepfather trying to find him.
Road to Chaos is an entirely different world where the magic is mathematical, and the muggle protagonist is a grown actor suddenly caught in a plot involving a long lost relative who is a fugitive from the school's faculty after an experiment gone wrong, and is transported to foreign countries and then to a foreign everything.
Both tales end with room for sequels, and I'd like to read those if they come out. They also happen to be the only books from this month's book post that I actually enjoyed.
Wrong Quarantine Reading: Stories of Three Decades, by Thomas Mann
Looking back, we had the feeling that the horrible end of the affair had been preordained and lay in the nature of things; that the children had to be present at it was an added impropriety, due to the false colours in which the weird creature presented himself. Luckily for them, they did not know where the comedy left off and the tragedy began; and we let them remain in their happy belief that the whole thing had been a play up till the end.
---from "Mario and the Magician
A dwarf lives life cheerfully with no complaints about his disability until one day he falls in love with a great lady with a perfectly formed body. He stammers and is shy. She is kind to him. He declares his love, and she flees, repulsed. He immediately kills himself.
An old man is friendless and taunted by local children. He rescues a dog that the children are torturing and tries to keep it as a pet. The dog hates him, too. one day the dog bites him and he injures it in self defense. As he treats the dog's wound over the course of weeks, the dog is responsive and becomes friendly to its benefactor. Late, when it is healed, it growls at the man again. After a moment's thought, the man stabs the dog. The dog dies. The man bursts into tears.
A carnival hypnotist forces members of his audience to humiliate themselves while the crowd laughs and jeers. He laughs diabolically and boasts of his power to sap people's will. he is the embodiment of all evil. His final victim is a mild-mannered waiter, whom he subjects to the worst indignities of all. When he is released from his trance, the waiter shoots the hypnotist. The audience is horrified.
All the tales are like this. I read them for the same reasons people watch Tarantino movies and Game of Thrones, as if the ugliest and most grotesque aspects of human nature turned up like the squiggly bugs under a rock might make us feel content with our own mundane existences. Except that this was just over the top depressing.
This was the last Thomas Mann on my reading list. Then i picked up something by his brother....
Garbage: Professor Unrat, by Heinrich Mann
Heinrich is less famous than his Nobel Laureate brother Tommy, but no less depressing. Professor Unrat's name is a German pun on "trash". He is a teacher whose pupils disrespect him and call him "Professor Trash". He is consumed with fury at the nickname and is vicious to the pupils. It is not clear whether teachers in this town are treated with veneration like the Japanese, or treated as the lowest, shittiest caste in society, as in America. It is not clear whether the teacher has become a misanthrope because of the disrespect he endures, or whether he is treated badly because he was a jerk to begin with. By the end of the first chapter, both the class and the prof are established as assholes.
Then the prof follows one of the worst students to an assignation with an exotic dancer at the local era equivalent of a strip club, and asks the dancer to stop corrupting the kid. She has a relationship with the prof instead, ruining them both. Again, it is not clear whether we're supposed to think she is a "vixen" who seduces him to be cruel, or if he's an old lecher who brings it on himself; neither are likeable characters. Mercifully, their tale of trash was brief, and I'm not inclined to read more like this.
Is most German literature like this, or is that just a stereotype?
More Trash: Personal; One Shot; Persuader; 61 hours, by Lee Child
Since I can't get to the libraries during the quarantine, I've gone to the online version and headed for the Jack Reacher section because mindless drivel is about what I can handle these days. Since only a limited number of people can check out the same online books at once, I'm taking the series out of order. It's fine. There is almost no continuity, the adventures are all self-contained, and the guy is the same age in 2015 as he is in 1998. one copes.
One is probably not supposed to binge-read Jack Reacher like this. Most of the stories are nominally "mysteries" with a big reveal, except it is always the same reveal. Some frequently mentioned detail that has no apparent connection to the main plot will be the central clue. If there are multiple police officers or Feds, one of them will always be either the big bad or be not-really-secretly working for the big bad, usually because blackmail or threats to torture the law enforcement bigwig's partner or small child while they watch. And somehow, with all the town cops or an entire agency or military unit at their command, they just go along meekly until Reacher does them in.
And Reacher is more indestructible than Rambo, Chuck Norris and the A-team combined, and so none of the situations are all that suspenseful. In the books I read this month, he fights a giant who can shrug off sledgehammer blows like mosquitoes; dives into a riptide and comes back from 50 feet under in choppy sea; walks through a subzero blizzard in casual clothes, just happens to be missed by the world's deadliest sharpshooter because reflexes; walks through open farmland to an impregnable fortress with security cameras without being spotted; survives an explosion that both blackens the ground for 400 yards around him and makes the nearest town high with meth fumes, and covers up the death of his assassin by randomly firing a bunch of assault weapons and telling the henchmen that they were ambushed by a gang.
Also, Lee Child fridges women. He has love interests killed in gruesome ways so that Reacher can hulk out and take revenge on the Most Evil Person Alive du jour in even more gruesome ways. Because if the villain did not kill in truly horrible ways, then Reacher would be a monster instead of an avenging good guy. You need to know that before getting addicted to the series.
Ennui: The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma, by Henry Adams
Poor Henry Adams lived in the wrong era, as his more famous works, longing for the "innocence" of the Middle Ages and pre-Civil War America, make clear. In this collection of short works from the end of Adams' life, he writes the life of his grandfather John Quincy Adams, whom he considers a tragic failure of a man because he got to be President for only one term; frets about how distressingly masculine women are becoming in the 1920s--he worries that all their strenuousness will endanger the human race by interfering with their capacity to have babies-- and frets further about the impending heat death of the universe, weeping because the Earth will not carry on to infinity millennia after he is dead.
I wanted to reach into the book, pull the poor man out and take him to a filksing, get him roaring drunk, and have him partake in a rousing chorus of "Rocket Ride", "Pour Your Brother" and "Many Hearts, One Voice". He needs some serious help!
The Great Brain: Relativity, the Special and the General Theory, by Albert Einstein
If we are to have in the universe an average density of matter which differs from zero, however small may be that difference, then the universe cannot be quasi-Euclidean. On the contrary, the results of calculation indicate that if matter be distributed uniformly, the universe would necessarily be spherical (or elliptical). Since in reality the detailed distribution of matter is not uniform, the real universe will deviate in individual parts from the spherical; that is, the universe will be quasi-spherical. But it will be necessarily finite.
Einstein on relativity is included in the 20th Century science volume of the revised Great Books set, and is an example of what SHOULD be included in the scientific part of a basic collegiate liberal arts education, just the way Newton and Bohr should not. It is actually understandable.
It's not easy, and the bit about Lorentz transformations is still lost on me, but the basic ideas critiquing Euclidean geometry and Newtonian physics on a cosmic scale, the speed of light as a constant, and gravitational fields are explained with as little jargon as possible.
I imagine this is the book that writers of sci-fi plots skim for quotations about the "space/time continuum" and "gravitational time dilation." At least it challenged me without making me feel like a hopeless dunce.
Short story; The Prussian Officer, by DH Lawrence
Lawrence is represented in the Great Books set by this story. I'm nonplussed. I would have thought a better choice would be the more well-known and interesting "Rocking Horse Winner" , in which a boy with the magical power to affect horse races by riding on his rocking horse provides a wicked commentary on the rat race and the need for ever-more money.
This one--Meh. A Prussian officer abuses his orderly; the orderly shoots him and runs off into the wilderness, where he dies of thirst and fever. I was like, so what?
------
One would think that all the forced leisure of a quarantine would increase rather than decrease my reading time. In my case, most of my spare reading was done on the gym cardio equipment, on the bus, or in the bathtub...and I'm not spending more time in the bathtub than I was before. In fact, my schedule has gone to the four winds, including the regular time I scheduled to write these posts. If your mileage varies, that's cool.