Books this year: a book diary

The Pioneers was the first of Cooper’s “Leather-stocking Tales” to be written, though it is the fourth and penultimate in terms of the series’ internal chronology (The Last of the Mohicans being the second, both written & in terms of internal chronology). It is set in the late 1790s, in the frontier of New York, in the new settlement of Templeton, a barely-fictionalized version of Cooper’s hometown of Cooperstown, founded by the author’s father.

The plot – which is laughable, in my opinion – is convoluted: Judge Temple, the founder of Templeton and owner of something like 10,000 acres, acquired about half of his land when it was confiscated from his dear friend Edward Effingham (who sided with the British during the War, serving as a Colonel) and sold at auction. This Effingham’s son, Edward Oliver Effingham, returns to the States (shortly before the novel opens) to care for his senile grandfather, Major Oliver Effingham, and to reclaim the property he believes Judge Temple wrongly acquired from the middle Effingham. Despite the obvious pseudonym he assumes – Oliver Edwards – and his “inexplicable” hostility toward the Judge, his true identity isn’t revealed until the novel is almost over – when it is also revealed that Judge Temple was really a good guy, who tried repeatedly to restore lands and fortune to his friend, until his letters began coming back unopened, and he heard that the two younger Effinghams had perished (and, conveniently, the old senile Major had long been “lost”). At that point, everyone’s happy, Edward Oliver Effingham marries the Judge’s daughter, Elizabeth (the whole romance subplot is heavily influenced by Pride and Prejudice, published about a decade earlier), and the American aristocracy is stabilized and justified.

Fortunately, this part of the novel is secondary (in practice, if not by Cooper’s intent) to the primary conflict driving the novel: that between the frontiersman Natty Bumppo and the settler & bringer-of-civilization Judge Temple. This conflict plays out in numerous incidents, some of which contrast the “wasty ways” of the settlers (as in their indiscriminate slaughter of the pigeons migrating in great swarms over the settlement, many of which are left to rot on the ground where they fall) and the kill-only-enough-to-eat practices of Natty and Chingachgook; other incidents center on the conflict between the “law of the wilderness” and the “law of civilization” (as when Natty is fined for killing a deer “out of season,” deer season being something he views as an utterly arbitrary construct).

These conflicts are often complicated, however. The young Effingham, who will eventually inherit all of Temple’s lands and fortune, and thereby continue the conversion of wilderness into cultivated land, dotted with towns, is, for most of the novel, a companion of Natty and Chingachgook, and appears to espouse their ideals. Judge Temple himself is often portrayed as wishing to find a middle ground between Natty’s absolute rejection of cultivation and “civilization” and the rampant, wasteful consumption of natural resources practiced by most of the settlers and endorsed by his verbose and outspoken cousin, Richard Temple. The Judge, however, is also generally portrayed as weak-willed and ineffective as a responsible cultivator of the wilderness, alternately giving in to the “excitement” of his cousin’s activities (the trawling of the lake, for instance, which produces a harvest of as many inedible fish as edible ones) and quietly disapproving from the comfort of his manor-house. Cooper seems incapable of or unwilling to consider the middle way the Judge (usually) espouses; there is no room in the novel for a westward expansion of civilization that also preserves areas of wilderness.

Though Cooper often seems to side with Natty, the cruelly ironic final line of the novel – “He [Natty] had gone far toward the setting sun, the foremost in that band of pioneers who are opening the way for the march of the nation across the continent” – betrays, in my opinion, a belief that the time has come for Americans to dominate and utterly transform the landscape as they move West to the Pacific – and that such domination and transformation is inevitable, if not also divinely ordained.

This is a book that I read once a year.  Since I’ve made a few meager contributions to this blog, I’ve already posted a review of it.  Hopefully I’m not breaking any rules by doing this.  You can find my previous mention of it somewhere around here, maybe under a couch cushion.

Yes, this is a novel about zombies. Yes, the author did a stint writing for SNL and happens to be the son of Mel Brooks. And, yes, one of the characters is an old, blind Japanese man who survives alone in the wilderness for years killing zombies with a “monk’s shovel” before teaming up with an otaku-turned-samurai-badass-motherfucker. It’s still a good novel, even if you’re not generally a fan of the undead.

It’s worth reading because it’s not really about zombies — or, rather, it uses zombies to talk about one possible way a lethal and easily-spread virus might spread and disrupt global society in a spectacularly clusterfucky manner. Zombies are more fun than ebola (well, in a manner of speaking), but the principle is the same.

World War Z was published in 2006, and the zombie pandemic with which the novel deals seems to begin (in China, of course) sometime around then. The novel is composed of a series of interviews (or excerpts therefrom) conducted toward the end of the decade of “peace” which followed humanity’s decade-long struggle for survival; the interviews are arranged chronologically according to which part of WWZ they address, from the initial outbreaks, through the “Great Panic” and humanity’s return from the brink of extinction, to the decade of rebuilding after “victory” is officially declared.

Though Brooks acknowledges his debt to George Romero, the novel is far different from Romero’s films in that it posits humanity’s survival; the humans win, and the zombies are contained, though not eradicated (some spend their winters frozen and thaw out in the spring, millions and millions wander around on the oceans’ floors, and, hilariously, Iceland is still completely overrun). Humanity survives, but the cost is high: not only are there significant (catastrophic, even) ecological consequences – the extinction of the whales, for example – but the survival of some humans means the sacrifice of many more. Israel totally isolates itself for the duration; South Africa adopts the Redeker Plan, which calls for the establishment of safe zones by simultaneously establishing “live bait” zones (and guess where most people end up?); and there are plenty of smaller instances of military units abandoning civilians, or civilians abandoning each other, or resorting to theft, rape, murder, cannibalism, &c. Good times.

The fact that this is a novel about zombies will, I think, keep it from being widely read, which is a shame; it deals intelligently with the issues that arise during and after a catastrophic disruption of society, and such things happen on a local (and not-so-local) level all the time. Reading the novel (or anything else, fiction or otherwise) won’t prevent such disasters, obviously, but being forced to think about the ways our choices and behaviors can exacerbate or alleviate the suffering of those affected by such disasters is a good thing – or, at least, a thing that’s good for us.

This novel was published in 1985, and set in what would then have been the not-to-distant future, in the Republic of Gilead – a totalitarian regime set up by a bunch of fundies who managed to kill the President and all of Congress and make it look like Islamic fundies were responsible. Despite the fact that I have a really hard time believing that people like Fred Phelps or even Pat Robertson (who seems reasonable in comparison) would be capable of such a coup, the novel is an extremely accurate portrayal of the repressive and hypocritical morality of religious fundamentalists, especially when it comes to sex.

Not only has the United States been overthrown by fundies (who are purging not only Catholics but Baptists – the novel has its darkly funny moments), but the birthrate has also plummeted, for a variety of reasons, including severe environmental degradation (nuclear and toxic wastes everywhere, pollution, etc). This leads to the establishment of “Rachel and Leah Centers” where fertile but not exactly moral (but not really really immoral) woman are indoctrinated and then assigned to high-ranking officials with infertile wives (because, really, it’s always the woman’s fault, right?) to have babies for them – like Bilhah and Zilpah did for Rachel and Leah.

The novel is narrated (”reconstructed”) by one of the handmaids, given the name “Offred” – which is both a patronymic (”Of Fred”) and a pun (”off red”), as the handmaids are dressed totally in red. Before the shit hit the fan, she was married and had a daughter; their attempt to escape to Canada (where else?) failed, and Offred ended up a handmaid, her daughter was given to someone more worthy, and her husband’s fate is unknown.

There are, as are required in dystopian novels, a secretive and potentially omnipresent police organization, an underground resistance, double agents, an escape attempt – but these are secondary elements: the novel is primarily concerned with exploring the role and psychology of a woman living under an oppressive patriarchy, and it does this quite well. The epilogue (a transcription of an academic talk titled “Problems of Authentication in Reference to The Handmaid’s Tale” and delivered in 2159) adds, well, problems of authentication – it draws the reader’s attention to the “reconstructed” nature of narratives that appear to be offering a running account of events, among other things.

Though I may not have made this novel sound interesting, it actually was; I finished it in two days because I couldn’t put it down. Certainly I would recommend reading a little of it before deciding that my taste in novels is not to be trusted.

I was first introduced to this book via an excerpt posted here, and it instantly earned a place on my “find this and read it” list – and it’s only taken me about two years to get to it.

Invisible Cities (or Le città invisibili) was published in 1972, and translated into English by William Weaver in 1974. Italo Calvino was born in Cuba to Italian parents; the family returned to Italy shortly after his birth in 1923.

It’s an intricately structured novel, but the short version is that its made up of nine sections, each itself made up of short (1-3 pages) descriptions of cities ostensibly visited by Marco Polo during his travels through Kublai Khan’s empire. Each of the larger sections both begins and ends with a dialogue between Marco and Kublai narrated by a third-person narrator; the descriptions of the cities are (apparently) narrated by Marco Polo himself. Some of them, though, are blatantly anachronistic, and I think a few more are subtly so, though I don’t know enough to know.

The headings of the descriptions recur – “Cities and Names,” “Cities and Desire,” “Thin Cities,” “Continuous Cities,” etc – and are incrementally numbered, which is important to one of the novel’s patterns. Several major themes run through the novel: on the dual (or tripartite) nature of cities; on what distinguishes one city from another, and what doesn’t; on how a city is different for an inhabitant and a visitor; on how cities endure and change through time. The dialogues between Polo and Khan deal with, among other things, memory, desire, facing one’s mortality, and the futility of attempting to know or understand everything, or even much of anything.

It’s a beautiful book, and I wish I had room to quote about half of it – so really, you should just go read it. It’s short (about 160 pages) and the brevity of its sections and subsections makes it easy to read in bits and pieces – though I imagine reading it in one sitting is an interesting experience.

I’ll end with an excerpt, the second section titled “Continuous Cities”:

If on arriving at Trude I had not read the city’s name written in big letters, I would have though I was landing at the same airport from which I had taken off. The suburbs they drove me through were no different from the others, with the same little greenish and yellowish houses. Following the same signs we swung around the same flow beds in the same squares. The downtown streets displayed goods, packages, signs that had not changed at all. This was the first time I had come to Trude, but I already knew the hotel where I happened to be lodged; I had already heard and spoken my dialogues with the buyers and sellers of hardware; I had ended other days identically, looking through the same goblets at the same swaying navels.

Why come to Trude? I asked myself. And I already wanted to leave.

“You can resume your flight whenever you like,” they said to me, “but you will arrive at another Trude, absolutely the same, detail by detail. The world is covered by a sole Trude which does not begin and does not end. Only the name of the airport changes.”

This book, written in 1884, is about people who live only in 2 dimensions. The author of the book, a square who had the rare opportunity to visit three dimensional space, writes to us, or anyone else who will read, about the nature of Flatland. It is a world where women are straight lines, and good people are regular polygons. The more sides a man has, the higher he is in society, until at last one obtains so many sides as to very nearly approximate the circle. At this point, you move into a sort of royal priestly class.

I’ve read about this book before that it might help with visualizing worlds with different numbers of dimensions than our own. I don’t know if it really does that all that well, particularly with visualizing worlds with more than 3 spatial dimensions. In any case, it serves its satirical purpose on social hierarchy quite well, and I think this is the main strength of the book.

So I went and read 3 plays by the moden dramatist Henrik Ibsen. They are, Hedda Gabler, A Doll’s House, and The Wild Duck. There’s a common thread in all three in that they each deal with marriages happy on the outside but broken in the middle.

I liked all 3 of the plays, but my favorite was The Wild Duck. I will definitely be reading more Ibsen.

I’ve wanted to read this book ever since Ken’s dad posted it on his book blog (which inspired this one). Chris has also posted it here before.

The main thrust of the book is the development of the medieval mind-model of the physical and metaphysical universe. Because this model is constantly referred to, and it is assumed everyone already knows it, it can be difficult to get on reading old texts without having at least a cursory understanding of it.

I feel I learned a lot from this. I found it interesting that the concept of plagiarism as being bad didn’t exist in medieval times, as authors constantly copied old works and changed them. One only has to look at the plethora of Arthurian stories to see this. Because there was a sort of truth to the stories, it was kind of like copying a fact rather than an original piece of intellectual property.

I’ve never really been a serious student of medieval or renaissance literature, but I would guess that the contents of this volume would probably help to catch some of the references.

This book is gives a treatment of the four major schools of economic thought, classical, Marxian, neo-classical, and Keynesian. It covers Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, Mill, Marx, Marshall, Walras, Clark, Bohm-Bawerk, Wicksell, and Keynes.

What I was most impressed with is how different classical conceptions are with neo-classical ones. The economics we learn in school is much more similar to that of Alfred Marshall than it is to Adam Smith’s. Smith, and other classical thinkers, didn’t have any real conception of equilibrium prices, and instead thought of the true value of things rather than their prices. This was quite surprising to me, as I had always assumed that Smith formulated equilbrium prices.

The whole dynamical construct of free markets solving for optimal parameters is really completely neo-classical. I also still have no idea why everything thinks Keynesian economics is so great. I’d love to find something that would pursuasively argue for it. I guess I should just read Keynes.

As some of you know, Ken and I are endeavoring to finish the entire series of Durant’s Story of Civilization. This is the third volume, covering Roman history. I took the entire audio set with me to the Peace Corps as it was impractical to take the printed volumes.

The book pretty much goes chronologically through the foundation of the republic and the emperors, and the last fifth or so covers the rise of Christianity in the empire. Much time is spent on Rome proper, but, in Durant’s characteristically holistic style, some time is spent exploring the outer provinces as well. Treatment is giving to literature, philosophy, architecture and the arts as well.

I’ve been inspired to read Plutarch’s Lives and Lucretius next, but I won’t get to them for a little while. A lot of people are said to have really loved the Parallel Lives and On the Nature of Things is an amazingly accurate scientific treatise/poem for its time. I also still plan on going through Gibbon, but I won’t start it this year.
I was very pleased with the book, and will be starting the Age of Faith next month.