winterbadger (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
winterbadger) wrote2009-09-17 11:08 pm
winterbadger) wrote2009-09-17 11:08 pm
Entry tags:
- 50books09,
- bike,
- fiction,
- intelligence,
- iran,
- islam,
- napoleonic,
- sailing,
- terrorism,
- uk
always trying to catch up
Despite doing a fair bit of reading (not of books) for my class, I've been keeping up the reading/listening.
35/50: Suffolk Summer by John T. Appleby. A wonderfully whimsical portrait of one summer in a rural corner of England, as seen by a US Army Air Corps sergeant in 1945. A good deal of discussion of his bicycle trips around the county in search of brasses to rub is interspersed with the good sergeant's observations on the English people, their countryside, his own countrymen, and life in general. Today this would probably be edited within an inch of its life. Then (originally published in 1948, reprinted at least ten times between then and 1997) it was simply sent out into the word as an unvarnished and eccentric account of the author's experience, and it's the better for it, in my opinion. It's worth reading, if only for his glowing encomia to the British people (their faults and their glories alike) and the impressive record of his bicycling adventures. (It's no joke when he estimates that over one summer he covered over 2,00 miles on a bike--the Green Hornet, he dubbed it--that had a minimum of both gears and tyre strength).
36/50: Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett: A re-read, and, as at the first time of reading, I am grateful that Neil Gaiman worked on this with Terry Pratchett, or I might be forced to fling it across the room with great force. I am among those few people who feel that Terry Pratchett is not *nearly* as funny as he himself thinks he is. This book has the humour of Tom Holt without his rather predictable elements. It's almost as good as it would have been if Neil Gaiman wrote it by himself...
37/50: Locked Rooms by Laurie King: Here again I become grumpy, and here I find the definite point that I stopped liking Laurie King so much. She abandons the first person so as to be able to tell two parts of the story at once, and her writing suffers for it. She also becomes (more of) that sort of author I detest now, but found dearly amusing when I was an adolescent, the author who coyly introduces a pre-existing character into her story in such a way as to pretend to share a joke with the reader. In this case, her (or, I should say, Conan Doyle's) fictional character (whom she has hijacked) encounters Dashiell Hammett and stikes up a working relationship with him. I'm not sure quite why I detest this sort of "cleverness"; I think what I find objectionable about it is the lugubrious effort to pretend that the very special person who the character(s) meet is no one special at all, the sense that the author has done something terribly clever that the reader is somehow supposed to find amazingly subtle and imaginative, while all the writer has done is take someone already fleshed out (by history or another author) and introduce them into his or her own work. I don't take offense when people include historical figures in historical novels. I revel in GM Fraser's historical novels, where he introduces all sorts of fascinating persons to the reader, people we might never have met otherwise. But he had far too much sense to indulge in the sort of 'cute' slipping in of a character, this sort of revelation of some private joke the author can share with the reader, as if to say "Aren't all of these silly people in my book so slow, for not knowing what you and I do?" King did this with Lord Peter Wimsey in an earlier novel, and she was (I gather) roundly thrashed by the Sayers estate for doing so (sustained applause), so she resorted to using real people in this way.
In any case, it's another of her character studies (no actual "mystery" that anyone could begin to unravel given the facts of the case), and her growing inability to create interesting of three-dimensional characters betrays the fact that she's a writer who has long since written the good books she had in her and is now going through the motions in order to cash in further on past success. I do recommend her early Mary Russell books, but this one I would suggest avoiding.
38/50: Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill by Jessica Stern: I was disappointed that the primary focus of this book was on Islamic militants and almost none of the book dealt with Christian terrorists. Not because I think the latter are more numerous or somehow worse, but because they get (IMO) so little press in the rush to talk about al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Lashkar-e-Tayyiba, Jemaat Islamiya, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad. I appreciated that a good portion of the book dealt with the terrorist portion of the Israeli religious right and settler movement. She went places and talked to people who I would not have dared to contact, so I honour her for her bravery. I think she has insightful things to say about terrorism and its roots, the motivations of people who volunteer to die and of those volunteer to plan, stay behind, and reap the rewards of others' sacrifice.
39/50: Storm from the East: The Struggle between the Arab World and the Christian West by Milton Viorst. I read Viorst's 1994 "Sandcastles: The Arabs in Search of the Modern World" for one of my previous AMU classes. I hope someone on their faculty notices that he has written more and more recently. This book came out in 2006, and it ends as the Iraq War is in full swing, with the tide just beginning to turn. This is an excellent (IMO) primer on the historical sparring between the Arab/Muslim world and Christian Europe. But more than that, it's a good introduction to the modern history of the Arab Middle East. I'm still working through one of the best histories of the *formation* of the modern Middle East, but this covers both that process of the European powers taking the Ottoman Empire and reshaping it for their own ends following WWI and the ensuing working on that construct of post-colonial nationalism that was somewhat explored in Michael Oren's book I reviewed earlier ("Six days of war: June 1967 and the making of the modern Middle East").
40/50: The Commodore by Patrick O'Brian: I truly hope that someday a writer emerges who is O'Brian's equal for historical detail, nautical detail, creation and development of characters, subtlety of plotting, and simply superb story-telling. In the meantime, I will do my best to spread out my initial consumption of his novels so that I do not exhaust them all before I have time to properly enjoy them. My father, bless his soul, never took any notice of which Aubrey/Maturin novels I had and which he had given me (I was always careful not to get any for myself) and jsut sent me from time to time whichever one he happened to come across, so I have a somewhat odd and asynchronous collection, which has just tossed up The Commodore to me as the next to be read. It is another masterpiece of understatement, naval adventure, period society, and political and professional intrigue. Our heroes set sail for the slaving ground of West Africa (not before personal and intelligence matters have come to a head back home), encounter a good deal of fascinating natural history (ashore and on their own ships), and then have a goodly plot anchor to haul in the last moments of the novel. I think this makes five or six of the twenty novels that I have read so far, and while I am well out of order having read all over the opus, I have no doubt that I shall enjoy them all just the same.
41/50: All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror by Barry Kinzer. Just finished this today. A truly depressing story, combining the venality, cruelty, and small-mindedness of several governments of the UK with the ideological mind-blindness of the Eisenhower administration (how is is that whenever Republicans get in the White House we have awful problems in the Middle East?) Essentially, the nationalist, democratic government of Iran decided in the 1950s to challenge the British oil company that controlled all of Iran's oil output and gave them almost nothing in revenue while treating their employees like dogs. When, after repeated attempts to get the UK to deal more fairly with Iran, all of which were contemptuously rebuffed, the Iranian government nationalised the oil industry. The British then attempted to invade Iran, were dissuaded by the US, enacted a blockade and embargo that did not reduce the Iranians to compliance, and eventually persuaded the councilors of newly elected President Dwight Eisenhower to overthrow the popular government of Iran and give power to a dictatorship headed by the feeble and indecisive shah. The US obligingly did so, without consideration for the rights and wrongs of the situation and in the process threw away nearly a century of high regard and good reputation that the US had held in Iran to that point. The resulting monarchy became more and more repressive, finally ending in complete collapse and the loss of Iran to a revolutionary Islamic government far worse than the nationalists would ever have been. And the US, taking exactly the wrong lesson from this dangerous enterprise, proceeded to overthrow countless other Third-World governments in the same manner and with, by and large, the same disastrous consequences in every case.
Rarely does a book evoke such a feeling of shame and sorrow that I am so attached to two countries (the US and the UK) that behaved in so venal, so horrific, so stupid, so criminal, and almost worst of all, so foolish and short-sighted a manner as in this case. Several US, and a few UK, civil servants did everything they could to prevent this policy from being carried forward; the US ambassador and the CIA station chief in Tehran in particular protested so much and were so violently opposed to the coup that they were reassigned. I credit them for having their nations' interests and honour at heart, and I only wish more people had listened to them.
35/50: Suffolk Summer by John T. Appleby. A wonderfully whimsical portrait of one summer in a rural corner of England, as seen by a US Army Air Corps sergeant in 1945. A good deal of discussion of his bicycle trips around the county in search of brasses to rub is interspersed with the good sergeant's observations on the English people, their countryside, his own countrymen, and life in general. Today this would probably be edited within an inch of its life. Then (originally published in 1948, reprinted at least ten times between then and 1997) it was simply sent out into the word as an unvarnished and eccentric account of the author's experience, and it's the better for it, in my opinion. It's worth reading, if only for his glowing encomia to the British people (their faults and their glories alike) and the impressive record of his bicycling adventures. (It's no joke when he estimates that over one summer he covered over 2,00 miles on a bike--the Green Hornet, he dubbed it--that had a minimum of both gears and tyre strength).
36/50: Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett: A re-read, and, as at the first time of reading, I am grateful that Neil Gaiman worked on this with Terry Pratchett, or I might be forced to fling it across the room with great force. I am among those few people who feel that Terry Pratchett is not *nearly* as funny as he himself thinks he is. This book has the humour of Tom Holt without his rather predictable elements. It's almost as good as it would have been if Neil Gaiman wrote it by himself...
37/50: Locked Rooms by Laurie King: Here again I become grumpy, and here I find the definite point that I stopped liking Laurie King so much. She abandons the first person so as to be able to tell two parts of the story at once, and her writing suffers for it. She also becomes (more of) that sort of author I detest now, but found dearly amusing when I was an adolescent, the author who coyly introduces a pre-existing character into her story in such a way as to pretend to share a joke with the reader. In this case, her (or, I should say, Conan Doyle's) fictional character (whom she has hijacked) encounters Dashiell Hammett and stikes up a working relationship with him. I'm not sure quite why I detest this sort of "cleverness"; I think what I find objectionable about it is the lugubrious effort to pretend that the very special person who the character(s) meet is no one special at all, the sense that the author has done something terribly clever that the reader is somehow supposed to find amazingly subtle and imaginative, while all the writer has done is take someone already fleshed out (by history or another author) and introduce them into his or her own work. I don't take offense when people include historical figures in historical novels. I revel in GM Fraser's historical novels, where he introduces all sorts of fascinating persons to the reader, people we might never have met otherwise. But he had far too much sense to indulge in the sort of 'cute' slipping in of a character, this sort of revelation of some private joke the author can share with the reader, as if to say "Aren't all of these silly people in my book so slow, for not knowing what you and I do?" King did this with Lord Peter Wimsey in an earlier novel, and she was (I gather) roundly thrashed by the Sayers estate for doing so (sustained applause), so she resorted to using real people in this way.
In any case, it's another of her character studies (no actual "mystery" that anyone could begin to unravel given the facts of the case), and her growing inability to create interesting of three-dimensional characters betrays the fact that she's a writer who has long since written the good books she had in her and is now going through the motions in order to cash in further on past success. I do recommend her early Mary Russell books, but this one I would suggest avoiding.
38/50: Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill by Jessica Stern: I was disappointed that the primary focus of this book was on Islamic militants and almost none of the book dealt with Christian terrorists. Not because I think the latter are more numerous or somehow worse, but because they get (IMO) so little press in the rush to talk about al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Lashkar-e-Tayyiba, Jemaat Islamiya, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad. I appreciated that a good portion of the book dealt with the terrorist portion of the Israeli religious right and settler movement. She went places and talked to people who I would not have dared to contact, so I honour her for her bravery. I think she has insightful things to say about terrorism and its roots, the motivations of people who volunteer to die and of those volunteer to plan, stay behind, and reap the rewards of others' sacrifice.
39/50: Storm from the East: The Struggle between the Arab World and the Christian West by Milton Viorst. I read Viorst's 1994 "Sandcastles: The Arabs in Search of the Modern World" for one of my previous AMU classes. I hope someone on their faculty notices that he has written more and more recently. This book came out in 2006, and it ends as the Iraq War is in full swing, with the tide just beginning to turn. This is an excellent (IMO) primer on the historical sparring between the Arab/Muslim world and Christian Europe. But more than that, it's a good introduction to the modern history of the Arab Middle East. I'm still working through one of the best histories of the *formation* of the modern Middle East, but this covers both that process of the European powers taking the Ottoman Empire and reshaping it for their own ends following WWI and the ensuing working on that construct of post-colonial nationalism that was somewhat explored in Michael Oren's book I reviewed earlier ("Six days of war: June 1967 and the making of the modern Middle East").
40/50: The Commodore by Patrick O'Brian: I truly hope that someday a writer emerges who is O'Brian's equal for historical detail, nautical detail, creation and development of characters, subtlety of plotting, and simply superb story-telling. In the meantime, I will do my best to spread out my initial consumption of his novels so that I do not exhaust them all before I have time to properly enjoy them. My father, bless his soul, never took any notice of which Aubrey/Maturin novels I had and which he had given me (I was always careful not to get any for myself) and jsut sent me from time to time whichever one he happened to come across, so I have a somewhat odd and asynchronous collection, which has just tossed up The Commodore to me as the next to be read. It is another masterpiece of understatement, naval adventure, period society, and political and professional intrigue. Our heroes set sail for the slaving ground of West Africa (not before personal and intelligence matters have come to a head back home), encounter a good deal of fascinating natural history (ashore and on their own ships), and then have a goodly plot anchor to haul in the last moments of the novel. I think this makes five or six of the twenty novels that I have read so far, and while I am well out of order having read all over the opus, I have no doubt that I shall enjoy them all just the same.
41/50: All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror by Barry Kinzer. Just finished this today. A truly depressing story, combining the venality, cruelty, and small-mindedness of several governments of the UK with the ideological mind-blindness of the Eisenhower administration (how is is that whenever Republicans get in the White House we have awful problems in the Middle East?) Essentially, the nationalist, democratic government of Iran decided in the 1950s to challenge the British oil company that controlled all of Iran's oil output and gave them almost nothing in revenue while treating their employees like dogs. When, after repeated attempts to get the UK to deal more fairly with Iran, all of which were contemptuously rebuffed, the Iranian government nationalised the oil industry. The British then attempted to invade Iran, were dissuaded by the US, enacted a blockade and embargo that did not reduce the Iranians to compliance, and eventually persuaded the councilors of newly elected President Dwight Eisenhower to overthrow the popular government of Iran and give power to a dictatorship headed by the feeble and indecisive shah. The US obligingly did so, without consideration for the rights and wrongs of the situation and in the process threw away nearly a century of high regard and good reputation that the US had held in Iran to that point. The resulting monarchy became more and more repressive, finally ending in complete collapse and the loss of Iran to a revolutionary Islamic government far worse than the nationalists would ever have been. And the US, taking exactly the wrong lesson from this dangerous enterprise, proceeded to overthrow countless other Third-World governments in the same manner and with, by and large, the same disastrous consequences in every case.
Rarely does a book evoke such a feeling of shame and sorrow that I am so attached to two countries (the US and the UK) that behaved in so venal, so horrific, so stupid, so criminal, and almost worst of all, so foolish and short-sighted a manner as in this case. Several US, and a few UK, civil servants did everything they could to prevent this policy from being carried forward; the US ambassador and the CIA station chief in Tehran in particular protested so much and were so violently opposed to the coup that they were reassigned. I credit them for having their nations' interests and honour at heart, and I only wish more people had listened to them.
no subject
no subject
Have you read The Art of Detection? Its a crossover between her Kate Martinelli detective books and the Sherlock Holmes thing and is a little too forced and rather spoils both, though for a kate fan it was at least nice to "catch up" on what the character had been up to, as it were..
The cycling book sounds intriguing, if a little odd! :)
no subject
I think one of the things that's always bothered me about Laurie King's books is that they're billed as mysteries, but they don't give the reader any of the clues he/she really needs to give out the riddle behind it all. I guess I'm willing to put up with that when the rest of the writing seems good--it's just that the writing seems to fall down a good bit in this book (as, if I recall, did the previous one--I didn't read them in sequence this time). And I get really, really tired of her having the characters (Holmes, Watson, et al.) continually abuse the author she stole them from. OK, ACD was a bit of a crackpot about fairies, but it's just catty to make fun of that when using his own creations for your own profit.
And, overall, I have very little patience with authors showing off, "look at me, aren't I clever?", which some of LK's introductions of other characters seem to do. After the first blush, a lot of Connie Willis's writing now strikes me the same way, as if the author is inordinately pleased with herself at how clever she's been and is looking archly at the reader to see if they "get it" and applaud her. A series of very heavy-handed "reveal"s.
no subject
Ah, maybe that explains it, I don't really read them as mysteries, I read them because I just love the characters and the interaction and the "what will happen next with local flavour" aspects, can agree that as whodunnits they leave a lot to be desired.
Yes, I don't appreciate that sort of writing and agree with you on Connie Willis.
If you like mysteries/detectives I've recently discovered Mark Billingham and his have kept me guessing nicely, Brit police novels.
no subject
If it's the Suffolk book you're interested in, I'd be happy to pass mine along. It will become a well-travelled book. :-)