A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

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Books of 2023

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If I counted correctly, I read about 34 books this year. Some substantial, plenty just for a good read. Books beat just doom scrolling through social media – which I probably still do too much of. Here is the list:

  • Conquistadores: A New History of Spanish Discovery and Conquest – Fernando Cervantes. This was a good one. A very readable history of the Spanish conquest of the New World.
  • Two Nights in Lisbon – Chris Pavone. I did not enjoy this one. A mystery where a woman’s husband disappears in Lisbon. He had a double life. I grew to actively dislike the protagonist and didn’t care what happened to any of the characters.
  • A Short History of Nearly Everything – Bill Bryson. Bryson is delightful. This was a re-read. Bryson starts with the Big Bang and goes from there.
  • Children of Time – Adrian Tchaikovsky. Very creative new(ish) science fiction series. Humanity mostly dies out. There are spiders that evolve.
  • 1984 – George Orwell. We all know the book. Good to re-read from time to time. Newspeak is fascinating.
  • Children of Ruin – Adrian Tchaikovsky. Sequel to Children of Time. There’s a third book that I have not yet read.
  • Travels With Charley – John Steinbeck. Steinbeck and his dog Charley circumnavigate the continental U.S. counterclockwise. That book inspired some blog posts. Here’s one.
  • The Big U – Neal Stephenson. Things get weird at an enormous university dormitory. This is Stephenson’s earliest work. It is not his finest work. He recognizes this. I’ve read that he only allowed continued publication because his fans were having to pay outsized prices on ebay to get copies.
  • The Come Up: An Oral History of the Rise of Hip-Hop – Jonathan Abrams. I really enjoyed this one. It is, as the name suggests, a lot of the folks involved in early hip-hop giving their perspectives on what was going on at the time. One minor detail I hadn’t appreciated – the significance of skating rinks as early venues. They had space, decent sound systems, and were usually cheap.
  • River of the Gods: Genius, Courage and Betrayal in the Search for the Source of the Nile – Candice Millard. One of those histories about the outsized personalities of the people exploring the blank spots on the map.
  • Upgrade – Blake Crouch. Crouch writes a good sci-fi thriller. In this case gene editing has made a guy superhuman and hijinx ensue.
  • The Ice Pick Surgeon: Murder, Fraud, Sabotage, Piracy, and Other Dastardly Deeds Perpetrated in the Name of Science – Sam Kean. The title tells the tale. A series of chapters telling the story of various misdeeds in the name of science. The title comes from the guy who would go to fairs and perform lobotomies with an ice pick.
  • From Property to Partner: Women’s Progress and Political Resistance – Sheila Kennedy and Morton Marcus. A bit of scholarship from a couple of prominent Indiana academics. A plain English discussion of social, legal, economic, and technological trends describing women’s progress from subordinates to (increasingly) equal members of society. It also describes the backlash we’re seeing to those developments.
  • Poster Girl – Veronica Roth. A science fiction book telling the story of a girl who was part of an elite ruling class, who was the face on propaganda posters. When she was young, the elites were overthrown and confined in a ghetto. A decade later, she goes out into the wider world and remains recognizable.
  • Unnatural History – Jonathan Kellerman. One of Kellerman’s Alex Delaware whodunit’s. A fun read, but I don’t remember too much about it.
  • Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Voyage – Rachel Gross. A nonfiction book on the current state of women’s health and its history. The history of overlooking women’s health is almost laughably bad at times.
  • The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West – David McCullough. A history of the earliest settlers in the Northwest Territory – primarily around Marietta, Ohio.
  • The Extraordinary Journey of David Ingram: An Elizabethan Sailor in Native North America – Dean Snow. Ingram was a regular sailor who got marooned in Central America in 1568. Over the course of the next year, he and two other guys walked about 3,000 miles up to the coast of Maine where they were rescued. It was particularly good for giving a sense that what is now the U.S. was a bustling, fairly developed place prior to being ravaged by the diseases that came with contact.
  • Reacher: No Plan B – Lee Child. One of his Reacher action books. As per usual, Reacher is smarter, stronger, and faster than everyone else. The women love him and the bad guys fear him.
  • The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder – David Grann. A British ship, part of an effort to cause trouble for the Spanish, wrecks off the coast of South America, leaving survivors stranded on a desolate island in Patagonia. They don’t play nicely with one another. Members of the warring groups manage to get back to Great Britain and tell conflicting tales.
  • The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music – Dave Grohl. An autobiography by Foo Fighters front man, Dave Grohl. He seems like a good guy, and he has some stories to tell.
  • This Time Tomorrow – Emma Straub. Fiction about a woman turning 40, mostly focused on her relationship with her father. Time travel is a plot device. I liked this one a fair bit.
  • Pines – Blake Crouch. Crouch is a good author and this one was decent, but it wasn’t among my favorites of his work. An FBI agent comes to in a little town where he was doing an investigation. But things get weird and all is not what it seems.
  • Fairytale – Stephen King. King is at the top of the heap for a reason. He produces quickly and consistently. A kid helps a cranky old man and ends up finding a portal to a fantasy land that needs his help.
  • The 90s – Chuck Klosterman. A nostalgic recounting of the decade. Like any retrospective, it has to simplify. And, looking back always minimizes the things we were afraid of (because we survived them) and highlights the things that were cool or interesting (because the mundane isn’t worth mentioning.)
  • Light Bringer – Pierce Brown. The sixth installment of the Red Rising series. If you like that kind of science fiction, it’s a great series and Light Bringer was one of the stronger books.
  • John Dies at the End – David Wong. Kind of wacky, kind of gory. A surreal story that was funny but, if I’m honest, not one of my favorites.
  • A Fever in the Heartland: the Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over the Heartland and the Woman Who Stopped Them – Timothy Egan. While there are some details about the prior history of the Klan and some of the doings in other places, this is mostly an account of D.C. Stephenson and the rapid rise and fall of the Klan in Indiana. Very well told and right in my wheelhouse. Timely as well inasmuch as some of the social dynamics that let Stephenson thrive seem to be problematic once again.
  • Zealot: the Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth – Reza Aslan. A pretty interesting account of the historical life of Jesus, as near as we can tell.
  • Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan – Herbert Bix. This is one that I’m very happy to have read, but it was a bit like homework. The book spends a good amount of time on Hirohito’s upbringing and sets the stage with enough detail about the Meiji era as well as his father’s reign and how those informed the early part of Hirohito’s reign. One thing leads to another and, before long, Japan’s acquisition of chunks of China is proceeding apace. Then it has the tiger by the tail. Domestic politics were such that Hirohito and those in his circle didn’t see a way (and it’s not clear they had any appetite to do so in any event) to back away from imperial expansionism without support at home collapsing. They seemed to have kind of known that they had no clear exit plan once they attacked the U.S.
  • Termination Shock – Neal Stephenson. One of Stephenson’s more recent books. A Texas billionaire who made his money with Buc-ee’s style gas stations shoots a bunch of sulfur into the air in order to slow down global warming.
  • Chain Gang All-Stars – Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. The story follows some of the stars of “hard action sports.” Basically death matches where individuals convicted of rape and murder are put in a reality TV, gladiator setting. If they survive long enough, they get their freedom. Mostly, they don’t. The story – particularly the footnotes – provides a lot of criticism of our own, actual prison system.
  • Lost in the Valley of Death – Harley Rustad. This has an “Into the Wild” vibe about it. Young man wanders around rather than getting a job. It doesn’t end well.
  • Boys from Biloxi – John Grisham. A Grisham page turner. It follows the lives of two kids from Biloxi who grow up into adults on opposite sides of the legal system.

Book: “Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan”

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This isn’t exactly “hot off the presses,” but I just finished “Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan” by Herbert Bix. It won a Pulitzer Prize in 2001. I got it for Father’s Day and have been reading it on and off ever since.  (The kids thought I’d be interested because I spent a fair amount of time telling them about Dan Carlin’s excellent Hardcore History podcast series called “Supernova in the East” about the rise of Japan between  1853 – 1945).

The Hirohito book is plenty readable and the subject matter is very interesting. Even so, at nearly 700 pages and with me being mostly unfamiliar with the many personalities involved, it was a bit of a slog. The book spends a good amount of time on Hirohito’s upbringing and sets the stage with enough detail about the Meiji era as well as his father’s reign and how those informed the early part of Hirohito’s reign. One thing leads to another and, before long, Japan’s acquisition of chunks of China is proceeding apace. Then it has the tiger by the tail. Domestic politics were such that Hirohito and those in his circle didn’t see a way (and it’s not clear they had any appetite to do so in any event) to back away from imperial expansionism without support at home collapsing. They seemed to have kind of known that they had no clear exit plan once they attacked the U.S.

The hope seems to have been that they would strike a devastating blow, expand rapidly, and then when the U.S. geared up for war, they could back off from some of their acquisitions into a more defensible position and then negotiate a more favorable peace than would have been possible had they not attacked in the first place. But, among other things, Japan had trouble retreating to more defensible areas in a timely fashion. The WWII geeks will have far more detail about the military history of the period. This has plenty, but the main focus is (as the title would suggest) Hirohito.

Bix makes the case that Hirohito was far more involved in the decision making leading up to and during the war than was acknowledged in the post- war period. Following Japan’s surrender, it was a useful fiction for MacArthur and the U.S. to pretend that Hirohito was mainly a figurehead who, left to his own devices, would have preferred peace. This allowed the U.S. to leave Hirohito in place where he could be influential in getting the Japanese people to come to terms with the post-war status quo. This was beneficial to Hirohito inasmuch as he was allowed to remain on the throne and not be tried for war crimes.

The book mostly ends around 1952 when the Treaty of San Francisco ended post-war occupation of Japan. There is very brief discussion of the next 37 years or so of Hirohito’s life. I’m glad to have read it. I don’t see myself re-reading it.

Another Day of Scurry and Production

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The phrase “scurry and production” caught my ear as I continued to listen to Steinbeck’s “Travels with Charley.” In his travels during (I believe) the Fall of 1960, he has just come through Ohio, Michigan, and northern Indiana – through or near cities like Cleveland, Toledo, Flint, South Bend. But he’s in a more pastoral location in northern Michigan where he writes, “I wanted a little time to think about the things I’d seen, the huge factories and plants and the scurry and production.” I guess it beats scurry without production.

But the real reason I was prompted to write was the preceding paragraph where Steinbeck says:

It is the nature of a man as he grows older, a small bridge in time, to protest against change, particularly change for the better. But it is true that we have exchanged corpulence for starvation, and either one will kill us. The lines of change are down. We, or at least I, can have no conception of human life and human thought in a hundred years or fifty years. Perhaps my greatest wisdom is the knowledge that I do not know. The sad ones are those who waste their energy in trying to hold it back, for they can only feel bitterness in loss and no joy in gain.

Bitterness in loss and no joy in gain. I see a lot of that now. I guess that’s part of why I’m always railing against nostalgia. First of all, it’s reverence for things as they never were. But, also, that reverence has a pernicious tendency to blot out joy in the things that are or might be.

Books of 2022

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Once again, I kept a list of the books I read this past year. I don’t have a particular reason to think this is of general interests, but for my own amusement, here they are:

  • Batavia’s Graveyard by Mike Dash. Really like this one. A Dutch East India ship wrecked on its way to the East Indies in, if memory serves, the sixteenth century. Survivors wind up on a spit of land and some bad dudes take over.
  • The Outlaw Ocean by Ian Urbina. A series of articles about various things going on in lawless or underpoliced parts of the ocean. Slavery. Whale hunting. Hunting the whale hunters and poachers. Abortions at sea just beyond the jurisdiction of anti-abortion countries.
  • Happiness of Pursuit by Chris Guillebeau. This one didn’t really land for me. From a Googled book review, “case studies of regular people in search of long-term happiness. Whether they’ve walked across continents, founded nationwide charities or – like the author – visited every country in the world by the time they’re thirty-five.”
  • Northland by Porter Fox. The guy travels the northern border of the United States and tells about his experience as well as some of the history in those areas. Reminded me a bit of the style of Tony Horwitz’s books. This was a good one.
  • Later by Stephen King. Enjoyable fiction of the sort that King produces so reliably. The protagonist is a kid who has the ability to see the ghosts of dead people.
  • Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. This was a re-read. Ender Wiggin is a little boy who is smarter than everyone, goes to space Battle School, and unwittingly commits a genocide against the alien Bugger race.
  • A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth by Henry Gee. This goes through the ups and downs of living organisms on our planet. The sheer scale of time is mind-bending. And the several episodes of extinction events are humbling. As individuals and, even as a species, we are fairly incidental and inconsequential in the scheme of things.
  • Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card. This is a sequel to Ender’s game. Ender is dealing with the aftermath of being the Xenocide and ends up on a planet inhabited by the second alien race encountered by humans.
  • Drunk: How We Slipped, Stumbled, and Danced Our Way to Civilization by Edward Slingerland. Alcohol has some very obvious negative effects which would seem to impose some competitive disadvantages when it comes to evolution and to competing cultures and civilizations. And, yet, use of alcohol and drunkenness is almost ubiquitous across history and civilizations. What advantages explain its staying power? He offers several explanations. Among them that alcohol facilitates certain kinds of lateral thinking that helps with problem solving at times, it facilitates social cohesion in certain ways, and it makes living in the relatively cramped, oppressive conditions of an agricultural civilization more tolerable.
  • Xenocide by Orson Scott Card. The third book in the original Ender trilogy. The writing was worse than I remembered. But the plot was fairly interesting, having to do with a smart virus that has made itself essential to aliens on a particular planet and might contrive to take over human biology as well; with a focus on the ethical concerns this sort of thing raises.
  • Billy Summers by Stephen King. Another solid piece of King fiction. Summers is a hit man who is pretty smart but plays dumb. He’s being set up.
  • The Greatest Beer Run Ever by Chick Donahue. Based on a true story wherein Chickie undertakes to deliver beers from home to the guys from his neighborhood who are serving in Vietnam.
  • The Quiet American by Graham Greene. A 1956 book having to do with the end of the French colonial period in Vietnam, the beginning of American involvement, and a love triangle.
  • Seven Games: A Human History by Oliver Roeder. The author takes a look at the history and game play of checkers, backgammon, chess, Go, poker, Scrabble, and bridge along with efforts to “solve” those games with computers.
  • Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages by Dan Jones. Very readable. A good survey of the middle ages in Western Europe. It starts with environmental catastrophe in Central Asia which displaced people who displaced the Huns who helped bring about the fall of Rome. I think we go from there to somewhere in the 15th or 16th century.
  • Men Who Hate Women by Laura Bates. A look at online incel culture, how those attitudes infect the broader culture, and how those things relate to a lot of the social dysfunction we see today.
  • A Beautifully Foolish Endeavour by Hank Green. A sequel to “An Absolutely Remarkable Thing,” the two of which comprise “the Carl Saga.” It’s a science fiction novel having to do with, among other things, addictive social media controlled by a malignant narcissist from the earlier novel.
  • A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles. I really liked this one. In lieu of having him killed, the communists have a Russian nobleman confined to an upscale hotel rather than just killing him. It follows him and the hotel over the course of many years.
  • Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War by Tony Horwitz. Written in the late 90s, Horwitz travels around the south and looks at the influence the Civil War stil has on the area as well as giving you some history lessons about the Civil War itself. Some of the issues he identifies in the late 90s as being related to the Civil War are even more pronounced in the present day.
  • Holy War: How Vasco da Gama’s Epic Voyages Turned the Tide in a Centuries Old Clash of Civilization. This book provides some background about Islam’s founding and rapid expansion and the subsequent Reconquista in the Iberian peninsula. Then it provides an in depth history of Prince Henry the Navigator’s efforts with respect to Portuguese navigation culminating in da Gama’s voyage around the Cape of Good Hope and his encounters in India. We learned a lot about Columbus growing up. Da Gama’s voyage was a lot longer and more difficult and arguably more consequential. But we only learned about him in passing. It was good to read this not long after that history of the middle ages because there was a fair amount of overlap but from somewhat different perspectives.
  • The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson. Book One of the Starlight Archives. Big, sprawling epic fantasy.
  • The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World and Globalization Began by Valerie Hansen. She takes you around the world, discusses the societies in those places and times, and talks about explorations happening around that time that linked one culture to another (albeit very tenuously in some cases).
  • The Midwestern Survival Guide by Charlie Berens. A cute, tongue-in-cheek book about Midwestern culture.
  • Die Trying by Lee Child. A Jack Reacher book. Reacher is smarter and tougher than everyone and will always defeat the bad guy and get the girl. That happens in this installment too. It’s a fun read.
  • Voyagers by Nicolas Thomas. A history of the seaborne migrations that settled the islands of the Pacific.
  • A Psalm for the Wild Built by Becky Chambers. A novella where a tea-monk who travels from town to town making tea for people who make it goes into the wilderness and encounters a wild-built robot seeking to make contact with humans.
  • Chrysalis by Lincoln Child. A tech thriller/mystery.
  • Retail Gangster by Gary Weiss. An account of the rise and fall of Crazy Eddie’s electronics stores in the 70s and 80s in the New York City area.
  • Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson. No description needed.
  • Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson. Book Two of the Starlight Archives.

All in all, a pretty good set of books, I’d say!

 

Books of 2021

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So, I messed around and kept a list of the books I read in 2021. Here they are:

1. Ready Player 2 by Ernest Cline. This was a cash grab from the success of Ready Player 1, and it was not very good.

2. The Fold by Peter Clines. Kind of a multi-verse thriller. I enjoyed it quite a bit.

3. Colonel Roosevelt by by Edmund Morris. I’m a sucker for T.R. biographies. If you want to feel lazy, read a book about Theodore Roosevelt. This one focuses on the post-Presidency period of his life.

4. Providence by Max Barry. A crew of four humans fight aliens in far off space with a super high-tech ship. Good page turner. It’s been compared to “Starship Troopers.” I was put in mind of “the Forever War.”

5. Bluescreen by Dan Wells. Kind of a cyber noir novel. Everyone is jacked into the future Internet pretty much constantly. A drug is introduced that hijacks the interface.

6. The Outsider by Stephen King. All-American suburban dad is implicated in a horrific murder. Turns out there is a creepy supernatural monster involved.

7. The Body by Bill Bryson. Bryson, in his inimitable style, takes you on a tour of the human body and its systems.

8. Sandman v. 1 by Neil Gaiman. A graphic novel where the Dream Lord is imprisoned, escapes, seeks vengeance and tries to make amends.

9. An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green. Robot sculptures suddenly appear all over the world. People suddenly start experiencing a collective dream where they can solve puzzles. There is conflict between battling collectives that organize through social media.

10. Fields of Blood by Karen Armstrong. This is a history of religion and its connection to violence. Armstrong makes the argument that the violence isn’t really a function of religion so much as a function of the agricultural and subsequently industrial revolutions and the governments that make them possible. When religion becomes attached to those who govern, the violence inherent in governance becomes part of the religion.

11. Dark Age by Pierce Brown. This is part of the Red Rising series (book 2 in the second trilogy.) Kind of a space opera involving humans that have been genetically engineered over the centuries into types of people designated by colors. The Golds are the rulers. The Reds traditionally work the mines. One of the Reds transforms into a Gold and rises up. Fighting ensues. I really like this series.

12. Recursion by Blake Crouch. Centered on technology that enables people to go back to a previous point on their personal timeline, cognizant of the old timeline. Hijinx ensues.

13. Waterknife by Paolo Bacigalupi. Set in the near future where climate change has put water at an extreme premium in the southwestern United States. The borders between states have been closed, and fighting to obtain water rights is vicious. This one was extremely good. Highly recommend.

14. Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown. Focused primarily on Joe Rantz, it tells the story of Rantz in the 1920s and 30s and his making it onto the University of Washington rowing team. Then it tells the story of the team that eventually made it to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. Another highly recommended book.

15. In the Garden of Spite by  Camilla Bruce. A fictionalized version of the story Belle Gunness, the serial killer who eventually settled in LaPorte, Indiana. She had bad luck with husbands and suitors but very good luck with insurance. (One of her husbands happened to die on the very day he had two insurance policies in place.)

16. Lafayette in the Somewhat United States by Sarah Vowell. A breezy biography of the Marquis de Lafayette and the Revolutionary War.

17. Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman. An ordinary Londoner finds himself in London Below where things are a lot different. Love this story.

18. The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi. Another book by Bacigalupi with environmental catastrophe as its background. I didn’t enjoy this one as much as I did the Waterknife.

19. On the Trail of Genghis Khan by Tim Kope. Kope decides to ride horses from eastern Mongolia across the Asian steppe to the Danube River. I really enjoyed this one as well. There’s a fish-out-of-water aspect as he learns to handle the horses and camping, and then the people he meets on the trail are fascinating. But the best character is Tigon, a puppy he acquires early in the journey that grows up on the way.

20. The Topeka School by Ben Lerner. I hated this one. There was a stream of consciousness approach that I suppose was intended as artistic but to me comes off as disorganized and in need of editing. It’s kind of an autobiographical work of fiction that wanders around the author’s teen years as a debater and disaffected youth in the suburbs.

21. American Gods by Neil Gaiman. Another re-read of a Gaiman story I love. Gods are brought to the New World by the people who believe in them. As that belief wanes, so does the gods’ quality of life and power. Odin is a grifter running a con.

22. A Voyage for Madmen by Peter Nichols. An account of the 1968 Sunday Times Golden Globe Race where nine sailors sought to be the first person to complete a solo, non-stop yacht circumnavigation of the globe. Very good book. Highly recommend.

23. Sapiens by Yuval Harari. Basically a survey of the history of human kind from the Stone Age through the present. Entertaining but probably a little superficial.

24. Endurance – Shackleford’s Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing. This is an account of the harrowing voyage led by Sir Ernest Shackleford in 1914 with the intent to cross Antarctica. The ship became encased in ice before it could even get to the continent. They had to survive in the ship, then on the ice pack when it was crushed, and eventually, Shackleton would have to make an open sea voyage in a lifeboat across hundreds of miles in the Southern Ocean. Another great book.

25. Hench by Natalie Zina Walschots. Fun story about a world where heroes and supervillains get support staff through temp agencies. Our heroine is really good with spreadsheets.

26. Dark Matter by Blake Crouch. A boring but reasonably happy physics professor is thrown from his normal life by an alternate reality version of himself who had sacrificed family life to pursue scientific greatness by inventing a means of traversing the multiverse.

27. Rooster Bar by John Grisham. Frustrated lawyers steal money from bad guys and wind up on a beach somewhere. But I guess that’s most John Grisham stories. This wasn’t one of his better efforts.

28. Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson. Near future, global warming has made living unpleasant. A Texas billionaire pulls together influential people from places where sea levels rising will cause immediate problems – the Netherlands, Venice, Singapore, Houston, etc. He creates a cannon to shoot sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere which will be a temporary reprieve from the warming until we can figure out more comprehensive methods. I pretty much love all Neal Stephenson books, so I can’t offer any kind of reliable guidance on how good or bad this one was. I enjoyed it.

29. Lost City of the Monkey God by Douglas Preston. An account of the archeological find in the jungles of Honduras. Lidar technology made it possible to detect lost cities in impenetrable parts of Honduras. These sites line up a bit with legends of a “Lost City of the Monkey God” and point to a previously unknown or at least little known civilization in Central America.

30. Tippecanoe County and the Flood of 1913 by Arnold Sweet and Pete Bill. An account of the impact of the flood of 1913 on Tippecanoe County. The flood in the spring of 1913 cut off Lafayette and West Lafayette with water rising to something like 32 feet. For several days after reading that, when driving in downtown Lafayette or across the river in West Lafayette, I couldn’t help but imagine the water that had been in those places. It destroyed the Brown Street bridge and the Main Street bridge. And the railroad bridge was significantly damaged.

31. The Institute by Stephen King. Kids with telekinetic powers are harvested and placed in the Institute to be weaponized against foreign leaders.

Coming at the Truth Sideways

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I thought it was timely that Sheila Kennedy (who blogs more regularly than me and you should read) spoke of reading fiction to escape the news of the day. (Michael Leppert also had a book related blog post.) Particularly since the election, I have backed away from social media to a large extent. (Less Facebook & Twitter but slightly more Reddit). I’ve always been a pretty diligent reader but have probably increased my reading this year and, in particular, have read more fiction.

[Side note: I think fiction and the stories we read give us what amounts to an advanced vocabulary. Not so much the extra words we learn; but the piles of narratives which can work as metaphors that help us understand and describe the world. In his book 1984, Orwell talked about how the Party was imposing “Newspeak” to limit the vocabulary of the population and make it easier to control. Instead of excellent, terrific, fantastic, etc. you’d have good or maybe plus good and double-plus good. Terrible would be captured by ungood and plus ungood, etc. If the population didn’t have words to describe concepts like “liberty,” it would be very unlikely that any opposition to the Party would arise around that concept. The stories we hear and tell give us additional metaphors with which to describe the world. I could take a further digression into Star Trek: The Next Generation’s episode Darmok which has aliens who speak entirely in such metaphors. But I won’t.]

Anyway, I’ve started the “Greatcoat” series by Sebastien de Castell. Described as “Three Musketeers meets high fantasy.” It’s generally light & fast-paced (as was his “Spellslinger” series which I read last year and earlier this year & enjoyed.) But, even in such pieces, you get observations that put you very much in mind of the real world. He has the beleaguered king in his world speaking to the protagonist about the Dukes challenging his power, the state of the people suffering from those Dukes, and the nation’s potential vulnerability to nations outside the borders. All of this creating discontent and despair:

“Our nation is weakened by a system that breeds a visceral hatred so deep that most people would as soon see the world burn as stay as it is, but lack the will to try and change it.”

My sense is that seeing that sort of sentiment expressed in the context of a fantasy land will make the reader more apt to recognize its presence in the real world when he or she sees it than would a similar statement made explicitly about the real world. Those words coming out of the lips of a fantasy king trying to make his land better end up being more persuasive than, say, the same words coming out of a political activist complaining about political opponents. Douglas Rushkoff touched on this sort of dynamic in “Media Virus.” Ideas sort of slip into our head when they’re carried by a vector that doesn’t trigger our defenses.

If we’re going to reach common ground as a country, it’s not going to be because we argue each other into submission. It’s going to be because we’re doing something else together in a way that inadvertently makes us realize that we have something in common.

Book: The Silk Roads

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I’m only 50 pages in, but I thought I’d mention a book that I’m really enjoying at the moment called “The Silk Roads: A New History of the World” by Peter Frankopan. I responded to a friend in a Facebook post, and enjoyed my own response enough (I’m modest that way) to want to convert it into this blog post.
As I said, I’m not that far into it. But, so far, it’s walking through a historical time line from the perspective of what things looked like in the Constantinople/Persia area without necessarily being a deep history of those places. Rather, it’s kind of telling what happened there as the situation changed to the east and west. When Rome became aggressive in the area and adopted Christianity as its state religion, Christians in the area had a tougher time — Zoroastrianism became more closely tied in as part of the Persian state identity and more militant as well. As the people of the central Asian steppes were displaced and/or marauded to the west and south, Rome and Persia found themselves aligned, and the power of Rome declined, Christianity was making inroads in Persia and co-opting Buddhism to some extent to expand to the east. (Any errors in this time line, I’m sure are mind — I’m reading this as a hobby and not necessarily studying closely).  
 
That’s where it stood as I went to bed last night. The chapter ended with mention of a wave of bubonic plague that created a great deal of devastation in the 6th century and indication that Islam was about to get going in the 7th. So, Christianity is about to experience some reversals and Islam will spread along those trade routes.
 
What I like about this book is the shifted perspective. There is a great argument to be made — and the author is making it — that this was the heart of the world for much of human history. So much of how I learn history is that stuff happened in Egypt and Mesopotamia for awhile, but it’s a little foreign. Greece really got culture started. Rome rose and adopted Greek culture. Rome fell but the Catholic Church carried the torch until the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Europe kicked ass and founded America. The U.S. had the Civil War and then beat the Nazis. Roll credits.
 
I’m a bigger fan of history than most, I think. And I’m painfully aware of how much more there is to know. Part of what ails our society, in my opinion, is a significant lack of perspective about what has happened in other places and other times. So, read your history, people!

Anthony Wayne: Daring Boy

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I stumbled across a used book in a library clearance sale; “Anthony Wayne: Daring Boy.” It was part of a series called “Childhood of Famous Americans” and I think many were written by an author named Augusta Stevenson. I’d guess they are about 60-70% fictional and definitely reflect a 50s worldview; but I really enjoyed these books as a kid, and now I’m enjoying re-reading the Anthony Wayne one with Cole.

The other one I remember reading was Sam Houston: Boy Chieftain.

The pattern, in those books anyway, is that a boy with promise gets into tough situations, shows pluck, courage, and ingenuity and saves the day; goes on to be Famous American. Sort of a Horatio Alger thing, I guess.

Captain Stormfield Arrives at Heaven

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I can’t remember if I’ve recommended Mark Twain’s short story, “Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven” before around here, but if not, I highly recommend it. Today, it was prompted by a post of Tipsy’s touching on the relationship between God and the world.

That reminded me of Captain Stormfield’s arrival at Heaven. He had been racing a comet which took him fairly far off course, causing him to arrive at Heaven by the wrong gate; causing much consternation for the Heaven bureaucracy that has to make arrangements for an entire universe worth of arrivals.

I lit. I drifted up to a gate with a swarm of people, and when it was my turn the head clerk says, in a business-like way –

“Well, quick! Where are you from?”

“San Francisco,” says I.

“San Fran – WHAT?” says he.

“San Francisco.”

He scratched his head and looked puzzled, then he says –

“Is it a planet?”

By George, Peters, think of it! “PLANET?” says I; “it’s a city. And moreover, it’s one of the biggest and finest and – ”

“There, there!” says he, “no time here for conversation. We don’t deal in cities here. Where are you from in a GENERAL way?”

“Oh,” I says, “I beg your pardon. Put me down for California.”

I had him AGAIN, Peters! He puzzled a second, then he says, sharp and irritable –

“I don’t know any such planet – is it a constellation?”

“Oh, my goodness!” says I. “Constellation, says you? No – it’s a State.”

“Man, we don’t deal in States here. WILL you tell me where you are from IN GENERAL – AT LARGE, don’t you understand?”

“Oh, now I get your idea,” I says. “I’m from America, – the United
States of America.”

Peters, do you know I had him AGAIN? If I hadn’t I’m a clam! His face was as blank as a target after a militia shooting-match. He turned to an under clerk and says –

“Where is America? WHAT is America?”

The under clerk answered up prompt and says –

“There ain’t any such orb.”

“ORB?” says I. “Why, what are you talking about, young man? It ain’t an orb; it’s a country; it’s a continent. Columbus discovered it; I reckon likely you’ve heard of HIM, anyway. America – why, sir, America – ”

“Silence!” says the head clerk. “Once for all, where – are – you – FROM?”

“Well,” says I, “I don’t know anything more to say – unless I lump things, and just say I’m from the world.”

“Ah,” says he, brightening up, “now that’s something like! WHAT world?”

Peters, he had ME, that time. I looked at him, puzzled, he looked at me, worried. Then he burst out –

“Come, come, what world?”

Says I, “Why, THE world, of course.”

“THE world!” he says. “H’m! there’s billions of them! . . . Next!”

That meant for me to stand aside. I done so, and a sky-blue man with seven heads and only one leg hopped into my place. I took a walk. It just occurred to me, then, that all the myriads I had seen swarming to that gate, up to this time, were just like that creature. I tried to run across somebody I was acquainted with, but they were out of acquaintances of mine just then. So I thought the thing all over and finally sidled back there pretty meek and feeling rather stumped, as you may say.

“Well?” said the head clerk.

“Well, sir,” I says, pretty humble, “I don’t seem to make out which world it is I’m from. But you may know it from this – it’s the one the Saviour saved.”

He bent his head at the Name. Then he says, gently –

“The worlds He has saved are like to the gates of heaven in number – none can count them. What astronomical system is your world in? – perhaps that may assist.”

“It’s the one that has the sun in it – and the moon – and Mars” – he shook his head at each name – hadn’t ever heard of them, you see – “and Neptune – and Uranus – and Jupiter – ”

“Hold on!” says he – “hold on a minute! Jupiter . . . Jupiter . . . Seems to me we had a man from there eight or nine hundred years ago – but people from that system very seldom enter by this gate.” All of a sudden he begun to look me so straight in the eye that I thought he was going to bore through me. Then he says, very deliberate, “Did you come STRAIGHT HERE from your system?”

As with just about everything Mark Twain wrote, particularly – in my mind – his short stories, it’s worth a read. In this one, he pretty deftly skewers the cartoon version of heaven that seems to have currency among the rank and file, if not the deep thinkers.

Unbroken

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I just finished Lauren Hillenbrand’s “Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption.” It was a very good book, telling the story of Louie Zamperini, who ran in the 1936 Olympics. While he was training for the 1940 Olympics, World War II broke out. He then became a bombardier whose plane went down over the Pacific. After subsisting for 47 days in a raft, he was picked up by the Japanese Navy and endured a harrowing existence as a P.O.W.

It’s just a gripping story.