Today’s TTT is books on our spring TBR. As is my custom, I’m going to look back at my previous quarterly TBR to see how I did. I batted .500, which is great by my standards: I read five of the listed titles. Two of the remainder turned out to be monstrously big, and two of them suffered from my subject obsession (the road to Civil War in 1850s America) finally burning itself out.
Teaser Tuesday
“At a focus group in Sunnyvale, California, one participant grew antagonistic when showed a device announcing e-mails with a buzzing noise. ‘If this thing buzzes every time I get an e-mail, you’d better ship it with a hammer,’ he warned. LOSING THE SIGNAL
So, Spring TBR!
(1) Paradise Lost, John Milton. I am currently a third of the way through this, and sometimes distracting myself by listening to the BBC adaptation which has Ian McDiarmid as Satan. Imagine, if you will, Palpatine growling “All is not Lost — the Unconquerable Will, the study of revenge, immortal hate!“. It’s chilling. I’m enjoying Milton’s writing — “Devils to adore for Deities” is a phrase that has stuck with me all week.
(2) Losing the Signal, a history of the rise and fall of BlackBerry. I’ve had this for a few years, but recently watching a very loose film adaptation of it prompted me to finally begin reading it.
(3) I need to circle back and finish a book Cory Doctorow wrote on why the internet has become progressively worse over the last decade or so.
(4) Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier. April means English Literature month here at RF, and I need to address the two EL titles on my Classics Club list. Mansfield Park is on there, as well…..I keep eying its girth and walking away glum.
(5) Backstage at the Ford Theater, an interesting history that focuses on the actors and stagehands who were present when Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth. I was making serious progress on this one before getting interrupted.
(6) Black Baseball in Alabama. A new release I’ve not gotten to read yet, despite trying to help the author when he was doing local research. (Turns out a Selma son played for a Harvard team and was nearly recruited by a Boston pro club: in an alternate universe, perhaps people know the name William Clarence Matthews as readily as they know Jackie Robinson in ours.)
(7) GIRLS: Gen Z and the Commodification of Everything, Freya India. One of my favorite substack authors, Freya India of GIRLS, writes on the digital world and the female Gen-Z experience.
(8) Polk: The Man Who Transformed the Presidency and America, Walter Borneman
(9) When the Earth Had Two Moons. It’s closing on the end of March, I really need to get moving on my science reading for this year. O_O
(10) Something by Annie Jacobsen. She’s written books on nuclear war, the CIA, Area 51, and other topics that, if you brought them up at a dinner party, you would be received with a ‘Oh, would you mind if I stepped to the bathroom for a minute’ and then promptly ghosted.
Trita Parsi’s Treacherous Alliance is a history of relations between the United States, Israel, and Iran from 1947 on. It principally argues that Iran and Israel’s relationship has become poisoned not because of Iranian ideology — specifically, that of the Muslim clerics who control Iran — but through each power pursuing geopolitical interests that sometimes included one another, but increasingly did not. Specifically, Parsi argues that the Israeli-Iranian animosity that exists at present owes to Israel changing its priorities: rather than court Iran as an ally against the Arab nations that surrounded it, in the 1990s Israel began courting its Arab neighbors and using Iran as a common enemy. This was partially entangled with DC’s decision to abandon its mission of balancing Iraq and Iran against one another, and instead settling on the more ambitious and imperial cause of “dual containment”, a cause enabled by the sudden folding of the Soviet Union and the fleeting establishment of the unipolar world. Treacherous Alliance is dense but informative, covering every step of the constant dance between Israel, Iran, and DC — a dance that has more than a few surprises.
A key point in Treacherous Alliance is that Iran and Israel both view themselves as regional outsiders: Israel is a quasi-western and Jewish outpost planted in a largely Arab world, and the Iranians have both ethnic and religious differences with their own Arab neighbors. These are not insignificant differences, but Iran has tried to overcome them from time to time — positioning itself as a regional leader through different means, first its connections with the west and then its status as an Islamist state. Parsi’s deep history shows how Iran has tried different tacks at different times — depending on how the geopolitical winds were blowing — but how realpolitik and not ideological fixation has always been the ultimate driver for Iran. The Shah, who was far more open to working with Israel than the bigbeards who followed him, still kept them at a bit of a distance: they were largely useful as a means of connecting more readily with the west, and as an ally against Arab (principally Iraqi) or Soviet aggression.
Events like the Iraq War or the collapse of the Soviet Union would change the dynamics — and the respective party’s priorities. Realpolitik is king: even when DC was inveighing against Iran, and Iran against Israel, in back rooms deals were cut to allow information and war material to flow as each state pursued its respective interests. (The Iran-Contra affair comes readily to mind.) While the mullahs might harangue Israel rather than offer terse depreciation of them the way the Shah did, both regimes were still willing to deal. In the 1990s, though, Highlander politics started to dominate each nation’s rulers’ more: in terms of regional hegemony, There Can Only Be One. Both Israel and Iran had the potential to dominate the area’s politics, but only if they could marginalize the other. This was especially true when Israel began making traction with the PLO, and Iran — which had made support of the PLO one of its planks for authority in the region — felt further isolated. DC was frequently complicit in this, think tanks declaring Iran a chief sponsor of terrorism even as the house of Saud funded wahhabist schools who would give us virtually all of the 9/11 hijackers. DC’s dismissal of the Iranians was partially fueled by lobbying groups like AIPAC, which also pushed the Clinton admin to ending trade between America and Iran.
But lest readers think “Ah, okay, now we’re at more or less present relations” — oh, no. At this point Netanyahu was a voice for moderation, pushing to preserve the relationship between Tel Aviv and Tehran. He viewed the PLO as a far more pressing threat. Another fly in the soup, though, is that Israel and Iran both viewed the United States in the context of their own struggle for power; neither power wanted the other to draw too close to DC for fear of being isolated. So, when DC and Tehran had golden opportunities to work together destroying the Taliban regime — foes of both governments — the Israeli lobby in DC kicked into overdrive, helped by Israel’s discovery of a ship full of weapons manufactured in Iran enroute to Arafat. Plans that were developing for DC and Tehran to stabilize Afghanistan together — complete with a jointly-trained army — disappeared, and the conduit for talks closed when Bush declared Iran to be part of the ‘axis of evil’. Clinton and Bush’s previous progress with the PLO was also undermined, as Bush’s team wrote Arafat off as untrustworthy. Ultimately, Tel Aviv appears to have been far better at navigating the particular tug-of-war, as our present circumstances (the 2026 – ? Iran War) prove.
The last section of the book, “Looking Ahead”, is now sadly moot. I appear to have a bad habit of reading Parsi books after Trump’s gunboat approach to Iranian diplomacy has rendered them somewhat irrelevant. Parsi comments that DC could benefit by leaning more on Iran as a potential ally, cultivating it as a guardian against Chinese encroachments into the region: instead, Bush, Obama, and Trump’s continued aggression against Iran (including funding al-queda in Syria to undermine Iran’s ally Assad) have pushed the regime deep into partnership with China and Russia, and the present war may have the perverse effect of rallying Iranians around the flag in addition to deep-sixing the global economy. Still, as far as understanding what’s gone before, this is an extremely detailed and generally fair-minded approach.
Although I’ve frequently re-read some Harry Potter books over the years, I’ve tended to avoid Phoenix after my second read.I found it depressing and irritating my first rounds, and had no desire to ever revisit it. The full cast audio edition, coupled with the fact that I am nearly twenty years older now, went a long way toward making the story come alive again, though they also drove home the reason I dislike Phoenix. Specifically, Dolores Umbridge, who is so excruciatingly hateable that she inspires violent desires that may involve her face and repeated Bludger assaults. For the uninitiated, The Order of the Phoenix is the first novel of Voldemort’s “comeback”: he was revived at the end of Goblet of Fire, casually murdering one of Harry’s classmates in the process, and now he and his followers are gaining power and disappearing people. The Ministry of Magic, rather than sounding the hue and cry, is turning a blind eye and repressing those who try to sound the alarm. That includes at Hogwarts, as Minister for Magic Cornelius Starmer has inflicted a vile woman — Dolores Umbridge — as the new Defense against the Dark Arts “teacher”. Her idea of teaching is just having the students read from some insipid book about theory, however: she spends most of her time building cases for sacking Dumbledore’s allies at the school and being a hateful, smug, sicky-sweet bureaucratic bully who thoroughly deserves the Cruciatus curse being inflicted on her over and and over.
I have strong feelings in re: Umbridge. I think she works as well as she does because she’s the most believable villain in the entire series: readers can pretend to be worried about dragons or dark lords or dementors, but our odds of encountering such creatures outside of a schizophrenic episode are fairly minimal. Running into a smug bureaucrat who enjoys abusing power and being legally barred from strangling them or tying them to a train track is completely plausible. She makes it worse by being so disingenuous and ‘sweet’: I have never met a character in literature I hate more.
Another aspect of the book that’s aged well for me is the ‘teenage angst’; I commented on it in my first read , but reading as an adult I can take Harry’s emotionalism more seriously. Reading it as a lad scarcely into my twenties, I found Harry’s emotionalism irritating — but reading it as a more thoughtful adult, who has drifted into positions of quasi–mentorship with teenage cousins and coworkers and such, I took his trauma more seriously. In the span of two months, Harry went from seeing a classmate murdered before his eyes, to being ignored by his mentor, talked down to by others who wanted to protect him, and then relentlessly bullied by a new teacher. This teacher’s bullying was not the petty and spiteful bullying of Snape’s, either, but purposeful and cruel torture by a woman who wanted to destroy Harry’s life. She even bans him from playing Quidditch and tries to destroy the Gryffindor Quidditch team. Worse, there is no remedy: she’s been granted authority from Herr Fudge himself, and even Hogwarts’ teachers are suppressed by her. Meanwhile, Harry is increasingly isolated: Dumbledore is inexplicably ignoring him, and Harry is subject to frequent visions from Voldemort that he tries in vain to shield himself against, and continues to be hectored by friends and mentors alike for not shielding himself better. Ultimately, Harry will rebel with some of the other students and take action rather than wait for the adults to do so, and….well, things escalate.
So, this being a full-cast audio edition I should comment on the audio. The new voices are excellent as always, and I’m even getting used to the FCA’s voice artist for Snape. Umbridge, performed by Kiera Knightly, is perfect at being sicky-sweet, and the atmospherics are as usual top-shelf stuff. I only found them irritating in one scene, in which Harry and Hermione have gone to see Hagrid in his hut: while they’re having an intense conversation about important stuff, Fang keeps barking in the background and it’s just as irritating as it might’ve been in real life. The sound balancing was especially well done during the big Quidditch match, with kids singing and shouting providing immersion but not disrupting the narration. The Battle within the Department of Mysteries was another strong moment, with the sounds of spells being shouted, the shouts themselves, and Bellatrix LeStrange’s mad cackling mixed expertly. Given the emotional heaviness of this book — Harry’s trauma, the Weasley children learning their father has been critically injured, the stakes of the battle in the Department of Mysteries — the voice acting performs a lot of work. Some of the new casting is perfect: I could recognize Bellatrix LesStrange and Luna Lovegood without their characters even being introduced.
This was another stellar entry in the series, though it’s strange; as much as I enjoy the execution of the story, I still don’t like the story itself — Umbridge just brings out far too much rage in me. There were a lot of elements about the story I’d simply forgotten and enjoyed re-experiencing, like Harry getting a dressing-down from a headmaster portrait for being too self-consumed and not admitting that Dumbledore could very well have his reasons for behaving the way he was. (Ron adding unexpected comic relief during the intense Battle of the Department of Mysteries by getting hit with a ‘drunk’ spell was also something I’d forgotten entirely.) The quality was such that I spent a few lunch breaks simply sitting and listening to it, rather than reading; typically, audiobooks are car and casual gaming fare for me.
“Well, obviously, she’s feeling very sad, because of Cedric dying. Then I expect she’s feeling confused because she liked Cedric and now she likes Harry, and she can’t work out who she likes best. Then she’ll be feeling guilty, thinking it’s an insult to Cedric’s memory to be kissing Harry at all, and she’ll be worrying about what everyone else might say about her if she starts going out with Harry. And she probably can’t work out what her feelings toward Harry are anyway, because he was the one who was with Cedric when Cedric died, so that’s all very mixed up and painful. Oh, and she’s afraid she’s going to be thrown off the Ravenclaw Quidditch team because she’s been flying so badly.” A slightly stunned silence greeted the end of this speech, then Ron said, “One person can’t feel all that at once, they’d explode.” “Just because you’ve got the emotional range of a teaspoon doesn’t mean we all have,” said Hermione nastily, picking up her quill again.
I gotta say, reading about Dolores Umbridge inspires a LOT of #7
WHAT have you finished reading recently? Robert Parker’s Blind Spot. Meh.
WHAT are you reading now? I’m listening to the full cast audio of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, and reading Eleanor Oiliphant is Completely Fine along with Treacherous Alliance for my serious read. The latter is a history of Israeli, Iranian, and American relations.
WHAT are you reading now? I need to start Paradise Lost by Milton.
1-4: Harry Potter and the Full Cast Audio Editions. These are wonderful.
5. Fan Fiction, Brent Spiner and the cast of Star Trek TNG. Fan Fiction is a silly novel ‘inspired’ by Brent Spiner’s experiences with overzealous fans, but the audiobook version of this actually brings in his TNG castmates to voice their past selves, and it’s brilliant. Reading the book when you can hear Patrick Stewart and Martina Sirtis is a travesty.
6. “A Christmas Carol” read by Sir Patrick Stewart. He even makes Christmas bell noises.
7. Woke Up this Morning, Michael Imperioli & Steve Schrippa. An oral history of The Sopranoes. Oh!
8. The Glory of their Times, Paul Ritter. Interviews with guys who played baseball professionally in the 1920s and 1930s.
9. Cold as Hell. Roger Clark, the mocap and voice actor for Arthur Morgan in RDR2, here does the voice artisty for a cowboy who died too nasty to go to heaven but too good to go to the other place. So, he’s given a black badge and told to rid the earth of nasty nephilim like vampires. Fun dark western fantasy.
10. Anything Wil Wheaton does, but especially Redshirts, Masters of Doom, and Ready Player One.
Today’s treble T is books with green book covers, in honor of St. Patrick, whose feast day is today. He is the patron saint of Ireland and green rivers. Funny story: blue was originally the color associated with St. Patrick, not green. So, if someone goes pinchin’ ya while wearing azure blue, you can give them a lecture. Cover-oriented lists are the worst, Patrick, because I don’t really remember books by their cover: I don’t judge them by that, ya see? I’m just going to have to trawl my posts looking for greenery..
Teaser Tuesday
Even alcoholics deserve help, I suppose, though they should get drunk at home like I do so that they don’t cause anyone else any trouble. But then, not everyone is as sensible and considerate as me. – ELEANOR OILIPHANT IS COMPLETELY FINE
(2) Franklin Pierce, a short biography American president Franklin Pierce.
(3) Roman and Anglo-Saxon Britain. There’s a bit of irony for you to celebrate St. Patrick’s day. Not one I’ve read, merely one I own.
(4) The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science Fiction and Fantasy, which is a decidedly odd volume in the PIG series: there’s almost no politics, just the author talking about his favorite SF&F titles and ruminating on modern trends he doesn’t like, like “hard” magic with rules.
(5) “3 Days, 9 Months, 27 Years“. A short story by John Scalzi about a time machine that only allows return after the aforementioned intervals.
Robert Parker’s Blind Spot is a mystery/thriller novel written to continue the stories of one of Parker’s existing characters, Sheriff Jesse Stone. I ran across the novel because I was looking for novels with baseball connections: this one begins when Stone is invited to a reunion of the minor league ball club he used to play before, before a fielding mishap wrecked his shoulder and cut short his career in professional ball before it really began. While Stone is at the party being seduced by his ex-girlfriend’s friend (said ex-girlfriend is there because she’s married to his former teammate), a teenage girl is murdered and her bedmate abducted. Random! Or…not. It turns out that Stone’s teammate had gotten into some shady business and wanted Jesse to help bail him out. Beyond the baseball intrigue – did teammate mean for Stone to get injured and put him out of the game? – I was largely uninterested in the plot, especially considering how many bedroom scenes there are. I can see returning to the Spenser series just because the Chandler influence was so strong, but this book didn’t do anything for me besides make me eye other books with longing.
I’m currently halfway through Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, full-cast audio edition, and beginning Eleanor Oiliphant is Completely Fine.
Spenser is a private detective working in the Hub City, and he’s just been approached with an interesting job. Red Sox management thinks one of their players is throwing games, and they want him to find out if their hunch is right, and if so, who the ne’er do well is. Posing as an author who is writing a book about the Red Sox, Spenser begins hanging out, getting to know the players and enjoying matches against the Yankees from a primo box. When he catches wind of a clue, it will take him into dangerous territory, involving both gangsters and crooked men attached to professional baseball. This was my first dip into the Spenser verse, and I found Parker’s attempt to resurrect Philip Marlow absolutely charming — from the terse narration to the frequency of violence and the heavy presence of whiskey. I was already predisposed to like this, given the Red Sox connection, but the tapping into Chandler’s style was so effective I could hear Bogie as Marlowe, and I sunk into the story for the pleasure of its narration if nothing else. It turns out a ball player’s wife has a…..past, you might say, and there are a couple of men giving the player the business: he has to throw games or else they’ll expose her. Spenser is able to find another option. I’ll definitely be reading more Spenser, he’s a gas. Parker captures Chandler’s style so well I could hear Bogie-as-Marlowe reading the entire book to me.
Ah, wilderness. The only flaw was that the gun on my right hip kept digging into my back.
“He’d made an error coming to see me, but it was the kind of error guys like Doerr tend to make. They get so used to having everyone say yes to them that they forget about the chance someone will say no.”
“Is his part of your technique, Spenser? Candlelight and wine and perhaps I’ll remember something about the young lady?” “Well, there’s that. But I hate to eat alone. The only people I know in the City are you and Violet, and Violet already had a date.” “Well, I don’t know how I feel about being second choice to — what was it you said — an East Village Pimp?”
“You spend too much time reading, Spenser. You know more stuff that don’t make you money than anyone I know.”
“I think you’re supposed to value me first,” she said, “then the food basket. I’ve always been suspicious of your value system.” “You look good enough to eat.” “I think I won’t pursue that line.”
“This is a thirty-eight caliber Colt detective special. If I pull this trigger, your mastery of the martial arts will be very little use to you.”
“Marty, you are the third person this morning who has offered to disassemble my body. You are also third in order of probable success.”
That’s the thing about a shotgun. At close range you don’t have to go checking pulses afterwards.
“There is a knife blade in the grass,” I said, “and a tiger lies just outside the fire.” “My God, Spenser, that’s bathetic. Either tell me about what hurts or don’t. But for God’s sake don’t sit here and quote bad verse at me.” “Oh, damn,” I said. “I was just about to swing into Hamlet.” “You do and I’ll call the cops.”
WHAT have you finished reading recently? Double Play, Robert Parker.
WHAT are you reading now? Mortal Stakes, Robert Parker — and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, full-cast audio edition. Released yesterday but I had a night class, so I’ve only gotten to when the Order of the Phoenix busts Harry out of Dursley Prison so far. Enjoying the vocal artist for Tonks.
WHAT are you reading next? Robert Parker’s Blind Spot, Reed Coleman. A continuation of one of his characters’ series. (I’m reading it for the baseball connection.) And Paradise Lost…..
Burke has returned home from World War 2 with a body full of scars and a mind even more disturbed. He arrived home not to hugs and kisses, but to a letter from his wife telling him that she’d run off with another man. Considering how torrid and fast his own courtship is with her, that wasn’t much of a surprise. Once fully healed — physically, anyway — Burke finds work for himself as a tough guy of sorts, working as a bodyguard. He’s hired by Branch Rickey, general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, with a special client: Jackie Robinson. The former Monarch is being brought into the Major Leagues, breaking the ‘color line’ that has kept baseball segregated. Ricky anticipates trouble: that’s why he chose Robinson, a man who was not only talented but who can keep his head, and it’s why he wants someone watching Robinson. Robinson needs protection from those who might try to assault him, yes, but he also needs someone to hold him back if provocations make him lose his cool.
This is the set up of Double Play, a novel that is more baseball adjacent than about baseball. Burke doesn’t care whether he lives or dies, and in the course of his work he angers or shoots dead several mooks who are in the pay of New York’s criminal elements. Burke’s lack of fear, tolerance of pain, and skills with his Colt 1911 come in handy a few times, and his relationship with Robinson is interesting. Because this is 1947 and segregation is as much a thing de jure if not de facto in New York, the pair find themselves struggling together: cabbies of either color ignore them out of fear, and when Burke accompanies Robinson in black restaurants and the like he’s glared at with contempt and hatred. There are at least two sets of baddies to deal with, and one possible femme fatale. This was a fast, punchy novel: while there’s not as much content on baseball or Jackie as one might expect, the game is never far away. There were some odd chapters following a young man named “Bobby” who grew up watching Jackie, and readers all appear to believe that these are the author (Robert/Bobby) being autobiographical and sharing the story of how he was inspired as as a kid. Some scenes were ‘racier’ than I’d like, no pun intended: Parker didn’t fade to black as quickly in the bedroom scenes as I’d personally prefer. The setup was fascinating, though, and the writing drew me in immediately. I’ve already gotten two more Parker & baseball novels checked out.
Today’s TTT is “books with ordinal numbers in the title”. Mmkay…..
But first, a tease from Robert Parker’s Double Play:
“We need to work this out,” Burke said. “I don’t want to have to keep shooting people.” “We got plenty.”
(1)One No, Many Yeses, Paul Kingsnorth. On global resistance to corpo-homogenity in favor of local economies. Oh, wait, “One” isn’t ordinal, it’s cardinal…
(2) The Last Man in Europe, Dennis Glover. If first is ordinal then by gosh and by golly last oughta be ordinal.
(3) The Eighth Continent, Rhett C. Bruno and Felix Savage. Hard SF on the moon. A bonafide ordinal!
Reading Freely 