Bibliobloggers Index

Posted on October 26, 2010 by smellincoffee
Bibliobloggers

I’ve been meaning to spruce up my sidebar for a while now and have decided to experiment with replacing the index of book-bloggers I read with the blogroll that updates itself, one that is limited to showing the five most recent blogs. I didn’t want to lose the ability to go straight to my favorites even if they were drowned out by five “Tuesday Teaser” posts or such,  so I decided to create a static index. It will be updated from time to time, and accessible under “Heads Up”.  As of 26 October this is just the old list with Booking through Thursday tacked on; I’ll add more as time allows. The blogroll list is slightly longer at the moment.  
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The Imperial Cruise

Posted on October 26, 2010 by smellincoffee

The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War
© 2009 James Bradley
387 pages

They may be sovereign countries, but you folks at home forget
That they all want what we’ve got, but they don’t know it yet.
The Gilded Age may be characterized as the United States’ coming of age, losing its innocence along the way. The former colony had by the early 20th century become an imperial state on its own — collecting territories as though they were the spoils of some vast game of marbles. Following the end of the Indian Wars and the ‘closing of the frontier’, the United States looked outward — to Cuba and the Philippines. This was the age wherein the United States became an industrial titan and a world power, and Theodore Roosevelt announced the US’s entry into the big boy’s club with the sailing of the Great White Fleet in late 1907: for just over a year, a large fleet of warships toured the world’s oceans, demonstrating to one and all what the Americans were capable of. 
That fleet’s voyage, however, is not the imperial cruise covered in this book. Bradley instead looks two years earlier, when a ship of diplomatic envoys made their way to Japan, Korea, and China after checking in on recent acquisitions like Hawaii and the Philippines. There, Roosevelt and his lieutenant, Secretary of War William Taft, made decisions that shaped Asia’s history. They did so, Bradley believes, out of conviction in the White Man’s Burden. According to Bradley, Roosevelt believed in the innate superiority of the Aryan race: the conquest of the world by the Anglo-Saxons proved it, and it was the Christian duty of Whites to spread the virtues of civilization across the world by any means necessary.  The Imperial Cruise is in essence a scathing condemnation of the United States’ birth and expansion which sees the entire history of the US ’til that point as one great race war. This led Roosevelt in his arrogance to proclaim the Japanese “Honorary Aryans” and encourage them to establish a Monroe Doctrine of their own in the east, which put Japan on the course of empire herself — a course that lead to Pearl Harbor when the Japanese Empire’s ambitions succeeded Roosevelt’s use for them.   “In this book I don’t so much write about Pearl Harbor, I only bring it up to say, what was the source of this explosion? Every divorce has a first kiss, I was looking for that first kiss…and I found that in the summer of 1905.” (James Bradley, interview.)
Bradley makes three general claims: first, that the United States’ expansion was motivated by something other than pure humanitarianism; two, that this expansion was fueled primarily by belief in white supremacism and imperial Christianity; and three, that Roosevelt went beyond the responsibilities of his office in sanctioning Japanese expansion in Korea and Manchuria.  Only the second claim is questionable to me, for as powerful as ideals — even rotten ones — are,  I see the wheels of history turning more on the basis of power and wealth; specifically, people attempting to accrue more of both to themselves.  Idealism is typically mere décor, justification. That the drivers of American history have been until the last half-century vicious racists is undeniable — even those who tried to assume the high ground of Christian moralism are drowned by a sea of their own speeches, essays,and letters. I can believe that racism made waging war against others easier, but race as a primary motivation is too great a leap for me to make.
Aside from this, I think Imperial Cruise needs to be read: I only wish it were more effective. Bradley is a popular historian, and even the most uninformed of readers would be able to follow his narrative with ease: unfortunately, the narrative itself gets lost. Bradley starts with the cruise, then shifts to a history of the United States’ conquest of Cuba and the Philippines. He returns to the cruise briefly, gives a history of Hawaii’s own violent subjugation, and then proceeds to dip into Japanese history before finally returning to Taft’s actions in Korea, China, and Japan. Imperial Cruise doesn’t flow: it bounces cross the Pacific. Structuring a text with so much content is understandably difficult, but it doesn’t appear to have been edited properly: Bradley repeats himself, and more than once I stopped to wonder why he was bringing this particular fact or quotation up again.
The book’s weaknesses are disappointing, in part because the subject presents an opportunity to analyze American history critically, and draw lessons that Americans today would profit by: Taft and Roosevelt’s repeated statements that the insurrection in the Philippines was almost over mirror Bush and Rumsfeld’s  statements to the same effect concerning Iraq.  Done properly, the book could have forced readers to consider the United States’ embracing of interventionist causes in the 20th century with a more critical eye — and Bradley’s publishing history (Flags of our Fathers, Flyboys)  would attract more mainstream readers than say, Howard Zinn, whose reputation discourages those less enthusiastic about criticizing American history from considering what he has to say. 
Related:
  • Mark Twain’s Weapons of Satire, a collection of articles, essays, and such written against American imperialism against the Phillipines and Cuba.
  • Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the 20th Century
  • Zinn’s People’s History of American Empire, which picks up at the close of the Indian Wars.
  • Albert Marrin’s The Spanish-American War, which is more apologetic than critical but still admits to the brutal treatment of the Phillipines by American forces. Interestingly, both Marrin and Bradley see McKinley as someone interested in peace, but beaten into submission by the press and warmongers like Roosevelt into sanctioning war against the Spanish. 

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Top Ten Books for Halloween

Posted on October 26, 2010 by smellincoffee

This week’s Top Ten list is…well, just read the title. 😉

1. The Harry Potter Series, J.K. Rowling

Autumn does not truly arrive in Alabama until late October, for summer’s heat and humidity have a long life near the Gulf. I associated autumn with Halloween, and Harry Potter with autumn for mot of the books pick up at the start of another school year. I first read Potter in the fall, but the series is particularly appropriate for Halloween given its lighthearted treatment of witches, ghosts, vampires, and other such things.

2. In the Forests of the Night, Amelia Atwater-Rhodes

I read this in high school, lured by the title borrowed from Blakes’ “Tiger, Tiger”:  I had never before read fantasy, and Atwater-Rhodes’ world of vampires fascinated me. In the Forests of the Night is the story of Risika, once the young daughter of a Puritan farmer and now a vampire who  makes her home in Concord
but hunts the streets of  20th century New York.  Atwater-Rhodes’ vampires are streamlined, free from Victorian myths  and modern vampire whining angst, and my own copy is battered from many re-reads.

3. (The) Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson 

This book sprang to mind the moment I saw this week’s topic, though it’s been almost a decade since I actually read the book — and then, just the Great Illustrated Classics version. The Strange Case concerns the experiments of a Victorian gentleman who wanted to free his civilized nature from more savage impulses, and who instead found he delighted in drinking a potion to become a man wholly savage, unfettered by morality or standards of conventional behavior.  Ultimately, it destroys him.

4.  The Millennium Trilogy, Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens

The Millennium Trilogy is more an apocalyptic thriller than a jeepers-creepers story, but as a young teenager,
it certainly got under my skin. The trilogy opened with the discovery of two men who had been killed when they were transported into the body of the station itself, their bodies fused with the metal of the hull: from there it turned into a nightmarish religious war that destroyed the Klingons, Borg, and Earth. Things just got disturbing once the universe ended.

5. Sleep No More, Greg Iles

John Waters’ life got a lot more interesting when a strange woman  named Eve passed him by on a soccer field and whispered a phase known only to him and his college girlfriend Mallory — Mallory, who was both manipulative and abusive, but who Waters could never quit.  His obsession for her died only with her rape and murder in New Orleans by strangers those many years ago, but the arrival of Eve brings the old obsession to new life again, and he finds out that it isn’t just the memory of Mallory that’s haunting him when Eve claims to be Mallory, in a new body.

6. Christine, Stephen King.

Dennis Guilder knew there was something wrong with the rusting ruin of this 1958 Plymouth Fury the
moment he saw it, but it infatuated his buddy Arnie, who buys it from a hateful old man. Arnie’s devotion to the car changes him: a once-timid nerd gains confidence and pride as he restores the wreck to its former glory, but as the months pass Dennis notes Arnie appears to be speaking with another man’s voice — a hateful, bitter, spiteful voice.  Despite Christine’s pristine condition, the instant reaction from most people to her is repugnance: they sense there is something wrong with the car. It smells of death, and it haunts close close to Arnie. When Dennis digs into the history of Christine, he finds it a car possessed by implacable maliciousness — and those who cross paths with it are destined to a grisly fate.

Horror usually bores me, but King’s Christine was utterly spellbinding and creepy.

7. The Stand, Stephen King

Again, more science fiction apocalyptic thriller than horror novel — but the fantasy element becomes more pronounced as the book matures. When human civilization is devastated by a new plague,  survivors are compelled to make journeys to Boulder, Colorado and Las Vegas, Nevada for a showdown between good and evil. The devastation wreaked by the plague itself was more effectively creepy to me than the Evil Floating Cowboy who is apparently one of King’s key characters.

8. The Fear Street series, R.L. Stine

My sister and I used to read these as children and teenagers, though given that most of the plots involved teenagers being murdered, I have no idea how we managed to get them past the radar of our censor-happy parents. I’d like to re-read the books in which some of the characters are thrown into the 1930s, but I cannot remember the names of them…

9. Stiff: the Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, Mary Roach

This is a bit of nonfiction,  actually, but the topic — dead people — is quite seasonable. Roach combines science and humor to dig into what the bodies of dead people do for the living.

10. Hamlet, William Shakespeare

“If thou didst ever thy dear father love, avenge his most foul and unnatural murder!”

Many years ago I had the experience of hearing William Daniels perform* part of Hamlet, and the experience was effective enough to make me regard the play as somewhat creepy ever since. For those not familiar, Hamlet is the story of a prince who is called on by the ghost of his dead father to see justice done.

*Starts around 6:20.
Incidentally, the Reduced Shakepeare’s Company’s performance of Hamlet is a riot. I literally fell out of my chair laughing — and by literally, I mean I fell over, hit the printer’s stand, and then had the printer fall on my head.

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Teaser Tuesday (26 October)

Posted on October 25, 2010 by smellincoffee

And Teaser Tuesday has rolled around once more!

Readers particularly loved it when Alice acted bolder than  a twenty-one-year-old  “girl” should, like when she welcomed the 1905 Fourth of July with a bang, going out to a car on the rear of the train after breakfast and taking potshots with her own revolver at receding telegraph poles. No one thought to ask why the president’s young daughter was packing her own pistol. Americans expected such risqué behavior from their Princess.

(p. 13, The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War; James Bradley.)

O’Brien reached into his satchel, extracted one of his remaining phaser grenades. He pressed the Arm button. One hippopot–

The grenade, not having been reset from the default ‘0 seconds’, exploded instantly.

(p. 106, Star Trek Deep Space Nine: Fallen Heroes; Dafydd ab Hugh)

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Fallen Heroes

Posted on October 25, 2010 by smellincoffee

DS9 #5: Fallen Heroes
© 1994 Dafydd ab Hugh
282 pages

On the cover: renderings of Avery Brooks as Commander Benjamin Sisko and Nana Visitor as Major Kira Nerys — although that expression makes her look more like Michelle Forbes as Ro Laren.

The day everyone on Deep Space Nine died started like any other: Sisko sat in his office brooding over intelligence reports, O’Brian and Kira were overworked, Dax sat happily at the science station watching the wormhole open, and Odo harassed  Quark over his latest scheme — this time, to auction off a locked box of goods from the Gamma Quadrant. Hoping to catch Quark selling cultural artifacts, he forced Quark to open the book so that the contents could be examined. One particular object defied description, but once activated threw the pair three days into the future — where DS9’s once-bustling promenade  has fallen deathly silent, its hallways and corridors strewn with littered corpses and evidence of explosions. Something terrible happened in those three days.

When I picked this up, I thought the description of a ‘silent DS9’ meant that everyone had vanished from the station. I wasn’t expecting to witness the brutal death of everyone onboard — including civilians and children — at the hands of a heavily-armed squad of alien commandos claiming to seek a captured comrade.  ab Hugh divides chapters between Odo and Quark’s perspective and the perspective of the DS9 crew in the ‘present’, who are powerless to find out what the commandos want or to resist them.  The security mooks are first to go, but no one who engages the aliens lives — and given their meticulous search, no one who hides will long escape a merciless execution. It’s up to Odo and Quark to figure out how to get back and prevent this assault before it begins.

This is book five of the numbered Deep Space Nine stories: though set early in the first season, ab Hugh manages to avoid any conflicts with future continuity. Only Odo’s dialogues came off as odd, though Kira’s tendency to compare the invaders to Borg drones is also peculiar, given that she’s never had contact with them. I picked this up because I’ve read ab Hugh before (my first Star Trek read was his Vengeance, which I remember with fondness), and he doesn’t disappoint. Though morbid, most of the book reads like an action thriller.

I didn’t pick this up for ‘scary readings’, but reading about 500+ murders in 16 hours, including those of my favorite characters, made this seasonally appropriate.

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The War of the Worlds

Posted on October 23, 2010 by smellincoffee

The War of the Worlds
© 1898 H.G. Wells
from The War of the Worlds with The Time Machine and Selected Short Stories, collected 1963.
303 pages

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter.

It is the late eighteen-hundreds, the high-water mark of western civilization. Western man and his science are ascendant, triumphant:  while the old empires of the east wither and decay, the virile west takes dominion of the world, uniting it with iron rails and ships belching steam. The earth surrenders her bounty to the miners, and in the cities — in which people gather in ever-increasing numbers — towers of steel climb into the skies, rivaling the trees from which we sprang so long ago.  But far away, lurking in the cold of space, lies another civilization, one which sees in the flourishing Earth new life for its own people — and salvation from its dying world. Like the the Trojans of legend, they have come to our own Italy seeking to establish a new home for themselves — and they care little for its current occupants.

The narrator of this work, an unnamed intellectual who is trained in comparative biology but is well-versed in all manner of sciences and technology, was there the night the first cylinder arrived. It crashed not two miles from his home, and he regarded these unannounced visitors with wonder, curiosity, and even sympathy at first — hoping as the cylinder cooled and began to open that the brave men inside had survived their journey all right. Never does it occur to our guide that these visitors come to Earth as the Puritans came to the Americans — for gold, god, and glory.  Even when the heat-ray vaporizes the fascinated crowds,  the survivors cling to the hope that there’s been a misunderstanding.  Every night that passes brings with it a new cylinder, and from the landing sites rise terrifying machines that visit death on anyone and anything that they approach. The crowds were first scattered by the heat-ray, but when the Martians’ advance is countered by artillery and iron-clads the otherworldly machines begin belching black smoke of their own — visiting the area around them with clouds of noxious gas that mitigate any thoughts of resistance.

They march toward London, and civilization flees from them, leaving behind towns in flames and thousands dead. A great mass of humanity routs southward, but our own guide through this harrowing time is trapped  in a partially-destroyed home. The man who had enjoyed a quiet evening chatting with his wife over wine, followed by a session at the typewriter discussing civilization’s moral progress is reduced to hiding in rubble, scurrying from ditch to bush and eating anything he can find while surrounded by the ruins of his old world and wondering what is yet to come. Will men take to the sewers, begin life anew while the Martians?  But this is not to be — for humanity’s greatest weapon is its heritage, having overcome generations of diseases that the Martians are utterly unprepared for.

War of the Worlds is a fascinating book; when doing research for my various WW1 papers I learned of the genre of  “invasion literature”*, which became popular in the late 1800s following Prussia’s swift technological victory over the French Empire in 1871. Fantasizing about how technological advances like balloons and airplanes could render a nation helpless in a matter of days was quite popular for a time, and though I am not familiar with the history of science fiction,  I wouldn’t be surprised if Worlds grew out of that and the increasing interest in Mars and other close astronomical bodies.  The devastation visited on civilian populations and the use of poison gas predicts some of the ravages of the Great War.

Wells is an effective writer, taking the reader through our guide’s wonder,  fear, terror, and joy. The guide is ideal for me: I like idealistic intellectuals like our unnamed host, who takes pleasure in the pursuit of knowledge. His status as an intellectual allows him to analyze the aliens’ biology, their machines, and what their world may be like — and his well-rounded education makes the epilogue’s musing predictions fascinating.    War of the Worlds is very much a classic, enjoyable though dated: the vastness of space probably insulates us against alien invasions, and I snorted when Wells mentioned that the Martians had effected a landing on Venus. Knowledge gained throughout the 20th century indicates that Venus is as inhospitable as it gets.

Good reading for those interested in a harrowing adventure, or a peek into classic science fiction.  If you enjoy Wells or want to own some of his works, this particular edition seems like a good investment. It gathers two classics along with a few short stories I’ve not yet read but intend to.  The publishers are Platt & Munk, a division of Grosset and Dunlap.  ISBN: 0-448-41106-7. The cover has a retro feel, and the introduction refers to Wells’ work as “scientific romance”, which I find endearingly quaint.

* Walter J. Boyne’s The Influence of Air Power Upon History shows that invasion literature was not just the stuff of fiction, but a concern to military strategists.

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True Grit

Posted on October 21, 2010 by smellincoffee

True Grit
© 1968 Charles Portis
215 pages

People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father’s blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day. I was just fourteen years of age when a coward going by the name of Tom Chaney shot my father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robbed him of his life and his horse and $150 in cash money plus two California gold pieces that he carried in his trouser band. Here is what happened.

So begins True Grit, a novel based on a movie I enjoyed many times in my youth, starring John Wayne as the one-eyed US Marshall, Rooster Cogburn, who Mattie  — the opening speaker — hires to help her track down Chaney and the crew of rascals and vagabonds he’s gone to ground with. Mattie is a wily, self-assured girl from Arkansas who knows what she’s doing and aims to get what she wants. Cogburn thinks a girl such as she has no business riding around in Indian territory looking for crooks, but is powerless to prevent her from following him — and together, accompanied by a Texas Ranger hunting Chaney for bounty, the two will brave the mountains and take down the gang of Lucky Ned Pepper.

True Grit’s most striking characteristic is its prose: simple, rough and oddly formal. I have heard Isaac Asimov’s style described as ‘unornamented’, but Asimov has nothing on Porter, at least in rendering Mattie’s tale. Mattie recalls the story in her silver years, and her narrative is in line with her character: bluntly plain, loaded with Puritan sentiments and judgments that sometimes border on inappropriate. She uses no contractions or descriptions: dialogue is flat,  which given the content of the sentences makes for surreal humor.  Characters argue in monotone, exchanging lines like “You take that saucy line too far,” and even in a context when they should be yelling or crying, they merely state: “Well, Rooster, I am shot to pieces.”  Because I’ve watched the movie — which the book is largely true to, only differing in the epilogue — I could hear the lines with emotional context, but I don’t know what others will make of it.



True Grit is essentially a western,  which is a genre I’ve not read from since childhood. The flat prose struck me as odd, though I suppose it adds to the authenticity in depicting the rugged simplicity of the old west. It’s readable, but…I rather prefer the movie. I don’t too much like Hattie in either — though her stubbornness is laudable, I tire of that constant haughtiness — but the movie has a cantankerous, and sometimes drunken, John Wayne.

Related:
True Grit (the movie) on TvTropes

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The Good that Men Do

Posted on October 21, 2010 by smellincoffee

Star Trek Enterprise: the Good that Men Do
© 2007 Michael Martin and Andy Mangels
464 pages

There’s a man who leads a life of danger
 To everyone he meets he stays a stranger
 With every move he makes another chance he takes
 Odds are he won’t live to see tomorrow!
 Secret Agent Man! Secret Agent Man!
 They’ve given you a number and taken away your name….



No series finale and few episodes of any of the various Star Trek shows are treated with as much loathing as “These are the Voyages“, the series finale of Enterprise. The reasons are numerous, but the useless death of a major character and the episode’s framing device are particularly despised. The episode is treated as a holographic recreation of one of Enterprise’s missions — the mission that caused the aforementioned useless death, and Commander William Riker is viewing the historical events as a way of drumming up courage to confess something to Captain Picard.  The device effectively turns the last Enterprise episode into various scenes tucked into TNG’s “The Pegasus”, but its portrayal as a holographic recording allowed Martin and Mangels to reinterpret the story with  framing device of their own.

Late in the 25th century, Captain Nog of Starfleet makes his way to see his best friend, the famous author Jake Sisko. While reviewing recently declassified files from Starfleet’s early history, he’s stumbled upon something that would make a compelling novel in the hands of a gifted author — historical records that indicate that the accepted history of the Federation’s beginnings is fabricated. A Starfleet commander was declared dead, even though new records indicate that he played a far more active role in historical events yet to come than would be expected of a dead man, and new records make the official story look painfully fabricated. And so the two old friends spend an evening viewing the records together, finding out what really happened in the days before the birth of the Coalition of Planets, the Federation’s progenitor.  The novel is in essence a ret-con of “These are the Voyages”, one sanctioned by Paramount and CBS, that turns one of the series’ most badly received episodes into a fantastic novel of politics, espionage, and war. For the sake of the Federation’s survival, one man will fake his own death so he may steal into the shadows and infiltrate enemy territory to prevent a war from endangering the lives of billions.

The Good that Men Do redeems “These are the Voyages” while giving attention to my favorite character from Enterprise, Commander ‘Trip’ Tucker. In addition to undoing some of the episode’s ‘mistakes’, Martin and Mangels also iron out all the various oddities of the episode, but The Good that Men Do can stand on its own. It is the introduction to the Enterprise relaunch, and in recounting Tucker’s story makes  the Relaunch’s first major arc obvious: the mysterious Romulan Star Empire is ambitious and paranoid, and sees in Earth’s attempts to unite the worlds of Vulcan, Andor, Tellar, and Coridan a major threat against its future plans of expansion. War seems unavoidable, but Tucker — aided by a mysterious and autonomous intelligence department within Starfleet — intends to make Romulus’ job as difficult as possible.  Martin and Mangels tackle the Tucker/T’Tpol dynamic well, though I’m surprised Archer agreed to Tucker’s plans so readily. In any case, I want to read more of these guys and look forward to Star Trek’s new “007”‘s adventures.

Related:

  • “Journey to Babel“,  in which the Enterprise carries delegates from Vulcan, Andor, and Earth to discuss Coridan’s entry into the Federation. I wonder how much work their make-up artists went through…(The episode introduced Sarek, Spock’s father.)
  • Cloak, S.D. Perry; Rogue, Martin and Mangels; Abyss, David Weddle and Jeffrey Lang;  and Shadow, by Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch. All four novels deal with the same autonomous intelligence department, although by the late 24th century it’s degenerated into a far less innocent organization. 
  • The Good that Men Do on Memory Alpha
  • Martin and Mangels on Memory Alpha
  • Enterprise Relaunch on TvTropes
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Booking through Thursday: Foreign

Posted on October 21, 2010 by smellincoffee

Booking through Thursday asks:  What is a book from a country outside your own that you love?

One of my favorite books is the autobiography of Emilie Carles, called A Life of Her Own. A professor of mine assigned it for either a French history or general European history class, as it depicts the advance of modernity — particularly, industrialization and nationalism — into a mountain village in the French alps.  I didn’t expect much from the biography of a farming woman, but it changed my life.

Emilie Carles has lead an inspirational life, for one. At an early age she developed a love for books and reading and began to spurn tradition. She became a true freethinker, and her values advanced accordingly.  This confirmed my belief that the morals of reason and empathy are not only superior to those of custom and religion, but  that they are universal, and that anyone can realize them.

Secondly, Carles broadened my political understanding. Before reading her, my perceptions of various political viewpoints were primitive: I thought communism and socialism were always linked to large, intrusive governments (like the USSR and China), and knew nothing of anarchism beyond a conceptions of bomb-throwing and worship of chaos. As the Great War drags on, Carles writes of her thoughts and those of her relatives, and they do not see it as a great patriotic struggle against evil. They see the war as the product of selfish aristocrats, ever covetous of glory and land, and they resent the deaths of so many people at the orders of   the land-owning elite.

They become radicalized in a populist sense, desiring that people rule themselves and have control of their own destinies: through Carles’ words, in sharing her opinions and those of her friends and family, I realized there was an entire spectrum of thinking I’d never heard of — that socialism and communism could be rooted as firmly in democracy, and that anarchism had less to do with revelry and disorder and more to do with the stern, principled lives of men like Henry David Thoreau.

I embarrassed myself for a year after reading this book, because I could not help thanking my professor profusely for having us read it, so great was its impact on my understanding of the world.

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This Week at the Library (20 October)

Posted on October 20, 2010 by smellincoffee

This past week at the library was a productive and enjoyable one. I’m caught up on the Voyager relaunch, having read Unworthy, and I also read a collection of short stories featuring the old Voyager family. Beyer’s best work for my money is still Full Circle,  but her humor and character drama continue to stun me.

Rapt’s one of the better books I’ve read recently, touching on attention’s role in personal happiness, morality, creativity, and personal relationships. I picked it up because of my interests in psychology, but found it more interesting from a mindfulness point of view.

Edith Hamilton’s Roman Way is her sequel to The Greek Way, and I read it to follow up on Caesar and Christ. Hamilton’s a writer from the old school, but Roman devotees will enjoy her attempt to find the Roman character via Rome’s plays, letters, and histories.

I also followed up on a recommendation from a friend and read The Good Guy. The opening plot — a man who is mistaken for a hitman by a murder contractor, and then mistaken for the contractor by the hitman — seemed interesting enough, but Koontz tells the story in chapters that alternate between the Good Guy and the hitman. The hitman is a sociopath, and being in his head creeped me out.

On a whim I also picked up The Worlds of DS9 volume 2 to touch base with the DS9 Relaunch. Years ago I thought the book unreadable, but I clipped through it in a couple of days. The book contains two novellas, one set on Trill and the other on Bajor. Trill’s plot was most interesting, being a political/crime mystery that gives Ezri room to become her own character. Bajor”s novella was interesting, but mostly sets the stage for further novels.

I had intended to combine the weekly recap with selected passages from the books, but I…forgot to write any down before I turned the books to the library. I’ve been losing interest in the weekly recaps as of late, and would be interested in knowing if anyone finds them of any use — I now only look forward to the recap post for the quotations and introduction of next week’s list, myself.

Potential Reads for Next Week:

  • The Seventy Great  Mysteries of the Natural World. I’ve been gazing at this book hungrily all week, picking it up and putting it back down again because I know it will be magnificent, so much so that I don’t want to spoil the anticipation by actually reading the book. It’s a bit like wishing I could have my cake and eat it, too. 
  • I’m finally going to finish The Good that Men Do by Martin and Mangels. The poor book has been twice preempted by other book series, but I’m a hundred pages away from finishing it. Even if a stranger knocks on my door and says, “Hello. Would you like this box of Trek Relaunch novels, none of which you have read?” I‘m going to finish it. 
  • A teacher of mine mentioned that she’s reading Charles’ Portis True Grit, a novel that inspired the John Wayne movie of the same  name. I started reading it in the library, and it appears to have some  of the film’s more memorable scenes included.
  • Finally getting around to The Devil’s Punchbowl by Greg Iles. Should be a doozy, if it’s anything like Iles’ previous work.
  • The War of the Worlds by H.G.Wells is a “classic” that I’m revisiting: I don’t think I’ve ever read the actual work, just abridged versions for kids.
  • The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War by James Bradley,  which explores the effects of Teddy Roosevelt’s “Cruise of the Great White Fleet” and its impact on foreign relations….especially with Japan.
  • I may extend my recess from the Story of Civilization for a week more, and I may try to read a chapter or two from The Age of Faith. 
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