June was a proper broadside, no holds barred, no quarter given! Books tumbled from Mount Doom by the day, screaming in terror and leaving behind stray bookmarks and badly-bound pages in their wake. We are halfway through the year, so it’s time to see how I’m doing with some of my goals. In 2022, 34% of my reading came from newly-purchased titles: that’s currently hovering just under 10%. I’ve made excellent progress on the science survey, having completed it in May and beating my earliest-finish date (August) by several months. Progress on Mount Doom is…proceeding. It’s not dramatic, but it’s happening. So far I’m at 45 % of goal, which means I’m a touch behind but not terribly. So far in 2023 I’ve read nine titles that earned the bold/superior favorite mark, and if that continues it’s going to be difficult to choose top ten favorites in December. Here are five I suspect will make it to the end.’
Classics Club Paradiso, Dante. Translated by Anthony Esolen.
The Big Reads: The Jewish Annotated New Testament: Serious progress made after I decided to focus on one Big Read at a time. I’ve finished the texts proper and am reading the bountiful essays.
Climbing Mount Doom: Sparring Partners, John Grisham Faces Along the Bar, Madelon Powers The Island of Dr. Moreau, H.G. Wells Paradiso, Dante. Translated Anthony Esolen. Inside the Klavern, David Horowitz The Dirty Life: Food, Farming, and Love, Kristin Kimball Nine Pints, Rose George The 99% Invisible City,Roman Mars DISCARDED: Spark Joy, Marie Kondo. There’s irony for you. DISCARDED: First Shift: Legacy. Someone gave this to me but I’m more interested in purging than finding out what it is. DISCARDED: Island of the Sequined Love Nun. Tried the first chapter, didn’t grab me. DISCARDED: Heart of Darkness, Joseph Konrad. Picked this up in a little free library at a friend’s urging but didn’t get interested in reading it.
And now, COMING UP IN JULY: Some American history-related material to coincide with Independence Day, naturally; Space Camp; and…..a special week of reviews in which I take a look at children’s literature from the 1990s, from Goosebumps to the Babysitters Club!
Today’s topic from Long and Short reviews is a song that’s been stuck in our heads recently. “A” song. A SONG? Music and song have been a part of my everyday life as long as I have memories, so I can’t just go with one. I’m going to go with three. Or four. Vive l’anarchie!
First up, something embarrassing. When this song first came out I immediately disliked it, probably for no other reason that it was pop music and I am an inveterate snob. A few weeks ago I was craving some happy music, though, and this came around, and it’s been stuck in my head since. I was listening to it in my head Sunday night while at dinner, head bobbing in the restaurant, and people were staring. Fortunately I’m too old to care these days.
Next up after googling the name Mark Ronson, I discovered he’d done an Amy Winehouse remix. I’ve listened to Amy Winehouse worshipfully since 2006, when NPR reviewed her album “Back to Black” and I had the dumb luck to be listening, and heard her for the first time. I was dubious about the merits of a remix, but this won me over.
Then, Pogo’s “Mazel Tov”, a remix of music, song, and speech from The Fiddler on the Roof. I can’t describe Pogo to you. Even if you’ve seen one Pogo remix, it’s different from every other Pogo remix.
And finally-for-realsies-this-time, I’d feel guilty if I did not include my current musical obsession, Mooooooooooooooooooooooooorgan WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAADE!
Harry and I were standing outside watching the sunset when Maria-Grazia came out dragging her suitcase. She was driving back to Italy that night, but that’s not why I did a double take. She appeared to be transformed. I almost didn’t recognize her. Harry laughed and said, “You see someone naked for a week and you don’t think anything of it, and then she puts on a cute dress and some makeup and you think, ‘What an attractive girl!’” And he was right. Here was someone I had eaten dinner with in the nude, whom I had hiked with in the nude, watched doing naked yoga on the grass outside, and I never once thought of her as a sexual being. Which is odd because she is a very nice-looking woman. But something had changed and it wasn’t her. Maria-Grazia was still Maria-Grazia; she’d just put on some clothes. What changed was my perception of her. Naked she was just another naked person among a group of naked people, but in a sundress and sandals, she was suddenly sexy.
Naked at Lunch: A Reluctant Naturist’s Adventures in the Clothing-Optional World
I’ve spent many hours in two of my city’s oldest buildings — one a church, the other a mixed-use Italianate beauty turned residence & bar — and have noticed, over the years, that the amount of little details contained within these beautiful structures is apparently infinite. There’s the outward big-picture stuff one notices — the loggia at the Harmony Club, the cloistered walk at St. Paul’s — but long exposures bring out other little things, like the fleur-de-lis welded onto the HC’s rain pipe, or its terazzao flooring at the landing. How staggeringly vast, then, must these little details be in an entire city? The 99% Invisible City takes as its subject mundane features that are part of the urban landscapes most of us inhabit, but often which we would not notice. This is aimed for a more general audience than something like Infrastructure: A Field Guide to the Industrial Landscape, because it looks only at little and local details.
Since I’ve previously read books like Infrastructure: A Field Guide to the Industrial Landscape and The Works: Anatomy of a City, I expected to thoroughly enjoy this and was not disappointed. The book stands out from the aforementioned because of its use of art, not only to preface chapters and sections, but often to illustrate the text. The cover itself gives some indication as to the quality, but some of the interior work is far more impressive. A draftsman friend of mine did a double-take when he saw me reading the book, in part because he follows the artist Patrick Vale online.
99% Invisible does not dig into the buried infrastructure of cities like pipes and underground cables: instead, the focus is on things which are on the surface, but unnoticed by virtually everyone — except for those who remain in a given spot for a long time and have occasion to start noticing the fine details. This subject includes things like manhole cover art, which varies widely from city to city; markings on utility poles and sidewalks that enable linesmen and engineers to communicate technical details and warnings to one another in a code of their own; and components on lighting posts that enable them to pop up and then over cars when they’re struck by a vehicle driven by someone texting, drunk, or trying to pass their backseat toddler a sandwich baggie of goldfish crackers. This is not a book about infrastructure detail, though: Mars casts his eye over the city more broadly, looking at the unique boundary markers present in D.C, the history of revolving doors, and cell towers disguised as flagpoles. I was already aware of the hidden cell towers, but Mars delivers more than a few surprises — like power substations disguised as houses, and emergency subway stops/exits which empty into similarly disguised buildings.
This is one I’ll definitely recommend and pass on to friends — both for its multitude of interesting little microsubjects, and its art.
Ove is a simple man. He likes to wake early, patrol the neighborhood and look for trouble, take care of what needs fixing, grouse about people not doing things properly, and then return home for his morning coffee. And today, since his wife is still dead and he can’t think of a reason to continue puttering around, he aims to kill himself. He’s chosen his method — hanging, the old tried and true approach with no messy cleanup. Of course, he’s made preparations just in case, with newspapers covering the floor to protect them from the scruffs of lookie-loos and the like. He’s drilled a perfectly centered hole, his affairs are in order, and it’s time to go — but wait. Wait. There’s someone driving in the residential area! Cars are restricted to the parking area! IT’S POSTED! THERE ARE SIGNS! And they’re — they’ve backed a trailer over his mailbox! A Man Called Ove is a fascinating story of a man who wants to shuffle off and join the choir invisible, but whose deep-seated need to make sure things are done properly, and the persistence neediness of his neighbors and a cat that won’t go away, continues to bind him to Earth — where, eventually, he finds meaning beyond the memory of his departed beloved.
From the moment I saw the trailer for the American adaptation of this novel, I knew I wanted to see this. Not only did it feature Tom Hanks, my favorite actor, but the story-as-advertised by the trailer of a isolated curmudgeon finding friendship and meaning is one of my favorite arcs ever since encountering it first in A Christmas Carol.A Man Called Ove proved to be as serious and heartwrenching as it was funny, though. Part of the humor comes from Backman’s writing, which even in translation has a dry punch to it — but much of it is the inherent absurdity of a man seriously engaged in attempting to kill himself constantly being interrupted by his neighbor’s shortcomings and Ove’s own inability to not respond to them, because he is despite his outward grumpiness a man of moral principle. That means helping people, even if they don’t deserve it, and it also means making sure things are done The Right Way. You have to do it yourself if you want it done properly these days. Look at the new neighbors — they can’t even back up an automatic car with a rear camera, for pete’s sake.
The humor is consistent throughout the novel, but the meat of it is Ove’s growing relationships with his neighbors. He has lived in his neighborhood for decades, but was not a social person: in reading this, in fact, I wondered if Backman was attempting to create a person with Aspergers: Ove is utterly fascinated by technical matters and machinery, and uninterested in almost everyone except for his late wife Sonja, who he encountered by chance on a train platform and was completely altered by. It was as if something in him had malfunctioned: his black and white world suddenly had color in it, made all the more intense by her interest in him — a man who reflected the same virtues she adored in her father. The arrival of new neighbors, one an Iranian woman named Parvaneh whose good humor and no-nonsense attitudes combine to make her someone impossible for Ove to offend and equally impossible to ignore, completely disrupts Ove’s withdrawing into himself, into his pain and routine. As the novel progresses, he becomes increasingly more part of the neighbor’s lives’ — not just Parvaneh’s,but of a young man kicked out of his home because his father opposes his lifestyle, and of a mangy cat that needs a home, and of a woman who the State is threatening to take her house and husband away from her.
A Man Called Ove hits all the sweet spots for me, as we see characters beset by tragedy but not destroyed by it : instead, they rally, not through unfathomable reserves of inward strength because even those who might fail themselves can still support others. Backman’s story drives home the need for human connection, and its ability to overcome not just overwhelming loss, but worse evils like bureaucrats. All told, this is an utterly touching and funny little novel. I’ve already watched the American adaptation and plan on watching the Swedish movie to do a rare double feature Reads to Reels. I thoroughly enjoyed Backman’s writing, from the humor to the games he plays with tense and time, to drive home how very much alive and central Sonja’s memory is to Ove.
Highlights:
The colleague looks very happy, as people do when they have not been working for a sufficient stretch of time as sales assistants.
Her laughter catches him off guard. As if it’s carbonated and someone has poured it too fast and it’s bubbling over in all directions. It doesn’t fit at all with the gray cement and right-angled garden paving stones. It’s an untidy, mischievous laugh that refuses to go along with rules and prescriptions.
Isn’t that bloody typical, he thinks. You can’t even kill yourself in a sensible way anymore.
The cat gives him a judgmental stare, as if it’s sitting on the decision-making side of the desk at a job interview.
You go to the hospital to die, Ove knows that. It’s enough that the state wants to be paid for everything you do while you’re alive. When it also wants to be paid for the parking when you go to die, Ove thinks that’s about far enough.
He had certainly not begun this day with the intention of letting either women or cats into his house, he’d like to make that very clear to her. But she comes right at him with the animal in her arms and determination in her steps.
They stood in silence for a long time, with their arms around each other. And at long last she lifted her face towards his, and looked into his eyes with great seriousness. “You have to love me twice as much now,” she said. And then Ove lied to her for the second—and last—time: he said that he would. Even though he knew it wasn’t possible for him to love her any more than he already did.
He’s silent. And then they both stand there, the fifty-nine-year-old and the teenager, a few yards apart, kicking at the snow. As if they were kicking a memory back and forth, a memory of a woman who insisted on seeing more potential in certain men than they saw in themselves. Neither of them knows what to do with their shared experience.
“Loving someone is like moving into a house,” Sonja used to say. “At first you fall in love with all the new things, amazed every morning that all this belongs to you, as if fearing that someone would suddenly come rushing in through the door to explain that a terrible mistake had been made, you weren’t actually supposed to live in a wonderful place like this. Then over the years the walls become weathered, the wood splinters here and there, and you start to love that house not so much because of all its perfection, but rather for its imperfections. You get to know all the nooks and crannies. How to avoid getting the key caught in the lock when it’s cold outside. Which of the floorboards flex slightly when one steps on them or exactly how to open the wardrobe doors without them creaking. These are the little secrets that make it your home.”
Rose George has previously shared with readers her voyages across the world following cargo ships and movements to make sanitation both more eco-friendly and readily available to poorer communities. In Nine Pints, she dips into the circulatory system. The result is my least favorite of her offerings, though it’s diverting enough, with a mix of history, science, and explorations of the British blood bank system. She delves into its origins, and into bloodletting’ history– from ancient ideas about the four humors, to the contemporary use of leeches to clean wounds. There’s a good section on bloodborne diseases like HIV/AIDs, and several sections involving menstruation — taboos about it, one man’s attempt to create cheap sanitary napkins, etc. As a childless bachelor, my interest in that subject is rather handicapped, as you might expect. What most disappointed me in this book was the complete absence of renal disease and the need for blood dialysis, which would be more substantive than a section on kooks who drink blood and call themselves vampires. She also falls into the modern error of using ‘gender’ when ‘sex’ is more appropriate, referring to the lower rate of hemoglobin replenishment in women than in men as a ‘gendered’ difference. That women wear panties and not boxer shorts is a gendered difference: that women have periods is a sexual difference.
In a completely different realm, I discovered the existence of Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit upon one of my friend’s bookshelves, and naturally had to tackle it. I’ve read loads of Wodehouse before, and as usual relished Wodehouse’s way with the English language. As is the usual with a Bertie story, there are several intersecting little threads that get increasingly tangled to hilarious results: the most prominent thread is that a woman who is occasionally engaged to Bertie (he’s a popular fellow to be engaged to) is having issues with her current fiance, and Bertie gloomily suspects that she’ll come after him again if something isn’t done. The current fiance also regards Bertie as a threat to his nupitals, and keeps threatening to break Bertie’s spine in several places — especially after he catches Bertie in his fiance’s room in the middle of the night, not knowing Bertie was merely there to burgle the room on behalf of his aunt, who wanted him to steal the fake pearl necklace in her cabinet so her husband would not discover she’d pawned the real one. But that’s another thread. Anyoo, here’s some quotes:
Love is a delicate plant that needs constant tending and nurturing, and this cannot be done by snorting at the adored object like a gas explosion and calling her friends lice. I had the disquieting impression that it wouldn’t take too much to make the Stilton-Florence axis go p’fft again, and who could say that in this event, the latter, back in circulation, would not decide to hitch on to me once more?
I was appalled, and I think not unjustifiably so. I mean, dash it, a fellow who has always prided himself on the scrupulous delicacy of his relations with the other sex doesn’t like to have it supposed that he deliberately shins up ladders at one in the morning in order to kiss girls while they sleep.
“You don’t think I’m angry, do you? Of course I’m not. I’m very touched. Kiss me, Bertie.” Well, one has to be civil. I did as directed, but with an uneasy feeling that this was a bit above the odds. I didn’t at all like the general trend of affairs, the whole thing seeming to me to be becoming far too French.
“‘I say,’ I said, ‘Here’s a thought. Why don’ t you marry Percy?” “But I’m engaged to you,” she faltered, rather giving the impression that she could have kicked herself for being such a chump. “Oh, that can be readily adjusted,” I said heartily. “Call it off, is my advice. You don’t want a weedy butterfly like me about the home, you want something more in the nature of a soul-mate, a chap with a number nine hat you can sit and hold hands and talk about T.S. Eliot with. And Percy fills the bill.” “Bertie! You will release me?” “Certainly, certainly, Frightful wrench, of course, and all that sort of thing, but consider it done.” “Oh, Bertie!” She flung herself upon me and kissed me. Unpleasant, of course, but these things have to be faced.
Jon Ronson’s journalistic niche is the weird, so when he learned that numerous intellectuals across the western world had received identical volumes of the same modified book — a richly bound but thin little volume that consisted of both blank pages and cryptic messages, with an identical square cut out of each volume’s page 13 — he had to find out more. The recipients found one another in their attempts to find out what on earth they’d received, and one of them reached out to Ronson to enlist his help. Ronson’s own investigation determined that the books were sent out by a particular person who he realized was a little mental, and he wondered that so much activity — including transatlantic meetings! — could result from the random activity of a crazy person. Maybe it’s not reason or love or money that makes the world go round. Maybe it’s madness. His interested kindled, Ronson then began exploring the world of being ‘crazy’: what is it? How do you know? — and then became interested in psychopathy in general after meeting someone who claimed to have faked mental illness to avoid prison, only to find himself locked up in one of Britain’s worst-case offender nuthouses.
Mental illness of varying kinds is steadily on the rise, spurred by both The Professionals’ urge to stick a label on everyone so they can sell them pills, and by the fact that 21st century American society is deeply dysfunctional, our animal brains deprived of much of what they need and saturated with so much of what they don’t. But there’s a difference between being depressed and anxious and being certifiable –– but behavior is so subject that even a normal person can get themselves in trouble, as witnessed by the Rosenhan experiment of the 1970s, in which a team of researchers faked diagnoses to get themselves institutionalized, and then learned that once a label had been appended to them, all of their behavior was interpreted to further justify and strengthen the diagnosis. This is not a problem unique to mental health, of course: as Will Storr discovered in his forays into conspiracy thinking, once people adopt a narrative our strongest tendency is to continue working anything new into the existing narrative. (For what it’s worth, the Rosenhan experiment has also been been deeply scrutinized, the publisher of the paper accused of exaggerating and cherrypicking his data.) Ronson’s time spent with someone locked up in one of Britain’s units for dangerous psychopaths intrigues him, in part because the man is utterly unlike everyone else: ‘Tony’ maintains he faked being mad using movies as his inspiration in hopes of avoiding a prison term, only to find himself stuck with an interminable sentence at a far less humane institution. The doctors maintain that Tony’s ability to fool Ronson is part of his psychopathy: he has no real emotions, but he has studied neurotypical people and can imitate and even manipulate us. Ronson is made cautious, but not convinced, especially after he goes forth to visit other people regarded as psychopaths and finds them decidedly more chilling by comparison. These include one man who was a prominent political figure in the Carribean and another who was a CEO.
The PsychpathTest is interesting and entertaining, but tends toward the disorganized.
Highlights:
“Can’t you see? It’s incredibly interesting. Aren’t you struck by how much action occurred simply because something went wrong with one man’s brain? It’s as if the rational world, your world, was a still pond and Petter’s brain was a jagged rock thrown into it, creating odd ripples everywhere.”
“Grandiose sense of self-worth?” I asked. This would have been a hard one for him to deny, standing as he was below a giant oil painting of himself.
“I think it’s rather a sad story, David,” said Belinda. “According to Messiah culture, or prophet culture, you’re making several mistakes. Firstly, you’re not taking time out to really meditate on your mission. You’re coming public far too soon. Secondly, you’re not gathering a following around you. Thirdly, you’re announcing it yourself when really it should be for other people to say, ‘He is the One,’ and start to bow down to you or whatever. But you’re coming out and throwing it at everybody. My point is, you’re not behaving in a very Messiah-like way.” David shot back that seeing as how he was the Messiah, any way he behaved should be considered a Messiah-like way.
Practically every prime-time program is populated by people who are just the right sort of mad, and I now knew what the formula was. The right sort of mad are people who are a bit madder than we fear we’re becoming, and in a recognizable way. We might be anxious but we aren’t as anxious as they are. We might be paranoid but we aren’t as paranoid as they are. We are entertained by them, and comforted that we’re not as mad as they are.
I wondered if sometimes the difference between a psychopath in Broadmoor and a psychopath on Wall Street was the luck of being born into a stable, rich family.
I missed yesterday’s Top Ten List because I was at the hospital doing my one-year transplant checkup. Everything looks peachy on that end: they were concerned about my low white blood cell count, but a shot and changes to my medicine regimen have gotten that squared way. Since today’s WWW is definitely not my cup of tea (romance genre), I’m going to do yesterday’ TT, Top Ten Reads on my Summer TBR.
First up, let’s look at my Mount Doom priorities from earlier in the year. I’ve addressed half of them this year, but let’s choose two from there.
(1) The War of 1812, John K. Mahon. This is one of the beefier titles on the list, and I’ve wanted to dig more into the topic since 2021.
(2) The Moral Animal, Robert Wright. I’ve wanted to read this one for a decade. Not really sure why it never makes it off the shelf and into my hands.
(3) Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville. I usually do a few books relating to American literature, early America and the war for independence in late June and early July, so don’t be surprised to see this one soon.
(4) My Name is Asher Lev, Chaim Potok. Ditto!
Relatedly, some Mount Doom titles that also fit with the American series will be:
(5) British Soldiers, American War: Voices of the American Revolution, Don Hagist
(6) The President’s Club: Inside the World’s Most Exclusive Fraternity, Nancy Gibbs
And now, just for fun!
(7) Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction. Alek Nevala-Lee.
(8) Live, From New York! An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live, Tom Shales. Mostly reading this for information about the original cast run (seasons 1 -5), since a friend is introducing me to them. We’re midway through season 3 and I’m Jane Curtin’s #1 fan.
(9) Sons of the Waves: The Common Seaman in the Age of Sail, Stephen Taylor. Purchased for RoE.
(10) A Man Called Ove, Fredik Bachman. I recently watched the America-adapted Tom Hanks version and had to start reading the book that inspired it.
There is one drawback to not wearing a moustache, and that that if you don’t have one, you’ve got nothing to twirl when baffled. All you can do is stand with your lower jaw drooping like tired lily, looking a priceless ass, and that is what Stilton was doing now. His whole demeanour was that of an Assyrian who, having come down like a wolf on the fold, finds in residence not lambs but wild cats, than which, of course, nothing makes an Assyrian feel sillier.
“It was not in eating the apple that I sinned, but in overstepping the mark set for me. ” – Adam, Paradiso.
Adrift at sea, a young biologist named Prendick – who had taken to natural history to relieve himself from the burden of inherited wealth and a life of ease — is rescued by a boat carrying a menagerie of critters and some rather strange passengers. The ship’s captain has been driven to drunkenness by the stress of these passengers, and when the floating party approaches their destination, Prendick finds himself abandoned to the seas once more – only to be rescued by the islanders. There’s something a little strange about them, but Prendick – disoriented from his near death and the turbulent circumstances can’t quite put his finger on it. Is it just him, or does that man have….slightly pointy, slightly furry ears? The island appears to be some kind of scientific outpost performing gruesome biological experiments, and when Prendrick flees the compound to find sanctuary in the jungle, he encounters sights even more harrowing than the frenzied screams from inside the outpost. As the story develops, Prendick learns that the chief scientist, Doctor Moreau, is attempting recreate animals in man’s image via vivisection , twisting pigs and leopards into human form regardless of pain or propriety. Prendick’s sympathy for the creatures so distorted by Moreau’s experiments turns increasingly into disgust at their uncanny mix of human and beastly features, made worse after events transpire and Prendick finds himself alone with the beast-folk and quickly assuming Moreau’s detachment and disdain for them. The tale reminded me strongly of Frankenstein, though with less humanity. Were it told today, Moreau’s obscenities would have been performed in part with genetic modification, I’m sure. Prendick’s own moral fall –beginning as a principled, sympathetic man who ends up as cold to the beast-people as Moreau, and as suspicious of other men’s own beastly natures – testifies to the darkness in each of us. This is a SF-horror story of lasting relevance, making me think about the ghoulish practice of aggressive ‘affirmative care’ for people, mutilating bodies with chemicals and surgery — or the spectre of transhumanism in general, of people trying to make robotic ubermensch of themselves.
Reading Freely 
