Category: Books

The Year 1000 by Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger is a very broad and highly entertaining overview of life in England around the year 1000. The title kind of gives it away, I suppose.

The book follows the rhythm of the seasons, describing what life was like in each month for the typical Anglo-Saxon with fascinating digressions into language, religion, medicine, warfare, politics, law and commerce. This is a popular history that reminds me of those Discovery channel shows that jump from topic to related topic to provide a glimpse of a culture, a window to a time.

More than anything else, The Year 1000 is teeming with interesting facts and short explanations that the reader could conceivably relate to friends in the did-you-know manner of discussing history.

For instance, did you know that for the right of English merchants to trade in Pavia, the English crown had to pay fifty pounds of silver, two shields, swords and lances, and two FINE GREYHOUNDS with gilded and embossed collars?

All told, a fun and informative little book for those of us who have forgotten a lot of the history we didn’t really pay attention to the first time around. It would probably be a good read to open an AP English IV class before diving into Beowulf.

Glyn Williams’s Voyages of Delusion caught my eye at Half Price Books a few years ago. A beautiful blue book with a tall ship navigating an icy sea superimposed over an eighteenth century map of North America most of which was still terra incognita, I had to buy it.

Sometimes it pays to judge a book by its cover when the cover is so striking. Of course, it still took two years to get around to reading it.

Voyages of Delusion tells the story of the eighteenth century quest for a navigable northwest passage between Hudson’s Bay and the Pacific. Despite the fact that there was almost no evidence to suggest that such a passage existed, discovery expeditions were organized by armchair geographers and endured by the crews of ships who suffered unimaginable hardships in their quest to find what wasn’t there.

Williams opens with accounts of the expeditions from Hudson’s Bay where explorers invariably had to deal not just with the cold, but with the Hudson’s Bay Company which didn’t want potential rivals encroaching on their monopoly over trade in the Hudson’s Bay drainage (almost all of Canada east of the Rockies, though they didn’t know there was that much of it). Between expeditions, he tells the stories of the battles of competing maps of North America, most of which were entirely speculative, representing more the hopes of the geographers than the actual outlines of the coasts.

The second half of the book tells of the search from the Pacific side, including the third voyage of Captain Cook in which he “discovered” Hawaii on his way to the Bering Strait where he and his men charted much of the Alaskan coast, bridging the maps of the Russians in the north with the Spanish in the south.

It was the tales of the competing maps – some of which were based on completely fictional voyages – that I found particularly interesting. Having a lifelong love of maps and geography it was quite enlightening to learn about how the map of North America ultimately came to be through speculation, intrigue, lies and fantasy mixed with real exploration. It is ironic of course how much nonsense was published and accepted by various geographers in the Age of Reason, but then that irony along with the many reproductions of various speculative maps that Williams includes work to make the book so enjoyable.

By the end of the book, one feels great empathy for Captain Vancouver who after years of searching for a passage from the Pacific apparently took great satisfaction in finally proving that there was no navigable northwest passage, thus turning his failure to find the fabled passage into a triumph of exploration and experiment over wishful thinking.

Of course, due to global warming, there is one now.

Loved it. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is a wonderfully satisfying conclusion to the series. It made me sad that it was over, but I don’t think it could have ended any more perfectly.

And, regarding the theory I posited right here on this blog two years ago, I was right.

Dark Waters by Lee Vybrony & Don Davis tells the story of the design, construction and first few years of service of the NR-1, the US Navy’s smallest and most classified nuclear submarine. I think what really hooked me was that it has wheels for driving along the bottom of the sea.

Vybrony was a member of the NR-1’s commissioning crew, an elite group pulled from the Navy’s top submariners in 1966, and he recounts his experiences throughout the construction, shakedown cruises, and first missions in the late sixties.

The crew of the NR-1 faced difficulties throughout those first years including reactor failure during a hurricane, getting caught in a fishing net on the bottom of Narragansett Bay, driving off an undersea cliff, and accidentally driving into an old WWII-era undersea minefield.

Much of what the NR-1 did (and still does) is highly classified so there isn’t as much detail about some of its missions, but Vybrony does a good job bringing the reader on board for a glimpse of life onboard the tiny ship with wheels.

“Don Quixote and Sancho Panza” by Honore Daumier (1850) via Wikipedia

I’ve always loved the story of Don Quixote, the tall knight and the paunchy squire traveling the dusty roads of Spain following their delusions from misadventure to misadventure. Funny, though, I had actually never read the book until this summer.

Perhaps it’s a testament to the power of these characters that this most wonderful of road novels had permeated my conciousness long before I ever actually read it. Like most people, I was familiar with the windmill story, and I knew the characters as well from a pair of statues my dad keeps in his study, the tall, emaciated Knight with shield and lance standing next to a gloriously fat Sancho with his fingers tucked into his belt.

Finally reading Don Quixote (Edith Grossman’s translation), then, brought those statues to life (for that is how I pictured the characters) and took me on Don Quixote’s mad quest to right all wrongs and win glory for the beautiful (and imaginary) Dulcinea. For the past month, I wandered the roads with Don Quixote and Sancho, laughing at some of the most hysterical scenes and brilliant conversations I’ve ever read.

The conversations between knight and squire were my favorite parts. Don Quixote is learned, intelligent, thoughtful and completely nuts. Sancho is simple, illiterate, oftentimes foolish, yet quite witty and most often rational, though his dialog is peppered with endless series and half-remembered and incorrectly used proverbs. Despite it all, their friendship grows and draws the reader in to the point that when it finally all ends, I found myself wishing for another 1000 pages.

Don Quixote is more than a road novel, though. It’s as much about the power of literature and books as anything else. Don Quixote, having been driven mad reading bad chivalric romance novels, allows Cervantes ample opportunity to celebrate and question the power of the written word and through his crazed and gallant knight ask that age old question about the pen and the sword.

Cervantes’s style is playful, and in fact he is almost a character in the novel. I can see him sitting at his writing desk cackling with glee as he wrote the two books that comprise Don Quixote. Part I, written in 1605, is more fun than Part II (1615), but the second part is more interesting in many ways, especially since the characters are aware of the publication of the first part and take plenty of opportunities to discuss both the first part as well as the “false Quixote”, an unauthorized sequel that was published several years before the second part. This self-referential game that Cervantes engages in makes Don Quixote as much a novel about writing as reading.

Long before I reached the end of the book, I knew that Don Quixote had made my short list of favorite books of all time.