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Tag: books

Blue Like Jazz

One of my cowokers loaned me a favorite book of hers, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Sprituality by Donald Miller. The cover of the book was a deep shade of blue with a picture of the top of a bridge as if taken as the car was racing underneath. I’m such a sucker for a blue book.

While reading it, I had an overwhelming urge to listen to Wilco. It seemed to fit. At the end of the book Miller writes about what he was listening to while writing it. The Pogues were on the list and so was Wilco. Especially Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. I hadn’t ever thought about whether a book could sound like what the author was listening to while writing it, but I guess they can. This one sounds like Wilco. That’s a good thing.

Miller writes about how he came to be a commited Christian while somehow avoiding becoming one of the right-wing Republican Christian fundamentalists that seem to tick him off. He even laments the difficulties of being a Christian writer who refuses to write right wing rants (try that ten times as fast as you can).

The polictical stuff aside (which tended to make me like him even more) it’s a heartfelt and thought provoking book that shares the author’s struggles with the difference between religion and spirituality. Being a Christian vs. Christianity as an institution.

The Fall of the Roman Empire

The title kind of gives it away, but Michael Grant’s The Fall of the Roman Empire was still interesting for me and at 235 pages a hell of a lot shorter than Gibbons’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I guess the decline makes up for the difference in page count.

I bought this one at Half Price Books many years ago, when I was first teaching Caesar and wanted to refresh my memory of all things Roman. Except for the three years in Naples when school trips took us regularly to Pompeii and various other relics of Rome, I haven’t really given the Romans much thought.

Interestingly, Grant’s book made me think less about the Romans and more about the fall of empire in general. What really interested me was Grant’s examination not so much of the outside forces – barbarians, huns and Germans – that destroyed the Western Roman Empire, but the internal forces that brought it down.

The unwillingness of most Romans to serve in the army, the ever-widening gap between rich and poor, many of whom found themselves crushed under unpayable debts, the squeezing of the middle class, mistrust of the emperor, racial tensions and animosity towards immigrants, increasing numbers of people dropping out of society, increasing demands for theological conformity, and an amazing sense of complacency (we’re Rome, we’re number 1) all combined to leave a great society devided against itself and easy pickings for the enterprising barbarians.

Worst of all, much of this sounded familiar. Way too familiar. 

1215: The Year of Magna Carta

I so thoroughly enjoyed Danny Danziger & Robert Lacey’s The Year 1000, I read the (sort of) follow up, 1215: The Year of Magna Carta by Danziger and John Gillingham. It isn’t so much about the Magna Carta as it is about life in England during that time including the events that led to the rebellion against the intolerable King John and his signing of the Magna Carta despite the fact that the pope quickly deemed it unholy.

Like The Year 1000, 1215 is a popular history offering an overview of a complex society in a time of profound change, the period in which England became less French and more English. The authors (whose introduction blames any mistakes on each other) sacrifice depth for breadth and cover education, religion, warfare, forest law, trial by ordeal, the crusades, castles and a staggering number of other topics, always coming back to what the Magna Carta reveals about the thinking of the times.

Much is written also about the kings of the years leading up to 1215, particularly Henry II and Richard the Lionhearted, the immediate successors to King John. It is John’s errors and villainy, however, that led to Magna Carta, and I found it interesting how the writers managed to tie every one of their subjects into the larger issues of the day, leading ultimately to Runnymede.

I find it wonderfully exciting, suddenly diving back into European history, a subject I have given less attention than deserved since finishing the required courses in college. For years, the history I read was either modern or concerned itself with ancient America. Now, I find there is much I didn’t know, and much that I had forgotten (what a great thing to be reminded of knowledge I’d thought lost in the nooks and crannies of my mind!)

I am also surprised by how much I did know, though without context, the filing system that is my mind had treated history as scraps of paper full of interesting information scattered across a desk that hadn’t seen a clean in years. Creating narrative cleans the desk.

The Story of English

Last week when I was asked about hanged and hung, I started wondering more about the history and development of the English language. I knew generally about the Anglo-Saxons and the Danes and 1066 and all that, but I wanted to go deeper. Sitting in the library at home, a book caught my eye: The Story of English. I don’t know where it came from, but I’ve had it for years and had never read it.

The book is a companion to a PBS mini-series circa 1985 and so some of the modern examples are a bit dated, but it traces the development and history of the language from it’s origins as the language of the Anglo-Saxons up through its many manifestations.

The book highlights the importance of Scots, Irish and American English to what we might now call standard international English. Additionally it covers the development of Australian, New Zealand, and South African English.

Most interesting is the treatment given to so-called third world Englishes, those of India, Jamaica, West Africa and Singapore, places where nations once owned (as opposed to settled) by the British are attempting to develop their own unique voice.

Combination history and current events (again circa ’85), The Story of English is a fascinating read that constantly surprised me with how much I didn’t already know. There is a revised and updated version available. Perhaps I’ll have to check it out to see what’s changed since ’85.

As an interesting aside, The New York Times reports this week that nearly half of the world’s languages are likely to be extinct by the end of the century. Part of this is due to the increasing adoption of English as the international language, although I wonder how many new languages will be born as people around the world localize English and evolve it to suit their own purposes.

The Year 1000

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.

Voyages of Delusion

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.

Dark Waters

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


“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.

Another Gilgamesh

I read Herbert Mason’s 1970 free verse version of the ancient Babylonian epic Gilgamesh last year as part of the Lost Book Club. It’s one of my favorites from the Lost project, so I decided to read a different version this summer. (Here’s the link to my post on Mason’s version).

I chose David Ferry’s 1992 version, written in unrhymed couplets in iambic pentameter. The basic story is, of course the same, but where Mason’s feels personal and cuts close to the heart, Ferry’s feels a bit more scholarly. Fine if you’re studying the poem, but not as moving.

Other than the poetic form, the biggest difference lies in what motivates Gilgamesh to go on his great quest. In Mason’s version he is motivated by the pain of losing his friend Enkidu, and he wants the secret of immortality in order to bring Enkidu back to life.

In Ferry’s version, Gilgamesh seems more motivated by fear of his own mortality and his wish to extend his own life.

Interestingly, this version seems more in line with issues on Lost, particularly since we’ve learned that the island appears to grant exceptionaly long life or slower aging or possibly immortality.

Gilgamesh was referenced in Season 2 as a clue in a crossword that John Locke was working on prior to meeting Mr Eko. Now that we have the perspective of Season 3 and Eko’s death (killed for angering the “gods” much like Enkidu), things seem a bit clearer as Locke is on a quest to know the island’s secrets including the one about longevity, though he doesn’t know that yet. I’m guessing Locke’s motivation isn’t as selfless as Mason’s Gilgamesh, though.

I’ll probably have to read another Gilgamesh or two to see which of these versions hews closer to convention. Maybe this will be an annual event.