some recent books read
Dec. 14th, 2009 10:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacThe Fantastic Horizon: Essays and Reviews by Darrell Schweitzer. The author hailed me at the WFC signing session and tempted me with this book, his first essay collection in some years. Sometimes it is good to be known. I particularly appreciated the opening essay on Tolkien. Most people who write on Tolkien's literary qualities are either themselves Tolkienists or from other literary universes altogether. Schweitzer is neither, and considers LotR as it would appear to a reader from the pulp dark-fantasy tradition, at which it holds up fairly well; but he is also well-versed in Tolkienesque scholarly concepts like ofermod, so he doesn't waffle around in ignorance. I also liked the analyses of often gawdawful old pulp stories ("What this story needs," he muses of one unmemorable 1929 South Seas adventure tale, "is a giant gorilla") in terms of what the formula was trying to do and whether it achieved this. Literary analysis is always best when it respects the integrity of its subject, even when the subject is trash.
The Wild Girls by Pat Murphy. If all the novels I saw lying around were this good, I'd read a lot more of them. This is a non-fantasy about two misfit 12-year-old girls who slowly work out a friendship and take a creative writing class together. It's very plainly written but the patterns are subtle instead of hitting the reader over the head. Of course there are dramatic family problems - e.g. one girl's long-lost mother suddenly comes waltzing back into her life, and how's she going to deal with that? - but there's nothing paint-by-numbers about Murphy's creativity. I like, for instance, that one girl is so much more imaginative that the other feels dull in her presence - but in social situations, it's the first girl who's paralyzed by awkwardness, and the second who feels more at ease and thus takes the lead, though no master of suavity herself. Thoughtfully done and easy to read.
Boccherini's Body: An Essay in Carnal Musicology by Elisabeth Le Guin. Now I have books by three generations of the Kroeber-Le Guin family. Elisabeth, daughter of Ursula, is a cellist specializing in 18th-century music. And what, you may wonder, could a book with such a weird title be about? It's about the chamber music of Luigi Boccherini, written primarily from the point of view of the physical experience of playing it as a cellist, a perspective that I, not an instrumentalist of any description, can learn a lot from. There's a lot more, as well: the effects of Boccherini's own physical health on his music, abstract music as an alternative way of expressing dramatic plots, and much more. It'll be a long time before I absorb all of this, so I'm lucky to have gotten it cheap from the U.C. Press booksale.
The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions by David Berlinski. Somehow I'd gotten the impression that Berlinski cut through some of the scientific problems in the current religion/atheism debate, but he doesn't. Berlinski is a philosopher, not a scientist; he knows nothing about science, and like everybody on both sides of this debate, is aggressively and belligerently ignorant about what he doesn't know. He starts out by punching a straw man of a supposed claim that science can prove that God doesn't exist (not even Richard Dawkins claims that). When he declares that the scientific method 1) is incomprehensible gibberish, and 2) is meaningless because it can be used to draw conclusions about trivial things (so what? so can philosophical syllogisms), I started skimming, because Berlinski had nothing left to say worth reading.
God's Defenders: What They Believe and Why They Are Wrong by S.T. Joshi. Joshi, the Lovecraft scholar? The same. I found this on the library shelf near Berlinski; amazingly, the two books did not explode or start crumbling into slimy ichor when I held them together to check them out. Joshi is actually more learned than most of the professional atheists out there, though like most of them he has an unexplained desire to run around kicking what he sees as people's crutches out from under them. His explanation for religious belief? "People are stupid." Accordingly he has some trouble pinning C.S. Lewis, who wasn't stupid, to the mat, and his knowledge of Lewis's total oeuvre is not as secure as he thinks; but it's great fun watching him demolish twaddle from the likes of T.S. Eliot and William F. Buckley, smart enough guys on their own grounds whose only mistakes were thinking they knew something about religion and then publishing it.
Charles Addams: A Cartoonist's Life by Linda H. Davis. On the surface, Addams led a quiet life of a genial fellow everyone liked. His marriages, though, were hairier. Between them, he had a semi-romantic relationship with Jackie Kennedy and an entirely platonic one with Greta Garbo. He certainly got around. Peculiar fact no. 1: The Addams Family TV show almost didn't get made because Addams had deeded the rights to his cartoons to ex-wife no. 2, to whom he'd given anything she wanted in a desperate attempt to get rid of her, but he either didn't bother to inform the TV people of this or forgot it himself. She, meanwhile, was a paranoid lawyer who went over all Addams's licensing contracts with a suspicious eye, convinced that everyone was cheating him (and, by extension, her) blind. Peculiar fact no. 2: Addams drew the cartoons, but he didn't always come up with the ideas. The one with the skier, for instance, was the work of an anonymous New Yorker staffer. Peculiar fact no. 3: The Family characters weren't named until they were licensed as dolls in the late 50s. Someone surnamed Pugsley wrote Addams to ask where he got the name from. Peculiar fact no. 4: Addams was prolific and fast, but Davis writes about each cartoon she mentions with the kind of close-attention worshipfulness more appropriate to a rare canvas by Vermeer.
Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford edited by Peter Y. Sussman. I've long enjoyed Jessica "Decca" Mitford's writing, and have picked up even some of her obscurer books (though I drew the line at the one about Philip Toynbee). When I first read that this volume was in progress, I sent the editor an encouraging e-mail. It came out three years ago, and I've finally gotten a copy. Mitford is as delightful a letter-writer as a book author, though less polished. Some of the letters read like rough drafts for her memoirs; others tell surprising anecdotes that never got in the memoirs. The feud with her sister over the missing photo album Decca supposedly stole (it later turned up unstolen) is not edifying on anybody. Sussman's introductions to the successive sections together form an adequate short biography.
How the States Got Their Shapes by Mark Stein. Now this is a book for me, or anyone who shares my peculiar fascination with the contact between physical reality and arbitrary artificiality that is political geography. This is more a quick reference book than a treatise to read. The problem is that the eastern border of Alabama is, perforce, the western border of Georgia, and Stein does not shy away from telling the same story twice. If you really want to know this stuff, you'll read D.W. Meinig's magisterial four-volume The Shaping of America, which of course I have. Stein's convenient form comes at the cost not just of duplication but of over-simplification, a liking for conspiracy theories of his own devising (thirty years later, this long-term boundary-planning was to pay off when ...), and some inaccuracies especially in the maps. Also I wish that he could have occasionally stuck in some of the amusing stories of how the states got their names. For a low-brow lay introduction to the subject, though, it's quite good, and if you just want to know why various state boundaries jog around in peculiar ways, he really will tell you.
The Wild Girls by Pat Murphy. If all the novels I saw lying around were this good, I'd read a lot more of them. This is a non-fantasy about two misfit 12-year-old girls who slowly work out a friendship and take a creative writing class together. It's very plainly written but the patterns are subtle instead of hitting the reader over the head. Of course there are dramatic family problems - e.g. one girl's long-lost mother suddenly comes waltzing back into her life, and how's she going to deal with that? - but there's nothing paint-by-numbers about Murphy's creativity. I like, for instance, that one girl is so much more imaginative that the other feels dull in her presence - but in social situations, it's the first girl who's paralyzed by awkwardness, and the second who feels more at ease and thus takes the lead, though no master of suavity herself. Thoughtfully done and easy to read.
Boccherini's Body: An Essay in Carnal Musicology by Elisabeth Le Guin. Now I have books by three generations of the Kroeber-Le Guin family. Elisabeth, daughter of Ursula, is a cellist specializing in 18th-century music. And what, you may wonder, could a book with such a weird title be about? It's about the chamber music of Luigi Boccherini, written primarily from the point of view of the physical experience of playing it as a cellist, a perspective that I, not an instrumentalist of any description, can learn a lot from. There's a lot more, as well: the effects of Boccherini's own physical health on his music, abstract music as an alternative way of expressing dramatic plots, and much more. It'll be a long time before I absorb all of this, so I'm lucky to have gotten it cheap from the U.C. Press booksale.
The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions by David Berlinski. Somehow I'd gotten the impression that Berlinski cut through some of the scientific problems in the current religion/atheism debate, but he doesn't. Berlinski is a philosopher, not a scientist; he knows nothing about science, and like everybody on both sides of this debate, is aggressively and belligerently ignorant about what he doesn't know. He starts out by punching a straw man of a supposed claim that science can prove that God doesn't exist (not even Richard Dawkins claims that). When he declares that the scientific method 1) is incomprehensible gibberish, and 2) is meaningless because it can be used to draw conclusions about trivial things (so what? so can philosophical syllogisms), I started skimming, because Berlinski had nothing left to say worth reading.
God's Defenders: What They Believe and Why They Are Wrong by S.T. Joshi. Joshi, the Lovecraft scholar? The same. I found this on the library shelf near Berlinski; amazingly, the two books did not explode or start crumbling into slimy ichor when I held them together to check them out. Joshi is actually more learned than most of the professional atheists out there, though like most of them he has an unexplained desire to run around kicking what he sees as people's crutches out from under them. His explanation for religious belief? "People are stupid." Accordingly he has some trouble pinning C.S. Lewis, who wasn't stupid, to the mat, and his knowledge of Lewis's total oeuvre is not as secure as he thinks; but it's great fun watching him demolish twaddle from the likes of T.S. Eliot and William F. Buckley, smart enough guys on their own grounds whose only mistakes were thinking they knew something about religion and then publishing it.
Charles Addams: A Cartoonist's Life by Linda H. Davis. On the surface, Addams led a quiet life of a genial fellow everyone liked. His marriages, though, were hairier. Between them, he had a semi-romantic relationship with Jackie Kennedy and an entirely platonic one with Greta Garbo. He certainly got around. Peculiar fact no. 1: The Addams Family TV show almost didn't get made because Addams had deeded the rights to his cartoons to ex-wife no. 2, to whom he'd given anything she wanted in a desperate attempt to get rid of her, but he either didn't bother to inform the TV people of this or forgot it himself. She, meanwhile, was a paranoid lawyer who went over all Addams's licensing contracts with a suspicious eye, convinced that everyone was cheating him (and, by extension, her) blind. Peculiar fact no. 2: Addams drew the cartoons, but he didn't always come up with the ideas. The one with the skier, for instance, was the work of an anonymous New Yorker staffer. Peculiar fact no. 3: The Family characters weren't named until they were licensed as dolls in the late 50s. Someone surnamed Pugsley wrote Addams to ask where he got the name from. Peculiar fact no. 4: Addams was prolific and fast, but Davis writes about each cartoon she mentions with the kind of close-attention worshipfulness more appropriate to a rare canvas by Vermeer.
Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford edited by Peter Y. Sussman. I've long enjoyed Jessica "Decca" Mitford's writing, and have picked up even some of her obscurer books (though I drew the line at the one about Philip Toynbee). When I first read that this volume was in progress, I sent the editor an encouraging e-mail. It came out three years ago, and I've finally gotten a copy. Mitford is as delightful a letter-writer as a book author, though less polished. Some of the letters read like rough drafts for her memoirs; others tell surprising anecdotes that never got in the memoirs. The feud with her sister over the missing photo album Decca supposedly stole (it later turned up unstolen) is not edifying on anybody. Sussman's introductions to the successive sections together form an adequate short biography.
How the States Got Their Shapes by Mark Stein. Now this is a book for me, or anyone who shares my peculiar fascination with the contact between physical reality and arbitrary artificiality that is political geography. This is more a quick reference book than a treatise to read. The problem is that the eastern border of Alabama is, perforce, the western border of Georgia, and Stein does not shy away from telling the same story twice. If you really want to know this stuff, you'll read D.W. Meinig's magisterial four-volume The Shaping of America, which of course I have. Stein's convenient form comes at the cost not just of duplication but of over-simplification, a liking for conspiracy theories of his own devising (thirty years later, this long-term boundary-planning was to pay off when ...), and some inaccuracies especially in the maps. Also I wish that he could have occasionally stuck in some of the amusing stories of how the states got their names. For a low-brow lay introduction to the subject, though, it's quite good, and if you just want to know why various state boundaries jog around in peculiar ways, he really will tell you.
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