thorold lights out for the territory in Q2 2024

… so there ain't nothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it, because if I'd a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn't a tackled it, and ain't a-going to no more. But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can't stand it. I been there before.

Welcome to my Q2 thread! The Q1 thread was here: https://www.librarything.com/topic/356199

Since I ended Q1 with an author riffing off Mark Twain, why not continue? I don’t think I’m likely to reach anywhere more exotic than the Western Reserve in Q2, but you never know…

Q1 Reading stats

26 books read, by 25 distinct main authors.

By language
Dutch: 4
English: 17
French: 1
German: 3
Italian: 1

By Genre
Art history: 1
Essays: 1
Fiction: 18
History: 1
Language: 1
Memoir: 1
Poetry: 2
Theatre: 1

By format
Other borrowed: 1
Paid ebooks: 2
Library: 10
Paper books from TBR pile: 12
Re-reads: 1

Q1 was quite satisfactory: I read a little bit less than usual, and although I don’t seem to have read anything really earth-shattering, I didn’t really have much fluff or rubbish either. I only managed two reads for the RG pre-renaissance theme read, but I did get from Belgium to India on the “reading round the world” theme. Including the first book I’ve read from Slovakia.

Aims for Q2:
I’m in Cleveland, away from my main TBR pile, for the first half of Q2, and I’m aiming to travel a bit more when I get back to Europe, so it’s hard to make any plans. My TBR-pile-away-from-home is building up, as I explore the bookshops around here. I’m certainly planning to go a bit further with the “reading round the world” project, and I want to read a few books for “landlocked countries”, the RG Q2 theme. Uzbekistan and Hungary are already on the pile, at least. I expect I’ll read a few more books about the Great Lakes as well.
When I get back to Holland, the book that’s calling out to me is Beyond the wall, which was a Christmas present to myself but which I’ve had to postpone starting because of other commitments several times.

And the first book for Q2, which I already accidentally posted in my Q1 thread and then deleted again, is another station on the world tour — after visiting India with R K Narayan last Sunday, I spotted a book from Bangladesh:

This won a lot of awards at the time it appeared, and Anam has since expanded it into a trilogy. She comes from a prominent Bengali family of politicians and journalists, and currently seems to be based in the UK.

A Golden Age (2007) by Tahmima Anam (Bangladesh, UK, 1975- )

  

A moving account of the Bangladesh War of 1971 from the point of view of a middle-aged widow, Rehana, who is drawn into the independence struggle by her adult children. Maybe a little bit over-romantic in places, but it gives a convincing picture of what it must feel like to find your normal life overturned by a civil war. Anam was only born in 1975, so she’s writing about people in her parents’ and grandparents’ generation, but she seems to have based the book on an extensive set of interviews with people who were directly involved.

>4 thorold: I already had this in my wish list so will star it now. I don’t think I’ve read anything set during that war, which for some reason always makes me think of George Harrison. Thanks for prompting me with your review.

>4 thorold: Good reminder. I have the first two books in that trilogy, but haven't read them yet.

Something very British, for a change. One of the great title of recent years, which I’ve been meaning to get to for a while to see if the book lives up to it. And it reminds me that I haven’t read any of Susan Hill’s novels in an eternity — certainly not since I’ve been on LibraryThing. That ought to be remedied…

Howards End is on the Landing (2009) by Susan Hill (UK, 1942- )

  

Long before “working from home” was a phrase people bandied about, Susan Hill decided to spend a year just reading books she already had lying around the house. “Attacking the TBR pile”, as we would put it. Except that she was mixing in a fair proportion of re-reads: the main principle seemed to be to follow her nose and the quasi-random patterns in which books had settled in different parts of her home. And of course this isn’t just a collection of book reviews, she drifts off engagingly into memories from her long career as an author, broadcaster and publisher. Her first novel was published when she was still in her teens, and she’s been in the literary scene long enough to have baby-sat Arnold Wesker’s children and have E M Forster drop a book on her toe in the London Library, so she knew a lot of the writers she is talking about here, and many of them were evidently friends. But she seems to be quite capable of separating the books from the people: V S Naipaul, for example, seems to have been rude to her the one time they met, but she still praises him as one of the best prose-writers of his generation.

A fun little book, which comes with a serious risk of encouraging you to buy more books, even if it doesn’t make you disarrange your home library to increase the serendipity factor…

>7 thorold: What a wonderful way to spend a year. This is a title I love, but for some reason have never seen the actual book except for in the picture you posted. Good to see it's worth the (risky) read.

>7 thorold: Sounds a little like Mantel Pieces in scope. I’m reading Pieces now and enjoying it - mix of book critiques, essays, memoir pieces. Now I need re read Hill’s.

P.S V.S. Naipaul was rude to me too.

>7 thorold: I guess this is the same Susan Hill who wrote The Various Haunts of Men, is that right? I read that one for a mystery book club back in 2011 and wasn't excited enough to continue with the series. There are a lot of Susan Hills writing books.

>9 kjuliff: There seem to be a lot of those little “books I’ve met in my long life” books around. I was half-convinced I’d already read Hill’s, but it turned out to be a quite different book by someone else.

Naipaul obviously had a talent for upsetting people. Interesting that another of Hill’s favourites-but-not-as-people is Roald Dahl, who has also been getting a lot of probably justified negative comment lately.

>10 Jim53: Yes, that one. She seems to have done a lot of different kinds of fiction at different times — I vaguely remember her from Strange meeting and In the springtime of the year, written in the early seventies, and from being on the radio a lot. I didn’t realise she’d done crime as well, but it makes sense.

>4 thorold: Great review. I've only read nonfiction about the 1971 war, this is going on my list.

>11 thorold: I know little of Roald Dahl’s works except for the chocolate factory one which my kids loved. I didn’t see anything wrong with it at the time, and haven’t followed the anti-Dahl news. With Naipaul, I’ve not read any of his books lately but I don’t think he was politically incorrect, though I gather that he treated his first wife badly, and that he was generally an unpleasant person. Which brings us to that 21st century question, are we to cancel artists such as Caravaggio and Picasso because of their morally-lacking their private lives?

>4 thorold: I read and enjoyed A Golden Age back in 2016. I had a couple of quibbles, particularly with the pacing of the first half, but overall reviewed it very positively.

That Susan Hill book sounds so nice. I’m catching up. Enjoyed your reviews. I was really pleased to read your review if James. (I’m not going to try to tag that.) I’m very interested and that was a terrific review.

I enjoyed A Golden Age but I loved The Good Muslim, the second book in the Bangladesh Trilogy.

>16 kidzdoc: I hadn’t heard of The Good Muslim but it looks good. Adding it to my list, along with A Golden Age

>16 kidzdoc: >17 kjuliff: I’m looking out for it.

Moving to the “landlocked countries” theme:

The Railway (1997,2006) by Hamid Ismailov (Uzbekistan, UK, 1954- ) translated from Russian by Robert Chandler

  

A complicated novel, telling the intersecting but sometimes contradictory stories of a large group of characters in a small railway town north of Tashkent between about 1900 and 1980, interleaved with the story of an unnamed character just referred to as “the boy”. The stories are often ribald and usually involve at least a hint of magic realism, and the point of view is always that of a Muslim, Uzbek observer, looking with slight puzzlement at western civilisation and the Soviet project.

Ismailov says in an interview with the translator included as an afterword here that he wanted to contrast the regimented, hierarchical, Soviet way of looking at the world — obviously symbolised here by the railway — with the unprejudiced, fluid, Sufi-like gaze of the innocent boy. Ismailov takes no prisoners either in his social and political satire or in his brutally matter-of-fact descriptions of sex and violence, so this definitely isn’t for everyone, but it is a quite remarkable book, and often very funny indeed, even in places where you had rather it wasn’t… Certainly another one that invites a re-read to get the most out of it.

>17 kjuliff: I thought I had written a review of The Good Muslim for Belletrista, Lois' online literary magazine, and I did, back in 2012. Here's a link to my review, which I've now posted in full on LibraryThing: https://www.librarything.com/work/11278105/reviews/77931718

>19 kidzdoc: it looks excellent. I’m looking for it on audio as I can no longer read in print. So far no luck :(

>19 kidzdoc: Thanks! Looks interesting.

Fabulous review of James from your previous thread, Mark! I'll buy and read it soon.

My least favorite memory of high school was my English class in 11th grade, when the teacher decided to make us read excerpts from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I was one of maybe three or four Black students in my class of 250-300 students, so I stood out like a sore thumb, although the teachers there generally liked me, even if I didn't take any of their classes, as I was the "smart Black kid" who broke through stereotypical barriers. This English teacher was a White woman with a head full of frizzy red hair and huge glasses who obviously took waaay too many hallucinogenic drugs in the 1960s, and she insisted in having me read Jim's dialogue in an "authentic" voice, as, being the only Black student in the class, I was the only one who could speak like that (this, despite the fact that I don't have a "Black" accent). I was intensely uncomfortable, as were my well meaning classmates, who generally liked me and hated that this druggie teacher put me in that position; they also hated trying to speak like White Southerners, especially since no one in the Philadelphia area talked like that.

Unfortunately that experience set me again literature in general, and American literature in particular, for many years.

Percival Everett is my favorite living American novelist, although I've only read half or fewer of the books he's published to date. My favorites are, in order of LT rating, The Trees, I Am Not Sidney Poitier, Erasure, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, and A History of the African-American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond, as told to Percival Everett & James Kincaid.

>22 kidzdoc: oh gosh Im so sorry that happened to you! Horrible things that adults do to kids that arent exactly abuse, but certainly adjacent. Twain was one of my fav authors in jr high, I still have good memories of our 6th grade teacher reading some of his stories. Sorry that teacher kept you from his work. I am very interested in reading James got it on reserve

A History of the African-American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond, as told to Percival Everett & James Kincaid.

!!!!!!!!!!! oh my I want to read that!

>22 kidzdoc: I’d never read any Percival Everett and just started The Trees a couple of days due to rv1988’s recommendation. What a wonderful book. I’ll have to read more Everett. Growing up in Australia we were not introduced to many American novelists. Only James Baldwin stands out in my memory as high school reading. So I am constantly finding writers new to me from LT members.

>22 kidzdoc: Ouch! It’s always scary how easy it is to end up insensitively trampling on toes when you go plunging into something with the best intentions — as your teacher obviously thought she was doing. Our liveliest teachers at that period often exhibited similar clumsiness: I don’t suppose they had any meaningful training in dealing with diversity.

I’m pursuing the Everett rabbit hole — more coming shortly. Thanks for the ordered list! His output is impressive, but of course he has been writing for a good forty years.

As promised:

I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2011) by Percival Everett (US, 1956- )

  

This feels a lot like a one-joke book, but Everett is clever enough to keep the joke going with subtle variations throughout the book, and turn it into an effective satire that constantly messes with our preconceptions about the experience of growing up black in America. The narrator is a young, unemployed black man, child of a single mother, a high-school dropout … but through no fault of his own, he is also extraordinarily wealthy. And he has been named “Not Sidney” by his somewhat eccentric mother, something that leads to an astonishing variety of misunderstandings, not helped by the fact that his surname is Poitier and he looks rather like the famous actor.

Not Sidney is helped along his way through adolescence by a friendly Atlanta media mogul named Ted Turner and a crazy college professor named Percival Everett (who teaches a course on “the epistemology of nonsense”) — both clearly totally fictional characters. The author cheerfully messes with our minds as the young hero gets arrested in a backward part of the Deep South for Driving While Black and is sentenced to an authentically thirties-style chain gang, or as a light-skinned girl takes him home from their black college to shock her conservative parents (the tables, of course, are turned when he is revealed to be rich enough to be husband material). At a later point he finds himself held prisoner by nuns, and before long he is investigating his own murder. Along the way we get a selection of dream sequences in which the narrator becomes a slave in antebellum New Orleans or a fugitive from a lynch mob. Everett doesn’t actually tell us that persons attempting to find a plot in this narrative will be shot, but that seems to be implicit. Very clever and funny, but with a sharp point drilling into the fundamental absurdity of the American obsession with race. And Hollywood movies…

I loved The Trees and keep meaning to read more of his stuff. Thanks for the interesting review.

Enjoying your reviews and The Railway sounds right on the rails for you.

>26 thorold: Sounds wonderful. After reading your review I found it in the NYPL and borrowed it immediately. I recently finished his The Trees, which was esquisite. Such intelligent humour.

Today is “lights out” day — the sun is shining at the moment, our eclipse glasses are locked and loaded, and the forecast for this afternoon is … well, a bit mixed. Fingers crossed!

Meanwhile, yet another book from the mid-sixties by a Cleveland Plain dealer hack…

Great Stories of the Great Lakes (1966) by Dwight Boyer (USA, 1912-1977)

  

This turns out to be mostly a collection of accounts of “great shipwrecks of the Great Lakes”, with the few pieces that aren’t about shipwrecks being about salvage operations or near-disasters. The main exception is the opening piece, an account of the celebrated steamboat race between the Tashmoo and the City of Erie in June 1901. Unfortunately, this opening piece also shows Boyer indulging his penchant for journalistic cliché to the hilt, putting dialogue into the mouths of the participants, including a Chief Engineer with a comic “Scottish” accent… Later in the book he moderates this sort of thing a little, but it remains hard to disentangle his historical research from his taste for reconstruction.

What I took from the book was a better sense of how extreme the weather conditions on the Great Lakes can be, as well as a general impression that most of the disasters he describes could have been avoided with better weather forecasting, better ships and skippers who weren’t under as much pressure to meet schedules. But that is probably true for marine accidents anywhere in the world. Obviously what is peculiar to the Lakes is that ships are on short and very familiar, frequently travelled routes, never more than a few hours from shelter, but the weather changes can be very rapid.

Fun if you like disaster stories, but you might prefer a more recent book, especially given that the most celebrated Great Lakes shipwreck, the Edmund Fitzgerald, occurred some ten years too late for Boyer to have included it.

>30 thorold: Is there any mention of the Lady Elgin disaster on Lake Michigan in 1860? I had a surviving ancestor and 2 lost ancestors on that ship.

>31 kac522: No, it wasn’t mentioned, or at least it’s not in the index and I don’t remember seeing it. Surprising, given the loss of life involved and the legal consequences — that was the accident that led to running lights becoming compulsory for sailing vessels at night.

>32 thorold: Probably in the history of the Great Lakes it's smaller, but it is one of the larger disasters on Lake Michigan. Or too many Irish... ;)
Well, then I'll probably take a pass on the book.
So how was the eclipse in Cleveland? I saw one report--it looked a little cloudy.

>33 kac522: Whispy high cloud, but we got a good view all the same. Fabulous light effects over the lake, as well. And it was much more of a social experience than I was expecting — we got chatting to all sorts of strangers. The eclipse put everyone in a holiday mood, I think.

>34 thorold: Lovely, thanks for sharing.

Great review of I Am Not Sidney Poitier, Mark; I loved that book!

>30 thorold: Your review has generated an earworm - Gordon Lightfoot's The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. It will be going through my mind for days!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuzTkGyxkYI

>37 SassyLassy: The OH was talking about that yesterday — now I’ve actually listened to it I see it would be an earworm. Sorry!
If you want to chase it away with another shipwreck earworm, you could try this one, which was depressing people locally when I was growing up: https://youtu.be/qUvX3JIzT2A?si=TkVdoG9PwAzthH7G

>38 thorold: Well the chasing away worked, but you're right - another earworm.

Thanks, guys. I think I have one in each ear now...

I've got to add the great Canadian singer Stan Rogers here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMRpYtAhGAo
"Northwest Passage" about the failed Franklin expedition across Canada.

Or his Barrett's Privateers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQbh7UNCZdc

>41 kac522: Now I'm really doomed. My book club did Frozen in Time last month, about the Franklin expedition and the Northwest Passage, and all of us had that song going through our minds. It was only just replaced by the Edmund Fitzgerald, and now Barrett's Privateers are jumping all around too. Well, maybe not jumping - "I'm a broken man on a Halifax pier...". All good rousing songs to sing at the end of a long night.

Stan's brother Garnet apparently brews some good stuff, and there is a great spoof of it to the tune of 'Barrett's Privateers', along the lines of "...a glass of Garnet's home made beer"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GI8P5Fhc5yU

Moving on swiftly, before I have to retitle my thread “thorold listens to depressing Canadian folk music in Q2”…. :-)

This was my first encounter with Willa Cather, a writer numerous other people here have told me good things about. It was a book I bought mostly because it was just such an attractive physical object. It was lying in wait for me in the eccentric little neighbourhood secondhand bookshop, and I couldn’t resist it, especially after the lady who runs the shop had kindly given us a couple of pairs of eclipse glasses from her own private supply. A slightly battered copy of what I think must be a later reprint of the Knopf first edition (it’s dated 1929), printed on heavy paper, with woodcuts by Harold Von Schmidt, and set in a gorgeous font called Poliphilus — a 20s Stanley Morison remake of a renaissance font used by Aldus Manutius. Sadly the dust jacket is long gone. But all for about the same price as a modern paperback, and five times as enjoyable to read. Elmer Adler is credited as the book’s designer.

 

Death Comes For The Archbishop (1927) by Willa Cather (USA, 1873-1947)

  

An odd choice of title, on the face of it, as the central character does not become an archbishop until well into the closing pages of the novel, and his death is one of the gentlest and least dramatic in the whole of modern fiction.

This is essentially a historical novel about the lives of two French missionary priests charged with setting up a new diocese after the US annexation of New Mexico in 1848, where Father Vaillant is the tough lower-class bruiser with the key human skills and sympathies for dealing with people from outside civilised European culture, while his officer-class friend and colleague Father Latour deals with the local gentry and keeps going off on long journeys to attend management conferences.

Both priests are presented as pious, idealistic, self-sacrificing and generally lacking in any interesting human vices (except maybe a taste for French cooking), in a way that might otherwise be rather tedious and even nauseating, but seems to be forgivable — and even appropriate — here, in the context of the epic framework Cather sets up, where the New Mexico scenery and the interplay of Spanish-Mexican and Native American cultures in it is always more foreground than background. Latour and Vaillant spend a lot of the book being tiny dots of black in a widescreen panorama of desert, cactuses and mesas. There isn’t really a direct plot, we learn about Latour and Vaillant and the transitional society of the new Territory through a series of Don-Camilloesque vignettes, and Cather takes the opportunity to remind us along the way of some of the values of Native American culture — particularly when it comes to living in harmony with nature — and the ways that they have often been mistreated by the US authorities (but not, apparently, by the Roman Catholic Church…).

Very odd, and not really my sort of book, but I enjoyed Cather’s writing all the same, and I liked the description of the cosy, lifelong friendship of the two priests, even if it did rely on a few clichés.

Im not a huge fan but her description of life in the southwest really is lovely.

>43 thorold: Great review but book seems not so great for me.

>42 SassyLassy: Thanks, that was fun! Did you enjoy Frozen in Time? I recently read a short story by Margaret Atwood called "The Age of Lead", in which she brilliantly weaves the Franklin expedition story (and later discoveries) with a young man dying of AIDS.

>43 thorold: I loved the descriptions, especially the colors, in Death Comes for the Archbishop. I'd never read anything about the Southwest, and reading that book made me feel like I was there. To me Cather's books are sort of myths or fairy tales; they're about the characters but they're also about larger ideas and truths. A short one to read is A Lost Lady, which is about a woman on the surface, but it's really about the lure of the Old West.

And thanks for sharing pictures from that wonderful old edition.

This was the book I meant to read on the plane a couple of weeks ago, before R K Narayan interrupted me…

The House by the Lake (2015) by Thomas Harding (UK, 1968- )

  

In 1927 Thomas Harding’s great-grandfather built a weekend cottage for his family on the shore of a lake in Groß Glienicke, on the western edge of Berlin. The Alexanders were able to enjoy the house for a few years before Hitler’s anti-Jewish policies made them emigrate to Britain. Another family, the Meisels, then acquired the place cheaply as “abandoned Jewish property”, but lost it again when it became part of the Soviet Zone and later the DDR. Two further families lived in the house during the DDR period, when it changed from dacha to permanent residence — but with the peculiarity that the Berlin Wall now ran through the back garden, cutting the house off from the lake.

Harding went to Berlin in 2013 to look for the now-abandoned house his relatives had talked about, and to research its history by talking to residents of Groß Glienicke, an exercise which culminated in a project to turn the house into a protected monument and eventually a museum of local history.

Harding uses a mixture of oral history and documents to chronicle the history of the house and the village from the 1890s, before the local landowner sold off portions of his estate for housing, right through to the campaign to restore the house. This is all quite engaging, particularly because Harding treats all the people who have lived in the house with equal respect and focuses on their experience of living there rather than allowing himself to be tempted into recriminations about strangers living in the house his family built for themselves. We get a lively — albeit somewhat arbitrary — slice of German social history through time, with quite a lot of interesting details.

The book is a little less successful when Harding is trying to fill us in on the bigger picture of German history to give a context to the events: inevitably, he has to condense and simplify, and he often ends up with a story that is lacking in nuance and precision. A lot of relevant information is banished to the (ridiculously long) endnotes, and Penguin make things worse by not allowing him to put references to the notes in the text: you have to guess which passages might have notes attached to them and which don’t.

Not bad on the whole, but I think there are much more interesting books about German history written by actual Germans (OK, Australians too…).

>47 thorold: Sounds vaguely similar in plot to Erpenbeck’s house story. Forget the name of the book, but the idea of different families living consecutively in the one house in East Germany. I think a lake was involved in Erupenbeck’s book too.

Edited to correct spelling Apr 12

>47 thorold: I hate it when they do that with notes! The book does sound engaging.

>48 kjuliff: Heimsuchung/Visitation — Yes, that was why I was a bit reluctant to try it when someone recommended it a while ago. Erpenbeck does it better, and she has the advantage of writing fiction, which lets you impose structure that wasn’t quite there in real life. But the Harding book might be more accessible to someone who doesn’t know very much about Germany.

A real case of a book I didn’t know I needed until it leapt off the bookshop shelf into my hand.

Essays in Idleness (1332) by Kenkō (Japan, 1283-1352), translated by Donald Keene (US, 1922-2019)

  

Kenkō was a Kyoto courtier-poet who took Buddhist orders in 1324. He wrote these 243 short essays when he was in his early fifties, apparently mostly for his own amusement. They didn‘t become widely known until about two hundred years later, but once the book did start circulating, it became established as a minor Japanese classic, treasured for the way it sets out some core elements of the Japanese view of aesthetics, etiquette and religious life.

That aspect of the essays is very interesting to us, of course, a door right into the court world of 14th century Kyoto, but they are also a treasure for their sheer randomness. We get thoughts on the uncouthness of the younger generation, rants against the import of useless stuff from China, careful analysis of exactly how we should enjoy the beauty of moonlight or cherry blossom, anecdotes about priests who get their heads stuck in cauldrons or ox-drivers who get the better of fine gentlemen, as well as some very precise laying down the law about which kinds of fish may be carved in the presence of the emperor.

Kenkō can be delightfully inconsistent on occasion, too — there’s a piece where he goes on about the evils of alcohol for a couple of pages, violently attacking irresponsible people who force booze on their friends and reminding us how boring other people become when they are drunk — and then, mysteriously, he seems to have overcome his hangover and goes on to tell us how wonderful a social stimulant alcohol can be, and what fun it is to see a friend getting tipsy… Kenkō does sometimes come over as a bit of a Polonius, but most of the time he is endearing, witty (although even after 700 years of research, some of his jokes are apparently still quite opaque to Japanese scholars), and very enjoyable to read.

The late Donald Keene was, of course, second to none in the art of making Japanese culture accessible to Westerners: here he gives us a short, helpful introduction, a wonderfully lucid translation of what seems to be a rather difficult and often ambiguous text, and enough notes to give us a good sense of all the deep cultural allusions buried in Kenkō‘s writing.

>51 thorold: I'm glad your serendipitous find turned out to be such a gem. I'm intrigued.

This is a left-over from the TBR pile I built up last time I was in the US — I seemed wrong to read it in Europe, so I left it here to mature for a bit. It still feels strange to think of Susan Sontag as a novelist, even though this is the second of her novels that I’ve read …

In America (2001) by Susan Sontag (USA, 1933-2004)

  

In 1876, the celebrated Polish actress Maryna Załężowska and a group of her Warsaw-intellectual friends set off to live on a Fourier-inspired commune in California. As so often happens with idealistic communities, it doesn’t quite work out as they had hoped, and Maryna finds herself going back on stage to create a new career for herself in America.

Sontag uses this historical-fiction framework to explore what it might have meant to be a famous woman, successful in a high-profile profession, in late-19th century Europe and America, as well as picking out some of the oddities of American life and thought from a European perspective, and vice-versa, and dissecting the ways that acting on stage intersect with real (family) life and relationships. But also about the way that migration creates opportunities — and pressures — for us to adopt new personas and names. We learn quite a lot about Victorian tastes in theatre, meet some interesting real-life figures from the period, and generally get an awful lot of information thrown at us.

Sontag also has a lot of fun playing around with a range of clever — and sometimes plain theatrical — narrative techniques, most notably in the opening chapter, where the far-from-omniscient narrator finds herself watching from the sidelines of a party taking place in an era and a place far outside her own experience, and trying to piece together who these characters might be and how they fit together. The closing chapter is another tour-de-force, a monologue, with stage directions, addressed to Maryna and delivered by her fellow-actor Edwin Booth (brother of…) as he slips in and out of the roles of himself and an assortment of Shakespearean protagonists.

A demanding read, but also quite a rewarding one, with its share of fun.

Another quick dose of Percival Everett:

God's Country (1994) by Percival Everett (USA, 1956- )

  

Curt Marder, the narrator of this ironic anti-Western, is a coward, hopelessly prejudiced, utterly lacking in moral sense, and not especially clever. When outlaws burn down his house, kidnap his wife and shoot his dog, the neighbours are all very upset about the dog, but it seems that no-one is going to help him to rescue poor Sadie. Eventually he manages to secure the assistance of Bubba, the only African-American in the district, a man who has spent so much of his life being chased that he has become an expert tracker himself.

Naturally, the partnership is not without its difficulties, but, this being an Everett novel, we can be pretty sure that the incompatible pair will not bond, Hollywood-style, to form an unlikely friendship. Bubba knows perfectly well that he can’t trust Marder, and Marder is too dim to see how much he owes to Bubba, so they go on hating each other to the last page.

A dark, unrelenting, and very funny story, complete with gunfights, painted ladies, the Silver Dollar Saloon, a stagecoach, Red Indians and the 7th Cavalry. But not quite in the mix you might expect from a Western, and strongly laced with Everett’s characteristic antipathy toward neat narrative closure…

>54 thorold: Great review. I feel such books - about the American West are too much outside my own culture for me to hold interest in them. I reaslise God’s Country is satirical but the very title sends shivers up my brain. Same with James. I haven’t read Huckleberry Finn so I just didn’t get the humor. On the other hand I was blown away by The Trees.

>55 kjuliff: I don’t know — I don’t think you’d have to change all that much in God’s country to bring it into the idiom of a Henry Lawson story. Everett is basically demolishing the myth that there was something intrinsically brave and noble about people who carved out a life on the edge of civilisation, and Lawson was already puncturing the Australian version of that myth over a hundred years ago.

>56 thorold: I haven’t read any Henry Lawson for many years so I’m probably remembering his short stories through much younger eyes. I remember his bush stories as poignant and sad. I vividly remember one called “Arvie Aspinall’s Alarm Clock” about an impoverished working class boy who has to wake at the crack of dawn to go to work. And “The Drover’s Wife” about a wife and child left alone in their shack in the Australian bush while the husband goes off driving.

My Australian bush in the early days of white settlement is one of unbearable sadness and the down-trodden lives of convicts and early settlers and the unimaginable damage done to the lives and culture of the first Australians.

My visions of the American West is quite different and is of painted wagons and painted women and battles with Indian tribes. It is colorful and full of sex and action, whereas Australian history to me is a sad eucalyptus gray, full of misery.

I see Lawson more as writing the Australian myth rather than demolishing it, but I suspect I’m remembering the sentimental Lawson that was rammed down the minds of Australian children in the ‘50s and ‘60’s.

I know my vision of American cultures in the 19th century is way off, but it’s stuck in my head and l can’t easily get rid of it.

I seem to have overlooked my 17th Thingaversary three days ago, but my Cleveland book pile ( https://www.librarything.com/catalog/thorold/cleveland ) has grown from five to 28 books in the four weeks I’ve been here, so I’m not feeling the need to go on an extra book-buying spree. If things go to plan, all of those books are either going to have to cross the Atlantic or be disposed of here, eventually.

Major sources of temptation here have included:
— In Cleveland — Mac’s Backs Books on Coventry, Corner of the Sky in Old Brooklyn, and the time-and-space-bending Loganberry Books on Larchmere Boulevard.
— In Oberlin — Mindfair Books (in the old Ben Franklin store)
— In Wooster — Books in Stock
…and all those harmless-looking suburban branches of Half-Price Books

Who was it who kept telling me NE Ohio was a cultural desert…?

>57 kjuliff: I also haven’t read Lawson for quite a while. I’m sure you’re right about the sentimental aspect in some of the stories, but I also remember a vein of slightly dark humour there. He’s gritty and realistic where Everett goes in more for irony and hyperbole, so it’s not a very strong parallel, perhaps. Especially since I looked back at my comments from the last time I read a Lawson collection and saw that I’d pointed out that he shares the common racist attitudes of white Australians of his time.

>58 thorold: Wow, Ben Franklin stores...there's a blast from the past...haven't seen one of those in decades, but apparently they still exist.

If you're still around next Saturday it's Independent Bookstore Day, for one last binge: https://www.bookweb.org/independent-bookstore-day

>60 kac522: I think it’s just the building that survives, not Ben Franklin as such. There’s a gift store as well as the bookshop. Oberlin has a fabulous art museum, too.

We’ll try to honour Independent Bookstore Day somehow…

>59 thorold: Yes it doesn’t surprise me that racist attitudes exist in Henry Lawson’s writings. He was born in 1987 and that does not excuse him. Australia has always been a racist country and even last year vote against to the Australian Indigenous Voice referendum.

I don’t see parallels between Lawson but I was impressed with your knowledge of him. Perhaps he was no more racist than American writers of the time, but I feel he was likely less racist than Australians of the time.

>61 thorold: Excellent use of an old "five & dime."

There was a Ben Franklin in my town on the way home from elementary school and it was a mandatory stop for candy, gum, baseball card packs, etc. I don't think the owners appreciated being over-run with schoolkids every afternoon, though.

I imagine Oberlin is an interesting town. I remember it being known for Oberlin College's music school. Still true?

>63 kac522: I believe so — we heard an Oberlin student playing the organ in a church in Cleveland last week.

It was very cheap, and the title sounded fun…

Madame Bovary's Ovaries (2008) by David P. Barash (USA, 1946- ) & Nanelle R. Barash (USA, - )

  

Two biologists (father and daughter) set out to explain literature from a Darwinian point of view — but it ends up being the other way round, in that they give us the evolutionary background to a particular group of animal social behaviours and then use the plots of great works of literature to illustrate at a very superficial level what they mean. All quite entertaining, but not very new if you’ve read other popular science books about evolution (Dawkins & co.). Their ideas about literature don’t seem to involve anything beyond the plot, and it doesn’t really deepen our understanding of Jane Austen very much to know that female animals have good evolutionary reasons for being choosy when it comes to picking partners (for example).

>54 thorold: This sounds like an Everett I would enjoy, and I won't have to read Huck Finn first. :)

>65 thorold: Sounds quirky, but not overly enlightening.

An Anne Tyler I hadn’t got to before:

Clock Dance (2018-07-10) by Anne Tyler (USA, 1941- )

  

Anne Tyler has been doing the same kind of thing for decades now, but she is supremely good at it, able to conjure up complex sets of family relationships with a few telling lines of dialogue or a minor bit of background detail. This time she tries to fool us into thinking she’s doing something different from usual, by spending the first hundred pages with people who live in weird foreign places like Pennnsylvania and California. But don’t worry, we get back to familiar ground soon enough, and all the rest of the book plays in a pleasantly quaint neighbourhood of Baltimore, just as we’ve been expecting! The central character, Willa, is summoned there (from her retirement in Arizona) as a result of a minor misunderstanding, but of course it soon becomes clear that this is where her true elective family is waiting for her. Nothing very radical or challenging, just beautiful writing and a lot of diverse and unexpected people being very nice to each other.

>67 thorold: I stopped reading Tyler when I could no longer distinguish one of her books from another. I’m not trying to be mean, it’s true. The only one of her novels that stands apart in my mind is her excellent Accidental Tourist.

>68 kjuliff: I think it’s fine if you don’t read more than one a year.

Back on the World Tour. I couldn’t find a novel from Burma easily, but this popped up in a local bookshop:

The Hidden History of Burma: Race, Capitalism, and the Crisis of Democracy in the 21st Century (2019) by Thant Myint-U (Burma, USA, 1966- )

  

How did Aung San Suu Kyi go from being the next Nelson Mandela, with pop stars and world leaders queuing up to have their photos taken with her, to become a figure of universal disdain, presiding over a humanitarian crisis she seemed to refuse to believe was happening? Well, obviously, that has a lot to do with our own insatiable appetite for heroes and villains and our reluctance to read long foreign policy analyses, but it also has something to do with the realities of governing postcolonial countries, where the legacy of generations of inequality, poverty, lack of education and the complexities of geography, religion and ethnicity cannot simply be magicked away by the first free election.

Thant Myint-U, as U Thant’s grandson, a former UN official in his own right and a senior adviser to the transitional government of ex-General Thein Sein, has his own stake in Burmese politics and is not exactly a neutral outsider, but he does give us a very clear summary of the country’s history and its problems, as well as a lively memoir of the period in the early years of this century when he was personally involved.

When the British withdrew in 1948, Burma was given borders which roughly corresponded to the area that had been under the control of the Myanma kingdom that came to power in the late 18th century. The cities and the Irrawaddy valley and delta in the centre of the country formed a reasonably homogeneous area, Burmese-speaking, mostly Buddhist apart from Indian workers brought in by the British, and with a legacy of British administration. But the border areas, west, east and north, were ethnically diverse and had not been under colonial administration. After 1948, all these areas came under the control of a patchwork of local militias, most of which have been in a state of civil war or at best uneasy ceasefire with the Burmese government ever since. In the west there were tensions between Buddhists and Muslims, some of whom were the descendants of people who had been living there for centuries, others more recent immigrants from Bengal. In the east the militias had important economic links with China, controlling activities such as narcotics, gambling, logging and mining. Burma came to be governed by an authoritarian military dictatorship that more or less kept the lid on the civil war, taking rake-offs from these illegal activities, and violently suppressing political dissent.

The country’s political and economic isolation, and the extreme poverty of most of the population, were only increased by the sanctions the international community used to try to pressure the leadership into democratic reforms. The dictator Than Shwe attempted to find a way out of the impasse by setting up a succession plan for his own retirement that would lead to a new constitution with the appearance of democracy but all the real power still in the hands of the army, but events moved much faster than he had anticipated, partly due to the great popularity of the leader of the main democratic opposition party, Aung San Suu Kyi, who found herself de facto head of government at a moment when the country was still far from being governable in any meaningful way, with an army that was not under her control, and rebel forces on all sides ready to take advantage of the apparent weakness of the state. Tragically, the crisis that exploded first was in the west, with attacks by Muslim separatists provoking brutal army repression and resulting in the displacement of hundreds of thousands of refugees to Bangladesh.

Very interesting, both in filling in a lot I didn’t know about Burma, and as a first-hand case study of the realities of postcolonial states.

One book about Burma that I enjoyed and would recommend is From the Land of Green Ghosts: A Burmese Odyssey by Pascal Khoo Thwe. He grew up in a rural area where his grandfather was a tribal chief, and also Catholic. The memoir talks about the intertwining of animism with colonial sponsored religion, the system of education under Ne Win, and Thwe's flight to the jungle in the 80s.

>70 thorold: >71 labfs39: Thank you for the recommendations - both books look very interesting!

>71 labfs39: AnnieMod mentioned this one in the world tour thread as well — I’ll look out for it.

Another quickie from the pile:

It's Not Over (2015,2016) by Michelangelo Signorile (USA, 1960- )

  

Signorile’s summary of the campaign for LGBT+ rights in the USA as it stood in mid 2015, in the immediate aftermath of the Supreme Court‘s Obergefell decision affirming marriage equality. He points out the many challenges still ahead, and the dangers from right-wing groups all too ready to find new ways of oppressing those who don’t match their vision of the world. And of course he couldn‘t even know at the time of writing that the US would be facing four years of Trump horror…

Apart from the interesting historical snapshot, Signorile makes some good points about strategy, in particular the importance of not allowing ourselves to be pressured into “covering”, i.e. conforming outwardly to social pressure in order to stay below the radar. As far as he is concerned — and he’s probably right — the only way to fight injustice is to stand up for yourself and make a noise whenever it happens. We can’t always rely on other people doing that for us, unfortunately.

Landlocked countries: Magda Szabó was one of the most successful Hungarian novelists of the communist era, but not very well known in English until the translation of The door became a big hit about fifteen years ago. Translator Len Rix has been working his way through her back-catalogue since then; I think this is the fourth of her novels I’ve read.

The Fawn (1959; English 2023) by Magda Szabó (Hungary, 1917-2007), translated by Len Rix

  

Narrator Eszter grows up before and during WWII in an impoverished former bourgeois family in a provincial town, where she has to help her parents make ends meet by giving extra lessons to her classmates for cash. Her resentment in life is focused on the lovely, rich Angéla, daughter of a judge, who infuriatingly sees Eszter as a good friend. Angéla never discovers that it was Eszter who was responsible for the death of her pet fawn. In later life they come across each other again, when Eszter has become a famous actor in the state theatre, and Angéla is a prominent party member. The whole novel is a monologue by Eszter, addressed to a lover whose identity we only discover towards the end of the story.

Clever, unsentimental and gloriously angry prose, a really memorable account of childhood poverty with a strong, resourceful female central character.

Another one that caught my eye in a clearance pile:

The Death of Expertise (2017) by Thomas M. Nichols (USA, 1960- )

  

Democratic societies work by having responsible, informed citizens choosing political representatives whom we trust to take complicated decisions on our behalf. Those representatives take their decisions based on the best advice they can assemble from competent professional advisers — analysts, administrators, technicians — who are experts in the topic in question. At least that’s the theory…

According to Nichols (who is a self-confessed foreign-policy expert as well as being a celebrated Jeopardy contestant), this model is breaking down in the USA because of a growing distrust of specialist professional knowledge. Lay-people have an exaggerated sense of our own expertise (we can Google it, after all, so we know as much as they do, don’t we?) and a tendency to resent anyone who tells us that they know better. We’re all too ready to suspect conspiracies and ulterior motives, we like to think that our opinion is (at least) as valuable as the next person’s, and we rarely bother to read anything written by people with a different point of view from our own. Nichols talks a lot about stupid, wilfully ignorant people, but he also makes the point — which I found rather more interesting — that this kind of thinking is also prevalent among people who are educated, experienced professionals in one field but dangerously willing to assume knowledge in other fields where they have no proper training and experience.

Nichols reminds us that expertise is gained through an education that challenges us to step outside our comfort zone and defend our ideas in serious logical argument, and through a long process of gaining practical experience and making mistakes. Things which he argues are no longer easily available to most Americans, because of the way the education system has turned into a commercial service-industry where the customer is always right.

There’s probably nothing new about any of these effects — I can remember a fellow-delegate at an important scientific conference forty years ago lecturing me over lunch about what he saw as the strong evidence for biblical-style creation. But they seem to have been accelerated by the effect of the internet, which allows stupid ideas and misinformation to spread around the world faster than ever before, and by developments in the way that news media work, serving us with the news they know their customers want to read, rather than the news they think it’s important for informed citizens to be aware of.

Obviously a lot of what Nichols says can be dismissed as the gloom-and-doom of an older, conservative academic, who sees the world changing around him, or as the reaction of a mainstream Republican to the rise of Trumpery. I’ve been reading British versions of the same kind of thinking since the Brexit referendum (apart from the fact that British commentators have the additional advantage of being able to blame America, which always goes down well…). I found a lot of what Nichols said quite patronising — for example, he is dismissive of the independence of mind of the current generation of students in the US, an assumption that is belied by the current protests against the Israeli actions in Gaza; and he implies that only stupid people could possibly vote for Trump, which clearly can’t be true: in real life a large proportion of the people who voted for him must have been decent, intelligent people who somehow allowed themselves to be convinced that the alternative was worse. But he does make some good points, although he unfortunately doesn’t come up with a solution to the problem…

Thanks for reminding me of this remarkable writer Magda Szabó . I read The Door years ago and had forgotten about her. I’ll have to see what other of her works are available now.

>75 thorold: I have both The Door and Katalin Street on my read next shelf. Do you have a favorite Szabó?

>76 thorold: Nice review of The Death of Expertise. Not a book I would pick up on my own, but the ideas he espouses are important to ponder. Changing the US education system would be a positive start, at least in this country.

>77 kjuliff: >78 labfs39: I think The door is still my favourite, but this one runs a close second. Obviously Szabó matured and developed as a writer in the thirty years between the two books, they are quite different in their tone. Katalin Street was OK, but I don’t remember much about it, and I was rather disappointed by Abigail, which is really what we would now call a YA novel. I’ve still to read Iza’s Ballad.

I found this in the OH’s pile of “miscellaneous books bought last time he went to Greece”, and immediately recognised the name of the author, but I couldn’t quite place it. I had definitely come across him somewhere else, but it didn’t seem to be anything to do with Classics…

Only when I looked him up did I realise that he’s the author of that invaluable reference book Who’s who in Wodehouse, something I turn to very frequently when I’m trying to remember which novel features Elsie the housemaid, or where Monty Bodkin first appears. Who knew that he was a classics professor in his day-job (and where did he get time to read and index the whole Wodehouse canon…)?

Sexual Culture in Ancient Greece (2000) by Daniel H. Garrison (USA, 1937- )

  

A straightforward academic summary of what we know about sexuality in Ancient Greece from literature, art and archaeology. As anybody who has ever looked at Greek vases in a museum can easily guess, this is a lot more than we know about sexuality in many other ancient cultures, but when you drill down into it there are still a lot of blind spots. Statues and painted pottery are luxury products made for a limited elite; literary references are often satirical, or reflect the ideals of exclusive or counter-cultural sects, so we don’t really know all that much about the sexual habits of (say) working-class Athenians, or married women.

Garrison helps us to get a grasp of what we do know and put it in context, with introductory chapters about Jewish and other middle-eastern cultures and a closing chapter about Hellenistic Christianity, and he takes us through the evolution of Greek depictions of sexuality from Archaic to Hellenistic times. Unlike most other books I’ve read on this subject, he isn’t particularly interested in the way later cultures have responded to (their notions of) what the Greeks got up to in their naughtier moments (or didn’t!), and there’s no overt agenda of criticising the way we see sexuality in our own times. Which probably makes it a more useful book if you’re trying to make sense of Greek literature yourself, but leaves it a little dry for the reader if your interest is more sociological than classical. There are plenty of naughty pictures to look at, though…

Department of books I should have read a decade or six ago. I don’t know why I didn’t — maybe it hadn’t quite established itself on our side of the Atlantic when I was young enough to be interested.

Charlotte's Web (1952) by E. B. White (US, 1899-1985), illustrated by Garth Williams

  

Pleasant, marginally subversive story about a little girl and a spider who save a pig. Some nice, mild jokes, and a charming storyline. However, seventy years on the cute farm setting and the stereotypical roles of the human characters are maybe getting a bit long in the tooth. Very much the rose-tinted childhood that Americans in the 1950s were already getting nostalgic about, a world where all the little boys were noisy and destructive and all the little girls thoughtful and sensitive.

A nice habit that we got into during my recent stay in the US was always to take a look inside if we came past a library during opening hours. Not only are libraries useful places where you can always find a public toilet in a strange town, they often have all sorts of interesting surprises, not all of them book-related. Rocky River Library on the suburban fringes of Cleveland turns out to conceal a fabulous museum of Cowan Pottery work, the private collection of a former librarian; in Ohio City’s neo-classical Carnegie Library the librarian insisted on giving us a behind-the-scenes tour and showing us their giant Rookwood Pottery tile panel (of Durham Cathedral, for some reason) and their fabulously messy toddler-zone; in industrial Lorain, we found a display about local girl Toni Morrison and a reading room dedicated to her work. Even the impossibly grand Carnegie Library of Carnegie libraries, in central Pittsburgh, managed to amuse us with a terrestrial globe temporarily modified to make a “Highly inaccurate eclipse simulator”. Another suburban library, in the blandest of bland shopping-mall architecture, turned out to have all kinds of fun stuff in a Maker Space, plus a very good local history section. All these places (and numerous others) were open and welcoming and seemed to be well-used — quite a contrast to the tiny branch library in the large village where my parents live in England, which struggles to stay open three mornings and four afternoons a week.

So this little book seemed kind of relevant:

The Library Book (2012) by The Reading Agency (UK)

  

A pleasant little anthology of essays and stories celebrating the magic of public libraries, by everyone who was anybody in British literature in 2012, from Alan Bennett to Zadie Smith, published in aid of the literacy charity, The Reading Agency. Most of the contributors were doing more or less what we would expect from them, in some cases with pieces that have been anthologised quite widely elsewhere, but it’s all in a good cause and a reminder of how valuable libraries are and how essential it is to keep them going even in times of austerity. Although I can’t imagine that anyone who didn’t already understand that would end up reading this book…

A re-read on the plane home:

Arms and the Women (1999) by Reginald Hill (UK, 1936-2012)

  

One of my favourites from the Dalziel and Pascoe series, written at a stage when Hill didn’t feel the need to let himself be confined by realism and the conventions of crime fiction any more, and just set out to have fun with his readers. Our two heroes are mostly cast as spectators (and as their classical alter-egos in a book-within-a-book) whilst Ellie Pascoe finds herself in the middle of a complicated thriller plot involving a big arms-for-drugs deal between Irish and Colombian terrorists. About a quarter of the story is taken up by the huge Grand Guignol finale, set in a remote country house during a dark and stormy night. As well as Ellie’s central role, there’s a welcome return by her upper-middle-class pal Daphne Aldermann (from Deadheads). Very entertaining!

>82 thorold: What an interesting group of libraries you explored. I do this somewhat haphazardly, but you make me think I should make it a regular part of my travel plans.

>83 thorold: I recently discovered that my library gives us free access to the TV adaptation of Dalziel and Pascoe. I watched a few episodes and didn't care for them, but I think perhaps I might like reading the books! You sure do make them sound fun.

>85 rv1988: The TV series (1996-2007) are a bit different from the books, which were written over the space of forty years, and change quite a bit from the beginning to the end of the series. By the end they get very literary and postmodern (one is a pastiche of Jane Austen’s Sanditon, another is structured like a Bach fugue…), while the early ones are fairly straight-down-the-line police procedurals.

Hill was a very good writer, but so were some of the people who wrote scripts for the first few sets of TV episodes (Alan Plater, Malcolm Bradbury, …). You won’t necessarily like the books better: it probably depends on why you didn’t like the TV version. Only about half the TV shows were based on Hill’s books: a lot of the later ones were just “characters created by”.

>83 thorold: Reginald Hill has been one of my favorite authors since my earliest days reading British mysteries. I will have to find this one as I missed it.

I especially noted in your comments you made about his musical references. I was always intrigued by his continuing inclusion of his musical interest in every book. At times I tried to understand how they reflected on the emotional condition of the author. I certainly never realized about being structured like a Bach fugue.

>82 thorold: >84 labfs39: Visiting local libraries is a favourite pastime of mine whenever I wind up in the States. Last summer's trip brought the delightfully named Flower Library, built 120 years ago as Flower Memorial Library by a daughter in honour of her father, a former governor of NY. It's in Watertown.
My favourite so far though has to be the St Johnsbury Athenaeum in St Johnsbury Vermont, "a monument of the nineteenth century belief in learning: https://www.stjathenaeum.org/

I'd definitely agree with the welcoming attitude, even though sometimes the staff may seem somewhat perplexed at the idea people from away are interested in their library.

>88 SassyLassy: That looks fun!
I completely forgot to mention that we also made a little (waterfall-related) foray into Ontario during the trip. There was one small town we absolutely had to visit:



It turned out to be quite charming, despite having one of the most truly terrible promotional videos I’ve ever seen ( https://youtu.be/0ZFy58fOD7s?si=0XxNyqshVaLy-NJU ) and we even got to see a ship using the Welland Canal locks.

>89 thorold: Oh, that's great. Did the museum have a gift shop? I hope you bought a snow globe or at least a keychain.

>90 rocketjk: I should have, but the truth of the matter is that we stopped there ridiculously early on a Monday morning on the way to somewhere else, so nothing much was open.

Juliff TX


Once a thriving raucous town full of bars and brothels, now of historical interest only. Founded by great great grandfather - John Juliff.

>89 thorold: Well that is a terrible video, especially for a place with such an illustrious name!
I used to go there for a week every year at this time for a get together, and stayed at the community college. It was great eating, as the college has a culinary school, a wine programme, and a hort tech programme. However, for anything real, you had to go to St David's or Niagara on the Lake.

>92 kjuliff: Out of indelicate interest: was your great great grandfather responsible for the raucousness? :-D

>94 Dilara86: Family folk law say yes. And given the behavior of the Australian branch of the family, seems it’s a family trait. 🙃😊🙃

>94 Dilara86: Well, he may have been a raucous-raiser, but he had his responsible side. According to this website, he was also the postmaster:

http://lifeonthebrazosriver.com/JuliffTexas.htm

>92 kjuliff:, >94 Dilara86: - >96 rocketjk: Fun! And nice to have such a clear connection.

All I can claim as a connection is that there was a tenuous tradition of Thorold as a given (middle-) name in my grandmother’s family that somehow landed on me as well. We assume the tradition must have started with a godparent (former employer?) who was a member of the same landowning family as the Lincolnshire MP in whose honour the Ontario town was named. But we’ve never managed to pin that down.

>93 SassyLassy: Since seeing that, the OH and I seem to have adopted the expression “Five municipal parking lots” as shorthand for anything ridiculously oversold.

>96 rocketjk: Brothel-owner, dance-hall manager, publican, postmaster - John J Juliff (JJJ), affectionally known as Triple-J - was a man of many talents,

>98 kjuliff: Nowadays, we Americans tend to think of Postmaster as sort of an out-of-the-way position. But in the early days of the American expansion west (and I'd guess similarly in Australia), when everything happened through the mail, I believe that postmaster was a position of some prestige in frontier communities, particularly so before the advent of the telegraph.

>99 rocketjk: Yes it was the same in Australia. Nowadays in Australia though, in very small towns, the post is held at the general store.

>100 kjuliff: …and of course it’s not unknown for postmasters to write novels in their spare time, cf. Anthony Trollope.

One of the nice things that sometimes comes out of my habit of picking up random books about topics I know very little about is that they tell me about the books I should have been reading instead. Thus, when I picked up a couple of books about urbanism last year, I kept seeing the name Jane Jacobs in all the footnotes… Now I’ve got around to reading her book too:

The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) by Jane Jacobs (USA, 1916-2006)

  

A classic “common-sense” demolition of the orthodoxies of mid-twentieth-century urban planning. Jacobs argues that planners trying to improve city neighbourhoods should abandon their giant master-plans and the quest for theoretical perfection, which have so often resulted in unliveable spaces full of terrible social problems, and instead focus on observing the way residents are actually using the places they live in now, and make small, incremental changes targeted at helping people to improve their current surroundings. For her, the essential qualities a neighbourhood needs to survive and function well are high population density, diversity of uses, and the flexibility to respond to changing demands. Those things usually get broken if you bulldoze a neighbourhood and try to rebuild the whole place in one go.

Jacobs’s ideal neighbourhood, where kids play in the street under the watchful eyes of neighbours and local tradespeople and there is a constant coming and going on foot between homes, shops, workplaces, schools, bars and restaurants, is probably rather unrealistic sixty years on, and of course it was only ever meant to apply to inner-city areas — as far as she is concerned, the suburbs are a lost cause anyway. But the arguments she makes against single-use zoning and against inflexible large-scale projects embodying someone’s paternalistic vision of how (other) people should live remain very valid. And there’s a lot of detailed and mostly sensible-sounding advice in the book about things like street layout, rent subsidies, lending policies, how to lay out parks, and much more.

>101 thorold: Apparently this kind of neighborhood concept, or something like, is in fashion right now as the 15 minute city, and the city of Paris has been trying to implement it. Like you though, I have some doubts about its feasibility, especially since it completely ignores the fact that most people in the Paris area live and work outside the city proper, but many have to travel across it to go to work, with commute times often upwards of an hour each way. And of course, this being 2024, apparently there are some conspiracy theories about this policy, because why resort to reasonable discussion when you can breed hate and fear instead.

>102 FlorenceArt: Yes, there was a piece about Moreno and The 15 minute city in the Guardian a few weeks ago — it seems to be a similar sort of idea: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2024/apr/06/why-has-15-minute-city-taken-off-...

Interestingly, Jacobs made the same point about how parts of cities are always interconnected and you can’t treat any city as an assembly of independent neighbourhoods. Even in 1961, different members of a household were likely to have destinations in different parts of the city. For her it still makes sense to have workplaces and shops mixed in with residential because it creates activity at different points in the day, you don’t have dead spells that make it difficult for local businesses to keep going.

This was another slightly accidental purchase — when I see “Gertrude and …” on a book-spine, my mind completes the phrase with “Alice”, and I’m interested enough to take it off the shelf.

Gertrude and Claudius (2000) by John Updike (USA, 1932-2009)

  

Who knew we needed a Hamlet-from-Gertrude’s-POV? Middle-aged woman trapped in dull dynastic marriage to beefy warrior finds happiness with her sexy and sophisticated brother-in-law, only to have her life messed up by her censorious perpetual-student son. Quite a fun idea, but I’m not sure if it really had enough substance to justify a whole novel.

Perhaps it would have been more convincing as a happy second marriage if Updike had somehow managed to find a way to get Hamlet sr. out of the way without involving actual fratricide. But no-fault divorce wasn’t really a thing (or even a thing) in medieval Denmark. It’s also slightly unclear to me how Gertrude’s father could be a first-generation Christian convert while her son was dabbling his toes in the renaissance. But it’s all just a bit of fun from a writer who was established enough to be able to publish whatever caprices happened to take his fancy, we probably shouldn’t look too closely…

>104 thorold: This was somewhat of a disappointment for me too, especially after it had been recommended by someone whose judgement I find usually spot on.

I notice it turns up in second hand book stores fairly frequently, which is never a recommendation!

Maybe Updike should have tackled Gertrude and Alice.

Oh I read that ages ago and loved it, but to be honest do not remember much about it now. Thing Id just saw the movie "rosencranz and gilderstern are dead" and was taken by the Hamlet twist. maybe I shoul reread it again and find out why.

>105 SassyLassy: Not sure — as I remember it, Updike didn’t really go in for plots without adultery in them. I don’t like to think what he would have done with Gertrude and Alice.

>106 cindydavid4: I think Tom Stoppard had a far more interesting take on Hamlet than Updike. But I haven’t seen R&G since we did it at school, so I might be overselling it…