Reader of the Stack

Paradise Lost by John Milton

Ibis — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 04:48:06 +0000

From Penguin:
“In Paradise Lost Milton produced poem of epic scale, conjuring up a vast, awe-inspiring cosmos and ranging across huge tracts of space and time. And yet, in putting a charismatic Satan and naked Adam and Eve at the centre of this story, he also created an intensely human tragedy on the Fall of Man. Written when Milton was in his fifties – blind, bitterly disappointed by the Restoration and briefly in danger of execution – Paradise Lost’s apparent ambivalence towards authority has led to intense debate about whether it manages to ‘justify the ways of God to men’, or exposes the cruelty of Christianity.”

My thoughts:
I don’t think there’s any debate. Exquisite poetry defending the indefensible. This poem exposes not only the cruelty of Christianity, but its absurdity, its sanctification of misogyny, its glorification of servility, and its exaltation of ignorance. God the Father is malicious and cares only for his own ego. The Son is a bit of a cardboard cut out (which is okay I guess because he’s just a puppet of the Father). Adam is, well, as misogynist as his maker set him out to be. And Eve is a submissive, simpering slave (the one time she shows some independent thought, she brings God’s curses down on them all). Life before the “Fall” is pointless and stupid. Knowledge—its own intrinsic value and the value of seeking it are both denigrated by God, by the angels, and by Adam (of course the one who is desired to be most ignorant is Eve who is sent away or put to sleep whenever anything of import is discussed or related). The only character with any redeeming value whatsoever is Satan, a real tragic hero. We know from the start that his cause is futile and he’s bound to pay a dreadful price for his rebellion, but we can’t help but cheer him on as he fights tooth and claw for liberty and justice and against ignorance and subjugation. Not that I think Milton really intended that to be the case, but Satan is brilliant. Oh, and did I mention that the poetry is exquisite?

The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Ibis — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 23:41:54 +0000

From the publisher:
“Visiting an idyllic German village, Werther, a sensitive young man, falls in love with sweet-natured Lotte. Though he realizes that Lotte is to marry Albert, he is unable to subdue his passion and his infatuation torments him to the point of despair. The first great ‘confessional’ novel, it draws both on Goethe’s own unrequited love for Charlotte Buff and on the death of a close friend. The book was an immediate success and a cult rapidly grew up around it, resulting in numerous copycat deaths as well as violent criticism and suppression for its apparent support of suicide. Goethe’s exploration of the mind of an artist at odds with society and ill-equipped to cope with life remains as poignant as when it was first written.”

My thoughts:
This little novella looms large over the nineteenth century, so I was keen to experience it for myself. I knew in advance that young Werther ends his own life over a star-crossed love and that his action inspired real life copycat suicides. I also knew he was held up as a kind of Romantic (note the capped ‘R’) ideal, with Sensitivity and Passion and a love of Nature. I thought it was kind of interesting in a historical sort of way, but it was difficult for me to quite take it seriously—to be so in love as to decide that life is no longer worth living? It’s just so over the top. Is that because we just don’t feel that strongly anymore? Perhaps this kind of situation is like a kind of religious fervour. As if falling in love like this was expected so that’s what he did? But then Goethe himself shook it off and went on with his life, so it’s hard to say. Throughout, I just wanted Charlotte, Werther, and Albert to throw off restraint and go for a nice, accommodating, polyamourous relationship. Am I a twenty-first century girl or what?

The Spy Who Came In From the Cold by John LeCarré

Ibis — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 00:43:55 +0000

From the back cover:
“In this classic, John le Carré’s third novel and the first to earn him international acclaim, he created a world unlike any previously experienced in suspense fiction. With unsurpassed knowledge culled from his years in British Intelligence, le Carré brings to light the shadowy dealings of international espionage in the tale of a British agent who longs to end his career but undertakes one final, bone-chilling assignment.

When the last agent under his command is killed and Alec Leamas is called back to London, he hopes to come in from the cold for good. His spymaster, Control, however, has other plans. Determined to bring down the head of East German Intelligence and topple his organization, Control once more sends Leamas into the fray—this time to play the part of the dishonoured spy and lure the enemy to his ultimate defeat.”

My thoughts:
On the face of it, one might suppose this novel is merely an outdated relic of a bygone era, a piece of genre fiction whose value at the time of publication might have been judged solely by how entertaining it was. However, this novel deserves its reputation as a classic of the twentieth century, offering much more insight than a typical spy story. It does have great spy novel elements too: plots and stratagems that take the reader by surprise, dark “action” scenes behind enemy lines, and a beautiful young love interest for the protagonist. But its strength as a novel lies in its exposition of the ubiquity of immorality in the fight no matter what the ultimate principles might be. In this particular instance, the fight is the Cold War, but it could just as easily be “the War on Terror” or what have you. They say that we on this side are fighting for good (i.e. human rights, anti-terrorism, freedom, democracy), and yet those very principles are being sacrificed with secret prisons, torture, and putting child soldiers on trial. Things haven’t changed much since this book was written, sadly.

Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell

Ibis — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 22:50:10 +0000

From the publisher:
“Mary Barton, the daughter of disillusioned trade unionist, rejects her working-class lover Jem Wilson in the hope of marrying Henry Carson, the mill owner’s son, and making a better life for herself and her father. But when Henry is shot down in the street and Jem becomes the main suspect, Mary finds herself painfully torn between the two men. Through Mary’s dilemma, and the moving portrayal of her father, the embittered and courageous activist John Barton, Mary Barton (1848) powerfully dramatizes the class divides of the ‘hungry forties’ as personal tragedy. In its social and political setting, it looks towards Elizabeth Gaskell’s great novels of the industrial revolution, in particular North and South.”

My thoughts:
This novel was a bit of a mixed bag for me. I started reading it at a time when I was looking for something fairly light-hearted. The murder element didn’t deter me because from the description it didn’t appear that we would get too attached to Mr. Carson before his untimely demise. I was, however, quite surprised to find nearly the first third of the book to be depressing and distressing as characters we’ve come to care about dropped off like flies, and all for the simple want of food, shelter, and adequate medical care (which alas, is still with us today). After the dismal beginning, however, the story followed along the lines I had initially been expecting and I ended up enjoying it quite a bit.

As a social commentary, I imagine it would have come across like gangbusters at the time, with an empathetic understanding of working class life and how intimate with utter poverty it really is. You wouldn’t find this in Jane Austen or, I think (I haven’t read ‘em all) George Eliot. And though Dickens often covers the same territory, his mechanism is satire rather than strict realism.

And then just for pleasure, we get a bit of a sensation novel in the last half, though it’s not as sensational as, say, a Wilkie Collins or R. D. Blackmore—Gaskell’s penchant for realism comes into play there too. A good novel for fans of nineteenth century literature (especially if you’re looking for something shorter than the typical Collins or Dickens).

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

Ibis — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 20:11:25 +0000

From the back cover:
“Catch-22 is like no other novel. It has its own rationale, its own extraordinary character. It moves back and forth from hilarity to horror. It is outrageously funny and strangely affecting. It is totally original.

Set in the closing months of World War II in an American bomber squadron off Italy, Catch-22 is the story of a bombardier named Yossarian, who is frantic and furious because thousands of people he hasn’t even met keep trying to kill him. Catch-22 is a microcosm of the twentieth-century world as it might look to someone dangerously sane. It is a novel that lives and moves and grows with astonishing power and vitality—a masterpiece of our time.”

My thoughts:
This novel is undeniably a masterpiece. It is not only a commentary on the absurdity of war (and capitalism thrown in for good measure), not only an encapsulation of the entire 20th century Zeitgeist with all of its angst, humour, brutality, and tragedy, but a metaphor for human life itself. Absolutely brilliant with great characters, outrageously funny episodes, and a jumble of a timeline that works both to confuse and elucidate the action (how’s that for a paradox?). I loved every minute of this book, even when I cried. I listened to the audiobook version (read by Trevor White), which I would highly recommend, and I thought the novel was so fantastic that directly upon finishing it, I put it on my wishlist for a hard copy for my permanent collection. This deserves to be on the top ten list of 20th century novels for sure. But I’m not going to touch the sequel with a ten-foot pole. Some things are best left alone, and I get the feeling this is one of them.

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

Ibis — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 03:07:40 +0000

From the publisher:
“The Woman in White famously opens with Walter Hartright’s eerie encounter on a moonlit London road. Engaged as a drawing master to the beautiful Laura Fairlie, Walter is drawn into the sinister intrigues of Sir Percival Glyde and his ‘charming’ friend Count Fosco, who has a taste for white mice, vanilla bonbons and poison. Pursuing questions of identity and insanity along the paths and corridors of English country houses and the madhouse, The Woman in White is the first and most influential of the Victorian genre that combined Gothic horror with psychological realism.”

My thoughts:
I quite enjoyed this “sensation novel”. It was extremely suspenseful and though I knew in advance what some of the plot twists were going to be, I was completely enthralled throughout. Not only did Wilkie Collins provide a wonderful escape to the nineteenth century complete with inheritances and stratagems, mad women and secret societies, mysterious foreigners (why are they always Italian?) and cruel men in power, but The Woman in White can be read with an eye to the rights of women and their position as second class citizens in every situation. On top of it all, Collins has given us the gift of Marian Halcombe, one of the strongest, most intelligent, most worthy of Victorian heroines.

Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin

Ibis — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 02:37:46 +0000

From the back cover:
“Why do we look the way we do?
Neil Shubin, the paleontologist and professor of anatomy who co-discovered Tiktaalik, the ‘fish with hands,’ tells the story of our bodies as you’ve never heard it before. By examining fossils and DNA, he shows us that our hands actually resemble fish fins, our heads are organized like long-extinct jawless fish, and major parts of our genome look, and function, like those of worms and bacteria. Your Inner Fish makes us look at ourselves and our world in an illuminating new light. This is science writing at its finest—enlightening, accessible, and told with irresistible enthusiasm.”

My thoughts:
I really enjoyed this book when I read it last year as a library copy. So much so that I decided to send it toStephen Harper for the What Is Stephen Harper Reading: BookCrossing Edition Release Challenge.

Rather than try to recover my initial thoughts, I went back to some posts I made on the BookCrossing Book Talk forum and will quote them here.

I [...] am now reading Your Inner Fish which seems okay so far, but the author seems like he’s aiming at someone far younger or with far less general knowledge than me. It’s like he’s talking to a 15 year old. It’s also annoying, especially in a book about science, to have measurements in US imperial instead of metric measures.

Finished Your Inner Fish, which was pretty good on the information side, though I was less than impressed by the style (just a bit too condescending, like he was talking to a child). Anyway, the book was well worth reading. I was aching for some science and got it. Very fascinating discussion of various anatomical features humans have (e.g. limbs, eyes, ears, bodies) and from what ancestors we got them (fish, microbes, worms). Interesting stuff like how the bones in mammalian ears evolved from jawbones of fish, and how our genes show evidence of messy evolution over time rather than any kind of rational design.

There are similarities even with fish and chicken embryos. It’s all very fascinating.

From the book:
Watching the process of development brought about a huge intellectual transformation in me. From such simple embryonic beginnings–small blobs of cells–came wonderfully complex birds, frogs, and trout comprising trillions of cells arranged in just the right way. But there was more. The fish, amphibian, and chicken embryos were like nothing I had ever seen before in biology. They all looked generally alike. All of them had a head with gill arches. All of them had a little brain that began its development from three swellings. All of them had little limb buds. In fact, the limbs were to become my thesis, the focus of my next three years’ work. Here, in comparing how the skeleton develops in birds, salamanders, frogs, and turtles, I was finding that limbs as different as bird wings and frog legs looked very similar during their development. In seeing these embryos, I was seeing a common architecture. The species ended up looking different, but they started from a generally similar place. Looking at embryos, it almost seems that the differences among mammals, birds, amphibians, and fish simply pale in comparison with their fundamental similarities.

Flies have genes that are associated with development of sections of their bodies and those same genes in us are associated with the same regions of our bodies. Shark heads and human heads have the same gill arches and nerve structures. Very cool.

It’s also amazing to think of how life went from being a bunch of single celled organisms into all the myriads of species we see today, all from miniscule changes over time.

He also has some very interesting facts about weaknesses we have due to our evolutionary history. For example, hiccups are a holdover from our amphibian days when as tadpoles we needed to close our airway.

QueenBoadicea wrote:
> Thanks for the critique. The condescending
> tone you mention is off-putting but
> perhaps the author was simply trying to
> make the book accessible to the average
> reader and didn’t want to discourage them
> by making it too esoteric.

Yeah, it kind of sounds like he’s used to talking to students who may not be the brightest on the block. But then, I’m sure many people would like the style because he sounds like a ‘regular guy’ explainin’ stuff & not some ivory tower academic or esoteric scientist who’s forgotten how to speak English.

LOL. I guess my problem was that it was *too* readable. But that was only a mild annoyance. Overall, I thought it was good and thought-provoking.

The Murder on the Links by Agatha Christie

Ibis — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 21:00:17 +0000

From the back cover:
“‘For God’s sake, come!’ Unfortunately, by the time Hercule Poirot received Monsieur Renauld’s urgent plea, the millionaire was already dead—stabbed in the back, lying in a freshly dug grave on the golf course of his adjoining Merlinville estate. There’s no lack of suspects: his wife, whose dagger served as the weapon; his embittered son, who would have killed for independence; and his mistress, who refused to be ignored—and each felt deserving of the dead man’s fortune. The police think they’ve found the culprit. Poirot has his doubts. A second murder proves him right.”

My thoughts:
This is Agatha Christie’s second novel featuring Hercule Poirot and his sidekick Captain Hastings. From the title, I was a little concerned that golf would be heavily featured (as apparently have most book cover designers for the novel), but in fact it isn’t really mentioned at all. One of the bodies in the case is found on property which happens to be a golf course under construction, but that’s the only connection to the game.

In this one, Poirot using his knowledge of human psychology, observation of the people involved, and his memory of a prior murder case is pitted against a French detective using “modern” methods of evidence collection and analysis. Hastings, blinded by the attractive and/or interesting women he encounters, is particularly foolish (for example, leaving one of them alone with the body for several minutes).

Some of the twists in the plot I figured out, but still I was surprised at learning the identity of the killer, so overall it was a good mystery. I didn’t care for the object of Hastings’ affection and had to agree with his initial dislike of her but it will be interesting to see how their relationship plays out in future books. Next comes a collection of Poirot short stories.

Scar Tissue by Michael Ignatieff

Ibis — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 01:30:35 +0000

From the jacket:
“At the heart of Michael Ignatieff’s disquieting novel of a woman’s descent into illness are the tangled threads of a family, strained by tragedy yet still tenuously connected.

An anguished philosophy professor watches his dying mother’s measured steps into the mysterious depths of neurological illness: the misplaced glasses, kitchen catastrophes, and anecdotes told over and over to a family overcome with fearful sympathy. His strenuous efforts to make sense of his mother’s suffering lead him to learn all he can about her illness, renewing contact with his neurologist brother in the process. But medical science can do nothing to ease loss, and genetics now routinely predicts destinies that medicine is powerless to avert.

More than a tale of isolated tragedy, Scar Tissue explores the fragile lines of memory, their configuration in identity, and the ways in which both are at one moment formed and the next shattered. Nominated for the Booker Prize, Scar Tissue is an intensely personal novel about family, love in all its guises, and the ultimate triumph of life over loss.”

My thoughts:
This is the kind of book I’m normally thoroughly uninterested in reading. Disease (or disability) and people’s response to it are turn-offs when it comes to reading selection for me. If I want to experience a root canal, I’ll petition a dentist, if lameness, I could shoot myself in the foot. If I have to deal with my mother dying of Alzheimer’s, once will be enough. I don’t need a sneak preview.

I only wished to read it because this was the novel for which Michael Ignatieff got on the Booker shortlist. I hadn’t read anything by him and wanted to (start to) get a feel for him through his work, seeing as he could be Prime Minister some day (though that’s looking less and less likely). Can I say I enjoyed his writing without enjoying the book? Just a little too absorbed with the whole mental deterioration thing. It’s just not to my taste. If this is the kind of topic you like, it’s well worth reading. Lot’s of contemplation about what makes self, and how self-consciousness and self are integrated. Not sure how autobiographical it is, since it came across as incredibly authentic. On the plus side, I’d be very interested in reading more by him.

20, 000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne

Ibis — Mon, 24 May 2010 02:27:06 +0000

From the publisher:
“‘The sea is everything. It covers seven tenths of the terrestrial globe. Its breath is pure and healthy. It is an immense desert, where man is never lonely, for he feels life stirring on all sides.’ Scientist Pierre Aronnax and his colleagues set out on an expedition to find a strange sea monster and are captured by the infamous and charismatic Captain Nemo and taken abroad the Nautilus submarine as his prisoners. As they travel the world’s oceans, they become embroiled in adventures and events beyond their wildest dreams. Visionary in its outlook, Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is a legendary science fiction masterpiece.”

My thoughts:
It took me some time to get into this book at all & had to pressure myself to read it at times. The two major problems for me were the extensive digressions into marine biology (the references to the different organisms for the most part might as well have been in Swahili for all that I could picture what was being described and I had no desire to spend ten times as long reading to look them up), and the heartlessness of both narrator and protaganist when it came to dealing with the animals they encountered (often killing just because they could). Verne seems to share this heartlessness (even viciousness) when he describes the slaughter of the whales in Part II, chapter 12 for example. Also, I don’t particularly like most seafood, so all the meal descriptions just turned me off (lol).

Aside from that, the book was fairly interesting, probably more so for the original readers who had no experience (even vicarious, on-film ones) of diving or submarines. The wide use of electrical light and power must have seemed almost unbelievable at the time. This is why I like reading Victorian sci-fi so much; it’s fun to go back in time to see how much what they imagined has actually happened in real life.

I liked the supporting cast characters, Conseil and Ned (a Canadian of course), even with the latter’s obsession with hunting, much better than the two principals.

Leaving the story of Nemo a total mystery was rather sneaky on Verne’s part. I believe there is a prequel (or sequel?) that explains things, but since I didn’t particularly like Nemo, I’m not drawn to read it.