A River Runs Through It and other Stories by Norman MacLean Montana seems to me to one of the most beautiful places in the world, judging by the movies that are set there. A River Runs Through It is perhaps foremost among these and I came to this collection (which contains that novella and two other short stories) through it. All three tales are of a semi-autobiographical nature and MacLean didn't write very much else other than these, having done so late in life. More's the pity. At its best, MacLean's prose rivals that of Hemingway and there are passages particularly in the main story that are breathtaking. That aside, I will confess to no interest in fly fishing and I learned much more about it here than I ever wanted to. The same is the case for the logging profession and the forest service which form the setting of the other stories. I do understand that these are things he's passionate about and part of his past. This shines through and makes the lengthy descriptions tolerable. Overall one can understand the view of the Pulitzer Prize committee who opted not to give the award to MacLean - apparently on the basis that while the story of the relationship of two brothers who fish by itself is perhaps deserving, the other two in the collection are a little more ordinary.
The Case of the Colonist's Corpse - Bob Ingersoll and Tony Isabella Aneher II is a miserably hot mining planet being competitively developed by the Federation and the Klingons under the Organian Treaty. Daniel Latham, the man in charge of the Federation side of things, is at odds with pretty much everyone in his life. Maybe the person who hates him the least is his opposite number with the Klingons. Guess what happens next. Samuel T. Cogley is brought in to play Perry Mason. Can he unravel the twisted knots of emotions and shady goings-on to clear his client and maybe find the true killer? Very entertaining. The lead-up presents the victim and suspects well while giving a sense of life on the planet. Cogley gets a couple of devoted assistants with their own backstories that don't overstay their welcome. The little tie-ins to the larger Trek universe also don't overstay their welcome. The number of allusions to Denubian slimeworms this or Altairian mugbats that was a bit much though. But a very enjoyable read.
Computing with Quantum Cats: From Collosus to Qubits by John Gribbin Quantum Computing will possibly be the next big thing after AI, or the next next big thing perhaps. It promises to be able to solve many of the problems that conventional computers are unable to. Worth getting a bit of a primer on it, I thought. Gribbin is a prolific science writer and I'd read one or two others from him in the remote past. Here he starts out with a brief history of computing, then gives a brief history of quantum physics, before combining both in the third section and providing a summary of the state of the field, as of the time of writing. Along the way, he gives a fairly convincing argument in favour of the multiverse interpretation of quantum mechanics. I didn't quite grasp all of the technicalities involved in the final section but I do feel that I got a sense of things. There are several requirements in order to make a working quantum computer and while these have been made to work individually or in some combinations, they've never been made to work all together or at the scale necessary. Unfortunately (and I've had this problem elsewhere as well) a serious bugbear is the proportion of the wordcount given over to relating mini-biographies for all of the many scientists whose work is described. I just don't care where they grew up and what schools they went to. I only care what their contribution was. It really breaks the flow of the narrative. I was also struck that with things moving so fast, in hindsight I might have been better choosing a book that was less than 11 years old. I might now go off to see what the latest actually is.
Western Society And The Church In The Middle Ages - R.W. Southern A rather dry, scholarly book that focuses on the 8th through 16th centuries, mostly the 11th through 15th. Mostly it looks at the church power structures, with their waxing and waning and adaptation in response to pressures from the less holy side of things. The experience of commoners isn't really considered until the orders start sprouting. Rome and Constantinople had become separated by very different customs that still could have been swept aside to allow Rome to come to Constantinople's defense. But Western Christians also resented the East for treating the West as unlearned and poor, and wanted Rome to be purely, well, Roman. The Easterners learned to appreciate Western learning to close the divide, but by the time the Byzantine emperor was willing to overrule his subjects' wishes and bend the knee to Rome, it was too late. Ca. 1050 - 1300 was an era of growth and change, with new ideas coming into play. It was an expansionist time, and the Catholic church developed an increasingly professional, centralized administrative structure as problems grew more complex, kings lost religious power, popes gained in direct religious and secular power, and relics lost their luster as a necessary source of royal authority that helped bring order and divine inspiration to a nonsensical world. "It is amazingly simple to knock over cherished theories when they no longer satisfy the needs of the time", the author observes. Popes identified themselves more through Christ than through Peter. They became very good at using their lawyers and dispensations to settle wars, to the point that only lawyers were being appointed pope, and they finally moved their base of operations to Avignon, to administrate better. Theology, urbanization, and population of Europe all grew, and with them new orders began to appear. The explosion of indulgences is covered. The main papal weapon in coercing obedience had been excommunication, but that became less of a big deal as time went by. By 1244 most major Italian cities had been excommunicated at some point. Indulgences weren't just for sale, popes felt free to hand them out as the spirit moved them for individuals or for pilgrimages. Anything to promote the salvation of souls. This first part, as I have said, is rather dry. There are a few individual studies here and there, most notably the comparison of several archbishops to give a sense of the state of the church in England, France, Germany, and Italy. It's all insightful, but largely broad strokes. The last ~40% focuses on the birth and evolution of various orders, and this I enjoyed more, finding something to appreciate in each of the orders. Before the 14th century, new ideas and orders tended to support the authority and power of the pope. Afterwards, they tended to be indifferent to, or alienated from, the pope, and consequently often came under attack. The Benedictine sense of discipline was initially at odds with the heroic sensibilities of its time, but people came to appreciate the order it brought, its flexibility of rigor and mildness combined. Benedictines built beautiful structures to attempt to bring heaven's perfection to Earth. As time passed, Benedictine settlements tended to amass a lot of donated land and wealth, and the order became powerful. But the order began to fail as monks felt a lack of personal religion in the externally imposed routines. With the era of expansion rose the Augustinian rule, which was less strictly defined, more oriented toward community service, and a lot cheaper for rich people who weren't wealthy enough to buy salvation by funding a proper Benedictine settlement. Augustinians benefited from being in economically booming towns. The Cistercians were a stricter offshoot of the Benedictines. They thrived by shunning society and ostentatious living and embracing militaristic rules. This led to them being at the geographical front of the population expansion, and accidentally accumulating wealth because they refused (at first) to spend it. Dominican and Franciscan friars, the former of which grew out of Augustinians, both centralized their governance as the Cistercians had. They grew out of the new towns and universities that came with European expansion. Dominicans used poverty as the means of connecting with those disillusioned by the church and previous orders succumbing to wealth, whereas Franciscans saw poverty as the goal. At this point there's a look at the ups and downs of religious women. With the patriarchy being automatically suspicious of anything women might be up to, any women who didn't put their head down and disappear into an orthodox nunnery tended to be targets. But the aristocracy's tendency to send their free-spirited women into service meant there would sometimes be someone to push back. There was a movement of women referred to as beguines, who simply lived together in quiet, religious communities within towns. Naturally there were men trying to do something about them too. At the end is the unassuming Gerhard Groote whose unaffiliated, unavowed, living-freely-with-laity communities gave the Catholic church absolute fits. But the free bonds between religious and laity unraveled there as with previous orders, as Dutch guilds forbade his communities from doing anything except copying out books. Which they loved to do, but it was beyond illiterate laypeople, who could therefore no longer contribute except as cooks and the like. I feel I have a pretty good start of an overview of this period of time, and a lot more context for The Name of the Rose. New words: point d'appui, landgrave, precentor, suffragan, Biggleswade, cartularies, anchorites, unco' guid, cure and other odd forms of familiar words
Zigzag - Bill Pronzini Four stories about Pronzini's noirish private investigator, who is referred to as Nameless out-of-universe, who works in the San Francisco area in the 2010s. Nameless is a semiretired no-nonsense 60-something with a young woman assistant who takes care of the offscreen Internet research part of the job. In this collection, Nameless follows the wispiest of threads to find the truths behind a senseless shootout deep in the woods and the vengeful ghost of a Satanist killed in a car accident. In between, he tracks down a niece and lies in wait for a deadbeat father. Fairly quick reads, would read more. Nice cover.
Passed by the Censor: The Experience of an American Newspaper Man in France - Wythe Williams Published in 1916, while the war was still on. The author was living in Paris when war broke out and stayed as a wartime correspondent. Obviously this is a first-hand account of his experiences: the first great patriotic reaction of Parisians when war was declared, encounters with individual soldiers, the effects of the war on the French countryside. The American ambassador is admired by author and native Parisians alike as he stays put and convinces American banks to not evacuate all of their wealth. The author eventually gets a pass to the front, but is imprisoned with other correspondents and has a long scary time regaining freedom. The universally admired Joffre comes off much better in this book, eventually allowing the author to visit the front properly and send the outside world its first proper (and glowing) description of the French army at war. The author also works with an ambulance, observes the Battle of the Labyrinth, hears the story of the 75 French machine gunners who held off 12,000 Germans, and meets General Foch and Sister Julie. Censors rarely factor in, after being done with complaints about how impossible it often was to get anything of interest out. Even a list of American civilians presently in France might be code, so code it was. This is a good read and the kind of first-hand account that is important to preserve for future generations.
Politics on the Edge by Rory Stewart. Rory Stewart appears to be one of those fabled creatures, a good Tory. I don't agree with much of his philosophy but he comes across as intelligent and genuine. He was an MP in the British Parliament for much of the last 15 years and this is his memoir. From a highly privileged background, and having worked as a diplomat and in some aid organisations, he spent some time as a backbencher and a junior minister. He was climbing into the senior ministerial ranks and ran for the leadership against Boris Johnson, when the latters victory and subsequent Brexit-related shenanigans led to his expulsion. The book is worth reading because it strikes one not as a public relations exercise (as many of these are) but an honest accounting, warts and all. What it describes is shocking, not perhaps in its aggregate which is well-known, but in the details and extent. MP's are driven by the party system to be robots, selected for their absolute loyalty. Backbenchers have little to do but reflexively do what the whips tell them. Ministers are given control of departments about whose activities they have no expertise in and then moved around before they can learn. And key functions of state - worryingly, the defense and intelligence apparatus among them - operate autonomously with little civilian control. In effect the UK system of government has morphed into a Presidential system, with a PM and a small group of mostly unelected advisers making most important decisions. Stewarts journey through this casts some light on the key characters of recent British history. David Cameron is slippery and false. Boris Johnson is a grifting populist. He somewhat admires Theresa May. And David Gauke. He does possess something of a Messiah complex himself and his privilege is apparent. But this is a sharp, informed, entertaining and horrifying glimpse at the corridors of power.
Finally read The Butcher And The Wren, given as a gift last Christmas. Good Lord, it's been a long time since I was so viscerally turned off by a novel. Cardboard characters, a villain who could only charitably be called even one-dimensional, and written about as blandly as possible. I'm also bothered that is clearly one story raggedly chopped in two so that they can make a "sequel". However, I have no intention of rewarding that by actually purchasing "the second novel in the Wren" series or whatever they're calling it.
Holy Bible - various My first start-to-end readthrough in, uh, far too long. I started several years back with the English Standard Version on my Kindle and switched to the New American Standard Version on my more portable phone somewhere around Psalms I think. The ESV is intended to be both modern language-accurate and readable. It's certainly very readable. Obviously the Torah and historical stuff is important in itself and as part of the overall story, but I wasn't getting as much out of it as I might have. Psalms hit hard though, there's actually a lot of theology in there and I started bookmarking at that point, I guess I'm becoming an old fogey after all. I've actually started pulling up Psalms on the Kindle when I wake up late at night and need to calm my brain down. Proverbs was also a slow-going, thoughtful zone. The prophets had some good stuff as I expected, two of my favorite verses in there, but the cruft-to-meat ratio was also a lot lower than I remembered. Or the cruft was a lot more sobering when you're old and experienced enough to watch nation after nation being charged and convicted with the same things modern society is guilty of. John was not what I needed. I'm at a place where I feel the need for challenge and insight, and the first three Gospels filled that need. John omits pretty much all of Jesus's hard challenges. I'm sure he'll be more my favorite when I'm old and doting. The Epistles were also quite edifying, a nice balance of instructive positivity and challenge. I continue to not read much definitive into all the imagery of Revelation, but Jesus's messages to the churches, the holiness in heaven, and humanity's behavior were all instructive. It was interesting reading Martin Luther's thoughts on the Revelation, as he personally rejected the book for not centering on Jesus or explaining its imagery but gave his best shot at interpreting the imagery anyway (a lot of bad popes and bad heretics).
Wow. How long did that take? I've read a few of the books but I don't think I'd try the whole thing. (If I did it would be with King James for the poetry or something I consider less guilty of overlaying theological preferences.)
My main complaint about the structure of the Bible is the way the OT ends. Or more accurately, the way it doesn't. Consider the NT as akin to the Sgt. Pepper album. Starts off with legit bangers, maintains a consistent level of excellence and variety throughout, and ends with a psychedelic classic. The New Testament works as a coherent whole, but to paraphrase John Lennon, only because we say it does. On the other hand, the Old Testament is more like a greatest hits album with a few tossed-off original songs. Not quite all killer and no filler, no definitive endpoint, and not a coherent whole beyond "these are the hits."
Uh, probably in the ballpark of four years? I just read at my own pace, at least a little each day, usually stopping at the end of chapters or when I'd read enough to think about for the day. When I switched to my phone I used andbible.org's app, which is free, open source, and offers several versions (but not ESV), plus Strong's Greek and Hebrew dictionaries, plus reputable commentaries like Luther and Wesley, and so on. So if I want to investigate a word or interpretation, I have cross-version capabilities and can usually look at the original Greek or Hebrew words if I want (not that I'm trained in either language). Mostly I think if you just pick a mainstream translation, you look up whether it's geared toward study or readability, and you're aware that there are cultural contexts and other reefs to potentially run aground on, you'll be 95% fine for a first pass. Obviously we've grouped the OT into stylistically different parts by genre, but the overall arc of relationship between God and Humanity is there. The prophets at the OT's end bridge the gap between the dead, voluminous Law of Moses and the spiritual, simple law of Jesus that fulfilled what the Ten Commandments and other laws were ultimately getting at. The prophets call out people who follow the most showy parts of the law but plot evil in private. They boil the law down to "love righteousness and justice" and "walk humbly with your God". (In between pronouncing doom against this or that nation.) All of which Jesus also did and expanded upon. There's definitely some filler from our point of view, though, and it's not written as we would write it today.
https://www.salon.com/2010/09/06/when_blue_collar_dreams_became_identity_politics/ Started this book about labor in the '70s and I'm taking so many notes in the Introduction and thinking "a lot of this feels like right now, oil crisis aside" and turns out I'm not the only one. This is a Salon article talking about the book and interviewing the author, it's worth a read.
