Michael Kevane

Enjoyable detective novel. Lots of interesting Ghana-related details, as usual.

Excellent novel from Yerby, with insightful passages on the injustices and stereotypes that stained the westward expansion.

Friends know I took every occasion to talk up this novel. I spent a bit of time also in the Trollope rabbit hole, which is a home of many mansions. There was so much to appreciate and savor in Phineas Finn. The complexity of the inner life, rather than plot, is at the heart of the novel, and upper-class men and women navigate the shoals of Victorian society and politics. I loved how characters appear, and Trollope notes, in a familiar way, that the reader is surely familiar with them (from another novel!).

After the (for me) disaster of a novel Artemis, I started Hail Mary with trepidation. But it opened well. The Martian back to form. A really interesting science fiction science problem, plausible enough to engage the reader. But trouble follows. Weir engages very unrealistically with the social consequences of the challenge confronting the planet. Like all good science fiction writers who have only read Robert Heinlein, he knows that all scientific challenges can be addressed by a hero who knows a lot of basic science, all of which can be extrapolated to any life-threatening problem, and generate an engineering solution involving duct tape. So, he creates two characters: a woman hero who is charged with saving the world and must make all the tough decisions. She is there perhaps because Weir’s editor said he needed a woman character? She has no life, no voice, no nothing, and is dropped halfway through the novel. That is when the second hero, Mr. Weir as middle school science teacher, takes over. Did he have a wife, or life, before being sent off to space? I honestly can’t remember as I write this. A most pleasant fellow, this one-dimensional middle school teacher. Wait! He has a second dimension, revealed about 5 pages before the end. Maybe an editor said, “The character needs some complexity, could you not add something?” “Gee most of the novel is already finished.” “What if he had amnesia, and then suddenly remembered the complexity?” “I can work with that! Where’s the duct tape?” So, slog through this if you wish. I would enjoy the first 100 pages and then skim.  Then enjoy the introduction of Rocky. Then skim again. Done. There is a nice unintended consequence episode (about two pages) and the final image is sweet.

Honestly, I read this just to read something in French. This is the young adult version (written by Tournier) of his longer 1967 novel. In may have been seen as edgy and genre-bending then, with a painfully drawn out colonialism allegory, but now it just seems contrived and even bizarre.

A pop history account of the competition between John Harrison, who made the first precision marine clock in around 1735, and the astronomers of the time (such as Edmund Halley, who figured out you could determine longitude by the difference between local time and time in some known place in Europe by published tables of when the moons of Jupiter would be eclipsed by Jupiter, or where the moon was in relation to the sun at certain predictable times once the orbits were worked out). Super interesting on the basics of measurement of something incredibly useful.

Pretty awesome reading. Reading random chapters in no particular order worked fine. As usual with Melville, the prose is engaging and clear, and the level of extraneous detail about how a Man of War worked, in terms of the interpersonal relations among the crew and between crew and officers, never fails to interest.

Read for my short book club, to be discussed next week. Poetic in its sparseness, devastating in its account of how trauma, in childhood and adulthood, irrevocably changes people. I don’t always like to link fiction to social sciences, but the novel helps you think about persistence, resilience, and change in the mental life of a person, with consequent ramifications for everything they do. And, of course, there is no better way in my opinion than fiction to promote what should be a human reflex, but often is not, to never “other” when others are “othering.”

Fantastic novel that will linger for many years in my memory, to be sorted out. With just a few building blocks, Ishiguro addresses a lot of subtle philosophy and rich description of what an interior emotional life could mean.

An intense psychological portrait of a bourgeois man descending into nihilism and uber-self-conception… Georges Simenon’s L’homme qui regardait passer les trains is precociously modern in style and subject matter. Not at all what I expected.

Really enjoyed this history of a variety of locations in what became the United States. Excellent readable style, and pretty much everything was new to me. Russians in the Aleutian Islands; Juniper Serra and others missionize the California coast; Spanish missionary explorers in the Colorado Great Basin area; the Creeks in Florida consider trading with Spanish Havana; and Henderson “buys” much of Kentucky. Food for thought for libertarians who refuse to ever consider the ethical question of property unjustly acquired at scale.

A meditation on sense of brightly burning life when 99.9% of us are nervous about confronting the boss, and second-guess ourselves, and maybe just think of what we would have said had we burned brighter inside, suffer the indignity of knowing that we should have burned brighter, and still can’t figure out what burning brighter is better, if in the end it means rearranging piles of books of stories. At least that was my initial impression. But that is what an epigram does?

Re-read Boneland by Alan Garner, from 2012. I think I was put off the first time by the excessive compression. Re-reading it I enjoyed it much more, though the reach for mystery and frisson of eternity still eluded me. But I appreciate the tremendous craft, and I will anticipate a re-reading in a couple of years (most of Garner’s adult books are so compressed that each re-reading opens up more levels). A good review, by Ursula K. Le Guin (!) helps understand the context of the book.

Read Funny in Farsi by Firoozeh Dumas. It is a light, almost stand-uppy commentary on childhood as Iranian-American during the late 1970s and 1980s, and then vignettes from marriage (to a Frenchman). Not quite Thurberesque. People my age will recognize many of the anecdotes, and that is part of the effort, to remind readers that we all share much in common despite our different backgrounds. I wanted more insight about her mother, about her (perhaps non-existent) political engagement or thinking about Iran, and about her cosmopolitanism and what that means for others.

In our discussion I was of course reminded of the amazing Iranian film A Separation.

And then of course Mariam Satrapi’s fantastic graphic novel Persepolis. And lastly, my colleague’s Mary Hegland’s Days of Revolution: Political Culture and Process in an Iranian Village.

I saw this mentioned in Marc Bloch, so I got a copy through interlibrary loan. Hitler and I, by Otto Strasser was published in 1940, and is a hurriedly written account (one-sided, if that word applies to people in Hitler’s orbit?) of the German politics and intrigue leading to the rise of the Nazi Party. Strasser and his brother (who was killed by the SS) were early allies of Hitler in the 1920s. Otto Strasser broke early, and formed what was known as the Black Front to oppose Hitler. Anyone who reads this and isn’t terrified by the constant obvious parallels to our current Republican Party being taken over by right-wing fanatics is sleeping through life.