Two free science advancements: The Voyage of the Beagle, by Charles Darwin
In the cases where we can trace the extinction of a species through man, either wholly or in one limited district, we know that it becomes rarer and rarer, and is then lost: it would be difficult to point out any just distinctionbetween a species destroyed by man or by the increase of its natural enemies. The evidence of rarity preceding extinction, is more striking in the successive tertiary strata, as remarked by several able observers; it has often been found that a shell very common in a tertiary stratum is now most rare, and has even long been thought to be extinct. If them, as appears probable, species first become rare and then extinct—if the too rapid increase of every species, even the most favoured, is steadily checked, as we must admit, though how and when it is hard to say—and if we see, without the smallest surprise, though unable to assign the precise reason, one species abundant and another closely allied species rare in the same district—why should we feel such great astonishment at the rarity being carried a step further to extinction? An action going on, on every side of us, and yet barely appreciable, might surely be carried a little further, without exciting our observation. Who would feel any great surprise at hearing that the Magalonyx was formerly are compared with the Megatherium, or that one of the fossil monkeys was few in number compared with one of the now living monkeys? and yet in this comparative rarity, we should have the plainest evidence of less favourable conditions for their existence. To admit that species generally become rare before they become extinct—to feel no surprise at the comparative rarity of one species with another, and yet to call in some extraordinary agent and to marvel greatly when a species ceases to exist, appears to me much the same as to admit that sickness in the individual is the prelude to death—to feel no surprise at sickness—but when the sick man dies to wonder, and to believe that he died through violence.
Patrick O'Brian had read his Darwin. The fictional naturalist explorations of Stephen Maturin are a more dramatic mirror image of Darwin's voyage to South America and many Pacific islands. The travel journal gives a lot of weight to native cultures, such as the gauchos of Argentina and the tragically fated aboriginals of Tierra del Fuego, but you can see some seeds of the evolutionary theory that rocked the world in his observations of the tortoises of the Galapagos islands, and why they appear to differ from island to island.
Strong Women and Superpowers: Who Fears Death, by Nnedi Okorafor
Of course she caught the bullet and Zoubeir did not. Tia's life was snuffed out by five more bullets as Zoubeir hid behind her body. he pushed her off him and ran, swift like his long-legged mother 17 years before. Once he was running, not even bullets could catch him.
You know how the story ends. He escaped and went on to become the greatest chief Suntown ever had. He never built a shrine or a temple or even a shack in the name of Tia. In the Great Book, her name is never mentioned again. He never mused about her or even asked where she was buried. Tia was a virgin. She was beautiful. She was poor. And she was a girl. It was her duty to sacrifice her life for his.
I've been hearing plenty about Okorofor as a rising star in the fantasy genre, and sure enough, I had to get on the reserve list for all of her books kept at our library, because they were ALL out.
I was a little surprised at the intensity of Who Fears Death, as I was led to expect YA. This book requires a content note for graphic descriptions of sexual abuse, murder, and supernatural death. In a post-apocolyptic Africa, the protagonist is born of a white-on-black rape and therefore shunned by both "tribes" and usually oppressed as a witch wherever she goes--which isn't too smart, as she actually does have supernatural powers, and it doesn't turn out so well for those who would attack her or those she loves.
Eventually, she and a small band set forth on a heroine's pilgrimage that asks the question so pertinent to our times: Can the power of women's rage rescue a sick society from itself? Very high recommendations.
The Victorian Murders: Resurrection Row; Bluegate Fields; Rutland Place, by Anne Perry; North Star Conspiracy, by Miriam Grace Monfredo; Why Kill Arthur Potter, by Ray Harrison; Railway Viaduct by Edward Marston
While the feminine propagandists of women's rights confined themselves to the holding of conventions and speech-making in concert rooms, the people were disposed to be amused by them, as they are by the wit of the clown in the circus, or the performance of Punch and Judy on fair days, or the minstrelsy of gentlemen with blackened faces on banjos, the tambourine, and bones...But people are beginning to inquire how far public sentiment should sanction or tolerate these unsexed women, who would step out from the true sphere of the mother, the wife, and the daughter, and taking upon themselves the duties and the business of men, stalk into the public gaze, and by engaging in the politics, the rough controversies, and trafficking of the world, upheave existing institutions and overturn the social relations of life...It was never contemplated that these exotic agitators would come up to our legislators and ask for the passage of laws upholding and sanctioning their wild and foolish doctrines.
--from North Star Conspiracy
"For heaven's sake, man! What's the matter with you!" Desmond reached up and grabbed at the skirts of the driver's coat and pulled sharply. "Control your animal!"
To his horror, the driver tilted toward him, overbalanced, and toppled down, falling untidily off the box over the wheel and onto the pavement at his feet.
--from Resurrection Row
The body of a man hurtled over the edge of the viaduct and fell swiftly through the air until it landed in the canal, hitting the water with such irresistable force that it splashed both banks. The mother put protective arms around her son, the other woman staggered back in horror, the three men in the barge exchanged looks of utter disbelief. It had been an astonishing sight, but the cows accorded it no more than a cursory glance before returning to the important business of chewing the cud. Hooper was exhilirated. Intending to portray the headlong dash of the train, he had been blessed with another stroke of good fortune. He had witnessed something that no artist could ever invent. As a result, his painting would now celebrate a murder.
--from The Railway Viaduct
"A young woman comes up to him and asks him to help her get a cab. Spun him some yarn about her mother being sick. He sees one discharging in Threadneedle Street, so he holds up traffic and beckons it over. By the time it comes, there's a hell of a tangle, buses and vans and carts all over the place. Not that it worries Silver! He hands the lady up, touches his helmet to her, and waves the cab on--then starts trying to sort out the mess. And all the time, her old man is doing a smash and grab on the silversmiths' round the corner! That was a laugh, that was! ...Mind you, he made up for it. He's pretty lively with a pencil, is Silver, and he made us a sketch of the woman. We could see straight away it was Nifty Larkin's judy. Picked 'em up with no trouble at all---swag still under the bed!"
--from Why Kill Arthur Potter?
If you read one series from the mystery sets I'm reading this year so far, make it Miriam Grace Monfredo. What her first, Seneca Falls Inheritance, did for early American feminism, North Star Conspiracy does equally well for the Fugitive Slave Act and the Underground Railroad. The story opens with Federal Marshals stopping a train to get on board and round up people who don't look like them, and who clearly aren't the ones they're supposed to be looking for (in those days, hundreds of FREE people were picked up by white men who merely SAID that they were the slaves they were looking for), in a book written in 1993, over two decades before ICE is making it happen all again. The central mystery takes a backseat to historical accuracy, which sends chills down one's spine, as 1850s New York is revealed as a state under Vichy occupation by an all-too-willing police force that never once hesitates to follow the Southern interlopers' orders. Very high recommendations.
Why Kill Arthur Potter is the first in a not-very-promising "unlikely buddy detectives" series in Victorian London, featuring an older working class inspector and a naive scion of the aristocracy who thinks crime detection might be fun. The two have different and complementary strengths and weaknesses, and will probably grudgingly get along as the series progresses.
The Railway Viaduct continues Edward Marston's series about Robert Colbeck, "the Railway Detective", beginning with a painter's capture on canvas of a body falling from a train, and continuing to a railroad construction site in France that has been subjected to increasingly deadly sabotage. despite offensive treatment of the Irish railway workers, it's a decent and cleverly plotted story.
Meanwhile, Anne Perry's Thomas and Charlotte Pitt series about the star-crossed marriage of a police inspector to a society lady shunned for her cleverness continues with stories about a series of disenterred corpses, a homosexually violated youth, and a poisoning on the street where Charlotte lives. Although this series takes place a couple of decades later than Perry's excellent William Monk series that I read last year, the first volumes at least, were written while Preey was still learning how to do it, and are rather clunky. I'm staying with it, as I know her ability improves.
Untopical Musings: Selected Writings of Sydney Smith
To force an ignorant man into a court of justice, and to tell him that the Judge is his counsel, appears to us quite as foolish as to sit a hungry man down to his meals and to tell him that the table is his dinner. In the first place, a counsel should always have private and previous communication with the prisoner, which the Judge, of course, cannot have. The prisoner reveals to his counsel how far he is guilty, or is not; states to him all the circumstances of his case--and might often enable his advocate, if the advocate were allowed to speak, to explain a long string of circumstantial evidence in a manner favorable to the innocence of his client. Of all these advantages, the Judge, if he had every disposition to befriend the prisoner, is of course deprived.
Sydney Smith was a very witty reformer, with a gift for the turn of phrase to make an opponent's ideas seem ridiculous. And the ideas he attacks in this volume of letters and essays are, by modern standards, ridiculous. We can read Smith standing up on behalf of such apparently controversial ideas as: that the accused should have the right to hire a lawyer; that education could do with a bit less rote learning of dead languages; that spring guns and man-traps to deter "poaching" do more harm than good; and that life would be better if women received educations. Maybe it is partly due to smith's rhetoric that these ideas are now almost universally accepted outside today's Republican Party; I would have liked to see him take the side of justice on an issue we are still debating.
Snoozing on the Steppes: A House of Gentlefolk and Fathers and Sons, by Ivan Turgenev
HALF an hour later Nikolai Petrovitch went into the garden to his favourite arbour. He was overtaken by melancholy thoughts. For the first time he realised clearly the distance between him and his son; he foresaw that every day it would grow wider and wider. In vain, then, had he spent whole days sometimes in the winter at Petersburg over the newest books; in vain had he listened to the talk of the young men; in vain had he rejoiced when he succeeded in putting in his word too in their heated discussions. ‘My brother says we are right,’ he thought, ‘and apart from all vanity, I do think myself that they are further from the truth than we are, though at the same time I feel there is something behind them we have not got, some superiority over us.… Is it youth? No; not only youth. Doesn’t their superiority consist in there being fewer traces of the slaveowner in them than in us?’
Nikolai Petrovitch’s head sank despondently, and he passed his hand over his face. ‘But to renounce poetry?’ he thought again; ‘to have no feeling for art, for nature …'
The Harvard Classics devotes a volume to these two Turgenev works, including Fathers and Sons, his most famous. It concerns the Russian 19th century equivalent of a story about a decent young man coming home from college with his friend the Bernie-Bro, to spend time with his good father and Trumpkin uncle, and the excesses of virulent rhetoric that erupt between the friend and the uncle while father and son look on helplessly and become somewhat alienated from one another.
unfortunately for readers of Russian literature, Constance Garnett was for decades the only translator of major Russian works into English, and unless culture shock is more severe than I thought, she did a mockery of it. Drink some vodka every time Russian peasantry "fly at each other with their fists" and you'll pass out. I had to keep turning back, realizing that my eyes were passing across pages with practically zero interest or comprehension.
Snoozing through the Spanish Succession: Henry Esmond, by William M. Thackeray
"A fig, Dick, for your Mr. Addison", cries out the lady: "a gentleman who gives himself such airs and holds his head so high now. I hope your Ladyship thinks as I do: I can't bear those fair men with white eyelashes. A black man for me!" (All the black men at table applauded and made Mrs. Steele a bow for this compliment).
Thackeray is mostly known for his masterpiece, Vanity Fair, which is so good that I was astonished that this heavy lump of a book came from the same pen. As a bildungsroman, it vies with books translated from the German for sheer dullness.
I should have read it towards the end of 2015, when I was getting theough the reigns of Louis XIV and Queen Anne. Henry Esmond begins his childhood as James II is falling and his Catholic family needs to keep a low profile; continues as the boy is dispossessed half voluntarily out of his inheritance by people he had been benefactor to and soldiers off to the Continent during the War of the Spanish Succession, and concludes with cameos from Addison and Swift, as (SPOILER) he inexplicably fails to marry the young woman who has been his primary love interest all along, choosing instead to marry her mother. WTF, Thackeray?
Zola, Zo-Zo-zo-Zo-Zola, Za-za-Za-Za-Zola: therese Raquin, by Emile Zola
A year before, he would have burst into laughter, had he been told he would become the slave of a woman, to the point of risking his tranquility. The hidden forces of lust that had brought about this result had been secretly proceeding within him, to end by casting him, bound hand and foot, into the arms of Therese. At this hour, he was in dread lest he should omit to be prudent. He no longer dared go of an evening to the shop in the Arcade of the Pont Neuf lest he should commit some folly. He no longer belonged to himself. His ladylove, with her feline suppleness, her nervous flexibility, had glided, little by little, into each fibre of his body. This woman was as necessary to his life as eating and drinking.
This 19th century psychological thriller is what they had instead of James M. Cain in those days. Therese is in a similar position to Emma Bovary, in that she is dissatisfied with her marriage to a good-hearted but dull and plodding husband, and feels like having an affair---except that this time, the exciting "other man" plots with her to kill the husband, after which they both slowly go mad with guilt. My imagination had them in noir trenchcoats on rain-slick cobblestones, although the book predates all that, of course. Very high recommendations, especially for the scenes with the mother.
Book of Mormon: Jacob; Enos; Jarom; Omni
Behold, it is expedient that much should be done among this people, because of the hardness of their hearts, and the deafness of their ears, and the blindness of their minds, and the stiffness of their necks; nevertheless, God is exceedingly merciful unto them, and has not as yet swept them off from the face of the land.
Oddly enough, when I think of hard hearts and stiff necks (the stiff necked people are very frequently mentioned as examples of who not to be), the first people who come to mind are those Mormon Republican leaders like Orrin Hatch and Gordon Smith, who walk around smiling like a door to door salesman while casting judgment in all directions. This is not true of most Mormons I know in real life, whose necks are no stiffer than average.
In March 2013, I read all of those minor prophets, epistles, and other very short "books" of the Bible so that I could say I'd already completed half of it. the Book of Mormon has 15 "books", and after 1 and 2 Nephi, I'm 2/5 of the way through it by number, though these four make up just a few pages consisting of Nephi's progeny dutifully doing what their father before ordered and keeping custody of the plates and noting on their deathbeds that another few hundred years have gone by, everyone's sinning, and there's not enough room on the plates to say any more than that. Omni, in fact, has five generations saying over the course of a couple of pages, "Yeah, what the guy above me said." If Mormons have sermons based on text from their book, I'm guessing they don't choose Jacob, Enos, Jarom and Omni all that much. During their generations in western North America, Jesus has come and gone in Palestine, with nary a note on it to this branch of the Chosen.
In Defense of Comments Sections: On Liberty, by John Stuart Mill
A recent writer, in some respects of considerable merit, proposes (to use his own words,) not a crusade, but a civilizade, against this polygamous community, to put an end to what seems to him a retrograde step in civilization. It also appears so to me, but I am not aware that any community has a right to force another to be civilized. So long as the sufferers by the bad law do not invoke assistance from other communities, I cannot admit that persons entirely unconnected with them ought to step in and require that a condition of things with which all who are directly interested appear to be satisfied, should be put an end to because it is a scandal to persons some thousands of miles distant, who have no part or concern in it. Let them send missionaries, if they please, to preach against it; and let them, by any fair means, (of which silencing the teachers is not one,) oppose the progress of similar doctrines among their own people. If civilization has got the better of barbarism when barbarism had the world to itself, it is too much to profess to be afraid lest barbarism, after having been fairly got under, should revive and conquer civilization. A civilization that can thus succumb to its vanquished enemy must first have become so degenerate, that neither its appointed priests and teachers, nor anybody else, has the capacity, or will take the trouble, to stand up for it. If this be so, the sooner such a civilization receives notice to quit, the better. It can only go on from bad to worse, until destroyed and regenerated (like the Western Empire) by energetic barbarians.
John Stuart Mill never saw a Youtube comments section, and neither had I the first time I thrilled to his great essay on freedom of expression in which he famously said that even false ideas should not be suppressed, because by examining their falsity we reaffirm truth. I agreed with him enthusiastically right up until the long summer and fall of 2016 in which America examined the ugliest and most blatant falsehood of the day, and elected it President.
11/9 changed everything. I can no longer be a JS Mill free speech absolutist.
Or maybe I can. Because he's no more absolutist than Milton or Locke. Looking at his essay again, I do see that he would restrict that speech that poses an imminent threat of harm to others (the same speech that would be acceptable (or at least immune from prosecution) in an editorial endorsing a racist candidate for Congress would be actionable if made at a live speech egging on the Charlottesville Nazis.
Further, Libertarians do not have a friend in Mill, who considers restraint of trade a legitimate function of government acting in the public interest. And he equates churches with government when they seek to force church doctrine on the general public.
But the most damning address to Trumpism is the part I quoted. He was speaking about "primitive cultures" that go under due to colonialism, but I read it as applying equally to the devolution of American conservatism, which used to have some favorable points, into an openly bigoted fascist movement that rejects truth itself. If we who have reasoned discourse about great ideas have not the ability or the will to take down the Epsilon-Morlocks whose main contribution to comments sections consists of "Your gay", maybe we don't deserve to exist.
Jerk in Jhansi: Flashman in the Great Game (Flashman #5), by George MacDonald Fraser
I'm remembering how I came to Balmoral half a century ago, aye, and what it led to...the stifling heat of the parade ground at Meerut with the fettering-hammers clanging; the bite of the muzzle of the nine-pounder jammed into my body and my own blood steaming on the sun-scorched iron; old Wheeler bawling hoarsely as the black cavalry sabres come thundering across the maidan towards our flimsy rampart ("No surrender! One last volley, damn 'em, and aim at the horses!"); the burning bungalows; a skeleton hand in the dust; Colin Campbell scratching his grizzled head; the crimson stain spreading in the water below Suttee Ghat; a huge glittering pile of silver and gold and jewels and ivory bigger than anything you've ever seen...and two great brown liquid eyes shadowed with kohl, a single pearl resting on the satin skin above them, open red lips trembling.
I've been reading the series in the order in which they chronicle Flashy's life, not in order of publication. this one (fifth in the series but eighth chronologically) may well be the zenith of the whole series. Using the excuse of a secret mission and a romance with the Rani of jhansi, Fraser manages to put his antihero at eyewitness to most of the major events in the Indian Mutiny of 1856-58, describing not only Jhansi but Meeruit, Cawnpore, Lucknow and Gwalior.
As usual, Flashman is an amoral, hypocritical coward, though when he has nowhere to flee to, he manages to fight effectively this time. Also as usual, the book has something to say about the savagery in human nature, more striking with every "civilized" and "barbaric" location he visits. We see British colonists treating the people of India worse than despised animals; then, the natives rise up and commit mass butchery, including of imprisoned women and children; finally, the British put down the "mutiny" and commit equal and opposite atrocities against humanity, fired by righteous christian craving for revenge on the "savages." If you've read other Flashman, you know what to expect; if not, you might not want to begin with this one. The blood flows more than ankle-deep through the streets.
The Other Russia: The Enchanted Wanderer, by Nikolai Leskov
"How is it that you speak of it as...as if you're not certain?"
"Because how can I say for certain, when I can't even embrace all my extensive past living?"
"Why is that?"
"Because much that I did then wasn't even by my own will."
"And by whose, then?"
"By a parental promise."
"And what happened to you by this parental promise?"
"I kept dying all my life, and could never die."
"Really?"
"Precisely so, sir."
"Then please tell us your life."
Thus begins an odd, odd story of supernatural phenomena, parable, and almost-redemption, by a writer I'd not before heard of. Most people see 19th century Russia through the eyes of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, whose tales center around the major cities, or Turgenev, who tends to write about genteel wealthy folks on country estates. The protagonist of The Enchanted Wanderer begins life as a serf, escapes from several nasty rural situations, and ends up fulfilling the destiny he'd tried to get away from in a monastery, becoming ultimately too poor to survive anywhere else. And there are angels and vengeful corpses.
Songs About Bad Smells: Les Chants de Maldoror, by Isidoe-Lucien-Ducasse ("Le Comte de Lautreamont")
The swimmer is now in the presence of the female shark he has saved. They stare into each other's eyes for some minutes, each amazed at finding such ferocity in the other's eyes. They swim, circling each other, not losing sigght of the other, each one thinking, "Until now I was mistaken; here is one more evil than I."....Carnal desire closely follows this demonstration of friendship. Two sinewy thighs cling tightly to the monster's viscous skin, like two leeches, and arms and fins are entwined around the body of the beloved object, while throats and breasts are fused into a glaucous mass amid the exhalations of the seaweed.
All the content warnings. This book is one of the grossest things I've read since Naked Lunch, and The 120 Days of Sodom,. It also bears some resemblance to The Stranger, but where Camus's existentialist antihero merely kills one man, the narrator of Maldoror commits atrocities throughout the book.
He is an unreliable narrator who fancies himself a poet and writes in chapters that he calls "cantos". He is a sadist who, when he isn't actually inflicting pain, enjoys watching scenes of torture that he describes in graphic detail, inviting the reader to praise him for having the humanity to shed a tear or two while watching suffering so horrible that it makes me shudder just to read it in print. In the scene quoted above, he has just witnessed a shipwreck at sea, enjoyed watching sailors drown or get eaten by sharks, has shot the one guy who was maybe going to make it to the beach...and then, he writes that he had sex with a shark.
Why? Why is this considered literature?