Since I began the month with a What Movies I’ve Seen This Year post, let's end it in similar fashion, only this time for books. Most of these I read without an eye to blogging about them, alas, so not a lot of quotations. Excepting some titles that I’ll discuss under separate cover, here’s a chronological account of books read or abandoned thus far in 2021.
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| (1958) |
An account of Thor “Kon Tiki” Heyerdahl’s expedition to Rapa Nui.
I didn’t finish this one. I was led to it from an issue of (I think?) The Jack Kirby Collector, which did a spread on possible book covers that Jack appropriated for comics covers. I liked the look of it and have always found the giant statues of Rapa Nui née Easter Island to be mysterious and intriguing. But I found the narrator kind of hard to take, truth be told. I agree with Paul Bahn that "he relied on the selective use of evidence, which resulted in a misleading conclusion". Much of his evidence has now been refuted by archeologists - Rapa Nui represents the furthest point of Polynesian colonization east-to-west, not a colonization from west to east from South America - and his methods have been criticized. (The first thing he records upon arriving at the island is his suspicion that the island's governor is someone who must be manipulated and tricked, and he congratulates himself on so immediately grasping how to deal with this native.)
There's a great (if all too brief) account in Captain Cook's second voyage of discovery of landing at Rapa Nui. These days of course there's no shortage of material (or pictures) to look at on it. Apparently the island's popularity as a tourist destination is now causing all sorts of problems. The history of the island is fascinating - and like anywhere in the world, punctuated with massacre and tragedy. Unlike just anywhere in the world, though, there's these:
Anyway, skip Aku Aku and just google it, I say.
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| (1998) |
A spellbinding chronicle of one of the most unusual communities in the world, these are the stories of the Hamptons' mansions and millionaires. Both a contemporary portrait of the Hamptons and a historical narrative and filled with tales of pirate treasure, a witch-hunt, and the many beguiling eccentricities of the Hamptons today.
I was led to this one from reading Gaines’s book on the Beach Boys. Start to finish great. I had no real interest in the Hamptons prior to reading it, but this book held my interest and consumed my imagination as much as the land-fever seems to grab the rich both new and old once they sail within sight of Montauk Harbor.
Too many great anecdotes and personalities to mention. If you ever wondered why people go so crazy about the Hamptons you might not learn the answer here - there's a FOMO that only makes sense at a certain level of income, I think, beyond just the desire of anyone for a safe harbor/ nice view - but it sure is fascinating to read it all unfold.
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| (1997) |
The difference between what this book purports to be ("a meticulously researched, comprehensive study of the cover-up by a former Air Force investigator") and what it actually is (a poorly written and badly organized collection of random anecdotes from UFO lore) is akin to the distance between non-alcoholic beer and the real thing. Except alcoholics sometimes drink NA beer and enjoy it, and I can't imagine anyone enjoying this.
Turns out the book I was wanting to read was this one. I’m not saying squat about straw regarding which ones are closer to the truth, here, or whether such truths are even knowable. Greenewald was one of the guys on a recent Megyn Kelly podcast, and I liked what he had to say re: the knowns and unknowns of the situation. I'm not ready to insert the Aliens-guy-meme yet, myself, but it’s fascinating stuff, right? I mean, it's recorded stuff, it ain't weather balloons, it ain't some weather phenomenon, and it ain't the Chinese or the Russians, so what are we looking at here?
Is there a Reed Richards out there, or what? Maybe Victor Von Doom. I’m pretty sure it ain’t Elon Musk, or Donald Trump for that matter, but you’d never know it from what people post to Facebook.
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| (1975) |
A recent college grad sets out in search of Eden with his VW bug, his girlfriend, his dog, and his ideals, and instead discovers a genetic disposition to schizophrenia. How do you cope with genuine mental illness in a commune culture that believes mental illness isn't real and schizophrenia just a rational response to an irrational society?
Here's one I never expected to circle back to - I've had it on the shelf for years and years. This year I finally read the whole thing. And it’s great! Much broader and better than I was led to believe – a really wonderful and vulnerable book covering a lot more than the summary above. It’s more about recovery and engagement with belief systems, albeit with some trimmings unique to the author’s experience.
Well worth your time.
“Knowing that you’re crazy doesn’t make the crazy things stop happening.”
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| (2007) |
Also well worth your time: this collection of essays from the New Criterion music critic (and more) Jay Nordlinger. I'm a big fan of his monthly podcast Music For Awhile and have sporadically read his "Impromptus" column over the years, but this was my first book-length dive into his mind and opinions.
I enjoyed it. The essays from the early years of the twenty-first century and on the campaign trail with George W. Bush are especially fascinating to me as I started those years as a radical liberal, gradually softening or hardening (however you look at it) into a constitutional libertarian. It took the subsequent administrations (and narrativemongering around them) to turn me into the lovable RWNJ I am today. Reading these late 90s and early 00s essays now, when my POV has more or less aligned with Mr. Nordlinger’s on a variety of points, and contrasting in my head to how they’d have been received by contemporaneous-me, was enlightening.
There’s more than politics here. The sections on the Salzburg Music Festival are great - all the music stuff is great. As are other reminders of early aughts culture and personalities you might’ve forgot. I like collecting these volumes of opinion across the decades for precisely that reason: the ideographic timeline.
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| (2010) |
Saw this in one of my neighborhood's little free libraries and took it home. Man, if you'd told me anytime 2000-2008 this would have happened, I'd have called you a liar.
A great read that was a little humbling. Even on areas where I still disagree, I could respect his viewpoint and how he got there - not only that but that he had a viewpoint. I spent virtually all of the years of the GWB Presidency convinced he was a fascist, moron, Cheney-puppet, Rove-bot, etc. In other words I was a member of that performative in-group signal academy of Daily Show/ Colbert Report addicts. Like I say this is not to say I instantly agree with every decision of his Presidency, now; this was me engaging with the man beyond politics pretty much for the first time.
Embarrassing to think of now, but, like Bush W. says of his own misbegotten (though considerably more gilded) youth:
"Without the experience of my first forty years, quitting drinking would not have been possible either. So much of my character, so many of my convictions, took shape during those first four decades. My journey included challenges, struggles, and failures. It is testimony to the strength of love, the power of faith, and the truth that people can change. On top of that, it was one interesting ride."
Interesting to contrast as a memoir to King's On Writing or hell, Ace Frehley's No Regrets - three baby boomer alcoholics whose circumstances and talents generated vastly different opportunities but no shortage of rope to hang themselves with, and who each found a humble sobriety through the storm.
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| (2010) |
Edited by Chuck Wechsler and Bob Kuhn, this is a collection of writings to appear in Sporting Life over the twentieth century. If you've ever heard any story about safaris or man-eating lions, whether they include Teddy Roosevelt or Michael Douglas or Ernest Hemingway or Meryl Streep, the original accounts are here. There isn't a skippable piece in this book. It's forty-one pieces of wow-that-was-great African adventure.
"There is a legend that elephant dispose of their dead in secret burial grounds and that none of these has ever been discovered. In support of this, there is only the fact that the body of an elephant, unless he had been trapped or shot in his tracks, has rarely been found. What happens to the old and diseased?
Not only natives but many settlers have supported for years the legend, if it is legend, that elephants will carry their wounded and sick hundreds of miles, if necessary, to keep them out of the hands of their enemies. And it is said that elephant never forget.
These are perhaps just stories born of imagination. Ivory was once almost as precious as gold, and wherever there is treasure, men mix it with mystery. But there is mystery even about the things you see for yourself."
- Beryl Markham, West with the Night
It's weird, I have no real interest in hunting or even with safari. I appreciate that these things exist, but my armchair reading of the subject(s) is curious to me. I don't know why I find it all so fascinating. Like sailing - another topic I read a lot about - it's not really an interest or hobby or anything I'd do first, second, or third had I the means to do so. And yet I frequently find myself spellbound by accounts of safari or sail - go figure.
I wish I had the exact quote, but the book's in the basement, alas. It's from the excerpt from one of Peter Hathaway Capstick's (Death in the Long Grass) books. It ends with some kind of animal charge, and the author's companion - in the middle of speaking to Capstick and nonchalantly spinning the chamber of his pistol saying (paraphrased) "Africa's great," he raised the pistol, "just don't make any mistakes."
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| (1971) |
A collection of short stories from the author of Bridge Over the River Kwai and Planet of the Apes. I've been a fan of Boulle's since high school when we had to read The Face of a Hero for English class. Lately I've been collecting his books - like Larry McMurtry, just one here or there, with the intention of going through them all one day in the future.
This one was... well, it was okay. It went over my head, I guess. I enjoyed the short reverie on the misery and nonetheless-nostalgia for duck hunting with the author's father ("The Duck Blind"), but some of the others perplexed me. Was something lost in translation?
Two examples: the first story ("His Last Battle") details the visit of Martin Bohrman to Adolf Hitler in South American exile. The names are teased out if more or less immediately obvious. It's a long set-up for the last line, which is Hitler reminiscing on the Jews. ("I have finally forgiven them." It seems overwrought. Was the point just Hitler's intransigence? Why write a story about that? I wonder if there was some immediate cultural reference or political parallel for which I lack context.
The second examples concern the last three stories, which flirt tantalizingly with their own cosmology of a "Holy Omega Computer," i.e. the holy ghost is actually some kind of celestial super-computer. It's interesting (one of the stories involves Allah, Jesus, and others dismantling every object of holy significance in Jerusalem based on new computations from the holy supercomputer, for example; another with a myriad of universes where Eve refuses to sin and instead kills the serpent) but I was left wondering if I was missing something.
He's obviously interested in layers and layers of irony. Another story ("The Plumber") amused me - the electroshock/ waterboarding interrogation of a political prisoner must wait out the fumbling old-school plumber who can only work when the light is good enough for his eyes and must deal with the ancient wiring and pipes of an old chateau the secret police are using. After he finally fixes it the prisoner is tortured and he goes home happy, where we see him eating dinner with his wife, unaware still of what his repair work allowed to happen, but bemused and exasperated at the bumbling fools who know nothing of real things like pipes and wiring but pretend at running the world.
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| (1965) |
A man answers a knock inside his closet and is tossed a horn. When he blows it, he enters a fantastic magical world and slowly begins to remember that he was once (see title).
I read this as part of a World of Tiers hardcover I have, which collects the first couple of books in the series. I'll read the others at some point. I enjoyed this one, but it may exhaust some readers's patience. It seems made up on the go, for one, which gives it an agreeable momentum, but also lends a sort of D&D hack-and-slash quality to things it is. Every chapter is roll for initiative, roll for damage. So much slaughter - you can see why Gary Gygax listed it as one of his original inspirations for Dungeons and Dragons.
There's a quality to that, it's like improv jazz or what, or improv prog rock, I guess, given the subject matter, but with the same pitfalls. And being a solo act, instead of a group improvisation gives it a different quality as well.
It's certainly very picturesque and interesting. Isn't it all a bit like the Chronicles of Amber though? Magical nobles remembering who they are and that they all want to kill one another? Lots of similarities, even with the writing (i.e. both Zelazny and Farmer employ that somewhat curt "Several months passed." "He raised his arm, and fifteen of the enemy died" "Thousands of theirs ranks collapsed" kind of momentum) I looked it up and see Zelazny credits Farmer for the inspiration. Interesting. I'm going to be reading (and re-reading in some cases) those Amber books again sometime, so I'll keep you posted.
And finally:
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| (1998) |
Another pick-up from the little free library - nice score! This one can be pricey used.
This is, as you can probably tell, the revised edition to a book I fondly remember from my old buddy Klum's. I'd always flip through it whenever I'd visit in the early days of our friendship, and when we ended up living together in Dayton, OH a few years after that it was one of two coffee table books we had:
We didn't have a coffee table, exactly, but they were on the carpet near the futon. Also some massive film reference guide hardcover that was indispensable (and settled many bets - most of which Klum won, he had a steel trap for who starred in what movie) in the days before imdb. And just as IMDB may have made that book obsolete, the internet itself lessened the essential-ness (arguably) of either of the books above. The Dickinson astronomy book was a bit dated (my version was from 1992, so lots happened after that) but the Macauley one is pretty timeless. A beautifully designed book, even if I'm not enough of a visual learner, really, to grasp the mechanical fundamentals and machine wonders illustrated and diagrammed within.
Still! A book suitable for any home.
Speaking of Klum - I picked this one up as well:
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| (1999) |
I say "speaking of Klum" because for the entire time I knew him he had this massive hardcover lying around.
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It's not very visible here, but there it is.
Pay no attention to the neohippy in the papa-san. |
In the years since his death I wondered who ended up with a lot of Klum's books. I think they were donated. I ended up with most of his clothes and his DVDs and blu-rays and assorted odds and ends, but every now and again I'll remember some book I used to look at down at his place. Canaris was one of those. I intend to read it, but the damn thing is a thousand pages long. That kind of thing takes a specific occasion in my life these days - a few plane rides or a week's worth of train commutes.
I'm happy to have it, though, and am looking forward to what I'm sure will be fascinating if intense reading.
~
If all goes well I'll be back on NYE to let you know about the next six months of books. Until then, keep your bookmarks... dry, I guess. Excelsior.
