Books read January through December 1987
| Author | Doyle, Arthur Conan |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: David McKay Co., 1958 |
| Copyright Date | 1891 |
| Number of Pages | 363 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| When Read | January 1987 |
A young monastery raised man goes out into the world where he joins up with an archer, a red-headed giant, a small, bald, middle aged, gentle knight who is a terror on the battlefield, and goes to France to participate in the latest expedition of the 100 years war.
The story is part satire, party young people's adventure, and part farce. Amidst talk of honor and chivalry and many fine, noble, personal deeds, it is still clear that the entire expedition is an invasion and destruction of people who have done no harm in order to install an evil king in Spain. There is bitter national antagonism and several instances of open class warfare - including the burning of a castle by desperate peasants who cannot live under the despotic rule of their lord. And yet the characters of the story, fine and noble as they are, always wind up fighting for the forces of national oppression and feudal rule.
D pays meticulous attention to detail in custom, language, heraldry, dress, etc. He obviously did much research and must have carefully worked over the book to get in all of the "quothe's" and "sooth's", and other details - most of which are only defined by context.
In the end, the hero Alleyne gets a knighthood, a demesne, and the beautiful girl. The old archer gets a pub and a wife. The giant gets a farm. And the knight returns home to live out his days in peace.
One doesn't know whether to say that the subtext of violence and oppression redeems or spoils the fairy tale adventure. It certainly makes it a more interesting book.
There's a good article, specifically about this book, in the Wikipedia.
| Author | Robinson, Derek |
|---|---|
| Publication | Toronto: Bantam Books, 1986 |
| Copyright Date | 1971 |
| Number of Pages | 278 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Aviation; World War I |
| When Read | January 1987 |
A shallow tale of pilots in World War I who are put through a brutal training course by their hardened commander and then go to the front, where most are killed.
Major Wooley, the squadron commander, has as his main theme that war is about killing people, not chivalry, and is constantly training his men to sneak up on an enemy and shoot him in the back, or kill the balloonists as they parachute down.
Technical flying details are sparer than I would like in a book which has so little else to offer, but there are interesting training sessions.
R tries to give his characters private feelings but fails. The principal distinctions between them are that one is cruel and aloof, one is a religious maniac, and one stutters. Otherwise they have very little individuality.
In the final analysis, Robinson fails to say anything of interest. If all chivalry is pointless and war is about killing, isn't killing even more pointless? Mustn't there be a reason to kill? It is not more real to reduce all to killing and then conclude with "Yes, that's what we're about, killing." It's even worse than chivalry - amoral rather than merely misguided.
I read this crap for the subject matter and because it's a fast reading adventure story. It's like watching crap on TV.
I was very hard on this first novel by the author. Amazon reviewers liked it a lot and it is claimed to have been short listed for the Booker Prize. I think that my reaction at the time was that Robinson was trying to impress the reader with his toughness, his sense of reality. It seemed like a kind of anti-hero swaggering.
I don't know whether I was right or wrong and I won't be reading the book again to find out, however I did read a couple of his later books, Piece of Cake and A Good Clean Fight. I liked those a lot more. Had Robinson matured as a writer or had I matured as a reader? Who knows. Maybe if I had read the later books first I would have developed more sympathy for the author's style and found this book less irritating.
Robinson was an RAF fighter pilot, but too late for WWII. He is still alive, publishing a book in 2014, at age 82.
I happened to get into an email exchange recently with Derek Robinson. I don't remember how it began and am not in a position to check my email archive at the moment. We were talking about the war in the Pacific and I recommended a book to him Japan 1941: Countdown to Infamy by Eri Hotta about the reasons why Japan went to war against the United States in spite of its inevitable disaster. Robinson went on to read the book and discussed some of it with me. He told me that he would not be writing any more books at his age and I told him that I thought his books would be continuing to entertain and enlighten readers for generations to come. Maybe I made up for my unkind thoughts about him in 1987.
| Author | Fuentes, Carlos |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Spanish |
| Translators | Peden, Margaret Sayers |
| Publication | New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1982 |
| Copyright Date | 1980 |
| Number of Pages | 225 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | January 1987 |
A complex novel in the Latin American style of mixing realism and myth like fantasy.
84 year old Count de Branly tells a story to his friend (named only at the end as Fuentes) about his relations with a Mexican father and son, Hugo and Victor Heredia. Each character seems to play multiple roles, as contemporary person, as a young man, and even as his own ancestor. Hugo, the father, is an anthropologist who hopes to atone for the sins of his conquistador and mestizo ancestors by resurrecting the glory of the Mexican past. His 12 year old son however disdains the past and the present, living a cruel and hedonist life. De Branly appears as an agent in the transformation of this family. bringing Victor together with another Heredia, the Distant Relation.
I don't know what to make of all this. The writing bears all of the marks of high literary stature. The social and historical analysis is progressive, but the semi-mythic approach and the story of redemption in childish love does nothing for me. Nor does the deliberate obscurity help. I see it as an overly personal novel which is interesting but cannot be great.
What I called "realism and myth like fantasy" is better known as "magical realism".
Trying to figure out what the book was about, and failing from reading my abstract and comment, I searched the Internet and read two interesting reviews. One, on amazon.com, was by a reviewer who seemed almost offended by the book. He regarded it as an exercise by Fuentes in demonstrating his extraordinary intelligence and esoteric writing ability. The book may have demonstrated that, but it fell completely flat as a novel, being too obscure. Interestingly, this anonymous reviewer praised Fuentes' other work and attached his review to the Spanish edition of the book.
The other review was by Guy Davenport, published in the New York Times when the book came out in English in 1982. Davenport also found the book obscure and confusing, but wrote of becoming "deliciously confused". He also had trouble following the story and separating the real from the fantastic, but thought that was all to the good.
As for me, I don't remember enough of the book to say anything more reasonable about it or to choose between the two interpretations.
| Author | Boll, Heinrich |
|---|---|
| Original Language | German |
| Translators | Vannewitz, Leila |
| Publication | New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984 |
| Copyright Date | 1981 |
| Number of Pages | 82 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Autobiography |
| When Read | February 1987 |
This is a memoir of Boll's high school years, 1933-37, aged 15-19. Boll stayed on the edge of the Nazi movement, largely uninvolved and unaffected. He went to a Catholic school and got a phony after school job in the library as an excuse to stay out of the Nazi mass organizations. He simply avoided the marches, camps, harassment of Jews and socialists, as much as he could. His family eventually chose his elder brother to join the Nazis as a way to keep the family out of trouble. Their greatest concern was poverty.
It is so easy to imagine all this. A family of rather isolated intellectuals, they are accustomed to a low profile anyway. When Nazism comes they simply pull their heads down even further and lie low. It is probably what we would do, if we weren't Jewish and could actually have carried it off. Or, being a bit more offended, we would have emigrated. But open resistance was impossible and underground resistance futile as well as impossible. It's hard to see individual alternatives.
So Boll studied and became accomplished in math and Latin. He toured the countryside on his bicycle. He seduced girls. He made a private life for himself - probably not very different from the life he would have made in other circumstances.
Later, he fell into the maw. There really was no escape.
33 years before this, Boll published The Train Was On Time, a novel about a 23 year old Catholic soldier on a train in 1943, riding to certain death at, or on the way to, the Eastern Front. I read that one in 2013. Boll himself was conscripted and fought in the war, being wounded four times according to the Wikipedia.
Boll won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1972.
A few months after writing the previous note I read Billiards at Half-Past Nine, Boll's most famous work. I'm glad that I did. It was a very fine book.
People who lived in Germany during the Nazi period were, or should have been, tremendously affected by the experience. I think Boll, at his age and with his Catholic, non-Nazi, background, his high intelligence, his efforts to stay aloof from the Nazis, and his final absorption into the war, would have been particularly deeply affected. He was a sensitive and intelligent observer.
| Author | Knebel, Fletcher |
|---|---|
| Publication | Garden City: Doubleday and Co., 1968 |
| Number of Pages | 407 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| When Read | February 1987 |
A political thriller about a prominent Washington attorney and best friend of the President who vanishes one night from a golf course, starting a major upheaval before the upcoming presidential election. The story is told by Gene Culligan, President Paul Rondebush's press secretary. It also involves the CIA director, who disobeys the President's order to stay out of the investigation, and a black FBI agent who digs up most of the truth.
At the end we learn that the attorney and two professors were participating in a secret meeting of top nuclear scientists from all the major powers who were organizing a strike against nuclear weapons production, with the blessings of the President.
There is a long wrap up at the end where the President and each major player describes the whole affair - which leads towards worldwide nuclear disarmament.
It is an idealistic book that perhaps aims to instill some ideas in the minds of both politicians and scientists while stirring up the public against nuclear weapons, cold war, and the CIA. The politics are "radical liberal". The writing is acceptable. The inside knowledge of Washington is interesting.
Fletcher Knebel was a widely read syndicated newspaper columnist who co-authored the the best selling novel Seven Days in May. He went on to write many more novels. His obituary in the New York Times describes him as quite a character in many ways. A member of the Hemlock Society, he committed suicide with sleeping pills when his terminal illnesses became too severe to cope with.
The term "radical liberal" was used in the Nixon administration to describe Nixon's Democratic Party opponents. I think it was coined by Vice-President Spiro Agnew, or one of his advisers or speech writers. "Spiro the Hero", as our local Baltimore County politicians described him, used the phrase in a televised speech, along with "nattering nabobs of negativism". But I digress.
| Author | Clarke, Arthur C. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Del Rey, Ballantine Books, 1986 |
| Number of Pages | 256 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | February 1987 |
In the year 2000 it is discovered that the Sun will go nova in another 1600 years. As the time passes, spaceships are built to send embryos and, later, DNA codes, to other worlds to restart earth life and civilization. One recipient of such a ship is the planet Thalassa, which has three islands now inhabited for 700 years by the human descendants of a DNA seed ship. Then the last ship arrives from Earth, carrying a million sleeping, frozen passengers. They stay two years to get new ice for a nose cone shield for the ship and then head on for a 300 year journey to another planet 75 light years away.
During the course of the story, a semi-intelligent race of lobster like creatures is discovered in the sea. There is a transfer of knowledge and culture from ship to planet. There are love affairs and a mutiny.
As usual with Clarke, characters are fine, straightforward types. The emphasis is on science and projection of the future. Despite the premise of the destruction of earth, it is one of Clarke's late, optimistic books.
This is another of the books I read many years ago that has stayed with me, or at least parts of it have.
The DNA seed ship contained no living humans, only human DNA and robots. The robots went through the steps to develop embryos from the DNA, eventually raising the first generation of people on the planet. The robots, with libraries available on the ship, also educated the people in the language, culture and science extant at the time the seed ship left earth, creating a relatively advanced civilization, even though there were no elders to teach the children. I don't remember if any of the robots were still functional at the time the story took place, 700 years after the original landing.
The arrival of the earth ship precipitated something of a crisis for both the planet's inhabitants and the new arrivals, each group seeing something in the other that they longed for.
Throughout the novel we see the lobsters planning their attack on the humans and feel some tension at the lack of awareness or concern by the people. But when the lobsters finally emerge from the sea, they are dispatched with ease.
I think Clarke did a fine job with this novel. In all the novels I've read of the expansions of humans into space, I can't remember any other novel that postulated the sending of DNA rather than live, or at least suspended, people. It was an imaginative idea and Clarke explored it with some creativity.
I liked the book.
| Author | MacLean, Alistair |
|---|---|
| Publication | Garden City: Doubleday and Co., 1986 |
| Number of Pages | 222 |
| Genres | Fiction; Short stories |
| Keywords | World War II; Naval |
| When Read | February 1987 |
Fourteen stories and an autobiographical essay. About half the "stories" are apparently true historical essays relating incidents in World War II. Many are of the heroism of people going down on torpedoed or bombed ships and not a few involve bumbling incompetence or criminal irresponsibility at the top of the Admiralty. All of them are the kind of stories that celebrate quiet determination and self-sacrifice for a higher good.
The lead story, whose title I've forgotten, was about a cantankerous old fisherman who talks about nothing else but his two fine sons. One night, in the midst of a storm, they hear about two children lost at sea and another boat attempting to rescue them. The old seaman takes his boat and crew into the storm to help. They arrive on the scene to find two men in the water in one place and two children going down a hundred yards away. They can't save both so the old man heads for the children and pulls them in while the two men drown. The two men were his own sons, all that meant anything to him. He knew they were his sons but said later that if they risked their lives to save the children, they wanted him to do the same. So he did, for his sons as much as for the children.
There was also a perfect gem of a story about a big gold watch stolen from a sea captain and recovered fortuitously from the Arab thief in the water. He turns to his officers who always doubted the quality of the watch and said, "Waterproof, you blasted unbelievers. Waterproof!"
All are fine story tellers' stories. Real plots, climaxes, and so on. I liked most of them.
After all these years the story that I remember best is the one about the gold watch. We were living on Rockridge Road when I read this. Robin was 14 years old. I don't remember why she read this story, whether I urged it upon her or whether she was curious about what I was reading, but she was tickled by it and shouted out, "Waterproof, you blasted unbelievers. Waterproof!" at the end. I'm sure it was our interaction that burned that story, or at least its ending, into my memory.
| Author | Haldeman, Joe |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: St. Martin's Press, 1976 |
| Number of Pages | 186 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | March 1987 |
A Nebula Award winning story set in the future concerning first contact with extra terrestrial intelligence. Why it won is not at all clear to me. Perhaps it was a very bad year. Maybe my taste is not like other SF fans.
The science is very hard but also very uninformative, not at all like Clarke or Forward who aim to expand our scientific imagination rather than merely justify arbitrary events with scientific explanation.
I suppose I dislike any story where the hero is young and superior and gets great quantities of sex and is the only one whom the extra terrestrials can communicate with and who lives to an old, old, old age and makes enigmatic remarks at the end that indicate that he may not die after all.
I think I could name six SF stories with those same elements - the adolescent fantasy with no holds barred, no concessions to reality, no surrender to maturity. Me, me, me, me - presented in a context in which guilt is impossible and everything happens to work out the fantasy because it had to.
Like so many books, this one uses death and destruction as its means of claiming realism and maturity. But it's just adolescence grown old and ugly.
I see that in 1987 I managed to write up this book without saying more than a single sentence describing what it is about.
I read the book again in December 2001 and my notes from that reading explain what the book was actually about. I reread the old notes at that time and argued for higher tolerance in the comment. When I transcribed those notes into XML on November 24, 2012 I was, again, less tolerant. Now in 2016 I'm feeling tolerant again.
Joe Haldeman is only three years older than me and is still alive. At this stage in his life he probably doesn't care much about what I think of this book that he published 40 years ago. And in any case, my criticism of his book is not a criticism of him. I have come to believe that writers of popular fiction, whether they be Jane Austen or Joe Haldeman, serve a valuable function in society. H's is certainly popular and a lot of people, mostly young men I expect, have had hundreds of thousands or millions of hours of enjoyment from his work.
I was apparently wrong about his winning a Nebula award for this book. He did win four Nebula awards, all for different books in subsequent years. Perhaps the publisher put "Nebula Award Winner" on the cover of this book to increase sales and, as intended, I took the words to apply to the book rather than the author. He was a Hugo Award nominee for this book.
| Author | Dodson, Kenneth |
|---|---|
| Publication | Boston: Little Brown and Co., 1954 |
| Number of Pages | 508 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | March 1987 |
A novel of the war in the Pacific during World War II. It is about the crew of the Belinda, an assault transport designed for carrying men and supplies to remote beaches for invasions. Characters include MacDougall, a merchant seaman who works as officer, then navigator, then exec; Hawks, the neurotic and brilliant captain; Flynn, Ball and Gates, the ship's doctors, and a host of officers and enlisted men, both hardworking and courageous - and some lazy, petty, and mean.
They go through invasion after invasion, culminating in the invasion of Okinawa, where the Japanese go all out to stop them with hundreds of kamikazes, three of which hit the Belinda. The ship is saved by heroic efforts but Captain Hawks dies, dreaming of sailing his red-sailed sailboat into the sunset where his wife awaits him. Two fine doctors are also killed and many good men.
This is a major novel, very serious and very good. It's no silly war adventure. We feel for the men and even for the Japanese. I even felt for the mad Hawks.
I don't know if Dodson ever wrote anything else. The book has the flavor of something written to capture and discharge a personal experience - though it is competently written and full of the small, quiet scenes that show a serious concern for people and subject. Perhaps it will help to preserve the terrible experience of those times.
With the benefit of the Internet and the Wikipedia, I now know that Dodson did indeed serve on the "attack transport" Pierce in the war, serving in seven landings. The ship was not hit by kamikazes but was nearby when another was hit and did engage in combat, shooting at both enemy aircraft and ground forces and suffering casualties and light damage from a bomb near miss.
I watched the movie made from this book at some time in the past and again within the last two or three years. Hollywood changed Captain Hawks to be a little less crazy than he was in the book and, of course, simplified everything to fit in a two and a half hour movie. It was still a good movie.
It is much easier for me to deal with stories like this than stories like Maus, the next book I recorded here. The crew of the Belinda were armed, organized, supported, and able to fight the enemy on more than equal terms. Such men can wind up just as dead as Holocaust victims, and can go through equally harrowing experiences. But they have weapons and training and they can fight back.
| Author | Spiegelman, Art |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Pantheon Books, 1986 |
| Copyright Date | 1973-86 |
| Number of Pages | 159 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction; Biographical fiction |
| Keywords | Holocaust |
| When Read | March 1987 |
Art Spiegelman, living in New York in the 1970's, gets his father Vladek to tell the whole story of his life under the Nazis' reign of terror. It is all done as a cartoon, with Jews portrayed as mice, Germans as cats, Poles as pigs, and Americans as kindly looking dogs. The story alternates between contemporary New York, where Vladek is living with heart disease and constant bickering with his second wife Mala, and with his memory of the events in Poland in the late '30's and early '40's.
Vladek lived by his wits, hiding out, bribing people, using influence, trading, passing as a Gentile, always protecting his fragile wife and doing what he could for a dwindling handful of relatives and acquaintances. They hide in holes in cellars, in attics, in closets of Gentiles whom they pay. Gradually, more and more of the once wealthy family are caught. Eventually, he attempts to flee to Hungary and he and his wife are trapped, caught, and sent to Auschwitz.
We know in the story that both survive the war but the wife, mother of Art Spiegelman, commits suicide in America. We don't know why. The story is to be followed by a sequel covering the Auschwitz period.
All of this is the stuff of my nightmares. Obviously it is the stuff of Art Spiegelman's also. He copes too with his own legacy of neurosis and conflict which originated in the Holocaust. It is compelling reading.
I don't see an index card in my archive for any sequel to this book, though I do seem to remember that the story continued right through to the liberation of the camps and the appearance of the American dogs with the German cats under full control.
According to the Wikipedia, S suffered an "intense" nervous breakdown in 1968, possibly associated with his use of LSD. He would have been 20 years old. He spent a month in a mental hospital and, shortly after his release, his mother committed suicide "following the death of her only surviving brother."
Life was very hard for the Holocaust victims and the survivors were marked by very deep psychological scars. Elie Wiesel talks about the high rate of suicide among survivors. People who manifested incredible strength, determination, and will to survive sometimes did survive, but then sometimes could not bear the weight of nightmare memories, dreadful losses, and survivors' guilt. From what I read from Wiesel, Primo Levi (who committed suicide), Victor Frankl, and others, I have come to believe that the life experience that we bring to the subject of the Holocaust is just not large enough, not horrible enough, to encompass what the survivors have to tell us. We must accept that the impulse to suicide may become overwhelming and, for most survivors, life can never be fully restored.
| Author | Francis, Dick |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Harper and Row, 1974 |
| Number of Pages | 217 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | April 1987 |
Jonah Dereham, a bloodstock agent (horse buyer) is bullied and threatened by other agents to try to make him participate in their scheme to bilk buyers and sellers of horses. But instead of giving in, he gets mad and "bashes back", eventually routing the bad guys.
This is neither the best nor worst of F's books, but it is dependable, enjoyable, always satisfying Francis. There is a wealth of technical detail about horses and the horse industry, a reasonable plot and reasonable characters, and a hero who's real sterling qualities are not exceptional strength or brains or even courage, but an honest, hardworking, direct approach to life. The hero here, as in many of F's stories is a former jockey, a man with no college education, working hard as a small business/professional person, faithfully serving his clients and earning a good reputation. How could I not like such a fellow.
I read this book in less than 24 hours as a break from two more ponderous books. A delightful break.
I often read long and/or difficult books over a long period of time, interspersed with books like this.
| Author | Dai Houying |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Chinese |
| Translators | Wood, Francis |
| Publication | New York: St. Martins Press, 1985 |
| Number of Pages | 310 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | China |
| When Read | April 1987 |
A very unusual and interesting novel of a group of teachers at a university in Shanghai. Some had been condemned in the Cultural Revolution, some even as far back as the anti-rightist campaign of 1957. Others had been their accusers. Now all were working together in an uneasy and mistrustful accord.
The central character, Sun Yue, had been attacked and submitted passively, even though she was a rebel at heart. Her husband left her for an unsatisfying second marriage to a worker. Now her true love, a teacher who had been condemned in '57, was back. But she could find no happiness for herself and make no satisfactory explanations to her daughter.
The story is very subtle. People whom we initially condemn are shown along the way in a sympathetic light. Even those who are unredeemed are at least understood. All is said to be politics, then all seems truly to be only personal, then again in a still subtler sense, it does indeed seem political.
A good book from anywhere, it is extraordinary coming from China.
I was strongly attracted to the Cultural Revolution in the late 60's or early 70's. I read The Diary of Lei Feng and other books and magazines from China. I read the book about it published by Paul Sweezy and Harry Magdoff's Monthly Review. I don't remember the author's name or the exact title but it was something like The Cultural Revolution at Tsinghua University. It was very stirring to read about young people like me who were overthrowing bureaucracy. It stimulated me to be combative in the University of Illinois Philosophy Department - something that did me no good and was most unfair to the professors whom I considered to be bourgeois.
I can't say when my views changed. When the Gang of Four was overthrown in China I was in a quandary. Were they guilty of the crimes with which they were charged? Were their accusers right wing anti-revolutionaries and "capitalist roaders"? How could I find out?
The changes in my thinking were gradual. I began to take the criticisms of the Cultural Revolution seriously. I began to believe that many people were unfairly punished. Gradually I came to see that "re-education" in the countryside was not what I imagined it to be. I came to understand that uneducated workers were not superior to intellectuals just because they were workers, and that intellectuals were not oppressors just because they did no manual labor and maybe even spent years studying poetry or Confucian philosophy. It was a fairly short journey from liberalism to radicalism, and a longer journey coming back. But come back I did, even though I still have a high regard for the Marxist analysis of history and the Marxist criticism of capitalism.
But in any case, by the time I read this book, I was ready to read and accept it.
Here is a brief entry about Dai in the Wikipedia: "Dai Houying (1938 – 25 August 1996) was a Chinese woman novelist. Her best known work Stones in the Wall which tells the story of intellectuals named Zhao Zhenhuan, Sun Yue and He Jingfu in the Cultural Revolution, an event Dai experienced from the perspective of the persecutor, as a red guard. In 1971 she divorced her red guard husband and married the poet Wen Jie. Dai received her bachelor's degree of Chinese literature from East China Normal University in 1960." [Some Chinese characters have been edited out.]
That kind of information, brief as it is, was not easily available to me before the Wikipedia and the age of the Internet. If it's accurate, I am even more impressed that Dai, having been a persecutor of other intellectuals, came to an appreciation of what she had done and was sorry for it. At any rate, I presume that she was sorry for it and not just writing something to ingratiate herself with the new leadership of the Party.
| Editor | Herbert, Frank |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Harper and Row, 1981 |
| Number of Pages | 223 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories |
| When Read | April 1987 |
"Sandkings" by George R. Martin was a compelling story of a gluttonous man who buys a set of warring little creatures which he keeps in a tank and tortures them to make them fight. Eventually they escape and engulf and destroy him.
"Enemy Mine" by Barry Longyear is a much more attractive one about a human and an alien who become friends in the midst of a war. The human raises the alien's child on a remote planet. Eventually they are rescued, but return to societies that regard them both as outcasts.
"The Extraordinary Voyages of Amelia Bertrand" by Joanna Russ is the pleasantest of the lot about charming people in a train station who discover a sort of platform into a twilight zone of travel.
Finally, there was a monstrosity by Orson Scott Card called "Unaccompanied Sonata" which was so bad in its conception of society and music that I wouldn't finish it. Two other stories of little interest also appeared.
"The Straining Your Eyes Through the Viewscreen Blues" by Vonda McIntyre is a really excellent essay on what can go wrong in writing SF with advice on manuscript preparation.
It's possible for me to convince myself that I remember something of each of the first two stories, with a bit more justification for the one by Longyear. I read a novel by Longyear just recently, thinking that I had never heard of him before or read any of his work. I was wrong on both counts.
It's hard for me to say why I prefer reading novels to short stories. Part of it must be the heft and weight of the novels, the fact that there is more substance to them. In cases like this collection, it may also be that I find it unsatisfying to read some stories by authors I like and others by authors I don't care for, but feel compelled to read anyway since I like to finish every book I start. I expect that these book notes are also a significant factor. Writing up a short story collection is more work. Skipping some stories that I didn't want to read makes me feel guilty about writing up a book that I haven't completely read. Skipping writing about the book makes me feel that I haven't given myself credit for what I've done. Reading an individual short story and writing it up in an entry of its own in my book notes feels like cheating, treating as a book what is only a short story, though I do do it from time to time.
It's a little silly, but what can I do?
| Author | Troyat, Henri |
|---|---|
| Original Language | French |
| Translators | Heim, Michael Henry |
| Publication | New York: E.P. Dutton, 1986 |
| Copyright Date | 1984 |
| Number of Pages | 364 |
| Extras | index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Biography |
| When Read | June 1987 |
A biography of the author, Anton Chekhov
Chekhov is a very sympathetic figure. He was a doctor almost all hs life, only completely ceasing to see patients when his own tuberculosis made it impossible. He treated thousands of peasants at no charge. He contributed much of his own money, earned by writing, to the building of schools and hospitals. He collected books for the public library at Taganrog. He made an arduous journey to the penal colony on Sakhalin island, conducted a thousand interviews, and published his research. And of course, he was a great writer.
This is not a literary biography. There is some, but not a great deal, of analysis of Chekhov's work. It tells more of the development of his life, his career in medicine and literature, and his relations with family, friends, and lovers. There are a great many quotations from letters.
Although Chekhov died in 1904, I think of him as the most contemporary of the writers of his era - the most 20th century of them. He was not a romantic, an aristocrat, or an idealist.
See my diary entries on Chekhov and on his stories.
And of course see also the notes on the other books I read with plays or stories by Chekhov.
| Author | Chekhov, Anton |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Russian |
| Translators | Dunnigan, Ann |
| Publication | New American Library, 1964 |
| Copyright Date | 1896 |
| Number of Pages | 64 |
| Genres | Theater play |
| When Read | June 1987 |
A group of people in a summer resort area are looking for different things from the local production of a play. The young playwright wishes to break with convention and revolutionize the theater. The young ingenue he pursues wishes to be a famous actress and wants to be young forever. Her lover, a famous writer, doesn't want much of anything. In the end, everyone is disappointed, frustrated, but no wiser. The young playwright kills himself.
As in Uncle Vanya, this play is about futility, about people who have no purpose in life but to go on.
| Author | Tolkien, J.R.R. |
|---|---|
| Publication | |
| Copyright Date | 1937 |
| Number of Pages | 300 |
| Genres | Fiction; Fantasy |
| When Read | July 1987 |
This was the famous Tolkien fantasy that has gone through 77 printings, inspired hundreds of imitations, and willl no doubt go through 200 more - perhaps as long as people continue to read novels in English.
I suppose it had its charm, especially in the beginning when we are introduced to the furry footed fellow in his warm and cozy hobbit hole home. But ultimately, and after not very long, I was disappointed. The difficult treks and narrow escapes became tedious. The unredeemably evil goblins and wargs and spiders became uninteresting. The search for treasure seemed pointless.
I'm glad I read it. I'm glad I know what such a book is like. But I have little inclination to read another.
Fifteen years later I did read another, three others to be precise. I read the Lord of the Rings trilogy in 2002. My comments there explain more about that endeavor.
| Author | Leonard, Elmore |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Delacorte Press, 1974 |
| Number of Pages | 254 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | July 1987 |
A mystery story about a 48 year old auto parts factory owner who had an affair with a young girl. The girl is kidnapped and then killed and he is approached, first for ransom, and then for blackmail when evidence is manufactured to frame him for the murder.
The three villains are quite well done. There is a fat loser who runs a hole in the wall strip joint, a black gun happy maniac, and a sadistic porno movie house manager who engineers the deaths of the other two and kidnaps the man's wife as well.
Surprisingly, the mark's marriage and job are handled quite believably. We become interested in his wife and his role as factory owner, battling an arrogant union representative and a sabotaging employee at the same time as he is handling his own deadly affairs.
All in all, it is a properly done page turner / pot boiler with no pretensions but with a reasonable amount of style.
This is it, the very first Elmore Leonard novel that I ever read. It was followed, as of this writing, by 21 more. I didn't know at the time how Leonard was developing and how appealing his later books would be to me.
This book was a more conventional mystery than his later books. He was at the beginning of his transition from western to mystery writing. The main character, if I remember correctly, had been a fighter pilot in World War II and was near the upper age limit for conventional action heroes. That struck me at the time as something of a throwback to an earlier era when experience in the war lent stature and credibility as a man of action to a character, especially considering that I read the book in 1987 when a veteran would have to have been at least 64 years old. None of L's later heroes were WWII vets. He was also different in that he got very angry and was determined to get revenge whereas the later heroes tended to stay very cool.
In any case, I liked the book enough to read Bandits the next year in 1988. Five years then went by and I read Stick in 1993. That must have sealed it for me and I began a steady diet of L's books.
At this time in my life, all the books that I read were on paper and almost all came from the public libraries. Each visit to the library was a bit of an adventure, looking for new books and poring over the shelves for any appealing older ones that I had missed. The pickings weren't nearly as extensive as they are today but they kept me busy.
| Author | Gilman, J.D. |
|---|---|
| Author | Clive, John |
| Publication | New York: Simon and Schuster, 1977 |
| Number of Pages | 317 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | World War II; Aviation |
| When Read | August 1987 |
During World War II the Germans formed an air unit flying captured allied aircraft to be used in special missions. These included: mixing in with American bombers and shooting them down, picking up or delivering agents and supplies behind enemy lines, and so on.
The novel is an entirely fictional account of two pilots, one British and one American, who track down KG200's main base, return to England, and are able to help break up a planned bombing raid aimed at killing Winston Churchill.
An adequate war/adventure story. Nothing particularly good or bad.
I was reading lots of war adventure stories in those days, and the days before, and the days after, and today. Then as now, the main subject of such stories was World War II, though I also read a lot of Napoleonic War sea stories, all by British authors of course, and some American Civil War or Revolutionary War stories - though I probably read more of those in my youth.
At the time, and as with the Dick Francis mystery I read after this book, it didn't seem to require much comment.
| Author | Francis, Dick |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Pocket Books, 1985 |
| Copyright Date | 1975 |
| Number of Pages | 223 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | September 1987 |
Steven Scott, an inventor/designer of toys, has been cheated and then beaten up by a horse trainer he had engaged for his race horses. It turns out that the fellow was cheating him on everything from small change to switching horses on him.
After long planning and with the help of all his friends, he pulls a horse switch on the trainer that costs the trainer and his crooked cronies - a vet and a gambler - everything they have and lands them in jail.
A very typical, very standard, and quite satisfying Dick Francis story.
| Author | Asimov, Isaac |
|---|---|
| Publication | Garden City: Doubleday, 1972 |
| Number of Pages | 288 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | September 1987 |
Set about 100 years in the future, this is a story of two separate cultures, human and alien, each facing possible destruction.
Physicists in both worlds discover a point of contact across which matter can be moved from a universe with one set of laws to one with another - where that matter is unstable and hence a source of enormous energy. But there are risks which few are willing to face.
There are three main sections, one on the earth, one in the other universe, and one on the moon.
The other universe is populated by three sex creatures - "Rationals", "Parentals", and "Emotionals". Sex consists in "melting" together - which can eventually lead to the formation of a "hard one", a single individual of great mental capacity. About 100 pages are devoted to these beings - in an imaginative construction.
The last section, on the moon, is traditional hard science SF, well done in the Asimov manner.
Oddly, contact between the two civilizations is not a goal of either side.
It's possible that I'm confusing this book that I read so many years ago with a different one, but I seem to recall that the aliens lived in the sea and aged via a process called "rocking up" in which an alien settles down to the bottom of the sea and slowly turns into a rock. None of the mobile aliens knows much about what happens to the rocks. Are they conscious? Are they even alive? It's possible to communicate with them for at least a while after the process begins but they become less and less communicative and finally will not respond.
I also seem to recall a scene in which a character swimming in the sea realizes that he, she, or it needs to see something in the air above the surface of the sea, something related to humans. The alien figures out what it needs and fashions an eye out of its own tissues. It thrusts the eye above the surface of the sea and takes a good look.
I read a lot of Asimov at one time but eventually went through most of his SF novels and ran out - something not easy to do with a man who wrote or edited more than 500 books. A high speed writer as well as reader, he could sit down at his desk and churn out a novel or other book very quickly, turning out at least one a month for a dozen years.
I liked his work.
No, the book about the sea creatures is a different book, possibly not by Asimov. I'll come across it some day.
| Author | Goncharov, Ivan |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Russian |
| Translators | Hogarth, C.J. |
| Publication | Cambridge, MA: Robert Bentley, 1979 |
| Copyright Date | 1858 |
| Number of Pages | 317 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Russia |
| When Read | October 1987 |
A story of a young gentleman, Ilya Ilyitch Oblomov, who has completely given up his life to sloth. He does not work, does not read, never goes out, never thinks, doesn't even put on his own shoes. He started of as a normal enough boy but grew up in a rural household in which the same people did the same things (nothing really) day after day and year after year. He too became infected with inertia.
Oblomov meets an attractive and energetic young woman who falls in love with him and sets out to make something of him. For a while he tries, but he cannot overcome his inertia. Although he loves her, he just can't be bothered to do anything about it. She marries his friend instead and he winds up marrying his landlady - who takes good care of him and enables him to live his non-life until he finally suffers a stroke from lack of exercise and dies.
G clearly cares for this character. All of the other characters are in love with Oblomov's noble and generous soul. But for us here and now, it's hard to see why.
There are marvelous descriptions here of the idiocy of rural life, and fine stylized characterizations of Oblomov, his father, his servant Zakhar, and of the indolent, lethargic way of life.
When I read this book I thought that it was peculiarly Russian. I had an idea in my mind of Russian gentry living in comfort, though not necessarily luxury, in old houses, attended by long standing family servants, with income provided by serfs. It was not wealth that characterized them. They may have been living on very moderate means. It was idleness that characterized their lives, idleness in the midst of an unchanging social and economic landscape, far from any urban change.
This, more than any other, is the book that created that image in my mind.
| Author | Le Carre, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977 |
| Copyright Date | 1977 |
| Number of Pages | 533 |
| Genres | Fiction; Spy |
| When Read | November 1987 |
Another Le Carre masterpiece, taking up the story after Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Smiley tries to find out what areas the mole Bill Haydon steered the Circus away from. The information he gets from these "back bearings" leads him to send a part-time agent, Jerry Westerby, the honourable schoolboy as his Italian neighbors call him, to the far east. The story goes back and forth between puzzling things out in London, and action in the field in Hong Kong, Vientianne, Saigon, Pnomh Penh, Bangkok, and elsewhere in South East Asia in the last days of the Vietnam War.
The picture of crumbling neo-colonialism in Asia is brilliant as are the characterizations of Smiley and Westerby - men of great intellect and deep feeling, lost, each in a different way, in a maze of politics and spy business which no longer bears much relation to their original idealized desires to serve their country - but within which they are hopelessly and inextricably enmeshed.
There is a subtlety and fine detail in L's writing which is unmatched in this genre. In no other writer do we feel the complex interaction of emotion and intellect, person and history, tradecraft and common sense - as in Le Carre. These books are truly extraordinary achievements.
There is a plot summary of this novel on the Wikipedia. Reading it just now I found that I remembered virtually nothing of the very complicated plot. What sticks with me is the sense in all of the Le Carre novels of complexities within complexities, and motives beneath motives. I always finished one of these novels a little bit stunned and exhausted.
| Author | Chekhov, Anton |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Russian |
| Translators | Magarshack, David |
| Publication | Hammondsworth: Penguin Books |
| Copyright Date | 1885-99 |
| Number of Pages | 281 |
| Extras | Introduction by David Magarshack (the translator) |
| Genres | Fiction; Short stories |
| When Read | November 1987 |
"Grief", "Agafya", "Misfortune", "A Boring Story", "The Grasshopper", Ward 6", "Ariadne", The House with an Attic", "Ionych", "The Darling", "Lady with the Lapdog"
I have written extensively about many of the individual stories in my diary over a several month period and will not try to analyze them here.
Checkhov is clearly a master of all the elements. He is able to present a character and develop our view of him over a significant range - always giving us a far deeper understanding at the end than the beginning. His plotting is very effective. He can handle an afternoon or a course of years with equal naturalness and success. His characters are well differentiated and very clearly drawn from life. Everything is managed with marvelous economy.
Most of all, after all technical effects are noted and appreciated, I am most impressed with his penetrating understanding of people in his society. His view seems clinical. Characters are examined objectively and their fundamental flaws exposed, and then we go on, more aware of the truth, no more able to change it.
Read over a long period, after reading Troyat's biography of Chekhov.
I found notes in five diary entries, extensive notes in a few of them, that tried to analyze the decisions that Chekhov made as a writer as well as the intent of the stories. This was a period when I was particularly interested in writing as well as reading and tried hard to think about things from the point of view of the author.
I liked Chekhov a lot. He seemed to me to have a more modern sensibility than the other nineteenth century Russians that I read, whom I also liked a lot. He seemed somehow more European and less Russian than Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Goncharov (as Russian as they get), or Turgenev. Many writers that I read made me want to be a writer too. Chekhov was definitely one of them.
| Author | Schulberg, Budd |
|---|---|
| Publication | Cambridge, MA: Robert Bentley, 1979 |
| Copyright Date | 1941 |
| Number of Pages | 303 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | December 1987 |
Sammy Glick, born Schmelka Glickstein, gets a job as a messenger boy at age 17 in a New York newspaper. by 30 he's the director of a major Hollywood movie studio. He makes it by tremendous hard work, ruthless exploitation of others, and a genius for perceiving where his own interest lies in every situation.
The story is told by Al Manheim, who worked with him in NY and followed him to Hollywood to be a screenwriter. Al, like Sammy, is a Jew, as are many of the other characters. There is some examination of immigrant Jews in the section on Sammy's roots.
S attacks Hollywood on multiple levels. There are hacks and exploiters like Sammy, sickening union busting techniques, Wall Street tycoons who finance the studios and love Sammy's ingratiating talk about cutting costs and running the studio like a business.
S's writing is an odd mixture of popular style and sophistication. It reads easily. It's mostly very straightforward and uninspired, but occasionally very sharp and powerful.
I think this was Schulberg's most successful book, though The Harder They Fall was also excellent.
| Author | Richter, Conrad |
|---|---|
| Publication | Time-Life Books, 1965 |
| Copyright Date | 1936 |
| Number of Pages | xxii + 118 |
| Extras | New introduction by the author. |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| When Read | December 1987 |
A very sentimental "miniature epic" story of a cattle rancher in New Mexico whose beloved range lands are broken up by farmsteader immigrants from the East. Colonel James Brewton owns the biggest herds on public range lands. He is a much larger than life figure - strong, silent, physically big with "fire in the back of his eyes." He marries a refined beauty from St. Louis, Lutie, who bears him three children but leaves home and disappears for 15 years because she couldn't stand life in the lonely prairie. One of her sons is the image of Brice Chamberlain, lawyer, D.A., later Judge, and champion of the nesters - and arch enemy of Brewton. The boy grows up a hell raiser and eventually an outlaw who is tracked down and killed. Lutie returns for his funeral and stays again with her husband.
The story is told by Hal Brewton, nephew of the Colonel and unabashed partisan of the Colonel's interests. He makes us feel love and loyalty for the man - as if it would be an honor to stand beside him in his battles.
The story is full of sentimentality and romance but is told with a marvelous economy and perfect attention to the elements of story telling. It has been remarked that it reads like a movie script, and it does, with images of the grasslands and the fire in Colonel Brewton's eyes which can't easily be seen in real life but can be created by the cinematographer.
The story is highly satisfying in spite of its obvious simplicity and transparency.
Richter was noted for writing novels of the American frontier. He was good at it and his sensibilities matched those of the reading public in the 1930's, 40's, and 50's, which had been educated in the grandeur of frontier history by Hollywood.
| Author | Ballard, J.G. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Washington Square Press, 1985 |
| Copyright Date | 1984 |
| Number of Pages | 375 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction; Autobiography |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | December 1987 |
B states in a Forward, "Empire of the Sun describes my experiences in Shanghai China during the Second World War, and in Lunghua CAC (Civilian Assembly Center), where I was interred from 1942-1945. For the most part this novel is an eye-witness account.
The eleven year old son of a well to do British factory owner or director in Shanghai gets separated from his parents on the first day of the war, during the Japanese seizure of Shanghai. Finding his parents disappeared, he lives from hand to mouth for four months - in houses of missing people and with two American sailors who hope to sell him, until finally the Japanese grab him and send him, eventually, to a camp. Life up to and in the camp is a tremendous struggle for food, warmth, and survival. Most die. But the boy, Jim, survives. He does odd jobs for people. He tries to ingratiate himself with anyone who can help.
The boy develops his psyche to meet the situation. He thinks of the camp as the only place where he can be safe, which is essentially true. He dreams of growing up to be a fighter pilot in the Japanese air force. Although the Japanese have him in the camp, he sees them in part as his protectors. They are the only strong ones. He admires their kamikaze pilots - young boys like himself, only a few years older, who fly off to die for a dream. Life and death becomes all mixed up. Death is so common. Disease, delirium, flies feeding on wounds, blood and pus, pointless cruelty, coolies worked to death, beatings, starvation - these are everyday occurrences. There is also civilization - Mr. Maxted, the architect and father of Jim's friend before the war, Dr. Ransom, Mrs. Philips the missionary - all of whom make sacrifices to help Jim survive. It is an extraordinary story.
British, Americans, Kuomintang, Japanese, all contribute to the terrible city of Shanghai. It is clear that only the Communists can save it.
I no longer remember why I made that last comment. I presume I meant that it was clear to me, not to Ballard.
The book, and Ballard's experience under Japanese oppression during the war, made a strong impression on me.
There was a pretty good movie made of this book.
| Author | Sladek, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | Daw Books, 1985 |
| Copyright Date | 1983 |
| Number of Pages | 254 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | December 1987 |
A perversely funny story of an anti-social robot whose main goal is to kill people and foul up human society. The story begins with his murder of a sweet little girl and framing of an old disabled war veteran for the crime. It ends with his acquittal in a criminal trial and a successful run for high office. In between there is the history of his gradual transformation from exploited sub-human slave to independent being who asserts his superiority and exacts his revenge through a secret life of crime.
Sladek is very good at this sort of thing. he has a flair for mixing ordinary human personality with imaginatively conceived robot consciousness to give us something that, although not realistic at all, is very interesting; something that engages us.
I liked it.
This is the first of three novels by Sladek that I read, all within a two year period. I like his writing and, in general, I like books about robots. Most books about robots are anthropomorphic and Sladek's are no exceptions, but I still like them. I like the idea, in principle, of creatures that don't age or can be refurbished if they do, that have the possibility of growing more capable and intelligent, that don't need to sleep, and that can pursue intellectual pursuits without the distraction of the inherited mammalian needs of us humans. And if they are decent and well meaning to us humans, so much the better but if, like the robot of this novel, they aren't, well, the book was still interesting.
I've got access to a few more Sladek stories and I may have a look at them.