I really enjoyed Frederic Durbin's "Lovecraftian Western," The Country Under Heaven. Most of all I liked the protagonist, Ovid Vesper, who has a terrific voice that I enjoyed following the story with/through. There's a good mix of the mundane and the mysterious, and sometimes those are the same thing (such as when he learns the "writing machine" a seer is using is a newfangled thing called a typewriter, common in the East). I'll read this again in a few years.
A Legacy of Spies - John le Carré The back story of the Spy Who Came in from the Cold operation, investigated years later by the Secret Intelligence Service.
Reading the Bible on Turtle Island: An Invitation to North American Indigenous Interpretations, which the back jacket describes as a book that "affirm(s) Creator's presence with Indigenous people since the beginning. {Authors T. Christopher Hoklotubbe and H. Daniel Zacharias} delve deeply not only into the stories of Scripture but into the stories of Indigenous communities, including the complicated colonial history in north America. In recovering these rich histories and reasserting the dignity of Indigenous cultures, {this book} offers us a fresh reading of Scipture that celebrates the assets, blessings, and insights of Indigenous interpretation that speak invaluable lessons. . . " etc. etc. Pretty decent book
White Trash by Nancy Isenberg. This book is subtitled, the 400 year history of class in America. I'm excited to read this.
This is a great read: Paying Calls in Shangri-La: Scenes from a Woman's Life in American Diplomacy. It's part the Diplomats and Diplomacy series from the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training; this one is published by Ohio University Press. Judith Heimann and her husband John formed on of the US's first "tandem couples" where both were in the Foreign Service. She's got a great narrative voice and is the author of a couple other books which I'd like to check out. And thanks to Inter-Library Loan, I shall.
I'd be curious to hear your reaction; I remember liking it but not enough to ever re-read it so I sold/gave away my copy.
Ohio University Press has some great sports titles - particularly in Africa, from the colonial era to the modern diaspora of athletes. I gave this one a whirl recently: Todd Cleveland's Africa and the Olympics: Winning Away from the Podium is probably best read by specialists, but there are so few of us that it seems mis-directed. Each of the chapters could really help a novice or someone who is an Africanist writ large but not a sports person, but they go deep (the research is impressive) in a way that won't benefit the generalists. I had hoped it could be useful in class, but the depth is an issue. A grad student, though? Absolutely useful there.
Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King, a book by the University of Maine's Stephen King Professor of English Literature, Caroline Bicks. Bick, a Shakespeare scholar has been a professor at King's alma Mater for a few years before she finally meets King. Eventually, King opens up his archives to her, and this book is about her re-reading his earlier books and seeing how and why they were edited into their final shapes. Part autobiography, part old fashioned bibliographic research. Thought it might work for a class, but it's a bit advanced for undergraduate classes (and the King books it covers, for the most part, are a bit too long for an undergraduate class on horror fiction. Incidentally, it should win awards for design: the hardback is created to look like a distressed, well-read, much passed around paperback, which is apt for this book.
Marc Bloch: History as Resistance. A collaborative book on Marc Bloch, a major historian of the medieval period who revolutionized the study of that era by drawing on other social sciences—such as sociology, anthropology, and geography. A combatant in both world wars, he wrote an immediate analysis of the 1940 French defeat—published posthumously as *Strange Defeat*—which has become a classic that is still read and discussed today. A persecuted Jew, he chose to join the Resistance in 1943. Arrested and tortured in Lyon in 1944, he was executed by the Gestapo in June of that year. Exactly 80 years later, he was inducted into the Panthéon, joining the likes of Voltaire, Rousseau, Victor Hugo, Émile Zola, Jean Jaurès, Jean Moulin, Marie Curie etc.
I took a Medieval history class in college and read a short book by him on technological developments (I think it was a selection from Land and Europe in Medieval France, but that was 45 years ago. The gut made the volition of the stirrup fascinating. Had no idea until a few years ago that he died in the Resistance.
What's quite remarkable is that Bloch's analyses of medieval society are still largely valid today. Take serfdom, for example. And the method he invented with a few others is also relevant: comparative analysis (France vs. England, for instance), the use of sociology and collective psychology to study the history of mentalities (completely new a century ago, commonplace today), and so on.
I finished three space opera-esque trilogies this year. Series one: Dennis E. Taylor's "Bobiverse" features the consciousness of one Bob Johansson, a computer programmer who contracted with a company to preserve him upon death, dies young, and wakes up a long time later as the property of a theocratic American government involved in a space race. Uploaded into a (potentially) self-replicating space probe, he's off right as the Earth essentially destroys itself via warfare which follows him outward in the form of similar consciousnesses. Bob is great. As in, likable and capable and moral without being preachy. He's who I hope would try to figure out our future (or be president now for that matter). Different versions of Bob have different strengths and weaknesses - they are clones but not identical - and their "Bob Moots" when they meet up are interesting. The prose isn't the greatest. But it's fun for sure.
Now here's one where the prose is magnificent: Sebastian Barry's Old God's Time. I haven't read anything by him prior to this but he's a well-known Irish author - he served as the national Laureate for Fiction - often in contention for the Mann-Booker Prize. I knew none of this, just happened to catch the title on the spine on a shelf adjacent to the circulation desk at the university library. University libraries aren't known for their fiction collections but the whole shelf was fiction. This was the only book with no jacket; the plain grey and title just sort of stuck out, and it was a reasonable length, so I grabbed it. Tom Kettle is a recently retired detective, contented, often sitting and thinking back on the powerful love story of him and his deceased wife, June. And on his kids, who it isn't clear are also dead or just away; he spends much time ruminating but some things are clearly imagined, or dreamed, or something. Some colleagues stop in and while he's reluctant to be brought back in, he is surprised to find how fondly he thinks of them and his old chief. There's a kind of equal amount of hope and love and utterly horrible in the book. But the prose is so, so glorious and Tom so deeply loved his wife that that's what sticks.
Eminent Jews: Bernstein, Brooks, Friedan, Mailer, an interesting collection of four biographies clearly modelled on Lytton Strachey's great Eminent Victorians by NYT reviewer David Denby. He had me at Mel Brooks (I did not know that the working title of Blazing Saddles was Tex X), but all were interesting (and I also did not know that Betty Friedan grew up in Peoria, IL, and went to a high school I visited for football games and wrestling meets. I hope he has a sequel in mind that covers, say, Allen Ginsberg, Lenny Bruce, Barbara Streisand, and... I don't know, Sammy Davis Jr.
As part of my reading for America 250, this classic: Bruce E. Johansen's Forgotten Founders: How the American Indian Helped Shape Democracy. It is narrower than that, since it focuses more tightly on the Iroquois and Benjamin Franklin. This came out in 1982 and while many historians had mentioned the link in passing in different works, Johansen made an overt connection.
Currently started Laura Purcell's The Silent Companions. Very much a love letter to gothic horror, mining from some classics of the genre such as The Turn of the Screw. Which was turned into the 1961 adaptation The Innocents, one of my all time favorite (horror) movies. This features newly widowed and pregnant Elsie Bainbridge, forced to go live on her now deceased husband's country estate, known as The Bridge. With only her late husband's mousy and somewhat strange cousin Sarah as a companion and greeted by servants that are varying degrees of uncouth and resentful as well as reclusive and openly hostile locals. Only it is the increasingly creepy atmosphere within the manor house that mostly troubles Elsie. Only about fifty pages into it so far, but it's clear that Purcell is a great admirer of the genre.
The Maidens by Alex Michaelides. This is a tale of a suspected murderer and the therapist who tries to catch him.It should be an interesting read.
The second of the three space opera-esque series: Alex White's Scavengers series has a fairly unique conceit, in that racing and magic intersect with galactic space intrigue. There are some interesting ideas but it's also reminiscent of Firefly. I liked the first book a whole lot, with the other two getting so large in scope and the escapades increasingly (seemingly) inescapable that my enjoyment waned a bit/
For a Moment, We Were Here: A City of Student... by Lincoln Chan, a pen name for bigsoccer poster @Excape Goat . Damn fine portrait of life among Asian an Asian American students at the various colleges and universities in and around Boston c. the mid-1990s. The focus is obviously on the Asian and Asian-descended students, but pretty much anyone who has attended college will recognize the particular nature of that time of their life. Good depiction of college life around Brookline and Kenmore Square, too. Damn glad he posted an announcement in the random thoughts about books. In the unlikely event I have an Asian or Asian American student looking for a good memoir, I'll be able to recommend this one (I say "unlikely event" because, in the 15 years we've worked at this college, my wife and I have had 4 Asian American students in our classes).
Blanketmen - An Untold Story of the H-Block Hunger Strike - Richard O’Rawe The author was in Long Kesh prison for years, and was the IRA press officer in the prison during the 1980 and 1981 hunger strikes.
What's So Great About the Great Books: Why You Should Read Classic Literature (Even Though It Might Destroy You), an excellent book about the classics, unique among the genre in that the author Naomi Kanakia doesn't care at all about the role of the great books in higher education. Rather, she focuses on adults reading these books for their own edification without arguing that doing so will guarantee enlightenment, etc. Basically, Kanakia, an author of YA and literary fiction, as well as an active blogger is writing as a fan of the classics, giving several well deserved shout outs to Clifton Fadiman's "Lifetime Reading Plan" and other such approaches. She also addresses many of the "political" arguments against the great books, which coming from a trans woman of color is quite interesting.
Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America - Michael Luo Very good history of some painful episodes in U.S. history.