#book
History of the Bible
I read The History of the Bible this weekend and enjoyed it a lot. I have a little collection of books about theology now, not because of any interest in faith but because I think it's an interesting vein of history and culture. The bible is so often quoted, wittingly or unwittingly, in popular culture and everyday speech. Here are some good excerpts from the book. The first I've included because I like the readings of the Old Testament that give God a personality. In this case it's a taunting condescention. I also just think the language here is amazing....
The bedsheets may be in use elsewhere?
I'm reading the epic biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker, at the moment. At the moment it's the 1920s and Moses is trying to wrestle swathes of land off the robber barons who've built their manor houses on Long Island, so that he can build extensive park systems and a parkway to connect them to the city. It's a mammoth book but I'm really enjoying it. The 1920s is an interesting era in American history not just because of my teenage obsession with The Great Gatsby and the associated milieu, but because it's also a period when the Klan...
Haruki Murakami Challenged On Women
— A Feminist Critique of Murakami Novels, With Murakami Himself, Mieko Kawakami in LitHub
James Joyce’s grandson and the death of the stubborn literary executor
— James Joyce’s grandson and the death of the stubborn literary executor, B.D. McClay in The Outline
Flights
I just finished Flights by Olga Tokarczuk. I really enjoyed it without really knowing what to make of it. It’s structured in a stream-of-consciousness way, with distinct sections (which aren’t quite chapters) that sometimes relate to what’s come before with a dream logic. Here are some of my favourite sections, or at least a couple that got me thinking. — “The Tongue Is The Strongest Muscle”, p183 I’ve felt various things about my only fluent language being the lingua franca of much of the world, but this is the first thing I’ve read that captures what a shallow, wasteful thing...
My Top Books of 2019
These are the books I most enjoyed reading in 2019, compiled from my Goodreads Reading Challenge.
Wasps
I read the Penguin Classics translation of Wasps by Aristophanes the other day. It's a satirical play about how an older generation of Athenians who fought in the Peloponnesian War were taken in by a pandering demagogue called Cleon. To grasp what's happening and get the jokes, you have to know a little bit about the context of Athenian politics at the time and how the jury system worked. But all of that is explained in a very quick note at the beginning of the edition. The point of this note though is that it's funny, really funny! It's broad...
Eugenics & Statistics
There were lots of interesting and terrible things in Superior: The Return of Race Science by Angela Saini but here's something that stood out. Eugenics was a widely respected field of study around the time of the turn of the 20th century, well before the rash of state-sponsored genocide programs we now associate with Nazis etc. University College London established a Eugenics Record Office, that aimed to study races of man and conct the best ways to hone the (presumably white) superior race to perfection. Of the many people who were both active in the field then, and still respected...
Madame Tussaud's Tall Tale
I started reading Little by Edward Carey without knowing what it was about. Soon it emerged that it's a fictionalisation of the life of Madame Tussaud based on her memoirs. It is typical of a revolutionary French narrative in that it involves a exploited child orphan, the beautiful disarray of Paris at the time, and finally: no shortage of chance encounters with significant historical figures that begin to stretch the reader's credulity. I haven't finished the book yet but the young orphan has already had personal interactions with: I'm sure that Madame Tussaud had a fascinating life that brushed up...