Berke Breathed. Bloom County Babylon (1986)

     Berke Breathed. Bloom County Babylon (1986) Ah, Bloom County: a place where all the American stereotypes live together in more or less happy harmony. If only real life were like that. This book is now 26 years old, yet almost all of it could be written today. The only clues to its age are the pop-culture references (eg, Star Trek instead of Mad Men) and the technology (the Banana computer looks like an Apple IIe). I have most of the Bloom County books, my children and grandchildren like them too, and we reread them at intervals. **** (2012)

Ellis Peters. The Hermit of Eyton Forest (1987)

     Ellis Peters. The Hermit of Eyton Forest (1987: #14 in the Cadfael chronicles). Three plot lines: a cruel master hunts for an escaped villein; a fierce matriarch wants to marry her newly orphaned grandson to a neighbouring squire’s daughter in order to consolidate the land; and a bloodied horse indicates the murder of Queen Maud’s messenger. Peters interweaves these with her usual skill, showing how human frailties, vices, and virtues threaten injustice and worse. Cadfael’s skills and his friendship with Hugh Beringar help these plots come to satisfactory conclusions, wherein justice is tempered with mercy, and the law yields to justice. As a puzzle, the mystery ranks low; as a visit to Cadfael’s world it ranks high. We fans of the soldier turned monk and physician like the (somewhat sanitised) version of late medieval history that Peters serves up. *** (2012)

Edmund Cooper. Transit (1964)

     Edmund Cooper. Transit (1964) A nicely conceived variation on the cast-away motif: Richard Avery finds himself transported to an alien place, along with three others, who like him are failures. There’s Tom, a public school man who is incapable of a human relationship; Mary, a clerk who thinks of herself as plain and plainly useless; and Barbara, a TV personality who has retreated behind a mask of glamour. Richard himself still grieves over the death of Christine many years before. He’s hardly able to decide to get up and perform the chores needed to enable him to do his job as an best accidentally competent teacher. These four must not only mature and become the people they were meant to be, they must also compete against four other humanoid beings who have been placed on the same island as themselves. Why? Because the immortal beings who placed them there want to know which of the two races should be nurtured as their heirs in the business of guarding and guiding this sector of the galaxy. The humans win, of course, but just barely.
     Cooper’s conception is better than his skill in conveying it. He’s a writer who tells rather than shows. What he mostly lacks is the ability to do much more than sketch his characters, but the sketches are convincing enough that we care for them, and are pleased when they reveal themselves capable of change and growth. They must all find that they are not only capable of loving but deserve to be loved. They must learn how to forge a community. And of course when the test comes, they must be willing to risk death in order to save their community from destruction by the competitors. **½ (2012)

Lyn Hamilton. The Etruscan Chimera (2002)

     Lyn Hamilton. The Etruscan Chimera (2002) The narrator, Lara McClintoch is looking for an extremely rare antiquity: a bronze Etruscan sculpture of a chimera. After various machinations, which have apparently advanced her to favoured buyer status, she returns to the chateau where the owner keeps the treasure, only to find him dead, apparently having fallen into an underground strong room.
     It was at this point that I stopped reading. The writing is competent enough, but the tone too cutesy for my taste. The characters are shallow, both as narrative devices and as persons. The whole thing feels too much like a lightweight TV drama, of the Jessica Fletcher (Murder She Wrote) type, albeit updated for early 20th century consumption, with hints of sex, alcohol, and other vices. I don’t mind fluff, but it has to be fluff confected to my taste, which this wasn’t. I’m sure there are people who did enjoy this book. The novel is labelled “an archeological mystery”, but the setting is actually the antique business. Hamilton appears have a following (this is one of a series) and a reputation: the cover blurb announces that she’s been nominated for the Arthur Ellis Award. I won’t hold that against her. *½ (2012)

Debra Jean Moncur. Winter Treasures (1997)

     Debra Jean Moncur. Winter Treasures (1997) A collection of paintings featuring winter. It’s not quite clear why this book was assembled, nor exactly who the intended audience is. The artist bios include references to art galleries that represent them, which indicates that the book was at least in part an attempt to drum up some trade. The pictures range in quality from quite good (three examples) to Sunday-painterish (far too many) to plain kitsch. A few convey the sense that the subject and its handling meant something to the artist, most look like what they are: more or less competent attempts to paint a picture by people who have some notion that an artist’s job is express some feeling. It isn’t. I agree with Dr Johnson’s opinion: the purpose of art is to make familiar things new and new things familiar. Or, in this case, to make us see what we’ve always seen as if we hadn’t seen it before.
     The introduction is laced with solecisms and vaguely romantic assertions of the significance of nature to the artist. I happen to have strong feelings about art
and for nature, too, but I’ve never understood why revealing that I have them should somehow make my work better than if I expressed, say, a preference for soot and mortar. * (2012)
    Update 20191025: Typo corrected, and winter scene photo added. The photo is copyright by me.

Robert Darnton. The Great Cat Massacre (1984)

Robert Darnton. The Great Cat Massacre (1984) Subtitled And Other Episodes in French Cultural History. A collection of Darnton’s essays on the subtitle subject: academic, and apparently intended for a reading list in French history. (My 2nd-hand copy has blue highlighter marks throughout). The cover blurb quotes Newsweek’s opinion this is a “brilliant work of popular history”, a somewhat excessive judgement. The essays are interesting, but not, I think, to most of the public. I learned a lot, mostly along the lines of how hard it is to recover the mind set and unspoken assumptions of our ancestors. Visiting the past entails a culture shock.
     I have some experience of culture shock, having been taken to England in 1945, and spending time alternately there and in Austria until 1954, when we emigrated to Canada. This perhaps makes it easier for me to imagine a different way of thinking, but there is still an impenetrable barrier, which no amount of reading of historical documents will remove. But Darnton does make me aware of just how much of a difference in worldview there must be.
     The essay on a reader’s response to Rousseau, which quotes and interprets an enthusiast’s letters to his book seller, is probably easiest to apprehend: we all know what it’s like to enjoy or endure an enthusiasm for a particular author, and fantasise about what (s)he is really like: to believe that one has somehow come to know a person intimately whom we can encounter only through their printed words. In this case, I found myself once again irritated by Rousseau, who I think has much to answer for. He made sentimentality respectable, no, worse, he encouraged people to believe that having the right attitude was more important doing the right thing.
     Oh, about the title essay: Darnton re/deconstructs a cat massacre, and shows us that it was a not too veiled attack by the workers on their masters and mistresses, whom they despised as not only taking a large profit from their work, but also as less than qualified in the metier. One of the things that we may have difficulty understanding these days is a society in which the middle and upper classes not only thought of the lower classes as below them socially, but thought of them as hardly human beings. It’s no wonder that resentment triggered brutality of a type we can barely imagine.
    Overall, a book worth reading, but I recommend reading it one essay at a time over several weeks. **½

K. C. Cole. Mind over Matter (2003)

     K. C. Cole. Mind over Matter (2003) Cole wrote a column about science for the L. A Times for many years. This book collects a number of them. She writes well, explains clearly, and ends almost all her columns with an implicit question: How does this bit of science affect you? The answer often is, Much more than I ever realised. It’s clear she loves to think about science. I liked this book a lot. It’s like eating potato chips: once started you can’t stop. I’m not sure how well her explanations will resonate with people who are not already “entranced with science”, since any explanation assumes some prior knowledge in the audience. I know too much to be able to judge how much is needed to read Cole well. Nevertheless, I recommend this to any one who wants to spend a few hours in the company of a delightful mind. It’s difficult to choose a sample, so I’ll just find one at random
     In terms of the energy required, there’s no difference between accelerating and decelerating.... This is a good thing to remember the next time you’re struggling to break a bad habit. Whatever energy you put into creating the bad habit is the amount of energy you will need to push it out the door. Which implies that because we want to break the habit faster than we acquired it, getting rid of it will feel a lot harder than getting it.
     Good book. **** (2012)