It's a Thursday reading thing, right?
Jul. 11th, 2024 04:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vaznettiNo, I know, but on Wednesday we were traveling from Aachen back to Oxford, with a stop for some tourism in Brussels. All perfectly straightforward until some kind of typical Paddington chaos caused a mass cancellation of trains and a complication of the penultimate leg of the trip. At least we got home in time to see The Goal.
But I have been reading and am in the middle of two books.
Fiction: Jack the Bodiless, Julian May. This is the first book in May's less-good second series which is a prequel to her first, but I read the whole trilogy in a rush when it came out and recently thought it would be interesting to revisit it. I vaguely remembered it as set in a semi-dystopia but also that the rebellion against the system was very clearly in the wrong, and I also vaguely remembered that May is an author whose weird complexes about sex and Catholicism are on display at all times. The second thing is very true -- I am obviously not a Catholic but I think this is a strongly Catholic book but in a weird fringe way as opposed to a how Catholicism normally operates way (unlike, say, Russel's The Sparrow which is also very Catholic but in a different way; for one thing in May everybody else thinks Catholicism is great.) And May has some strong ideas about sex and reproduction, that is for sure; I had forgotten her thing about incest, but that is also present here. May's incest-and-reproduction thing in a nutshell: character learns that they and their sexual partner have fewer than the recommended number of grandparents between them, and respond by insisting that at least those grandparents were genetically superior so it's really important for them to have children. Really. I do like these books but they are so bizarre and sketchy.
The setting is... I guess I'd say its a utopia with dystopian features? Some of the complaints the rebels have are reasonable to my eye but a lot of them are just humans being cranky and paranoid and over-ambitious; the book hasn't actually engaged with the parts of the system that seemed really dystopian to me (like assigning colonies based on "ethnic dynamism," whatever that is supposed to be.) Maybe it will do so in the later books? But I also think that there is a huge gap between what May thought she was doing in these books and what I think she's doing, so who knows?
Nonfiction: How the World Made the West, by Josephine Crawley Quinn. So far I'm still firmly in material that I already know a lot about (it's the 7th century BCE and things are great if you're an Assyrian) but my observations at this point is that this is an excellent book and I recommend it highly. It's engagingly written and erudite at the same time -- Quinn never simplifies the evidence but her presentation of it is always clear. This is still Mediterranean history, at least as far as I've got, but Quinn puts the Phoenicians in the central place where they belong, and reminds the reader throughout that the ancient world was a world of connections, not isolated cultures. I am never certain whether it's common knowledge that the Phoenicians were involved in lots of the things we give the Greeks credit for "inventing", but that is very much the case. So my impression that the "civilisational theory" that Quinn is arguing against is kind of a straw man may be mistaken.
As always, there are details of Quinn's interpretation that I don't agree with but overall I think this is a really stunning work of history, pulling together a lot of different threads into a lively and coherent narrative and showing how all the details she brings in matter and contribute to the whole. I hope I keep enjoying it as the narrative moves forward; it also makes me want to read her history of the Phoenicians. [obligatory disclaimer, I guess, that I have chatted with the author.]
But I have been reading and am in the middle of two books.
Fiction: Jack the Bodiless, Julian May. This is the first book in May's less-good second series which is a prequel to her first, but I read the whole trilogy in a rush when it came out and recently thought it would be interesting to revisit it. I vaguely remembered it as set in a semi-dystopia but also that the rebellion against the system was very clearly in the wrong, and I also vaguely remembered that May is an author whose weird complexes about sex and Catholicism are on display at all times. The second thing is very true -- I am obviously not a Catholic but I think this is a strongly Catholic book but in a weird fringe way as opposed to a how Catholicism normally operates way (unlike, say, Russel's The Sparrow which is also very Catholic but in a different way; for one thing in May everybody else thinks Catholicism is great.) And May has some strong ideas about sex and reproduction, that is for sure; I had forgotten her thing about incest, but that is also present here. May's incest-and-reproduction thing in a nutshell: character learns that they and their sexual partner have fewer than the recommended number of grandparents between them, and respond by insisting that at least those grandparents were genetically superior so it's really important for them to have children. Really. I do like these books but they are so bizarre and sketchy.
The setting is... I guess I'd say its a utopia with dystopian features? Some of the complaints the rebels have are reasonable to my eye but a lot of them are just humans being cranky and paranoid and over-ambitious; the book hasn't actually engaged with the parts of the system that seemed really dystopian to me (like assigning colonies based on "ethnic dynamism," whatever that is supposed to be.) Maybe it will do so in the later books? But I also think that there is a huge gap between what May thought she was doing in these books and what I think she's doing, so who knows?
Nonfiction: How the World Made the West, by Josephine Crawley Quinn. So far I'm still firmly in material that I already know a lot about (it's the 7th century BCE and things are great if you're an Assyrian) but my observations at this point is that this is an excellent book and I recommend it highly. It's engagingly written and erudite at the same time -- Quinn never simplifies the evidence but her presentation of it is always clear. This is still Mediterranean history, at least as far as I've got, but Quinn puts the Phoenicians in the central place where they belong, and reminds the reader throughout that the ancient world was a world of connections, not isolated cultures. I am never certain whether it's common knowledge that the Phoenicians were involved in lots of the things we give the Greeks credit for "inventing", but that is very much the case. So my impression that the "civilisational theory" that Quinn is arguing against is kind of a straw man may be mistaken.
As always, there are details of Quinn's interpretation that I don't agree with but overall I think this is a really stunning work of history, pulling together a lot of different threads into a lively and coherent narrative and showing how all the details she brings in matter and contribute to the whole. I hope I keep enjoying it as the narrative moves forward; it also makes me want to read her history of the Phoenicians. [obligatory disclaimer, I guess, that I have chatted with the author.]
