Category Archives: First Monday Book Day

First Monday Book Day

First Monday Book Day: The First Musketeer

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Going to an airport with only a few pages left on your book is a rookie mistake. Which I'm happy to have made recently. The Boy and I were flying back from the ABQ via Lost Wages, laying over for a couple hours. So I wandered into the book store and found this inviting biography of Alex Dumas, swashbuckling father of the famous novelist.

Tom Reiss's biography garnered him the 2013 Pulitzer. It's certainly a good read so far (~150 pages in). Dumas, the son of a ne'er-do-well French nobleman, the Marquis Alexandre Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie and a black slave woman, Marie-Cessette Dumas, in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (later Haiti). Davy had been sponging off his younger brother, Charles, until they had a falling out in 1748. Antoine disappeared into the wilderness with three slaves and lost all contact with his family for 30 years. Charles eventually returned to France to take over the family estate, under the presumption that Antoine had died. In 1773, both Charles and their youngest brother, Louis, died. Somehow, word of this got back to Antoine, who then apparently sold Marie-Cessette and Alex's two siblings, but took Alex with him back to France to claim the estate in 1776.

France was an odd place in the late 18th century, both racist and progressive. Alex was raised as the legitimized son of Antoine, thus earning a title of "Count" as the son of a Marquis. He ws trained as a gentleman and swordsman at the academy of Nicolas Texier de la Boëssière, learning his swordcraft from the most famous swordsman of the day, the Chevalier de Saint-George, who also happened to be a mixed-race black man from the Caribbean. But Alex, as a care-free knockabout (taking after the old man), eventually clashed with his father over money (he was spending it fast, while his old man was going broke of his own accord), and, in a huff, ran off to join the army.

Rather than pressing his case as the more-or-less legitimized son of a nobleman, and thus receiving a commission, Alex joined up as a mere enlistee under his mother's name, Dumas, in 1786, only 13 days before his newly re-married father kicked off. The old man had sold the estate and squandered the fortune, so there was only an empty title to be had anyway. Alex entered service with the Queen's Dragoons and was posted off in a provincial town, where, as luck would have it, he boarded with the family of a local inn-keeper and rising Republican. Dumas became engaged to the innkeeper's daughter and went off to serve the emerging Republic. He quickly rose through the ranks and in October 1792 accepted a commission as the second-in-command of the "Black Legion." In July 1793, he was appointed brigadier general in the Army of the North and, by September was commander-in-chief of the Army of the Western Pyrenees. These were exciting times, with French generals being denounced and executed left and right. But eventually he would win the (guarded) respect of Napoleon and be appointed commander of the cavalry for Napoleon's campaign in Egypt.

I've got a long ways to go in this book. It has some flaws -- fundamentally misinterpreting Rousseau's famous opening words from The Social Contract ("Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.") as fundamentally a commentary on slavery in the age when that quote really has almost nothing to do with the institution of slavery at all. But Reiss is an entertaining storyteller and the book is a wonderful introduction to the history of the French Caribbean, pre-revolutionary France and, of course, the Revolution, the Terror, and the rise of Napoleon. Dumas was fated to have a tragic ending -- dumped by Napoleon in Egypt, imprisoned in Taranto and all but forgotten for two years before being freed, a broken man.

Dumas' imprisonment provided much of the inspiration for his son's famed novels, such as The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers. This book helps bring the historical Dumas back into clearer focus. The book may not reach the majesty of a Robert K. Massie or the scholarly qualities of the Roommate, but I highly recommend it as a fun and informative read.

What are you reading?

First Monday Book Day

First Monday Book Day: One baad Mother

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I have never been a major consumer of Poul Anderson's prodigious output, but I remember with great fondness one novel of his that I read in my youth -- the masterful Tau Zero. In retrospect, that book was so great that I really can't explain why I haven't read everything he ever published.

Add to that the fact that Anderson grew up on a farm in Minnesota and earned a B.A. in physics from the U, and again, I'm surprised I haven't explored more of his oeuvre. So when I happened upon this volume on the discount rack at my local used book store, I figured I could afford 50 cents for a hardback.

Mother of Kings is much more an historical novel than a fantasy work, although the dust jacket had some blurb trying to compare it to Marion Zimmer Bradley's magnificent feminist take on the Arthurian legends in The Mists of Avalon. It centers on the life of Gunnhild, the historical "mother of kings" as wife to Eric Bloodaxe, king of Norway in the mid-10th century.

The book plays off the Icelandic Sagas of the 13th century. The first couple of hundred pages (or, how far I've gotten so far) are thick with faux-period speech and turns of phrase, and there's lots of hewing and hacking and wenching to be found. The thickness of the patois has abated somewhat as I've gotten deeper into the book, but it is a bit annoying. And with all of the familial references (soandsosson) and obscure-to-me titles (hersir, jarl, etc.), the bear grease got a little thick. But, like I said, it seems to be lightening up as I get deeper into the book.

Gunnhild is a conniving beeyatch from a tender age, determined to use whatever skills at her disposal to rise in the world (and succeeding). Some of the characters hint at being sympathetic ones, but those hints don't seem to last too long.

If you have a hankering for some Norse historical novelization, this might be up your alley. So far it has held my attention. What are you reading?

First Monday Book Day

First Monday Book Day: Paranoia Strikes Deep

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Mother Nature has a deathgrip on the Far West this week, with a forecast high of 112 deg. F. for my neck of the woods today, after 109 on sunday, 104 saturday, and 101 friday. The high school jazz camp closed out Friday evening with a gig at the local pizzeria, playing in an outdoor courtyard. Amazingly, only one kid got sick. The crowd plowed through about 20 gallons of ice water, along with lots of beer and 'za.

This miserable weather did not stop me from my appointed task, however. I know how much this post means to all of you...

So, yea, I finished a book this month. Actually, I finished two books: Last month's selection as well as this one's. Both just so happened to have been co-written by Larry Niven. I guess I'm on a kick.

This month's pick is one of the prequels to Niven's 1970 classic, Ringworld. Juggler of Worlds was the second of a sequence of prequels. Luckily, it did not matter. This book stands on its own as an entertaining, well-crafted and complete story, particularly if you have not read a number of Niven's prior Known Space works with which this one overlaps/intersects (for a decidedly less positive interpretation, see this capsule Kirkus review). I think we've pretty well established that I am easily entertained.

Anyway, I found the adventures of paranoid-schizophrenic genius superspy Sigmund Ausfaller to be quite entertaining. Earth, for not-well-explained reasons, suffers from what its world government regards as severe overcrowding and some fascistic governmental interference in individual liberties, despite possession of FTL technologies that enable interstellar colonization. Interspecies politics and machinations are the focal point of this volume, but it is not nearly so deadly dull as that might seem.

What are you reading?

First Monday Book Day

First Monday Book Day: Beowolf in the skies

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Hey, what what! I'm back with a book post, and on time for a change.

This month's selection was a page-turner from those icons of hard-core, oft-times military-glorifying sci fi, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, along with that odd duck of sci fi, an African American male, Stephen Barnes, a frequent Niven collaborator, also well-published in his own right. Published in 1987, The Legacy of Heorot is very much and very self-consciously a retelling and retooling of Beowulf, set on a far-away world where a small cadre of human colonists are trying desperately to establish a foothold. (indeed, Heorot is the name of King Hroðgar's mead-hall and palace).

Like I said, a page-turner. The pacing is taut with tension, both sexual tension between the Beowulf-protagonist and another character, and dramatic tension as the story's perspective shifts between protagonist and alien antagonist(s). As is typical with Niven/Pournelle stories, the science is pretty solid and used to good, dramatic effect. The action is frenetic and compelling, but well-interspersed with dialog, descriptive exposition, and character development. This book would make a tremendous foundation for a summer blockbuster horror flick. I wonder why no one has tried to film it yet?

What are you reading?

First Monday Book Day

First Monday Book Day – Hugo Awards (and others)

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It's that time again, to survey the various science fiction and fantasy awards and see what kinds of interesting short fiction we can find.

2013 Hugo Award Nominees

2012 Nebula Awards

2012 British Science Fiction Association Shortlist

I've read the majority of the short story nominations for those three awards. The three up for the Hugo are all excellent. My favorite is probably "Immersion" by Aliette de Bodard. It's about a society that uses avatars to keep harmony between conqueror and conquered, and the identity confusion that results.

Of all the awards, my favorite story might be "Limited Edition" by Tim Maughan about a group of hoodlums going after a load of precious cargo.

I'll put more extensive links in the comments if people are interested, but that should at least get us started on some book talk.

First Monday Book Day

First Monday Book Day: No Foolin’, It’s a Whole New Ballgame

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Yea, yea, it's April Fool's, which means that most of you (or at least the two of you who even thought about it) were assuming that my threat to deliver a First Monday post today was just another joak. Ha. Joke's on you. I actually did read a book this month.

In fact, I read it in about two days: the late Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time prequel, New Spring.

Jordan, who had the poor manners to die before completing his opus, somehow managed to squeeze in the time to knock out this short novel, which was published in 2005. It was a light, enjoyable read.

The book focuses fairly heavily on the relationship between Moiraine Damodred and Siuan Sanche, with a secondary story attempting to develop Lan's character a bit as the plot leads up to the point at which Moiraine takes Lan as her Warder. If you are addicted to the Wheel stories, you've probably already read this one. If you are not and never plan to be, this one is forgettable. If you enjoy the Wheel stories and are twiddling your thumbs waiting for the next book to arrive, you might enjoy this one.

Overall, the writing style is pretty easy. As I said, I blew through this one in a couple of days. My main problems with the book are its implausibility (within Jordan's universe, obviously). Moraine and Siuan are presented in this volume as young Accepteds, in their early 20s or perhaps very late teens, at the time of the Dragon's rebirth. This means that within far less than 20 years, Siuan has to rise to the Amyrlin Seat not via a civil war within the Aes Sedai. That. Would. Not. Happen. Siuan is presented in the series later as a mature, powerful, imposing personality, all of which possibly could come to pass in that time frame, but it just isn't long enough to be credible.

For her part, Moiraine comes across as incredibly naive, petulant and, well, arrogant. Nothing like the character she becomes.

Jordan introduces the Black Ajah in this book, but in ways that I found pretty unsatisfying. And the book wraps up entirely too conveniently and quickly (hard to believe for a Jordan novel). As one reviewer put it, "The term padding comes to mind soon and often as New Spring blooms. Perhaps it should have been left a short story, and perhaps only Wheel of Time junkies will genuinely enjoy it." I think that comes pretty close to the truth. The book fills in some background material, tells a mildly interesting set of stories, and is over with pretty quickly. Not Jordan's best effort, but I didn't feel too cheated by my purchase at a used book store.

What are you reading?

First Monday Book Day

First Monday Book Day: Now You See Me…

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Back in college I took a two-semester course called "Great Books," wherein all we did was read and discuss (and I suppose there were some papers?) great books.  The professor provided a list of 100 great books (it wasn't the Time 100, or any other known list, just the professor's own, but there was obviously a substantial overlap with such lists) and we read maybe 12 - 15 books a semester.  A couple times a year I'll pick up one that I haven't read yet.  Someday I'll get through the list.  Maybe. Continue reading First Monday Book Day: Now You See Me… →

First Monday Book Day

Monday Book Day: Difficult Reads

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I like pretentious things. I like difficult things. The higher the concept is, the more willing I am to try and appreciate what the author/artist/musician was going for. This past month was the most prolific reading month I've had in quite a while, and I read three books in particular that bore out my penchant for difficulty.

The Fifty-Year Sword by Mark Z. Danielewski

Danielewski made this book into an art project. The illustrations are hand-stitched (in the more expensive versions of the book at least) and the effort undertaken to make the experience of this book a visual one as well as a textual one was something that I thought worked very well. The story is short and perhaps not as engaging as it could be; at a party, five orphans are mesmerized by a mysterious storyteller and the box he brings as a prop to tell the story of the titular sword. The book is narrated by the five orphans years later, with different colored quotation marks denoting which of them is recounting the story at that time. The layering of stories and storytellers is something that Danielewski loves to do, but I think he' done it better elsewhere.

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

I put this book down after 100 pages and I wasn't sure I was going to pick it back up. The violence was unrelenting, unending, and awful. I didn't know that I wanted to suffer through another 250 pages of that. It sat there for two weeks or so before I started up again. When I started back up again, something clicked. It's the story of the kid who joins up with a gang in Mexico/Texas in the 1850s that cuts a bloody path through the West toward the ocean. But it's more about the kid who ends up having to respond to evil, to extermination (of people, of feelings, of knowledge, of everything). McCarthy writes this all in a way that is amazing. I've heard it described as biblical and also as though he's trying way too hard to make it sound like important literature. Both are accurate. Like I said, I like pretention, so I ate it up. I'm really glad I stuck with it, the judge is a great character pitted against the kid.

Satantango by Lazlo Krasznahorkai

Maelstrom is the word that comes to mind. The members of a small, dying, Hungarian village are caught in a rainstorm. Rumor gets around that a savior is coming. Every chapter started with a sense of disorientation, that slowly resolved to something resembling clarity once the point of view was revealed. Every sentence battered and threw me around before finishing half a page later. The rain never lets up in the story and the deluge of the writing matches that well. The structure of the book is really well done (the chapters in the first part are numbered 1,2,3,4,5,6: the second part is numbered 6,5,4,3,2,1 and there is a good reason for it). It's not an uplifting book by any means, but the first half left me in awe, and the second half didn't quite match that, but it was very good. I know there are a couple people here who like Roberto Bolaño, and I think this would fit that same category.

Three books with big aspirations, and I enjoyed all three, although for different reasons. I think that "Satantango" was my favorite that I read this month, it's difficulty ended up being the most rewarding. Share your thoughts on difficult literature or start a discussion of what you read this past month.

First Monday Book Day

First Monday Book Day: It’s the End of the World as We Know It

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Comes the end of the year, the last First Monday of the year. With the world ending on Dec. 21 and all, my selection for this month seems entirely appropriate: Charles C. Mann's 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

This 2006 best-seller by the science writer and Atlantic Monthly contributor was a huge, popular revelation when it was released. It brought to a mass audience a major revision of our understanding of Native Americans' impact on the environment, the depth and richness of Native cultures, and the utter (and largely unintended) devastation wrought on Native populations by Western diseases.

Mann compellingly musters the academic evidence to argue that Native populations were huge prior to the arrival of Westerners, that those populations had highly sophisticated economies, polities and cultures in many cases, and that many Native cultures had dramatic impacts on the landscape, from sculpting and expanding the Great Plains, to building magnificent pyramids, to cultivating a complex ecosystem in the Amazon, to crafting a sophisticated trading culture in the Andes.

Perhaps most importantly, Mann offers us lay readers a new understanding of the relationship between the Indians and the early settlers in North America. As the New York Times review of the book put it,

According to some estimates, as much as 95 percent of the Indians may have died almost immediately on contact with various European diseases, particularly smallpox. That would have amounted to about one-fifth of the world's total population at the time, a level of destruction unequaled before or since. The exact numbers, like everything else, are in dispute, but it is clear that these plagues wreaked havoc on traditional Indian societies. European misreadings of America should not be attributed wholly to ethnic arrogance. The "savages" most of the colonists saw, without ever realizing it, were usually the traumatized, destitute survivors of ancient and intricate civilizations that had collapsed almost overnight. Even the superabundant "nature" the Europeans inherited had been largely put in place by these now absent gardeners, and had run wild only after they had ceased to cull and harvest it.

These are important cultural adjustments that will probably take another generation or more to fully be accepted by our national psyche. This is no guilt-ridden, lefty apologia, but rather an honest attempt to help us make better sense of our real past in this hemisphere. The book is fairly well-written, if non-linear in its presentation. It won't keep you up at night with riveting story-telling, but it has a lot to teach, and a lot to ponder. I would have appreciated Mann taking Jared Diamond's work more seriously (there are only two, brief mentions of Diamond's work in the book, even though much of the story he tells fits closely with Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel explanations for European conquest of the New World), and eminent historian Alan Taylor delivered some trenchant criticisms in his WaPo review, but I nonetheless found the book to be tremendously interesting.

Shifting gears, I return to the end-times theme. It's the end of the year, which is a time of lists. And since this a book post, my lists are about books. Duh.

Here are two biggies: Slate's best books of 2012 and the NY Times 100 Notable Books of 2012 list. Ho ho ho. I can honestly say that I have not read a single book on either of those lists (what, no A Dance With Dragons??? PrePOSterous!!!!). But I bet that in five years, I will have read a handful of them.

What are you reading, or at least buying for someone you love?