Poll for What to Read in 2011

I'm trying to set some reading goals for this year, and I came up with the idea of reading the complete works of four authors, one per season. So far, I'm thinking Albert Camus, C.S. Lewis, and maybe Plato, or Ray Bradbury. Perhaps Susan Howe, even though I've read a couple of her books for classes.

Do you have any suggestions for which four authors I should choose?

Guards! Guards!

I listened to this story on the road between my family's home in Colorado and El Paso, Texas (my mother's hometown). This was our family's first encounter with Terry Pratchett's Discworld. Guards! Guards! had everyone in the van shrieking with laughter.

Terry Pratchett's style of humor is coarser than that of P.G. Wodehouse, more literary than that of Dave Barry, more heartfelt than that of Douglas Adams. The storyline - which involves, among other things, a simple but honest youth who was raised by dwarfs, the unsavory City Watch that he joins, a magic book stolen from a university library, and dragons - meandered somewhat, as if the author had toyed with various possible plot developments and decided to keep whatever bits amused him.

What endeared Guards! Guards! to me the most was the way that the author conveyed the wonder of books. Large collections of books, Pratchett says, can bend space and time. Someone initiated into the secret knowledge of librarians can venture into "L-space", which connects all libraries everywhere. His descriptions suited my sense that books in general, and libraries in particular, are magical.

(The recording from Isis audio books was excellent, too. Reader Nigel Planer brings to life a large cast of characters.)

I'm curious - are any of you acquainted with Pratchett's Discworld novels? If so, do you have a favorite? More generally, what do you read when you're looking for a good laugh?

Black Like Me [John Howard Griffin, 1960]

Rest at pale evening...

A tall slim tree...

Night coming tenderly

Black like me.

-from “Dream Variation” by Langston Hughes

This book instills a need to explain every assertion I will make, because I cannot be misunderstood at the expense of this man’s journey and the racial truths he explores. I have dallied in writing this review, partly in trepidation of not providing due justice to the topic. I fear that my writing will be too dull or flat and you will miss the intense emotions that accompany this narrative.

I will do my best.

In 1959, John Griffin leaves his family in their Texas home to travel as a black man, in the South, for six weeks. John first visits New Orleans, where he darkens his skin with medicine, sun lamps and dye. Then he moves on to Mississippi and then Atlanta. He is financially supported by Sepia Magazine, for the promise of writing articles detailing his discoveries. Those are the basics. This is an easy read in terms of syntax and vocabulary - but you may find yourself pausing to digest the information. Let me take a moment to encourage you to do that - don’t rush this subject matter. Because it seems easy to understand and this is a topic we’ve all heard much about, it would be easy to dismiss as nothing-new-here.

Now, since this is already lengthy, I will write of two incidents that struck home.

The sad irony-
White men would often write want ads expressing desire for sexual acts with black women because it was widely believed that black people were sexually immoral and engaged in abnormal sexual behavior. (Griffin gives a shocking account of hitching rides with white men at night and the explicit sexual interrogations he was sure to encounter from these ‘respectable’ men). The ads promised the greater the ‘perversion,’ the more money to be made. White men would post these advertisements in the black male restrooms and give a reward to any black man that brought a black woman willing to prostitute herself. I can say it no better than Griffin, “In these matters, the Negro has seen the backside of the white man too long to be shocked. He feels an indulgent superiority whenever he sees these evidences of the white man’s frailty...He cannot understand how the white man can show the most demeaning aspects of his nature and at the same time delude himself into thinking he is inherently superior. To the Negro who sees this element of the white man’s nature- and he sees it much more often than any other- the white man’s comments about the Negro’s alleged “immorality” ring maddeningly hollow” (pg. 82-3).

More irony -
“You afraid I’m a cop or something?” “The unpardonable had been said. The white man, despite his protestations of brotherhood, had made the first dirty suggestion that came to his mind. He was probably unaware of it but it escaped none of us. By the very tone of his question he revealed his contempt for us...He had become just like the whites he decried.” Ok, you guys, this got me. I really strive to find the right, moral balance to racial relations. I struggle often with what I should be thinking or feeling or doing in this area. Maybe this sounds foreign to you, but here in the ‘buckle of the Bible belt’ (Louisiana), racial tensions are very much present. Not in the same sense they were in 1959, of course. But in the way this paragraph describes, in the subtleties and nuances of our language, tone, posture, etc. And I -full of pride at my grand ideals of equality and education on the matter- find myself, as I leave the drive-thru, trying to remember what the black guy that took my order at McDonald’s looked like. And I can’t remember. But I can remember the white men and women and the black women. (I realize what this may sound like to someone from a more integrated area. And it gives me a strong desire to plead for understanding that I'm not racist, yadda yadda). Despite my outward spurning of prejudices, I grow increasingly disturbed with just how ingrained these beliefs may be. Will no amount of awareness lead to purification of thought and feeling ? At this point, I feel the best I can hope for is a strong grasp and consciousness of the issue.

There are many more gems in this book, and I recommend it. I am quite intrigued to hear of your stories, especially with the geographical differences among this group.

The Lantern Bearers

So I'm totally biased because I love Rosemary Sutcliff and have read this book before, but over Christmas break I decided to revisit it and was not disappointed. The Lantern Bearers is one of several in Sutcliff's Green Dolphin series that loosely follows a Romano-British family through the late Classical and early medieval periods. All of her books are beautifully written, but these in particular show an incredible craftsmanship and gravitas that I've found from few other authors.

The Lantern Bearers focuses specifically on a member of this family in Britain at the end of the Roman era. Aquila, a Decurion, watches the last legions sail from Rutupiae since they have been recalled to defend Rome one last time. Left in Britain, he is captured by the invading Anglo-Saxon-Jutish hordes, and the story unfolds from there.

The first and last chapters of the book are probably the most beautiful at least as far as writing style is concerned. Sutcliff has an amazing gift for bringing medieval Britain to life through the tiniest sensory details. Her Britain is luminous with everyday occurrences, the movements of people groups taking place in context of people's simple, mundane affairs.

Perhaps that's one reason why this book is so wonderful: as a reader, you are given a very keen sense for what it might have been like to watch one empire crumble and invading barbarians take over your homeland. Humanity's universal transience is upheld alongside the courage of individual men and women, forming a uniquely lovely  but bittersweet reading experience.

The Nibelungenlied

This is a version of the legend on which Wagner's ring cycle is based. A. T. Hatto has translated the thirteenth-century poem - purported to be the greatest of German medieval epics - into businesslike prose. The narration is brisk and direct, with no use of suspense. Indeed the grim ending is given away in the first chapter:

In the land of the Burgundians there grew up a maiden of high lineage, so fair that none in any land could be fairer. Her name was Kriemhild. ...The time came when she was wed with honour to a very brave warrior... What terrible vengeance she took on her nearest kinsmen for slaying him in days to come! For his one life there died many a mother's son.

The doomed husband-to-be is Prince Siegfried, who travels to Burgundy when he hears of Kriemhild's beauty. With his matchless strength and his cloak of invisibility, Siegfried helps Kriemhild's brother, King Gunther, to win the fierce Icelandic queen Brunhild (and subsequently to woo her, in a scene which pretty thoroughly offends both chivalrous and feminist sensibilities). In return for this help, King Gunther agrees that Siegfried may marry Kriemhild.

This happy state of affairs does not last, for Siegfried impudently stole a ring and a girdle from Brunhild while he was invisibly assisting Gunther. A spat between the two queens reveals Siegfried's possession of the items, which has unseemly implications. Brunhild's allies murder Siegfried in retaliation for the scandal. Kriemhild eventually achieves her revenge, and the epic ends with a bloodbath that leaves over a thousand dead.

Reading the Nibelungenlied gives a glimpse into an alien culture, a society in which it is common courtesy to crowd around and jostle strangers to show that they are welcome. What caught my attention was the poet's emphasis on clothes. Clothes are brought up constantly: for example, a wedding is shown to be a grand event because every guest is wearing brand-new clothes. Before anything important can happen, the first step seems to be to put on splendid clothes.

Clothes are important for us, too. But as far as I can tell, in the Nibelungenlied clothes are not valued for self-expression, or fashion even. Clothes are important solely and supremely as a signal of wealth; of status.

And status has weighty implications for medieval kings and their vassals. So maybe a lesson that can be drawn from the epic is the potential fragility of the feudal system. After all, the catalyst of the entire tragedy is Brunhild's confusion about Siegfried's social standing. Tampering even slightly with the network of loyalties that is supposed to maintain stability has violent consequences.