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Wednesday Reading Meme
Jul. 27th, 2016 07:37 amWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
I finished Barbara Hambly’s latest Benjamin January mystery, Drinking Gourd, which gave me nightmares and also the vague guilty sense that I’ve somewhere lost the thread. The series has gathered up so many secondary characters that I can no longer keep track of them all: I’m fairly sure, for instance, that I ought to remember Jubal Cain, but I had forgotten him completely. As well as Levi Christmas. I think an entire book revolved around Levi Christmas, and I don’t remember him for beans.
I actually have this problem with a lot of mystery novels - I often don’t remember whodunnit or how they done it or any of that - but in most mystery series, this doesn’t matter, because things more or less reset with every book. (I mean, the status quo does change in the Charles Lenox mysteries, but verrrrrry slowly.) In Benjamin January, the status quo changes practically every book, which was fine when I was reading the whole series all in a row but is clearly going to be a problem now.
I also read Rachel Field’s Calico Bush, which is a historical fiction novel about the early pioneers in Maine. It has lots of nice landscape description and some fun details about things like dyeing cloth (and some unfortunate stereotypes about American Indians; it was published in 1931), but the characters never really popped for me.
What I’m Reading Now
I’ve been reading Jared Diamond’s The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?, “traditional” in this case meaning “hunter/gatherers,” agriculture being a new-fangled invention that has occupied a few paltry thousand years of human existence.
There is obviously a lot of food for thought in this book. The thing that struck me the most is Diamond’s comment that the current Western custom of having small children sleep in rooms alone is basically unique in human history, and would strike lots of hunter-gatherers as child abuse - I think just because this is such a basic fact in American culture that it never would have occurred to me to think of it that way; it’s not good or bad but just how things are done.
It was something of an “ah-ha!” moment for me, because I think it’s easy to look at the past and say, “How could these people not see that X thing is terrible and wrong?” - but of course seeing it as wrong would require seeing it in the first place, and if something is just the way a thing is done and has always been done (this is not actually the way things have “always” been done in the West, but it’s been the fashion among middle class people for ~150 years which in terms of human memory is always), then most people don’t see it at all. It’s not a custom that could be changed; it’s just there, like the air we breathe.
What I Plan to Read Next
I’m on a bit of a Ngaio Marsh kick now, so probably another one of those. Maybe Killer Dolphin? Even though there are apparently no actual murderous dolphins in the book, which I think we can all agree is a misfortune.
I finished Barbara Hambly’s latest Benjamin January mystery, Drinking Gourd, which gave me nightmares and also the vague guilty sense that I’ve somewhere lost the thread. The series has gathered up so many secondary characters that I can no longer keep track of them all: I’m fairly sure, for instance, that I ought to remember Jubal Cain, but I had forgotten him completely. As well as Levi Christmas. I think an entire book revolved around Levi Christmas, and I don’t remember him for beans.
I actually have this problem with a lot of mystery novels - I often don’t remember whodunnit or how they done it or any of that - but in most mystery series, this doesn’t matter, because things more or less reset with every book. (I mean, the status quo does change in the Charles Lenox mysteries, but verrrrrry slowly.) In Benjamin January, the status quo changes practically every book, which was fine when I was reading the whole series all in a row but is clearly going to be a problem now.
I also read Rachel Field’s Calico Bush, which is a historical fiction novel about the early pioneers in Maine. It has lots of nice landscape description and some fun details about things like dyeing cloth (and some unfortunate stereotypes about American Indians; it was published in 1931), but the characters never really popped for me.
What I’m Reading Now
I’ve been reading Jared Diamond’s The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?, “traditional” in this case meaning “hunter/gatherers,” agriculture being a new-fangled invention that has occupied a few paltry thousand years of human existence.
There is obviously a lot of food for thought in this book. The thing that struck me the most is Diamond’s comment that the current Western custom of having small children sleep in rooms alone is basically unique in human history, and would strike lots of hunter-gatherers as child abuse - I think just because this is such a basic fact in American culture that it never would have occurred to me to think of it that way; it’s not good or bad but just how things are done.
It was something of an “ah-ha!” moment for me, because I think it’s easy to look at the past and say, “How could these people not see that X thing is terrible and wrong?” - but of course seeing it as wrong would require seeing it in the first place, and if something is just the way a thing is done and has always been done (this is not actually the way things have “always” been done in the West, but it’s been the fashion among middle class people for ~150 years which in terms of human memory is always), then most people don’t see it at all. It’s not a custom that could be changed; it’s just there, like the air we breathe.
What I Plan to Read Next
I’m on a bit of a Ngaio Marsh kick now, so probably another one of those. Maybe Killer Dolphin? Even though there are apparently no actual murderous dolphins in the book, which I think we can all agree is a misfortune.
