Build, Borrow or Buy?
Tuesday, 20. February 2007, 07:28:59
I have finished my books. And I am on the road. Maybe I will go buy a new one or two....
I'm making good progress on my book-a-week plan. (Funny, but I am making bad progress on my cook-a-meal-EVERY-week plan - having not done it for several weeks now. Also my stop-geting-fatter plan seems not to be working. Time to get some scales maybe. Or do some exercise. But I digress...)
Number 10 was A Penguin, narratives about the Essex disaster. It contains pretty straight transcriptions of various documents that talk about the ship that was sunk by a whale, part of the inspiration for "Moby Dick" (and the subject of the book :in the heart of the sea" or something like that, which I read a few years ago). Stories about people eating people to survive shipwrecks seem to stay around a long time. This book was interesting to read in particular for the very different stories told by each of the authors. It gives a good idea of how hard it really is to know much history without very careful investigation and inspired guesswork.
Number 11 was "The Trial" by Franz Kafka, from a 1977 translation (the original is called "Der Prozess" and I doubt I could read it). Simple, in fact, to read, despite the fact that the main theme is not knowing what is really going on. Maybe it helps to have seen "Brazil" a couple of times, and have forgotten bits of it. Or to have lived in the current tissue of media fabrications and mystery that we call the world.
Number 12 was "Train to Pakistan" by Khushwant Singh. A short novel about love, tribalism, class, and India, set against the Partition of 1947. Extremely good value for 75 rupees. Or even more, if I had paid more.
Aeroplanes are bad places to read fast. I am tired, it is hard to concentrate. But being stuck in them for hours and hours means that it is still possible to read something. More surprisingly, one night I sat up in bed and read a few pages this week - a much rarer luxury. But enjoyable.
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Good book (still about 30 of the 300-odd pages to go). It gives a reasonably balanced history, which is something I haven't seen much (in an area I haven't read much about). Interestingly, so does Private Joseph Martin's autobiographical account of being a private then, as I recall (from reading it some time last century).
I've got a little book about Quantum theory, and then I am looking for more again, to get me as fara as my bookshelf which still has some stuff I never got around to...
By chaals, # 22. February 2007, 17:49:09
Martin is plain spoken, humorous, and had an incredible eye - and memory - for detail. he participated in most of the major campaigns of the war, from the disasterous battles of Brooklyn and Harlem Heights; through the winter at Valley Forge; fought in the battle of Monmouth, in New Jersey, where he heard a campfollower named Molly - who, having taking over swabbing duties for her husband, a fallen artilleryman - exclaim, upon having the bottom two-thirds of her skirt blown off by a British cannon ball, "'tis a good thing it wasn't aimed a foot higher"; and he was present at the end of hostilities, at the battle of Yorktown.
Martin's narrative is not a dry recitation of places nor a melodramatic eighteenth century account of grand battles. it is, what - during World War II - would come to be called the "grunt's eye view" of war. Martin effortlessly recaptures the feelings of a teenaged soldier: the ideals that drove him to volunteer at the age of 15, and the dogged determination that drove him, and countless other anonymous americans, to persevere - at least long enough for the french navy to trap Cornwallis (who otherwise had a brilliant career as an officer in the british army)at Yorktown.
[disclaimer: i am hardly an objective observer; i am the one who gave chaals a copy of Martin's narrative, and - a year or 2 later - lent him my musket, cartridge box, and bayonet (along with authentically ill-fitting citizen-soldier's garb), so that he could stand in my stead at Lexington and Concord on Patriot's Day in 2000, and muster with the local militiamen. and, naturally, when it came time for the television reporter to interview a reenactor, chaals - the microphone magnet - was amongst those chosen.]
By oedipus, # 3. March 2007, 06:03:45