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Palimpsest


My fascination with two towering and toweringly problematic white, male, America intellectuals (Jefferson and Vidal) continues. People, I think, get my interest in Jefferson (which arguably dates back to a visit to Monticello with my mother when I was in elementary school), but Vidal continues to be get confused shrugs from my friends and family.

Elegiac. Remembrances of people lost. He is in his late sixties as he writes it, but sounds much older. His name dropping feels less pretentious and his poison pen less malicious than usual.

Early on, he notes that he has his grandfather’s imperious ponch, but that unlike that statesman, his is fueled by alcohol consumption. I noted this bit of honesty because I have read that in his last years, he suffered from dementia brought on by alcoholism.

He seems to have almost forgiven Kennedy for betraying him, politically, as he saw it (believing that Kennedy, after getting us into Vietnam, would have escalated as surely as Johnson did) and to look kindly on Jackie Kennedy.

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‘TekWar’ By William Shatner


I assume he also had the benefit of an anonymous co-writer. I remember well the placement of these books in the Dunedin Library when I was in high school and later the TV movies and series.

It isn’t good, of course, but it’s not bad. The vision of the future is surprisingly realistic and the writing not that bad. The plot keeps moving forward at a solid pace and it really resembles a Neuromancer, if it had been written by a mid-level writer of sixties pulp space opera. I even managed not to always see the actors from the series (which I watched, of course).

All told, a relief. I love Shatner and it’s pleasant to see this lark of his was not unsuccessful.

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Half A King


I read an earlier Abercrombie trilogy. I gather this is the start of another. Thrilling with many twists and turns, but it ultimately felt rather lightweight for a novel in the so-called grimdark genre. If it is easy to find in the library, I may read the rest of the series, but I won’t rush to do it.

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‘First Love’ By Turgenev


After finishing it, I felt that I must have read it before.

Many years ago, when I first moved to DC, I read some Turgenev, definitely reading Fathers and Sons. I can actually remember being on the metro and reading it. Did I read this too?

Alternatively, the story is just so universal that it feels familiar. A man in early middle age who even now cannot bear to speak the story, but writes it down. The canny, experienced reader realizing early what is happening, but the young version of the narrator incapable of truly seeing. The girl is what might now be called a manic pixie dream girl, but because this is Turgenev, more complex than that cinematic savior of sensitive, white men.

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Revelation Space


I appreciated that ‘hardness’ of the science fiction, by which I mean that it doesn’t, for example, hand wave moving faster than light; travel can take centuries because ships can only approach light speed. I am most reminded of Dan Simmons’ Hyperion.

And though it may disappoint one of my closest friends, I much prefer space opera to this. It doesn’t help that none of the characters are terribly likeable. But, within the genre, I must admit it is good and if you like more scientific science fiction, you will enjoy this.

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‘Jade City’ By Fonda Lee


Sort of fantasy, but not really. More like science fiction, in some ways, set on a fictional world resembling the late forties detente that followed World War II. This, perhaps, threw me off and it took me a while to get into it.

What is worthwhile is a fascinating locale, resembling an Asian nation, ostensibly a constitutional monarchy, but in reality governed by rival criminal families (I could be wrong, but it seems modeled on earlier eras in Hong Kong or Macau, when Triads had a hand in much of the economy). Also, while most of the characters are men, the one, major POV protagonist, Shae, is absolutely compelling. One wishes that the author had written more strong women into the book and that sequels will feature Shae and other women more prominently.

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Letters From A Stoic


Coming at a difficult period (a toxic work climate and the passing of a beloved family member), I read this slowly. It is exactly the sort of consolation one might want from a collection of Stoic writings. How to deal with bad influences, grief, old age, and illness. How to appreciate friends.

Because he mostly writes these letters from a sort of pastoral exile (at one point, from the house that once belonged to Scipio Africanus), it also reinvigorated my own fantasies of a wealthy, rural exile.

In a more academic sense, it does not necessarily delve too deeply into things like Stoic atomism and not at all (except by noting it exists) Stoic logic (for which, I gather, they were most famous; I haven’t read any of the school’s treatises on logic but I gather they are mostly concerned with “and” and “or” statements).

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‘The Necromancers’ By Robert Hugh Benson


It is not nearly so lurid nor horrific as the title might lead one to believe. It’s really just an Edwardian ghost story.

The comparison I kept coming to is a wholesome, English take on J K Huysmans Le-Bas, which I now want to read again. A young man who is vulnerable to the deductions of occultism, but ultimately rejects it after going nearly as far as one can, and returns to his faith in the end. Benson was an Anglican minister who converted and became a Catholic priest and Huysmans a writer within the French Decadent movement who had a Pauline moment and became a devout churchgoer and eventually an oblate.

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Anglo-Saxon


I suppose my eyes passed too quickly over the extended title because when I came to the end, I was surprised to see this was intended for part of instruction at the Jefferson founded University of Virginia, which he intended to include instruction in Anglo-Saxon as part of its curriculum.

I have not Jefferson’s apparent talent for picking up languages, but I remember reading about him harassing the supposed translator of Ossian for the original Gaelic texts (who always put him off because, of course, they didn’t exist).

I almost purchased a recent book about the University and its Jeffersonian founding, but better, I thought, to keep reading what the man himself wrote than what others have written about him, having read enough of the latter in recent years.

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Raiders From The Rings


A decent, exciting yarn: pretty standard fare for sixties pulp science fiction (if you remember that most of it wasn’t written by Heinlein or Dick).

I am mostly thinking back to how many of these stories of conflict within the solar system use aliens as a deus ex machina or science fiction magic. From Agent of Chaos to the more recent Leviathan Wakes.