I can't believe the last thing I posted on this blog was about Ezra Koenig! (Maybe some of you have forgotten who he is, given that he hardly tweets at all anymore. I don't blame you.)
Last year, I said I'd do away with reading challenges, and so I have. I've also done away with Goodreads ratings, for the most part: there's something absurd, isn't there, in asking the present-day reading population to rate Common Sense — for instance — on a scale of one to five. (It's currently at 3.97, for those wondering. One one-star review by a "Parentheses Enthusiast" remarks that the pamphlet is "DRY. DRIER THAN AN ANCIENT RAISIN IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ATACAMA DESERT.") But here are five books I read in the past year that I would have rated four or five stars, I suppose, and that you might feel similarly about:
5. THE SHEPHERD'S LIFE (James Rebanks)
One of the first things I saw when I arrived in England last May, apart from the inside of the Manchester airport, was a group of sheep grazing on a highway median. That set the tone for the next few months, during which I developed a surprising affinity for sheep of all stripes; I picked this book up in the same airport on my way home. Rebanks writes of his childhood (and adulthood) spent as a shepherd in the Lake District, so there are no highway medians here, but it's no less interesting for it. The Shepherd's Life is at once memoir and cultural history (its subtitle, in some editions, is A People's History of the Lake District). It is better as the latter than as the former, although Rebanks's account of his journey from his sheep to Oxford to London and (finally) back to his sheep is necessary — it shows us that he's the best-placed person to do what he does in this book, which is to advance a critique of capitalist society from the point of view of a pre-industrial profession. I don't know if that's what Rebanks intended, exactly, but I do think that's what makes this book so valuable.
#4 through #1, under the cut.
4. THE MISMEASURE OF MAN (Stephen Jay Gould)
We too often forget — in a political climate recently dominated, for many, by the rhetoric of a "war on science" — that science is a "gutsy, human" enterprise (or, if you like, a cultural product), as Gould writes, and not (yet) "the work of robots programmed to collect pure information." Gould's not saying that we shouldn't trust science; he's merely saying that we should take care to interpret scientific research within the social context in which it was produced. Gould's narrower discussion begins with 19th-century "race science," which attempted to rank "the races" by relative intelligence (as "measured" by the relative sizes of members' skulls); this biological-deterministic view of intelligence is further expressed in a large body of psychological studies (see The Bell Curve for an egregious example), but, as Gould explains, its underlying assumptions have always been racist.
3. THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE (Philip K. Dick)
I first read this several years ago, at my father's recommendation. But the Amazon series — the impetus for my reread — is wildly popular (and for good reason). At first blush, The Man in the High Castle is a straightforward alternate history, answering one of the more popular questions in the genre: what would happen to us if we lost WWII? The series takes that as its starting point for — well, almost exactly what you'd expect, feat. larger-than-life players and larger-than-life intrigues, on all sides — but the book, though beginning with the same premise, turns out to be something entirely different. It is still an alternate history, but it's one on a very small scale, about little people (once more, on all sides) caught up in big things, much of which they (and we) cannot quite understand.
2. MARY BARTON (Elizabeth Gaskell)
Mary Barton, despite being Elizabeth Gaskell's first (and, some say, worst) novel, is better both as a story and as a piece of (not particularly radical) social commentary than anything Charles Dickens ever produced. Gaskell wrote about Manchester under another name in her most popular work, North and South; perhaps contrary to her intentions, it is a joy to read Mary Barton as a Manchester novel (a Manchester love story), in a way that North and South (with its "Milton") can never be. We feel what Mary feels when she, faced near the end of the story with the characterization of Manchester as "a nasty, smoky, hole" by a Liverpudlian who can't believe that such a beautiful girl is "bound to live there," replies instantly with "Oh, yes! it's my home." She does eventually leave, but by that point, she has little choice in the matter. (And a bonus, for those familiar with the real-life story of Alexander Berkman — if Berkman hadn't been born decades after Mary Barton's publication, I'd have said Gaskell drew significant inspiration from his life.)
1. MY BRILLIANT FRIEND (Elena Ferrante)
As Mary Barton is (sort of) a love letter to Victorian Manchester in all its dirt and misery, so My Brilliant Friend is one to post-WWII Naples — which, adjusting for a century's passing, seems not to be a very different sort of place. But while Elizabeth Gaskell writes what she sees, Elena Ferrante writes what she knows; My Brilliant Friend offers the reader such a sense of place that it seems that Ferrante must have lived the early life of her two main characters, Elena and Lila. (Obviously we can't be sure. It's possible I only feel this way because Ferrante named her narrator Elena, intending for me to think exactly this.) Like all the best books, this one doesn't go anywhere, plot-wise, until the very end; as you can read in any number of reviews and thinkpieces, it centers on two reading girls (in a long tradition of reading girls) and the changing nature of their (touching, infuriating) relationship as the world turns around them. For better or for worse, an (Italian-language) HBO adaptation is forthcoming.
YOUR MILEAGE MAY VARY: Brideshead Revisited (Evelyn Waugh) — I would have listed this sumptuously bleak (bleakly sumptuous?) novel above, if I didn't think you'd all read it and formed your own opinions already. Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë) — relegated to this section for the same reason, recommended because it's even bleaker and more horrible; consume it in darkest Yorkshire for the full experience. Ditto Rebecca (Daphne du Maurier), but on the other end of that country. The abridged Mahabharata (translated by R.K. Narayan) — I dropped the class for which I bought this, but I found it so delightful a translation that I couldn't manage to do the assigned reading for the classes I'd chosen to remain in until after I finished it.
ADDITIONALLY, regarding the month I spent watching (and re-watching) Austen adaptations: Happily, I can't recommend Pride and Prejudice (1995 miniseries) enough; watching it at age 20 was even more wonderful than watching it at age 14, and I'm sure it'll only get better. Unhappily, I cannot recommend Emma (2009 miniseries) at all, Romola Garai's brilliance notwithstanding. (Catch her in The Hour, 2011-12 miniseries, instead!) Sense and Sensibility (1995) remains unmatchable. Queen of No Marriage (2009 series) is not an Austen adaptation, but it is a refreshing riff on the marriage plot — for the whole family, y compris your little brother! — that isn't Jeffrey Eugenides' excruciating The Marriage Plot.
No comments :
Post a Comment