Tag: books

Surviving the test of time

Bestselling Novels
#TitleAuthor
1.The Broad HighwayJeffrey Farnol
2.The Prodigal JudgeVaughan Kester
3.The Winning of Barbara WorthHarold Bell Wright
4.QueedHenry Sydnor Harrison
5.The HarvesterGene Stratton Porter
6.The Iron WomanMargaret Deland
7.The Long RollMary Johnston
8.Molly Make-BelieveEleanor Abbott
9.The RosaryFlorence L. Barclay
10.The Common LawRobert W. Chambers

How many of these writers or novels do you recognize? They are the 10 best-selling authors of exactly 100 years ago. I am a reasonably well-read individual, and I have to admit that I have never heard of any of these books or any of these authors except for Robert W. Chambers, who also wrote the ur-Lovecraftian collection of short stories entitled The King in Yellow. One of the things that became clear in last week’s discussion about the literary decline of the fantasy genre, (or, as I would argue, the literary decline of the SF/F genre), is that very few of those involved in the discussion appeared to fully realize just how unusual it is for literary works to survive 70 years, as the works of Robert E. Howard and J.R.R. Tolkien have, let alone 100. Nor, as should be readily apparent from the names and titles on this bestseller’s list from 1911, should one be inclined to confuse book sales with literary longevity, let alone immortality.

Read the entire post at the Black Gate. Then comment here, or there, as you prefer.

At the Black Gate

Last week, I read with great interest the discussion that began with Leo Grin’s comparison of the heroic fantasy fiction of J.R.R. Tolkien and Robert E. Howard with the anti-heroic fantasy fiction of Joe Abercrombie. As this is a topic that has interested me for years, I certainly have a number of thoughts regarding it. However, since I am a political commentator who is correctly said to be well outside the ideological mainstream of the SF/F community, I think it is best to begin by pointing out to those on both sides of the spectrum who may be eager to turn this into a political debate that this is not a political subject, but rather a historical, literary, and philosophical one. And as such, there is no need to argue over whether the trajectory over time that Grin observes is desirable or not, since that is a matter of perspective and personal opinion.

Regardless of one’s ideological self-identification or opinion on the specifics of Grin’s observations, it should be eminently clear to all and sundry that something material and significant has changed within the field of fantasy fiction in the 71 years that separate Howard’s final publication from Abercrombie’s first one and the 52 years that separate the publication of The Return of the King from The Blade Itself. I should also point out that I offer no personal criticism of Joe Abercrombie here, as he merely happens to serve as a representative of modern fantasy fiction and one of its more accomplished representatives at that….

Read the rest of what is a rather lengthy post on the link between literary decline and societal decline over at Black Gate.

So close

I have to admit, I enjoy it every time I happen to see who keeps RGD in #2 on Kindle, as was the case again today.

The decline of fantasy

I found this back-and-forth on the decline of modern fantasy into nihilism to be quite interesting. I’ll probably weigh in with my own thoughts on the matter when my turn comes around again on Sunday, so check out the discussion between Leo Grin, Joe Abercrombie and others at the Black Gate:

The other side thinks that their stuff is, at long last, turning the genre into something more original, thoughtful, and ultimately palatable to intelligent, mature audiences. They and their fans are welcome to that opinion. For my part — and I think Tolkien and Howard would have heartily agreed — I think they’ve done little more than become cheap purveyors of civilizational graffiti.

Soiling the building blocks and well-known tropes of our treasured modern myths is no different than other artists taking a crucifix and dipping it in urine, covering it in ants, or smearing it with feces. In the end, it’s just another small, pathetic chapter in the decades-long slide of Western civilization into suicidal self-loathing. It’s a well-worn road: bored middle-class creatives (almost all of them college-educated liberals) living lives devoid of any greater purpose inevitably reach out for anything deemed sacred by the conservatives populating any artistic field. They co-opt the language, the plots, the characters, the cliches, the marketing, and proceed to deconstruct it all like a mad doctor performing an autopsy. Then, using cynicism, profanity, scatology, dark humor, and nihilism, they put it back together into a Frankenstein’s monster designed to shock, outrage, offend, and dishearten.

Longtime Ilk may recall that I touched on a few of these themes in an essay entitled CS Lewis and the problem of religion in science fiction and fantasy, which was published in the 2005 anthology Revisiting Narnia by BenBella Books.

The nonsense of noir

I recently read three more books in The Dresden Files, the popular noir magic series written by Jim Butcher. And while I quite enjoy them, something was bothering me throughout the books, something that I couldn’t quite identify until I had nearly reached the end of Changes. And then it struck me. The noir genre, which these days is predominantly seen in its urban fantasy form, is considered to be based on the hardboiled school of American detective literature published in the 1930s. So, we have a fantasy literature based upon the figure of the cynical, wise-cracking private investigator, who fights evil in all its various criminal forms along with the aid of his allies in the police department, who regularly risk their lives and careers on his behalf.

Read the rest at The Black Gate.

Book review: The Fuller Memorandum

The Fuller Memorandum, by Charles Stross
Ace (320 pages, $24.95, July 2010)

Charles Stross is the technocratic heir to H.P. Lovecraft. While he is probably best-known for his Singularity-inspired science fiction and has been known to dabble in committing the occasional fantastic indiscretion with his Merchant Princes series, Stross is unequivocally at his best when he combines his techno-savvy competence with unadulterated occultic horror. The Fuller Memorandum is the third of his Laundry series, which centers around the deeds of a British agent named, significantly enough, Bob Howard, who works for a branch of the English Secret Service in confronting evils that are much more dark and dangerous than anything James Bond ever had to face.

Having triumphed over die-hard trans-dimensional Nazis and grandiose villains with master plans, Bob and his wife Mo are forced to confront an evil, world-threatening plan to awake and unleash the demonic Eater of Souls in The Fuller Memorandum. The plot is convoluted and the squamous horror is amped up to eleven, as the strain of being forced to deal with the implacable darkness beyond the borders of our universe as well as the soul-crushing bureaucracy of the agency are beginning to wear heavily on both of them.

Read the rest at Black Gate.

Reading list 2010

I often get asked about what books I’m reading, so around March of this year I started keeping track of what I am presently reading and what I’ve read already. I only include books that I finished here; I’m still reading sporadically through Manzoni and the second volume of Isaac Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare and there have also been a few books that I picked up and abandoned here and there. I read a lot of Project Gutenberg books this year; P.G. Wodehouse always makes for excellent travel reading on a smartphone. It turns out that I read about one book per week now, which is considerably down from the days when I ripped through several science fiction and fantasy books per week. On the other hand, it takes a bit longer to get through Procopius and Dante than Heinlein and McCaffrey.

Anyhow, here’s the list, divided by how well worth reading I happened to find the book. This isn’t a statement about the quality of the book or the writing, just whether I happened to enjoy it or found it to be either useful or thought-provoking. For example, I think Gladwell is vastly overrated, but he’s quite readable and I picked up one tremendously useful insight from an essay in What the Dog Saw. And while it’s no secret that I don’t think much of Sam Harris’s ability to make his case, I quite enjoyed the fact that he dared to try making it as well as how he went about it. It’s always difficult to narrow it down to a single choice, but I think the most interesting book I read this year was probably Bourrienne’s Memoirs of Napoleon.

Five Stars
Memoirs of Napoleon, Louis de Bourrienne
Life of Nelson, Volume I, Alfred Mahan
Life of Nelson, Volume II, Alfred Mahan
Blood, Sweat and Chalk, Tim Layden
Free Trade Doesn’t Work, Ian Fletcher
The Divine Comedy, Inferno, Dante
This Time It’s Different: A Panoramic View of Eight Centuries of Financial Crises, Carmen Reinhart & Kenneth Rogoff

Four Stars
The Moral Landscape, Sam Harris
The Fuller Memorandum, Charles Stross
The Makers of Ancient Strategy, VDH ed.
What the Dog Saw, Malcolm Gladwell
Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare, Vol. I, Isaac Asimov
The Armada, Garrett Mattingly
Goblin Moon, Teresa Edgerton
My Own Kind of Freedom, Stephen Brust
Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth, Ludwig von Mises

Three Stars
The Economic Consequences of the Peace, John Maynard Keynes
Making Money, Terry Pratchett
The Letters of Cicero Vol. 1, M. Cicero
Space Cadet, Robert Heinlein
Ensign Flandry, Poul Anderson
A Circus of Hells, Poul Anderson
The Rebel Worlds, Poul Anderson
The Day of Their Return, Poul Anderson
Agent of the Terran Empire, Poul Anderson
The Persian Wars, Procopius
The Father of Us All, Victor Davis Hanson
Eugenie Grandet, Honore de Balzac
A Feast for Crows George RR Martin
The Magician, W. Somerset Maugham
Death at the Excelsior, P.G. Wodehouse
The Coming of Bill, P.G. Wodehouse
The Cutting of Cuthbert, P.G. Wodehouse
The Adventures of Sally, P.G. Wodehouse
Jill the Reckless, P.G. Wodehouse
Mike and Psmith, P.G. Wodehouse
Mike at Wrykin, P.G. Wodehouse
A Damsel in Distress, P.G. Wodehouse
The Gem Collector, P.G. Wodehouse
The Girl on the Boat, P.G. Wodehouse

Two Stars
The Greatest Show on Earth, Richard Dawkins
The Stress of Her Regard, Tim Powers

One Star
On the Road, Jack Kerouac
The Diary of a U-boat Commander, Stephen King-Hall

I’m working on it

This is courtesy of an award-winning graphic artist with whom I have been collaborating on the map and interior art for the sequel to Summa Elvetica.  It’s not the cover, just an image that he was inspired to create as a reminder that there is a second book on the horizons for the fans of Selenoth.  Unfortunately, it hasn’t been a very productive year on the writing front; I ended up being very busy with some other projects that required priority and kept me too occupied to get very much done in either fiction or non-fiction terms.  Also, I’ve thrown out the planned structure at least three times now, so I wasn’t ever able to really get rolling.

But, I’ve put myself on a strict writing schedule now, so I’m determined to finish the book in 2011.  I can’t promise that it will actually be published then, since that’s somewhat outside my control, but it will be completed.  Marcus is at an important nexus and is facing a difficult decision; having turned away from the presumably brilliant clerical career that everyone was expecting of him, he now has to decide what he is going to do with his life.  As a scion of a wealthy patrician family, the world is literally at his feet, but how does he reconcile his ambitions to make a meaningful mark in life with his scholarly pursuits in an empire that stands upon the twin pillars of its unshakeable faith and its unbreakable legions?

Note: “Summa Elvetica II” is not the title.  It’s merely for reference.

WND column

The Moral Landscape

Sam Harris’s first two books were commercial successes and intellectual failures. Riddled with basic factual and logical errors, The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation served as little more than godless red meat snapped up by unthinking atheists around the English-speaking world. His third book, The Moral Landscape, is also a challenge to established wisdom, but it is a much more sober, serious and interesting book than its predecessors.

The basis for the book is Harris’s own neuroscience experiments, in which he tested his hypothesis that when hooked up to an fMRI scanner, the human brain would produce an observable difference in its activity when contemplating non-religious beliefs than when considering religious beliefs. As it happens, the hypothesis was found to be incorrect, as the same responses were elicited from both the believing group and the non-believing group for religious and nonreligious stimuli alike. (Full disclosure: I was one of the Christians asked by Mr. Harris to review the religious stimuli to ensure their theological verisimilitude. In my opinion, the questions utilized were both reasonable and fair.)

NOTE: For those who happen to be interested in the subject, I will be posting the bookmarked notes I made in the course of reading The Moral Landscape here later this week.

Mailvox: beyond overload

HW writes of the effects of engaging in an intellectually hazardous adventure:

Effects of reading 7 years of Vox Popoli entries in two months:

I started following your blog and somehow came to the insane conclusion that I should read every single one of your posts, starting from 2003. I came to Vox Popoli after reading TIA and thoroughly enjoying the unapologetic demolition of the New Atheists’ best arguments. While I know that TIA is not meant as a defense of Christianity, its author was clearly a believer, and not the kind whose confused imagination portrays Christ as a limp-wristed hippy. Vox’s posts on feminism piqued my interest further and I decided to read the entire archive. You know, for fun.

How has concentrated exposure to Vox’s writing affected my life? Let’s break it down by category.

Career: Won’t try to become a professional writer.

Economics: Intense feelings of doom.

Child-rearing: First child is due in January. Won’t be vaccinating, (at least immediately), will be homeschooling. It’s clear now that my public school education was not only inefficient, but just plain wrong at times. The Dark Ages never happened? Who knew?!

Politics: Clearer view of how police power is dangerous and needs to be severely restricted. I previously described myself as a conservative, and though my political leanings were similar to libertarianism, I consistently voted Republican. However, as I reached the end of the 2008 archives, that changed. Two years of the Obama administration has conditioned me to blame everything on him, and the bailouts fit his modus operandi perfectly, so my brain naturally added the farcical attempts at recovery to his list of sins. Then a shocking realization: Bush was still President. The man I VOTED FOR was governing like Obama. The time-travel effect of the archives has convinced me that Bush was not conservative, and I now regret voting for McCain. Fortunately, this was in time for the November elections, and my wife and I cast our first votes for libertarian candidates.

Digesting the archives was a thoroughly enjoyable experience and while it challenged several of my concepts of the world, I don’t feel that it’s any exaggeration to say that I’m better off for it. I’m taking steps to cure my historical blind spots and my wife happened to be convincing me that homeschooling was superior at the same time as I was reading Vox’s posts on the subject. The only downside to finishing this little project is that I have to wait until you post now, instead of being able to simply move on to the next month. I guess I’ll start Summa Elvetica…

I know the feeling, I did much the same thing a few years ago when I discovered Fred Reed’s articles. I am pleased that HW found the experience to be a useful one, especially because it appears to have encouraged him to think for himself and to heighten his critical faculties. The primary goal of this blog is to encourage myself and others to raise our intellectual game in a free, casual, and reasonably civil manner.

Speaking of which, I have an idea for a book which would require an amount of fairly serious research help from the Ilk. Despite the copious amounts of ink and its digital substitute that have been devoted to blathering in ignorance about religion and war, there has never been a serious book about it from the military historians, the military strategists, or the critics of religion. So, I’m contemplating the expansion of the two chapters of TIA devoted to the subject into a book entitled God and War that deals with the use and utility of religion in historical warfare dating back to the earliest written records.

This would not be a book of apologetics or even an attack on the hypothesis that religion causes war, it would be a straightforward summary of all the known facts about the relationship between religion and the causes and practice of war. This strikes me as a more useful contribution to the sum of human knowledge than continuing to beat up on intellectual lightweights like the New Atheists and Keynesian economists. It’s a rather large-scale undertaking and will take an amount of time to write since I can’t devote any work time to it, so it would help speed up the process if if five or ten people would be willing to help with digging up the details on specific wars that have either eluded the three-volumes of the Encyclopedia of Wars or been given insufficient shrift by the authors of that very useful reference work.

Anyhow, it’s just an idea at this stage, so let me know if it would be of any interest to you, either as a reader or a potential volunteer.