Every month I resolve to keep track of what I've been up to so I'll know what to write about in these posts, and every month I fail miserably at doing so. Put it this way: I'm amazed that June is over already. Last year sometime I decided that I wanted to have all of my junk organized by September of this year, and let me tell you, the clock is ticking. It's particularly hard because sunny days aren't the kinds of days that I want to be spending cooped up going through a bunch of old stuff. But, I think I've had a fairly productive month. I'm relatively on track with my reading goals for finishing this project someday in the foreseeable future, as well as my reading goal for the year.
Not a lot besides that to report for now.
Watching
I saw the new Warcraft movie, and while I thought it was horrendously uneven, there were also a lot of things about it that I really, really liked. Devin Faraci's review at Birth.Movies.Death encapsulates my feelings pretty well.
Finally watched John Wick. I was expecting something more along the lines of The Raid: Redemption for some reason, but enjoyed what I got instead nevertheless.
Socializing
I've become a bit of a fan of this new book app called Litsy. I'm "twohectobooks" over there as well. Goodreads is still where the full listing of all the books I've ever read and some of the books I plan to read lives, but Litsy makes it really easy to quickly share things while I'm reading in a way that I've never gotten the hang of with Twitter. If you follow me on there, you'll definitely get some sneak peaks at what I thought of books, long before the reviews come up in the cue on this 'ere blog.
Listening
I'm listening to Star Trek podcasts again in hopes of getting into the headspace for the new movie (Into Darkness really did a number on me). I'm pretty sure I've mentioned Mission Log before, but there's a new, official podcast, called Engage that's been pretty good so far, too.
Looking Back, Part 4
Last time I did a retrospective post, it had been over two years since the previous one. This time it's been almost three. This time I'm also really serious in saying that it won't happen again. Hopefully you've noticed that the pace of my posting has gone up lately, and to be honest I'm actually almost all of the way through the next ten/twenty books, so pending some catastrophe, I'll be able to do the next one of these within a year *knock on wood*. As much as I've enjoyed many of the books (over one third of them, apparently!), I really am looking forward to finishing this project at some point. Here we are now at 40% complete, and I don't have any charts or graphs yet. Maybe next time.
Proportionally there weren't as many 3/3s this time (down to 46% from 50%), and 1/3s were up to 15% from 10% last time. Of course, there was no Finnegans Wake, though, so that's a major improvement.
Here's an updated table:
70. The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durell - 2.33/3
69. The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton - 3/3
68. Main Street by Sinclair Lewis - 3/3
67. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad - 2/3
66. Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham - 3/3
65. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess - 3/3
64. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger - 3/3
63. The Wapshot Chronicle by John Cheever - 1/3
62. From Here to Eternity by James Jones - 1/3
61. Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather - 2/3
Total Pages: 3874
R32. The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi
R33. The Dark Tower series by Stephen King
R34. Small Gods by Terry Pratchett
R35. The Tin Flute by Gabrielle Roy
R36. Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
R37. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
R38. The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough
R39. The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
R40. Hotel by Arthur Hailey
Total Pages: 7606
Top 100 So Far
Once again I must note that this part of The List consisted of some low lows and some high highs. There are more 3/3s than ever before (6 out of 12—thanks to the presence of The Alexandria Quartet there are a couple of extras this time around), so things really do appear to be getting better. The 1/3s were really unenjoyable though, and every time I hit one of them, it leaves me with a sour feeling.Proportionally there weren't as many 3/3s this time (down to 46% from 50%), and 1/3s were up to 15% from 10% last time. Of course, there was no Finnegans Wake, though, so that's a major improvement.
Here's an updated table:
70. The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durell - 2.33/3
69. The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton - 3/3
68. Main Street by Sinclair Lewis - 3/3
67. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad - 2/3
66. Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham - 3/3
65. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess - 3/3
64. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger - 3/3
63. The Wapshot Chronicle by John Cheever - 1/3
62. From Here to Eternity by James Jones - 1/3
61. Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather - 2/3
Total Pages: 3874
Random/Romnovs So Far
R31. The Hunger Games by Suzanne CollinsR32. The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi
R33. The Dark Tower series by Stephen King
R34. Small Gods by Terry Pratchett
R35. The Tin Flute by Gabrielle Roy
R36. Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
R37. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
R38. The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough
R39. The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
R40. Hotel by Arthur Hailey
Total Pages: 7606
R40. Hotel by Arthur Hailey
Year Published: 1965
Pages: 408
First Sentence: If he had had his way, Peter McDermott thought, he would have fired the chief house detective long ago.
Review:
Strangely enough, this book is exactly what it says on the tin. It's about five days in the life of a hotel in New Orleans. The hotel is a large independent one, and the picture painted by this book is surprisingly fascinating.
The novel is structured as a succession of days featuring a number of subplots including various hotel guests and staff. These subplots include: a hotel thief on the make fresh out of jail, a potential hostile takeover of the hotel, a couple of romances, and the fallout of a hit and run. The characters are all surprisingly vibrant* and well-rounded, the functions of the hotel are gone over in great detail that never feels strained, and there's a surprising depth—or maybe just a nice bit of lip service to the issue of desegregation. But…
Published in 1965, the book is of course out of date in a large number of its details (the elevators have operators in them) which is not a problem at all, except for one pretty glaring thing. Marsha Preyscott, approximately 19 years old, is very nearly gang raped at a hotel party hosted by a frat. I doubt that situation is dated, sadly, but what is dated is the way Arthur Hailey writes the aftermath, which is that Marsha brushes off the whole thing with astonishing ease and proceeds to latch on to the main hero, Peter McDermott, as if absolutely nothing traumatic has happened to her.
So that being said, I'd have preferred if Hailey could have handled that a little bit better or found some other way for Peter and Marsha to encounter one another that had nothing to do with rape. Hailey is like so many other authors here in his race but not sex consciousness. It's even more disappointing considering that another female character in the book has a tragic backstory involving her whole family being killed that isn't paired with her having been raped as well (an inseparable combo for all time, if fantasy novels can be believed).
Still, despite certain predictable beats, and the whole gang rape thing (um), I quite enjoyed this book. Hailey is listed on Wikipedia as being "British Canadian" for reasons I can't quite decipher, and his greatest claim to enduring fame as far as I'm concerned is that he wrote the book that inspired the movie that inspired Airplane! (do yourself a favour and read this plot summary, you will not regret it). Nevertheless, a bunch of his books, including this one I think**, were huge bestsellers, and he obviously knew what he was doing. Even if it wasn't great literature, it was a fun book to read.
* I keep saying "surprisingly" because this would seem to be (and is) a rote thriller about a hotel, and I suppose I'm just really astonished at the quality of it.
** This book also inspired a tv series of the same name.
Pages: 408
First Sentence: If he had had his way, Peter McDermott thought, he would have fired the chief house detective long ago.
Review:
Strangely enough, this book is exactly what it says on the tin. It's about five days in the life of a hotel in New Orleans. The hotel is a large independent one, and the picture painted by this book is surprisingly fascinating.
The novel is structured as a succession of days featuring a number of subplots including various hotel guests and staff. These subplots include: a hotel thief on the make fresh out of jail, a potential hostile takeover of the hotel, a couple of romances, and the fallout of a hit and run. The characters are all surprisingly vibrant* and well-rounded, the functions of the hotel are gone over in great detail that never feels strained, and there's a surprising depth—or maybe just a nice bit of lip service to the issue of desegregation. But…
Published in 1965, the book is of course out of date in a large number of its details (the elevators have operators in them) which is not a problem at all, except for one pretty glaring thing. Marsha Preyscott, approximately 19 years old, is very nearly gang raped at a hotel party hosted by a frat. I doubt that situation is dated, sadly, but what is dated is the way Arthur Hailey writes the aftermath, which is that Marsha brushes off the whole thing with astonishing ease and proceeds to latch on to the main hero, Peter McDermott, as if absolutely nothing traumatic has happened to her.
So that being said, I'd have preferred if Hailey could have handled that a little bit better or found some other way for Peter and Marsha to encounter one another that had nothing to do with rape. Hailey is like so many other authors here in his race but not sex consciousness. It's even more disappointing considering that another female character in the book has a tragic backstory involving her whole family being killed that isn't paired with her having been raped as well (an inseparable combo for all time, if fantasy novels can be believed).
Still, despite certain predictable beats, and the whole gang rape thing (um), I quite enjoyed this book. Hailey is listed on Wikipedia as being "British Canadian" for reasons I can't quite decipher, and his greatest claim to enduring fame as far as I'm concerned is that he wrote the book that inspired the movie that inspired Airplane! (do yourself a favour and read this plot summary, you will not regret it). Nevertheless, a bunch of his books, including this one I think**, were huge bestsellers, and he obviously knew what he was doing. Even if it wasn't great literature, it was a fun book to read.
* I keep saying "surprisingly" because this would seem to be (and is) a rote thriller about a hotel, and I suppose I'm just really astonished at the quality of it.
** This book also inspired a tv series of the same name.
Five Years Ago This Month: June 2011
Five years ago this month...
...I wrote my second retrospective post. I posted this within a year of the previous one, and can you imagine if I'd kept up that pace?! If only.
...I was distracted.
...I wrote my second retrospective post. I posted this within a year of the previous one, and can you imagine if I'd kept up that pace?! If only.
...I was distracted.
 |
| A beautiful day in a beautiful city. |
61. Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
Year Published: 1927
Pages: 299
First Sentence: One summer evening in the year 1848, three Cardinals and a missionary Bishop from America were dining together in the gardens of a villa in the Sabine hills, overlooking Rome.
Rating: 2/3 (meh)
Review:
Over the last little while, I made the mistake of reading too many books that I needed to review in quick succession, and so ended up putting off writing my reviews. Honestly, writing reviews doesn’t come very naturally to me, especially given the resounding silence that most of them are met with. I’m not good at it, either, although I’m subject to various levels of desire to do better. Lately those have been suppressed in favour of actually sitting down and posting some of my backlog. So, with my excuses about why this review is terrible out of the way...
...We move on to some lamentations. I’ve posted about the lack of books by women on The List at some length in the past. All I want to add right now is that my general lack of enthusiasm for the books by women that actually made it onto The List is kind of a tragedy.
I read My Ántonia, also by Willa Cather, in 2014, and I liked that book a bit better than this one. In fact I’m afraid that the bulk of my review of Death Comes for the Archbishop will be in the context of other books.
To dispense with the plot, inasmuch as there is one, a young French priest, Jean Latour, is nominated by some Cardinals to be the first bishop of the new American territory of New Mexico. It’s largely unclear what the extent of this territory is (as I imagine it was historically), but basically the bishop and his friend Father Joseph Vaillant spend most of the rest of their lives touring around this area and serving the people there. Eventually Bishop Latour becomes an Archbishop, and he builds a cathedral. The book reads more like a collection of short stories and vignettes than a novel. The setting is powerfully and wonderfully described; the friendship between the two priests (who have been together since the seminary in France) is gorgeous and moving by the end of the book. I found the novel lacking, though.
I’ll quickly mention before I get into it that Kit Carson is a character in the book, which got me wondering about whether Bishop Latour was a real person as well. Turns out: not exactly. The real first bishop of New Mexico was a man named Jean-Baptiste Lamy who inspired and informed the character Cather created.
Anyway, this book is the oldest of an unofficial “missionary trilogy” by three different authors that of course I read in reverse order. When I say this is an unofficial trilogy I mean that I am, as far as I know, making it up right now for the purposes of this blog.
The last book is Joseph Boyden’s The Orenda, which I also read in 2014. That book has the least overt Catholicism, with its French Jesuit, Christophe, being one of three major characters in the novel, and the focus less on matters of faith than of colonialism. He’s a missionary in 17th century eastern Canada. However, it’s the only one of the three books that provides a point of view for those who are receiving the ministry, which is an important development.
The middle book is Shūsaku Endō’s Silence. I very briefly mentioned this book in my review of Small Gods but didn’t get around to reviewing it for the same reasons that I put off this review. In fact I got both of these books from the library at the same time. Silence had come to my attention via a list of books being adapted for film in the next few years, and I thought it would be a good companion piece to read not long after The Orenda. I wasn’t wrong, because it’s the best of this “missionary trilogy.” In Silence, the main character is a Portuguese Jesuit, whose name is Sebastião Rodrigues (but I had to look that up because he’s almost never named in the novel). Anyway, he travels to Japan during a time in the 17th century when the Christians there were being hunted down and seriously persecuted after some early inroads by the Catholic Church. Often, this takes the form of making people renounce their faith (“apostatize” appears more frequently here than I’ve ever seen it before, and much much more seriously than the way I self-style myself an apostate). Written by an actual Japanese Catholic, this book goes amazingly deep into matters of faith, or rather of doubt, and the ultimate silence of God in the face of suffering and death. If you have to choose to only read one of these three books, make it this one.
In Death Comes for the Archbishop, the 17th century-style missionary work is two hundred years in the past, but the Catholic Church has gone a bit wild, and Bishop Latour appears to tame it. All three of these books bring up all kinds of questions about things like race, evangelism, faith, worship, etc, and confront those things with various levels of success. The problem with Death Comes for the Archbishop is that, being old, it’s not as sophisticated when it comes to some of this stuff as it needs to be. This isn’t to say that its point of view is necessarily straightforward when it comes to questions of religion/oppression/colonialism, and I appreciate that. In fact the biggest problem was that I read this book so soon after Silence, and the violent ambiguity of that novel stands so high above the warmth and self-assurance of this one.
To sum up, this novel feels inessential to me. It’s historically interesting, to be sure, and has good stuff in it, but it’s not especially powerful. I’m giving it a “meh” rating, but I will say that it might be recommended reading if one was to read the “missionary trilogy” in publication order, which would make it feel less like a devolution.
Pages: 299
First Sentence: One summer evening in the year 1848, three Cardinals and a missionary Bishop from America were dining together in the gardens of a villa in the Sabine hills, overlooking Rome.
Rating: 2/3 (meh)
Review:
Over the last little while, I made the mistake of reading too many books that I needed to review in quick succession, and so ended up putting off writing my reviews. Honestly, writing reviews doesn’t come very naturally to me, especially given the resounding silence that most of them are met with. I’m not good at it, either, although I’m subject to various levels of desire to do better. Lately those have been suppressed in favour of actually sitting down and posting some of my backlog. So, with my excuses about why this review is terrible out of the way...
...We move on to some lamentations. I’ve posted about the lack of books by women on The List at some length in the past. All I want to add right now is that my general lack of enthusiasm for the books by women that actually made it onto The List is kind of a tragedy.
I read My Ántonia, also by Willa Cather, in 2014, and I liked that book a bit better than this one. In fact I’m afraid that the bulk of my review of Death Comes for the Archbishop will be in the context of other books.
To dispense with the plot, inasmuch as there is one, a young French priest, Jean Latour, is nominated by some Cardinals to be the first bishop of the new American territory of New Mexico. It’s largely unclear what the extent of this territory is (as I imagine it was historically), but basically the bishop and his friend Father Joseph Vaillant spend most of the rest of their lives touring around this area and serving the people there. Eventually Bishop Latour becomes an Archbishop, and he builds a cathedral. The book reads more like a collection of short stories and vignettes than a novel. The setting is powerfully and wonderfully described; the friendship between the two priests (who have been together since the seminary in France) is gorgeous and moving by the end of the book. I found the novel lacking, though.
I’ll quickly mention before I get into it that Kit Carson is a character in the book, which got me wondering about whether Bishop Latour was a real person as well. Turns out: not exactly. The real first bishop of New Mexico was a man named Jean-Baptiste Lamy who inspired and informed the character Cather created.
Anyway, this book is the oldest of an unofficial “missionary trilogy” by three different authors that of course I read in reverse order. When I say this is an unofficial trilogy I mean that I am, as far as I know, making it up right now for the purposes of this blog.
The last book is Joseph Boyden’s The Orenda, which I also read in 2014. That book has the least overt Catholicism, with its French Jesuit, Christophe, being one of three major characters in the novel, and the focus less on matters of faith than of colonialism. He’s a missionary in 17th century eastern Canada. However, it’s the only one of the three books that provides a point of view for those who are receiving the ministry, which is an important development.
The middle book is Shūsaku Endō’s Silence. I very briefly mentioned this book in my review of Small Gods but didn’t get around to reviewing it for the same reasons that I put off this review. In fact I got both of these books from the library at the same time. Silence had come to my attention via a list of books being adapted for film in the next few years, and I thought it would be a good companion piece to read not long after The Orenda. I wasn’t wrong, because it’s the best of this “missionary trilogy.” In Silence, the main character is a Portuguese Jesuit, whose name is Sebastião Rodrigues (but I had to look that up because he’s almost never named in the novel). Anyway, he travels to Japan during a time in the 17th century when the Christians there were being hunted down and seriously persecuted after some early inroads by the Catholic Church. Often, this takes the form of making people renounce their faith (“apostatize” appears more frequently here than I’ve ever seen it before, and much much more seriously than the way I self-style myself an apostate). Written by an actual Japanese Catholic, this book goes amazingly deep into matters of faith, or rather of doubt, and the ultimate silence of God in the face of suffering and death. If you have to choose to only read one of these three books, make it this one.
In Death Comes for the Archbishop, the 17th century-style missionary work is two hundred years in the past, but the Catholic Church has gone a bit wild, and Bishop Latour appears to tame it. All three of these books bring up all kinds of questions about things like race, evangelism, faith, worship, etc, and confront those things with various levels of success. The problem with Death Comes for the Archbishop is that, being old, it’s not as sophisticated when it comes to some of this stuff as it needs to be. This isn’t to say that its point of view is necessarily straightforward when it comes to questions of religion/oppression/colonialism, and I appreciate that. In fact the biggest problem was that I read this book so soon after Silence, and the violent ambiguity of that novel stands so high above the warmth and self-assurance of this one.
To sum up, this novel feels inessential to me. It’s historically interesting, to be sure, and has good stuff in it, but it’s not especially powerful. I’m giving it a “meh” rating, but I will say that it might be recommended reading if one was to read the “missionary trilogy” in publication order, which would make it feel less like a devolution.
- - - - -
That air would disappear from the whole earth in time, perhaps; but long after his day. He did not know just when it had become so necessary for him, but he had come back to die in exile for the sake of it. Something soft and wild and free, something that whispered to the ear on the pillow, lightened the heart, softly, softly picked the lock, slid the bolts, and released the prisoned spirit of man into the wind, into the blue and gold, into the morning, into the morning!
- - - - -
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