Current Reading

I actually have read other books between April and now, several! Just...didn't have much to say about them, apparently.

1. 1603: The Death of Queen Elizabeth I, the Return of the Black Plague, the Rise of Shakespeare, Piracy, Witchcraft, and the Birth of the Stuart Era - Christopher Lee

Well! The subtitle pretty well says it all, doesn't it? So far things are progressing rather less excitingly than one might expect from a book that promises talk of the Plague, piracy, and witchcraft. The first two chapters function primarily to set the stage by recounting the historical events and circumstances necessary to an understanding of 1603's significance, while the third chapter is a social and economic history of late Elizabethan England. I have, however, learned a great deal about the process of molding sea-coal balls, which has most certainly been a longheld source of fascination for me.

There's hope, though; Lee's writing style is lively enough to have actually kept me mildly interested through the sloggier passages, and chapter four focuses on James VI/I of Scotland/England, who's typically a reasonably interesting character (though never moreso than in one of my summer books, John MacLeod's Dynasty: The Stuarts 1560-1807. James had some issues, I think). Too, subsequent chapters bear titles like "Bonfires," "Coronation," "Plague," "Witchcraft," "The Coroner's Tale," and "Poets," so things can only get better.

2. A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Gödel and Einstein - Palle Yourgrau

I am Arts and Humanities chick. The theories of Einstein and Gödel discussed here are just a little beyond my purview. And yet, I'm enjoying the read so far, primarily because I like Yourgrau's style:

Worse, the world of general relativity, much to Einstein's displeasure, was actually 'expanding,' that is, expanding over time. (God, apparently, had for once failed to consult first with Einstein.) (18-9)

...and a little dry wit and a poetic turn of phrase ("Time itself must have been smiling over the puzzle it had created" [19]) will get a person very far with me.

3. The Fall - Albert Camus

Been on something of an absurdist/existentialist kick of late; read and loved Kafka's The Metamorphosis and The Trial in July, and followed those up with Camus' The Plague and The Stranger. The Plague, I loved as well, but the style of this particular translation of The Stranger -- and I only specify this because the translator himself made a big to-do in the Translator's Note about how special his "American" translation (versus the earlier "British" translation, apparently) was -- didn't really grab me until the last few chapters; too choppy and abrupt, which, yes, is meant to underline Meursault's shallow and amoral approach to life (and death), but it didn't make for a particularly smooth read.

Anyway. I only mention the above in order to say that The Fall has more in common with The Stranger than it does The Plague, which might limit my appreciation of it a bit. The Plague was wonderful for the claustrophobic, populous world it presented, with multiple characters expressing conflicting views and motivations. The Fall, though, is a single man's monologue (presented as one side of a conversation; the listener's response is never indicated, probably because we're expected to fill in the blanks ourselves), and on that note it reminds me not only of The Stranger, but also just a bit of Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground, a novel that I read and kind of hated in my junior year Russian Literature class. There's just something about the process of vacationing in an unstable person's mind that doesn't entirely thrill me. Perhaps because I spend enough time in my own unstable mind. HA! MWA-HA! Ha!

I shouldn't do this late at night *sigh*