ndrosen

I have begun reading Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time, the latest choice of the No Strings Attached Book Club, and so far, I like it. Even though it has been heavily praised by literary types, it appears to be a well-written book.

I did make borshch last night, and enjoyed that.

And now, I need to start work.

A book is now available as a Kindle download and on paper, Swordsmen from the Stars, by Poul Anderson, consisting of three novellas which Anderson published in the pulp magazine Planet Stories in 1951, the year he turned twenty-five. I have downloaded the book, and read the first tale, “Witch of the Demon Seas,” which is not another A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows or Hrolf Kraki’s Saga, but is not completely contemptible. Even when still learning his craft, Anderson could write, and the writing contains a few nice touches. “Witch” is a pretty well done low fantasy, in which our doughty hero, who had been conducting a campaign of piracy against the empire which had conquered his country, is spared from public execution to carry out a mission for a powerful wizard and his beautiful granddaughter (the dazzling young lady’s father being the Thalassocrat). This entails a dangerous ocean journey to deal with a more dangerous nation of aquatic and intelligent non-humans. Accomplishing what he resolves to do is difficult even for a man of mighty thews and exceptional combat skills.

I plan to read the other two tales (the second title is “The Virgin of Valkarion”) when I can find the time. Second or third rate Anderson is still worth reading, and I hope that Astrid Anderson Bear and her children are getting a few dimes in royalties from my purchase.

I have made some progress reading Chip War, by Chris Miller, which the No Strings Attached Book Club will discuss in June. I expect to have more to say later; let it suffice that Miller explains how there is an elaborate and potentially vulnerable supply chain involved in the production of integrated circuit chips, and of the equipment needed to make the chips themselves. This is globalization at its finest, so long as things function, with industries in different countries collaborating to accomplish what no single country is large enough to do equally well for itself. On the other hand, if China invades Taiwan, or even manages one successful missile strike on a key factory there, the whole world could have major problems.

This weekend, having finished my work for the quarter, I downloaded Swim Among the People, the fifth book in Karl Gallagher’s Fall of the Censor series. I have read only part of the book, but it seems that Karl hasn’t lost his ability to write intelligent space opera.

Friends may know that George Orwell is one of my heroes, and an influence on me. He is best known for Nineteen Eighty-Four, Animal Farm, and for his political writings and other essays, but it should not be forgotten that he was also a mainstream novelist. You really need to be an Orwell enthusiast to seek out and read A Clergyman’s Daughter and Keep the Aspidistra Flying, as I have done, but Coming up for Air is a better-written work, and would be of interest even if it had not been written by the author of “Politics and the English Language” and the “As I Please” columns for the Tribune.

I therefore made note of a post by David Post at the Volokh Conspiracy, referring to this novel. If I recall correctly, Orwell wrote the book without a single semicolon, believing at the time that that form of punctuation served no real purpose. He did not stick to the position, and, as I recall, there are semicolons in 1984.

I’ve read part of Lindsey Fitzharris’s book The Facemaker, about the British physician Harold Gillies, who developed techniques for reconstructing the faces of men who had been hideously wounded in World War One; the No Strings Attached Book Club will discuss it in a week and a half. Before even getting into the war, I was reminded of the pain and disability which people in those days could suffer from dental problems, the British in particular being noted for bad teeth. Fitzharris mentions one eager volunteer for the war who had his rotting upper teeth pulled, and offered to have the lower ones pulled as well.

People in those days certainly suffered pain, just as people do today, but there seems to have been a greater expectation that they would tough it out, although, of course, there was also a market for laudanum and other analgesics. I remember George Orwell’s account of being ill in a crowded French hospital ward, and of his writing about the Good Old Days which for him and his readers were only a few decades gone. Back then, the astringent socialist wrote, a charity patient having a tooth pulled would not be given anesthetic; he wasn’t paying for it, the thinking went, so why give it to him?

I read Patrick Radden Keefe’s Empire of Pain for the No Strings Attached Book Club meeting ten days ago. The book certainly makes the Sacklers, the family behind Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of OxyContin, look like an ethically challenged bunch, and details the efforts of Purdue’s drug reps to get physicians to stop worrying about addiction, and prescribe more opiates. And yet, there is another side to it. I remember one of my long distance friends, an elderly lady, telling me how a friend of hers, another elderly lady, had committed suicide, because she was in chronic pain, and the DEA intimidated doctors from prescribing opioids; I commented that John Waters (the drug czar a number of years ago) had much to answer for.

Mr. Keefe does write in the Afterword to his book, “l have heard from many readers who suffer from chronic pain and worry that my investigative reporting on the misdeeds of Purdue might jeopardize their access to appropriate medication, by stigmatizing opioids and the patients who rely on these drugs to live their lives.” Just so.

On Wednesday the eighteenth, the day after the book club meeting, we heard from the president of the club about a court ruling requiring CVS, Walgreens, and Walmart to pay some Ohio counties 650 million dollars for the harm they had supposedly done by filling prescriptions for opioids. I have to wonder whether it is part of the job of a CVS pharmacist to diagnose each patient for himself, and determine that the OxyContin prescription which Dr. Smith has written for Melissa Jones is perfectly legitimate, whereas the prescription which Dr. Carpenter has written for Evan McGrath is a medical error, which the pharmacist should refuse to fill. What if Mr. McGrath then sues CVS for subjecting him to severe pain? What if Mr. McGrath substitutes black market heroin or fentanyl for the OxyContin? I point out that with the DEA pressuring doctors, and reducing the amount of legal opioids which may be manufactured and prescribed, we have seen an increase in the number of deaths from opioids, as a result of people turning to black market drugs.

And what incentive will this $650 million award have on future behavior? Drug store chains may either get out of filling opioid prescriptions in Appalachia altogether, or do so only if they can charge high prices, to cover future legal bills and possible awards for supposed damage. The Sacklers may be called callous, but one could say the same about politicians and regulators who do not concern themselves with the consequences of their anti-drug crusading.

I have been reading Patrick Radden Keefe’s Empire of Pain, about the Sackler family, and about the opiate epidemic. Arthur Sackler, the patriarch, comes across as a man of great ability and extraordinary energy, a physician, medical researcher, advertising man, journalist, and collector of Asian art, but also as unscrupulous, and quite capable of lying about the safety and effectiveness of drugs. In his day, Miltown, Librium, and then Valium were the pharmaceuticals at issue.

I have only read part of the way through the book, so I’m not yet informed of what Mr. Keefe has to say about the involvement of Purdue Pharmaceuticals and the Sacklers with the promotion of OxyContin and other more recent scandals. I also reserve judgement about how far the pharmaceutical manufacturers are culpable for people misusing the drugs they manufactured.

I’ll try to read further; the No Strings Attached Book Club discusses the book next week.

I’ve been catching up on my sleep, doing some shopping, cleaning, and laundry, and reading Colton Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle, which the No Strings Attached Book Club is scheduled to discuss Tuesday afternoon. I probably won’t finish it by then, but I’ve at least made some progress.

On Wednesday, I took a detour on my way home from the Patent Office, and went to Barnes & Noble to shop for books, of which I bought four. This morning, I stopped at the Post Office on my way to work, and mailed two of those books to relatives with birthdays around this time of year, also replenishing my supply of stamps. I hope to read the other two books myself when I can find the time.

This weekend, I finished reading “A Dead Djinn in Cairo,” by P. Djeli Clark. It’s a story written to a certain standard of competence, but it didn’t strike me as all that great, so I may or may not someday read the other books set in that world, a version of the nineteenth century where someone let magic, and beings like Djinn, into the world. The story takes place in Cairo, with local color; I wonder what Edward Said (who excoriated Western Orientalism) would have said about it.

I have also downloaded Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H Mart, the current selection for the No Strings Attached Book Club, to my Kindle, and have begun reading that.

There’s delightful online comic strip I’d like to recommend, Sandra and Woo. I would advise starting at the beginning. Sandra is a tween and later teenaged girl; Woo is her pet, an intelligent and talking raccoon. Then there are some other memorable characters, like Larisa the succubus, Sandra’s boyfriend Cloud, Cloud’s younger sister Yuna, who is a budding mad scientist, and more.

Current Music: Bach, The Musical Offering

I received a notice that a package was waiting for me in the North Building’s package room, although I wasn’t expecting anything. I went over there yesterday, and found a package from a woman in Montreal, whose name I didn’t know. The package turned out to be a mug with “Lifelode” written on it.

I remembered that I had participated in a Kickstarter about five months ago to finance an audio edition of Jo Walton’s Lifelode, and my reward has now arrived. I do recommend reading or listening to the book.

And now to cross the room, and begin my workday.

Joseph Epstein has an article in the December issue of Commentary: “Books Do Furnish a Civilization,” about libraries, personal, public, and institutional. I benefited by reading some of my parents’ many books, and I remember that when they were planning to move from their own house to an apartment in a retirement community, and needed to downsize their book collection, my father asked me whether I wanted any of their books; I declined. If I had been there, I might have gone through the shelves and chosen some, but I didn’t know which books they were planning to give or sell as opposed to taking with them, and didn’t have a list of my own of things that I wanted.

In hindsight, it would have been nice to acquire a few books for myself: some history books, like Peter Green’s Alexander to Actium, which I don’t recall seeing afterward in my parents’ apartment, or a book or two by Bernard Lewis. When my mother died, my sister and brother gave most of the remaining library (I picked out a few for myself) to a university in Fujian, China.

I wonder what will happen to my own more modest book collection when I die. Will someone want my sf, or my Georgist tomes, or some other stuff? Will there be much reading of anything that isn’t on Kindles or the Internet?

There is a Kickstarter seeking money to pay for an audio version of Jo Walton’s novel Lifelode. The last time I checked the webpage, it was still several thousand dollars short, and set to expire on October 20. If you’re interested, and have some money to chip in, now’s the time.

If you’re not familiar with Kickstarter, someone can use it to raise money for a project, and you can pledge money with your credit card. If people don’t pledge enough to put the project into action, you aren’t charged anything; if enough is pledged, then your card is charged, and in due course, you get your reward, which might be an audiobook, or, if you pledge more, an audiobook and extra goodies.

I enjoyed the novel, which the estimable Jo Walton wrote some years back, and I would be happy to see an audiobook produced, so I pledged a little money, and I’m boosting the signal.

When not busy with patent applications or following the news and my favorite websites, I have been reading Karl Gallagher’s The Fall of the Censor, a science fiction series comprising three books so far (Storm Between the Stars, Between Home and Ruin, and To Seize What’s Held Dear), with a fourth book to follow in a few months, and I don’t know how many after that. The author has been clever at devising some imaginary physics to make space opera possible, involving a hyperspace with clouds and shoals of aether. A sphere of aether shoals has kept a region including three habitable planets isolated for nine hundred years, but now a tramp freighter has discovered an opening letting its crew explore the greater galaxy beyond, from which their ancestors fled from a devastating war centuries earlier.

It turns out that an empire called the Censorate has taken over, and that histories and written records have become strictly illegal (with some narrow exceptions); ordinary subjects are supposed to believe that the Censorate is a million or so years old. Our gallant captain and crew do some trading and learn a few things, while the local Governor (he rules over Corwynt, which the traders visit, and several other worlds, a tiny fraction of the whole empire) learns that there are inhabited planets outside the Censorate.

The stage is set for combat in space, and also for trade and cultural exchange between the Fierans (the tramp freighter is from Fiera) and the Corwynti subjects of Censorate. The Censorials are not beloved by most of the ordinary people of Corwynt, and likely not by the people of most of their other planets, but they rule by threatening massive bombardment of any planet where a rebellion succeeds.

There is some wit in the books, and some insight into how different cultures could work, and how their different laws, customs, and ways of seeing the world could lead to both mutual benefit and conflict.

Several years ago, I bought a copy of the late Sue Grafton’s Y Is for Yesterday, and I recently got around to reading it (many years before, I had read another of the Alphabet mysteries, I forget which). Ms Grafton dedicated the book to her grandchildren, hoping that they would lead lives of integrity; from the contents of the novel, she seems to have been quite concerned with integrity and other virtues, without being under any delusion that they are universally practiced.

Y Is for Yesterday is a quite competently written mystery, and further displays considerable psychological insight and lively style. There are multiple wrongdoers, of various kinds and to various degrees, and if perfect justice is not done by the end, it is difficult to imagine how it could be. Things could be much worse, and at least the citizens of Santa Teresa, California are safe from one killer.

Someday, when I don’t have so much work to do and so much else to read, I ought to find a copy of A Is for Alibi, and proceed from there.

Current Music: Loreena McKennitt, “An Ancient Muse”

I have finished Louise Erdrich’s The Night Watchman, the No Strings Attached Book Club’s latest selection. For those who don’t know, the author is a member of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa band, and the book is a novel set in the 1950s, and dealing with the American Indians’ reaction to the attempt by certain politicians to “terminate” their tribes, meaning to take away their reservations, have the federal government abandon its treaty obligations, and “help” the individual Indians integrate into white society. This really happened; I remember reading an article in the National Geographic many years ago about the Menominee tribe, and how one of their members had later lead a successful fight for “de-termination.”

This is a novel, not a history textbook or a historical polemic, although it is based on real events and Ms. Erdrich clearly has definite views on the issues. We meet a number of characters, Indian and white, and see them interact; there are admirable people, there is at least one alcoholic mess-up Chippewa, there are white gangsters, and several decent and helpful whites. There are also a pair of Mormon missionaries, who do not achieve much success in their efforts, and there is a ghost, with other touches of the surreal.

For the most part, I found the narrative compelling, and I was curious to see how these people would deal with each other, whether they would succeed in their objectives (raising money to take the train to Washington and testify before the Senate is only one of them), whether and how some younger people would pair up, and so forth. Ms. Erdrich is a critically admired author of literary fiction who can actually write a book worth reading.

I have started reading Louise Erdrich’s The Night Watchman, the No Strings Attached book club’s latest selection, and I’ve been caught up in it. So far, we’ve met a number of characters, most of them (like the author) Turtle Mountain Chippewa, facing poverty on the reservation, and other human problems. The story is set back in the 1950s, when the federal government was trying to terminate its recognition of and treaty obligations to Indian tribes as such, and make the landholdings of the individual Indians salable. One of the characters, a night watchman and a tribal official, has read of the proposal, and does not like it.

The novel demands to be read, and I plan to read more when I can. Various stories of different families are braided into a whole, and it is notable that while the author sympathizes with her characters, some of whom command admiration, and has things to say about the historical mistreatment of the tribe, she does not make plaster saints of her Amerindian characters. There are drunks and mess-ups, and there is one character whose fate in the big city has not been revealed so far; she has fallen out of touch, and her sister has set out to find her.

I have at last finished The Tale of Genji, sometimes called the world’s first psychological novel. As critics have been commenting on it for a thousand years, I am sure that I have nothing original to add, but I have made a few observations before, and will attempt to write a few words for the benefit of fellow Americans who have mostly not read it.

The lords and ladies of the Heian court, as portrayed in the novel, alternate between striving for the pleasures and distinctions of the world and wanting to renounce it, and become Buddhist monks or nuns. Old age and disappointment may make them more likely to want to cease attempting to attain worldly ambitions, and hope for Amida’s paradise; even younger people, though, can sometimes be devout. If one cannot yet renounce the world, then one can, if a wealthy courtier, pay for scripture readings and make splendid gifts to monks who are following the path which one cannot yet take oneself. I wonder what Gautama Buddha himself would have thought of all this.

Current Music: Mozart’s String Quintet in E Flat, KV 614

Profile

ndrosen

July 2025

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
		1	2	3	4	5
6	7	8	9	10	11	12
13	14	15	16	17	18	19
20	21	22	23	24	25	26
27	28	29	30	31

Syndicate

Page Summary

Active Entries

Style Credit

Style: Neutral Good for Practicality by timeasmymeasure

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated Jul. 9th, 2025 01:59 am

Entries tagged with literature

“The Ministry of Time”

“Swordsmen from the Stars”

“Chip War”

Swim Among the People

Orwell’s “Coming up for Air”

The Facemaker

“Empire of Pain”

“Empire of Pain”

Harlem Shuffle

Book Shopping

“Dead Djinn” and “Crying in H Mart”

“Sandra and Woo”

Unexpected Swag

“Books Do Furnish a Civilization”

Kickstarter for Jo Walton’s Lifelode

The Fall of the Censor

The Alphabet Ends with Y

“The Night Watchman”

The Night Watchman

The Tale of Genji