Knight's Reading List XVIII: June 2008

Reading List:

Bear, Greg. Eon.
Berton, Pierre. The Last Spike.
Catullus. Catullus.
Coben, Harlan. The Woods.
Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
Kanon, Joseph. The Good German.
Orlean, Susan, editor. The Best American Essays 2005.
Stewart, Mary. The Hollow Hills.

Non-Fiction:

Berton, Pierre. The Last Spike. 1971. xv + 566 pages.

See Reading List XVII: May 2008 for a description of the first volume of this set. The Last Spike takes the story of the Canadian Pacific Railway up to the completion of the road. It’s a good story, and well worth reading. One thing these two books make clear is that the shape of modern Canadian geography, particularly where the cities of the West are located, was largely determined by the men who laid out the route for the CPR.

Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Modern Library, 1993. Originally published 1961. xxiv + 598 pages. Index.

This is an amazing book. I read a review of it in Newsweek when it was first published, and I never forgot it. There was something about it that stuck in my head for years and years. I saw it in my local library last spring, and I started reading it in early May. It was all that I expected of it, and it illuminated a lot of questions I had been mulling for years.

Jacobs asserts that cities are for use, and that the proper use of cities requires a certain amount of density, a lot of activity in public spaces, and plenty of connections among the various destinations. Urban planners and reformers, such as Le Corbusier, Lewis Mumford, and others, set out not so much to reform and improve city life, as to abolish it altogether. Jacobs describes city life as fundamentally different from suburban or small-town ways of living, and as having requirements that are subverted when one tries to make a city act like a suburb or a small town.

One of the key characteristics of cities is that they much accommodate the interaction of large numbers of strangers. Thus, sidewalks are safest when they are busy and there are many pairs of eyes watching events. Parks are dangerous because they are thinly populated and, thus, short of observers, let alone defenders. This point struck me in light of Jared Diamond’s book Collapse, in which he described the behavior of New Guineans when meeting strangers. The first imperative is to establish some relationship so that one party doesn’t have to kill the other. The basic human response to meeting a stranger is defensive/aggressive. Big cities have to make it safe for strangers to come into the city and move around, and, at the same time, make it safe for residents to deal with transients who are unknown and untraceable.

Insights like this make The Death and Life of Great American Cities an invaluable resource. Among other things, one can see that the sort of small-town attitudes and prescriptions characteristic of the Sarah Palin wing of the Republican Party are utterly unworkable in the very different circumstances of big cities.

Orlean, Susan, editor. The Best American Essays 2005.

This is a terrific series of books, and the 2005 version is a fine example.

Fiction:

Bear, Greg. Eon. 1985. 436 pages.

Mediocre science fiction of the world builder/ancient artifact sort. Comparable to Michael Crichton’s Sphere, but without the sharp characterization. An asteroid modified for human habitation has turned up near the Earth, and a large and various team set been set to exploring it. Naturally, there is more to this artifact than at first appears, and it may hold the key to whether or not Earth is destroyed by a nuclear war. I suppose the worst thing about the book is that, when Earth is destroyed, we are so little engaged emotionally that it isn’t particularly moving. Bear has gotten so involved in constructing a stage setting that he has forgotten that “the play’s the thing.”

Coben, Harlan. The Woods. 2007. 404 pages.

I found this thriller interesting and disturbing. When I had finished reading, I realized that there is an enormous flaw at the heart of the plot. The story turns around the disappearance of a number of people involved in a crime committed at a summer camp, and the impact many years later of these events. The problem is that I don’t see the motivation provided by the author as sufficient to have caused the characters to act in the manner described, and certainly not to continue that course of action for twenty years.

Kanon, Joseph. The Good German. 2001. 482 pages.

This is a very fine novel about an American journalist in Berlin right after VE Day. The portrayal of the ruined city, its desperate residents, and its callous occupiers builds a great background to a persuasive murder mystery. Our hero finds that the greatest mystery isn’t the crime, but the human heart.

Stewart, Mary. The Hollow Hills. 1973. 499 pages. The sequel to The Crystal Cave. This is the story of Arthur’s growth to manhood and kingship, and his seduction by his half-sister. A fine story of age meeting youth, wisdom tempering energy, and good intertwined with evil.

Poetry:

Catullus. Catullus, second edition. Translated by Francis Warre Cornish. Cambridge, MA, and London, England: Harvard University Press, 1962. The Loeb Classical Library.

The Loeb Classical Library actually published three poets, each with a different translator, in this little volume. I finished The Poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus in late June. These are quite famous Latin poems, and the German composer Carl Orff followed his success with Carmina Burana with a setting of Carmina Cutulli (Songs of Catullus). I had run across a couple of the first poems in the book in a Latin instruction book. There are one hundred sixteen poems here, with the Latin version on the left-hand page and the English on the recto. (The translators make no attempt to render the English in verse. So you have an English prose translation of each Latin poem.)

Catullus, who lived from 84-54 BCE, wrote love poems, erotic poems, and some downright disgusting poems. One of the nicest is the second:

Passer, deliciae meae puellae,
quicum ludere, quem in sinu tenere,
cui primum digitum dare appetenti
et acris solet incitare morsus
cum desiderio meo nitenti
carum nescio quid lubet iocari,
credo ut, cum gravis acquiescet ardor,
sit solaciolum sui doloris,
tecum ludere sicut ipsa possem
et tristis animi levare curas!

Sparrow, my lady’s pet, with whom she often plays whilst she holds you in her lap, or gives you her fingertip to peck and provokes you to bite sharply, whenever she, the bright-shining lady of my love, has a mind for some sweet pretty play, in hope, as I think, that when the sharper smart of love abates, she may find some small relief from her pain – ah, might I but play with you as she does, and lighten the gloomy cares of my heart.