I think I’m almost off my disaster-book jag here, but I had two more on my stack and decided to read them as a follow-up to A Wall of White and Into Thin Air.

Week 28, The Children’s Blizzard by David Laskin: intermittently gripping, so grade B+.

This is an account of the January 12, 1888 blizzard that swept down through Minnesota and the Dakota Territory into Nebraska, Iowa, and Kansas. It killed hundreds of people, including scores of children who had been sent home from school when bad weather loomed and were caught on the prairie by the storm. Vivid descriptions of the catastrophe, including this quote from a South Dakota man who saw the blizzard approach:

We were all out playing in our shirt sleeves, without hats or mittens. Suddenly we looked up and saw something coming rolling toward us with a great fury from the northwest, and making a loud noise. It looked like a long string of big bales of cotton, each one bound tightly with heavy cords of silver, and then all tied together with great silvery ropes. The broad front of these cotton bales looked to be about twenty-five feet high; above them it was perfectly clear.

An excellent step-by-step account of the storm; once I got halfway through, I was engaged enough to stay up late finishing it. The book did suffer a bit from awkward backstory insertion, particularly right at the beginning before the reader’s attention was thoroughly seized; right after the preface, Laskin goes all the way back to Scandinavia before the Norwegian immigrants leave for the American prairies. He nearly lost me there. Plus, he halts the narrative way too long to tell us all about nineteenth-century methods of predicting the weather. But his story is definitely worth a read, and the conclusion told me something I didn’t know about the Great Plains of today:

Out-migration is on the rise once more. Nearly 70 percent of the counties in the Great Plains states have fewer people now than they did in 1950. These days nearly one million acres of the plains are so sparsely populated that they meet the condition of frontier as defined by the Census Bureau in the nineteenth century….Indian and buffalo populations have now reached levels that the region has not seen since the 1870s….in large stretches of the prarie it’s beginning to look like European agricultural settlement is a completed chapter of history. “It’s time for us to acknowledge one of America’s greatest mistakes,” wrote Nicholas D. Kristof on the op-ed page of the New York Times, “a 140-year-old scheme that has failed at a cost of trillions of dollars, countless lives and immeasurable heartbreak: the settlement of the Great Plains.” The blizzard of January 12, 1888, was an early sign of that mistake.

Fascinating. Intend to find out a little more about this. (Is Kristof’s view peculiar to him, or shared by others?)

Week 29: Forever on the Mountain by James M. Tabor. Grade: B-. Or maybe C+. I really, really wanted to like this book, which is a carefully researched account of the 1967 expedition to Mount McKinley in which seven men died and no rescue was launched. It was clear and interesting but Tabor’s style drove me nuts. He uses the present tense for much of his retelling, which fits chick lit better than history, even recent history. It obscures the distinction between what Tabor knows and what he guesses, and it also forces him to make strained use of past and future tenses: here’s a passage describing the doomed expedition in the middle of the storm:

Fatigue and altitude are dragging all of Jerry’s men down. They have been without food and water probably for twenty-four hours now. Jerry may think vaguely of trying to take off his boots and massage his feet, but the effort required will seem insurmountable….Jerry will understand better than the others what is happening, having learned more about high-altitude and cold-weather physiology during his Antarctic training. He will not say this to his friends, because he doesn’t want to frighten them, but Jerry must know that if the storm doesn’t break soon, some of them will be unable to move and could die right here. Given the way he’s feeling, he could well be one of them.

Those tense shifts are so weird (to my ear, anyway) that I had to stop and puzzle them out right when I should have been transported by the story. Plus, Tabor further confuses the issue when he refers to present-day interviews he conducted with the survivors. Those also go back and forth between past and present tense. Additional distraction: Tabor uses quotation marks for dialogue which he can validate, and no quotation marks for dialogue he’s inventing…something which I didn’t figure out until the very end of the book. Bottom line: not as effective as it could have been.

Week 30: The Invention of Love, by Tom Stoppard. Grade: Er. Um. I have no idea.

I picked this up on a whim because I have fond memories of reading Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead about fifty times in college, and because I haven’t read a play since I finished writing the drama section in The Well-Educated Mind. Possibly my play-reading skills are rusty. But man, did I struggle with this one, which I’m tempted to think is only going to appeal to Brits over fifty. It was premiered in the U.S. in 2000 (with James Cromwell in the leading role). I have to wonder what that was like. I mean, with lines such as “Affability is only suffering the fools gladly, and Cambridge afford endless scope for this peculiar joy. I introduced creme brulee to Trinity, but if that isn’t enough I’ll talk to people. Do you still ride a bicycle?”

I have a stack of new plays to read, though, so maybe I’ll revisit this one once I’m back into drama-mode.

Last week I picked up a disaster book that was on the New Books shelf of the Williamsburg library: A Wall of White: The True Story of Heroism and Survival in the Face of a Deadly Avalanche, by Jennifer Woodlief.

(If you have to have a subtitle THAT long, maybe you ought to have a longer title instead? Although I should talk, since the subtitle of my upcoming book is “From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade” and the subtitle of the corresponding kid’s history book is “History for the Classical Child, Volume 2, The Middle Ages, From the Fall of Rome to the Rise of the Renaissance, Revised Edition.”)

A Wall of White was OK, but not gripping; I skimmed through a bunch of pages to get to the end. Grade: C+

So this week I balanced it out with a disaster classic that I haven’t read for a while: Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air. Grade: A+ on any scale.

I’m in awe of Krakauer’s narrative. I find that disaster books encapsulate the challenge I have (in a much more sprawling way) in writing narrative history: how do you keep the pages turning when the end of the story is already ? Barbara Tuchman, a writer I much admire, says in Practicing History that she does her best work when she writes as if she didn’t know what was going to happen: Henry VIII won’t grow unhappy with this wife, the English will drive off those Norman invaders, the plague won’t spread across the known world. That’s a mental trick that doesn’t work at all for me. What’s astounding about Krakauer’s work is that he tells you right at the beginning of the book exactly what happens, who’s going to die, and how, and yet the narrative still holds you all the way through. Woodlief tries to create suspense by not revealing the end of the story…and it doesn’t work. I was bored.

There were a couple things I could point to: ill-timed digressions (Krakauer has plenty of digressions, but once events really start to accelerate he stays on task; Woodlief takes off three pages while a rescue dog is digging for a dying avalanche victim to tell us about the dog’s babyhood and training), clunky prose (”The final tumbler in the lock of their fate clicked smoothly into place.” You can use a metaphor if you only have to touch on it twice, but three times is flogging it), cliched language (”Jake was moved by the experience”). But I’m not sure that analyzing technique explains why Woodlief’s book flags while Krakauer’s drives relentlessly ahead. Into Thin Air comes out of some deep well that’s accessed by novelists more often than by writers of nonfiction.

Week 17: Curtis Sittenfeld, American Wife. Really? Seriously??? A top ten book from Time, People, and Entertainment Weekly? A New York Times Notable Book? She’s a good writer (I loved Prep), but this is just plain sloppy. Completely unbelievable characterization and motivation. Writing means you’re supposed to ENTER INTO the psyches of people you loathe, not just caricature them and then pat yourself on the back.

Week 18: John Sedgwick, In My Blood: Six Generations of Madness & Desire in an American Family. Promising study of the hereditary tendency to manic-depressive disorders, bogged down by way too much irrelevant detail and far too much worshipping of one’s Mayflower-disembarking ancestors.

Week 19: Stephen Fry, Moab is my Washpot. Recommended by a blogger who posted on this site. Fascinating: I’m guessing that nothing, from home education to board-school-privilege, erases that out-of-place feeling of unbelonging. (See Prep, which, like Fry’s book and unlike American Wife, was actually insightful.) Fry reminds me that this discomfort always co-exists with creativity.

Week 20: Geraldine Brooks, People of the Book. I hate it when I get invested in a first-person narrator and then am suddenly jerked into a third-person perspective. Stuck with this book and enjoyed it, but I still wish the narrative strategy had been different.

Week 21: G. K Chesterton, The Secret of Father Brown. Haven’t read this for years; popped it back onto my to-read pile for nostalgia’s sake. Here’s Father Brown, explaining how he solves murders:

I don’t try to get outside the man. I try to get inside the murderer. Indeed it’s much more than that, don’t you see? I am inside a man. I am always inside a man, moving his arms and legs; but I wait till I know I am inside a murderer, thinking his thoughts, wrestling with his passions; till I have bent myself into the posture of his hunched and peering hatred; till I see the world with his bloodshot and squinting eyes, looking between the blinkers of his halfwitted concentration; looking up the short and sharp perspective of a straight road to a pool of blood. Till I am really a murderer….No man’s really any good till he knows how bad he is, or might be; till he’s realized exactly how much right he has to all this snobbery and sneering, and talking about ‘criminals,’ as if they were apes in a forest ten thousand miles away; till he’s got rid of all the dirty self-deception of talking about low types and deficient skulls; till he’s squeezed out of his soul the last drop of the oil of the Pharisees.

Curtis Sittenfeld, are you listening?

Week 22: Kathryn Harrison, The Mother Knot. Like Sedgwick’s book, a potentially fascinating study of mental pain, made less interesting by its intensely personal nature; not too many points of contact here between the narrator’s journey into her individual past, and anyone else’s. Perhaps this is the nature of writing about mental illness: that it is almost impossible to connect yourself with a pain that might be larger than yourself?

Week 23: Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression. Disproves the statement above. Sweeping, painful, empathetic, real.

Week 24: Charles Barber, Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry is Medicating a Nation. Blanket statements, unsupported suppositions, sweeping generalizations, and just plain fuzzy thinking. Skip it.

Week 25: Sophie Kinsella, Shopaholic and Baby. Oh, shut up, I was tired and it was fun. Also I kept trying to read Karen Joy Fowler’s Wit’s End and never got past the first chapter. Might try again next week.

I’m reading novels right now. Still feeling massive post-manuscript burnout (I need to post some more reflections on this but that would mean WRITING) and I’m trying to recover my story sense. And also my brain is too tired for nonfiction.

So in the last two weeks I’ve read three novels–two entirely redemption-free and the third with no apparent reason for existing.

#1: Revenge, by Stephen Fry
Grade: C

A reasonably entertaining updating of the Count of Monte Cristo, until the end anyway, when instead of hard-won peace, the hero becomes exactly like the men he seeks vengeance upon. Actually that sounds like it might be quite poignant and meaningful, but it isn’t; Fry takes too much nasty delight in the exact tortures that the one-time victim inflicts on his enemies.

#2: The Vicar of Sorrows, by A. N. Wilson
Grade: B+

I like A. N. Wilson’s prose, even if I’m perpetually glad that I don’t live in his universe. This was a beautifully written novel, even though it 1) didn’t throw any real light on why an agnostic would choose to be an Anglican priest, 2) featured a completely unlikely set of romantic alliances, and 3) ended with a toe-cringing scene where the one-time priest faced up to the complete emptiness of his calling. I won’t ruin the climax for those of you who want to read the book; I’ll just say that if that’s a secular redemption, A. N. Wilson can have it.

#3: The Gazebo, by Emily Grayson
Grade: D

I picked this up because it was on the end shelf at the library and I had to get on a plane and wanted to read something that didn’t demand a fully oxygenated brain. I finished it thinking: What editor decided to buy this, and why? There was nothing strikingly wrong with it; it just had absolutely no reason for existing. Undistinguished setup, undistinguished characters, predictable plot, resolution visible about fifteen pages in. I only finished reading it because I didn’t have anything else in my bag. And yet William Morrow published it, and Ms. Grayson seems to have gone on writing novels. Amazing.

Does anyone want to suggest their favorite novel for me to read next?

The Other Woman by Jane Green. My fluff book because I was on an airplane too much this week. What an incredibly unsympathetic main character. I spent most of the book muttering at the pages, “Your life is hard because you’re a PAIN in the NECK, that’s why.”

The Stillborn God by Mark Lilla. Wound down into a somewhat unsatisfying ending, but his dissection of the political theology of medieval and Renaissance Christianity was insightful and I took a lot of notes which I’ll use when I get back to the third volume of the History of the Entire World And Everything In It.

The Enemy of God by Bernard Cornwell. Pretty decent take on the Arthur legend; Arthur is a pagan, which is most likely closer to the historical kernel of the story, and good depictions of all those fractured little British kingdoms that followed Roman occupation. Also made me grateful for indoor plumbing and shampoo, which probably wasn’t the author’s intent.

As far as writing anything insightful, or even coherent….I seem to be in major post-book burnout mode. More on this as soon as I can force myself to write another blog post.

Books: While I Was Gone, by Sue Miller, and Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement, by Kathryn Joyce.

Grade: B for both

I seem to be on a run of pretty-good-but-didn’t-knock-my-socks-off books. I picked up the Sue Miller novel because it was on sale at my local library and I remembered liking The Good Mother when I read it, years and years ago. (I didn’t realize until after I got it home that it was an Oprah selection–I tend to avoid these out of sheer middle-brow snobbery.) Sue Miller does marital unhappiness with absolute brilliance. Contentment, not nearly as vivid.

Quiverfull had its points. I’m not going to “review” it in part because it isn’t the book I would have written on the same topic, and I personally loathe it when a reviewer criticizes one of my books for that reason. (It happens fairly frequently.) It’s very much a book of outside reporting: I would have liked to see much more analysis of the phenomenon that Joyce chronicles, but she takes the position of an observer rather than a cultural critic. Any outsider account is bound to appear un-nuanced to those who have more of an insider point of view, and that’s certainly true of this book. Joyce does point out clearly the extent to which many home school venues and circles have been taken over by a movement with a very specific theological agenda–one which has nothing to do with good educational practice–and that’s a useful thing for home schoolers, particularly new ones, to be aware of.

Celebration, USA: Living in Disney’s Brave New Town, by Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins

Grade: B for both

I’ve been interested in planned communities and utopian endeavors for a very long time, but the town of Celebration is particularly fascinating. Celebration, for those of you who don’t know, was planned and built by Disney; it reminds me of what might happen if Thomas Kinkade got enamored with New Urbanism.

Both of these books were written in the late nineties, right after Celebration was established (I’m digging around now to find a more recent book on the same topic, since I’m curious to see how the town has fared ten years later). Both of them were good if not outstanding. (Those are old-style Bs: above average.) Frantz and Collins are journalists, and it shows; their prose is readable, but too consciously entertaining, and their account is low on critical reflection. (Also they talk about “pixie dust” way, way too much.)

Andrew Ross is an academic, so his cultural criticism is a little more pointed, but whenever I read Ross I have the same reaction: he’s so elitist, even when he’s trying to appreciate the Common Man, that I just want to hit him over the head with a copy of People.

I’m still mulling over exactly what I think about the whole Celebration enterprise. Both books talk a lot about how people moved to Celebration because they wanted to move backwards, not forwards; to recapture some sort of lost nostalgic past when things were better; to recapture the 1950s, only with better technology and (presumably) civil rights. I’m sure there’s some truth to this, but any planned community is a utopian endeavour; I think I’d like to read up a little more on Levittown or Seaside or Columbia in order to see just how Disney’s involvement ramped up this expectation.

One of the most contentious elements in Celebration was the school, which turned out to be the place where utopian dreams and nasty reality smacked into each other with the most force. The school was designed to be innovative and cutting edge–so innovative and cutting edge that it veered into chaos, didn’t provide grades or transcripts, and generally made parents so nervous about their children’s progress that they fled in droves. Fascinating to read about this from two different points of view–the journalists (married to each other, with two school-aged children) were among the parents agitating for reform, while Andrew Ross (single, an academic by training) concludes that the school would have been just fine if the uninformed, rabble-rousing parents had minded their own business and let the educational experts run the show.

“Nick and Becky brought home little homework, and there were few tests,” the parents write. “We were asked to trust the teachers to an unusual degree, and not everything we saw inspired trust….One of Nick’s nine-week goals was to learn to read more slowly because he kept getting ahead of his reading group in class.” (Insert sound of me hyperventilating at this point.)

Ross, on the other hand, writes, “Teacher-parent meetings were dominated by exasperated complaints, usually from male parents, based on badly digested information or opinion. Seemingly oblivous to the reasoning behind the teaching methods, parents posed the same questions again and again: ‘Why aren’t you teaching my son the basics?’ ‘How is he going to know your basic history, your basic geography?’ ‘Who’s teaching my child to diagram a sentence?’” These all seem like completely worthless queries to Ross; he concludes that the parent dissatisfaction with the school (remember, this is a school with open classrooms which at one point had two teachers supervising a group of over eighty middle-school students with no texts and no written curricula–the students were expected to come up with their own learning objectives and carry them out) stems from American anti-intellectualism, that the parents had “little enthusiasm for knowledge that offers no immediate practical use.” When the school finally buckled to parent demands and agreed to provide textbooks and standard grades (in large part so that high school students would be able to apply to college), Ross chalks the changes up to “the Disney training philosophy that ‘the customer is always right.’”

This, folks, is why home schooling is on the rise.

There are many great schools out there, with dedicated and skillful teachers. But if you’re unlucky enough to run into a Ross-style educator, convinced that parents are unqualified to have any opinions on what and how their children learn, you may find yourself doing what a number of the Celebration families did. Yanking your kids out and teaching them at home.

Grade: B+

When my brother found out I was doing the “52 Books in 52 Weeks” challenge, he sent me a list of novels he thought I’d enjoy. This was at the top of the stack.

I’ve read Neuromancer, of course, and appreciated (as opposed to “enjoyed”) it. Gibson’s other books have frustrated me. Have you ever had a serious conversation with someone whose accent is difficult to follow, or tried to listen to a dinner-party companion in the middle of a very noisy restaurant? You can follow the gist of what’s being said; you get the main points; but there are large stretches of time when you just keep smiling and nodding, waiting for the next audible words. Islands of meaning rise up out of the inaudible fog that obscures the rest. You’re mostly adrift in the mist.

That’s my experience when I read Gibson. Usually I have to reread two or three times before I can follow him. I don’t like this. It makes me feel stupid.

That sense was present but muted during my reading of Pattern Recognition. The book isn’t cyberpunk (a genre I don’t think I really have an affinity for), but Gibson’s still got his allusive, present-tense, real-time, proper-name thing going, and it doesn’t take much of that before I start struggling. (”Still doing heels, she checks her watch, a Korean clone of an old-school Casio G-Shock, its plastic case sanded free of logos with a scrap of Japanese micro-abrasive. She is due in Blue Ant’s Soho offices in fifty minutes.”)

Plus, I have absolutely no idea why Gibson decided to drag 9/11 into his plot. It didn’t fit when he introduced it; it still wasn’t fitting at the book’s end. It was totally extraneous to the novel’s world.

Despite that I was drawn into the plot (eventually; it helped that I got stuck this week on an airplane to Indianapolis with nothing else to read). To put this in a spoiler-free fashion: Gibson’s writing, in a way that strikes me as very personal to him, about the impossibility of existing in today’s world as a solitary, independent artist. You can create all you want; you can lock yourself in your lair, your studio, your retreat, your chicken-shed, and turn out the most innovative, beautiful, gripping stuff in the world; but if you don’t have an enormous, powerful, and very rich publicity machine behind you, no one will ever see/hear/read what you do. And the most effective publicity machines of all are those with enough money and clout to disguise marketing ploys as spontaneous interest.

Which I know to be true. It was a heart-felt and very depressing read.

Brock starts out with this assertion: “An unconditional rejection of war, so far as we know, arose first among the early Christians….True, the idea of peace and nonviolence can be found earlier in the history of man as well as in other cultures…for instance, among Indians and Chinese and the indigenous peoples of North America. But nowhere else do we find ‘pacifist’ ideas leading to…the refusal of military service as the ultimate expression of a principled repudiation of violence.”

Which is fascinating in a couple of ways. First: is that really true? If someone can contradict it (with proof, please), I’d be interested to hear about it. Second: the biggest question I have about principled pacifism is wrapped up right in this sentence. The “refusal of military service” can only be carried out by an individual who is rejecting a government’s demand. And this is what I continually come back to: Can there be such a thing as a pacifist government?

I tend to think not; I’ve just worked my way through centuries of military history, and it is abundantly clear that governments which do not fight for survival die. Violence–defensive violence, at the very least–is essential to survival. Brock’s book points this out, several times, in its pairing of the rejection of war with the rejection of the entire apparatus of the state. “The Czech Brethren,” he writes about one pacifist movement, “regarded the state…as an unchristian institution and renounced war as an unchristian occupation.” Pacificist are, in Brock’s history, consistently portrayed as separatists, men and women who turn away from any involvement with the structures of state and nation in order to hold to their principles.

I have no problem with this as an individual stance. But if a principle is true, won’t it apply to states and nations, as well as to individuals?

Not pacifism, according to Brock. Invariably, pacifist movements forbid their adherents to hold office, because that might require them to wage war or to enforce violent punishments on criminals.

I am drawn to this philosophy. But I can’t help wondering: Are these individual pacifists (please excuse the metaphor) moral parasites, holding to a principle which they can only assert because others–those who do not share their beliefs–are willing to fight in order to hold the framework of nations (the nations in which the pacifists live) together?

Or is pacifism, by its nature, a movement which will always exist on the fringes of the established order, forcing that order to answer for its decisions? And is it morally defensible to insist that something is 1) true and 2) incapable of being applied on a national, global scale? I am distressed by this question…as an individual, as a voter in a democratic society, as a historian.

Or is this an incredibly basic and stupid question? And if it is, can it be answered succinctly, so that I can struggle with more essential questions? And what are those?

No answers, this time around. Just questions and more questions. And no grade, because I don’t have enough knowledge yet to evaluate this book.

Last week (Week 5) I spent a good bit of time in a hospital with a family member. All is well and we’re more or less back to normal now, but I’ll tell you something about hospitals–it’s impossible to read anything serious when you’re there. Even if you’re not the sick one. So I decided to take advantage of one of the “52 Books in 52 Weeks” rules and reread a mystery I first read several years ago: P. D. James’s Death in Holy Orders.

(I also read about three-quarters of an epic fantasy by George R. R. Martin. It’s been years since I wanted to read an epic fantasy, and I’m not sure why this one was so satisfying, except that it was on my Kindle, which was in my purse, and I was in the mood for it. Didn’t realise until later that George R. R. Martin was one of the writers for Beauty & the Beast–does anyone remember this series? I adored it when I was eighteen because it was SO ROMANTIC. Now I just want arms like Linda Hamilton’s.)

I’m a big James fan, and I enjoyed this book, but I do have a few random observations which are less than glowing…

The Baronness’s age is showing. Every one of her sympathetic characters, no matter what age, race, or gender they are, at some point goes into an internal monologue about how 1) no one in school learns how to read or write properly any more and/or 2) all that PC stuff about racial inequality is SO overblown–there’s no such thing as prejudice any more. Even more jarring is her highly sympathic portrayal of a priest convicted of sexual abuse of choir boys (”It wasn’t really abuse,” one of the characters explains, “just fondling, nothing violent”) and her obvious disapproval of the church authorities who insisted on prosecuting him (they had a “vendetta” and ruined his life by forcing him to confess). AGGHH. Ick.

Second: It’s astounding how highly rationalised the Church of England appears to be, in the world of this book. It’s like a tightly structured corporation with a set of rituals that have to be performed at certain times and places just for the purpose of keeping things orderly…and apparently for no other purpose. James shoehorns into her plot a letter from Pontius Pilate to an underling about the arrangements to dispose of the body of Jesus, a letter which appears to be in the book solely so that her most intelligent priest can say something like, “For one who is sure of the presence of the living Christ, what difference do earthly bones make?” (Paul might have something to say about that.) When I was reading Death in Holy Orders I kept thinking about Susan Howatch’s Starbridge series–a highly enjoyable set of potboilers about the Church of England which tries, more or less unsuccessfully, to convince us that all of those weird supernatural things that happen in churches can be explained by way of Freud.

Third: I’ve always enjoyed those English-manor-house closed-circle mysteries where you have to figure out who, among a limited number of suspects, is most likely to have committed the crime. That’s essentially what Death in Holy Orders is, with the manor house transformed into a theological seminary on a remote spit of land. But this time I found myself growing a little impatient with the whole setup. I can’t even remember, now that I’ve finished it, who did the first murder, and I don’t really care. I think that James’s less conventional mysteries, like Innocent Blood with its themes of revenge and need-based love, or Original Sin, which I’ve always liked, maybe because of the whole murder-your-editor theme (no offense to any editors who may be reading this), are more engaging.

I’ll post about the next book later on; back to nonfiction for this week.

Grade: B-

Disclaimer: This may be an unfair grade, since this is my first venture into the theology of pacifism. I’ve been increasingly fascinated by the practice and philosophy of nonviolence as I’ve worked my way through the ancient and medieval history of the world. Somewhat to my surprise, I’ve discovered that my inclination is to write traditional political narratives–and also that I find military history absolutely fascinating. I wouldn’t have expected that. But there it is.

More and more, though, I’m fascinated not so much by the kings and generals who declare war (their motives are usually fairly transparent) but by the armies who fight for them. Why do soldiers march out and die? How do their leaders convince them that this is a good idea? Why do some men and women refuse–and why are they the exception?

So I have a stack of books on pacifism and just war which I’ll be reading, over the course of this year. This was on the top of the stack, and while I found parts of it useful and interesting, overall it was a disappointment for two reasons.

In the first place, Brimlow spends most of the book attempting to debunk the theory of just war, rather than carefully laying out his own position–it’s a very defensive book. If I’d wanted a book about just war, I’d have bought a book about just war. (In fact, I did, and it’s in my stack.)

And second, his conclusion skirts the real issue. OK, if you call your book What About Hitler? you’re probably setting yourself up for disappointment. (I remember C. S. Lewis writing once about The Well at the World’s End that the biggest problem with the book was that NO book could ever live up to the wonderful title.) But Brimlow’s book wraps up with the assertion that followers of Christ are commanded to “follow Jesus along the path of peace as his faithful disciple,” even though this “will probably lead to our death.” Then he spends pages and pages defending this, on the assumption that his readers will say, “Hey, that can’t be the message of the gospel!”

Well, of course it is, and anyone who’s spent more than a week or so with the New Testament will have figured that out. The reason the Hitler question is vexing is because it doesn’t pose us with the problem of: What if I choose nonviolence, and then die? It poses us the much more complex question of: What if I choose nonviolence, and then others die, six million or more?

Brimlow does point out, usefully, that the “What about Hitler” question, when posed to pacifists, is essentially unfair. The is passage worth quoting in its entirety:

In a very important respect, the Hitler question is a dishonest one, or at the very least misleading. It assumes that Christians and the church have no involvement and no responsibility prior to some arbitrary date in the early 1940s. If the question is asking how a pacifistic church should have responded to the horrors of the Holocaust, the answer surely lies in being a peacemaking church long before the Holocaust ever began. The church should have preached and lived a love of the Jews for many centuries before the twentieth; the church should have formed Christians into the kind of people who do not kill Jews, or homosexuals, or gypsies, or communists, or other Christians, or Nazis, or whoever else was victimized by the war. The church should have lived and taught in such a way that the First World War would have been incomprehensible in a largely Christian Europe and, failing that, should have railed against the Versailles Treaty and the vengeance it embodied in favor of forgiveness and reconciliation.

All true. But I’m still left wondering…given that this entity called “the church” did no such thing, what was the responsibility of the individual peacemaker?

This question remains unaddressed. Brimlow does attempt to deal with Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his choice to turn away from nonviolence and involve himself in an attempt to assassinate Hitler, but this is one of the most unsatisfying parts of the book–in fact I’m still trying to figure out exactly what he’s getting at.

Well, it’s only the first book on nonviolence in a large stack. Looking forward to discovering more.

Collective Grade: Hmmm…

I’m actually a chapter or so into next week’s book, a set of theological essays on God and genocide called Show Them No Mercy, and I’m finding it enlightening. But I started it last week and then, for various reasons, needed a week of just plain fun reading.

So instead of finishing it, I raided the library and had myself a chick lit week. I read five novels this week (they go pretty fast): Jemima J. and Mr. Maybe, both by Jane Green; The Next Big Thing by Johanna Edwards; Glitter Baby by Susan Elizabeth Phillips; and Sushi for Beginners, by Marian Keyes.

Come on, guys, what do YOU read, the adventures of Dirk Pitt? Sports Illustrated? We all need fun reading. And no one with a family and a job (which is to say, no one who works 18-hour days) picks up Proust at 11 PM to relax. I read chick lit, and I’m not embarrassed.

Well, I’m a little embarrassed, mostly because my father reads my blog.

Anyway, this was an enlightening week of reading. Two of these books were repeats; I read Jemima J. and Sushi for Beginners several years ago when I wrote a review-essay on “women’s fiction” for Books & Culture, and wanted to see how they struck me now. The other three were new.

Back then, I concluded that chick lit was as interested in food as in love, maybe more so. That obsession is alive and well. The Next Big Thing is about an obese woman who joins a reality show to lose weight and change her life, and finds love (I’ll give you a moment to recover from the shock). The heroine of Glitter Baby diets for most of her teen years and then liberates herself by gaining twenty pounds. There’s lots of calorie counting and nibbling and binging in all these books, and if you want to know what I think about it, you can read the essay.

But in this past week, what really leapt out to me was this: chick lit has no idea what to do with mothers.

I note this in passing in my earlier essay. But now I have an eight-year-old daughter, and I am astounded by how much the heroines of these novels hate their mothers. All of these women are trying to create a brand new life for themselves from scratch—a good life, a satisfying life—but this inevitably involves rejecting their mothers and the world where their mothers live. Rejecting them with loathing and scorn, too. “My mother on her own is bad enough,” scoffs Libby, the heroine of Mr. Maybe, “but with her ridiculous twittering friends it’s just a total nightmare….I want to kill them. All of them. And in my mother’s case I’d make it particularly tortuous.” Libby’s mother doesn’t understand why her daughter wants a career in PR; she just wants her daughter to get married, which Libby finds completely laughable.

Never mind that the whole books is about finding a man; no, if your mother wants it, it must be horrendous.

Chick-lit mothers come in four varieties: mothers who keep telling their daughters to lose weight, mothers who want to feed daughters who are trying to diet, mothers who try to suck their daughters back into boring drab lives, and dead mothers. All of them, except for the dead ones, spend every moment criticizing their daughters. Jemima J.’s mother tongue-lashes her about her weight until Jemima gets thin, at which point her mother calls her a scarecrow, and Jemima finally has an epiphany: “God knows I’ve tried. I mean, I’ve achieved the one thing that I always thought she wanted, but no, it’s still not enough, and I suddenly realize that, for whatever reasons, I will somehow never be good enough for her. I will never make her happy. I am either too fat or too thin. There is no middle ground. Nothing I every do is destined to please her.”

Sushi for Beginners’s Lisa dreads going home: “With every visit the house she’d grown up in became smaller and more shockingly dreary. In the poky little rooms crammed with dirt-cheap furniture, she felt shiny and foreign, with her false nails and glossy leather shoes. Uncomfortably aware that her handbag probably cost more than the couch she was sitting on. But though her mum and dad oohed and aahed respectfully over her fabulousness, they were fluttery-nervous around her. She should have dressed down on her visits, to try to narrow the gap. But she needed as much stuff as possible, to wear like a suit of armor, so that she couldn’t be sucked back in, subsumed by her past. She hated it all, then hated herself.”

You get the idea, so I won’t keep on quoting. All of these women are trying to create a brand new life for themselves from scratch—a good life, a satisfying life, a life where they inhabit a new world. By definition, this world is the opposite to everything their mothers treasure.

I’m still trying to figure out exactly why this is. In part, it seems to be an inability to deal with aging; middle age is inevitably pictured as a time of disappointment and automatic boredom. (I’m forty and haven’t yet found this to be the case, although I have quite a bit of middle age to live through yet.)

But partly it seems to be because Mom is too powerful to fit into the new worlds these women build. She shatters them, shows them to be illusory. She has to be rejected for them to thrive. She has to disappear–and in most of these books, she does. The daughters find men, but they walk away from their mothers, and there is no resolution of difficulties, no restoration of relationship.

In the end, it wasn’t quite as relaxing a week of reading as I’d hoped. (I may need to go back to rereading Agatha Christie when I need a mental break.) But it did leave me with a deep and abiding gratitude for my own mother–who helps me teach my children, tells me that she likes my clothes, shares her books with me, and assures me that I’m doing a good job with my life when that’s what I most need to hear.

Grade: A-

Why: The first fully successful alternative history. Japan and Germany triumph in World War II, but a novelist living in Japan-controlled Cheyenne has written a bestselling alternative history in which Germany lost. Fearing German reprisals, the writer has retreated to a guarded fortress: he has become the Man in the High Castle.

I’ve been meaning to read this for years, and I was so exasperated by James Wood’s snotty pretentiousness that I decided to read science fiction for my second title. Philip K. Dick can be difficult to read. He doesn’t give you a lot of backstory; you plunge right into the story and have to figure out what’s going along as you read. But if you persist, the kaleidescope of fragmented scenes eventually starts to shake itself into a visible image. It’s a composition skill that I admire. When I write, I always overexplain; you have to have a lot of confidence in yourself and in your readers to write as he does.

In one way, The Man in the High Castle is intriguing because it so clearly lent its techniques and strategies to an entire genre. Alternative history existed before this novel, but almost every alternative history that follows it owes Philip K. Dick a debt. By coincidence I just finished watching the prematurely-cancelled TV series Jericho, and was struck by the number of ways in which the episodes pay homage to this book.

As a stand-alone work, the book fascinates by circling around and around the idea of reality. There are three political realities in the book: the one in the reader’s mind (ours), the one in which the characters live (a world divided between Japanese and German control), and the one constructed by the Man in the High Castle’s novel-within-a-novel; the Allies triumph in his book, but there are significant differences between that triumph and the one that we know. A secondary plot involves the sale of “genuine historical artifacts,” American items from before the war, and by the end of the book we are forced to question seriously what “genuine” means. And almost every character has a double identity: which one is “real”?

Philip K. Dick even manages to question his own skills, channeling James Wood at the same time that he laughs at high-brow pretensions. “Amazing, the power of fiction, even cheap popular fiction to evoke,” one of the German victors thinks to himself after reading the Man in the High Castle’s novel. “They know a million tricks, these novelists….Yes, the novelist knows humanity, how worthless they are…swayed by cowardice, selling out every cause because of their greed–all he’s got to do is thump on the drum, and there’s his response. And he laughing, of course, behind his hand at the effect he gets.”

The minus is because Philip K Dick is not much on character development; he’s a plot and theme man, and there’s not a lot of psychological reality to his people. Which is fine. Take the novel on its own terms.

Grade: C

Why: Too much micro-analysis, too little attention to the whole; too much scorn for the “popular,” too much delight in his own prose (”Nearly all of Muriel Spark’s novels are fiercely composed and devoutly starved”), way too much jargon (”Characterological relativity”? Really?).

Wood is intensely interested in small things. In use of detail, in single phrases and sentences, in rhythm and vocabulary. Which is fine, and I gave the book a C (”average,” or was before the days of grade inflation) because he makes useful observations about the construction of prose. His section on “The Rise of Detail” was particularly good, and I plan on rereading and making use of it.

But he pays no attention to the entire novel. He spends page after page after page rhapsodising about single sentences and details. Saul Bellow’s description of flying, he enthuses, tells the reader exactly what flying feels like. “And yet until this moment one did not have these words to fit this feeling. Until this moment, one was comparatively inarticulate; until this moment, one had been blandly inhabiting a deprived eloquence.” (Yep, that’s been my entire experience of flying up to this point. I blandly inhabit a deprived eloquence.) What the entire novel does, why we might read it, what effect the whole sweep of it might have on us, and (most important for a book called How Fiction Works) how the writer constructed it–all of these things are ignored.

He’s also a snob. He loathes something he calls “commercial realism,” a style which “lays down a grammar of intelligent, stable, transparent storytelling,” and instead praises the obscure, the high, and the literary. Plot he dismisses as unnecessary–unless your reader is slow and uninterested in real fiction. The novel does not have plot, he implies; it does something much more important. Yet he can’t really express what this is without resorting to academic jargon and self-consciously pretty writing: “And in our own reading lives, every day, we come across that blue river of truth, curling somewhere.” I have a mental picture of Mr. Wood reading that sentence out loud and kissing his fingers like a chef: What a beautiful sentence! (Maybe, but what does it mean?)

And talk about a gratuitous slap: when David “sees Bathsheba,” Wood writes (on the way to analysing David’s character as one who “sees, and acts…[a]s far as the narrative is concerned, he does not think”), “what happens to him is not an idea, or at least not in the way that Jesus, that cheerless psychologist, meant when he said that for a man to look lustfully upon a woman is already to commit adultery.”

“Cheerless psychologist,” huh? What pithiness, what cutting insight. (That is sarcasm, which does not do well in blog-form.)

But there it is. He is flip, self-satisfied, self-absorbed. He is uninterested in the entire novel, obsessed instead with single phrases and turns, with minor effects and details. He scorns plot as “essentially juvenile” but leaves us with vagueness about what the novel should be doing instead. (Apparently “subtle analysis of character” is important, but he doesn’t make clear what this is.) Buy The Fiction Editor, The Novel and the Novelist by Thomas McCormick instead.

Next week I’ll actually be getting back to work, since I haven’t finished up the maps, timelines, and illustrations for the History of the Medieval World. I’ll update you then on where the MS is in production (I haven’t heard back from my editor; the Norton offices close before Christmas and stay closed until after the New Year).

In the meantime, though, I’m joining a challenge begun by one of the wonderful women on our message boards: to read a book a week in 2009. Fifty-two books in 52 weeks.

I read all the time for work. Like most writers and academics, I plow through several books a week related to my current project. But since I started writing the History of the World, I haven’t been reading many un-work-related books. I have a whole shelf of titles I’ve been meaning to get to, but haven’t.

So beginning tomorrow, I’m reading a book a week that ISN’T related to anything I’m doing for work. Every Wednesday evening, I’ll post my reaction to the book I just finished and the title of the next book I’ll be reading.

First title: James Wood, How Fiction Works. I pre-ordered this book before publication (back in July) and still haven’t read it.

(Incidentally, that’s a truly hideous cover. If I were James Wood I’d be lobbying for a redesign.)