Paging All Bookworms! discussion

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Read any good books lately? We want to know about them.
How about real stinkers? We want to know about those too!


Enter your reading list and/or reviews here. Did you like it? Hate it? Feel lukewarm?

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Happy reading!

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A Cup of Friendship – Deborah Rodriguez – 3***
Also issued as “ The Little Coffee Shop of Kabul”. Sunny is a 38-year-old American who has found a “home” in war-torn Kabul, Afghanistan, running The Coffee Shop. Sunny is often willfully blind to local customs, beliefs, traditions. Yes, the traditional treatment of women is appalling, but running headlong into the fray seemed not only naïve but extremely dangerous. That her business thrives is mostly due to the ex-pat community that she serves. I did really like the two Afghan women – Halajan and Yazmina – who work in the shop.
LINK to my full review

William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra [1606] about 130 pages

After missing a year due to my cataract surgery, I am going to the Utah Shakespeare Festival again this summer. The only play I hadn’t reread in the past ten years was Antony and Cleopatra. There’s probably not much point in reviewing one of Shakespeare’s most famous plays.

Oscar Wilde, Vera; or, The Nihilists [1880, pub. 1882] 147 pages

Oscar Wilde’s first play, Vera was a dramatic and critical failure, which folded after a week and has seldom been performed since. Although the title is perhaps suggested by Vera Zasulich, an attempted assassin and later a member of the Menshevik party, it has nothing to do with any real people or events. Even if I knew nothing about Russian history, I would have to say that the plot of this play is totally ridiculous, and it certainly shows none of the talent of his later plays.

On the Wrong Track – Steve Hockensmith – 3***
Book two in the “Holmes on the Range” series of mysteries set in the American Wild West, circa 1893. I really like this series. One of the best things about the series is Hockensmith’s way with words. In addition to the brothers, Hockensmith populates the books with an array of interesting and colorful side characters.
LINK to my full review

Oscar Wilde, Lady Windemere’s Fan [1892] about 140 pages

Lady Windemere’s Fan was the first of Wilde’s major plays. It portrays the hypocrisy of the British upper classes, particularly with regard to marriage.

Oscar Wilde, Salomé [1893, Eng. tr. 1894] about 125 pages

Originally written in French, Salomé is unlike Wilde’s other plays; it is written in a poetic, symbolic style, rather than a realistic and witty one. The subject matter, the death of John the Baptist, is ultimately from the Bible, but probably owes more to the story by Flaubert. It was long banned in England, because it deals with scriptural characters who were forbidden to be portrayed on stage, rather than from any moral objections.


Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance [1893] about 100 pages

A Woman of No Importance is the second of Wilde’s four plays about the hypocrisy of the British upper classes. All seem to have similar plots, and are of course full of witty dialogue and end with revelations to the spectator and the prevention of revelations to the other characters. The distinction of this play is the use of an American character as a foil to the British aristocrats. The main problem with the play is that it breaks into two completely different parts, the first acts being total satire and the last acts being serious and somewhat too didactic.

Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband [1895] about 100 pages

The third of Wilde’s social comedies, An Ideal Husband is somewhat different in that it deals in a light way with political corruption rather than marital relations, although that is not entirely absent. It is similar in its theme of forgiveness and tolerance.

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The Legend of the Bluebonnet – Tomie DePaola – 5*****
This is a lovely children’s story book that relates some of the Native American legends about the wildflower that is the Texas state flower – the Bluebonnet. It’s a wonderful lesson about family, community, sacrifice and selflessness. Beautiful illustrations, too.
LINK to my full review

Anyone else enjoy a little Christmas in July ? ....



A Merry Little Meet Cute – Julie Murphy & Sierra Simone – 3***
A porn star is cast as the heroine in a time-travel Christmas romance movie (think Hallmark Channel) opposite a former teen pop idol / bad-boy. Instant attraction on both parts. Lots of sex. Both with hearts of gold, though, and of course, a HEA ending. Not your typical Christmas rom-com, but okay for the genre.
LINK to my full review

Under the Big Top – Bruce Feiler – 3***
Subtitle: A Season With the Circus. Feiler is a writer who got a rare opportunity to spend a season with the Clyde Beatty-Cole Brothers Circus, as a clown. He detailed his experiences and the life of circus workers in this book. I found this quite interesting. Feiler didn’t sugarcoat the difficulties of life on the road, nor did he pull any punches when describing the personalities and activities of some of the workers. I was disappointed, however, that there were no photos.
LINK to my full review

Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest [1895] 187 pages

The Importance of Being Earnest is Wilde’s best-known and most popular play. It is also the Wilde play I will be seeing later this month at the Utah Shakespeare Festival, which mixes Shakespeare plays with more modern fare. I saw it performed about fifty years ago in a college student performance with one of my roommates in the starring role, but I haven’t seen it again and as far as I can remember I have never read it before.

It is the least problematic of his social satires, which may be why it is the most popular; it is a very witty comedy about two men who lie about their identities to their potential fiancées with the expected entanglements. A fun read and a good introduction if you haven’t read anything else by Oscar Wilde.

Philip Traci, The Love Play of Antony and Cleopatra: A Critical Study of Shakespeare’s Play [1970] 171 pages

Since I am going to see Antony and Cleopatra in about two weeks, I decided to read the only book specifically on the play which I had (undoubtedly purchased at some point for ten or twenty cents from the sale table at some used bookstore). Traci’s book originated as a dissertation; it is mostly a “survey of the literature”, and not a very good one at that. He basically just summarizes every famous critic who has written on the play in a few sentences and says that they did not understand the meaning of the play. When he gets to his own view of the meaning of the play (in the last ten or fifteen pages), beyond the trivial observation that it is about love, his views are very strange and not at all what I got from reading it. The book did occasionally point out some pun or image I hadn’t noticed, but otherwise the only good thing I can say about it is that, if it didn’t talk much about the play, at least it was talking about people who were talking about the play, while ten years later it would undoubtedly have been talking about people who were talking about literary theory. Perhaps it might have a use as a kind of annotated bibliography, but then it is rather outdated.

Bury Your Dead – Louise Penny – 3***
Book # 6 in the Inspector Armand Gamache series of mysteries. This episode actually involves multiple mysteries, both current time frame and in the past. What I like about the series is the way Penny builds her characters, and their relationships to one another, over the course of the series. We get to know Gamache, his strengths and weaknesses, his joys and disappointments, over the various books, each episode giving the reader more insight into the man’s complex character.
LINK to my full review

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, In the First Circle: A Novel. The Restored Text [1955-1958, Eng. tr. 2009] 741 pages

This month’s book for the World Literature Group I am in on Goodreads is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s In the First Circle. It has taken me three weeks to read this long novel (admittedly I was also reading other things), and three days to write this review. I remain somewhat ambivalent about it.

Written between 1955 and 1958, it was his first book, although One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was published first (the only one legally published in the USSR). According to the introduction, Solzhenitsyn prepared a self-censored (“lightened”) version in an unsuccessful attempt to get it approved for publication in the Soviet Union, and that was the version translated originally into English and published in 1968 as The First Circle. The version I read was the “restored text” that was first published in Russian in the Collected Works (1978) and in this translation in 2009, a few months after the author’s death. It was “refined”, so I am not sure what was in the original and what may have been added later. I have not compared it with the earlier translation, but going by the introduction it seems that the parts I had the most problems with were the ones that were “restored”.

Like One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, In the First Circle is based on Solzhenitsyn’s own experiences in prison; in this case, not the deeper hell of the labor camps, but the “first circle” of hell, a “special camp” or sharaska for prisoners with scientific or engineering skills needed by the Soviet regime. Ostensibly, it is a kind of detective story about a diplomat, Innokenty Volodin, although we know from the beginning that Innokenty is the guilty one and there is never any doubt that he will be caught. His “crime” in the “lightened” edition was a simple
act of humanity, trying to keep a colleague from compromising himself in the eyes of the regime. In the “restored” version, he actually betrays his country to the Americans in an attempt to keep the USSR from getting information about the atomic bomb. Although the reader is supposed to sympathize with him as a “hero” who risked his life to save the world from the danger of Stalin getting the bomb (actually, whatever technical information the Soviets may have gotten through espionage, essentially they were quite capable of building it on their own; the only “secret” was that it was possible, and the Americans revealed that with Hiroshima and Nagasaki) I personally could not really sympathize; the United States is the only country which ever used the bomb, Stalin never did, the USSR had the right to defend itself, and Stalin’s getting the bomb may well have prevented the US from using it again in Korea, Vietnam, or against the USSR itself. Another character, supposed to be one of the most sympathetic in the novel, actually says he would not mind having himself, his family and all his neighbors killed in a nuclear attack if it would destroy the Soviet government.

In fact, the detective story really plays very little role in the novel; it comes back from time to time, but it seems more like a pretext for the book because a realist novel needs to have some plot. What the book really is, is a series of episodes about a couple dozen different prisoners, their experiences in the prison (and various other prisons in reminiscences), their conversations and their opinions about life and politics. Although I have no way of knowing, I can well believe that his account of life in Stalin’s prison system is fairly true, and perhaps also his accounts of life outside at the time. (The novel is set in four days over Christmas of 1949.) When he goes beyond this and tries to describe the early history of the Revolution before Stalin, he is on much shakier ground. Solzhenitsyn was born in 1918, so he was about six when Lenin died and hardly into his teens when Stalin consolidated his power with the purges and the Moscow Trials. Whatever he says concerning times before Stalin is based on hearsay, and his method is essentially to believe whatever is most opposed to the official history, even if it is mutually contradictory. The best (or rather worst) examples of this are the chapter which takes place in Stalin’s mind, and the chapter about Uncle Avery.

The chapter which takes place in Stalin’s consciousness is one of the most interesting parts of the book. (I realized when reading it that it was the model for the chapter in Mao’s consciousness in Ismail Kadare’s The Concert.) It is partly factual, partly an attempt to present Stalin’s personality, and partly very imaginary. The most imaginary parts, including the claim that the young Stalin was a Tsarist spy in the Bolshevik party, are the ones added in the “restored” version. In his mind, Stalin distances himself from the “naive” and “fanatical” Lenin and Trotsky, who actually believed in the possibility of world revolution, which Stalin considers a total fantasy.

The chapter with Uncle Avery, on the other hand, presents the view that Lenin from the beginning was identical to Stalin, only interested in personal power, and that all the promises of the Revolution were deliberate deception. As with many anti-Bolshevik writers, his major proof is an idealization of the dissolved Constituent Assembly as an ideal democratic assembly, which I have commented on in an earlier review.

Considering the episodes from the prison which make up most of the novel, the characters represent a fairly broad spectrum of opinions. One important position which is omitted is that of the opposition within the Bolshevik party (apart from the minor character of Abramson, who is never really developed); I suppose this could be justified on the grounds that they would not still be surviving in 1949, and certainly not in a “special” prison, but it does skew the discussion. There are three characters which stand out and receive far more attention than any of the others: Nerzhin, who according to the introduction represents Solzhenitsyn himself, Sologdin, who represents Christianity and a certain nostalgia for the Old Regime, and Rubin, who considers himself a Marxist and argues that the Stalinist deformations are simply a temporary period in the march toward Communism, and justifies much of Stalin’s rule, even though he feels guilt at some of his own participation in his crimes (forced collectivization and so forth.) Again, I can believe that these were the main positions represented among the prison population in 1949.

In the end, however, Solzhenitsyn is not a historian but a novelist, and we should not look to novelists for political analysis. As Lukacs says, it is enough that they ask the important questions, not that they give correct answers. We need to judge the book as a work of literature. What can we say about it?

First, that it is in fact a work of literature, unlike many of the novels about Stalinism which are simply propaganda disguised as literature (e.g. Darkness at Noon). Secondly, it is a first novel and has many of the faults which are often associated with first novels: it is overambitious, too long and has too many characters; it is not well-structured; I would get interested in one subplot and he would move on to another, and by the time the first one came back, if I remembered where it ended up at all, I would no longer feel the same interest in it. On the other hand, the characterization is masterful; all the characters, no matter how minor, seem like real people and the dialogue almost never seems forced or unnatural to the characters.

I am not sure to whom I would recommend this. Perhaps to someone who can read sufficiently critically to see both what is right and what is wrong about it — and has lots of time for reading.

Christmas With Anne and Other Holiday Stories – L M Montgomery– 3***
This is a collection of short stories set around the Christmas holidays. It begins with our lovely Anne Shirley and an early Christmas with Marila and Matthew, and the “puffy sleeves” fashion trend. Most of the other stories do not involve Anne, but they are all heart-warming and charming. And isn’t that what the holidays are all about?
LINK to my full review

Franklin M. Dickey, Not Wisely But Too Well: Shakespeare’s Love Tragedies [1957] 205 pages

Primarily a study of three of Shakespeare’s plays, Romeo and Juliet, Troilus and Cressida, and Antony and Cleopatra, this book begins with several chapters about the Elizabethan view of love and Shakespeare’s two long poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. Throughout, it discusses the plays in their context of Renaissance literature and in the case of Antony and Cleopatra the classical and mediaeval background as well. I found much of what he said both interesting and well-argued. There is very little discussion of modern critics, except in general terms, and no literary “theory”.

Oscar Wilde, A Florentine Tragedy [unfinished, pub. 1908] 33 pages

A Florentine Tragedy is one of Wilde’s two unfinished plays; I read it just for completeness. Judging by what exists, it probably wasn’t much of a loss that he didn’t complete it. The plot is rather conventional, although Wilde might have done something unexpected with it; perhaps it was meant as a parody.

Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Stories [1888] 96 pages

One of Wilde’s three collections of “fairy tales”, The Happy Prince and Other Stories is often published as a children’s book, although I am not sure that was his intention. The five stories included were “The Happy Prince”, “The Selfish Giant”, “The Nightingale and the Rose”, “The Devoted Friend”, and “The Remarkable Rocket.” They all contrast the enjoyments of the rich with the miseries of the poor, and contain some of Wilde’s irony, although less subtly than in the plays. It was a fun, short read (about forty minutes at most).

Serhiy Zhadan, Voroshilovgrad [2010, Eng. tr. 2016] 445 pages [Kindle]

Zhadan is a popular Ukrainian novelist, poet and political activist, who is now a soldier at the front in the war with Russia. His novel Voroshilovgrad was written before the war, in 2010, and is not explicitly political, although it shows the violence of the capitalist restoration after the collapse of the Stalinist regime. It is set in the Donbass region, along the border with Russia, somewhere near the former city of Voroshilovgrad; the text uses Voroshilovgrad, which technically no longer exists (it is now Luhansk), as a symbol of transience.

The plot involves a man named Herman who left his home city of Starobilsk (Zhadan’s birthplace, in the Luhansk region) to take over the gas station run by his brother Yura, who has mysteriously disappeared (allegedly he suddenly emigrated to Amsterdam, but no one manages to contact him there.) There is a gang of gangster-capitalists of the kind that blossomed in post-Stalinist Eastern Europe trying to pressure him to sell the station to their chain of gas stations, and Herman together with his brother’s employees Kocha, Injured, and Olga decides to resist. There is also an important subplot about a man named Ernst, who is trying to save an abandoned airport from the same gang.

The story is largely told in a Romantic style, although there are some impossible events which may be dreams, hallucinations or just magic realism. There is no real ending, and we never learn many of the most important facts, or whether Herman and his friends and allies succeed in defeating the gang or not. The theme of the novel is the importance of solidarity among friends.

The Sound and the Furry – Spencer Quinn – 3***
Book number six in the Chet & Bernie mystery series takes our intrepid duo East to the Louisiana bayous to search for a missing man. I just love this series. Chet (the dog who failed obedience training) narrates the adventures that he and his human, Bernie, have when they take on various cases as part of their business, the Little Detective Agency. Quinn gives us a fast-paced book, with sprinkles of humor to lessen the tension.
LINK to my full review

Oscar Wilde, Intentions and The Soul of Man Under Socialism [1891] 333 pages

This was the fourth volume of the 1909 Nottingham Society edition of the Complete Writings of Oscar Wilde. Intentions was a composite volume published in 1891, which contained four separate works.

The Decay of Lying, originally published in The Nineteenth Century in 1889, is a dialogue in Wilde’s most “contrarian” style. (To succeed in this one needs the brilliance and wit of a Wilde, which the contrarians of today, such as Christopher Higgins and Slavoj Zizek, are totally lacking in.) If we take away the paradox, which of course is to take away the essence of the dialogue, it is claiming that Art is never realistic, and that writers who try to imitate reality accurately are not real artists. He says that Shakespeare, for example, cares nothing about giving an accurate description of actual life. The dialogue is the origin of the claim that “Life Imitates Art” rather than the other way around.

Pen, Pencil and Poison, originally published in Fortnightly Review in 1889, is a short piece on the art criticism and criminal activities of Thomas Griffiths Wainewright.

The Critic as Artist, a long contrarian dialogue in two parts, originally published in The Nineteenth Century in 1890, discusses literature and criticism, opposing all the usual platitudes; it has much that is of value, although exaggerated. It is not clear how much of it is actually Wilde’s real attitude and how much is just pose, although it is usually taken as the statement of Wilde’s own aesthetic creed.

The Truth of Masks is not written in dialogue form. It is basically an essay on Shakespeare, arguing that he is meticulously accurate in his descriptions of life, particularly in costume.

The Soul of Man Under Socialism is not part of Intentions but was published separately in Fortnightly Review in 1891 and republished as a book in 1895. The book begins and ends with talking about socialism; this is not of course Marxist socialism but rather influenced by the Fabians, with many of whom Wilde was friends. It argues in a somewhat contrarian fashion (but I think it has a lot of truth) that socialism represents the triumph of individualism over bourgeois altruism, and ignores the methods of achieving socialism for a description of what it will mean once achieved, with the elimination of the state. (This is what all socialists, including Marxists and anarchists, have as a goal, although it seems strange to people who confuse socialism with Stalinism, and the reason I would recommend this little pamphlet.) Most of the book, however, is discussing the nature of literature and art, and since it is in Wilde’s own person and not a dialogue I think it is probably a better description of Wilde’s actual opinions, and practice, than the previous dialogues

Oscar Wilde, The Rise of Historical Criticism [1879, pub. 1908] 108 pages

One of Wilde’s earliest works, this was written while a student at Oxford for a prize competition in the University (the prize was not awarded.) It is a good example of Wilde’s writing when he was serious rather than paradoxical. He discusses the rise of critical historiography in classical Greece, covering mainly Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, and Polybius.


Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde at Oxford: A Lecture Delivered at the Library of Congress, on March 1, 1983 30 pages

This is a pamphlet published by the Library of Congress about Oscar Wilde’s life as a student at Oxford. Richard Ellmann is also the author of a long and somewhat controversial biography of Wilde. The pamphlet is interesting; Wilde is a complex and contradictory character, and Ellmann definitely has a particular interpretation, which is probably as good as anyone else’s.

I’m currently doing a personal reading challenge where I read one book from every country in the world 🌍📚 I would love to hear what you guys think and if you have any suggestions for me!
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A Year In the World – Frances Mayes – 3.5*** (rounded up)
Subtitle: Journeys of a Passionate Traveler. Mayes recounts her many adventures traveling from her home base in Tuscany as she and her husband roam through the British Isles, Spain, Portugal, Turkey, Greece, Morocco, France and other areas of Italy. Her passion for travel certainly comes through loud and clear! I particularly enjoyed the way she wrote about food. I could practically smell and taste the dishes, and I was constant hungry for “more.”
LINK to my full review

Oscar Wilde, Miscellanies (Complete Writings, v. 8) [pub. 1908] 321 pages

The final volume of the 1908 Complete Writings is as the title suggests a miscellaneous collection of writings which did not fit into any of the earlier volumes. It contains twenty articles, thirteen letters, some unfinished works and two lectures. I read it simply because I had it, and I have a completeness mania in reading. It does cast some light, though not very much, on his personality and works. Along with the next four books, I will have read everything by Wilde except his reviews and his letters, and then after two rather old biographies I will return to my other projects.

Oscar Wilde, The Duchess of Padua [1883] 108 pages

Wilde’s second play, this was much better than Vera but not comparable to his later plays. It is a melodramatic imitation of Jacobean drama, with passion and murder, which is rarely performed.

Oscar Wilde, A House of Pomegranates [1891] 104 pages

Wilde’s second collection of stories, this is similar to the stories in The Happy Prince. It contains four stories, “The Young King”, “The Birthday of the Infanta”, “The Fisherman and His Soul”, and “The Star Child”.

Oscar Wilde, Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Stories [1891] 192 pages

The third collection of Wilde’s stories, this contains five stories, “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime”, “The Canterville Ghost” (which I had read previously). “The Sphinx Without a Secret”, “The Model Millionaire”, and “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” The last-mentioned story is one of Wilde’s most interesting, giving under the guise of fiction a new (though not entirely original to Wilde) theory of the dedicatee of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.

Oscar Wilde, De Profundis [1897, unexpurgated ed. pub. 1962] 163 pages

The last of Oscar Wilde’s works, apart from “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”, De Profundis is a long letter to his lover Lord Alfred Douglas written while in prison. It was published in a very much shortened version soon after his death, a longer version in the 1930s, and the complete “unexpurgated” version in the Collected Letters in 1962, from which this Vintage paperback is taken.

The ostensible purpose of the letter is to accuse Douglas of being an unintellectual and unimaginative person who has destroyed Wilde’s life by his selfishness and hatred for his father. Douglas spent much of the rest of his life trying to refute it and reinterpret his relationship to Wilde, although the most damaging parts were not published until long after his death. Of course, biographers have no choice but to try to decide the questions, but if I have learned anything through long experience it is not to judge between (ex-)lovers, given that the facts by definition are not accessible to any independent third party. Perhaps the best approach is that taken by Jacques Barzun in the introduction to this edition, to take it as a literary tragedy.

In any case, the real interest to a modern reader is not in the personal scandal but in Wilde’s retrospective summary of the purposes of his life and art. There is also a long digression which presents an aesthetic version of Christianity, which would be of more interest to someone who takes religion more seriously than I do.

Frances Winwar, Oscar Wilde and the Yellow ’Nineties [1940] 381 pages

After reading most of Wilde’s writings last month, I decided to read the two (rather old) biographies which I had in my garage. Winwar was what is called a “Romantic biographer”, which I assume means that she emphasizes the personal and especially the scandalous side of Wilde’s life.. She not only gives scandalous anecdotes about Wilde’s relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas, and other relationships of his last few years, but also digs up scandals concerning his earlier life, his parents, and even persons who had no connection with him other than having been at Oxford at the same time he was. She has little about his actual writings, except for trying to draw connections with other “decadents” (she wrote a collective biography of the “decadents”, so perhaps that is understandable). There is some interesting material but I would take it with many grains of salt.

Give the Boys a Great Big Hand – Ed McBain – 3***
First published in 1960, this is book number eleven in the 87th Precinct mystery series, and starts with the discovery of a severed hand in a tote bag. It’s a classic police procedural mystery that held my interest throughout. There are several red herrings (both for the cops and for the reader), but the boys of the 87th precinct are nothing if not tenacious. They WILL get the guy or gal responsible.
LINK to my full review

Hesketh Pearson, Oscar Wilde: His Life and Wit [1946] 343 pages

The other old biography I had of Oscar Wilde, this is somewhat more important in that it is based largely on interviews with people who actually knew Wilde fairly well. It is also better than the previous biography in that it does not concentrate so largely on the scandals, but as the subtitle suggests gives many anecdotes about his witty conversations, as well as a bit more on his writings.

The Soul Of an Octopus – Sy Montgomery – 4.5**** (rounded up)
Subtitle: A Surprising Exploration Into the Wonder of Consciousness. Montgomery spent a year volunteering at the New England Aquarium to study and learn about octopuses. This is her memoir of that time, and it’s marvelous!
LINK to my full review

The Secret Book and Scone Society – Ellery Adams – 2.5**
One of my book club buddies suggested this for our group so I re-read it. My opinion didn’t change much, though I did enjoy the discussion. The relationships between the four friends stood out more. But I also see that there is another secret that hasn’t been revealed. A ploy that I view as “forcing” readers to continue the series, and one that I hate.
LINK to my full review

D.T. Potts, The Archaeology of Elam: Formation and Transformation of an Ancient Iranian State [1999] 490 pages

My reading project on ancient history is moving east into Iran. This book was written for professional archaeologists and archaeology students, which I’m not, rather than for general readers, so it was somewhat difficult; but what made it the most difficult and frustrating is simply the nature of Elam itself. From my readings on Mesopotamia, I had the impression that Elam was essentially Susa and its surrounding area, and this was in fact long the view of historians, but as Potts points out, the word “Elam” simply means “highlands”, and Susa is in the lowlands. Susa, although at times the “capital” of an Elamite polity (and at other times a dependency of one or another Mesopotamian state) was actually just the projection of the highland Elamite culture into the adjoining lowlands. The core of Elamite culture was in the ethnically heterogeneous tribes of the Zagros mountains and their foothills, from “Awan” and “Shimaski” to Anshan in the southeast.

Contrary to what one might expect from that, the book concentrates mostly on Susa. The reason in simple; it is the only part of Elam which has been sufficiently well excavated to allow for any sort of history; even then much of the story is derived from Mesopotamian and other external texts. Anshan has been only partially excavated, and the other settlements of the highlands have not been excavated at all and in fact in most cases have not even been identified. Given the present regime in Iran and its relations with the rest of the world, this is not likely to change in the near future.

Thus much of the book consists in the same history of relations between Susa and Mesopotamia which I had already read about in books about Sumer, Akkad, and Assyria, told from the perspective of Susa. This is not to say that that perspective is not interesting, or that the narrative of Susa doesn’t give a different viewpoint on the reason for events, which often seem arbitrary from the Mesopotamian side.

The book also differs from other books on the Near East by continuing through the Achaemenid, Seleucid, Parthian and Sassanian periods, and in fact through most of the Middle Ages, although the farther it goes the less we know about the Elamites until they finally disappear entirely with the conquests of Tamerlane.

This was a very interesting book, but I would probably not recommend it to anyone not specializing in archaeology or Near Eastern history. I will be following up with four or five books on the Persians and other later peoples in the region.

A.T. Olmstead, History of the Persian Empire [1948] 568 pages

The first two sentences of Olmstead’s preface are “Eighty years have passed since George Rawlinson . . . published the first edition of his Five Great Monarchies of the Ancient Eastern World. During these eighty years ancient history has been made over completely.” I have resisted the temptation to begin with Rawlinson’s 1867 book, although I have a copy of it, but today Olmstead’s book is itself almost eighty years old, and is certainly also very outdated. It is, however, the most complete book I have on ancient Iran under the Achaemenids (the period from Cyrus II, who became “King of Anshan” in 539 BCE and established the Empire in the succeeding decades, to the defeat of Darius III by Alexander the Great two hundred years later) and so I decided to begin with this and supplement it with later (but much shorter) works. (The book actually begins with a chapter on “Iranian Origins”, but this is the most outdated part; fortunately the subject is dealt with in the previous book I read, Pott’s Archaeology of Elam, which is only a quarter of a century old.)

Much (perhaps disproportionately much) of Olmstead’s history is devoted to the relations of Persia with Egypt, Judea, and of course Greece, and I had already read much of this material from the perspectives of those regions, but as in the case of Elam and Mesopotamia in Pott’s book, it all makes more sense when considered against the Persian background. The Greeks do not come off very well in his account, the Egyptians perhaps somewhat better, and it is astonishing how the Biblical prophets were usually totally mistaken in their prophecies. (The story of Ezra and Nehemiah was interesting, though, considered in relation to Persian policies.) Generally, the history of all four regions is presented as a series of personal conflicts and revolts, although he does consider overtaxation as the major cause of the weakness of the Empire; the class conflicts of the landowners in the countryside with the mercantile interests of the cities is disguised by the terms “conservatives” and “democrats.”

After the first few reigns, the eastern part of the Empire tends to get short shrift; this is perhaps understandable given the distribution of the evidence, and the lack of both textual and archaeological sources.

Nora Ikstena, Soviet Milk [2015, Eng. tr. 2018] 159 pages [Kindle]

Nora Ikstena is one of the best-known contemporary Latvian authors. Soviet Milk tells the story of the dysfunctional relationship between two women, a mother who is a gynecologist with psychological issues and her daughter, about nineteen or twenty at the end of the novel. The book alternates between short sections in the first person by each of them, mostly talking about the other. The mother was born at the end of the Second World War, while the daughter was born on October 15, 1969 – the same day as the author. Whether this is supposed to suggest an autobiographical element I don’t know. The mother’s mother and stepfather are also significant characters.

The main plot of the two women is told against the background of Soviet Latvia, and obviously a major theme of the novel is to show the conditions under Russian domination; however, I didn’t find the political aspects particularly insightful. Essentially, it was just what we all know, that the Baltic “Republics” were bureaucratic Stalinist dictatorships under Russian control. We are supposed to conclude that the mother’s issues were the fault of the Russians, because of the mistreatment of her father at the end of the war, and her Latvian patriotism, but this is never convincingly shown. In fact, she is allowed to study in Leningrad, where her promising medical career is side-railed when she attacks someone with a meat tenderizing hammer and puts him into the hospital. This is supposed to be political oppression by the Russians, but really, wouldn’t any country have responded the same way to that sort of incident by a foreign student? She is still allowed to work in a clinic in a smaller town, until she begins missing work due to her psychological issues.

The daughter doesn’t understand her mother’s hatred for the Soviet system until she experiences the repression herself in her school, where a teacher she particularly likes is dismissed on political grounds, and she is required to denounce him. This is a far more believable example of what Stalinism meant in the countries it controlled. Of course, it is also the same as any dictatorship tries to do, and we are slipping into it here with Trump’s attempt to enforce his political agenda in the universities by threats of reprisals and deportations. The novel ends with the collapse of the USSR and the independence of Latvia; I don’t know whether or not Latvia has fared any better than most of the other formerly Stalinist states.

Sun Dog Memory – Doug Armstrong – 3.5***
A Depression-era family saga full of lies, treachery and vengeance. Armstrong goes back and forth in time from 1930 to 1911. We learn how the Albrights came to the Kansas homestead and their efforts to make a go of it, and how their fate becomes intricately linked to that of the town’s wealthy railroad executives. There’s a lot of intrigue here and the reader is just as clueless as the main character, Jed. I’m not sure that I ever figured out who was really behind all the treachery, and while I thought the family saga had a satisfactory resolution, the epilogue threw me for a loop.
LINK to my full review

A Certain Age – Beatriz Williams – 3***
Williams gives us a novel of romance, family secrets, and scandal in New York Society, set during the Roaring Twenties. The title refers to two things: the age of the era in American society, and a woman of “a certain age.” Williams definitely gives the reader a sense of the era … speakeasies, flappers, bathtub gin, horse races, etc. I saw through the murder mystery pretty quickly, but it held my attention throughout.
LINK to my full review

The Pancatantra: The Book of India’s Folk Wisdom [ca. 300?] 195 pages

The Pancatantra is a collection of stories designed ostensibly to educate about political science; it is anonymous and the date could be anywhere between the third and mid-sixth centuries, although most scholars put it about the beginning of the fourth century. The style of stories embedded within stories makes it a forerunner of the later Indian and Arabic collections down to the Thousand Nights and a Night which I read over the last two years. Nearly all the stories in The Pancatantra are animal fables, interspersed with didactic verse.

I read this in the 1997 English translation by Patrick Olivelle, in the Oxford World Classics, which is based on Franklin Edgerton’s 1924 reconstruction of the original Sanskrit text. It is worth reading for anyone interested in the oldest traditions of popular fantasy literature.

Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade, Crimes de l’Amour (Gay et Doucé) [1881] 272 pages (+12) [Kindle, in French]

My eighteenth-century reading project is up to the Marquis de Sade, who was probably (at least according to some critics) one of the three most important French prose fiction writers of the later eighteenth century (just before and after the Revolution), along with the similar if less extreme Pierre Choderlos de Laclos and the early science fiction writer Sébastien Mercier, who are also on my planned reading list; mainly I will be reading a couple of secondary works, but I wanted to read a few of his non-pornographic writings to get an idea of him as a literary author. I downloaded this old book from Project Gutenberg which was published by the nineteenth-century “erotic” publishing house, Gay et Doucé, thinking it was the complete short story collection Crimes de l’Amour, but it was actually only the preliminary essay “Idée sur les Romans” and the first story, “Juliette et Raunai”, together with a fairly long and very confused “Notice bio-bibliographique” by Pierre Gustave Brunet. The essay by Sade gives his views on literature, and the story, set at the time of the Protestant “Conspiracy of Amboise”, gives a typical example of his writing style when he is not writing pornography, so it really did have what I was looking for. (I hadn’t realized that the name of this publishing house, named for its two partners, became a term for “homosexual” in France; possibly the origin of the English use of “gay”?)

I also downloaded (separately) Sade’s early “Dialogue entre un prêtre et un moribond”, about twelve pages, which was an attack on religion. I’m also thinking of reading his novel Aline et Valcours, but that may be more than I can take; he’s not really a very good writer, even without considering his subject matter.

Marguerite de Navarre, Clement Marot, etc, (various selections from the Internet) [mid-16th century] [in French or Spanish]

This week I have been reading a lot of Middle French poetry, mostly by Clement Marot, from the sixteenth century from various sources on the Internet. I won’t even try to estimate the number of pages as they were almost all unpaged HTML. I started with a few short poems by Marguerite, but mostly I was reading Marot, and mostly from the website ClementMarot.com. This website based in Holland had two of his longer poems, Enfer and Avantnaissance, all forty-two of his Chansons, and many of his Rondeaux, Ballades, Epistres and Epigrammes. Most had translations into English and/or Dutch. (It also had his translation of the Psalms, but I didn’t read that.) From other sites I read a few poems, including the long Egloge au Roys soubz noms de Pan et Robin. I’ve also been reading some Spanish poetry from the same period from two print anthologies I have, mainly by Garcilaso de las Vegas.