Round Up of Things I've Recently Read

[aggienaut]

On The Road
   When I was a mohawked teenager and my disreputable friends used to hang out at the local coffee shop every evening, back before it was bought by starbucks, one of these characters used to carry around a copy of Jack Kerouac's On The Road as if it was some sort of bible. The group was the usual mix of people who desperately wanted to be artists of some kind, even if just in spirit. Some may have had the spark, but many of whom would never be more than poseurs. Somehow Suzanne's carrying about of the Kerouac book like some kind of totem didn't inspire me to read it but I vaguely assumed it must contain some truly mystical stuff.

   Looking for what to read next with my reading-ears on audible the other week I remembered this book and gave it a listen. And a fair bit of the wind was taken out of the shellacking I was about to give it when I thought I'd read what Wikipedia tells me the critics say about it before having a go myself, and reading the plot summary I realize somehow I must have thought it was over about 40% of the way through, or my brain just stopped listening, because I swear I have no recollection of the happenings of parts 3 - 5.

   So now with the caveat that I may have only read parts 1-2, I was frankly fairly disappointed. It countained no beautiful descriptions, poetic observations, epic wisdom.. as a travelogue it doesn't really hold any value as he seldom describes things around him much. Reading the plot summaries it sounds like maybe the protagonist might come to some realizations towards the end but throughout what I read its just like the rambling wanderings of a young guy with irresponsible friends and bad money management skills. ::shrug:: I really don't know how I somehow thought I was at the end when I apparently wasn't. It sure did seem to end randomly.


Travels With A Donkey In The Cevennes
   After finishing that, or at least thinking I had, and feeling very unsatisfied, I looked in my Audible wishlist of titles I'd previously tagged as interesting and came across Travels With a Donkey in the Cevennes, which I recalled having been mentioned as a pre-20th-century travelogue (takes place 1878). This short book I found to be everything Kerouac was not, vivid descriptions, insightful humor, well crafted philosophical observations. It was so good that I thought immediately to look up other works by the same author, whose identity I hadn't really registered. Somehow the name didn't even register when I clicked on it, until I saw "Treasure Island" and "The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde" listed and was like oh OH it's THAT Robert Louis Stevenson!
   Maybe I should read Treasure Island again, I think my dad read it to us as a bedtime story when my brothers and I were wee? And one is always vaguely familiar of various cartoon or tv versions of it but reading this latest work of his reminded me that he IS a really good author and it might be time to revisit the original of the source of most of our current pirate cliches.


The Rihla
   Next up, I think I had been inspired to google historical travelogues. This brought me into awareness of muslim traveller Ibn Battuta who traveled as extensively as Marco Polo just about 30-60 years later (1325-1354), and wrote extensively about it in a book known as the Rihla, which wasn't fully translated into English until ... 1994. The book was not available on audible but I ordered it on amazon. We've come a long way since 1354 but I still can't magic his book into coming to me, like many books it wasn't available on amazon Australia and had to be shipped to my parents house in California from whence hopefully they will dispatch it to me presently.


The Travels of Marco Polo
   Following this vein, it's been bothering me for awhile that Marco Polo himself is someone we all vaguely know in a general sense traveled a lot and wrote about it... but has anyone read his travels?? So I conjured up what seemed the best version of Marco Polos Travels on the audible -- there didn't seem to be any strictly direct translations but this one was a retelling of his travels with discussion of what he said about every place, which I was relatively content with. He had quite the interesting life. I kept thinking they should make a tv series about his life, then I remember that they did and I found it kind of disappointing. The netflix series, in my opinion, fell victim to the frequent problem of low budget and/or failure of production vision that it made everything seem close together and overly simplified and more soap opera esque.


And randomly here's a picture I took on Friday from not far from where I live

One Second After
   After that I was just perusing audible recommendations or something and came across the description of a book about what happens in a small American town after America is hit with an electromagnetic pulse weapon which shorts out all electronics. Well this sounded just like my cup of tea -- I love interesting takes on post-apocalyptic situations and creative explorations of the ramifications of unusual weapons. Well as soon as it started with a forward by Newt Gingrich I began to suspect I'd walked into a doozy. And then I realized "with a forward by Newt Gingrich!" was written across the cover almost bigger than the title (selecting books on audible its easy to not pay too much attention to the cover). So this wasn't merely the-kind-of-book-that-would-have-a-forward-by-Newt-Gingrich, it was the kind of book that would very proudly broadcast that.
   That being said, the book isn't terrible, but it's so full of unimaginative Norman Rockwell America cliches that the author actually references Norman Rockwell twice in like the first chapter, and its full of things that will surely give republican readers huge stiffies, such as all the protagonists being veterans, the bad guys all being druggies, lots of good guys with guns, hippie-types being referred to with condescending pity .... I keep wanting to roll my eyes and think of it as verging on republican pornography. I think the protagonist even has a mild Oedipus complex for his mother in law. There's some stuff to unpack here.
   But I haven't thrown it out the proverbial window yet because other than reading like propaganda it moves along and I'm curious to see how they handle the disaster. They've had some weird interpretations of what they think their American duty is so far, in my opinion, and being as at the point in the book I'm at they're 10 days on and still fending for themselves, I think the author is being willfully ignorant of the fact that by this point unless the rest of the world has also been blasted they'd probably be being visited by either European aid forces (but wouldn't that wilt the gop-boners!) or an invasion force of whomever did it (not yet determined). And also our heros with guns are somehow bullying the nearby much larger town, which seems to be stretching credulity in ignoring the fact that the nearby much larger town would have many more guns and resources and would easily impose its will on them. If anyone happens to have read this book, "One Second After" ("Pulse" would have been such a better name, considering literally nothing happens in the one second after!), I'd love to discuss my building stock of disagreements with it with you (:


Keeping Up With My Career-Twin!
   My career twin has published a book. That's right. There's another guy, who I believe is around my own age, who travels the world doing beekeeping and writes about it. William Blomstedt had contacted me after my Beekeeping in Ethiopia article was published in the American Bee Journal in 2012. He's been a regular contributor to the venerable ABJ, while I haven't submitted anything since. Well the realization that he's just published a book, Foraging Afar about his travels around the world with bees made me realize I really need to get on the stick. That and, while a mention years ago that ABJ was "tired of" stories about beekeeping abroad had been the reason for my lack of effort in that area, I had recently heard they were back into it. So I recently contacted the editor and... they said the editor who had been so enthusiastic on the subject had already been canned ... but he still expressed an interest in an article about my project in Kyrgyzstan.
   A lot of things in the ABJ are very dry. Oddly I haven't actually read one of Blomstedt's articles, they all seem to be in issues that I miss. But I'm gonna try to put as much of the best traveloguing magic I can into it while still balancing it with enough technical discussion to keep them satisfied! The ABJ has a circulation of probably several thousand and actually paid me $300 for my other article, which more than the intrinsic value of said money makes it really feel validating as serious writing.

Comments

[bearshorty.livejournal.com]

I taught world and European history for a while (I trained as a Medieval historian) and I read and then assigned to my students both Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta. Mostly so I would read them too.

And you can magically have Ibn Battuta, or at least a version of it immediately. I downloaded it for free from Medieval Sourcebook website.

https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/source/1354-ibnbattuta.asp

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Oh heyyyy you probably have sweet sweet other recommendations for good premodern writing to read. Gimme a hit of the good stuff :D :D :D

[bearshorty.livejournal.com]

I can think of three right now"

1. Usama Ibn Munqidh, "Book of Comtemplation" - basically Crusades from Muslim perspective

https://www.amazon.com/Book-Contemplation-Crusades-Penguin-Classics/dp/0140455132/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1551016000&sr=8-1&keywords=book+of+contemplation+munqidh

2. Columbus, "Four Voyages" - Columbus's journals of his travels

https://www.amazon.com/Four-Voyages-Christopher-Columbus-Classics-ebook/dp/B002RI9JA0/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1551016247&sr=8-1&keywords=columbus+four+voyages

3. Gilgamesh - classic and worth reading . I really like this version by Stephen Mitchell:

https://www.amazon.com/Gilgamesh-English-Version-Stephen-Mitchell/dp/0743261690/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1551016323&sr=8-2&keywords=gilgamesh+a+new+english+version+by+stephen+mitchell

[ryl.livejournal.com]

The only good thing in On the Road was the jazz. They listened to a lot of good jazz in those clubs but since you, as a reader, can't hear it with them I recommend that anyone wanting to read Kerouac go look for a Lester Young recording instead.

One of my former coworkers knows the guy who wrote One Second After. I think she took one of his classes at Montreat College or Mars Hill College. I can't remember which one but I know it was one of the religious colleges near Asheville. Which explains a lot of the republican propaganda, doesn't it?

[wpadmirer.livejournal.com]

Kerouac, being a part of the beat generation, changed the rules about writing. He really struck a chord with generations of young men, rebelling against the idea of getting a job, getting married, having children, and growing old. They wanted no roots and lots of freedom. Kerouac also had the benefit of being friends with some fabulous poets and writers - all doing the same thing at the same time. I have a friend who made a wonderful movie based on a letter written by one of Kerouac's friends and traveling buddies, Neal Cassidy. I think their letters to each other (in the group), was really the last of the great letter-writing generation as well.

I read a book in the last few years that was about Marco Polo and his travels. It was fascinating, but for the life of me, I can't remember the title right now. But it is astounding what he accomplished in his life.

I have read the first couple of chapters of One Second After. I tutored a student whose father wanted him to read the book. It's complete bullshit, and I found it offensive. If you want to read something in that vein that is good, read Alas Babylon by Pat Frank. It, of course, deals with nuclear destruction, but it's excellent.

[cactus_rs]

Everyone loves On The Road because they assume that Kerouac, IRL, was the cool guy the writer in the story follows around. Which of course he wasn't, that was Neal Cassady—Sal is the On The Road stand-in for Kerouac.

I read it right after university, and the largest portion of it on a bus trip from Philadelphia to Chicago (because I thought, "Fuck it, I'll be that pretentious asshole who reads On the Road on a road trip"), and I was....underwhelmed. Groundbreaking style or not, that doesn't change how shitty and entitled these dudes were. Oh, beg more money off your aunt, let's just go fuck off to Mexico! Like what the hell, what kind of sociopath do you have to be....?

I think Simone de Beauvoir's America Day by Day is the better mid-century jazz road trip across America book by far, and it's honestly one of my all-time favorites of ANYTHING.

[lookfar.livejournal.com]

Don't forget the Disney movie "Treasure Planet -" basically a remake, but in space. It's a good movie.

If you like those post-apocalyptic no-more-technology stories, have you read the work of Paolo Bachigalupi? I highly recommend these as interesting and beautiful, as well as beautifully written, novels. AU and environmental degradation. But don't read The Road; it will make you want to brick up your doors and crawl into bed till you die.

Weirdly, I have read about half of a book about Ibn Batuta. I really made an effort with his journals. Honora was in Arabic summer school and they based the program on The Travels of Ibn Batuta. I vaguely came to understand the haaj, so that's worth the price of the book. Now he survives in my life as the root of a joke I make about the spiders in my office; I'll sometimes watch one circumnavigate the whole ceiling-wall intersection and then say, "He's a regular Ibn Batuta," which of course no one gets.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Ah yes, I read Gilgamesh in college, quite liked it. Later for a writing class we had to write something from the perspective of either a bad guy or at least other character from a famous story, so I wrote of the demon of the cedars (I forget his name exactly) and his encounter with Gilgamesh. Too bad its surely been lost with a computer crash I quite liked it.

Will check out the other two you mention! It would be interesting reading Colombus' account. While in Dominican Republic I read up more on the history pertaining to him and he was quite the psychopath -- previously I had kind of assumed the modern criticism of him was just cultural relativism at work, but apparently even from the standards of the time his behavior was appalling.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Ahahaha color me not even sligtly surprised that he is a professor at the very college his protagonist is a professor at (Montreat). His protagonist truly is a great big masterbatory mary sue for him isn't he.

Edit-to-add: and he also makes so many references to the students of the college enthusiastically becoming a militia and/or volunteering to act as a pseudomilitary body even before that and do all sorts of things, as if they wouldn't all want to strike off home however possible or lead lives other than sudden conscription, that its clear this must be a real life reoccuring wet dream of his.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

I must say, the Kerouac book is written with a certain je ne sais pas that makes it flow along very well for something that seems to have no gripping plot or redeeming value.


Ohhh you've read the first few chapters of One Second After! Good I can vent to someone! ahaha. The one thing Ii thought was particularly weird towards the beginning is where they execute the druggies -- that the protagonist whose primary THING is that he's a professor of American history, nad moreover the book itself is about Maximum America (tm) and the author had endless time to look things up, and the one thing he absolutely insists about the execution is that it can't be done by the police or military -- which frankly is flat out not true -- yes hangmen and electric chair operator's were private contractors, I believe, but I'm pretty sure firing squads have always been of police officers. Meanwhile "the good professor" neglected a number of execution related traditions that would have actually been handy, such as giving one member of the firing squad a blank (his character very acutely suffers from exactly the kind of guilt that might have helped alleviate), a hood on the condemned, and I think I had thought of one other thing. Frankly I think the author clearly contrived to have his sock-puppet-of-himself do the shooting because he was absolutely horny to have the character gun someone down.

Also it seems like every single character smokes wtf.


Ohh I'll look for that Alas Babylon book, thanks!

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

And the Neal Cassady character I didn't even think was that cool, he seemed a bit too much of a live-wire to me, overwhelmingly full of energy and prone to stick lots of big words into every sentence in a nonsensical trying-too-hard kind of way.

It also bugged me how the lot of them are constantly falling in love, marrying, impregnating women .... and then leaving them on an absolute whim, like oh my mate wants to go on a road trip yeah I'll just totally abandon the woman I just married!

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Ahh I haven't heard of this Paolo Bachigalupi I'll have to look him up!

I actually did read The Road. I think I did basically like it but yeah it sure is dark! And then I made the terrible mistake to watch the movie version with my ex Kori, who is a sensitive and emotional young woman and for the next day she was deeply deeply depressed because of it ):

About Ibn Battuta ahaha. I'm looking forward to reading his writings!

[ryl.livejournal.com]

I read your other comment about OSA and it really does confirm my suspicion that the author wrote it to get out his frustrations about all those damn hippies in Asheville.

[wpadmirer.livejournal.com]

I agree. I think this guy just has a hard-on to play badass. It didn't do anything to enhance an already crappy book.

I think you might like Alas Babylon. It's a classic. It was written in 1959.

[lookfar.livejournal.com]

It's an assignment! Read Pump Six and The Windup Girl!

[lookfar.livejournal.com]

Also, yeah, The Road nearly did me in.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

I'm now reading a collection of "Pump Six and Other Stories" and its really good! I can't believe I hadn't heard of him before! The first one in this collection, "Pocketful of Dharma," is very William Gibson Neuromancer esque.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Read Alas! Yeah much much better! It's interesting Alas Babylon is almost _too_ upbeat ... all the central characters are better off after the nuclear apocalypse!

If you can make it to the end of One Second After, practically the only other state he mentions is that "no one survived in Florida," and he doesn't really explain why. I wonder if that was a pointed slight at Alas.

[wpadmirer.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it was upbeat, but it was also a much better book.

I'm sure the guy was taking a shot at Alas. It's a really well known and beloved book.

[lookfar.livejournal.com]

I'm so glad you like him! I've read all his adult things and also his YA novels which are in same/similar universes but more simply plotted. Wait till you read Pop Shop. It's amazing.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Definitely, especially reading it just after One Second After it was blowing my mind how much more well written it is. (:

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Is that the one with the cop who shoots kids? Yeah it really draws you in

[lookfar.livejournal.com]

Yeah, and it's about what eternal life would really look like. It's a beautiful story.