Havelok the Dane

Continuing on my reading foray into medieval things, I took up another book by Kevin Crossley-Holland.  This is Havelock the Dane (1964), which was Crossley-Holland's first book, and is a retelling of a legend originating around Lincolnshire (and the town of Grimsby), written down as a poem in the late thirteenth century. It's an almost-typical medieval story. Two kings, one in England and the other in Denmark, are dying, and appoint a Regent or Steward to rule the realm while their children grow up. The Regent (in England) and the Steward (in Denmark)  both prove evil and treacherous, and in England the princess Goldborough is imprisoned, while in Denmark the two princesses are murdered while their brother prince Havelok survives only because he is taken away to England by the kindly fisherman who the Steward had ordered to kill the boy. Inevitably, Goldborough and Havelok are united, and both regain the rule of their lands. Overall it's a decent romance but not on the high level of Beowulf or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. 

Space Cat

Space Cat (1952) was the first in a series of four children's books by Ruthven Todd.  They were pretty successful in the 1950s and 1960s. If the idea of a smart cat going with his astronaut keeper on a trip to the moon, where the cat discovers alien life in cavern, and saves the life of his astronaut companion, sounds interesting, then this book will appeal to you. For me, the book was pleasantly done but mostly outside my sympathies.

Wordhoard: Anglo-Saxon Stories

After my recent experience with Kevin Crossley-Holland's Wulf, I wondered whether I should bother with his collaboration, with Jill Paton Walsh, on Wordhoard: Anglo-Saxon Stories (1969), a slim book containing eight tales. I'd already bought the book, so I figured I'd read it anyway. I'm glad I did. The tales are gathered in pretty much historical order, chronologically, from early Anglo-Saxon times on to the final story set at the time of the Norman Conquest. What they do is to tell stories of various people, mostly ones unknown to history, and of the intersection of their lives with better known figures. The style of the telling varies. Some tales are more vibrant, others more introspective.  At first I wondered if the difference was related to which author wrote the tale, but after finding the key (on the table of contents, the authors initials are given after the page number, so one learns that Paton Walsh wrote four, and Crossley-Holland wrote four) the observed stylistic differences are not so easily accounted for. Crossley-Holland's tales usually have the more relevant historical association, as in "The Horseman," in which a deserter from the Battle of Maldon seeks assistance from the children of a  man who had left them and went on to be slaughtered, or in the final tale, "The Eye of the Hurricane," in which King Harold is dying on the battlefield in 1066 and recalls better moments in his life. Overall, it's a decent collection.

Wulf

Wulf (1988), by Kevin Crossley-Holland, is a revised omnibus of three very short books comprising "The Sea Stranger" trilogy, The Sea Stranger (1973), The Fire-Brother (1975), and The Earth-Father (1976). It's set in seventh-century England, on the east coast of Essex. It follows a young boy named Wulf and his friendship with Cedd, a historical figure and Christian missionary who founded a monastery in Ythancestir (modern Bradwell-on-Sea) in the 650s and later became a bishop. The book is clearly intended for the young adult audience. I approached it expecting a coming of age tale, with (I hoped) some vivid historical detail, but what I found instead is basically a piece of Christian propaganda. The characters are simplified down to the willing and eager acolyte, and his kindly and knowledgeable master. Yawn. This kind of stuff was trite when it was first published forty-some years ago, and it hasn't gotten any more palatable with the passing decades. 

The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde

Neil McKenna's The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde came out sixteen years ago, when there was already a bookcase full of Oscar Wilde biographies, but McKenna boldly ventured into Oscar's sex life in ways that most previous biographers had avoided. And McKenna turned up lots of sources previously untapped, like the voluminous diaries of George Ives, who recorded all sorts of confidences from his friends Oscar and Bosie. The end-result makes previous biographies seem almost G-rated. I'm glad to read all the details of the lives of Oscar and his many friends. Occasionally, though, there are some conclusions by McKenna that seem to stretch the facts a bit (e.g., McKenna takes as fact that Oscar was one of the authors, if not the major author, of the infamous pornographic novel Teleny, and though many Wilde scholars had questioned the evidence for Oscar's involvement and found it inconsistent and unreliable, McKenna does not mention any of it). Still, it's an important book for anyone interest in the whole British 1890s milieu.  

Shelf Life: Writers on Books and Reading

Shelf Life is a slim book collecting eleven essays, or extracts,  from writers discussing books and reading. The oldest is a piece by Francis Bacon from 1601, the most recent being one by Walter Benjamin from 1931.  Five are from the nineteenth century, while five (including the one by Benjamin) are from the early twentieth century.  Sadly, this gives a feeling of mustiness to the anthology, but there are some worthwhile observations here and there amidst the otherwise dated perspectives. Walter Benjamin opines that "writers are really people who write book not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like" (p. 17).  Theodore Roosevelt, perhaps the best-read of the presidents of the United States, writes with gusto in the best essay in this collection:

The equation of personal taste is as powerful in reading as in eating; and within certain broad limits the matter is merely one of individual preference, having nothing to do with the quality either of the book or of the reader's mind. I like apples, pears, oranges, pineapples, and peaches. I dislike bananas, alligator-pears, and prunes. The first fact is certainly not to my credit, although it is to my advantage; and the second at least does not show moral turpitude. (p. 54) 

Other essayists include Charles Lamb, Arthur Schopenhauer, W.E. Gladstone and Rudyard Kipling. A moderately diverting selection. 

Harmless Ghosts

Harmless Ghosts is a booklet of three short stories by Jessica Amanda Salmonson. (The title is ironic, for the ghosts are not really harmless....)  All are concerned with investigator Penelope Pettiweather, and take the form of letters written to friends about her supernatural experiences. The first and longest story, "The Hounds of the Hearth," is the best, but all three are enjoyable ghostly tales. Subsequent to reading this booklet, I have learned that the complete Penelope Pettiweather stories are collected in  The Complete Weird Epistles of Penelope Pettiweather, Ghost Hunter (2016). This volume contains fourteen tales. I'll add this to my wants list. 

Appendix N

Appendix N is a book in which Jeffro Johnson reviews the forty-three works and authors that were listed (as "Appendix N") in 1979 by Dungeons & Dragons creator Gary Gygax as the seminal influences on his famous role-playing game.  It covers well-known classic authors such as Poul Anderson, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft, Michael Moorcock, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Jack Vance, and less-remembered authors such as Gardner Fox, Fletcher Pratt, and Margaret St. Clair.





Sadly, the book is written in confessional self-important blog style, and each entry is filled with irrelevant anecdotes and asides. Some entries seem to have very little content about their supposed subjects. I found the book disappointing and completely exasperating. A much better thing to do that read this book is to take the "Appendix N" list and read the authors.  One will learn a lot more this way.

The Conspirators: A Tribute to Jorge Luis Borges

This is a collection of fourteen pieces, written in tribute to Jorge Luis Borges, and edited by Alcebiades Diniz Miguel, who also contributed one of the fourteen pieces.  Other notable authors include Rhys Hughes, Mark Valentine and John Howard (in collaboration), Justin Isis, Jonathan Wood, Brednan Connell, D.P. Watt, Adam Cantwell and Eric Stener Carlson.

The bulk of the stories are good to excellent. Only one, the opening tale by Rhys Hughes, did I find labored and dull. The best story was that by D.P. Watt (a writer new to me), together with the bookish tale by Mark Valentine and John Howard. Most are openly Borgesian in nature, some more so than others.  In all a good read and a good tribute. 

The Archive of Alternate Endings

This new book sounded very interesting.  The blurb notes that "tracking the evolution of Hansel and Gretel at seventy-five-year intervals that correspond with Earth's visits by Halley's Comet, The Archive of Alternate Endings explores how stories are disseminated and shared, edited and censored, voiced and left untold."  Well, I suppose it does all that, and much less too. 

This is a short book, which I hesitate to call a novel, and some of the sections are only a sentence or two in length, with a lot of white space afterwards, so it feels even shorter than the 152 pages that it clocks in at. The narrative bounces all over chronologically, from the past to the future, telling snippets of life stories. The problem with this book is that the narrative distance between the text and the reader is large. There is little connect, little characterization, and little story, beyond the structural meta-speak about storytelling. And the disparate elements (e.g., tying threads in with appearances of Halley's Comet) serve no purpose other than structurally. Some readers will find such writerly playfulness intriguing. I didn't. In fact I found it dull and disappointing. 

How Long 'til Black Future Month?

N.K. Jemisin won three consecutive Hugo Awards for the three volumes of her Broken Earth trilogy. Not wishing to embark on a trilogy at the present time, I thought I'd try Jemisin's new short story collection, How Long 'till Black Future Month? (2018), as a taster before approaching her novels.  It contains twenty-two short stories, plus an interesting introduction by the author. One expects the first story in a collection to be a standout, and in this case, "The Ones Who Stay and Fight" (a kind of oblique response to Ursula K. Le Guin's famous story "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas") is a standout for all the wrong reasons. I found it dull and diffuse, and my reaction tempered my interest in reading further.  But I persevered, and found some better tales in "The City Born Great" and "Stone Hunger."  But the author's style never really won me over.  It might be described as stream-of-consciousness surreal.  The fantastical elements don't really make a great deal of sense.  They are just there as plot-devices or plot impediments.  I'm still planning to give the first volume of the Broken Earth series a try, but my interest has diminished.

Le Guin: The Last Interview and Other Conversations

This is a collection of seven interviews with Ursula K. Le Guin, who passed away early last year at the age of 88.  These range in years from 1977 to "The Last Interview" itself, by the volume's editor, which took place occasionally from the summer of 2015 until Le Guin's death.  All of the interviews are interesting and revelatory, but the later interviews seem to me to be more free and revelatory on more subjects. So I would suggest that Le Guin may have been guarded in her early interviews, but opened up in the later ones.  In any case, the seven interviews make for a nice collection. I did not know before getting this book that it is one entry in a series of such books, all titled "The Last Interview and Other Conversations." Other volumes cover Ray Bradbury, Jorge Luis Borges, Philip K. Dick, and Christopher Hitchens, along with musicians such as Lou Reed and David Bowie, as well as public figures like Martin Luther King, Jr., and Hunter S. Thompson. All of the books have a uniform cover design, with frankly ugly art by Christopher King. 

The Addams Family: An Evilution

This coffee-table book, edited by H. Kevin Miserocchi, is basically a brief history of the evolution, from the late 1930s onward, of the characters of Charles Addams's cartoons that became known later as The Addams Family. The book is heavily illustrated with the cartoons from The New Yorker, as well as from other places. The characters are probably best known from the 1964-66 television series, or from the 1991 film (and its 1993 sequel). The characters have lived in popular culture for decades, and it's pleasant to revisit them while viewing the story of their development. And it's hard to describe the appeal of these characters--essentially they are outsiders, who view the world from a jaundiced and indeed morbid perspective, but who also have a warm-hearted side. Mostly.  Or to their fellow family members. Sometimes. Anyway, I enjoyed this retrospective as a kind of nostalgia. 

The Writer's Map

The Writer's Map (2018) is one of those coffee-table books with lots of colored illustrations. Here the subject is maps of imaginary literary lands. Contributors to the volume include Phillip Pullman (prologue), David Mitchell, and Lev Grossman, and others.  In some ways this book is a kind of variation on J.B. Post's Atlas of Fantasy (rev. ed., 1979), but while Post showed a lot of maps (all in black-and-white) he gave very little text.  Yet his coverage was more representative across the field than is found in the present volume, which seems more scattershot. And the text here is often less illuminating than it might be--most are personal histories rather than in-depth critical articles. Still, for what it is, this is an interesting compilation.

The Binding

The Binding (2019) by Bridget Collins is marketed as her first book for adults, following seven novels for young adults.  But there is really nothing in this novel that marks it out as for adults per se. It is basically an elongated love story, though details of the love are at first hidden.  Young Emmett Farmer tells his own story after a mysterious illness. It turns out that he was taken to a witch-like Binder, whom he learns removes memories from willing subjects and writes them down in beautifully bound books.  After he recovers from his ailment, Emmett is taken by the Binder Seredith (of whom he has no memory) to be her apprentice, for in binding him she discovered that he had the powers of being a notable Binder himself. In the first of three parts of this book, Emmett tells his story up to when he learns that he had previously been bound, and by burning his book, the memories come back to him. The second part of the book is  also in Emmett's voice, telling of the memories that were taken away. It is not really giving much away to say that his love story concerns another young man, as this is foreshadowed from very early on. For the third and final part of the book, the narrative shifts to the point of view of Lucian, Emmett's lover, who has similarly had his memories of their relationship bound. The shift in narrative voice is not very successful, and the whole third section seems rushed and forced in the telling.  Thought inevitably the two young men end up together again at the end, the reactions of virtually every other character in the novel to the idea of a same sex couple is positively medieval.  Though the plot gives the tale some aspects of a page-turner, the construction and technique of the author are second rate at best.