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Katie, here is your new thread in 2015. Happy reading in the new year.

Our Required Format:

JANUARY

1. by Winston S. Churchill
Finish date: January 2015
Genre: (whatever genre the book happens to be)
Rating: A
Review: You can add text from a review you have written but no links to any review elsewhere even goodreads. And that is about it. Just make sure to number consecutively and just add the months.

JANUARY

1. edited by Peter D. Clarke (no photo)
Finish date: January 12, 2015
Genre: Medieval History
Rating: B
Review: This work is part of a series of books edited by Peter Clarke and a small group of other scholars. Nearly all the series' volumes have a penchant for taking popes that are often underrated and demonstrating how important they actually were to the era in which they lived. Eugenius III lived in the shadow of St. Bernard, Celestine III was known as the old man who hung around for a while before Innocent III became pope, and Adrian IV is probably best known for the relatively trivial fact that he's the only pope from England. Though he's probably the most famous and well-respected of the lot, this work on Alexander III continues the trend - Alexander is best known for his decades-long struggle against contemporary emperor Frederic Barbarossa, and it's easy to paint him as perpetually hounded by the forces that surrounded him. This work instead turns that into an asset for his pontificate, exploring how his frequent bouts of exile could function as a boon for the role of the papacy in general.

There are a lot of good essays in here - I particularly enjoyed one about the relationship between Alexander and the resurgent Roman commune written by John Doran - though some may be a bit dense or specific for someone without a good knowledge of what's going on with the papacy during the later twelfth century.

2. (no image) Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century edited by Robert Louis Benson (no photo)
Finish date: January 19, 2015
Genre: Medieval History
Rating: B+
Review: The 12th century is probably my favorite century, and the relationship of medieval people to their past is one of my favorite topics. So I am as close to a target audience as this collection of essays is ever going to get.

There's really something for everyone here (really, there's 700+ pages of essays on a huge swath of topics). There are essays on what renewal actually entailed in the medieval period, how it was articulated, how it shaped science, music, politics, art, literature, and learning. Hovering around the edges is the question of just how much of a renaissance the renaissance of the twelfth century was, which is an interesting question to ask (if maybe not that helpful).

My favorite essays were those by Giles Constable - who explores the language and articulation of reform - and by Robert Benson - who explores how the revived Roman Senate and Frederick Barbarossa both utilized antiquity and rediscovered Roman law to shape their political philosophy. But if you'd like to know pretty much anything about cultural life and change in this very important historical period, you can probably find something of interest here.

3. (no image) Dissent and Order in the Middle Ages: The Search for Legitimate Authority by Jeffrey Burton Russell
Finish date: January 20, 2015
Genre: Medieval History
Rating: B
Review: Though Jeffrey Burton Russell would probably get mad at me for saying so - he explicitly rejects the phrase in his book - this book works pretty well as a primer for the history of medieval heresies. Russell is right that such a phrase is questionable (heresy isn't really a 'thing,' so it's hard to have a history of it), but it's probably the most helpful way to look at it for prospective readers.

I had mixed feelings, overall. It's a good overview, and Russell is a good writer. I like that he framed his short essay around the idea of tension between dissent and order. I think he's right that it's one of the most important concepts to grasp if you want to understand what drove the Middle Ages (at least the religious and cultural end of things).

Because it's so broad and sweeping, though, details sometimes get sacrificed. He notes, for example, that Arnold of Brescia "used his charismatic leadership to drive the pope out of Rome and to declare a republic there" and that he was a "prophet as politician," which really isn't all that true. Arnold of Brescia was a politician only by default & circumstance, and he certainly didn't found the Roman commune, which existed for several years before he arrived in the city.

Despite that, though, this is a nice & readable work for anyone looking to get a quick overview of the religious tension that pervaded the Middle Ages & was inherent in Christianity from the time it became associated with the Roman Empire.

4. by John of Salisbury (no photo)
Finish date: January 27, 2015
Genre: Medieval History
Rating: A-
Review: John of Salisbury is one of my favorite medieval writers. This book comes fairly close to being a personal memoir of John's years working at the papal court, probably around 1146-1154. He witnessed everything first hand, and knew most of the participants personally, so he makes for an unusually informed chronicler by medieval standards. He's always felt like a somewhat unusual medieval figure to me, and he's often striking in just how moderate he is. If I could meet anyone from the Middle Ages, he'd be fairly high up on my list.

He's also just a fun storyteller, and he's not afraid to paint relatively three dimensional portraits of the people he's discussing. Pope Eugene III comes off as a particularly interesting figure, alternately powerless among factions and inspiring in his role as leader of the Church. There's loads of fun stuff in here, but the highlight is probably the first 30 or so pages recounting the 1148 Council of Reims. It's full of scandals and bribery and secret crossing of the English channel by fishing boats.

It's a shame it's not longer - my edition only ran about 90 pages, and the single manuscript that's survived abruptly cut off in the middle of the narrative. Still, definitely worth a read if you're at all intrigued by 12th century religion.

Nice job, Katie. It just takes a while but we strive for consistency. Soon it will become second nature.

Thanks to both of you. I've been enjoying it here!

Glad to have you.

FEBRUARY

5. by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Finish date: February 6, 2015
Genre: Fiction
Rating: B+
Review: When I first started reading the Quixote I thought it was the most tragic book in the world, and I would read it and weep... As I grew older...my skin grew thicker... and so when I was working on the translation I was actually sitting at my computer and laughing out loud. This is done... as Cervantes did it... by never letting the reader rest. You are never certain that you truly got it. Because as soon as you think you understand something, Cervantes introduces something that contradicts your premise.
-- Edith Grossman

In his introduction to this edition of Don Quixote, Harold Bloom notes that Cervantes is present in his novel "pervasively." Bloom obviously knows much more than I do about books, but as I was reading Don Quixote this struck me as a really curious statement. It strikes me as so even more having finished it. If Cervantes is so present, he must be present silently: I can't recall reading anything with so much persistent ambiguity in how it wanted me to react to its protagonist.

It's cliche by now, but Don Quixote really is a tragedy and comedy rolled up into one. This did not turn out to mean what I thought it would mean. I'd assumed this meant that the work was bittersweet, or that Don Quixote himself managed to be both ridiculous and pitiable. Or that it was going to be the story of someone standing stock-still at the end of an age and refusing to move forward, with the comedic or tragic potential determined by each reader's own personal preference. All of that's kind of true. But's it's more than that, too. Don Quixote is ridiculous, but he's also rather kind and terribly well-intentioned. The book is fond of referring to Sancho as "simple," but he's also insightful and clever. The people they meet are much more level-headed than either of them, but they all either could have fallen out of a chivalric romance themselves or are desperately eager to use Quixote's "madness" to set up the simulacrum of one. If the work mocks the death of chivalry, there seems to be very little available to take its place.

There are so many reasons to love Don Quixote: the delightful nose-dive into meta-fiction in the work's second part, the labyrinth of narrative diversions, and Sancho Panza (who is absolutely wonderful). I docked the grade a bit due to the fact that this book is very long and very episodic, which can be a bit trying to modern readers accustomed to a particular kind of narrative pattern. That's nearly all down to personal preference, though. It's absolutely worth a read.

Good read I imagine

It was! I had been meaning to read it for ages and I wound up really enjoying it. Took me forever, but it was worth it.

6. by The Missouri Review
Finish date: February 3, 2015
Genre: Literary Magazine (short fiction, essays, poetry)
Rating: B
Review: I've never really read a literary magazine before, and I've certainly never read one straight through. A year ago, to be honest, they were not even really on my radar. But I'm hoping to start writing more short stories, one of these days. And am a big believer in the piece of advice that the best way to improve one's writing is to read & read & read. So I went for home-field advantage and I subscribed to the Missouri Review.

As with anything of this nature, the appeal of each story or essay is going to vary. I absolutely loved Sarah Cornwell's short story "The Floating Life," and I'm really excited to read more of her work & her novel (she is apparently branching out into screenplays as well, which is exciting). It's the tale of a semester-at-sea biology professor who is preparing to take his students on an end-of-term (and once-in-a-lifetime) dive. Things are complicated by the fact that something ambiguous but clearly rather terrible has happened on the mainland, leaving them all bobbing in the ocean, uncertain of what waits for them when they return to shore. The story has a wonderful sense of atmosphere and a simmering sort of anxiety. I also quite liked the poetry from George Looney. The other stories were interesting in their own right, but tended to wallow a bit (something that's irritated me about short fiction in the past). Some seemed to operate off the assumption that dissatisfaction or disillusionment equates to depth.

But overall it was a really good experience. I'm looking forward to reading more of them.

Thank you Katie for your great add.

7. by The Missouri Review
Finish date: February 27, 2015
Genre: Literary Magazine (short fiction, essays, poetry)
Rating: B / B-
Review: Short fiction is odd. I tend to have ambivalent reactions to novels: of course I'll love or hate them on occasion, but much more often I'll wind up with a pile of negatives and positives that are difficult to extract from each other. But I tend to know how I feel about short fiction right away, often before I'm even finished with a story. Maybe it's just because it's short, and there's no room to hide beyond all the twists and turns of a long story. It's just there, blunt and ready for opinions. Or maybe it's something else. But there's a risk in them, an all or nothing sort of feeling I rarely get in novels.

I'm very divided on this volume, which is probably good. The thing I like about reading literary magazines is that it makes me read things that I'd otherwise probably skip over. I think I'm getting things from this, benefiting from it even if I'm not always terribly enjoying it.

Mako Yoshikawa's essay about her mother and how we deal with traumatic memories and forgiveness is wonderful. Jane Gillette's story "The Trail of the Demon" is oddly exhilarating even though I found the ending a bit unsatisfying. Allegra Hyde's "Bury Me" made me feel anxious while reading it, but has really stuck with me over the last week or so. But at the same time, for reasons I can't quite pinpoint, I was not a fan of Peter LaSalle's "Istanbul Nocturne."

Still having some trouble getting into the poetry in these volumes. I know nothing about poetry, so maybe it's on me. The only poetry in here I really enjoyed was that in a little retrospective on New Orleans poet Everette Maddox.

Excellent job Katie.

MARCH

8. by Richard Hughes
Finish date: March 20, 2015
Genre: Historical Fiction
Rating: B+
Review: This is such an odd piece of fiction, bouncing back and forth between swashbuckling & funny and alienating & terrifying. Richard Hughes's novel follows the story of the Bas-Thorton children as they are sent away from their childhood home of Jamaica by their parents, and captured en route to England by a band of pirates.

The set up sounds like your standard adventure novel, and in some ways it is. But it's also a really interesting look at memory, how certain events are amplified into great importance while others - ones that should objectively be more important - are muted. Early in the story Emily, the most complex of the children (or at least the most explored), experiences both an earthquake and a violent hurricane. The former is very minor - no one around her is hurt and it doesn't have a lasting impact on her life. The latter is much more 'important' - it results in several deaths, destroys the family's home, and results in the kids being shipped off to England. But Emily sees the earthquake as far more important - it's an Earthquake with a Capital E, an event that makes her interesting and gives color and texture to her life. Hurricanes, though this one was worse than most, happen all the time.

My friend mentioned to me that this book looks at children as if they were a different species, and I think that's a very apt way to look at it. It's a very lonely book: characters live entirely in their own worlds, bumping into each other, taking past each other, creating confusion, sadness, or anger.

It's beautifully written, as well. The whole thing feels like summer days when it's just a little bit too hot to think properly.

A very nice post Katie

APRIL

9. edited by David H. Lynn (no photo)

Finish date: April 5, 2015
Genre: Literary Magazine
Rating: B-
Review: Still exploring some literary magazines - after a couple of issues of The Missouri Review, which I really enjoyed, I jumped over to the most recent issue of The Kenyon Review. I came very close to going to Kenyon College back in 2006, and I like toying with the idea of how differently my life would have went, had I gone. Maybe they would have let me read their slush pile!

In any case, I have really fond feelings towards Kenyon & I enjoyed the issue. Like nearly any lit mag, it's going to be a bit hit-or-miss on a personal level. But I liked the stories by Domenic Russ-Combs and Katherine Robinson quite a bit, and the female protagonists in each complemented each other well. There is also a really fascinating essay about the plaster casts of Pompeii by Matt Donovan that I liked a lot.

The poetry was a bit beyond me, to be honest - I know almost nothing about modern poetry, and most of the poems in here were near-incomprehensible to me. I did really enjoy Erika Reinart's two poems in here, though, particularly "Post-Game-Day Blessing."

10. by Andy Weir
Finish date: April 5, 2015
Genre: Science Fiction
Rating: B+
Review: This was not a great book, but it was SO MUCH FUN. About ten pages in my childhood love for Apollo 13 was re-awakened and I was totally on board for the rest of the trip. Funny People Fixing Things in Space is a subgenre I will never turn away.

Poor Mark Watney gets stranded on Mars after an unexpected dust storm impales him with some debris (right through the bio-monitor!) and the rest of his crew leaves him for dead. The rest of the book is Mark using The Power of Science! to save himself from an array of life-threatening problems. Mark, the class clown of the Mars Space Program, records these adventures in a series of tongue-in-cheek log entries.

All of this is tons of fun, and if you're a fan of space travel or wilderness survival, you will probably enjoy this quite a bit. I got the impression that most of the science was actually pretty solid. It's also a really fast read, and it's pretty easy to plow through it in three or four sittings.

There is nothing particularly deep going on here. Weir avoids having to deal with the inevitable despair of being stranded on Mars entirely alone for an amount of time that would make most people go crazy by having Mark's journal entries be very selective. They're almost performative - he's nearly always cheerful, and the hints at anger or sadness all occur off-screen. I think that's fine for a book like this, and it's a clever way to keep the tone of the book light without sacrificing realism.

The rest of the characters are paper-thin (particularly the rest of Mark's crew) and the writing is fine, but nothing special. There's lots of rambling about science, which will probably be annoying for some readers. But this is a book mostly about the coolness of space exploration, technology, and clever people. That's what's it's aiming for and it does that really well.

Great progress Katie.

11. by Brian P. Levack, et al (no photo)

Finish date: April 30, 2015
Genre: Western History, Textbook
Rating: B
Review: This is a pretty solid textbook for an introductory western history class. It has its pitfalls, but they're mostly the pitfalls that you're going to find in nearly any textbook of this sort, and it does a good job avoiding the worst of them. It's very broad, very general, but serves as a decent introduction.

Though it's called "The West" I do wish that it was occasionally a bit more international in its outlook, particularly in the final chapters.

MAY

12. by Chris Wickham (no photo)

Finish date: May 2, 2015
Genre: Medieval History
Rating: A
Review: This is a wonderful and brilliant book. It's one of the most impressive pieces of history that I've read.

Chris Wickham traces the history of Rome from 950-1150, a period roughly in line with the end of Carolingian influence in the city until the conclusion of a lengthy "crisis" period (c. 1050-1150) that ended with the re-establishment of papal authority under Innocent II and a newly-formed Roman Senate.

The book is wonderfully rooted in a sense of place. Local histories often get a bad rap - that they're antiquarian, or myopic - but it's honestly just what you need when studying a place like Rome, wrapped up in all sorts of obfuscating myths. Wickham dives head first into the economics and social meaning of land ownership (in Rome essentially monopolized by the local churches), the varying positions of the aristocracy, the varying personalities of different neighborhoods. He details the wide swath of land around the city - the Agro Romano - the narrower vineyard belt closer to the Aurelian Walls, the Porto salt pans and the more distantly scattered castles. He tells you how Trastevere was the Brooklyn of medieval Rome, filled with potters and ironmakers, how Pigna was a vibrant & growing artisanal community, how the Tiber was filled with floating mills. He tells you how the individual neighborhoods were tied together with massive processional movements filled with lanterns and homemade archways, how Roman law made its way back into common practice (only to be rejected outright by, of all things, the medieval Roman Senate), and how the remnants of ancient Rome functioned as a "toy box" for various groups to pick up and use the symbols they saw to be most fit.

It's a wonderful book, honestly, and makes medieval Rome feel like such a real and tangible place. The early chapters will be tough going for non-academics - there's a whole lot of legal details of land ownership - but they lay the groundwork for everything that comes after, so I'd recommend reading them if you're up for it. If not, though, the last two chapters in here are wonderful for everyone. They discuss the use of processions, Roman law, and antiquity in the city and then deal with the developments of the "crisis century" that led to the re-articulation of the papacy under Innocent II and the founding of the commune.

I must put this book on this year's ASAP list. :)

I look forward to hearing what you think of it!

13. edited by Louis I. Hamilton (no photo)

Finish date: May 6, 2015
Genre: Medieval History
Rating: B
Review: The central concept that ties this book together is the idea that Rome - in the twelfth century & probably beyond - is that Rome, when written about, is a more imagined place than a real one. This is not a very controversial idea once you spend some time reading through the sources of the twelfth century: they are filled with evocations of republican Rome, imperial Rome, early Christian Rome, modern Rome as cesspool embodying everything wrong with the modern world. For those outside the city it was a projector, where people could place their hopes & disatisfactions. For those inside the city it was a "toy box" (in the words of Chris Wickham), where individual objects could mean a whole range of overlapping and conflicting things.

This book collects six essays on twelfth century perceptions of Rome. There are two essays on the The Marvels of Rome - Mirabilia Urbis Romæ, a twelfth century 'guidebook' through the city's ancient monuments. There's one of the city's Jewish community and its ambivalent relationship to their adopted home. There's an essay on (unsurprisingly negative) interpretations of the city from their Roman counterparts in Constantinople as well as a more ambivalent take from Englishman-abroad John of Salisbury. It ends on the most interesting essay in the volume, which discusses Arabic interpretations of the city, how it was differentiated from or incorporated into Constantinople, and why it was so often associated with labyrinths.

This book fills a nice gap - there's truckloads written on the classicizing tendencies in twelfth-century Rome, but much less on how minority populations within the city or foreign populations outside it would have seen it. It leads to really interesting discussions on the rumored treasures from the Temple of Jerusalem housed in St. John's Lateran (there were supposedly two bronze columns from the Temple housed in the basilica, and they were supposed to weep every year on the anniversary of the Temple's destruction) and on how an early tie between labyrinths and Roman city foundations led to rumors in the Islamic world of complicated labyrinths within the city of Rome.

Good Katie, don't forget to use the little "d" on Finish date:

Fixed! Thank you for the reminder, Bryan.

14. by James Gleick

Finish date: May 13, 2015
Genre: Science, History of Science
Rating: A
Review: A wonderful and eclectic book that gave me a new perspective. I'm not sure how this book reads for those already versed in information theory - I think it's largely designed for those who are not - but it's a great introduction to the subject.

Gleick is especially got at illustrating how wide-ranging this subject is, and how innovations from people like Claude Shannon or Alan Turing rippled out into fields as diverse as linguistics, genetics, and psychology. It's rare that an introductory book can legitimately offer a slightly different way of viewing the world while still remaining grounded and accurate, but this work pulls it off beautifully. I'd love to read more on information theory if anyone has any recommendations for me.

15. by Ann Leckie

Finish date: May 21, 2015
Genre: Science Fiction
Rating: A -
Review: Life's tough when you're a gender-less corpse soldier who used to be a spaceship and you have difficulty expressing your feelings. :(

Ancillary Justice is packed with engaging ideas: it's been widely celebrated for making its main character a spaceship AI, and for making its central civilization communicate without gendered pronouns. Both of these are very cool, and work well. The story centers on Breq, a spaceship AI who finds herself housed in a single human body (the 'ancillary' of the title, created in a rather nefarious manner by the Radchaii Empire) after the rest of herself is destroyed. How that came to be - and what Breq intends to do about it - unfolds really nicely in two parallel plotlines that build on each other. I get the impression from other reviews here that I'm in minority on this one, but I liked the first half of the book quite a bit more than the second half, in large part because it's so interesting to figure out what's going on, and Leckie does a genuinely wonderful job carefully doling out information and building up to her book's first big reveal. It's also emotionally striking in a way the second half never manages to capture.

The book seems to be most famous for a relatively small world-building detail - the fact that all characters in the book are referred to as 'she,' since the dominant culture does not differentiate between genders (male and female sexes exist, but the culture is lacking in outward markers that would distinguish them). I really liked how this managed to be both a big and small part of the book at the same time. Minor spoilers: (view spoiler) Despite this, I found myself surprised by how much it challenged me as a reader. I got used to the single pronoun surprisingly quickly, but it surprised me how often my brain subconsciously started assigning genders to characters who didn't really have them. I found myself gendering Lt. Awn and Lt. Staaiat pretty regularly as female and male, respectively, though I don't think it's ever specified. That probably says unfortunate things about me. In any case, it's interesting to me that this seems to be really difficult for some people to get past (I've read reviews where people claim that it nearly ruined the book for them). I get that it's disconcerting at first, and that it's not necessary to the plot. But it's a cultural detail, and a much more interesting and thought-provoking one than most. The fact that Radchaii never show their hands to each other is disconcerting and unnecessary to the plot, but no one seems particularly upset about that.

While those issues are great, I think the most interesting theme in Ancillary Justice is identity, particularly how any identity is inherently fractured and at odds. (view spoiler). There's also a neat bit on free will, that doesn't take up a lot of space but sort of hovers over the rest of the novel.

If I have any criticisms, I think it's that on occasion the ideas almost run ahead of the writing. It's definitely possible I missed something, but I'm not convinced that Anaader Mianaai's (view spoiler) The writing itself is good, but I never quite found myself falling in love with it. That's probably just a matter of personal taste, though.

I think it's a book that I admired more than I loved, which is keeping from giving it the full five stars (I'd probably put it at 4.5). But I did like it quite a lot, and I'm looking forward to reading the sequels. I think I'll jump ahead to Ancillary Sword asap, since I want to read it before Hugo voting closes.