Rocketjk's 2020 reading 'round the world

I've had fun charting my travels the last ten years. 2019 brought me 16 countries, including the U.S., and eight states within the U.S. Plus several "non-country specific" books in Europe and "non-state specific" books in the U.S. Oh, yes, and one visit to Jasper Fforde's "Bookworld."

As always, I don't select my reading to purposefully "travel" around. Rather, I just have fun seeing where my more random reading choices take me! I'll be writing at greater length about each book on my 2020 50-Book Challenge thread: https://www.librarything.com/topic/315064

EARTH

ASIA
Japan
The Dragon Scroll by I.J. Parker

Malayan Archipelago
The Rescue by Joseph Conrad

EUROPE
Czech Republic
Prague Fatale by Philip Kerr (also listed in Germany)

England
At Death's Door by Robert Barnard
Leaves in the Wind by Alpha of the Plow (a.k.a. Alfred George Gardiner) (essays)
The New Men by C.P. Snow
The Crust on Its Uppers by Derek Raymond
Early Riser by Jasper Fforde

Finland
The Unknown Soldier by Väinö Linna

France
Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini
Strange Defeat: A Statement of Evidence Written in 1940 by Marc Bloch (memoir/history)

Germany
Prague Fatale by Philip Kerr (also listed in Czech Republic)

Greece
Nine Greek Dramas edited by Charles William Eliot

Ireland
The Republic: The Fight for Irish Independence, 1918-1923 by Charles Townshend (history)
Great Irish Tales of Horror: A Treasury of Fear edited by Peter Haining

Italy
Sudden Death by Alvaro Enrigue (also listed in Mexico)

Norway
Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsen

Russia
To a Distant Island by James McConkey (memoir)
Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History by Steven J. Zipperstein (history)

Turkey
Istanbul Passage by Joseph Kanon

MIDDLE EAST
Non-Country Specific
Soldiers of the Faith: Crusaders and Moslems at War by Ronald C. Finucane (history)

NORTH AMERICA
Haiti
Foreign Shores by Marie-Hélène Laforest

Mexico
Sudden Death by Alvaro Enrigue (also listed in Italy)
A Deadly Shade of Gold by John D. MacDonald

The United States
Non-State Specific
It's All In the Frijoles: 100 Famous Latinos Share Real-Life Stories, Time-Tested Dichos, Favorite Folktales, and Inspiring Words of Wisdom by Yolanda Nava (also listed in South America)
1963 Official Baseball Almanac by Bill Wise (non-fiction)
Where Dead Voices Gather by Nick Tosches (non-fiction)
Creek Walk and Other Stories by Molly Giles
Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life by Louise Aronson (non-fiction)
Living in the Weather of the World by Richard Bausch
In the Distance by Hernan Diaz
Mr. Lincoln's T-Mails: How Abraham Lincoln Used the Telegraph to Win the Civil War by Tom Wheeler (history)
Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery by Leon F. Litwack (history)
Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow by Leon F. Litwack (history)
Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party by Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin (history)
The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man by James Weldon Johnson
What I Think by Adlai Stevenson (non-fiction)
Women, Race & Class by Angela Y. Davis (history)

California
Reminiscences of a Town With Two Names: Greenwood, Known Also as Elk by Walter Matson (history)
Maravilla by Laura del Fuego
The Only Rule Is It Has to Work: Our Wild Experiment Building a New Kind of Baseball Team by Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller (memoir)
Valleys of Mendocino County by Ray Shultz (history)

Florida
Fun and Deadly Games by Don Tracy

Georgia
An American Marriage by Tayari Jones (also listed in Louisiana)

Hawaii
The Black Camel by Earl Derr Biggers

Kentucky
Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J. D. Vance (memoir)

Louisiana
A House Divided by Fredrick Barton
An American Marriage by Tayari Jones (also listed in Georgia)
Naked She Died by Don Tracy

Massachusetts
The Russians Are Coming The Russians are Coming (a.k.a. The Off-Islanders) by Nathaniel Benchley

Mississippi
The Hamlet by William Faulkner
The Town by William Faulkner
The Mansion by William Faulkner
Blues for Mister Charlie by James Baldwin (play)

New York
The Bronx Zoo by Sparky Lyle and Peter Golenbock (memoir)
Bad Guy by Rosalyn Drexler
The Lost Memoir by Lou Gehrig, edited by Alan D. Gaff (memoir/biography)
The Hucksters by Frederic Wakeman
Ragged Dick or, Street Life in New York with the Boot-Blacks by Horatio Alger, Jr.

Pennsylvania
The Pittsburgh Pirates by Frederick G. Lieb (history)

Wisconsin
Janesville: An American Story by Amy Goldstein (non-fiction)
Bushville Wins!: The Wild Saga of the 1957 Milwaukee Braves and the Screwballs, Sluggers, and Beer Swiggers who Canned the New York Yankees and Changed Baseball by John Klima (history)

West Indies
Capitalism and Slavery by Eric Williams (history)

SOUTH AMERICA
Non-Country Specific
It's All In the Frijoles: 100 Famous Latinos Share Real-Life Stories, Time-Tested Dichos, Favorite Folktales, and Inspiring Words of Wisdom by Yolanda Nava (also listed in the United States)

Argentinia
Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin

Chile
Tierra Del Fuego by Francisco Coloane
Cape Horn and Other Stories from the End of the World by Francisco Coloane

Columbia
Of Love and Other Demons by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

MARS

The Swordsman of Mars by Otis Adelbert Kline

I finished The Rescue the next to last novel by Joseph Conrad. The protagonist of The Rescue is Tom Lingard, who also appears in Conrad's first two novels, Almayer's Folly and An Outcast of the Islands, although the events here predate those two stories in Lingard's life. Lingard is the owner and captain of the brig, The Lightning. He plies his trade, such as it is, among the islands and mists of the Malayan Archipelago, where he has gained outsized status as a man of power and prestige, while at the same time almost entirely, by design, cut off from English civilization. In flashback we see the story of Lingard's life being saved by a young prince, Hassim and learn that Lingard has in turn saved Hassim's life, helping him escape from, basically, a coup. Lingard has sworn to help his friend gain back his rule, and as the action opens here has been planning and plotting this action for two years. He is gathered his forces and is almost ready to put the plan into action, when unexpected events, as events usually will, intercede. The novel revolves around Lingard's attempts to overcome a succession of potentially fatal roadblocks thrown in his way.

There's nothing new about a Conrad plot being slow to get itself going (in fact, sometimes they never really do!). In this case, however, once we go into action, the story moves along quite well. Which is not to say that the novel is plot-driven only. The ins and outs of Lingard's thoughts and motivations are certainly delved. And always, Conrad uses the natural surroundings almost as a character itself, darkness and mist in particular. Finally, Conrad is quite deft at creating and maintaining suspense, and the periods of tense waiting for events to add fuel to the heat the story even while slowing down the action.

This is not Conrad at his height or at his most skillful. But I still found it to be very good storytelling, and since I love Conrad's voice, I enjoyed this novel very much indeed. And, happily, at the points where I thought Conrad might be about to fall into cliches of plot, he twists himself out of those traps deftly.

I finished To a Distant Island by James McConkey yesterday. This is a memoir by McConkey that has Anton Chekhov as its central figure. How does that work? Toward the end of his life, in 1890, Chekhov made a long arduous trip by boat, train and carriage from Moscow all the way to Sakhalin Island, off Russia's Pacific Coast. McConkey tells us in this book's first paragraph that Chekhov "had been undergoing a depression so severe that his most recent biographer believes he might have been nearing a breakdown" and that this was "a journey of over sixty-five hundred miles, or more than a quarter of our planet's circumference." The trip's avowed goal was to study and document the allegedly horrific penal colonies that the Russian government was running on the Island. But as McConkey, via Chekhov's own letters and the book Chekhov wrote about the trip, tells us that Chekhov's real goal was to shake himself loose of this depression by plunging into the unknown and experiencing life away from the restrictions of Moscow society and his own growing fame as a writer. He made it to Sakhalin and spent three months interviewing thousands of prisoners and their families, as well as the island's administrators and other inhabitants of the place. Conditions were even worse than Chekhov had expected. He ultimately wrote a book about his findings, The Island of Sakhalin.

OK, back to McConkey. In the mid-80s, McConkey decided to write a memoir about his family's year in Florence, Italy in the early 1970s. McConkey was on sabbatical from his tenure at an unnamed university, driven away from the school by the late-60s turmoil on campus that he had found himself drawn into but ultimately repelled and distressed by. While in Italy, he came upon a volume of Chekhov's Sakhalin letters and became fascinated, going on to read everything he could find of these letters and of Chekhov's life. From the letters, McConkey imagines and creates a novel-like narrative for Chekhov's journey, interspersing known facts with his own fancy. He makes an admittedly conjectural examination of Chekhov's motivations and psychological evolution during his travels. But this is, as I said up top, ultimately a memoir. McConkey endeavors to thread his own memories of his family's stay in Italy throughout his telling of his Chekhov tale. The problem here is that while the thematic connections between the two story lines were evidently clear to McConkey, he fails, in my view, to present them effectively (or at all) for the reader. I would recommend this book only to those with a particular interest in Chekhov's life.

Although McConkey does include some nice descriptions of the parts of Italy his family stayed in and traveled through, the heart of the book, and the part I cared about, is in Russia, so that's where I'm counting this, global reading-wise. Furthermore, I'm going to get lazy and just put Russia in Europe, for the purposes of my Post #1 listings, though of course most of Chekhov's journey was through Asian Russia. So sue me. :)

I finished The Dragon Scroll by I.J. Parker. This is the first book in Parker's "Sugawara Akitada" series of mysteries set in 11th century Japan. Our man Akitada is a low-level nobleman trying to rise in the bureaucracy of Imperial Japan. In this first story (the LT series listing says this is the first book chronologically though the third book published), Akitada is sent out to a distant province to try to solve the mystery of the disappearances of three straight convoys carrying tax payments to the capital. Murder and mayhem ensue. The plot is engaging, and the story is mostly enjoyable, though there is precious little real character development. The writing is OK, although about halfway through the book I started noticing that people's "eyes lit up" and that their "jaws dropped" with mildly irritating frequency. Once my cliche alarm goes off, it's hard for me not to trip over each instance. Nevertheless, this was a nice, breezy reading experience. On a whim I bought the first four books of this series (there are 14 books in all!) a while back. I will read through those first four gradually, though I doubt that I'll bother to go much further.

I finished Soldiers of the Faith: Crusaders and Moslems at War by Ronald C. Finucane. This is a clearly written and (to me, anyway) interesting book about the crusades. Finucane's purpose was not to provide a chronological narrative of the the several crusades that took place over several centuries during the Middle Ages, but instead to provide, to the extent possible from this far remove, a look into what it was like to take part in the events, looking, as the title suggests, from the perspectives of both European Christians and the Moslems they went to do battle with. Finucane began with an overview chapter laying out relatively briefly the timeline, goals and results of the various crusades to provide a context. But then he presents a series of explications of the different factors of the events, showing the patterns that held true throughout the centuries and differentiating between the various eras when appropriate. So we get insights into "Enlisting for the Crusades," "The Journey," "God's Armies," "Fighting and Dying," "Searching for God: Christian Enthusiasm, Moslem Beliefs," "Christian-Moslem Interactions," "Minorities at Risk: Women and Jews" and, finally, "Decline of an Ideal." Finucane didn't romanticize or admire any of this, but instead tried to present a clear-eyed view of it all. His writing was not particularly graceful, but was, as I mentioned up top, clear and straightforward enough to allow for a relatively unfettered reading experience. I'm putting this in a Middle East: Non-country specific category.

I finished Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History by Steven J. Zipperstein. This is a fascinating and clearly written book about the Kishinev pogrom. This tragic event took place, obviously, in the town of Kishinev, which is in Moldavia, at that time a province within Russia, relatively close to the seaport of Odessa, 1903. Somewhere around 50 of the towns Jews were killed in the riots, many women were raped, and of course many more people were injured. Businesses were destroyed, as well. There were many, many first-hand, written accounts of the violence, which spread over two days, and in particular two journalists who spent weeks in the town afterwards taking down survivor and witness testimony. Zipperstein makes the point that the fact that Kishinev is on the very westernmost area of the Russian Empire made it easier for news and information about the event to get out into the rest of the world than pogroms that took place deeper inside of Russia.

Zipperstein does a very good job of placing the Kishinev pogrom in historical context. In fact, although his description of the violence is detailed, graphic and horrifying, it takes up a relatively small portion of the book's 208 pages. The first several chapters describe conditions in the town of Kishinev, describing the town, the people who live there and relations between the various nationalities and between Christians and Jews. Zipperstein also deals with the several widely believed falsehoods about the pogrom, including the belief that the event was planned at the highest levels of the Russian government, and that the Jewish men of the town uniformly acted in a shame-inducing cowardly fashion, and discusses the repercussions that this belief has had for over a century.

Finally, Zipperman shows how the strong reaction against the pogrom throughout the U.S. became linked to the nascent Civil Rights movement, as some, both black and white, came to see the hypocricy of condemning the anti-Semitic violence in Russia while remaining silent about, or even defending, lynchings and anti-black riots in America.

So, all in all, this is a very interesting history of a dramatic, tragic event placed within the flow of both the events that led up to it and the events and concepts that emanated in its wake.

I finished Tierra Del Fuego by Francisco Coloane. This is a collection of nine exquisite stories by revered Chilean author Francisco Coloane. Coloane spins tales in spare, expressive prose about life in the lonely pampas, mountains and rugged islands and coastlines of Chile's southernmost country. For the most part, the characters are men, in small groups or in pairs, interacting for good or ill with the hazzards of land and sea and with their own frailties, both spiritual and physical, and, of course, with each other. In one of my favorite stories in the collection, "The Empty Bottle," two men, unknown to each other, meet at random as they ride their horses across the pampas. Their journeys are taking them in the same direction, so they ride along together for a while, lost in their own thoughts. The younger of the two thinks of his fiance, waiting in a far off town, and his desire to return to her. The older thinks of a murder he has committed years back in almost identical circumstances.

One of the blurbs on the book's cover refers to Coloane as "the Jack London of our times." I suppose in terms of subject matter, this might be apt. Stylistically to me it seems less so, though admittedly it's been a long time since I read much London. This is going to be a fairly obscure reference, but Coloane's writing brought to mind for me that of Finnish author Väinö Linna's "Under the North Star" trilogy. Another of my favorites, here, "How the Chilote Otey Died," about a group of survivors of a failed uprising on the run from pursuers intent on deadly retribution, particularly reminded me of Linna.

Here is Pablo Neruda's quote as offered on the back cover of my Europa Edition copy of this collection:

"Long arms, arms like rivers, are necessary to fully embrace Francisco Coloane. Or perhaps it's necessary to be a squall of wind, gusting over him beard and all. Otherwise, take a seat across the table from him and analyze the question, study him deeply; you will surely end by drinking a bottle of wine with Francisco and happily postponing the matter to some later date."

I had never heard of Coloane until my wife and I traveled in Argentina and southern Chile this past November. We spent almost a week on the large Chilean island of Chiloe, and happened to visit the town of Quemchi, where Coloane was born, and where there is a statue of him in the town square. In fact, the square is basically dedicated to him. My curiosity piqued, upon returning home I immediately went online and ordered two collections of his stories in translation, this one, and Cape Horn and other Stories from the End of the World. I will immediately be putting Cape Horn into my "between book" reading rotation.

I finished Istanbul Passage by Joseph Kanon. This is a fun, engaging espionage thriller about a low-level U.S. operative trying to navigate all sorts of mayhem in 1945 Istanbul to try to save a high-level escapee from the Soviets because the American government thinks this fellow has information they can use about those darn Ruskies. The war is over and all the spies are leaving Turkey. Well, not quite all the spies, of course. Anyway, the plot is pretty good and the various twists and turns enjoyable, with just enough history worked in to add spice. Just a smidge of character development, but, how much do you need in an "entertainment" like this one? I read Kanon's The Good German a while back, and enjoyed it a bit more than this book, but still I would recommend Istanbul Passage to fans of the genre. Kanon does employ a narrative tic I can do without, the cobbling together by comma of phrase smash-ups meant to approximate train of thought breathlessness. Occasionally annoying, but not so much as to ruin the fun. There is a lot of good description of the Istanbul of the era. I have no idea how accurately Kanon portrays either the city or Turkish politics of the time, of course.

I've just read Of Love and Other Demons by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It took me just about a day of "shelter in place" reading to enjoy this short, charming novel. It had been a while since I read any Marquez and was happy to return to his world, if only for the day. The story takes place in coastal city of an unnamed South American country during colonial days. The beautiful, young Sierva Maria, the only daughter of a dissolute nobleman, is bitten by a rabid dog on her 12th birthday. Are the subsequent manifestations of her wild, unruly spirit manifestations of the disease or of demonic possession? Marquez skillfully weaves themes of the passions of love, the ills and absurdities of a repressive culture, especially when it comes to powerless young women, and the inevitable dissolution of a bankrupt colonial system ruled from a distance of thousands of miles into 147 pages of floating, lyrical fable. Other reviewers here on LT seem clear that the book takes place in Columbia, although no country is ever named, so I'll go along with that here.

I finished Prague Fatale by Philip Kerr. This is the eighth book in Philip Kerr's addictive "Berlin Noir" detective series featuring Bernie Gunther. The series starts out with Gunther as a wise-cracking, Nazi-hating homicide detective in mid-1930s Berlin, only surviving in the post--for a time--because he's good at his job. Over the course of the series, Kerr has already taken Gunther through World War II, as a very reluctant officer (and even more reluctantly technically a member of the SS) on the Eastern Front, and then out the other end to his post-war life. Prague Fatale, however, is a flashback, taking Kerr back to 1941, and back to his forced work relationship with Reinhard Heydrich, the real life "Butcher of Prague." It is Heydrich who calls Gunther to his headquarters outside Prague to solve a murder that's taken place in that headquarters during a gathering of top Nazi officials. There is much less espionage intrigue here than in most Gunther novels. This one's more straight-forwardly a murder mystery, but with several twists, of course, and the standard amount of historical content, some straightforwardly factual and some as imagined by Kerr. While not quite up to the top standards of the series, this is still a very entertaining entry. Philip Kerr passes away a while back, but I still have six more Bernie Gunther books to enjoy. The book takes place about half and half in Berlin and in-and-around Prague, so I'm listing it as both Germany and the Czech Republic.

I enjoyed Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini. Sometimes I just feel like diving into a good, old fashioned romance/adventure and Scaramouche certainly filled the bill. Sabatini is, perhaps, best known as the author of Captain Blood, a swashbuckler that many of us read in adolescence and that became an Errol Flynn movie. Scaramouche is a bit subtler in subject matter, although there is a fair amount of sword play. The action takes place in Paris, commencing just before the onset of the French Revolution. The title character, of uncertain parentage, has nevertheless been brought up in privileged circumstances in Brittany. He is, of course, one of those whimsical characters who becomes master of any trade or skill he sets his mind to learning or which fate tosses him into. Romance, adventure, narrow scrapes, dastardly noblemen, friendship and treachery ensue, at a fast pace and with a genial tone. The writing is fine and the book is fun. Long live Scaramouche!

Book note: My reading experience was enhanced by the fact that, as you can see from the image I've included here, I chose this book off of my pulp fiction shelf. This is a second printing (1946) of the Bantam Books edition of 1945. The book was originally published in 1921.

I finished At Death's Door by Robert Barnard. This is a nice and breezy, good-but-not-great English murder mystery, first published in 1988. Barnard, who died in 2013, was a prolific and popular mystery writer. He wrote two books featuring Inspector Idwal Meredith. I read the first, Death of a Mystery Writer a short time ago and enjoyed it, deciding at the time to read this second Meredith case as well. Like the first Meredith mystery, we get about half a book's setup here before the crime is even committed. So part of the fun is guessing who is going to be murdered before trying to think along with Meredith to figure out who done it. We have here an aged famous writer on death's door in an upstairs bedroom, his soon and step-daughter tending to him, his much younger daughter, product of his scandalous second marriage showing up with her boyfriend, the second wife, a famous and revered professionally if roundly loathed personally also coming by with her new husband, plus other assorted family members and connective characters putting in appearances. Lots of ego, jealousy and questionable motives. An enjoyable diversion, all in all.

I recently finished Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun. This novel is a classic of Norwegian literature. First published in 1917, it won Hamsun a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920. The book is Hamsun's ode to hardy settlers and farmers of Norway's rugged and remote areas. A long, hard day's work is a man's greatest accomplishment, and Isak, the strong, simple, unremittingly persevering farmer is Hamsun's hero. The storyline follows Isak's early days carving out a farm, his taking on of a helpmate, Inger, who becomes his wife, and the growth of their family. Along the way, there are problems aplenty, of course, some of their own making. Hamsun often uses a sort of stream of consciousness narrative to good effect to get inside of his characters' minds. Even when they are flawed and troubled, they are characters we are happy to follow along with through life. We get a close up, if certainly idealized, picture of the tough life of these country communities. But also, as the narrative progresses, we come to understand that Hamsun is placing these mostly admirable people before in contrast to his disdain for modernism, and especially for new more or less liberal ideas about human nature.

So it was enjoyable to read Growth of the Soil. And interesting to read this acclaimed example of the early 20th-century style, Norwegian New Realism. Hamsun's prose here is certainly engaging, as is his humor and eye for the foibles of human nature, and his extremely deft touch at describing the intense beauty of the Norwegian countryside. But it's also the case that Hamsun was a Nazi sympathizer, and I have to admit that knowing, as I read, that the author was at the very least an admirer of people who would have been very happy to murder my grandparents and my parents drained a bit of the enjoyment out of the experience for me.

I raced through Fever Dream by Argentinian author Samanta Schweblin. This short novel ushers us into a hallucinatory world where a dying woman in a hospital ward is conversing with a mysterious, possibly imaginary, possibly ghostly young boy who speaks as an adult. As the woman, Amanda, replays the past few days of her life, we are brought to understand the ways in which even the privileged will eventually share in the miseries currently being visited on the poor and indigenous people of the world by the environmental degradation going on around us. The narrative is powerful, but because of the story's brevity, I think we are in and out of the reality it creates too swiftly for full effect. Schweblin's short story collections have won numerous awards. I will be on the lookout for English translations.

Book note: I bought my copy of this slim volume at an impossibly beautiful bookstore in Buenos Aires, El Ateneo Grand Splendid. https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/el-ateneo-grand-splendid

>14 rocketjk: Ooh...that bookshop is high on my wishlist.

I hope to visit Livraria Lello in Porto sometime next year. There were nearly 100 people waiting in line on a hot summery day when I tried to go two years ago, so I only took a photo of its exterior.

>15 kidzdoc: Wow! A bookstore with a waiting line to get in!

We made a special afternoon trip to the neighborhood where El Ateneo Grand Splendid is one afternoon while we were in Buenos Aires last November. We didn't even realize it was a bookstore. Due to a translation snafu, we thought we were going to the city's grand library. Imagine my surprise and delight! As the photos in the link I posted show, the place is vast and truly beautiful. In the whole giant store, though, they only have two scrawny shelves of English language books. That's not meant in any way as a criticism. What do they need 'em for? Even though my Spanish, despite a couple of months of adult school Spanish classes leading up to our trip, was rudimentary at best, my wife and I still had a wonderful time wandering about. I made a point of scanning the fiction shelves to find authors that looked interesting so that when I got home I could research English translations I might be able to order.

There are also several nice English language bookstores in Buenos Aires, and I went to one or two of those, as well.

There's also a big, beautiful bookstore in central Helsinki (the name escapes me right now) that I highly recommend. It was a bookseller there who suggested I read the wonderful Under the North Star trilogy by Väinö Linna.

>16 rocketjk: Although... that may be most bookstores this summer and fall.

Still, I'd love to be a bookstore tourist on a grand scale. I always try to go to the local indie when I travel(ed) for work, but that some of those would be pretty spectacular.

>16 rocketjk: Indeed. I just looked at the two photos I took on the day I tried to go to Livraria Lello, as I thought that my claim of 100 people waiting in line to enter was an exaggeration. The first photo shows the end of the line, and the bookshop is visible behind the No Left Turn sign:



The second photo, taken a minute or so later, shows the front of the bookshop:



I did a quick head count, and came up with at least 70 people standing outside of Livraria Lello, so my estimate of 100 people in line wasn't too far off.

The bookshop, besides being one of the most beautiful in the world, is very popular with tourists who are Harry Potter fans, as J.K. Rowling frequently visited Livraria Lello when she lived in Porto, and supposedly some of the sets in her movies were based on the design of the bookshop and its majestic staircases, which you can see in this article:

https://www.travelandleisure.com/culture-design/livraria-lello-portugal-harry-po...

Livraria Lello is so popular that it charges a 3,00€ fee (roughly $3.50 US) just to enter, and visitors are encouraged to purchase tickets online in advance.That amount does count toward the purchase of any items in the bookshop, though.

El Ateneo Grand Splendid is always featured as one of the world's most beautiful bookshops, as are two of my three favorites, Bookshop Dominicanen in Maastricht, which is housed in a 13th century Dominican church, and the flagship branch of Daunt Books in London. My third favorite is Livraria Bertrand in Lisbon, the world's oldest continuously operating bookshop, which opened in 1732. The bookshops in Maastricht and Lisbon also have limited English language titles, and I learned from my LT friend deebee1, who I met in Livraria Bertrand in 2018, that very few of the books written by best selling and critically acclaimed Portuguese authors are translated into English; the same may also hold true for Dutch authors, and, from my half dozen visits to Spain, I know that's the case there as well.

I finished Strange Defeat: A Statement of Evidence Written in 1940 by Marc Bloch. This is a fascinating testimony about the factors in the French army, government and society in general that, according the author, accounted for the French collapse and premature (in Bloch's opinion) surrender in the face of the German invasion in 1940. Marc Bloch was a veteran of the trenches of World War I and by trade a highly respected historian, so analysis of the type he undertook here was his stock and trade. When war was declared in 1939 with the invasion of Poland, Bloch returned to the military as a reservist, and was set to work as an officer working out the tracking and distribution of petrol supplies for the French First Army. As such, Bloch was in a position to see first-hand the hardening of the arteries that had taken place within the French military, both during the long period of inactivity known as the Phony War and then during the tragically short period of actual fighting once Germany invaded. Bloch describes, here, the scene on the beaches during the Dunkirk escape. Among those taken off the beaches, Bloch spent a short time in England, and then returned to what he thought would be the battle to defend his country.

This book was written in 1940, almost immediately after the French surrender. There are a few footnotes that Bloch entered to amend or add to the information presented in around 1942. Bloch discusses a great many reasons that came together to create a France wholly incapable of fighting off the German Army. A top-heavy military structure with too much jealousy and too little cooperation between branches, a complacency born of a wholesale refusal to take a clear look at the way warfare had changed since the first world war, the widespread loathing for and distrust of the working classes and the democratic process in general among the country's governing and industrial classes, to the extent, Bloch says, that some even thought that not only was it inevitable that Germany's autocratic system would defeat France, but that perhaps it was preferable that they would. In the field, according to Bloch (and he certainly wasn't alone), the French Army was done in by a lack of adequate training and equipment, poor leadership in crucial posts, and the dismay and sometimes even panic derived from the surprising speed and fury of the German attack (which Bloch takes pain to point out should not have been surprising).

Bloch takes the reader on a tour of French pre-war society, taking industrialists, labor leaders and academics (including himself) to task for the ways in which the nation fell short and laid themselves open to defeat. Bloch goes on to provide a more global context with a final section acute and highly readable political philosophy. The combination of Bloch's status as an expert historian and as a first-hand participant in so many of these events, plus Bloch's lucid and enjoyable writing style, makes this an entirely fascinating testimony and analysis of a fascinating if tragic historical saga.

This book was a birthday gift (along with the recently reviewed Lou Gehrig memoir) from my wonderful wife, who knows what I like to read!

>18 kidzdoc:

Just so you know, JK Rowling has countless times said that she has never visited that bookshop and thus no parts of Harry Potter were influenced by it. This is just a rumor (that the bookstore has greatly benefited from) that continues to get spread around the internet. She would like to visit it though!

https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1263377779338481665?lang=en

I finished The Unknown Soldier by Väinö Linna. Considered a classic of Finnish literature, The Unknown Soldier tells the story of Finnish Soldiers fighting in the Continuation War (as it's known in Finland) between Finland and Russia from 1941 through 1944. The novel presents a gritty depiction of the experiences of soldiers of one Finnish company.

Linna creates a memorable group of soldiers and follows them from the initial invasion and success, to the stalemate that develops at the point of the invasion's furthest advance, and then through the interminable retreat. Death stalks the company throughout, of course. Men die throughout the narrative in ways foolish, cowardly and brave, in attempts to accomplish specific objectives or randomly. But also, these men are portrayed as individuals, with a wide spectrum of personalities, bravery or cowardice, with a wide range of ideas about the war and what they're doing there, and a very specific attitude about the advantages or (mostly) disadvantages of the officers above them, whose success as leaders is generally tied to their willingness to forego the trappings of their rank and insistence on military discipline.

The novel, published 10 years after the war's end, became an instant success in Finland and propelled Linna to literary hero status within the country. It was, according to what I've been able to read, the first novel in Finland that portrayed the war and its soldiers in anything close to realistic, rather than idealized, fashion, and veterans of the war were evidently vocal in their praise. The novel is harrowing, to be sure, full of bitterness and, especially at the end, despair, but also full of life and humor, frailty and honor. What are human beings willing to do, and how do we stand up, principles intact (or not) in the face of deprivation and almost certain death? Linna doesn't really ask these questions, but he does provide his own answer to them.

The narrative remains quite focused on the "here and now." Linna dispels almost entirely with digressions about the backgrounds of individual soldiers. We don't travel back to childhoods or to marriages and children or businesses left behind. We are, almost wholly, with these men in this place with shells falling all around. Also, Linna, who himself fought in this war, provides gripping, horrific and seemingly very realistic combat scenes.

There is certainly, from our contemporary view, a limited world view among these soldiers. Their perspective is almost entirely bordered by the quarrels between Russia and Finland, and Germany's early successes and eventual defeats are seen only through their filters of what it all means for Finland and for their own situation.

The most consistent hero of The Unknown Soldier is Vilho Koskela, the calm, veteran lieutenant, survivor of the Winter War, caring and inspirational leader of his men. In fact, after the success of The Unknown Soldier, Linna went back and wrote his Under the North Star trilogy which begins with Koskela's grandfather breaking ground on a wilderness farm and takes the family up through Vilho's service and beyond. While on vacation in Finland with my wife several years back, I was told in a Helsinki bookstore that I should read this trilogy if I wanted to understand Finnish history and the character of the Finnish people. That trilogy provided me one of the most memorable reading experiences I've ever had. It's been a couple of years since I finished Under the North Star. I've been saving this book, but finally decided it was time to read it. When Koskela makes his appearance on page 4, I actually said to myself, "Ah, there he is!"

By the end, more than one of the characters is of course asking, as the reader will, "What was the point of all that horror?" Linna mostly leaves those questions to history, and to the reader the task of understanding the ultimate tragedy and futility of the endeavor.

I finished Sudden Death by Alvaro Enrigue. This is a fanciful, inventive novel by Mexican writer Alvaro Enrigue about the twin seismic events in Western history of the Counter Reformation that sought to crush Protestantism under the weight of Inquisition and expulsion and the destruction of the Aztec Empire by Hernan Cortes and creation of New Spain which brought new wealth to Europe. The narrative mostly jumps back and forth between two scenarios. First is a whimsically rendered tennis grudge match played between the Italian artist Caravaggio and the Spanish poet Quevedo. Much is made over the rules of early versions of tennis, the differences in the composition of the balls, as well as the symbolic (and invented) detail of four tennis balls filled with the hair of Anne Boleyn, shorn just before her execution. Second is the progress of Cortes and his relationship with Montezuma, whose world he is about to destroy. The tone of almost all of this is deceptively light, often played for laughs. But the veil is often pulled back, the smile shown to be the grin of a death's head. For both focus also spins out from the tennis game to show us that nobles and religious figures who sponsor and support both artists--and those figures' forebears--men who can at the same time appreciate a revolutionary use of lighting in a painting and condemn thousands and thousands of people to death via the headman's axe and the pyre. The Aztec culture is identified as tyrannical and murderous, and the conflict between Cortes and Montezuma as resulting in a sea of misery and blood. With all that being true, how to reflect accurately how delightful a reading experience I found this? Let's go back to the start and speak of a novel fanciful, inventive slyly humorous and inventive. As the narrative is split between Italy, where the tennis game takes place and whence the Counter Reformation speads, and (what is now) Mexico, I'm listing this book as both in my master list.

Yesterday I read the final essay in Leaves in the Wind by Alpha of the Plow (a.k.a. Alfred George Gardiner). This collection of delightful essays, originally written for a British evening newspaper called The Star, was published in 1919 as a followup to Pebbles on the Shore, another collection by this English author who was very popular in his day. Although they were written while the slaughter in the trenches of World War I was still going on, and is often referred to, Gardiner's writes with a light hand and a wish to be uplifting. The war is a necessary evil, with a noble aim. In the meantime, it is possible, and necessary, to see the beauty in nature and in life. So writes Gardiner. Many of the pieces are nicely humorous (I should say "humourous.") "On a Distant View of a Pig," for instance, or "In Defense of Ignorance," from which I offer this example of Gardiner's writing . . .

"When I was young I was being driven one day through a woodland country by an old fellow who kept an inn and let out a pony and chaise for hire. As we went along I made some remark about a tree by the wayside and he spoke of it as a poplar.'Not a poplar,' said I with the easy assurance of youth, and I described to him for his information the characters of what I conceived to be the poplar. 'Ah,' he said, 'you are thinking of the Lombardy poplar. That tree is the Egyptian poplar.' And then he went on to tell me of a score of other poplars--their appearance, their habits, and their origins--quite kindly and without any knowledge of the withering blight that had fallen upon my cocksure ignorance. i found that he had spent his life in tree culture and had been forester to a Scotch duke. And I had explained to him what a poplar was like! But i think he did me good, and I often recall him to mind when I feel disposed to give other people information that they possibly do not need."

I recently finished A Deadly Shade of Gold by John D. MacDonald. This is the fifth novel in MacDonald's classic and beloved "Travis McGee" mystery series. McGee is the classic world-weary, heart-of-gold, uber competent private eye who only gets involved in trouble when a friend is in trouble or he runs out of money. Here, it's the former, as McGee heads off to Mexico looking for information about and revenge for the killing of a friend. At the heart of the search is a collection of ancient gold figurines.

As always, great plotting, great observations about the acquisitive, materialist drain the world, and U.S. society in particular, is circling around (circa mid-1960s!). The plotting, pacing and writing quality are all quite good. It's no wonder that this series has remained so popular. The sexism is baked in, I'm afraid.

A quick note that I finished another short story collection by revered Chilean author Francisco Coloane, Cape Horn and Other Stories from the End of the World. Many of the stories are also found in Tierra del Fuego, the Coloane collection I read (and reviewed above) earlier this year. Both collections are wonderful, although I found the translation Tierra del Fuego a bit more flowing, and so would recommend that one a little more strongly.

I recently finished The New Men by C.P. Snow. This is the 6th novel in C.P. Snow's Strangers and Brothers series. Goodness how I have been enjoying these books, which I've been reading through at the rate of one or two per year. The series takes protagonist Lewis Eliot, and English society, from the mid-1920s through the mid-1960s. Eliot is a "self-made man" who has battled his from working class roots into the relatively high echelons of British government work, his early plans to become a high-powered attorney having been short circuited by his love and loyalty to a depressive wife who know will barely see him, so reclusive has she become. Now we are back in the years of World War 2, where we also spent much of The Light and the Dark. Eliot finds himself as, more or less, second in command to a cabinet minister whose portfolio lands Eliot in the midst of gathering funding and manpower for the British attempt to create an atom bomb. The ethics of creating such a weapon, Eliot's relationship with his younger brother, a scientist whom Eliot wishes to help "get on" in ways he himself had not been able to, the gathering of middle age and the interpersonal and power-related relationships of scientists, politicians, friends, brothers and lovers are all deftly handled. Snow was an acute observer of the human condition, a writer with a keen eye to human ego, frailty, desires and strengths. He has the grace not to descend into cynicism. In fact, Nicolas Tredell's study of Snow and his works is entitled C.P. Snow: The Dynamics of Hope. The writing is always low key, with the first person narrative infused with what we Americans, at any rate, would describe as a standard English diffidence. Within this, however, the language is alive with wit and the sort of tiny detail of speech and thought that makes characters really come alive, at least for me. Some might find this writing too slow, I suppose, but for me Snow's writing is entirely delightful.

I finished Foreign Shores by Marie-Hélène Laforest, who is Haitian-American. This is a slim collection of wonderful, haunting short stories deal with life in Haiti, the perils, joys and regrets of those who immigrated to America, and the lives of those who had either stayed behind or returned to Haiti. Many, though not all, of the stories deal with poverty and longing. The tales that take place in the U.S. usually add strong themes of displacement. Parents in the U.S. try desperately to save enough money to bring their children out of Haiti, or grown children to bring their elderly parents. Meanwhile, back in Haiti, life becomes more dangerous, political murders more frequent, in the stories dealing with the DuValier regime. The stories are grouped into four sections: Island Life, Some Drifted, Many Stayed, A Few Returned.

Says George Lamming in his Foreward to the collection, the stories speak of "the more somber theme of involuntary migration and slave labor on arrival at the metropolitan ports that promise rescue from the grim legacy of the Duvalier regimes. The name, Duvalier, defines an epidemic which extends its blight on the expectations of those who have never surrendered to despair."

Here, from the story "Language of the Gods" (from Part II: Some Drifted) is a longish excerpt to give an idea of Laforest's use of language and imagery to get at the dislocation many of her characters feel. Marinette's husband Charles has just died of a heart attack. She walks through their New York City apartment afterward, waiting for her two children, May and Roger, to return home from grocery shopping:

She walked to Roger's room. A picture of his football team hung up alongside the triangular banners that read Chess Club, Book Club, Softball Club. Charles insisted that they place a desk in the room for the large dictionary paid in installments. She needed both hands to lift it when she dusted. A room in black and white Roger had asked for. Too funereal for her. But what did her children know about funerals and mourning until two days ago? About wearing black for a year, then white and black or gray for another six months? Mourning then half-mourning, that's what they said back home. She ran a hand down the front of her black dress to smooth out a crease that was not there. Death in a family, black dresses ready overnight. A sewing machine stitching black cambric white cotton . . . long ago . . . for a ceremony to the wrong gods, those that come from Guinea, the mecreants their followers, white head ties, white dresses in swirls around a pole, spinning, whirling. Goatskin drums, the deep sound of hollow bamboos resounding in the countryside, beating in her head now. In the dark night flashes of red kerchiefs in the shadows of vast trees. Invoke the spirits. The Iwa comes. White forms thrash to the ground. The other gods, which her family renounced.

Mariette brought her hands to her temples. That disorder in her head, those strands of memory, they had come so unexpectedly, so wrongly. "Mourning," she said aloud to hear her voice, "then half-mourning," she added for the sound of her voice to stop that reeling out of a skein in the mind, to wind up all those threads somehow, to pin them somewhere.

I will think of this collection often, and may even read it again soon. It seems that Laforest has spent much more of her career in research and academia than in fiction writing, which is sad for us. I couldn't find reference to any other fiction other than these stories, in fact.

Book notes: Foreign Shores was published in Quebec in 2002. I bought the collection in a wonderful bookstore in the Little Haiti neighborhood of Miami during a trip there a couple of years back. At this moment I am the only LT member with the book listed in his/her library.

I finished The Crust on Its Uppers by Derk Raymond. Published in 1962, The Crust on Its Uppers is a sly takedown of the British upper class disguised as a noir caper novel. The protagonist a young man with the advantages of that upper class background and education, has become disillusioned with what he sees of the rot, the lack of joi de vivre and purpose, of that class, and has submerged himself instead in the South London grime scene of con men, sharks and shady players. Dark bars, drugs, booze and dodgy business dealings fuel the scene. Readers have to fight their way through Raymond's use of London rhyming slang, and often I found myself just sort of skating along on top of that, going with the rhythm and the flow instead of worrying about the meaning of every word or phrase. Never did I feel like I didn't know what was going on, however, plus my edition had a handy glossary that I used sometimes more and sometimes less. The first half of this relatively short novel is more of a character/class study than anything else, with the caper part of the proceedings not really getting going until about the midway point.

The caper itself, once it gets going, is handled well and kept me turning pages. I noted that once that action commences, Raymond (whose real name was Robin Cook, in case anyone's keeping score) dispenses to a significant degree, with reliance on slang.

I enjoyed this read experience, and I believe the book has standing as one of the first examples of London noir. The story is seedy and dark, but often funny, and I never found it to be cynical.

I finished reading Nine Greek Dramas, edited by Charles W. Eliot. Here's another book that I've had on my shelves waiting to be read since before I first posted my library here on LT. The volume contains four plays by Aeschylus, two by Sophocles, two by Euripides and one by Aristophanes. I know I've probably read a few of these in the past, and seen one or two performed. And certainly I knew the classic, iconic story lines of the House of Atreus plays and, more or less, of Prometheus Bound. But browsing my shelves one day, I came upon this book and decided it would be interesting, maybe even fun, to give these plays a read over the period of a couple of months. I haven't, nor am I going to at this late date, going to make a deep study of the archetypical themes found here, although I do recall well my high school English teachers description of these Greek tragic heroes being brought down, each one, by their "fatal flaws," pride being among the foremost. Editor Charles Eliot's, in his introduction to the Euripides plays notes that these plays are often marked as the beginning of the decline of Greek tragedy, as events begin to be driven by happenstance rather than destiny. This opinion was evidently firmly held by Aristophanes, whose entry here, The Frogs, is a hilarious comedic take down of Euripides, who loses a debate with Aeschylus in Hades about quality their verse.

I can't say I entirely enjoyed every minute of this reading. The long expositions in each play by chorus and character alike could be a slog for this poor Philistine. But I always found the reading interesting. As far as the language is concerned, I agreed with Euripides' take that the poetry in Aeschylus was far superior to the other writers here. That might have to do with the translations, of course, as each playwright received a different translator. Aeschylus is translated here by E. D. A. Morshead. And in fact, according to Wikipedia anyway, Morshead's main claim to fame was his translations of Aeschylus.

Book note: My copy of Nine Greek Dramas is, at this writing, 111 years old. It is Volume 8 of the 1909 edition of the Harvard Classics, noted on the title page as "Dr. Eliot's Five-Foot Shelf of Books." Sadly, no, I don't have the whole set. Goodness only knows where I picked up this volume.

I finished Great Irish Tales of Horror: A Treasury of Fear edited by Peter Haining. Although some of the stories in this anthology were quite good, all in all I'd call this a so-so collection. For one thing, Haining's definition of a "tale of horror" differs from mine. I was expecting a collection of Irish stories dealing with ghosts and other paranormal matters, but many of the stories here do not fit that description at all. The opening entry, "The Morgan Score" by Jack Higgins, is a crime/noir story. The final tale, "Last Rites" by Neil Jordan, harrowing and excellent though it is, is a story of the psychology of a working class suicide. A few of the stories are humorous, the "fear" experienced only by characters portrayed as foolish and/or gullible, but not by the reader.

There were, to be sure, several excellent ghostly tales. Familiar names among the author list include Elizabeth Bowen, Sax Rohmer, J.M. Synge, George Bernard Shaw, Patrick Lafcadio Hearn and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. Even Bram Stoker shows up.

At any rate, not a terrible collection by any means, but I'm sure Irish horror stories are better represented elsewhere.

My final novel in 2020 brought me to Jasper Fforde's fantastical, dystopian and extremely fun version of England via his latest standalone, Early Riser. And so that's a wrap for the year. 2020's reading brought me 20 countries, including the U.S., and eleven states within the U.S. Plus "non-country specific" books in the Middle East and South America and "non-state specific" books in the U.S. That's on earth. I also left the planet once via Otis Adelbert Kline's The Swordsman of Mars.

I'm looking forward to seeing where my 2021 reading takes me. Cheers, all!