Here are some books I got for Christmas 2018. I used to get toys for Christmas, then clothes, now books.
If you have read any of these, please let me know what you think! They are listed here in order of first publication, which is also, roughly, the order from best to worst according to my Theory of Old Books:
The Ignatius Bible (300s AD): a Catholic edition of the Bible based on the RSV-2CE, an updated RSV translation from 2001. I read the books of Esther and Daniel in the King James Bible. The Catholic version has added chapters.
Emperor Taizong of Tang: The Ruler’s Guide (600s): Advice from the second emperor of the Tang Dynasty of China, as told by Chinghua Tang, a New York management consultant.
The Bronte Sisters: Three Novels (1847): Bound as a book that looks great on a bookshelf (one of those). It has Charlotte Bronte’s “Jane Eyre”, Emily Bronte’s “Wuthering Heights”, and Anne Bronte’s “Agnes Grey”, which all came out the same year (1847). I adored “Wuthering Heights”, hated “Jane Eyre”, and have yet to read “Agnes Grey”. I asked my sister a few weeks ago if “Agnes Grey” was any good. I guess I got my answer.
James Baldwin: Just Above My Head (1979): A long James Baldwin novel I have never read! Like the Bronte sisters, he is an old favourite of mine.
Bill McKibben: The End of Nature (1989): The book he wrote about climate change back in the 1980s complete with an I-told-you-so introduction from 2006. The other week I was telling my mother about his book “The Age of Missing Information” (1992). She says I have too many books – but got me this one anyway.
Charlene Spretnak: Lost Goddesses of Early Greece (1992): The Greek goddesses as they probably were before the Indo-European Greeks came to Greece and masculinized the religion there. The oldest knowable layer of Greek religion.
Walter Metz: Bewitched (2007): “Bewitched” was one of my favourite television shows from childhood. Metz liked it too, only he grew up to become a professor of film and theatre and watched all the episodes over again armed with film theory – and then wrote this book about it. The book is part of the TV Milestones Series.
Sven Beckert: Empire of Cotton (2014): a history of cotton and how it led to the rise of capitalism and the deep inequalities that last to this day. A must read – unless Beckert is just a capitalist shill.
Walter Isaacson: Leonardo da Vinci (2017): I got Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs three or so Christmases ago. Should be good.
Tim Marshall: The Age of Walls (2018): From Trump’s wall to Israel’s wall and other walls and what it all means for the world and where it is going.
Hannah Fry: Hello World (2018): How computer algorithms affect daily life and the moral issues that arise from them.
Timeline:
- Before 1950: Bible, Taizong, Brontes
- 1950s:
- 1960s:
- 1970s: Baldwin
- 1980s: McKibben
- 1990s: Spretnak
- 2000s: Metz
- 2010s: Beckert, Isaacson, Marshall, Fry
– Abagond, 2018.
Sources: Cover images mainly from Goodreads, but also Amazon and Simon & Schuster. They match the editions I have.
See also:
- books
- James Baldwin
- English Bible translations
- Israel’s Wall
- possible future posts:
- Greek goddesses
- Esther
- Bewitched
- cotton
- climate change
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James Baldwin’s Just Above My Head is a big thick book I read in the Summer of 84 I remember it was long and tedious and it took me four weeks to finish it. Baldwin knows how to write about the black church and Evangelical culture.
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That’s a lot of heavy duty reading material, Abagond. I can’t wait for you to read each one and give a synopsis.
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One can never have too many books. The one about climate change seems interesting and the book about the Greek goddesses looks interesting.
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@ Abagond
The only ones I’ve read are the Brontes. Not sure what you will think of Agnes Grey as it is closer in theme to Jane Eyre (the protagonist is a young governess) but different in plot and nature.
Of Anne Bronte’s novels, I think The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is the better of the two, especially considered in the context of its time and how groundbreaking it was.
But nothing holds a candle to Wuthering Heights.
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Wow..
Please tell me you’re a Kindle user.
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Sometimes I feel like you and I are like those parallel lines on the same plane but never meet. We like the same music groups but have different favorite songs. I’ve never read Wuthering Heights but Jane Eyre was my girl. Her story is amazing and I consider her one of the best literature friends I have, right up there with Jo March.
I know you have issues with women but that is absolutely no reason to hate Jane although her story is uniquely feminine. There is very little male gaze to Sully her story and most of the men do come off like the villain in a Tyler Perry movie but there are a few decent ones. I think you should give Jane another try.
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Since you asked, I have read both Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. Like you, I found Wuthering Height much more appealing and entertaining than Jane Eyre, although you need a genealogy chart to read it. Literally, and I did print one and tape it up the last time I dived into it, though I did not get so far that time.
Jane Eyre is however an interesting story, and I think shows how more and more modern society is keeping people in a state of permanent postadolescence (not that I should talk). Jane at a very young age was deemed to be able to teach school up to the level of her own education, and proved able to do it. FIction, of course. But I hold the view that all fiction is a reflection and representation of the time in which it is written. You only need to read some 1950’s science fiction to see the point, In 1950’s science fiction, diversity meant a male character with a STEM background who was ostentatiously Polish. Not that we don’t sometimes have contrived diversity in literature and film today.
Wuthering Heights is a great gothic novel. I mean, if you’re going to be gothic, be gothic. It would be a great movie today if it was made right. But unfortunately Hollywood often botches the casting, and I imagine it would do so with this story too.
Jane Eyre would make a good movie also, but the casting would be difficult. I do not think it would work unless you put an actress, excuse me, female actor, in the role of Jane. One of my thoughts about casting is that when you have a character of some intelligence, it doesn’t work unless the person playing that character has a little of the same. That is why Daniel Day Lewis was a good Lincoln and Sigorney Weaver has done so well in some of her parts. And why Hillary Swank was a flop as Amelia Earhart. Earhat went to the same high school I did and suffered some depredation there also. I might not be so interested in her story had she not gone to the same high school. I console myself sometime that at least I didn’t end up dead before my time like she did. But Hillary Swank as Earhart? Seriously, if Earhart was a young woman in the era after 1970, she might have gone to Annapolis. Or majored in aeronautical engineering at Purdue. Really.
Since we are on the subject of period novels and period films, I want to say something about the film version of 2005 Pride and Prejudice. Considering the difficulty of casting Elizabeth Bennet, I thought they did pretty good with Keira Knightley in part. D’Acry was a fiery and brutal character. He should have been played different and that means cast differently so that he could be played differently. But I can’t quite say who.
The novel itself I thought was a powerful reflection of the period. Again, the issue of prolonged adolescence and post adolescence came to fore. The idea that a girl was ready to be courted, get married, run a household and experience her first pregnancy at 16 is not a fiction. The “Sweet 16” idea is a residue of the fact that this once was the practice of society. So is the quinceaneras in Hispanic-American society. Today, it is the equivalent of a Sweet Sixteen party although I think it also taken a little more seriously as rite of passage. In Latin American society back in the day, and that was not too long ago, the quinceaneras marked the entrance of a girl into adult society. At that point, she likewise was deemed eligible to be courted, get married, run a household and experience her first pregnancy. As recently as around 2000, my brother, who works in Silicon Valley, worked with an engineer from Central America whose brother, a 30 year old physician, had just married a 15-year-old girl.
My understanding is, in Latin American society, at least in the past, it was a frequent social pattern for a man, after a long period of playboying, to marry a much younger woman and then father his own children. By the time his oldest son had grown up, he was ready to pass on his business to the son, who then repeated the pattern. Men of that ilk, because of smoking and long history of heavy drink and nightlife, and just because people in the past did not live as long, often died pretty young, and left their wives with decades of widowhood to naviage their way through.
Another thing in the 2005 Pride that might have gone over people’s heads was the presence at the dance of a staff of silent, uniformed male servants in the background. Wasn’t this something that was duplicated in the plantations of the old South, with black men dressed up for the role and given fanciful names, things like “Nebulon” and “Romulo” and the like? Everything has its antecendents. The difference was, servant-for-hire or event staff could be a career and the person had a choice of seeking other work however harsh life was for them. Not so on the plantation.
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I stumbled across this really delightful Twitter thread that begins:
https://mobile.twitter.com/RobGMacfarlane/status/1081445249522851840
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