As a lover of Anglo-Saxon literature and history, Beowulf is very near and dear to my heart. So when our book club decided to tackle it, I was happy as dragon on gold. I decided that it was time to take a serious look at multiple translations and to try my hand at reading as much as I could in the original Anglo-Saxon as well. Here’s a breakdown of all the versions I read this time around:
ISBN13: 9780393320978
This version is functional as far as capturing the words in a fairly rote way, but feels clumsy and fails to evoke much in the way of mood. It does have the advantage of facing-page original Anglo-Saxon, so it’s what I used for my attempts at reading the original text.
ISBN13: 9780615612652
This one approaches Beowulf as modern poetry and makes some bold decisions about how to present the content. Line breaks, indentation, alignment, and white space are all vital to its interpretation. And the text is less concerned with literal accuracy on a word-by-word level and more concerned with creating an impactful effect, which it does very well. In many ways, I prefer this version to the Heaney, though there are some outright omissions of passages, which I disapprove.
ISBN13: 9780763630232
For fun, I threw in this great graphic novel adaptation I picked up at Half Price Books a while back. It makes no attempt to be a complete representation of the text. But the art and visual storytelling are great.
My grasp of Anglo-Saxon language is very far from fluent. Mostly, I can bring to bear my knowledge of middle and early modern English, German cognates and grammar, a smattering of Icelandic and Old Norse pronunciation and concepts, and my study of Anglo-Saxon and Norse cultures.
There is a great deal I missed in my reading, but it was worth it for hearing the sound and rhythm of the original poetry and for the linguistic thrill of discovering words that unlocked some linguistic puzzle in my mind.
One of the most amazing and thought-provoking collections I have read in a long time. Ted Chiang has joined the ranks of my most cherished authors of fiction.
My book club chose this one to read and I was relatively interested to see how Dostoyevsky’s work stands up to my high school memories of Crime and Punishment and fragments of The Grand Inquisitor section of this book. The answer is not so good. The book is rambling in the extreme and most of the plot involves around a quasi-incestuous, middle school style game of he-said-she-said romance melodrama. It does explore philosophical themes, but the central question of whether a person can be moral without faith seems to me (as a humanist atheist) to be pretty well answered and not particularly germane to contemporary readers.
I really enjoyed reading Sinclair's The Jungle when I was in high school, but had never yet gotten around to any of his other works. Then a few years ago I watched Paul Thomas Anderson's brilliant and chilling There Will be Blood, which I learned is loosely inspired by this novel and its seemed like the perfect excuse to get back to Sinclair's work.
The first thing I have to report is that the writing is superb. Lovely prose, fantastic structure, characters you can believe, sardonic humor, and messaging that is (almost) never heavy handed. I mention messaging because this book is all about capitalism versus labor (and socialism and communism). Written a hundred years ago, all the big questions it asks are still shockingly relevant today. How do we know who's version of events to believe? Where is the line between getting things done and cheating the system? How do you find balance when your beliefs are opposed to those you love most?
It's a very long book, but one that kept me hooked the whole way through.
This book is three-stars, but that's all it wants to be. It's great at being three-stars!
An extremely shallow look at the idea that language is central to the power of cults and cult-like organizations. It feels like most of the author’s research was done on social media, and most of the content focuses on providing very basic descriptions of different types of cultish groups. Disappointing.
A solid deconstruction of spycraft and the cold war.
If not for my book club, I wouldn’t read a book with such an inflammatory title, but we’d previously read Haidt’s previous book The Righteous Mind and found it pretty interesting. This one doesn’t at all live up to that precedent.
The basic point is unarguable–by over-protecting children, we make them vulnerable to fragility and likely to have extreme reactions to disagreement–but the authors seem to be more interested in clutching their pearls about kids these days and in cherry-picking scandalous sounding exemplars than in asking deeper questions about why young people feel the way they do or how the situation might be more nuanced than it seems at first glance. It leaves me with a strong urge to dismiss it with a shrug and an “okay, boomer.”
As he proved in Killers of the Flower Moon, David Grann can really make history come to life so that it reads like a novel. Part of it is that he’s a fantastic writer with great prose, but part of it is that he finds stories that make your jaw drop, repeatedly.
The Wager does just that. It’s hard to believe what these sailors went through, what they survived, and the choices they made. You sit on the edge of your seat, holding your breath for what might come next, terrified and hopeful. It’s exhilarating, harrowing, and a lot of fun.
