Category: books

Books I Like #1

The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane by Kate DiCamillo, Illustrated by Bagram Ibatoulline

Candlelick Press, Cambridge MA, 2006

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I was a puddle of goo by the end of this book. It is simply the most beautiful thing I have ever read.

It was recommended to me by Jørn Otte, a friend of mine from my MFA program, who writes YA fiction and nonfiction. He said it was his favorite book, and the passion he obviously felt for it was convincing. As soon as I had headspace to read something on my own recognizance, this was my choice.

It has a Buddhist feel, but it is about as close to atheist a fantasy as one could imagine, and it is a deeply spiritual book. Edward’s journey, and it is a journey in all senses of the word, is as described, and I was gutted at the end of it. If I didn’t have a hundred things in my tbr pile, I’d pick it up and read it again right now. I’m sorely tempted to do that anyway, but I can’t really justify it.

 

Books I Like Meta

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I’m doing a series of Facebook posts that include exclusive content here as an experiment. I’m also trying to use more pictures, going for shorter posts, and seeing how long I can maintain posting every day.

This is one of those challenge meme thingies. I was asked to do this by Valerie Nelson.

Thus we begin Season 3: The Groma Era.

Some Thoughts on The Alexiad

It took me four months to read this book.

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I’ve talked about my struggles with The Alexiad before. Though it took me an embarrassing amount of time to make it to the last page, I deem the journey well worth it. I still don’t trust everything Anna Komnene wrote. Ultimately, however, I feel that far more of the story she tells is authentic and important than it is self-justifying or intentionally embellished. She speaks about a crucial period in world history from a primary-source perspective. There are sections of the book that are clearly from Anna’s direct point of view, written in first person. I found those sections of the book to be most compelling, imbuing the account of that time — Alexios’ reign, from 1081-1118 CE — with urgency.

Her insights and immediacy to the events recounted bring them to life in a way that is unique. There are times when she apologizes for “straying from the history” with personal interjections. I understand her concerns. As she tries to present an objective recounting of events, she is likely resisting what she has been taught: that adding personal details affects the integrity of a classically-told history. But the beauty of her work is greatly enhanced by her presence in these pages, even as it brings into question the purity of her recounting.

Anna lived in a convent the last 30 years of her life, her husband dead. It is suspected that she tried to take the throne from her brother John II Komnenos, but failed. The 15 books of the Alexiad were written over the last ten years of her life, and apparently finished as Anna herself was dying. My suspicion is that she knew she was dying for the last book and a half, based on a change of tone and focus that begins in Book XIV, at times shifting away from a recounting of events in and around the Empire and focusing more on her own situation. Here again, however, she is not explicit. She tells us that she is not free, but she doesn’t explain why.

In my estimation, an estimation backed by numerous other historians, Anna Komnene was brilliant. I once saw Ted Kennedy speak at Lesley, and he was a bright light and a very astute politician. He was whip-smart, a very fast thinker. He spoke in the Marran Theater at Lesley, and the force of his personality filled that stage in a way that I have seen no one else manage.

My sense of her is that Anna was easily as bright as Ted.

If Anna was brilliant, she clearly follows upon the brilliance of her father. His reign was a titanic struggle to revive the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire. Anna claims all of this in the beginning of her book, but when you first read it in Anna’s voice, you think “this is just the great man’s daughter’s bias.”

But by the end, she has made her case, as far as I’m concerned. When Alexios I Komnenos made his putsch, the Byzantine Empire was on the ropes. Anna doesn’t say this explicitly, but based on the sheer number of fires Alexios immediately has to put out, it seems clear to me that the Empire wouldn’t have lasted very much longer if he hadn’t seized power. Its coffers were empty and there were several invasions of the Empire just in the offing. Alexios met each challenge in turn, and though it was at times in doubt that he would be able to meet those challenges, I believe he extended the life of the empire for another 300 out of the next 350 years, barring an interregnum from 1204-1261 CE, when the Latins — the Catholics of the Holy Roman Empire — held the city. (Those dates represent the second and third sackings of Constantinople.)

Still, it’s a question worth pondering: did Alexios save the Empire or destroy it? He extended its life, certainly, but nobody came along after him and completed the work he began. Some of the measures he took, I have learned elsewhere, are considered to have weakened the Empire’s long-term prospects irreversibly. Constantinople fell to Mehmet II on June 4th, 1453, and was sacked for the fourth time. For the next 470 years, it was the capitol of the Ottoman Empire.

Alexios was, arguably, both its savior and its doom. His army was the first to sack Constantinople, proving that such a thing was possible, when the city had previously been thought to be impregnable. A deal made with the Venetians to enlist the aid of their navy against the invader Robert Guiscard ultimately curtailed the Empire’s ability to fund itself. I’m sure that Anna knew this, but glosses over it in her recounting. We learn nothing from her about concessions to the Venetians, only that some were made.

Much of the book is a litany of the many battles her father fought. So. Many. Battles. The Empire was beleaguered on all sides, including from within. Constantinople was the prize every pirate wanted to take, the job of Emperor many a man’s dream. There were many willing to take it, and some of them had armies. Alexios’s time as Emperor was battle after battle, and battle of wits after battle of wits, and he almost always won. His brilliance is most evident to me in Anna’s accounting of his conduct during the First Crusade, which happened in the latter half of Alexios’s reign. I won’t recount his actions in any detail here, but I will refer you to the book Anna wrote.

The very beginning, the Prologue (which annoyed me when I read it, for reasons I’ve detailed elsewhere), the last chapter and a half (which more than justifies the Prologue), and a few different points in the course of The Alexiad is most vivid. Those are the places where Anna reveals herself, and in doing so elevates her telling of her father’s story.

It must be said that not everything in the book will meet modern eyes and sensibilities with a heroic luster. She details two genocides that Alexios and the Romans committed during his reign; a heretical sect called the Bogomils, all of whom either recanted, died in prison, or were burned, and the Patzinaks, a tribe of Scythian nomads who invaded the empire and were “wiped out in a single day.” In the former case, Anna casts the wiping out of the Bogomils as Alexios’ last great victory. She presents the destruction of the Patzinaks as a tragedy.

People talk about American Exceptionalism, but the American version of this attitude is slight when compared to medieval Roman Exceptionalism. Anna writes about every people but her own as various sorts of barbarians, and in each case gives her reasons why. It’s true that the Empire was beleaguered, and that peoples in every direction were trying to destroy it. How much did Roman attitudes contribute to those who sought its destruction’s motivations?

The Alexiad is one of the greatest books I’ve ever read, but I also had problems with it, as I’ve noted. As Anna is writing her book, she is engaged in realpolitik, and conscious of her influence. In spite of that, she is very honest about a number of things she could have glossed over easily: she told of her father’s failings in the same matter-of-fact tone that she applied to his successes. Her lively, clear mind balance her great love for and admiration of her father.

Anna Komnene

It’s been pointed out that I haven’t posted much about my research into the Eastern Roman Empire of late. There’s a reason for this: I’ve gotten hung up reading The Alexiad, written by the Roman princess Anna Komnene in the Twelfth Century CE: a history of her father, the Emperor Alexios I Komnenos, and his reign.

The problem is the relationship I’m having as reader to Anna Komnene as an author. She’s a huge personality, clearly brilliant, and every bit a member of an old-world, long-standing ruling class family. I’ve found the time I’ve spent with her words compelling, difficult, frustrating, and ultimately rewarding. I still haven’t finished it, so I won’t go far into the content of the book here. I’ll write about that once I’ve made it to the end. But I can talk to you about my experience of reading the book so far.

I’m intrigued with the contemporary perspective. She talks in the introduction about her uncle, who died of exhaustion: he was so tired he developed a tumor. As a result of such misunderstandings, I was willing to accept her as an at-least-somewhat unreliable narrator due to her medieval worldview. But there are other problems, including chronological errors throughout the book, which I wouldn’t have been aware of if I hadn’t been checking the end notes as I read.

I understand she was working within limitations: she was banished to a convent, and while primary source materials were available to her, it appears that she may not have been able to reconstruct timelines dependably. So much for the chronological inconsistencies.

It also seems to me that she considers the official narrative and contemporary affairs of state as she writes, which I can’t fault her for. It still made me trust her less as an authoritative voice. Causing your reader to be skeptical is a huge challenge to overcome in a work of nonfiction, and I was definitely skeptical about certain things I read.

But the main problem I’ve had is that I’m not sure what to make of Anna Komnene as a person. She was clearly, as I’ve said, brilliant, perceptive, and an engaging writer as well, but she was caught up in the politics of her time, about as high-born a person as there could have been. I admit that I am leery of such people. I have socialist leanings both politically and in how I view class generally. I was prepared to set those prejudices aside, but I was daunted by the way she speaks about her father: how gifted he was, how resourceful, how strong, what a great soldier, how handsome, how pious. It all began to seem like too much. After one such hagiographic passage, I set the book down for a couple of weeks.

To be fair, she doesn’t avoid talking about Alexios’ failures, and she avoids mitigating or excusing them. On reflection, I think she did her best to meet the challenges of writing about her father within the limitations of her circumstances. I still suspect she doesn’t tell the whole truth, and it’s taken me a fair amount of processing to make peace with that.

I also let myself in for a little bit of disappointment by imagining that this book would contain story elements I didn’t end up finding. That’s my shortcoming. I wanted more description, more relationships, a stronger story arc. I think I was looking for a style of writing that didn’t exist in her day. Modern narrative writing is richer in the sorts of details that for the most part Anna either only barely touches on or skips entirely.

The book is mainly accounts of wars and battles Alexios fought, with a paragraph here and there of surprising granular detail. There’s a brief conversation between Anna and her mother. Elsewhere there’s a description of the workings of a particular weapon. It’s for those moments that the book has held my attention most. They’re sparsely strewn throughout the narrative, and when I come upon them, the world of the story becomes much more vivid.

I have to remind myself that she wasn’t there for most of the events The Alexiad covers: not yet born at the beginning, a child in the Imperial creche for much of the time she writes about. She clearly held her father in the highest esteem, and probably heard stories of the events she writes about from him or those around him. It’s unfair of me to judge her for that.

Having understood these things, I am having a much easier time with her book. When I finish, I’ll say more.

Books I Am Currently In The Middle Of Reading

A byproduct of going through Lesley’s MFA program is that for that two years, I was limited in what I could read by available time and required reading.

In the past, my book buying habit has been to buy one book at a time and get through it and/or abandon in, then go book shopping. I love to book shop (actually, let’s face facts: I love to shop, period) so I was hardly ever without a book to read; I just never had a backlog. Two years of prescribed reading has changed that in a big way. I now have a TBR (to-be-read) pile that is somewhere around fifty books.

I’m also finding that I will read part of a book, then set it down in favor of something else, with the full intention of going back to it. At this moment, there are 8 books I’m somewhere in the middle of.

  • The Birthgrave by Tanith Lee
  • The Elements of Journalism by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel
  • The Best American Essays: 2016, Robert Atwan, series ed.: Jonathan Franzen, ed.
  • E. B. White: Writings From The New Yorker 1927-1976, Rebecca M. Dale, ed.
  • Brand New Ancients: a Poem by Kate Tempest
  • Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books 2000-2016 by Ursula K. Le Guin
  • Little, Big by John Crowley
  • A Darker Shade of Magic by V. E., Schwab

So, three adult fantasies, three books of essays, one epic poem, and a craft book. The book that’s in my bag right now is the Schwab. The one that’s been on this list the longest is the Crowley.

The two single-author essay books are made up of very short pieces. To my mind, they’re not one-sitting books, because neither has anything in them that’s longer than 7 or 8 pages, and in the case of the E. B. White, there could be as many as three short pieces on a single page. The Le Guin’s shortest pieces are around a page to a page and a half. Both seem to me to be the sort of book you pick up and thumb through when you have a free moment. The White, especially, excites me because the prose is so tight and the pieces so poignant.

On the other hand, the epic poem feels like something I should sit down with and read through, possibly aloud, in one sitting. I will have to make a hole in my schedule to do this. I made it a few pages in, and then decided that I needed to start over with the above conditions met.

The craft book — The Kovach & Rosenstiel — feels like work. It’s essentially a text book for journalism students, and as a nonfiction writer, I want to have some of the finer points of objective journalism in mind. I’ve read the introduction and have in mind a strategy for getting through it. I’ve identified what feels like 4 sections of two or three chapters each, and I should sit down with each section and get through each in one session. This is where it is handy to me to know that I read approximately 30 pages an hour. Each section should take me about 3 hours. Sorry: not all reading is for pleasure.

The Best American is also required reading. I have the 2017 in my TBR pile, and as soon as I finish this anthology, that one should be added to this list immediately. This is both work reading and pleasure. I’ve found some of my favorite writing in the pages of these anthologies, including a recent piece by Franzen himself in the 2015 anthology.

The Lee is something I picked up based on a short story of hers (“Bite-Me-Not or Fleur de Fur”) I’d read for an interdisciplinary studies course in fantasy writing taught by Mark Edwards. The Birthgrave her first published book in a long and prolific career.

The Crowley is on my list for the same reason. At the time, I felt like it was a “nutritious” enough read for a budding nonfiction author, but at the moment, I seem to be drifting more towards fantasy again, so it may get picked up sooner rather than later, though probably not next after the Schwab.