2024 read #142: Cunning Folk by Tabitha Stanmore.

Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic by Tabitha Stanmore

232 pages

Published 2024

Read from November 15 to November 21

Rating: 3 out of 5

Reading this book immediately after Magic: A History wasn't serendipity; I had Cunning Folk checked out from the library and waiting. It provides some of the depth I had longed for when reading Magic. As a history, Cunning Folk offers a Peter Ackroyd-like sampler of primary-source anecdotes from aristocrat and commoner alike, spanning from the Medieval through the Early Modern period. It isn’t memorably well-written or especially eye-opening, but it’s solid enough.

2024 read #141: Magic: A History by Chris Gosden.

Magic: A History: From Alchemy to Witchcraft, from the Ice Age to the Present by Chris Gosden

465 pages

Published 2020

Read from October 15 to November 15

Rating: 3 out of 5

It's been a long time since I regularly read nonfiction. When I say I struggled with this book, that’s entirely on me. (And on the election. And on life stress before that.) Gosden’s prose is dry and a touch academic, but should be quite readable to anyone whose attention span hasn’t been fried by the last four, eight, twelve years of ~everything~.

And right in the middle of reading this book, we got set back so many decades, and have so many decades of work ahead of us to undo the damage, if it can even be undone.

Magic is a broad overview (perhaps too broad) of the role and practice of magic in human societies over the last forty thousand or so years. The scope of Gosden’s thesis tends to crowd and minimize each region and time period, with sometimes unfortunate results. It’s one thing to say that life during the Ice Age is beyond the conception of modern minds; it’s quite another to write “Understanding Chinese thought and action requires considerable imaginative effort, but is definitely worthwhile.” Wild to see something that amounts to the cliche of the “inscrutable East” get published in 2020.

Gosden’s occasional otherization aside, I would love for any of these chapters to get expanded into a full length book. My own bias would be for Paleolithic, Mesolithic, or Neolithic cultures, or perhaps for Early Modern learned magic, but I would adore a more in-depth examination of anything in here.

2016 read #70: Laughter in Ancient Rome by Mary Beard.

Laughter in Ancient Rome: On Joking, Tickling, and Cracking Up by Mary Beard
278 pages
Published 2014
Read from September 4 to September 9
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

I enjoyed Mary Beard's snark and snappy-but-educational style in her popular history, SPQR -- so much so that, after I finished it, I immediately looked up her other works. This one caught my eye: a book about Roman laughter and jokes from a scholar gifted with that rare combination of wit, writing ability, and authoritative knowledge. What could possibly be better?

I suspected my error the moment inter-library loan put the volume in my hands and I saw it was from the University of California Press, published as part of a line of classical lecture series. I still enjoyed Laughter, but it was a dense, technical work, full of the convolutions of postmodern scholarship in the humanities. (Beard vows in the preface, "My aim is to make the subject of Roman laughter a bit more complicated, indeed a bit messier, rather than to tidy it up.") This is a worthy goal -- fatuous simplifications and over-general "explanations" are a pest to be rooted out and burned away -- but the English language has yet to arrive at a fluent way to handle the necessary backtrackings, subordinate clauses, and complexification of statements this entails. I'm having a hard time even getting across what I mean (though, to be fair to myself, I've been out of academia for six years, and it's unseasonably hot and sticky as I struggle to write this review). Beard pushes bravely through the thickets of po-mo social science and emerges with, mostly, a surprisingly readable work, but popular history this is not. It's fascinating, largely because of Beard's skill at making such thick stuff readable, but for a casual reader who keyed in on the title and expected hilarity, it's a bit of a disappointment.

2016 read #26: Walking on the Wild Side by Kristi M. Fondren.

Walking on the Wild Side: Long-Distance Hiking on the Appalachian Trail by Kristi M. Fondren
143 pages
Published 2016
Read from March 29 to March 30
Rating: ★★½ out of 5

This one is a bit of an oddity, both as a book on the Appalachian Trail and within the context of my recent (post-college) reading habits. I found it during one of my periodic searches through the Suffolk County library catalog for new-to-me hiking narratives. Outwardly, Walking on the Wild Side is packaged as if it were yet another trail memoir, with an "outdoorsy" font, a generic title that could apply to just about any AT narrative, and a cover photograph of booted feet propped up in leisurely contemplation of a view. With movie versions of Wild and A Walk in the Woods recently in theaters, I've been expecting a wave of copycat memoirs to peak sometime in the next year or two; I assumed Wild Side was the first to appear, and promptly put in an ILL request.

Imagine my surprise, then, to discover that Wild Side, while no doubt packaged and marketed to capitalize on the copycat wave, is actually a sociological study upon the subculture of long-distance hiking upon the Appalachian Trail, the result of interviews and participant observation. I almost discarded the book upon this discovery, before my own academic instincts reemerged from hibernation (my BA is in anthropology) and I found myself unable to resist that dry, dry thesis prose. It was almost like discovering an old favorite pair of shoes in a closet, and finding them still comfy.

As is often the case with sociological research (and with science in general), Fondren merely takes the time to properly document aspects of the long-distance hiking subculture that were already obvious to anyone who's read the memoirs and watched the YouTube vlogs. Proper documentation is nothing to be sniffed at, and to be fair, Fondren expands upon certain behaviors and places them within a sociological context, which I found illuminating. Academic works tend to err in the direction of scrupulously contextualizing any statement or assertion, which can make for dull or repetitive reading, but it's a useful practice, and in any case, Wild Side was a brief read. What makes it odd is how Rutgers University Press is so evidently trying to market this dry and rather niche study in order to cash in on the current long-distance hiking craze, even going so far as to have various professors awkwardly attempt to provide blurbs for the back cover. ("Upon finishing a chapter, the reader is anxious to move on to the next one," raves Professor Alan Graefe of Penn State.) The trick worked on me, and it worked on Suffolk County, whose libraries (which typically avoid university press type material) have obtained four copies and counting, so I guess I can't fault them. It just seems like an unexpected move for a university press, because it's, well, a trick.

2015 read #43: My Journey to Lhasa by Alexandra David-Neel.

My Journey to Lhasa by Alexandra David-Neel
Introduction by Peter Hopkirk
328 pages
Published 1927
Read from August 20 to August 25
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

An adventure tale on the antique model, full of benighted natives (though David-Neel's genial, paternalistic contempt for the rural poor of Tibet seems rooted more in classist assumptions than racial ones -- though she demonstrates those in plenty, as well) and a European slyly making her way across a distant, half-fabulous land. David-Neel embellishes her ostensibly true story (which I have no cause to doubt, at least in its broad outlines, any more than I would doubt any other exotic travel narrative of its time) with hints of Orientalist mysticism, lampshading each event with "Surely I must have been asleep and dreaming when I heard and saw this," clearly intending her readers to wonder if she really might have struggled with ghosts of lamas over cursed daggers, or called down demons upon startled robbers. If the intent was to whet interest in her subsequent volumes on Tibetan mysticism, it worked -- I'm halfway intrigued about it, and have already priced Magic and Mystery in Tibet on Amazon. I would put no more credence into it than I would, say, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's adventures with mediums, and for the same reasons, but it would be an area of folklore almost wholly new to me, and therefore especially tempting.

The first two-thirds or so of David-Neel's narrative is brisk and engaging, but even though the pace didn't appreciably suffer in the latter passages, I found myself losing interest and wishing the book were over with already. Perhaps that, once again, says more about my current attention span than about the relative merits of this work.

2014 read #42: Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life by Herman Melville.

Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life by Herman Melville
315 pages
Published 1846
Read from May 5 to May 7
Rating: ★★½ out of 5

I would have eaten up this sort of book as a kid. I loved the 19th century adventure narrative back then, and the questions of authenticity, culturally filtered expectations, and massaging the narrative to move copies wouldn't have bothered me at that age. As it is, with no way to determine how much of the book is fiction, and how thoroughly the "true" parts were caricatured to suit the worldview of author and reader, the book's only commendation would be Melville's prose -- yet here, in his first book, he had yet to fully master the wry, ironic tone that elevated Moby-Dick to the short list of my favorite books. Typee is a historical curiosity, but useless as an anthropological document.

2014 read #39: The Future Eaters by Tim Flannery.

The Future Eaters: An Ecological History of the Australasian Lands and People by Tim Flannery
407 pages
Published 1994
Read from April 28 to April 30
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

One would never guess from the current pitiful state of popular science, but the past two or three decades have been an extraordinary golden age of scientific discovery, theory, and interpretation. Every field from physics to biology to paleontology to archaeology has exploded with new approaches and new raw data, vastly building upon or wholly overturning old concepts and understandings. If there weren't so much else to worry about in the world (staggering economic inequality, social apathy and stagnation, regression from egalitarian aspirations, the decay of democratic institutions, the reemergence of all-powerful oligarchies, loss of interest in real sustainability in favor of fashionable sops to status and suburban ego), it would be a great time to be alive, if only because we're finding out so goddamn much about the universe and our beautiful, life-filled little pocket of it.

Which makes reading 20 year old science books a little bit like blowing the soil off the lid of a time capsule. The speculations are so quaint, the optimism so... depressing. For the casual-yet-engaged reader, there's also the awareness that practically any information in a book like this could well be superseded by more recent research or reinterpretation.

Much of this book's human ecology talk is drawn wholesale from Guns, Germs, and Steel, with Flannery adding grand speculations of his own, built upon if-we-assumes and then-logically-it-musts and an overriding belief in reductionist interpretations of behavior. More interesting to me are Flannery's accounts of primordial biogeography in Australasia and the various reconstructed effects of human incursion, but even those chapters left me wondering whether reanalysis or new archaeological sites might have obsoleted all the information he presents. I dreaded Flannery's windup for the inevitable "What can we do now to create a sustainable future for these lands?" pitch, knowing nothing at all of any substance had been done before all pretense of informed democracy had died over the last two decades.

I found myself wishing for an updated, fully revised tome addressing much the same information, but alas, the '90s were a more hospitable age for such publications. It's unlikely anything like this would get published in today's dismal popular science climate.

2013 read #131: A History of Warfare by John Keegan.

A History of Warfare by John Keegan
398 pages
Published 1993
Read from October 12 to October 15
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

The main gist of this book, repeated again and again in every chapter, is the insufficiency or outright incorrectness of the Clauswitzian analysis of war, "continuation of politics by other means." Keegan's essential idea seems to be that war is an element and extension of culture, its practice and purpose culturally bound, which as far as ideas go is pretty darn safe and unprovocative. Keegan's explorations of martial history have a slight tendency toward mechanistic, reductive explanations; he traces the ultimate cause of nomadic steppe people's willingness to fight and kill without compunction, their "dynamism and ruthlessness" in contrast to "primitive" and "oriental" warmaking, to their practice of slaughtering stock, for example. I do agree with Keegan's assertion that anthropologists (and conventional historians as well, though he doesn't single them out) have a tendency to ignore the actual prosecution of warfare in human society and history. Overall a stimulating, interesting read, rather tragicomically dated by its 1990s optimism regarding peacekeeping, the United Nations, and "neighbourliness" in the coming decades.

2013 read #107: The Anthropology of Turquoise by Ellen Meloy.

The Anthropology of Turquoise: Meditations on Landscape, Art, and Spirit by Ellen Meloy
324 pages
Published 2002
Read from August 16 to August 19
Rating: ★★★★½ out of 5

When you haven't read many books of a particular mold, the few that you do read inevitably suggest similarities between each other. Drawing comparisons between this book and Rebecca Solnit's A Field Guide to Getting Lost are unavoidable. Both collections mingle astoundingly articulate personal essays with digressions on art and the natural and human history of the American Southwest. Both sets of essays ramble over vast conceptual territories but remain loosely (sometimes very loosely) held together by the themes in their respective titles. Both spend an extravagant amount of time dwelling on the color blue (half of Solnit's book consists of ruminations on the theme "The Blue of Distance," while the entirety of Meloy's text relates, however indirectly, to the tints between blue and green). Of the two authors, I think Solnit writes the more concise, gorgeous prose, whereas Meloy conveys richer and rawer emotion, funnier, more heartbreaking, and at times more infuriating than anything in A Field Guide.

This is the sort of book you can't rush your way through, but it isn't a book that permits you to put it down for long, either. I feel inarticulate and dense after reading it, despairing of words to convey how Meloy's immense yet delicate imagery absorbed and abraded me. It wore me out, in a good way, leaving me both drained and replete, wrung out and refreshed. In a way I'm glad to be rid of it. Books this good can be parasitic, taking life from you while bending your will to their impulses. Perhaps I'm being dramatic. I liked this book, though.

2013 read #66: Sapphistries: A Global History of Love Between Women by Leila J. Rupp.

Sapphistries: A Global History of Love Between Women by Leila J. Rupp
236 pages
Published 2009
Read from May 10 to May 29
Rating: ★★½ out of 5

[2024 edit: I wrote this review early in my own gender and sexuality deconstruction. At that time, I was also a recovering would-be social academic with a data-driven bent. This review is bad. No way around that, and no excuse for it. I’m leaving it up in order to sit with my past ignorance.]

The social sciences are vital, indispensable for a complete picture of human motivations and behavior. Human beings cannot be understood on a purely biological basis, nor should conventional social or religious attitudes be left unquestioned. Many social sciences do not lend themselves to numbers and statistical analyses, so in some cases non-traditional or postmodern approaches may yield insightful and informative contributions to our understanding of human behavior. Unfortunately, postmodern approaches can also lead to a bunch of twaddle and poppycock.

Queer and gender studies, by their avowedly subversive natures, are especially prone to this. Which is doubly unfortunate, as queer and gender studies are essential to establishing the healthy sort of society I would like to live in. The very importance of queer and gender studies makes them ideal for (or perhaps susceptible to) the promulgation and promotion of political causes, such as identity politics. There is also an incredibly self-defeating idea out there that the conceptual framework of science itself is inherently masculine, and that all those oh so "emotional" and "intuitive" women should, instead of claiming science as a gender-neutral pursuit, come up with their own alternative approaches to understanding the world. Which, if you give it a moment's thought, is every bit as limiting and as prejudiced as the actual institutional sexism you would assume we'd all like to be fighting.

That all comes together to dispiriting effect in certain portions of this book. The second chapter is by far the worst offender. It's supposedly a musing or speculation upon the idea of woman-on-woman love in prehistoric times. Given how little real information we have to go on, some carefully contextualized speculation would make for interesting reading. Rupp, however, ignores the possibilities of social science altogether, quoting or inventing "creation stories" to prioritize the female procreative role, and giving credence to the whole "primordial earth goddess and original matriarchal society" myth popularized by second wave feminist identity politics. There quite simply isn't any persuasive evidence of worldwide goddess worship "suppressed" after a "masculist revolution" deep in prehistory. Which is not to say that such events did not occur occasionally throughout the world. But subscribing to the idea of a global goddess religion and subsequent "masculist revolution," while useful to certain factions of feminism, is about as naive as postulating the lost continent of Mu to explain scattered linguistic similarities. Or, for that matter, as naive as postulating that men are a separate, alien species tainted by a "mutant Y chromosome." Speculations are excellent, except when they ignore what evidence we do have. Speculations that simplify the head-spinning diversity of culture and customs over the last 40,000 or so years are no better than wholesale myth-making. In my view, social science should seek to contextualize and controvert myths, not create them. Likewise, quoting modern novels that treat with the subject of woman-on-woman love or all-female societies in prehistory does not tell us anything about the possibilities of the past; it does nothing but reflect our own modern sexual and emotional sensibilities back at us.

This isn't a criticism of Sapphistries so much as of postmodern scholarship in general. Subsequent chapters aren't as egregious, drawing more from historical sources than modern fiction, but even then the "scholarship" can stretch culturally appropriate expressions of friendship into a modern homoerotic reading not likely intended by the original authors. Again, this is a case of augmenting woefully sparse sources, but it's none too convincing. Unless Rupp's thesis is merely to suggest that women cared about other women in the middle ages, in which case, thesis proven.

Sapphistries finally merits something of its "global history" title halfway through, when historical sources become numerous enough to predominate over modern fictionalizations. The book becomes rather engrossing by the time it visits the cabaret culture of Weimar Germany or the jazz clubs of 1920s Harlem. If Sapphistries had confined all the myth-making and literary speculation to a concluding chapter on the ideologies of recent lesbian feminists, and concentrated more on the eras with substantial primary documentation, I would have gotten much more useful knowledge from its pages. Unfortunately, this scintillation of actual scholarship comes as too little, too late.

2013 read #8: A Kayak Full of Ghosts: Eskimo Tales, gathered and retold by Lawrence Millman.

A Kayak Full of Ghosts: Eskimo Tales, gathered and retold by Lawrence Millman
191 pages
Published 1987
Read January 14
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

I love folklore and fairy tales, but I never read enough of them. During the course of this reading project, I expect to visit just about every book in my library's folklore section. I picked this one first because it was small and the stories brief; I'm reading four other books at the moment, two or three of them fairly dense, and a brief interlude of grim whimsy (grimsy?) is just the restorative I need. If anything, the tales here are just a little bit too insubstantial, the read just a bit unsatisfying. But many of them are delightfully fucked up, and that's all I ask.

One of my favorites was "The Birth of Fog," told by a man named Nattiq during a seal hunt in modern Nunavut. I won't transcribe the entire story (though it barely fills a page), so strain your eyes to read it here: http://i.imgur.com/Go7ct.jpg

I also love this droll affair: http://i.imgur.com/U4AyM.jpg

Not sure what else there is to say about this one. It feels like cheating to even add it to my tally, it's such a slight volume. Half of those 191 pages are filled with no more than a paragraph or two. I finished the whole thing in maybe an hour of reading. But it's done and it's on the list now, damn it.

2013 read #5: Worlds to Explore: Classic Tales of Travel & Adventure from National Geographic.

Worlds to Explore: Classic Tales of Travel & Adventure from National Geographic, edited by Mark Jenkins
439 pages
Published 2006
Read from January 4 to January 10
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

As soon as I read Mark Jenkins' introduction, I knew this book was going to be a disappointment. When I found it squeezed randomly into the chaotic mess of my library's travel section (the inconsistent and possibly inebriated application of the Dewey decimal system at my local library deserves an entire rant of its own, so I won't mention it further for now), my heart filled with glee. I adore old National Geographics, especially from the classic Grosvenor eras (1910s to late 1970s). I have a soft spot as wide as Africa for the romance of early twentieth century exploration and world travel, even as I despise its implicit and overt racism, sexism, colonialism, and patriarchal tone of benign "improvement." Worlds to Explore's cover blurb promises "more than 50 stories from the magazine's first half-century," implicitly suggesting (to my mind, at least) the inclusion of more than fifty complete articles, written by such motor-, airplane-, and rocket-age luminaries as Teddy Roosevelt, Roy Chapman Andrews, Joseph F. Rock, and many others. A quick flip through its pages revealed original maps and photographs from the articles. I didn't stop to think how they could squeeze fifty complete articles into a scant 439 pages; I guess I just figured the font looked pretty small. I was too busy immediately checking out the book and placing it at the very top of my reading pile to think such thoughts.

But the introduction quickly deflated my dreams. "The following selections," I read -- and my heart sank to my knees. Sure enough, Teddy Roosevelt's massive East African safari -- the source of the Smithsonian's African dioramas -- gets slimmed down to eight and a half pages, including one map and one picture. The first motorized crossing of Africa, from Lagos to the Red Sea by 1930s motorcycle, gets crunched down to a handful of paragraphs about improvising bike repairs out of dental plates and antelope hide -- fascinating stuff, but mere crumbs of what must have been a spectacular article. Jenkins eviscerated each of the fifty-plus articles that fell into his hands, ripping out a quick anecdote or two for his Frankenstein abomination of a book and discarding everything that makes the rambly Grosvenor-era travelogues so charming. I like the rambly bits, the contextual bits, the scene-setting, that weird and uncomfortable section where the author has a lovely formal dinner with a tyrannical dictator, the paternalistic comments on the plucky women of the grass-hut village. I don't want anything edited down or massaged to soothe modern sensibilities. I want the authentic experience, horrible social attitudes and all. Without context, Worlds reduces socio-geographical history to a keepsake of yarns. What could have been the most amazing book I read all year becomes a slumping disappointment.

I want to use the entire buffalo, as it were. Jenkins shoots dozens of them just to get at their spleens. I'd have been 100% happier with this book if it were a collection of, say, a dozen complete articles with original maps, photos, and illustrations. I know I could just get the complete National Geographic archives on disk, but hey -- if that's an argument against my idea, then what's even the point of Worlds to Explore?

Out of all the articles butchered apart for this collection, the only one I'd read before was "Triumph on Everest," by Sir John Hunt and Sir Edmund Hillary, which appeared in the July 1954 National Geographic. That was a wonderful article, a signal conquest, a resounding victory of the jet age, gleaming with the manly sheen of 1950s optimism. The selection just made me wish I had the complete issue again, with all its fabulous pictures and its full account of the climb. My favorite selections were those regarding travel by "motor" (or, even more charmingly, "flivver") across Africa, Asia, and Mexico in the 1920s and '30s. I totally want to invent "flivverpunk" as a science fiction subgenre now. The romance of the early motor age is one of my very favorite species of romance. But that's a whole other story.

An aside: My late grandfather had accumulated Geographics in an old army-ration water barrel in the basement (to preserve them from damp, I guess?). Most of the collection was from the late '50s, '60s, and early '70s, but there were a couple anachronisms, issues so old the color plates were printed separately from the articles and bunched in between them. The oldest was the July 1932 issue, with its dazzling color photos of Ford Model A's climbing the new motor-roads into the Colorado Rockies. I also remember the January 1952 issue -- not so anachronistic, perhaps, but memorable for the article "Solving the Riddle of Chubb Crater" (now Pingualuit). You can't find a more iconic image of 1950s privilege than the bottom picture here: Caucasian men's men grinning away on their boy's life adventure, "solving the riddles" still left undiscovered in the remotest corners of a jet-shrunken globe. You can't find a more iconic caption for the 1950s dominant culture attitude than the subtitle of the next article, "America's 'Meat on the Hoof'": "Because housewives want smaller beef roasts, bigger and leaner pork chops, scientific breeders remodel the steer and hog." In a world smothered by anthropogenic climate change and global environmental catastrophe, there's a lurid fascination in watching it all begin.

I could go on and on, picking out little details from every issue scanned in on that site. I think I'm steadily talking myself into purchasing the digital archives, actually.

Anyway. Yeah. This book. It was okay. Could've been a lot better. It's worth a peek, especially if it's in your local library and you need ideas for jungle incidents and oriental encounters in your a steampunk or flivverpunk or atompunk story. But the complete digital archives would be a far superior investment if you're in the mood to buy something.

Next up (and already in progress): Parrot & Olivier in America by Peter Carey.