John Keay, Historian

Over the past several months I have made my way through John Keay’s India: A History and China: A History, each an approximately 600 page overview of the history of the respective region. Keay describes himself somewhat apologetically as a “generalist” in his introduction to India, but suggests this may have placed him well to develop a synthesis from the work of many different fields and eras of research. Certainly his narrative and choices of key moments and players carries conviction and and impresses with its balanced judgment. The books are helped along by an easy, readable style, a dry wit not overindulged, and an eye for finding the best from his written sources.

From the list of other works inside the cover, I find that Keay has written extensively about much of Southeast Asia – I would guess beginning with graduate work focused on the British East India Company. I highly recommend both these books and would, given the time to do so, cheerfully read anything else he’s written. It is probably unrealistic to ask Keay to apply his methods to a completely different region such as the Americas, but I did even find myself wondering what he would make of that history on a similarly extensive time scale.

For that matter, though, India and China are themselves fairly distinct, if largely in contact with each other for some thousands of years now. As such, the two narratives offer fairly distinct political emphases. Briefly, “India” as such is an anachronism – the subcontinent was never unified until the British conquest and Indian nationalism is a weird amalgamation of deliberate British policy and native reaction – while China at its most disunified preserved a clear linguistic, geographic, and cultural identity all imperial contenders and pretenders have laid claim to for some three thousand years.

On the other hand, this should not be exaggerated, and some of the similarities, cultural trappings aside, are remarkable. As modern nations, India and China include not just the core areas of their historical empires – northern India and east-central China – but an additional ring of what in Indian history were usually openly rival powers and to China nominal tributaries but actually largely independent and threatening as often as not. Both volumes contain substantial information on these regions as well as the “mainstream” empires of the regions.

If there is an area I suspect Keay has not done full justice to, it is the question of religious an ethnic tensions, both historical and ongoing. In India, for instance, he describes the apparent origin and basic theory of its caste system early on, but it largely vanishes from view for the remainder of the book: Keay is more interested in the successive invasions and changes to direct political and military structures. In China, tensions over Han ethnicity are mentioned repeatedly but in most cases it is not clear what this amounted to practically. Religion, meanwhile, Keay treats in most cases as little more than an additional, even secondary, cultural trapping, apart from occasional interest in its effect on political shifts. The simplest explanation may be that he is reading modern multiculturalism into history: he certainly emphasizes toleration edicts where they are clearly documented, and the prospects fifteen years ago, when China was written and India updated, probably looked better for the continuing successful spread of multiculturalism worldwide than they do now.

Another curiosity is Keay’s handling of each country’s respective 20th century. China reaches 1880 30 pages later than India, but India is the longer volume, taking 150 pages over a time period China dedicates only 50 to. India covers the movements that would lead to Indian – and Pakistani – independence in detail, and traces the fortunes of those two countries with equal thoroughness. Chinese politics were no less complicated, and the movement towards independence, while substantially more militarized, would seem to lend itself to a parallel level of detail.

It is tempting to draw conclusions about the relative openness of India and China today. Certainly it appears that Keay was able to do more field research in India, and while he does criticize the Chinese Communist Party and its leaders, he seems to have taken more care with those egos than those of India. Mention of Tianamen Square, for instance, is decidedly oblique. However, I am inclined to put this down to a stylistic choice. Keay repeatedly mentions, and thus invokes, a standard Chinese practice whereby criticism of the current regime was considered acceptable when cloaked as, or referenced to, critiques of historical events. It will not escape the careful reader that Keay links old to new throughout the book, or that he draws – carefully – parallels between China’s historical and current bureaucrats. What is impossible for me to say is whether this conceit of imitating Chinese historical practice was intended from the beginning, or the product of later revision, if he realized it might not be wise to record everything a full account might properly include.

On one final note, it seems necessary to say something about the role of European powers. Purely considered as imperialists, Britain – obviously the primary aggressor in India but also the leader in the “trade” wars and treaties with China – and others come off no worse, if no better, than previous invaders. What does stand out is a fundamental element of dishonesty: treaties made intentionally vague, or deliberately broken, or “re-negotiated” on minimal pretenses or without any justification beyond implied threats of force or loss. On the other hand, from this and other recent reading, the picture that seems to emerge is that, while many colonies themselves were of course older, colonialism, as a recognizeable pattern or deliberate policy and distinct from ages-old human practices of conquest and settlement, is barely older than 1750, and as such, whatever its passing glories, can hardly be counted a success on the scale of centuries.

Review: Africa: A Biography of the Continent

John Reader’s 1997 volume fascinates throughout but taken as a whole fails to deliver on its initial promise. Although his narrative progresses roughly chronologically, he is forever diverting from the main stream. As topics arise he constantly races ahead to compare modern conditions – of farming practice, for instance – but does not quite link “then” to “now”. His ecological interests show strongly – even in the structure of the book – but are not tied into a continuous history, and the book is badly lacking in maps.

The best-constructed portion of the book is the opening section, which presents the geological origin and human evolutionary story (as of 1997 theories: whether changes have been made to accepted theory since then I don’t know). In the remainder, Reader is at his best drawing pictures of single sites and short periods. Descriptions of the Ethiopian citadel of Aksum, the Niger delta society, and Ukara (an island in what is now Lake Victoria) – societies of which I knew little or nothing – are exciting and produce a demand to know more, but they are disconnected: vignettes among others that fail to cohere. Narratives of colonial tribulations are moving – but disconnected: his attempts to suggest larger narratives fall short. Even in noting the similar behavior of European powers towards inhabitants of areas they colonized, Reader is much better in local stories than in general scope.

The obvious reason would seem to be a lack of written sources. Reader barely refers to any oral traditions, and definitely prefers archeological evidence to traditional narratives – not always, to my mind, convincingly. He also swings back and forth repeatedly between his own inclination to present African societies before contact with Europe as nearly utopian, and strenuous efforts to acknowledge previous utopian theories as having been insufficient, to have misinterpreted evidence, or even have been entirely debunked. He openly admits that he chose to emphasize a reading of African history in which, since contact was made with Europeans arriving by ship, the entirety of sub-Saharan Africa has been dependent on European whims.

That this was the case from the colonial era proper (as the early trading posts expanded into settlements by the early eighteenth century) can hardly be doubted. The choice not to include the Mediterranean coast in his history could be defended, I suspect, fairly easily; but the choice to mention but downplay the gold and slave trades with the Arab states in northern Africa leaves his overall narrative open to question. He admits, for instance, that the evidence on the subject of relative numbers and effects of the three trades in slaves – internal to southern Africa, trans-Saharan, and Atlantic – is ambiguous, but chooses to tell his story in which the European (and later American) depredations are pictured as taking an out-size toll, even before outright colonization, while the trade with the Muslim world hovers in the background but is never examined. (What more recent research shows I don’t know: certainly the tenor of what else I’ve read suggests he guessed right – but is that history, exactly?) Similarly, human sacrifice appears to have been widespread (and a major source of demand for slaves internal to Africa) but while admitted is never really examined.

Reader manages to tell only the story of Africa in its relation to European power, with the resulting structure: two hundred pages of origin; about a hundred reaching from early Egypt and Ethiopia but then jumping practically immediately to the fifteenth century AD; a hundred fifty more to reach the mid-seventeenth; and the remaining two hundred and fifty to work through the almost four hundred years of colonial and now barely-post-colonial history. That this matches the thesis he expresses about halfway through the book in discussing the first Portuguese expeditions makes this weighting, I suppose, fair enough: and when Reader is good, he is very very good. But that’s not exactly what he seemed to have in mind in the beginning. The book thus raises more questions than it answers, can hardly be said to tell the African history of Africa at all, and leaves me questioning the claim of “biography” in the subtitle rather strongly.

Vaction Speed-Read

Although not actually a “speed reader”, when traveling for no particular purpose I spend an inordinate amount of time reading (mostly other people’s) books. Over the past weekend or so, I got through:

Unpopular Opinions

A collection of essays by Dorothy Sayers, divided by topic: theological, political, and Sherlock Holmes. Sayers’ primary theological concern, based on the essays I’ve read (and not just these) is the question of the practical implications of specifically Christian doctrines about God, such as the Trinity or Christ’s humanity. The “political” include encomia of the English character – addresses from World War II and practically propaganda; feminist pieces mainly demanding that women’s views be treated inclusively and human and not distinct from men’s when there is no reason to suppose any particular advantage or disadvantage to one’s perspectice based in sex; and an essay complaining about other people’s bad English style, the production of at least one of which such pieces seems to have been a moral requirement of mid-20th century English authors. The pieces on Sherlock Holmes are mainly of the mock-critical variety purporting to determine various details of a “real” Sherlock Holmes which, of course, Arthur Conan Doyle never bothered with. The effect of the essay attempting a quasi-Aristotelian analysis of the detective story, which Sayers claims in her introduction to the collection to be serious, unfortunately suffers from an overly flippant tone.

Shakespeare’s Game

The William Gibson who authored this book is not the reasonably well-known science fiction author (although the title would be entirely believeable for one of his novels) but a playwright and professor. He uses several well-known plays by Shakespeare to discuss a theory of how both individual scenes unfold to hold an audience’s attention and how this is mirrored in a play’s overall structure. I more skimmed this one than read it: Gibson’s structure of move, object, barrier, and plunge (the consequences that follow on when the barrier is surmounted and the object achieved) seems useful and worth more attention than I spared, and he tosses in some useful or thoughtful tidbits on Shakespeare’s plays, but his own writing hardly holds the attention. And I can’t, for the life of me, figure out why he insists on using “move” instead of “mover” when the latter would usually make better grammatical and situational sense.

Wylder’s Hand

One of Sheridan LeFanu’s earlier novels of suspense. The plot is perfectly serviceable for any mystery or thriller, and the male characters are intriguingly drawn although the female ones are a bit flat. But I can’t say I care for the technique of telling a story by definitely leaving out some information while including other events, without any consistency about what the narrator should have known when, purely to induce suspense. This can work in a short story with a quick payoff but in a novel it’s mostly just frustrating. (I’m also not entirely sure the eventual revelation is entirely consistent with what we’re told to begin with, but I’d have to reread to make sure.) Dorothy Sayers, to judge by references to his work, seems to have been a fan, so my evaluation seems a bit presumptuous – or his technique may have improved with practice and lent a more sympathetic glow to younger efforts.

Pharaohs and Kings

In 1995 Egyptologist David Rohl published this work (in the original British edition as A Test of Time) suggesting a significant revision to standard dates assigned in academic reconstruction of the ancient Egyptian chronology. His starting assumption is that Biblical myths and legends should have similar relation to actual events as other cultures’ stories, so that the fact that with the conventional dates it is peculiar and a sign of possible error that no archeological evidence appears to match the events of the Biblical stories at all. (Rohl is not a Christian, but suggests this non-match was perhaps accepted too easily by others willing to “debunk” the Bible as religious without regards to its historical value.) He thinks that Victorian Egyptologists – ironically, in an attempt to solidify Biblical credibility – grabbed the first plausible correspondence between Hebrew and Egyptian names of a Pharaoh they could find, but that this does not hold up under the standards of modern philology or documentary evidence. As far as this goes, this critical argument seemed plausible to me: however, a difficulty is that Rohl relies on similar linguistic arguments further on which to a non-expert are not particularly more (or, to be fair, less) plausible than this one he begins by debunking.

However, if this identification is discarded, other difficulties with conventional dates can be admitted (since they are held to be necessary based on that “fixed point”) and re-examined, and the correct record established. Rohl claims his own reconstruction does result in the expected correlations between Egyptian and Hebrew texts and archeological evidence. Rohl’s recreation of the archeological evidence from and concerning Canaanite sources again seems quite plausible – but the dates are a bit murky. I also thought it very odd that, if I read the section correctly, Rohl seems fairly satisfied with the established chronology for Israel, despite apparently questioning some accepted conclusions about technology levels, while he was willing to start over virtually from scratch with the Egyptian.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, his thesis has not found any significant acceptance with Egyptologists generally. Rohl has, per Wikipedia, written various follow-up works, presumably refining his reconstruction further and addressing some of the problems it creates. The primary difficulty is that it would change not just Egyptian dynastic dating but all the cross-linked dating based on comparisons lists of kings from across the Near East – some of which are apparently considered more stable than our understanding of Egyptian chronology. Adjustments have of course continued to be made even within the conventional framework for Egyptian history, but no accepted revisions come anywhere close to the scale of change Rohl advocates.

Review: Anna Karenina

Leo Tolstoy was deeply unhappy with the complacency and hypocrisy of upper-class Russian society in the late 19th century.

The plot of the eight hundred page novel is obviously a little more complex than that, but that’s the point of the book. We’re treated to the contrast between Anna, whose affair breaks the conventions of society, and all the rest of the adulterers who carry on more discreetly and so lose no real status. Tolstoy is more inclined to blame social conventions for producing unhappiness than he is to introduce any serious moral reflections on individuals’ behavior. He has a distinct sympathy with individual desires.

We also have, running through the book, a distinct preference for the country over the city. The country is more honest, more necessary, less artificial. At the same time, many of the superfluous city nobility are quite sympathetically drawn: Tolstoy does not seem to want to blame anybody for being caught up in – born into – any condition whatever.

Through the character of Levin, Tolstoy seems to suggest the best life is simply to carry on life, to try to do the right thing, and to accept what comes of your choices. In some sense this is echoed by the rest of the plot: the eventual tragedy falls out through a process in which virtually every character, in one way or another and extending even to Anna herself, refuses to deal with the consequences of her affair sensibily or morally or both.

Tolstoy has a remarkable ability to turn a phrase, capture a scene or a feeling, and describe entirely plausible characters. The wit dries up somewhat in the last quarter of the book, and I can’t help feeling that the book sort of wanders to an end – although in a way the sheer lack of impact Anna’s eventual death has – quite plausibly! – on the rest of the cast is emotionally a little terrifying.

Still, it is for the most part a magnificently constructed novel: but not, on the whole, pleasant reading.

William James on Teaching

Jacques Barzun in a number of places highly recommends William James’ book of collected lectures, which he refers to as Talks to Teachers. Perusing the library catalog, I was unable to tell whether this referred to the volume found there as Talks to Teachers and Students or the one titled Talks to Teachers on Psychology, so I requested both – and found out they are in fact essentially the same book.

Wikipedia informs me that the full publication title in 1899 was Talks to Teachers on Psychology: and to Student’s on Some of Life’s Ideals – which was quite sensibly shortened to “Teachers and Students” for the second edition in 1900. The talks for teachers were given at what the preface indicates we would call a professional development workshop in 1892 for, from the content, mainly high school teachers in Cambridge, Massachusetts; the “students” addressed were, however, evidently James’s own pupils at Harvard.

James’s preface explicitly includes the first lecture “to students” as following on the same subject matter of the classroom, but admits the final two are really on a separate subject – mainly, a presentation of James’s theory of individualism of pluralism. The 1939 reprint, having excised those final two lectures, kept just the first part of the original title; while Wikipedia’s entry indicates the latest reprint reproduces the full 1899 version, with its extensive title.

Having no training in the subject, I have no sure way to judge to what extent the content of James’s formal psychology holds up. He deliberately in these lectures limited the technical content, preferring to talk in more commonplace about how the ways students behave can be understood and should influence how teachers teach. As an outline manual for thinking about the classroom, it seems to me to hold up quite well.

James defines education as “the organizaing of resources in the human being of powers of conduct which shall him him to his social and physical world”. He makes the business of teaching the process of training students to react appropriately to what is received and perceived: and then spends quite a deal of time discussing how inputs are received, what instincts a teacher can appeal to, and his understanding of learning as a process of making appropriate and useful associations, which leads him to stress the importance of good habits.

The talks are, understandably for what looks like lecture notes for one week of relatively short sessions, not fully fleshed out in some ways. James stresses that this conception of “education” is not simply academic but that the best-educated student would be bodily fit and have acquired any number of useful skills. This seems to me a tall order for any school to manage on its own, but then he was talking to teachers. While family or other social institutions barely appear, it is difficult to tell exactly how much of this program James thought could or should be taught in schools. His more specific advice is clearly given with the academic classroom in mind.

In the classroom, he advocates presenting a subject in as many ways as possible – although I found it interesting that he is clearly aware that not every teacher has the same gifts of presentation, an admission today’s pedagogical experts seem unwilling to make. Similarly, he talks about the variety of ways students can learn, but is unwilling to commit himself to trying to define what we would call “learning styles” – and in fact he is actively skeptical of schemes for trying to pin down and classify such things. He strongly recommends, as much as possible, keeping students’ attention – or regaining it when it wanders – not by threat of consequences but by actively engaging interest. However, he is again realistic enough to acknowledge such discipline in his methods and stresses that while maintaining student interest is a mark of an ideal teacher, this should not be pursued at the expense of rigor in the work and again he recognizes that not all teachers are ideal.

Of the three lectures to his own students, the last two as mentioned do not really address the subject of education at all. If there is a continuity with the rest of the lectures, it is in their individualism or pluralism. For all his insight on managing a classroom and understanding students, James avoided any specific comments on curriculum. At the same time, there is a discord between the main lectures and these last two. James’s educated man will be able to respond appropriately in as many circumstances as possible, and here we are directed to appreciate all of the ways in which our fellow-men may live: good so far.

The conflict, though, appears when you contrast James’s quite conventional approach to forming good and bad habits – which is to say, pursuing virtues and avoiding vice – in the main lectures with his almost formless theory of almost anti-Platonic “ideals” which are and even can be only determined by each individual for himself. I am inclined to suspect he included these two lectures or essays almost as a counterweight to the conventionality of the main body of the work: a sort of attempt to express his own views honestly either as they really were or perhaps as they had changed in the years since he gave the talks to teachers in Cambridge originally.

The first of the these three talks to his own students, however, does touch directly on education, and “The Gospel of Relaxation” borrows its title, and evidently its theme (although supported by other authorities) from advice given by Annie Payson Call. While his tacit endorsement of the 19th century British psychologist who held up the British as a model – chiefly for their easier pace and air of imperturbability – may seem mostly amusing, the theme overall sounds shockingly topical. He observes that America is all hustle and overwork, and so advises – don’t stress over the work of the moment but keep working at a sound pace; focus on the work and not yourself; and so on.

Review: Witness

In this 1985 film, the plot is set in motion when Samuel, a young Amish boy traveling with his mother Rachel through the big city, witnesses a murder: Harrison Ford plays the police officer who has to deal with the case. Ford’s character, John Book, is a well-meaning maverick – I suppose it’s possible Harrison Ford played a different kind of character at some point in his career but no instances are occurring to me – who tries to wrap his investigation up quickly, but when the case turns complicated he tries to get Samuel and Rachel out of the way until things settle down, and ends up living with the Amish for a while himself. Things are all serene in Lancaster County, but the case is still open, and then the villains turn up again…

The movie is built around contrasts: city and country, pacifism and violence, independence (or is it loneliness?) and community – and of course Rachel as a pretty young widow faces tension between her Amish suitor Daniel and her attraction to John. The Amish countryside is portrayed as idyllic in this movie – even if they have to deal with tourists and local bullies – but then the train to Philadelphia and the station are shown to be impressive. The bits of Philadelphia shown are run-down and the police are overworked and none too particular in their methods, but John’s sister, a single mother, is as willing to take in strangers on short notice as the Amish are in accepting John living and working with them. We are meant to conclude, I think, that Rachel finds John maybe more attractive than Daniel individually – but Daniel is part of the Amish community and John, despite his willingness to work, does not quite fit in and would not be willing to stay. Violence is an intrusion on life, but the in the end John must use violence to protect the peaceful. (Although in the end – are the bad guys finally stopped because the rest of the police show up, or because too many witnesses, even if they don’t offer resistance, have gathered?)

The score by Maurice Jarre provides another contrast. While it sets off the picture magnificantly, for a film set mainly in Amish country, who would have thought to write music mainly (maybe entirely) for synthesizer? True, the style suggests organ or other sacred music at times – but from what I know I would guess the Amish use few or no instruments in their services.

While I can’t quite figure what earned Ford the Best Actor nomination, Witness is a beautifully made film and one I would recommend watching. The other stars were Kelly McGillis as Rachel and Lukas Haas as Samuel, though I also thought the best performance might have been Jan Rubes as Samuel’s grandfather Eli. Do be advised that, while I’m not sure they’d give it an R rating today, it does earn it: the violence is brief but disturbing, there’s a little bit of bad language in places, and one strictly gratuitous topless scene.

A Representation Experiment

Some months ago it was brought to my attention (by an aside in some news article on one of the recent gerrymandering or voting rights cases – which one, I’ve forgotten) that the United States lags well behind many other countries when comparing the number of elected representatives to the total population. For example: the United States House of Representatives has 435 voting members for a population of approximately 330 million, while the German Bundestag has 736 members representing only about 80 million people.

The size of the House of Representatives is not limited by the Constitution, but has not ben changed (I find from Wikipedia) since 1911. For the population of the United States as it was then – about 90 million – the resulting ratio, while lower than the current German example cited, was at least comparable to it. Why the number of representatives has not been increased again since, even as the population has grown by nearly four times and more states have been added to the Union, is a question I am not going to attempt to answer.

To some extent the federated government and division of powers would appear to make it less urgent for the United States’ national government to achieve as dense representation as some other countries. On the other hand, the national government has taken an increasingly large role in the past century, not only increasing the number of matters to be decided at the national level, but also affecting local policies and priorities monetarily through conditional grants and loans, so that the American people could be more accurately supposed to need fair national representation more now than before. Still, a third consideration is the size of a representative assembly, which cannot be too large or it grows unwieldy: in fact even now the powers of various committees compared to the whole House are occasionally viewed with suspicion.

I was brought to consider how I might approach the problem, and worked through the following process:

The House being in theory the more representative body, and each state electing two senators, it seemed to me that each state should ideally be guaranteed a minimum of at least three representatives. Considering the state with the smallest population, the population to be represented by each member would be a third of that (to, say, the nearest ten thousand), with a number of representatives assigned to each other state proportionally.

As the population count will, of course, not divide completely evenly, and considering the likelihood of a population to grow, I considered rounding up, not from the convential halfway mark (0.5), but from three tenths (0.3) – which is somewhat arbitrary although sometimes used for approximations when dealing with exponents and logarithms. However, the slight addition the customized rounding made to the – now quite large – total, as well as the consideration of making it easy to understand the system, made me decide to use the normal method for this approximation.

As described, dividing Wyoming’s 2020 census population of 576,851 by three yields one representative for about every 190,000 persons. When this is proportioned out over all the states, a total of 1740 representatives is arrived at – California, with a population of nearly 4 million by itself, would have 208. (Which figure is not including what would be 17 for Puerto Rico and 4 for the District of Columbia, whose current representatives may not vote in the House – which is a different question. Other territories in the Pacific have relatively negligible populations; but each of the three currently also has a non-voting representative.)

This is admittedly a large number – large enough to make me doubt whether the idealized formula is workable. However, any method that actually requires that representation be proportional will demonstrate that the House of Representatives is currently too small. If each state must have at least two representatives, each representative would currently stand for 288,000 persons, and the total would be 1146 (now with 11 for Puerto Rico and 2 for DC): this is about what I think probably ought to happen.

Even if each state only must have at least one representative, but proportionality were mandated as it is not now because of the fixed total, a representative in the current Congress then would have a district of approximately 580,000 persons and the total number of voting representatives would be 569 – which is not only a hundred and thirty four more than the current total, but also still significantly smaller than the membership of Germany’s Bundestag, and thus by all evidence entirely workable.

Review: The Stars Now Unclaimed

As a first novel, this one from Drew Williams has some limitations but has to count as a success. The Stars Now Unclaimed, published in 2018, is a science fiction adventure story that would fit right in with the last decade of superhero movies: long on the action, don’t worry about the plausibility.

I found influences among my own favorites from – or at least similarities to – Star Wars, Jim Butcher, and Timothy Zahn. The backstory suggests Iain Banks’ Culture novels, although the “pulse” event/condition omnipresent through the story is – while unbelieveable – a clever way to keep the action (which is to say, the possibility of destruction) on a more manageable scale. For the most part Williams’ first person narration carries the story well, although the femininity of his protagonist is not really believeable. In fact most of his characters are simplistic, with variety of sex and species being mostly cosmetic. The one teenager is sometimes believeable, sometimes a caricature, sometimes indistinguishable from the adults – which actually doesn’t not work, exactly, since that sums up most teenagers pretty well. (Most people at any stage of life, really.)

I thought Williams did good work in maintaining a relatively optimistic, even idealistic tone given the setting. I find that there are now sequels, the next being A Chain Across the Dawn, although given the list of books I already want to read it will be a while if ever till I get around to that one. Stars hangs together well enough as a single story, and while I would love to see whether he delves into the ethical problems in more detail and if so how, I’m not quite sure whether the big-picture resolution would be satisfying.

Overall I thought Williams’ writing improved over the course of the book, his art not quite being up to selling the low-context “Lone Ranger” introductory chapters. Conversation throughout is limited – again, think action movie – mostly to exposition or repartee, but is done well enough. The most surprising success, for a first-time author, I thought was the pacing, which at all times suits the action depicted without dragging at all and only once or twice becoming unsuitably rushed.

So, to sum up: well-drawn setting, good action scenes, decent plot, satisfying resolution. While not a perfect book, one I can recommend if you’re looking for some light reading with a bit of crunch.

Review: The Ascendant Kingdoms Saga

I recently picked up a couple volumes of Gail Z. Martin’s Ascendant Kingdoms series, or as the cover has it, Saga. I was not previously familiar with the author, who apparently has written several other series as well.

The first two books, Ice Forged and Reign of Ash form a single story arc: I did not read the other two, despite completionist tendencies. Martin writes competent if uninspired fantasy, with no pretensions but fortunately also no affectation. The appeal of the books lies in their tight plot, good use of suspense to keep the pages turning, and clever twists on common fantasy conventions. Characterization even of the protagonists is however fairly weak: its hard to see them as much more than so many paper dolls with standard fantasy plot events hung on them. That plot is also perhaps overcomplicated, in that not enough effort is spent to really justify the resolution – sometimes even the origin – of each successive crisis.

The underpinning of the series’ system of magic probably would take more than even the remaining two volumes to explore. I don’t know (obviously) which of the various remaining threats or sequel hooks are addressed in those books – but Martin is clearly telling a story where we’re not supposed to get all the answers or background.

On the whole, a quick and entertaining read, without threatening or pretending to take up too much brain space.

The Half-Hearted

The classic musical The Sound of Music is a a parade of hits from one end to another, but it was with some alarm I found myself actually listening to some of the lyrics. It’s inspiring to be told to “Climb Ev’ry Mountain”, particularly if you take it for a generalized metaphor and avoid specific applications – or I guess if you like climbing. And a dream is nice to have – if you set aside that it “will need all the love you can give / every day of your life for as long as you live”.

Actually, as a certified dabbler, it’s more a case of re-awakening concerns sparked by a more inspired source a year or so ago as my pastor was preaching through Revelation. I happened to notice – in the warning letters to the churches that open the book – that only two of the churches are threatened with complete repudiation. Ephesus is commended for works and doctrine, but judged as having abandoned their first love; and Laodicea – more famously – found to be self-confident and “neither cold nor hot”. It’s easy enough to point out that these warnings could both fit the stereotype of the American Reformed churches – the “frozen chosen” – maybe even without the works – and wonder whether it applies personally as well.

It’s a bit odd to be surrounded by admonitions towards self-care and balance and setting boundaries – things I’m generally quite good at – while suspecting I need a push in the opposite direction. Personal self-diagnosis, though, makes me a bit suspicious of these trends themselves, even if I tend to believe most movements and fads result from some real felt need whatever their eventual over-reactions. Is “safety first” the most necessary watch-word for today?

I tend to criticize indistinct tone and failure to embrace natural conclusions when I write reviews here: it is a point on which I’m aware of failing to live up to my own standards, and so perhaps I’m a bit hyper-aware on the subject with others. I care deeply about words, but I’ve avoided any professional commitment to opinions about them: the blog’s a hobby. I teach mathematics, but I don’t know that I treat it seriously enough. I’ve resisted “over-commitment” to any number of my hobbies, out of a deep-seated suspicion that it would mean time to play with the others would disappear: yet I’m unhappy with others – and not really satisfied with myself – willing to settle for second-best-at-everything.

It seems not unlikely all that actually qualifies as sloth, even if I tend to say I’m busy. I don’t know that everybody is required to have some all-consuming passion – it doesn’t seem to fit the evidence at hand. But it does rather seem as if getting anything worthwhile done requires you to work as if you had those feelings about the work at hand.