As nonsensical as Pratchett’s Discworld books may seem, they often make a great deal of sense. Hogfather pokes fun at old gods, evolving gods, power, and belief systems. There’s even an “oh god,” as in “oh god I’m gonna be sick.”
The Hogfather is Discworld’s version of Santa Claus, and things go very, very far astray forcing Death to step in and try to put things right, while his granddaughter tries to behave like a normal person.
And I always enjoy reading Death trying to understand humans, and trying to behave as though he’s human when needed. Usually with very confusing results for the humans he encounters. Think Nightmare Before Christmas when Jack Skellington tries to introduce Christmas joy to Halloween Town.
Title: The Epic of Gilgamesh
Author: Translated by N. K. Sandars
Published: 1972
ISBN-13: 978140441000
Publisher: Penguin Classics
I found SparkNotes helpful.
This is the grandmama of all written epic stories, the progenitor of familiar quest stories and tropes through the ages. It’s also based on the historical Mesopotamian king Gilgamesh
Gilgamesh is 2/3 god, 1/3 human and has no equal. As such, his arrogance and hubris get the better of him while he literally rapes and pillages his way through his own land, Uruk.
The gods create Enkidu from clay (completely mortal) as a balance to Gilgamesh’s excesses. When they meet, they fight each other but once they discover they are equals, they become great friends.
Because Gilgamesh is restless, he and Enkidu go on a quest which includes stealing cedars from a forest forbidden to mortals. After they kill the demon Humbaba, Ishtar tries to entice Gilgamesh into a love affair with her. He flatly turns her down, which enrages her and she calls down the Bull of Heaven to kill him.
Enkidu dies from a protracted illness because the gods must punish one of them for killing the Bull of Heaven. Gilgamesh is bereft and leaves Uruk in search of Utnapishtim, the man who survived the Great Deluge and was given eternal life.
In his travels to the end of the world and back, he finally accepts that life is not eternal, but the impact on those he comes in contact can be.
I first read Gilgamesh for a class about ethics towards animals (Enkidu was raised among the animals).Reading it is the start of many familiar stories, like the Great Deluge, considered to be the genesis of the Flood story and Noah in the Bible.
For more about the genesis of myths which have become common knowledge around the world, read my review of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
William deWorde has a newsletter he sends to rich people who pay him to write about the gossip in Ankh-Morpork. The dwarves move in with a mechanical printer and make a deal with deWorde to publish more frequently. Soon, Ankh-Moorpark has two papers, one which publishes the truth as deWorde has been able to ferret out, and the truth people want to believe. DeWorde gets wind of a story which is politically dangerous, and find himself in danger.
It may be heresy to say, but I think Pratchett is funnier than Douglas Adams. And Pratchett’s silliness in my kind of silliness. And while they’re silly, Pratchett’s books are also social commentary. The Truth is about facts, truth, justice and what people want to believe is true. It also features mayhem, but then all of Terry Pratchett’s books feature mayhem of one sort or another.
To my wife Anne, without whose silence this book would never have been written. Dedication
Japan and Germany have won World War II and have taken over the world. Hitler is dying from syphilitic incapacitation in an insane asylum, while his henchmen maneuver for power.
The US, as we know it, has been divided into three regions: the Eastern US controlled by the Nazis, Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere (the Pacific states) controlled by Japan, and a buffer zone called the Rocky Mountain States.
This should have been a gripping story, given the premise. But overall, I found the characters bland, and the dependence upon the I Ching an overused plot device.
Title: How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World
Author: Steven Johnson
Published: 2015
ISBN-13: 9781594633935
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Twitter: @StevenBJohnson
Steven Johnson picked six topics we take for granted in our modern-day lives and explores how these topics became so important. For instance, he tells the story of standardized time by first telling the story of sea trade and railroads and multitudinous time zones until someone had the idea of synchronizing our clocks. Which then led to even greater discoveries and implementations.
I’m a big James Burke fan. My favorite episode of Connections was the one in which he explained how Jacquard weaving patterns led to Hollerith computer cards which led to modern computer programming. I’m also a history nerd and love multi-disciplinary works like Johnson’s.
The topics are relevant and interesting. Johnson’s writing style makes some the complexities easy to understand, and offers up intriguing anecdotes about how things like Clean came to be such a big deal.
One of the best things in this book is Johnson’s reminders that innovations don’t happen on their own. Creativity builds on the work of others, often over many years of trial and error
The Six Topics are:
1. Glass
2. Cold
3. Sound
4. Clean
5. Time
6. Light
Title: Baby You’re a Rich Man: Suing the Beatles for Fun and Profit
Author: Stan Soocher
Published: 2015
ISBN-13: 978-1-61168-380-5
Publisher: ForeEdge
This was a LibraryThing Advance Reading Copy, which I received in exchange for an honest review.
I was looking forward to learning more about behind the scenes Beatles. Reading about the lawsuits against them, and the people who got rich from these suits seemed a fascinating way to go. Not so much.
Stan Soocher’s deeply researched book does tell every single detail (or so it seems) of the convoluted legal world of The Beatles from their first manager, Brian Epstein, to their last, Allen Klein. But after a while, it reads like a laundry list of industry moguls suing each other and The Beatles in a frenzy of mean-spirited greediness. Some of the lawsuits seem to be filed out of spite. Those are just the outsiders. The suits between the members of the group are a reflection of their evolution from young Liverpool lads to mature artists realizing that many of the events happening to them are neither what they expected, nor what they wanted as artists.
The most interesting part was the intertwined lawsuits against John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Not only was J. Edgar Hoover’s campaign to have Lennon expelled from the US for his vocal political views against the Viet Nam war, but Yoko’s ex-husband was playing games with custody of her daughter with him. Lennon and Ono were caught in a Catch-22 of suits which hampered their ability to resolve anything.
The odious Allen Klein looms large for much of the book, finding new and distasteful ways to put more of The Beatles’ money into his own pocket. It was almost a never-ending litany of fleecing his clients by law suit.
Soocher’s detailed writing tends to be dry. Not quite completely boring, but not quite enthralling either.
Title: Sand
Author: Hugh Howey
Twitter: HughHowey
Published: 2014
ISBN-13: : 978-1328767547
Publisher: Mariner Books
Publisher’s Blurb:
The old world is buried. A new one has been forged atop the shifting dunes. Here in this land of howling wind and infernal sand, four siblings find themselves scattered and lost. Their father was a sand diver, one of the elite few who could travel deep beneath the desert floor and bring up the relics and scraps that keep their people alive. But their father is gone. And the world he left behind might be next.
“It was strange how tense one could become while surrounded by the banal. It was the waiting, waiting.” (p. 78)
Hugh Howey shot to the top of my favorite authors’ list with his Wool trilogy. His dystopian world-building is solid, as are his characters and their relationships to each other, and their harsh living conditions.
In Sand, Colorado has been covered by … sand. Familiar city names have become bastardized versions of themselves. The biggest lost city was once Denver but is now Danver. Danver is El Dorado. Everyone’s heard the myth that lost treasure can be found in Danver; enough wealth to make life worthwhile, if not pleasant. Pirates and sand divers from all over have searched for Danver to no avail. Until one day …
The main protagonist, Palmer, is a highly skilled sand diver. Able to go deeper than most others, his talents are well known. He and a friend are hired by a group of brigands to dive and bring back proof that this location is the mythical Danver.
It is indeed. And then everything goes wrong. Because, the brigands don’t want the buried treasure, they want something more valuable and dangerous. Power.
And thus we have another dystopian political thriller. A good one, albeit a little light on the details of how Colorado became the sand covered danger that it has become.
Sand’s main protagonist is brother to three siblings, abandoned by their father who left for another not-so-mythical destination, No Man’s Land. It’s supposed to be a better place where the rebels are gathering to join forces and devise a way to take Colorado back from the greedy forces in power.
And while that’s a common theme in political thrillers, Howey manages to give it a twist, and make it much more interesting. I like his world-building a lot, and the quirks he gives his characters are really entertaining.
Sand is about more than survival, though. It’s about community, family, and trust. It’s about figuring out who we are and what matters. And that’s what resonated for me.
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