What I read last month

I am on Goodreads (as "Tomj"), I have decided to start blogging about what I've been reading, here is what I read in October. I'll have another batch for November. 

Playground, Richard Powers. As others have remarked, this novel kind of does for the sea what The Overstory did for trees. Powers is one of my favorite novelists, and this one is one of his best, up there with The Gold Bug Variations and The Echo Maker. 

A Few Days in Athens; being the Translation of a Greek Manuscript Discovered in Herculaneum, Frances Wright. A 19th century novel that discusses Epicureanism, a pretty good. Available from Project Gutenberg. I've really gotten into Epicureanism.

The Demon Breed, James Schmitz. A science fiction adventure novel, featuring a strong female protagonist, set in a planet with an interesting ecology. I am reading books nominated for the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award (I am a judge). Pretty good book.

Polostan, Neal Stephenson. Historical fiction, featuring a Russian-American woman brought up as a Communist. First book of a trilogy. Stephenson and Powers are two of my favorite living writers, so October was a good month for me.

Chapel Perilous: The Life & Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson, Gabriel Kennedy. This is the book that most of you will be interested in, so it deserves a few more words.

Exhaustively researched (there's even a list in the back of many of the places RAW lived), accurate in the most important particulars, the section about Robert Shea is well-researched, too.  I agreed with most of the opinions in the book. The research generates quite a few things that surprised me. I didn't know that Paideia University, where RAW got his advanced degree, actually was a creation of RAW and his wife. You'll learn other things about RAW you didn't know before, even if you are well read in his work.

The book is formatted accurately for Kindle (not a given for self-published books) and has a good cover, by Laura Kang. The book's main flaw is that it is poorly copyedited, or rather, it reads as if there was little copyediting. Lots of spelling and grammar mistakes. 

Chapel Perilous is available as a Kindle, hardcover and paperback via Amazon and on Lulu. 

Review: Richard Powers' 'Playground'

 

As this is a blog for people who like to read, I'd like to write a bit about a new novel that impressed me a lot, Playground by Richard Powers. 

Powers has been one of my favorite writers for years. He had a career as a well-regarded literary novelist who didn't sell a lot of books until The Overstory (2018) which was a surprise big hit that sold many copies. 

If you don't know Powers (no relation to the "Richard Powers" who did covers for SF books), he has won a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award and a MacArthur "genius" grant (in the early days of the award). As far as literary merit goes, Playground seems to me an excellent novel, on a par with The Gold Bug Variations, The Echo Maker and The Overstory, which are generally considered the best of Powers' 14 novels. Playground currently is longlisted for the Booker Award. (I also am especially fond of Orfeo, which is largely about classical music.)

The novel is largely set in  Makatea, an island in French Polynesia, in Chicago and various seashore locations; whereas The Overstory focuses on trees, Playground focuses on the ocean and the sea creatures who live in it. The main characters are a woman who becomes a famous Canadian diver, a programmer from the Chicago area who becomes a wealthy tech company founder, his best friend, a Black young man from a tough background who has a literary bent, and a woman with a Polynesian background who is the love interest for the two young men. There is a plot that brings all of them together but I don't want to give away any spoilers. Powers has often shown interest in saving the environment, and that's one of the themes of this book, too. 

Aside from the ocean stuff, there's a lot about AI and computers (Powers was a computer programmer when he quit his job to try his hand at writing a novel, and computer technology comes up a lot in his work. Wikipedia: "One Saturday in 1980, Powers saw the 1914 photograph 'Young Farmers' by August Sander at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and was so inspired that he quit his job two days later to write a novel about the people in the photograph.")

While Powers is a different writer than Robert Anton Wilson, I will mention a couple of things they have in common. 

As I mentioned in a previous  post, each of the two writers have a favorite composer, and references to the composer recut in their work. For RAW of course, it's Beethoven; for Powers, it's Johann Sebastian Bach. In that earlier post, I wrote, "I have been reading the new Richard Powers novel, Playground, and I'm on page 141. Johann Sebastian Bach hasn't put in an appearance yet." Bach does turn up late in the novel.

Perhaps more significantly, like Wilson, Powers doesn't limit himself on the number of topics he will cram into a  novel. Wilson's fiction encompasses political theory, magick, the innovations of James Joyce, history and on and on. The new Powers novel takes deep dives into oceanography, racism, history, computer science, the game of Go, the fauna of offshore reefs, and I'm surely forgetting a few things. 

Richard Powers has a composer obsession, too

I have been reading the new Richard Powers novel, Playground, and I'm on page 141. Johann Sebastian Bach hasn't put in an appearance yet. 

I remarked once again yesterday about the role of Beethoven in RAW's works, and then I realized that Bach plays a similar role in Powers' works. This is most obvious in The Gold Bug Variations, which has a lot about Bach's Goldberg Variations (one of the main characters listens to Glenn Gould's famous 1950s recordings) but Bach is mentioned in many of Powers' other books. 

An interest in classical music also is a theme in Powers' books, most obviously in Orfeo. Here is my interview with Powers about that book. The official Richard Powers website has links to music mentioned in Orfeo. 

Of course, an interest in classical music pervades RAW's "Historical Illuminatus" books, and Mozart even appears as a minor character. 

I've read other works of fiction that mention classical music and specific composers, but when I tried to think of another modern writer who focuses in much of his/her work on one particular composer, I came up dry.

If it isn't obvious, I'm a huge Powers fan. I've read 11 of his 14 novels so far. Powers has won a National Book Award, a Pulitzer, a MacArthur "genius" grant, etc., so he's a good example of a writer embraced by the literary establishment, as opposed to RAW, who spent his life being pretty much ignored by it. I guess the issue is that RAW wasn't published as a "mainstream" writer, but it seems a shame he never got discovered by one of the major literary review magazines, got a lot of press in major newspapers or came up for any of the major literary awards. (Playground was listed as a nominee for the Booker Award even before it came out!)

Footnote: Classical music doesn't loom large in the works of Robert Shea (most of his novels are set in the Middle Ages, preceding such music) but from what I can tell reading his nonfiction bits, he had a particular interest in Mozart. 

What books have you read over and over again?

Cover for the Standard Ebooks edition of Moby Dick. 

Tyler Cowen recently estimated that he has read Moby Dick five times. Cowen  named it The Great American Novel back in 2006. 

I have been thinking of re-reading Moby Dick (I think I've read it only once.) Robert Anton Wilson told Eric Wagner to read James Joyce's Ulysses more than 40 times.

All of this made me think about what books I've read over and over again.

Illuminatus! would be a good example for me. I read it for the first time in the 1970s, probably not too terribly long after it came out, and I have read it many times since then. In fact, I've read all of Wilson's novels more than once (except for The Sex Magicians, which I will finally read when Hilaritas releases it soon), and I've read other RAW books more than once, too; I am re-reading Cosmic Trigger 2 now. 

Other works of fiction I have read more than once: The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe; Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen; The Lord of the Rings, J.RR.. Tolkien; All Things Are Lights, Robert Shea; Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov; I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, Harlan Ellison (short story collection), The Gold Bug Variations, Richard Powers, Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson. 

My reading plans for the next few months

This is downloaded to my Kindle app. Looks interesting, don't you think?

I recently read Tyler Cowen's Jan. 4 blog post, "My reading program for the half-year to come."  I thought reading Tyler's post was a lot of fun, so I thought I would try a similar blog post. (Note that one of Tyler's plans is "Reading or rereading through the works of Jonathan Swift," which I believe RAW also did at one point).

1. I am a judge on the nominating committee for the Prometheus Awards, so for the next couple of months I will be busy reading science fiction novels. I am currently reading Babel by R.F. Kuang and soon I will be reading Widowland by C.J. Carey.  I'm also going to read Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng. 

2. I am currently slowly reading RAW Memes by Robert Anton Wilson and Rasa, a couple of pages a day or so, and I am re-reading Natural Law, or Don’t Put a Rubber on Your Willy for the online discussion group, see you here tomorrow.  The Hilaritas Press publication schedule shows that the next three republished Robert Anton Wilson books are TSOG, The Walls Came Tumbling Down and Reality Is What You Can Get Away With. I am not so sure about TSOG, it's not my favorite RAW book, but the other two I actually have not read, I will buy them and read them as soon as they are released.

3. I like  history and I have particular interests that I usually pursue every year. So I'll likely read at least a couple of titles on the later Roman Empire/the Dark Ages/Late Antiquity and very likely at least one book about World War II, and quite possibly something involving aviation history. Does anyone else sometimes look at the bibliography first when reading nonfiction? 

4. I don't get review copies as often as Tyler, but it occasionally happens, both because of being a Prometheus judge and because of this blog, so we'll see what arrives in the mail. Alec Nevala-Lee is a RAW fan, and he kindly sent me his excellent new biography of Buckminster Fuller, one of the few well-reviewed books of 2022 that I read and that Tyler missed. 

5. I gave a friend of mine copies of some favorite novels by Richard Powers and Leonard Richardson, if he decides to read them, I will re-read them so he can discuss them with me. (Powers, The Gold Bug Variations, Richardson, Situation Normal.)

6. My habit for decades has been to try to get caught up with a few favorite authors. Jane Austen and Jack Vance aren't coming out with anything new, so anything from them will be a re-read, but there are still a few Vladimir Nabokov novels I haven't read and a few Sinclair Lewis titles I either haven't read, or haven't read for more than 40 years. I am closing in on Robert Shea but still need to read his first two solo novels. And there are a few authors I read whenever anything new comes out. Neal Stephenson may not show up again the next year or two and Elinor Lipman has a new one out, but Tom Perrotta just issued Tracy Flick Can't Win so he'll probably be silent in 2023. 

7. I read book reviews in publications such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and I read blogs and Twitter accounts from people who read a lot, so I'm sure I'll read a few titles that sound like something I would like. The NYT and Tyler both gave Babel a good review.

I recently listed what I read in 2022 and for several years I've come out with a similar list each year. I am on Goodreads and I track my reading there, look for Tomj. 

What are you going to read? 

Current reading [Updated]

 

Tired of "homework" reading such as reading nominees for the Prometheus Award and reading locally written books for my newspaper, I decided to give myself permission to read something I really wanted to read. I'm a big fan of Richard Powers, so I read Plowing the Dark, one of his I had never gotten around to. It's a good novel; I think there's only a couple of his left I haven't gotten to yet.

I mention this because I guess I'm curious about other people's reading habits; one of my tendencies is that when I find an author I really like, I try to read as many books by him or her as I can. Robert Anton Wilson would be an obvious example; for the few I still haven't read, I'm waiting for the definitive Hilaritas Press edition. I've also read everything by Jane Austen I can find, and all of Tom Perotta's books and all of Jack Vance's science fiction titles. I only have 1-2 Iain Banks Culture novels left. Every few years I do another Vladimir Nabokov novel. And so on. 

Plowing the Dark is largely about tech geeks in Seattle working on a virtual reality project; the book makes the argument for the novel as a art form, and as a form of virtual reality, as Powers remarks in this interview: 

At the end it's as if a digital Byzantium has somehow crossed over into the real world.

That is my metaphor for reading; that's what reading does. In the end, the book becomes an apology for the virtuality of fiction, fiction not as a replacement for the real world, but as a hybrid place where the real world is suspended and reconstituted into something more survivable.

Addendum: I forgot to mention that the title Plowing the Dark apparently takes it title from a poem by William Blake. It's believed to be a reference to "Or the plowman in darkness plow?" line 20 of "Earth's Answer."

John Higgs says, "There's a fair amount of plowing in Blake - hence you find Blake-titled novels like Drive You Plow Over The Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk, who won the Nobel Prize a couple of years ago. Plowing in Blake is often a metaphor for revolution, in the French and American sense - the old order needs to be overturned in order that new life can grow - so he talks a lot about the plow passing over nations."

Starseed and Gold Bug

If you are familiar with DNA, you know that it consists of four different biochemical building blocks, two kinds of bonded pairs: Adenine always pairs with thymine, and cytosine with guanine. This is analogous with the sexual pairing of men with women, as RAW remarks in Chapter 14 of  The Starseed Signals: 

Wands -- adenine
Cups -- thymine
Swords -- cytosine
Discs -- guanine

These four amino acids serve as bonds for the DNA helix. These chemical bonds are analogs of the sexual bonds at higher levels. (Here is some of the analogical, non-linear, non-Aristotelian right-lobe thinking we warned about earlier.) The pyrimidines are "male analogs," so adenine and cytosine are Wands and Swords respectively. The purines are "female analogs" so Cups and Discs are thymine and guanine. The lovely thing about this analog is that the phallic-vaginal symbolism (wands to cups, swords to discs) describes exactly the bonding system (adenine to thymine, cytosine to guanine) that actually does hold the DNA helix together. 

RAW has a footnote to this passage, remarking, "It is perhaps safe to mention in a footnote that this concept was received by both the present author, in California, and by poet Brian Barritt, in Switzerland, the same week, one reason for believing in a central Starseed Transmission facility." 

I was quite started by this passage. Two bonded pairs of DNA chemicals as an analogy for two mating couples is a good one-sentence description of the plot of The Gold Bug Variations by Richard Powers, a 1991 novel that is one of my all-time favorite works of fiction. The two main plot strands are a romance in the 1950s between two biologists, Stuart Ressler and Jeanette Koss, and a romance in the 1980s between librarian Jan O'Deigh and computer programmer Franklin Todd. Todd and Ressler work together in the 1980s sections of the novel, so the two couples are intertwined. 

A central conceit of the novel is that information and codes are behind everything; the title alludes both to Bach's Goldberg Variations and to Edgar Allen Poe's story, "The Gold-Bug," in which cryptography is an important plot element. If you've already read The Starseed Signals, you can't help but compare that to the Leary-Wilson emphasis on the importance of the DNA code. 

 According to Wikipedia, the famous American cryptographer William F. Friedman became interested in cryptography when he read "The Gold-Bug" as a child.  One of the characters in Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, another one of my all-time favorite novels, is based upon Friedman. 

Powers, 63, won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Overstory and the National Book Award for another novel, The Echo Maker, so if you follow literary news you likely have at least heard his name. The Gold Bug Variations also attracted quite a bit of attention. 

Powers, like RAW (and myself), is a huge classical music fan, and his novel Orfeo  also connects music to the genetic code.  Powers' short novel Genie involves the discovery of code apparently written by intelligent life billions of years ago and inserted into Earth DNA. I re-read it Saturday night; it also connects music to the genetic code. 

You can read my 2014 interview with Powers, in which he remarks, "Self-replicating molecules have set every living thing in motion, and that pattern-making impulse, at the inanimate level, is, in some profoundly mysterious way, the mother of all animate pattern-making and pattern-seeking urges." And he also remarked, "Meditation on our molecular roots is tremendously inspiring, and thinking about the journey from the first self-replicating molecules to the pinnacles of human achievement is the deepest kind of spiritual reflection."