Where Titus Loses Everything

Titus Andronicus by William Shakespeare
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

For me, the play is a 4, but the edition is a 5. That's what I'm scoring here.

I expected to kinda hate this. I put off reading this particular play for years because of the reputation it has. Specifically, one of my early teachers maybe 50 years ago described it in a very unflattering (but humorously horrible) way. I remember being told about a character (Lavinia, as it turns out) having to take a severed hand in her teeth to get it offstage when there is a scene change. There's no curtain, so you've gotta get the characters to remove all the props, so I get the need, but it does sound ridiculous. And I'm not sure that scene really works, but having read it now I don't think it sinks the play, either. It isn't that different from the rest of the play.

Is the play itself bloody? Yeah. Was Rome bloody? Well, yeah. Did Roman Empire nobility have terrible values? IMO, yeah. Slave-holding, empire-building, people-oppressing, misogynistic... Pretty bad. And that's how they are in the play. Shakespeare just presents their bloody heads in all their gore and horror.

The story is horrible, but I found it entertaining as long as I embraced it as representing people living in a terrible, brutal system. Imagine a father who has lost almost all of his sons in war and is just fine with it. And is willing to kill one of his sons and deny him proper burial for opposing him. Titus is horrible because he's almost the perfect Roman general.

The vengeance story, Titus and his family against those who framed his sons and killed them and raped his daughter, is mostly satisfying. I was pretty okay with almost everything--except Titus killing his mutilated daughter. After all his errors and seeming redemption, why did he do that? Grrrrr. Just more misogyny on display, I guess. It's better for a raped daughter to die than live to remind him of her shame, they believed. Horrible.

But accepting the ugliness as part of the story, part of the social critique, part of the satire--which maybe requires taking a step back from pure suspension of disbelief--the play is biting and the language often brilliant, and the revenge is absolute. A lot of bad stuff happens, to good guys and bad guys (they're all bad guys, but go with it) but the final son of Titus Andronicus outlasts the villains. It's like a football game where both teams are wiped out except for a single running back on one side, and he limps off the field alone at the end of the game. Where he becomes the new emperor. (Something seriously wrong with that simile...)

I liked it and enjoyed reading it. I hate the horrors, naturally, but I think the play hates the horrors, too, so we're not really on opposite sides there. I'm definitely glad I finally read it.

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Where Burton Watson Schools Us

The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry by Burton Watson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a very nice collection of Chinese poetry, filled with wonderful literature from many time periods, but it is also a useful survey for students or others new to these works.

Much of the literature here is available in other collections, especially the poetry from the biggest Tang writers, but a lot of it was still new to me. And the introduction, chapter openings, and back matter were very useful, even for bits I'd read elsewhere. Burton Watson does an excellent job of explaining and teaching those of us in the West who are unfamiliar with the references and common symbols and the like or are still working out the differences between the various poetic forms. It's hard (but not impossible) to appreciate poetry in translation if you don't have some of these additional helps, and I appreciate how well Burton Watson supported us.

I still prefer books that are collections of works all by a single author--for the same reason that I prefer the original albums to "best of" albums, which are nice but lacking something--so I don't have quite the same feeling when I read collections like this, with examples from so many different authors. It feels somewhat artificial in a way I can't entirely defend. But it obviously has its uses, and this is a very good example of that type of collection. In addition to presenting some very fine poetry and educating me on it, a benefit of books like this one is tipping me off to "new" poets (from 1000 years ago or 800 years ago!) that may have whole books of just their work done by some helpful translator that I can now go look for. I have a few such names that I intend to follow up on.

In general, I love Chinese poetry for it's themes and simple clarity--so much is about loving the land, admiring a beautiful landscape, drinking wine with a neighbor, growing vegetables on a small plot, looking out over a river for a sail you recognize, and other romantic topics--and there's a bunch of that here. I'm aware that there can be many important messages buried in such simple-looking lines, which the editor sometimes clues us into, but even without that it's possible to love much of this literature. My favorites? Wang Wei, Li Po, and Tu Fu, out of the Tang era (who are so popular it is kind like saying you like Shakespeare, but it's true), and Su Tung-p'o, from the later Sung era. However, I'm now on the hunt for books focused on Lu Yu, Mei Yao-ch'en, and a few others. That alone makes it worth looking into this collection.

Wish me luck finding them.

New readers especially should take a look at this collection. Recommended.

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The Golem and the Sad Girl

The Book of Splendor by Frances Sherwood
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I enjoyed this quite a bit. 4 stars.

In part, this is the story of a young woman who falls in love with a golem, and that's my favorite part of the story. Rochel is a marginalized young woman in the Jewish quarter of Prague in the early 17th century. As a child of rape, she looks different and is treated different, though a decent man makes her his wife. He's not a bad guy, but he has blind spots that leave Rochel feeling unseen and unloved. (He does love her. He just isn't good at it.) When threats from the intolerant Christians make them fear for their lives, the rabbi creates a golem (a story which is repeated in legend and is here treated as fact). The golem can't speak but he's intelligent and sensitive, and he definitely sees Rochel.

I would have liked more of their story. They're together on the page too little. The other characters are also interesting, but lead nowhere. We have the Holy Roman Emperor, who's crazy and wants to live forever; Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler; the alchemist John Dee; doctors; spies; a rag and bone man who is one of the heroes of the story; Vaclav, the bastard son of the emperor who serves him though the emperor has no idea who he is; and more. As much as I enjoyed them, most of their stories peter out, with their endings coming off-stage or omitted altogether. We don't get the scene when Kelley is hanged. We don't see when Kirakos and Sergey escape to South America. The final scene with Vaclav and the emperor on the sands by the river seem to hint at something, but I don't know what. And Rochel's story, with her husband, has a logical conclusion, but we skip most of the events that get us there.

It was fun to read, but a little frustrating in the end. I can appreciate the excellent prose, and there's an entertaining plot filled with memorable characters, but the loose threads and skimpy conclusion didn't entirely satisfy. I usually feel like books are longer than they should have been; I think this one could have used another hundred pages.

Anyway, I still liked it.

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Where Dame Frevisse Hunts a Killer

The Novice's Tale by Margaret Frazer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is an entertaining and satisfying mystery. I enjoyed it quite a bit, and wish GR let me say 4.5, though for now 4 is my most honest rating. Quite good; maybe the next in the series will be even better.

I came here from starting her second series, the one focusing on Joliffe the actor. Realizing there was this earlier group of novels, I looked it up. I found this about equally entertaining and well done.

This series is set in a monastery, with Dame Frevisse as the central character. I'm not actually sure how old she is, but she's smart and tough and intelligent, kinda no-nonsense, though she is decently patient and compassionate. A woman dies at the monastery, and then a second person. That's bad. But it looks like a sweet young novice, a woman as pious as they come, had the most reason and best opportunity to commit the crime. The characters are sufficiently round for the first book in a series, and the world they inhabit is well-drawn and believable. I need to look up the clothes they wear--not too sure about houppelandes and such--but there's time.

Dame Frevisse is sure that the poor little novice can't be the real murderer, and she works to uncover the truth. It is due to her work that the crime is solved, though she gets timely help from a few people, and I like it that the answers don't just emerge accidentally the way some mystery novels do it. I also like it that she isn't sleuthing from beginning to end. When that happens, books can feel too narrow, too forced, and not very real. The investigation here is really just the last quarter or third of the book. This is not a bloodless mystery, not just a brain puzzle, like some mysteries I've enjoyed less. It's a story about people who are living through a strange time, doing the best they can, getting on with the business of living, and the reader is a witness to all of it. I guess, for me, that creates a nice balance of plot, blending the warmth of human lives and everyday interactions with the coldness of criminal problem-solving.

The conclusion is somewhat complex, but not confusing, and that's a plus. It feels more real that way, IMO.

Overall? Fun to read. Good characters to root for. A nice premise. A very good start to a series. So it is recommended. I'm hunting up the next couple, pretty confident they'll be to my taste.

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Where Rupert Gets No Support

The Stranger Prince by Margaret Irwin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I saw a five-star review of this and a one-star review of this and I agreed with them both. I'm going with four stars, because the book pissed me off over and over and yet I liked it quite a bit.

It's a great story, and though she will try your patience, the author writes many amazing scenes, demonstrating a solid grasp of history, politics, the tactics and strategies of war, and the personalities of the various characters (real people) involved. Her writing tends toward the literary at all times, but when she's telling about a cavalry charge in a complex battle scene, the writing is remarkable.

The difficulty, the one that almost made me DNF about 1/3 in, is how her attention jumps from page to page, paragraph to paragraph, and even sentence to sentence. The focus is so scattered and diffuse that the reader has to scramble to keep up with the current topic. It sometimes feels like the novel is restarting again and again, as if everything before was prelude and throat-clearing, and now she's at last talking about the thing she really wanted to get to.

The thing is, I wanted to like it. So rather than DNF, I intentionally, consciously chose to let her tell the story in her distracted, shiny-object, ADHD, mind-wandering way, and though it was a challenge, the storytelling is so complete and satisfying in other ways I found myself really enjoying it.

Prince Rupert was the nephew of Charles I, and grew up on the continent, taking part in the unending wars there during the 17th century even as a teenager. He was well-liked, tall, capable, energetic, and war-like, literally raised to be a leader of men, and when he went to England, his aunt and uncle really took to him. When Parliament, with Puritan support, opposed the king and openly rebelled, Rupert was the king's best general. The story, as told here, was how Rupert was having great success and could have--and should have--won the war for him if only the king would have listened to him and not his detractors. There's a lot of useful history in here, though it feels like Margaret Irwin wanted to tell about Rupert more than what he did or what happened. Hard to say, TBH.

All in all--the author tells a great story and pens a fantastic novel despite having a sometimes frustrating style. I feel like that's fair. YMMV.

Recommended for readers looking to take a chance on books they've never heard of. You never know.

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Where Some People Do Some Stuff in a Place

Decipher by Stel Pavlou
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It was okay.

There are a thousand ideas in this book, from ancient civilizations to gravity wave science, from corporate greed to international diplomacy, from golems to ghosts, but they don't hold together all that well. Even though I happily read lots of fantasy and science fiction and pulp, I found the suspension of disbelief while reading this increasingly hard to maintain. Bunches of it--the parts under the pyramids in Giza and under the ice in Antarctica especially--seem a lot like the monumental ancient history stuff out of H.P. Lovecraft stories, and it just never really seems to work.

It's reasonably fun to read. It breezes along pretty well, not hard to digest, though there's just way too many scenes with people sitting around and talking about stuff they know about ancient civilizations and weird things in science, piecing together what's happening all over the world like Robert Langdon figuring out the Da Vinci code. It's meant to be useful exposition, but it's mostly nonsensical. They translate 12,000 year old writing by assuming it's Sumerian, and it works. That's kinda silly. In the end, I found it impossible to care very much about anyone in the story. I learned literally zero of the names involved. I just read what they said and did and didn't worry who was saying it, because it didn't really matter.

This sounds like a 2-star review, and that's slightly unfair. I gave it 3, because it had enough movement and "what's gonna happen?" interest for me to finish it. It was okay. It aimed for big ideas like Jurassic Park and fell short, IMO, but some readers will enjoy it.

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Where Joliffe Plays Detective

A Play of Isaac by Margaret Frazer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

My first book by this author, and I really liked it. Went back and forth on a score--4 or 5--because I bet I'll like others in the series even more, but why be cheap? It was a fun book, a pleasure to read, so let's give it all the points.

I've read more than a few mysteries set in medieval or renaissance times, and I find most of them are so dreary I can hardly get through them. I think that's intentional--the dreary part, not the "hardly get through them" part--but I don't like it. Maybe life was mostly dreary then, and this is, after all, a murder mystery, but it's not supposed to be a bad experience for the reader, IMO. It's supposed to be fun to read. And this one is.

Fun why, you ask. First, I generally liked the main characters, which include Joliffe and the others in the troupe. (I found the minor characters interesting and well drawn, too, FWIW.) They're not totally best buds, and so they bicker and annoy each other part of the time, but it's friendly enough, and they all look out for each other. They're pretty good people, too, or so it seems to me, with engaging backstories, though I didn't read the previous series where they showed up. In other words, I like to side with them and cheer for them. Second, the setting is well done, with the land, the town, the society, the economy, and pretty much all the details seemingly accurate. Anything out of place is beyond my knowledge. The story inhabits that setting in a way that I enjoy, kinda like when you have a really good diagram of a ship or something and you can say "Oh, that's how that fits together..." Scratches a brain itch. And third, it's a good mystery.

Joliffe and the troupe he's part of have a gig in Oxford for the Corpus Christi festival, and when they're kind toward a mentally challenged theater-loving young man, they get invited to his rich family's home (well, barn) to stay a few days and perform a little for the family and their get-togethers. A body is found outside the barn where they are camping, and though they aren't explicitly named as suspects, they know how precarious their position is, and Joliffe takes it upon himself to solve the mystery.

It's good stuff: good pacing, plenty of intrigue, no dry patches. Now that I know the characters, I'm eager to see more of their stories, as well as others by this author. Fingers crossed.

Recommended for those historical mystery readers like me who haven't already discovered these books.

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