January 2025 Reading

When January began I knew it was going to be a stressful month and so my reading theme was "escape". I planned for it by putting aside a number of books (mysteries) that I had been looking forward to reading. I had been holding on to them for months. Maybe that built them up too much in my mind, but they didn't do the trick for me this month.  Unfortunately.  Very disappointing.

Although one of my reading resolutions for the year was to, again, try to read fewer mysteries, four out of the seven fiction books I finished this month were mysteries. I think when I set my goals I didn't realize how traumatic the news of the world would be this year so I am letting myself off the hook.  This may be a year when I do mostly "lite" reading. I did also read one book of poetry and one non-fiction book. One of the fiction books was a classic and three were historical (literary fiction or mysteries). 

These are the books I finished in January:

The Wildes: A Novel in Five Acts by Louis Bayard

I was on the library hold list for this novel for quite a long time. I can see why it was popular. The dramatist/author Oscar Wilde infamously had his life ruined by the Marquess of Queensberry who accused Wilde of debauching his son leading to a criminal trial and imprisonment for Wilde. In this novel Bayard looks at Wilde's family: his wife Charlotte, his mother and his two sons, Cecil and Vyyan.  From what I can tell, Bayard seems to stick to the facts and, in fact, credits interviews with Vyvyan's son Merlin for some of his facts. A lot is made (quite rightly) about the travesty of the anti-gay laws in countries like the UK and how they forced people to lead double lives. And that was certainly hard on non-heterosexual persons. But the wives and children who were lied to were also harmed, psychologically and, if the spouse was ruined, sometimes financially. Wilde's family suffered financially but mostly psychologically, changing their name to Holland and hiding their connection to him. Wilde, who is depicted in the novel as a very good father, never saw his sons again. This is an interesting novel because it doesn't try to tell Wilde's side of the story (and Lord Alfred Douglas comes off as a complete ass), it follows the rest of the family. I found it quite engrossing and rather sad. This is literary fiction at its best - the characters are well drawn and the move through time from the late 1800's to the 1920's is handled well.  I'm glad that the first book I finished in 2025 was so good.  Recommended. 

The Fortnight in September by R.C. Sherriff

When someone posts their three favorite books of 2024 and you have read two out of the three, it's only logical to find the third and read it. I would never have heard of this book otherwise.  First published in 1931, this novel was re-issued in 2021.  Sherriff  was more well known as a screenwriter, working on Mrs. Miniver, Goodbye Mr. Chips and other films, but did write several novels and at least one well known play.  In this book the Stevens family (father, mother, three children of which two at this point are adult and working) take a yearly holiday to Bognor, a seaside town on the coast of England.  Every year they stay at the same boarding house, a place that the parents stayed on their honeymoon more than 20 years earlier.  They do the same things every year and rediscover the familiar places each year - noting the changes that have been made in 12 months. Of course the boarding house is getting shabby and the children are perhaps getting too old for these types of family holidays but for this year at least they enjoy their traditions. The Stevens are always aware that with the passage of time things may change so it's important to enjoy them in the moment.  Anyone who has ever vacationed each year at the same place can relate to this. This is not at all a plot driven book but by the end you know the characters like they are your own family and you know the place so well it is as if you, too, had holidayed there each year.  It is a book that explores what it is like to be in a family that loves each other and looks forward to being together on holiday each year - even if they also worry about things going right. I finished the novel with the hope that the characters enjoyed more years on these holidays even though knowing that nothing is for certain.  

Death on the Tiber by Lindsey Davis

The most recent Flavia Albia mystery, this one also includes her dad Marcus Didius Falco in a small role.  A woman's body is found in the Tiber and Flavia is determined to find out what happened to her.  It turns out that she was from Britain (as was Flavia) and was the common law wife of the man who raped Flavia when she was a young girl.  He is now in Rome and she is determined to avenge herself. (and the dead woman). This was one of the books I was saving for January and it didn't quite do it for me. I enjoy this series because I like ancient Rome, but for some time now I've felt that Davis' very thorough research has gotten in the way of the pacing of her stories. I don't remember that being an issue with the Falco series but I do find it with the Flavia Albia series. I only recommend this if you really like reading about ancient Rome - if not, you will probably find yourself skimming a lot. I also think this series is best read from the beginning.   

Water, Water (poems) by Billy Collins

Billy Collins is the former poet laureate of the United States. He is known to write "accessible" poetry because he writes about day-to-day things. I generally enjoy his poems for that reason. I like that he can take something perfectly ordinary and write a poem about it. This most recent collection was, however, not one that particularly resonated with me. Usually there are a few poems that I really, really like - that I would read aloud or say to someone: "listen to this".  But this time, there were none. Which is not to say that I did not enjoy it.  I did.  I just don't think it will stay with me like, say, Picnic, Lightning did. 

The Grey Wolf by Louise Penny

Another book that I saved to read in January that didn't quite do it for me. This is #19 in the Inspector Gamache series and, while I enjoyed it, it was not my favorite of the series.  A few years ago Louise Penny collaborated with Hillary Clinton on a thriller that I thought was very good.  Well, this also seems like a thriller with international travel and big national consequences. While the premise of the threat seemed very real to me, the actual finding of the culprits seemed very forced to me.  A lot of "coincidences" needed to occur to get to the end. And then it ended on a cliffhanger. There wasn't enough of the residents of Three Pines in this book to satisfy me. I like this series best when Inspector Gamache is solving actual murders and not trying to avert national (or international) catastrophes. 

Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson

I am a big fan of Kate Atkinson, although I like her literary fiction more than her Jackson Brodie mystery series.  Possibly this is because she only writes an installment when she feels like it (there was five years between the last one and this one) and she is far more interested in characterization than in plot. This was the main book that I was saving to read in January and ... it didn't quite hit home for me.  Atkinson is exploring the trope of the Golden Age mystery by setting it (at times) in an English Country House where everyone is stranded due to a snowstorm.  But she also throws in everything but the kitchen sink - art theft, a killer on the loose on the Moors, the death by accident(?) of a character we never really meet, the local Vicar who has lost his religion, and more. There is also a Murder Mystery Weekend going on at the Country House. It's all somewhat farcical - although I think it is intended to be that way.  In true Kate Atkinson fashion she gives many of her characters a lot of depth. Part of the problem for me was that there were so MANY characters that I found myself wanting her to get back to the plot and away from their back stories. I enjoyed this novel but it won't go down in my books as the best Jackson Brodie mystery.

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

This was another BlueSky read-along. Maybe if I had read this at a different time I wouldn't have disliked it so much. But given the state of the world right now, and following on the heels of reading Gravity's Rainbow, Cat's Cradle and Things Fall Apart, it was just too depressing for me to like. And the constant themes of pedophilia, incest and rape were enough to make me dislike it. I find it interesting that the book reviews that I've read (and watched) gloss over the pedophilia, incest and rape - most of them don't mention it and when they do mention it they don't analyze it's use in any way. One said that the book was like mythology and you would find all of  that in myths. Ok, but myths are short and this was a long book. Another said that Garcia Marquez was using them, along with all the other bad things that happen in the story, to show that humans were constantly doing things like this throughout history. And I agree that history as circular time is a theme of the book.  But the thing is - not ALL history is bad. In my opinion, this novel was unrelenting in its negative view of people and history. And the actions that he chose, over and over, to reflect this were actions that I'm tired of reading male authors write about. I guess I'm glad that I can cross it off of my list of classic books I "need" to read.  But I didn't enjoy it.  And I think it colored my reading for the whole month because every day I dreaded picking it up and reading the assigned pages. 

Gallows Court by Martin Edwards

Desperate to find a mystery that would keep my mind occupied (which didn't happen with any of the other mysteries I read this month) I went to my very, very long TBR list and chose Gallows Court.  My expectations were low but I was so happy to discover that it was a real page turner.  The story takes place in London in 1930. The main character is Rachel Savernake, the enigmatic daughter of the late Judge Savernake. There is a lot going on in this novel - Rachel is very mysterious - is she good or is she evil?  Jacob Flint, the new crime reporter for The Clarion isn't sure but he is desperate for a scoop.  And Scotland Yard thinks a woman should mind her own business and not try to assist them in solving crimes. I actually guessed one of the major twists in the story fairly early but it didn't matter.  There are at least two more books in this series so far and I'm sure I'll read them. 

How Sondheim Can Change Your Life by Richard Schoch

This was a book I was looking forward to because I love the music (and lyrics) of Stephen Sondheim so I was happy my library hold came up during my "escape" January.  But what a disappointment it was.  First, it really didn't focus on "How Sondheim Can Change Your Life", it didn't even focus on how Sondheim changed the author's life. The author is a drama teacher and the book seemed to be written for people who didn't have enough life experience to understand the point of some of Sondheim's lyrics. Maybe he has spent too much time around college students. It is also possibly written for people who had never seen the Sondheim shows. There is a lot of explaining the plot and the characters.  I didn't need any of that and there were no new revelations to come from him. Not recommended. 

In addition to the books I finished in January, I embarked on a year-long read of Don Quixote with a BlueSky reading group which I am very much enjoying. I also joined in on a read of Clarissa which is an epistolary novel (written in letters).  The letters are dated and we are reading each letter on the day of the month on which it is dated.  It should take all year (if I keep up with it - it's too early to tell). 

 

More on Fur, Fortune and Empire

Just a couple more thoughts on Fur, Fortune and Empire.  After writing my previous post and before returning the book to my dad I decided to take a careful read of the footnotes.  I had skipped back to them while reading the book when something caught my attention but I wanted to give them a thorough read. 

Sometimes the footnotes can be more interesting than the actual book or, at least, can provide separate items of interest.  This was the case here. 

As I said before, the scope of this book was different than I expected.  I would have preferred to have read about the actual trading itself but this was really a history of Americans.  In the footnotes he points out the following, which I think is very true:

“One of the difficulties in writing about the American fur trade, especially during the colonial era, is that almost all the historical documents were written by the white people who interacted with the Indians rather than the Indians themselves.  Thus it is nearly impossible to say with certainty what the Indians thought about their participation in the trade, and how they perceived the people with whom they were trading.  Still some documents do exist, and historians have used them, and have also carefully analyzed the broader contemporary literature written by whites, to create portraits of the fur trade, and in particular Indian involvement, that are as accurate and balanced as possible.” (p. 328 fn. 18).

Unfortunately he doesn’t give any specific examples of those historians in that citation.  But I think he’s correct.  They say that history is written by the victors and that’s true. But it’s also true that history tends to be written by those who can write.  The oral tradition of the Indians doesn’t make their histories any less valid than the written histories of the whites with whom they traded but it does make them more difficult to access. 

One of the best quotes in Dolan’s footnotes, though, is from Professor Jennifer Brown, of the University of Winnepeg:  “European records made a big thing of how impressed the Indians were with their trade goods; Indian oral tradition tells the reverse – how impressed the Europeans were with the furs that the Indians didn’t value particularly highly.”  (p. 328 fn 20).

And this sounds true.  It especially sounds true when you know exactly what the colonial traders were trading for. Dolan had some very good sections about the anatomy of the beaver and how beaver skins are used in the making of hats.  The beaver has two types of fur – long coarse outer hairs covering the soft warm inner fur.  Plucking out the outer hairs was time consuming but necessary to get to the fur they wanted.   The most profitable furs were, therefore, furs for which this process had already taken place.  Indians tended to create robes with the fur on the inside and as they wore them the outer hairs would wear away leaving only the soft inner fur.  Fur traders valued these “worn” garments more highly than new unused furs.  I’ve always thought the Indians must have thought the Europeans were slightly crazy to want to buy what the Indians saw (quite rightly) as their smelly used clothes. 

In return for their old clothes and some animal skins, the Indians got mettle goods like kettles. In a later footnote, Dolan quotes historian Ian K. Steele:  “Historians have been irrationally embarrassed by Amerindian economic interests evident in the fur trade of the north and the deerskin trade of the south.  Earlier portrayals of naive Amerindian victims of underpriced furs and overpriced European goods have righty been superseded by more plausible accounts of discerning Amerindian customers able to demand exactly the kind of kettles, blankets, knives, or guns they wanted.” (p. 330 fn. 31).

All of this is to say that some of the things I may have complained about in my post yesterday as lacking were not lacking because Dolan was unaware of them.  Clearly he had his own viewpoint that he was trying to get across and these things were outside the scope of what he was trying to accomplish.  But the footnotes make it clear that he was well aware of these other issues. 

It also is a way of leading up to a quote that he gives in the footnotes from an interview/discussion between Richard White and William Cronan on why the Indians valued kettles:  “Indians wanted kettles partly because you can put them on a fire and boil water and they won’t break.  That’s nice.  But many of those kettles didn’t stay kettles for long.  They got cut up and turned into arrowheads that were then used in the hunt.  Or they got turned into high-status jewelry.  Indians valued kettles because they were such an extraordinarily flexible resource.” 

It’s a great quote but he also gave a a web address for the citation to the quote which took me to an interesting article:  http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/1986/5/1986_5_18.shtml

This article is a discussion between Richard White and William Cronan that took place before White published his seminal work The Middle Ground.  In it they talk about the Indian’s use of animals and I was very much reminded of the discussion that took place when I read and blogged about Lewis Hyde’s The Gift.

R[ichard] W[hite]: What’s hardest for us to understand, I think, is the Indians’ different way of making sense of species and the natural world in general. I’m currently writing about the Indians of the Great Lakes region. Most of them thought of animals as a species of persons. Until you grasp that fact, you can’t really understand the way they treated animals. This is easy to romanticize—it’s easy to turn it into a “my brother the buffalo” sort of thing. But it wasn’t. The Indians killed animals. They often overhunted animals. But when they overhunted, they did so within the context of a moral universe that both they and the animals inhabited. They conceived of animals as having, not rights—that’s the wrong word—but powers. To kill an animal was to be involved in a social relationship with the animal. One thing that has impressed me about Indians I’ve known is their realization that this is a harsh planet, that they survive by the deaths of other creatures. There’s no attempt to gloss over that or romanticize it.

W[illiam C[ronan] There’s a kind of debt implied by killing animals.

RW Yes. You incur an obligation. And even more than the obligation is your sense that those animals have somehow surrendered themselves to you.

WC There’s a gift relationship implied …

RW … which is also a social relationship. This is where it becomes almost impossible to compare Indian environmentalism and modern white environmentalism. You cannot take an American forester or an American wildlife manager and expect him to think that he has a special social relationship with the species he’s working on.

WC Or that he owes the forest some kind of gift in return for the gift of wood he’s taking from it.

RW Exactly. And it seems to me hopeless to try to impose that attitude onto Western culture. We distort Indian reality when we say Indians were conservationists—that’s not what conservation means. We don’t give them full credit for their view, and so we falsify history.

It’s a very interesting interview all around and I encourage everyone to read it.  And as Richard White says: “We can’t copy Indian ways of understanding nature, we’re too different. But studying them throws our own assumptions into starker relief and suggests shortcomings in our relationships with nature that could cost us dearly in the long run.”

Fur, Fortune and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America, by Eric Jay Dolin

The problem is, I interpreted the title wrong. I thought it was an epic history of the fur trade in America. Yes, I know it says that. But I thought it meant North America. Or at least that it meant the fur trade in parts of North America that later became the United States of America But it really was an epic history of the fur trade in the United States of America with occasional asides about the rest of the fur trade in North America, including parts that later became the United States of America. And, unfortunately, that means that the most fun part of the history of the fur trade in North America was off stage for most of this book.

I knew I was in trouble when it began with the Pilgrims. And while I understand that he was trying to show how the fur trade was an important part of the history of Plymouth Colony, the plain fact of the matter is that Plymouth Colony's fur trade failed fairly quickly (relatively speaking). In fact, most of this book is about the failed history of the American fur trade – at least until old John Jacob Astor decided to buy the entire trade and wipe out the animal population of the west. Which, if you think about it from an environmental perspective, is also a failure.

If you are looking for a thorough history of how the United States and its territorial expansion was affected by the fur trade this is a good place to start. If you are looking for a good history of the North American fur trade, reading this is like wanting to learn about Jazz and starting with a history of Jazz in France. Of necessity a little of the overall history has to be thrown in, but the picture is skewed.

And what is really odd is that the actual mechanics of the trade itself – with the Indians – seem glossed over. I was actually a bit excited that he spent some time talking about the evolution of New Amsterdam because I don’t know as much about New Amsterdam and the Albany trade as I’d like. But then I was disappointed that there wasn’t really much about actual Dutch people trading with actual Indians in it. Just a lot about Dutch people and English and Swedish people fighting over boundaries. The story of the Dutch as they actually traded and their relations with the Five Nations must have been more interesting than as portrayed in this book. Unlike the English in New England, the Dutch were relatively successful in their trade. But they failed as a colony. Reading this book reminded me that history is written by the victors.

And I know the French story was far more interesting than he portrayed it. And although the period I focus on is predominantly the 18th century and not the 19th century, I know that the story of the men involved in John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company was much more interesting than he made it. David Lavender’s biography of Ramsay Crooks, The Fist in the Wilderness, made them come alive for me. I highly recommend that book to anyone who really wants a picture of the trade in the 19th century to see if they are interested in learning more.

The truth is that he tried to put so much into this book that he ended up making it rather dry. The details seem accurate but it tends to plod along. And looking at the footnotes and the bibliography he seems to have relied quite a bit on secondary sources rather than primary sources, which is understandable given the breadth of the topic. But this lacks the spark that quotations from primary sources give.

On the other hand if you need a reference book on the fur trade that goes into a lot of really great detail about the animals being hunted, I think this is an excellent book.