Robin Hood and his merry . . . everything

Robin Hood has always been a favorite of mine because it is, for Anglo-derivative cultures, the fairy tale of which the Magna Carta is the founding document--the ideal of the rule of law, of the king and the sheriff being subjects of the law, not the origin of it. And, of course, it's just a lot of fun. Though I have to admit, it's a bit repetitive, something even the small ducklings twigged onto back when they would listen to the Howard Pyle audiobook every night. First Robin Hood meets a stranger--they get in a fight--Robin Hood loses--everybody laughs and they join Robin Hood's band. Though even that formula has a subtle truth about leadership. 

But what struck me more this time was the sheer joy at the root of protest. Robbing the rich to give to the poor is of course not quite on point; Robin Hood is part an Anglo-Saxon partisan sticking it back to the Normans and part his own arbiter of a rough justice. But though Robin Hood is happy to help out the poor when the occasion comes, it sounds to me like of the money lifted from the overfed abbots most of it goes to keep the merry men in ale and Lincoln green. Nonetheless, he certainly does have a revolutionary edge but I think the strength of it is that it comes from joy more than anger. If there is one adjective that gets painfully overused in the stories, it's merry. But that is also the key. Vengeance nearly always turns sour; the men get replaced with pigs but the same oppression goes on. But joy . . . joy can be shared. Joy can let us remember what we are fighting for. Even the Sheriff of Nottingham can join the fun if he only submits to lightening his purse and laughing at himself. 

Anyway, children have been reenacting Robin Hood and Little John for almost a thousand years and I hope they continue for a thousand years more. 

Moby Dick I finished it and it was well worth re-visiting; it won't be the last time. The more I read it the more the long digressions on natural history felt like the book itself was deliberately taking us on the similitude of a whaling voyage; long periods of boredom interspersed with heart-stopping action. And the compelling triad of the cheerful skepticism of Stubbs, the steadfast piety of Starbuck, both ultimately doomed by Ahab's obsession.  

And the Ocean was Our Sky by Patrick Ness. It seemed like a good time to do a Moby Dick riff; in this one, it's the whales who are the heroes. It was fun to read but I didn't feel the whale world quite held together and the book and its moral seemed at odds with each other. 

Life Between the Tides by Adam Nicholson. This one was a spontaneous grab from a library display and I was blown away by it. It's about a man building his own tide pool on the Scottish coast but it's also about philosophy, ecosystems, natural history, and nearly everything else, beautifully written. 

On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes by Alexandra Horowitz. This was recommended on a local book list and was fun read; the author walks around her own block, then takes a similar walk with a variety of experts, from a geologist to a sound engineer, to learn to notice more. My favorite of all was the walk with her toddler son, though. That was still one of my favorite things ever that the kids and I did when they were tiny; we could walk the same route every day for a year and there was always something to notice, something to talk about. Although my block is very different from Horowitz's and many of her experts would not have much to work with (there's almost no lettering and hardly any rocks except gravel) the idea of there always being more to see applies to everything.

Tress of the Emerald Sea by Brandon Sanderson. I have been meaning to read this for a long time but finally remembered to actually do it. It was utterly delightful; there are deadly spores and a brave and resourceful heroine and an adorable talking rat in a pirate hat and everything wrapped up just as it should, but in quite surprising ways. However, I am not satisfied with the water cycle explanation, even if it means I have no personality. 

The Island of Dr. Moreau by H. G. Wells. This was easy to get on audio once Moby Dick was over, inspired by some passing reading of a post complaining of the "mad scientist" trope because such individuals (as first typified by Dr. Moreau and Dr. Frankenstein) were clearly not mentally ill. This seemed not only to miss the rather obvious point that words have many shades of meaning, but that "mad" in particular is not about cause but effect: behavior that outrageously passes the bounds of human expectation--whether motivated by anger, mental illness, whimsy, or scientific hubris.