Narnia and the North

I reread all but one of the Narnia series on our weekend getaway we did for our anniversary in early September. In publication order, of course. It was and remains a delightful journey. Some of Lewis's adult women in his other books are a bit dubious, but his children, boys and girls, are uniformly real. (One of my favorite lines, ever since I *was* a child, was the exclamation "We can pretend we are Arctic explorers!" upon entering an entirely alternate world unphased. To be a child is to live in a world where everything is both wonderful and possible.) 

There seems to be some controversy these days about ethnic diversity in fantastical fiction, though whether there is any real controversy or just a few trolls and bots is always impossible to say. (We will soon reach the point where social media is entirely taken over by AI talking to itself and then we can all go play outside again.) This seems wrong-headed to me on either end of the spectrum. 

On the one hand, there is nothing at all wrong with people telling their own stories, even if they happen to be white people, and any fantasy rooted in folktales is going to reflect its place of origin and also humanity's intrinsic ethnocentricity. There is nothing offensive about all the characters in *Monkey King* being Asian and let's remember that Westerners tend to cast Aladdin as Middle Eastern but the Middle Eastern tale sets it in China, and how they tell it in China I don't know but I bet it's somewhere far away from there. If we want more diversity the thing to do is encourage and read stories by all different kinds of people. 

 On the other hand, anyone who really loves a story should think it a great compliment if it can work in different times and places or with people of different origins. That's a testament to its power and universality as a story. A prime example of this is Shakespeare. While quasi-Elizabethan performances are common, so is every possible kind of racial swapping, gender swapping, setting swapping, and while not every production is great there is no doubt that Shakespeare works in so many settings that Shakespeare himself could never have visualized, and very few people get huffy about it. 

 Anyway, supposedly Calormen is one of those areas that is problematic in Narnia and why *The Horse and His Boy* has never been cinematized even though it is a perfectly cinematic story. But on re-read I don't see *The Horse and His Boy* version of Calormen to be offensive. Lewis did not put much effort into worldbuilding, it's true, but then nobody at all did that I can think of before Tolkien. He simply mashes together a bunch of fairy-tale settings and Calormen is simply an Arabian Nights setting. Sure, it's a dictatorial society but then let's not forget the worst tyrant of all in Narnia is the *White* Witch so there is hardly a racial monopoly on such behavior. It's also a far more civilized place than Narnia and nobody looks askance at intermarriage. (It's actually *The Last Battle* that has far more offensive references to Calormen, but at that point Narnia is an occupied country and that does tend to make even the best people testy.) 

 But in contrast to that, I would like to point out something that nobody, not even Lewis particularly, seems to remember, which is that canonically, the Telmarines are at least 50% Pacific Islander in origin, and the rest of their heritage could and should be a pretty fair racial mix because it was a crew of pirates, who were not fussy about such things. And as far as I can tell all of the human population of Narnia is Telmarine from Caspian forward. I suggest someone cast The Rock as Lord Berne, the reclaiming of the Lone Islands could be a great little action episode. 

I think my favorite of the series is *The Silver Chair*, partly because it's simply a great straightforward quest story about holding on to hope in the dark and the cold, partly because of all the children I identify most with Jill's mix of down-to-earth grit and occasionally being a show off or breaking down, and partly because Puddleglum is just the absolute best. 

 Other books I read or didn't as the case may be: 

*I Cheerfully Refuse!* by Leif Enger: Enger is one of the very few current authors I make an effort to read new books more or less as they come out (I'm still slow). This is set in a not-so-distant dystopia and built on a tragic loss, and yet it's full of light and joy and laughter and the joyful defiance of friendship. love, and literature in the teeth of cruelty and ignorance. 

 *Elder Race* by Adrian Tchaikovsky. I enjoyed *Children of Time* so much I decided to check out some more, and this one was also great. It's a very quick read but it still manages to delve into the "science as magic" theme with great depth and also a thought-provoking exploration of the power and limits of dissociation as a coping method. 

 *In the Kingdom of Ice* by Hampton Sides. I have not finished this yet, but I intend to even though it is quite overdue. I still seem to be on a high seas adventure kick, and this one, about an unsuccessful attempt to find the "Open Polar Sea" has got perils, hubris, scientific advancement and follies, and the danger of taking a crewmember who is addicted to puns. After this I will probably need a Shackleton book. 

 And some I did not finish: 

*In the Kingdom of the Sick*. Despite the promising title, this was not nearly as interesting, being about how being chronically ill sucks and nobody gets it, especially doctors and insurance (public or private). While that is a valid point, I already could write several books on the topic so I don't see a point in finishing. 

 *The Dutch Wife* This was the current book club selection which I usually try to finish even if it's not my cup of tea (which realistic historical fiction seldom is) but I just couldn't do back to back chapters of rape, torture, and then more rape. For me anyway the graphic physical descriptions diminished rather than increased empathy so I called it quits.

A Wedding

 This does feel like a full circle moment, as this blog was started shortly after our own wedding and also very shortly before we found out Duchess was on the way, and now here we are. 

Professional shot

Coming out for pictures

Dinner

 

I did manage to make it on time and all siblings were present and suitably, if somewhat eccentrically, attired. (Though I realized two-thirds of the way through the day that I was wearing a mismatched set of boots. I did bring a more wedding-ish pair of heels for the ceremony but I changed back out as soon as it was over because we were getting pretty deep in mud and also I hate heels.)
 

Between Duchess and DOB they managed to orchestrate a beautiful and well-organized wedding on four weeks' notice based on Mr. Duchess's ever-shifting departure date for the Air Force. (We have been racking our brains to come up with a good blog name, but Mr. Duchess will have to do for now.) 

Our family has a long-standing joke about our surprisingly good luck with outdoor wedding weather in our very uncertain climate as over the past twenty-some years we, Their Majesties, Toolboy and his wife and a couple of years ago the oldest girl cousin all have had outdoor weddings in either September or May and the weather has uniformly been delightful. While September weather around here is a transition from the desert dry of July and August to the rainforest rest of the year, heavy rain is quite unusual and there are many beautiful days or at least beautiful hours. So we were hopeful when the weather forecast a few scattered showers with clearing.  

That is not what happened. What happened was it rained buckets, starting during the rehearsal the night before, when we scrambled to cover the tables before the decor got soaked (though Duchess had already prepared for that contingency with plastic tarps). Continuing through the rehearsal dinner, which we were supposed to have on the deck of a local restaurant but by great luck their indoor group canceled and we got the event room. And then the following day it drizzled throughout getting ready and set up, poured during the pictures, let up to a light drizzle for the ceremony in the woods, poured again for the reception, and only finally ended in time for dancing and send-off after dark. We had a few canopies to cover the meal tables but mostly everyone just got soaked. And had a marvelous time doing it. 

An Accomplishment

I have at last, for the first time ever, completed my coloring in page and obtained the library's 100-hour reader t-shirt for the summer reading program. While keeping track of time, or even the tracker, has been a barrier, I have to admit that even for me 100 hours in three months is quite a lot of reading. (DOB opines that reading for work should count but I never do count it, it's too fragmentary.) I don't listen to books in the car or while doing chores usually--I need a lot of auditory silence to function the rest of the time--so it essentially means I must eschew nearly all other leisure activities in favor of reading. It was fun to do but I'm also quite relieved to be done. I don't really need a lot of extra challenge in my life. 

My latest childhood re-read was Huckleberry Finn, which I picked up when James by Percival Everett came in at the library. It was a compelling pairing. The tone is understandably vastly different--Huck is a boy having the adventure of a lifetime, James is an adult in constant mortal peril. I didn't try to do a point-by-point comparison of the plot or timeline--most of major characters and events carry over and James has his own encounters during the portions where they are separated. The ending is completely different, but Tom's "rescue" is so absurd I don't see any way it could have fit in the more serious book. On the whole it gave a compelling perspective of what it is to live a life of oppression in a world superficially pleasant. There were a few places where James felt more like an idealized 21st century character than a genuine person in the past. For instance, while I can accept James as a skeptic, especially after sneaking Enlightenment authors out of Judge Thatcher's library, he comes across as a 21st century skeptic for whom the lack of the spiritual is a simple given not as a 19th century one always looking over his shoulder. More than that, the portrayal that all the enslaved people were feigning any religious fervor solely to pacify the white folks seemed disrespectful to the history and contribution of the African-American church. 

The Frugal Wizard's Guide to Surviving Medieval England by Brandon Sanderson was just plain fun. 

Doctor Thorne by Anthony Trollope. I needed one more long public domain audiobook to get me through and this was just the ticket. Except there are some events that did not happen in this one so clearly I'm going to need to finish the Barchester Chronicles. Trollope is particular vicious in his satire of the Victorian gentry posing over birth and money in this one. Also I had to laugh at the lawyer who complained of needing to work until 9 every night and then wasting hours of time just chit-chatting. I've seen those billable records. I'm still working on getting myself to stop at 5, though. 

1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed by Eric Cline. OK, I really have been spoiled by my recent ancient history readings. This one was, despite the inspiring title, quite dull and academic and full of hedged answers and cited quotations from specialists in Mycenean pottery, which caused me to lose interest and start speculating on how one becomes a specialist in Mycenean pottery and what their lives looked like. I guess it was interesting enough for me to finish, though. 

I almost forgot because I finished it awhile ago but wanted to wait to add it to my list until after book club discussion: A Warrior of the People by Joe Starita. I read this first about a year ago and thought my book club would enjoy it, which they did. Susan LaFlesche (the first Native American to become a doctor with Western medicine) was an amazing person and the way she and her siblings threaded the balance as advocates for their people and simultaneously helping their people adapt to the changing world was thought-provoking. It definitely held up to a re-read. 

And now Duchess is getting married in two weeks so who knows what reading will occur, although I'm not really trying to contribute anything more than showing up and making sure siblings are decently attired.  

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. 

The Princess and the Goblin

 The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald is one of the most perfect fairytale stories that exist. From the brisk mountain air to the absurd and terrifying goblins to the transcendent and mysterious Grandmother, with Irene's courage matched with faith and Curdie's courage matched with intelligence and humor, it has everything a fairy tale should have and I will never get tired of it. 

I have to read The Princess and Curdie to go with it, and I could hardly say I dislike it, but it's a very, very different book. Our hero and heroine have only advanced from primary to secondary school, but the tone of the book has advanced from childhood wonder to midlife crisis. The villains are not comical goblins, but ordinary people being selfish and cold in ordinary ways. And for that, there is no permanent cure. The last story's happily ever after dissolves and never comes back. The tone is so very different that I do want to sit Mr. MacDonald down and ask him what *was* going on when he wrote the second book. 

Other Books:

The Brothers Karamazov: I finally finished this. I loved the trial scenes, although I did probably spend an inordinate amount of time wondering whether the rules of evidence really allowed that or whether it was just the novelist's oversimplification. It ends satisfactorily but untidily, but I am left imagining my own ending in which Dmitri and Gruschenka *do* successfully escape to America where, despite Dmitri's current opinion, they settle permanently and Ivan and Katarina follow, along with Ilyosha, and thirty-five years later everyone is trying to have a nice normal American Thanksgiving for the sake of the grandchildren with all this dramatic backstory which keeps coming up awkwardly. 

How to Read Nature  by Tristan Gooley. Yes, I will just be working through all of this author's books I can get from the library. This is a small one and highly accessible, packed with very simple exercises that can be done without fancy equipment right where you are. The theme is the opposite of snooty, as Gooley focuses on the conflict, sex and death that always arrest human attention and that are going on all around us all the time. 

Monkey King: Journey to the West, by WuCheng'En, translated by Julia Lovell. I actually started this when Dame chose it for school last year but I've taken it slowly and just now finished up. This is a classic Chinese fantasy tale, and it is a wild ride. It reminds me of nothing so much as Looney Tunes with the wisdom of fools and so much slapstick. I presume it's been serialized many times. Monkey King is a subversive, obnoxious, and hilarious trickster hero and I remain a little in doubt that he's actually achieved enlightenment by the end. The translation is pretty accessible but as with most old stories modern parents might want to edit a few parts for the younger readers. 

Moby Dick by Herman Melville. I *was* listening to this on Spotify and then they put in a 10-hours max per month audiobook rule so now I'm listening on Librivox. Anyway, the dry Yankee wit is a welcome change from all the Russian drama. (My favorite scene is when Ishmael tells the captain that he wants to sign onto a whaling ship to "see the world." The captain gestures to the water over the starboard side as a fair sample of what he will actually be seeing.)  

It's certainly long-winded but I find myself enjoying the diversions and rambles and there's a lot of interesting insight into early natural history and classifications. Think of it as a podcast. It goes well with farming or grinding in video games. Every era has its way of wasting colossal amounts of time and everyone wrings their hands over the current ones and praises the prior ones as superior or abuses them as tedious but the reality is, we're large mammals. While movement is essential, we aren't meant to spend all day every day tearing around like insects or hummingbirds. We're meant to "waste" a good bit of our time, it's how we operate. 

Also, I'm making great progress towards my 100-hour reader t-shirt for the first time ever. 

Echo North by Joanna Ruth Meyer. There are a lot of retellings of East o' the Sun, West o' the Moon, or as I think of it, the Heroine's Journey (aka Cupid and Psyche or Beauty and the Beast), but that doesn't mean there's no need for more. This one felt a bit cliche to me at first but it drew me in. 

Stories in the Stars by Susanna Hislop. Dame has been on an astronomy kick lately wanting to learn to identify some more constellations, so I reserved a bunch of books. (This time of the year is the only time we really have a shot at observing the stars on any regular basis; unfortunately it takes a very long time to get dark.) This one was not particularly helpful for identifying but is more a highly varied sampler of the stories behind them. I did enjoy learning about some of the more modern creations or the myths from different cultures. 

A Walk through the Heavens by Milton D. Heifetz and Wil Tirion. This one, on the other hand, is perfect for actually finding new constellations, it starts you off at the Big Dipper and gives step by step instructions to each one. We also discovered that some old red tissue paper over a flashlight works fine for preserving night vision. And I have discovered that my eyes are starting to decline, and I cannot see all the stars that Dame can. I should have spent more time learning constellations when I was younger, I suppose.  But I can spot Cygnus now, and Vega of the Lyre. 

Trial by Jury

Progressing through *The Brothers Karamazov* I was startled to hear a jury being selected. Tsarist Russia has trial by jury? Turns out it did, for some crimes, for a little while, as part of Tsar Alexander II's reforms in the 1860s, shortly after freeing the serfs and ending with the 1917 revolution. This law review article answered a lot of my questions, though being over twenty years old it still leaves me wondering how the revival of trial by jury is going these days. 

Anyway, you can hear the skepticism of the upper classes as the jury is seated--what can these muzhiks know about the passions and motives of a (sort of) aristocratic Karamazov? Well, everything, of course, because crimes are committed by humans for human reasons, and what we need of the jury is to simply be human beings. Which brings in Chesterton's great defense of exactly why the right to jury is so important: 

Our civilisation has decided, and very justly decided, that determining the guilt or innocence of men is a thing too important to be trusted to trained men. It wishes for light upon that awful matter, it asks men who know no more law than I know, but who can feel the things that I felt in the jury box. When it wants a library catalogued, or the solar system discovered, or any trifle of that kind it uses up its specialists. But when it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round.

Interestingly, while jury nullification (i.e. the unavoidable ability of the jury to refuse to convict a person even though the case against them is proven, because they disapprove of the law) is a hush-hush or lunatic fringe concept in American law, it was explicitly authorized and stated in Russian trials. Yet despite that, and despite a presumably higher historic degree of antagonism between the government and the people, acquittal rates in Russia were always similar to those in the US, which suggests that perhaps we will not unloose anarchy if we talk about it.  

My practice does not involve many jury trials, none criminal, but I have conducted or assisted with a few. From what I have seen, it is quite true that it is impossible to impress the nuances of legal concepts upon a jury. No matter how carefully explained, they will have no comprehension of burden of proof or causation. But they will very seriously try to understand who is in the wrong and to be fair, and in the end that comes out as close as we could ask for. 

On a lighter note, the miniseries Jury Duty provided a goofy but surprisingly heartwarming look at our judicial system. The premise is that a single person gets what they believe to be a legitimate jury duty summons and is seated on what appears to be a real jury. Only everyone--judge, attorneys, litigants, and all the other jurors--are actors. (The judge is also a retiring judge, so the legal process itself is fairly accurate.) The actors then provide increasingly absurd hijinks yet, through it all, our random juror remains committed to trying to give the litigants a fair trial and make a just ruling. 

The Phantom Tollbooth

 Last winter someone was asking in a Facebook group on reading for more books like *The Phantom Tollbooth* and neither Bookworm nor I could come up with any. There's really nothing like *The Phantom Tollbooth*. However, on further reflection, although it would completely skew anyone's expectations of either book, what *The Phantom Tollbooth* is most like is *Pilgrim's Progress.* It is a *Pilgrim's Progress* of the mind. The zany characters and situations are not merely a series of puns, they are the embodiment of ideas, turns of phrase, paradoxes. And it is, of course, a moral journey: from ignorance and indifference to wisdom and curiosity. 

I am afraid that will convince no one to read it, or the people who do read it will find it not at all what they were expecting. It is also a hilarious, delightful, relatively easy read. It has been one of my favorite books since I first read it at an age so young I no longer remember. It was definitely the most formative book of my first decade of life. As a child for whom abstract knowledge came more readily than the often overwhelming world of the senses, it convinced me that the real world was full of wonder as well. 

Other Books:

*Atlas of a Lost World* by Craig Childs. G. K. Chesterton writes in several places with great humor of the folly of archaeologists and anthropologists imagining "primitive man" (as the term used at the time) as some utterly alien being full of incomprehensible behaviors instead of (whether separated by time or geography) people very much like us with customs no stranger, when you stop to think about it, than our own. Fortunately I think this is one area where the prevailing mindset has improved, and this book was a terrific example. The author writes of various archaeological discoveries related to the arrival of humans to the Americas in the Ice Age, and intersperses those with his personal camping and travel experiences (on foot or by boat) among landscapes that might resemble those of the Ice Age. It's a wonderful exercise of the imagination, vividly portraying the courage, curiosity, and skill must have taken to survive in a world of megafauna.  

*The Summer Book* by Tove Jansson. This is a deceptively simple book, about a little girl and grandmother experiencing summer on a remote island in the Gulf of Finland. That sounds rather saccharine, but it is not. Grandmother is not growing old gracefully and the little girl is as contrary and unpredictable as any real child and the simple life close to nature is undertaken with the casual indifference of an earlier era when it was perfectly normal to throw your trash into the sea. There is Father, too, but he is a middle-aged person who spends all his time working or fishing. It's up to the very old and very young to experience being human.

*The Brothers Karamazov* I've almost made it to Dmitri's trial. I really don't think much of Dmitri but I also don't think he did it. Dostoevsky is certainly deft about exploring the labyrinths of the human mind: though everyone is a bit over the top, especially the women, they are over the top in recognizable ways. 

*Songs of Willow Frost* by Jamie Ford. This is the current book club selection, so I am finishing it even though it's not the kind of thing I like (but it is definitely the kind of thing that winds up picked for book clubs so apparently a lot of people do like that kind of thing.) It's a notable local author who provides well-developed stories illuminating local history. I just don't really read to deal with realistic family problems and personal calamities, that's what I deal with all day. But I take it like medicine and then I go read something like:

*Oath of Swords* *The War God's Own* *Wind Rider's Oath* *War Maid's Choice* by David Weber. These are the books you read when you want some big damn heroes with great big swords to stabbity stab some even bigger nasty demons. While the main character, Bahzell, a verrry reluctant paladin, is a joy in any circumstance, I'm also a big fan of his fellow paladin Dame Kareitha, who has a sword divinely blessed to let her know when documents are forged and who settles boundary disputes with some deft legal expertise combined with using the sword in its more traditional fashion. 

*What Feasts at Night* by T. Kingfisher. I never know what to say if people ask if I like horror. I don't find horror particularly horrifying for whatever reason, so reading for pure adrenalin does not work for me. It's a book, nothing's going to eat me. If there's interesting psychological development, though, horror doesn't put me off. This series, by T. Kingfisher, tends to have a rather botanical twist and features frequent appearances by Beatrix Potter's aunt, a noted mycologist.