Puttering in the Study

A Thread Across the Ocean - John Steele Gordon (#1581)

Just finished this short book about the laying of the transatlantic cable.  Was a little disappointed - while it told a story that was interesting, it didn't tell it in a very interesting way.  It was a little too much narrative and not enough drama - an example of a similar book that had enough drama is "Brunelleschi's Dome" by Ross King, about the creation of the Duomo in Florence.

Long Before Forty - C.S. Forester (1580)

This is a autobiography C.S. Forester wrote about his life up to the age of 31 or so, written when he was about forty.  It also contains the background on his development of the Horatio Hornblower novels, written many years later for "The Hornblower Companion."  I found this very enjoyable reading - Forester has  a dry wit and a wonderful way of explaining things, and told a very interesting story about his upbringing, with primary emphasis on his schooling and how he drifted into wanting to become a novelist.  What I enjoyed particularly was his description of reading as a boy, devouring encycploedias and books at the local library (which sounded a little familiar...)

Pond bridge waterfall

I posted a few weeks ago about the work I had been doing getting the pond bridge channel excavated.  I finally got it more or less completed (at least for the moment) and took some pictures of the resulting waterfall yesterday after we got some heavy rain the night before.

Download MOV00472.MPG

The First Men in the Moon - H.G. Wells (#1332)

I just reread this old favorite - this time a "critical text" with an introduction and appendices edited by Leon Stover.  The book was good, as usual, but the introduction, which focused on Wells' opinions and theories about uptopian and dystopian societies (yawn).  Unfortunately the annotations focused on the same thing, not paying much attention to the story itself - just focusing on what the story might be telling us about Wells' views about society.

Frankly, I don't really care about Wells' opinions as to how society ought to function, or even the fact that he was probably using the story the same way Stover is using it - as a fable to illustrate some point about the failings of society, and how we'd all do better if we had a central world government.  I'm just looking for a good science fiction read.  So, while I normally enjoy an annotated version of a book I like (I devour ones on works by Bram Stoker and J.R.R. Tolien, for example) this one actually detracted from the enjoyment of the story.  Yes, yes, I know it's literary analysis, but that wasn't what I had in mind.

Still, it was good to see the story through a new pair of eyes.  Now I'm just waiting to get the DVD of the 1960's movie of the book.

The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien

Just finished rereading the trilogy - last reread was in 2002.  Before that I hadn't read since college (maybe high school - not real sure).  This time I read the 1992 "Centenary"edition illustrated by Alan Lee, since supposedly his illustrations for this edition served as the inspiration for a lot of the movies' images.

It's interesting how much of the movie's dialogue came directly from the book, although the characters saying the dialogue and the place in which it occurs changes in a lot of cases.  One of the things that struck me this time was how much detail Tolkien put into place descriptions.  He would wander on - frequently for a paragraph or two describing locations in such detail that it becomes very hard to believe that he wasn't describing a particular location he had seen.  The same sort of detail is apparently in the appendices in volume , which I finally read, start to finish.  The amount of detail he puts into the chronologies, the history of the kings of the various kingdoms, etc. puts the trilogy into such a historical context that you have to keep reminding yourself that this isn't real. 

But the thing that just blew me away this time was the "translation" notes I had never read before, where Tolkien describe, apologetically almost, how he changed the real characters' names in translating the story from the original Elvish or Westron to try to get them to come across the same way in English as they would have in the characters' original tongues.  I had read this in high school far enough to learn how to write using Tengwar characters, but I hadn't read the notes on translation of character and place names.  It seems that Tolkien changed the character and place names to give them an English feel so they'd sound to modern readers like they did to the original.  Thus "Merry" or Meriadoc was really Kalimac, and he chose the name he did because the shortened form "Kali" had the same jolly sort of double meaning in Westron that "Merry" has in English.  He then casually mentions that Sam Gamgee and his father Ham were originally "Ban and Ran".  All these changes were to "modernize and make familiar" the language and places of hobbits.  Probably not surprising for a professor of languages, but this is incredible - it's like reading Shakespeare's notes on how he changed the facts of "Henry V" from the historical record.  Except that there's no historical record here - Tolkien is making all this up, and then inventing backstory upon backstory upon backstory for it.  This makes it more like George Lucas saying that Luke Skywalker was really Luca Skivversads, and Darth Vader was really Divvy Waba, but he thought changing their real names would make them work better for the movies.  I can just picture what Tolkein must have been like after dinner puttering around his study mumbling to himself.  I'll bet no one asked him what he was thinking more than once!

Of course the language of the trilogy is also hopelessly archaic, and you really come to admire (and thank) the scriptwriters for the movie for keeping the flavor but not the substance of the writing.  Until this morning when I read the paper I had never heard of a living person using the word "alas" but these guys do it all the time.  But it is still a phenomenal work - probably still the greatest work of imagination ever written down.  I already have it penciled down to reread next year.  I'm hoping to get the new leatherbound version to read this time.

Battlestar Galactica - season finale

Okay, if I wasn't hooked on the new SciFi series Battlestar Galactica before, I sure am after watching the season finale last night.  There were four intensely interesting story threads going on, and by the end of the episode, virtually every character was in a major-league situation, including being shot, arrested, stranded on a planet, involved in major developments with an alien race - you name it. 

While I taped all the episodes (thank you TiVo) I am anxiously awaiting the season 1 DVDs.  This year's episodes are ones to savor.  Again, the characters are great - that's why I like this remake.  But the writing is magnificent.  I'm something of a student of the original series, and while it'll always be a sentimental favorite, the writing was never better than passable, and was frequently just plain awful - episode after episode were just recycled western stories set on the Universal back lot.  I didn't really understand what the writers of this story meant when they talked about the possibilities the series presented, but I do now.  They are handling the original series' vaguely religious story lines about the birth of humanity on a planet called Kobol with so much more sophistication.  Not just Eqyptian flight helmets & pyramids here.

Next season starts in July with 20 new episodes.  I can't wait.