Grand unified books thread

[Syt]

Nicholas Binge - Ascension

When a mountain mysteriously appears in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, a group of scientists are sent to investigate – and discover what is at the summit.

Eminent scientist, explorer and chronic loner Harry Tunmore is among those asked to join the secret mission – and he has his own reasons for joining the team beyond scientific curiosity...

Very Lovecraftian in form - a man discovers his brother who had disappeared nearly 30 years ago in an asylum. The brother is incoherent and proceeds to off himself ... but he left behind a collection of unsent letters that tell the tale of what happened on that mysterious mountain back in the ancient past of ... 1991. (I feel old.)

It's a bit of At the Mountains of Madness, The Thing (scientists in a hostile cold climate), and X-Files.

It's a pretty quick read with enough crumbs along the way to get an idea what's happening before the main character does. Maybe a bit too cliché at times including some very stock characters. And the ending was a bit of a letdown for me, in the sense of, "Really? That's it?" I felt almost comedic.

7/10.

[mongers]

I intend to read more books this year than last, which was a shocking performance on my part. 

[Sheilbh]

Got slightly side-tracked for reasons but down to the last three Booker long list and last year's list was very, very good. Most of the way through Kiran Desai's The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny and it's fantastic. I've never read Kiran Desai before but will definitely be picking up The Inheritance of Loss some time this year.

She didn't win this time but think she's possibly one of the doors opened for me from this year's list, a bit like last year's list sent me working my way through Tan Twan Eng's catalogue.

On the non-fiction front, I'm about halfway through Sudhir Hazareesingh's Black Spartacus and it's a revelation. I've already stacked up How the French Think to pick up again later this year. Black Spartacus is a new lif of Toussaint Louverture. It is fantastic.

I think CLR James' The Black Jacobins is possibly the greatest history book I've ever read so I possibly had quite a high bar to clear for someone writing about the Haitian revolution, but it's an extraordinary re-telling (I understand there's been a lot of new research and discoveries on Louverture) on the fashioning of a new, not just derivative republicanism. (Though I still perhaps sympathise more with James' take emphasising the masses )

I'll also pick up Hazareesingh's Daring To Be Free which I think came out last year which sounds very interesting - and I recently read Marcus Rediker's The Slave Ship so possiby a complement to that.

[Norgy]

Jeff Sharlet, "The Undertow". Beautiful, frightening and exceedingly well written. A series of essays covering the division of the United States. Sharlet met quite a few characters, following the trail of Ashli Babbit's deification after Jan 6th 2021.

For me, it was an enlightening read, and one that further convinces me that the term conservative is meaningless with the regards to politics anymore. It is either code for reactionary or wildly radical religious, racist zealotry. There is no reform to conserve. Just visions of an imagined happy past. 

Currently reading "Unholy" by Sarah Posner about the "unlikely", yet very likely coalition of the Evangelicals and the "Alt-Right" prior to 2016.

I think I need something brighter and more hopeful soon, as this subject matter is dragging me down into a mental abyss of hopelessness. Maybe I'll just read "The Remains Of The Day" again and go and lie down in the woods.

[Sheilbh]

Love The Remains of the Day.

Also off the top of my head not sure I can think of a better/higher quality book and movie combo. Both fantastic.

[Jacob]

Just ordered this book:

This book argues that tribal Scandinavia was set on the route to kingship by the arrival in the AD 180s–90s of warrior groups that were dismissed from the Roman army after defeating the Marcomanni by the Danube.

Using a range of evidence, this book details how well-equipped and battle-seasoned warriors, familiar with Roman institutions and practices, seized land and established lordly centres. It shows how these new lords acquired wealth by stimulating the production of commodities for trade with peers and Continental associates, Romans included, to reward retainers and bestow on partners. In these transcultural circumstances, lords and their retainers nurtured artisanal production of exquisite quality and developed a heroic ethos and refined hall etiquette. The topic of warfare, created by the volatile politics of lordly cooperation and competition, is also explored. Venturing substantially beyond the usual scope of syntheses of this period, this book looks at how the break-up of the Western Roman Empire and the rise of 'Great tribes' such as the Franks and Goths influenced lords and tribal leaders across Scandinavia to form kingdoms, emulating what they for centuries had considered the superior polity, the Roman Empire.

This book's fresh take on disputed research topics will inspire scholars, students, and interested readers to delve further into this pivotal period of European history.

https://www.routledge.com/The-Northern-Routes-to-Kingship-A-History-of-Scandinavia-AD-180-550/Skre/p/book/9781138831384

[The Brain]

nurtured artisanal production

Hipster origin story.

[Norgy]

Just ordered this book:

Skre is a well-regarded archaeologist in Norway, leading the excavations at Harald Fairhair's supposed seat at Karmøy, Avaldsnes.

I think it will be a good read.

[Oexmelin]

I think CLR James' The Black Jacobins is possibly the greatest history book I've ever read so I possibly had quite a high bar to clear for someone writing about the Haitian revolution, but it's an extraordinary re-telling (I understand there's been a lot of new research and discoveries on Louverture) on the fashioning of a new, not just derivative republicanism. (Though I still perhaps sympathise more with James' take emphasising the masses )

Yes. A lot has been done on the Haitian Revolution in the last few years - and a lot has been made to make it accessible in English. Quite a bit isn't as great a read as The Black Jacobin, but maybe you'd like Ada Ferrer's Freedom's Mirror, which is about the Revolution's impact on Cuba.

[Sheilbh]

Yes. A lot has been done on the Haitian Revolution in the last few years - and a lot has been made to make it accessible in English. Quite a bit isn't as great a read as The Black Jacobin, but maybe you'd like Ada Ferrer's Freedom's Mirror, which is about the Revolution's impact on Cuba.

Thanks! I'll certainly take a look.

And I should say I'm not expecting James to be definitive - my personal experience of it as such a great book is more about style.

Finished both books and they ended strongly, in Black Spartacus I particularly enjoyed the last chapter on his receptions and versions of Louverture - so definitely be of interest to see the book about impact in Cuba.

Just ordered this book:

Looks very interesting.

[Sheilbh]

Just read Pekka Hamalainen's Lakota America - which was very interesting. The whole text is in large part about re-centring and injecting agency into this narrative - it's subtitle is a new history of indigenous power. He is writing explictly against the grain of history that has this story - however framed - as ultimately ending up at and building to Little Bighorn and Wounded Knee. Instead this is a story of an adaptable indigenous power building its own power, managing relations with competing indigenous powers and colonial empires.

And yet, I think it is impossible to read without reading through the end. I feel like he's trying to write against it but there is just an inherent pathos.

Also onto the last book I need to read on the Booker longlist which is Tash Aw's The South, and I can confirm that last year's was a fantastic* list. I'm not sure there's  book on ther I wouldn't recommend

*very aligned with my tastes

[Jacob]

So I'm slowly working my way through this, and it's pretty heavy going as it's at about my limit for academic writing - but it is super fascinating.

Skre clearly has a bunch to say in a number of scholarly controversies in his and related fields and I've enjoyed his contributions. All the "some people make this argument, which is deep and profound and contributes a bunch of stuff, but doesn't seem to address A, B, and C which this author finds surprising" and so on. Nothing like a good snarky academic shit-fight

The topic of the book is essentially the social changes amongst Scandinavians in the period 180 - 550 CE. The sources are not massively abundant. So Skre takes a very thorough interdisciplinary approach - the opening chapters about methodology cover a wide range of disciplines relating to human society, motivations, how hierarchies and heterarchies function, how power is accrued and exercised, the nature of heroism in specific cultures and whether there's a more universal quality, and so on. It's all applied to the topic at hand - the societies of pre-viking-age Scandinavia, but I found the approach and analysis illuminating and an interesting lens to apply to current events. Very stimulating.

I'm about 100 pages in and it's getting a little more focused - Skre is discussing Beowulf as a potential source of insight into Scandinavian society in the period. Therefore, the question of the origin of the poem is very relevant. Was Beowulf authored by a talented Anglo-Saxon creative, using Scandinavia as a setting (a view initially articulated by our homie J.R.R. Tolkien and still a mainstream position among Beowulf scholars) or did it actually originate in Scandinavia in the period (and therefore provides more useful insight into the social structures of the time)?

As I said, the Englishness of Beowulf is a mainstream position, especially among Beowulf scholars (relying primarily on literary analysis). However, applying a multidisciplinary approach, Skre makes a strong case (IMO, but I'm typically persuaded by the book at hand in these types of situations ) that it's Scandinavian in origin. He touches on linguistics and other evidence, but particularly persuasive IMO is the degree to which the scenes in Beowulf match the contemporary Scandinavian material culture as attested by archaeology, in ways that did not exist in England in the relevant period (though in cases it appeared in later periods).

[Norgy]

Skre's mostly accepted, yet in its time, controversial hypothesis was that the kingship of Norway was in the west at Avaldsnes. A slow building of strength.

[Sheilbh]

FWIW I'd be interested to hear more about the Beowful comment.

In part because I'm not sure on the Englishness point so would love to know more. Certainly when I studied it, it was understood as being set in Denmark and probably tied to or originating in an older oral tradition/story (all Old English poetry was oral and has some of the same sort of formulas like in Homer).

Where I think the Englishness maybe comes in is obviously that the text is in Old English (as a text) - but the real point on Englishness was more that it is clearly a poem from a Christian society so it is a very non-judgemental re-telling of a pagan story (a huge theme in Anglo-Saxon poetry is elegy and elegiac tone there's some suggestion that is almost a structural quality of elegy of a newly Christianised society remembering their past). There's basically nothing of Gods or the wider mythic world Beowulf himself lives in, instead all the references are to a more generic but perhaps safe "father almighty" and there are explicit Biblical references in the text - there's definitely a debate over whether Beowulf is a "Christianised" hero in a pagan world or if the whole story is in effect a Christian re-casting.

(Although I wonder if the assumptions and version you get from a literary critical/English department version of academia is different from what the historians and archaeologists are thinking about something? I've had the experience reading a history and then suddenly being jolted out of it by the most unsophisticaed, flat-footed reading of a text I know so it might be that they're positioning it in an English tradition )

Edit: Also I think that's slightly harsh on Tolkien. He is absolutely central still in Beowulf and Anglo-Saxon criticism but that's because he made the argument that it needed to be read as a poem first and foremost - until then it had just been viewed as an interesting historical artefact (because only the Classical world was capable producing poetry worth studying/enjoying as art). Before him it was seen as a source on the Anglo-Saxons. But I'm fairly sure part of his interpretation was that it was a poem that was clearly from an inherited tradition. What might be the difference is that Tolkien's view was that it was a creative act basically taking the raw material of inherited traditions and sifting or forging that in an act of creation into a narrative poem and I suppose that might be the difference? Tolkien emphasises the creative act/Beowulf as art but if it's inherited traditions you will see within it the material world those traditions come from (but that is perhaps just re-framing how 19th century philologists read it? ).

[Jacob]

FWIW I'd be interested to hear more about the Beowful comment.

...

Well I can't speak to it in depth, relying as I am on Skre's summary which is primarily a "here's where I stand in this controversy, and why" as a building block towards his larger argument.

Tolkien is mentioned primarily - I think  - because he's one of the originators of modern Beowulf scholarship. I don't think there are any aspersions cast his way.

There are basically two main points of contention - the single author vs multiple author question, and the English origin vs Scandinavian origin question... well three, I suppose, as the original date of origin as been argued to likely be at different points in the 5th, 6th, and 7th centuries. 

Arguments have apparently been going back and forth since the 50s and my impression is that there's not a wide consensus yet. Skre cites papers as recent as 2008 attempting to (unconvincingly he says) reconcile the archeological record with an Anglo-Saxon origin Beowulf, for example. It sounds, however, like your instruction was based on the "multiple author / Scandinavian origin" interpretation, which is Skre's as well. There's probably significant nuance on top of that (there always is), but I'm not sure I'm equipped to articulate it

Skre posits a world in which epic songs were performed by itinerant singers in the vein of Widsith across at least parts of the Germanic world as part of a kingly hall culture that had evolved. The languages were similar enough that the clever performer could adapt in different halls. The song or skaldic poem was largely self-contained and resistant to incidental change (due to the complexity of the form), but individual performers nonetheless added or changed elements to suit the specific audience.

Beowulf, Skre suggests, was composed in Scandinavia but the crossed into England, as it was part of a larger cultural continuum were such songs and poems were performed. That tradition of such performances continued into the Christian era where relevant changes were made to suit the (sometimes ecclesiastical) Christian audiences, but the remainder of was the poem was largely unadulteratedly pagan (though the concerns of that pagan warrior-ethos society were still relevant to the Christian warrior-ethos society which is the reason the songs were still performed).

One of Skre's primary arguments here (which I find compelling) is that the material culture described and implied in Beowulf matches the archeological record for an earlier Scandinavian authorship quite closely in ways that are absent in both the Anglo-Saxon Christian society in which Beowulf was written down, and I believe during the earlier periods where a proposed English author is would have composed it.

... that's my understanding anyhow