Robert Harris: Lustrum

One of my top book recommendations in recent years has been Imperium, Robert Harris’ thriller-like novel on the early career of Marcus Tullius Cicero. Now the second part of the trilogy, Lustrum,  has appeared, and like most second parts of trilogies, is darker and more depressing than the first one.

It’s 63 BC and Cicero is on the eve of his consulship, when a particularly gruesome murder is brought to his attention that turns out to foreshadow even worse things to come. His term as a consul is troubled by the Catiline conspiracy, which he manages to uncover and put down at the last moment, but at a terrible personal and political cost. The execution of the conspirators will haunt him for years to come, while at the same time the vulture-like Caesar, together with powerful Pompey and rich Crassus, is preparing to disembowel the republic…

As expected, Harris turns the well-known story into a ripping yarn, and the historical protagonists such as grim and grimy Cato, lascivious Clodia and the truly blood-curdling Caesar are very memorable. I also really liked how Harris constructs a plausible motivation for Cicero’s descent into corruption and self-aggrandizement. However, this book wasn’t quite as much a page-turner as the first one, but I don’t think the blame can really be laid at Harris’ feet: at this point in history, I found it very hard to care for the fate of the Roman republic, which comes across as a thoroughly corrupt system designed merely to make a ruling elite rich and  stripped of all that had initially been sensible about it. I mean, I am all in favour of republics and so on, but this one just seemed to have run its course.

As everyone knows, much worse is yet to come and Cicero is going to meet a sticky end. Which is why I am very much looking forward to book three!

Lev Grossman: The Magicians

If you have ever experienced the delicious dive into enchanting magical book worlds and still find yourself secretly or not so secretly longing for more, but at the same time feel a little embarrassed about the blatant escapism that marks so much fantasy writing, here’s a wonderful new novel that lets you eat your magical cake – and have it!

Quentin Coldwater is among the brightest of the brightest high school students in New York, but neither academic success nor the chances offered to him at prestigious colleges have yet managed to make him happy. He’s constantly feeling left out, ignored, spurned by potential love interests – in short, a typical unhappy teenager, whose one consolation are his daydreams that take him into the magical world of Fillory from a series of children’s books*. One day, on his way to an interview for Princeton, mysterious circumstances transport him to a secret magical college where he has to sit a highly entertaining and fantastical entrance exam and is eventually admitted.

This sounds familiar, of course. Actually, the students who attend Brakebills College appear to have all read the Harry Potter books and occasionally make jokes about broomsticks, but the magic practised at Brakebills is both more luminous and more difficult than what J.K. Rowling came up with. This is no stale re-run of a familiar plot: Grossman creates a world that is entirely his own and that anyone in their right mind will immediately fall in love with. This is no children’s book: there’s sex, drugs and a lot of drinking, but most of all there is a sense of threat and mystery that’s more reminiscent of books like The Secret History.

For magic is a dangerous thing, and it may lead you to places that are fare more threatening than their reputation may have led you to believe. When in the last third of the book, Quentin and his friends enter a new magical world, the story, despite all the monsters and spectacular fights and the nods to Narnia, is still a novel about reading, about growing up and about the disenchantment with the world that comes with adulthood.

This is truly an excellent read: fast-paced, funny, wonderfully imagined, cleverly tongue-in-cheek and also rather scary. Read it before everyone else does!

Listen to an NPR story about the book and read an excerpt – it’s from the wonderful exam scene!

Author’s website

*Am I right to assume that before the films came out, people here in Germany didn’t really know about Narnia, the beginner’s drug in fantastical literature? I read it as a child, and it was one of the first English books I read, but I’ve always had the impression that the books weren’t too popular here.

Summer reading, in brief

• Nicholas Drayson, A Guide to the Birds of East Africa. Reserved and old-fashioned Mr Malik is a man of passion – even if his friends at the Asadi Club in Nairobi (a place of gentlemanly leisure where elaborate bets about say, the frequency of Danish farts are discussed with utmost colonial decorum) have never noticed. He has long harboured a secret love for Mrs Rose Mbikwa, the Tuesday-morning bird walk leader, and when a former schoolmate turns up and becomes a rival for Rose’s hand, things start to get very interesting. This is a very charming and funny and moving book, with a quietly heroic hero, a tongue-in-cheek narrator and plenty of African action. Highly recommended.
  Will young advanced learners like it? I think so, if they enjoy gentle comedy.
• Julie Powell, Julie & Julia. It’s a bit lame to read the book just before the film comes out, but it was enjoyable enough, particularly the really rather sexy food parts.
  Will young advanced learners like it? Possibly, but they would  have to be into food.
• Roddy Doyle, A Star Called Henry. I’ve made another attempt to work up some compassion for the Irish Cause, but even though this is a very finely written novel with the punchiest dialogue, outrageously casual violence, a truly horrifying Irish childhood, mesmerizing characters possessed of a mind-boggling sex drive, I still fail to be particularly interested. That’s probably because Doyle himself has very little time for romanticizing Irish history. This, of course, is a good thing.
  Will young advanced learners like it? The extremely good writing, the fun, sex and violence certainly make it a good candidate, but you have to be able to tolerate a lot of history that you (or at least, I) don’t know a thing about.
• Marilynne Robinson, Gilead. John Ames, preacher in a small Iowa town, is dying and feels the need to account for his life to his six-year-old son. Written in ethereally beautiful prose, it tells of several generations of Ames fathers and sons, reaching all the way back to the time before the Civil War. It’s a meditation on faith, the justification of war, fatherhood, pain and joy. Very beautiful, and I will definitely re-read it soon.
  Will young advanced learners like it? I would suggesting waiting for a few more years before reading this book. But make sure you get round to it eventually, it’s really worth it.
• Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies. I like seafaring books and books about India, so this one was bound to be a hit. The Ibis, a former slave ship, is about to depart from Calcutta with a cargo of migrant workers going to Mauritius, as well as several characters who are there for wildly divergent reasons. Fantastically colourful and studded with the oddest languages from Anglo-Indian to pidgin, it’s a rolicking good read that I really didn’t want to end (Ghosh has promised two more instalments, though!). If it doesn’t make the top tier of recent novels, it’s because some of the characters are a little too saintly to be believed. Nevertheless, an extremely enjoyable book!
  Will young advanced learners like it? The weird languages are a bit hard to understand, but otherwise this is a great adventure story.
  

Neil Gaiman: The Graveyard Book

I recently enjoyed reading Neil Gaiman’s novel for older children, The Graveyard Book, which tells the story of Nobody Owens, who is raised by ghosts after his family have been slaughtered by a very mysterious assassin. Yes, it’s a children’s book, but these days, they’re sold as All Age books, aren’t they – and this one even comes in a different cover for adults. Neil Gaiman writes so very beautifully and manages to combine the horrific and the graceful so well that I think this book deserves a wide audience.

He also has a lovely voice, and on his website you can actually listen to him read every single chapter of the book. Frankly, I don’t think anyone will be able to sit still long enough to do that on a computer, but it’s worth having a look at.

Edit: I meant to say more about Neil Gaiman’s voice, which I first heard on a Guardian Books podcast where he was introducing Susannah Clarke and her short story collection The Ladies of Grace Adieu. In my very humble opinion, the sort of rich and slightly rumbling baritone he is blessed with sets off to perfection British English with its clipped consonants and overtone-rich vowels. Yum.

Great Non-Fiction: Confederates in the Attic

This book was recommended to me for this series by an invisible friend with the words “…it will let them laugh at the crazy Americans”. Now, while I don’t endorse Laughing at the Crazy Americans – a very narrow-minded European custom – I did indeed laugh at the many deliciously crazy people in this book, but I also enjoyed the unique window it provides into the American soul as well as the exciting adventures the author had on battlefields, in musty old museums and other godforsaken places.

Tony Horwitz, a former war correspondent in the Middle East, wakes up one morning to gunfire in his peaceful Virginia village, only to find a bunch of Civil War reenactors on his lawn, clad in Confederate uniforms so authentic (read: filthy) that even a very desperate Southern soldier on the point of freezing would probably have run from them. He is intrigued and has a good chat with them, which leads to his decision to tour the South in search of the different ways the Civil War is remembered these days.

Books I did not like: Sovay, by Celia Rees

Two years or so ago, I really enjoyed listening to the audiobook of Celia Rees’ YA novel Pirates, so when I saw this at the library and remembered it had been praised in my newspaper, I idly picked it up and devoured it in a day. And now I’m feeling slightly ill. Want to know why?

Great Non-Fiction: The Face of Battle

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers…

“Band of brothers” might be true, but happiness is probably not an emotion shared by many soldiers, as shown with chilling clarity in John Keegan’s book The Face of Battle, an account of three of the most famous battles in British history from the point of the view of the men who actually fought in them. Keegan, a well-known military historian, does a masterful job of gathering archaeological and historical evidence to find out what it was actually like to fight at Agincourt (1415), Waterloo (1815) and the Somme (1916). As you might have guessed, battles have always been absolutely terrifying affairs, but why exactly they were terrifying is told in clear, cold and extraordinarily interesting detail here (or have you ever thought about what soldiers do when they need to go to the toilet? Or how they spent the night before the battle? Or how much intoxication is advisable to be able to make it through a day of fighting?)

I remember the chapter on Agincourt as one of the most bracing and illuminating reading experiences I have ever had. Of the three battles, it is the least complicated one, but perhaps also the one with the biggest myths attached to it – the tired Englishmen, hopelessly outnumbered against heavily armoured French, winning only because of the prowess of their longbowmen*  and because of the mud the French knights got stuck in, all spurred on by a great speech Shakespeare wrote:

Keegan, who knows his sources, tells us that things were actually quite different, and his account of the battle is so vivid that you will almost, but thankfully not quite, smell it. Whatever your opinion on the sense of armed combat may be, you will never be in doubt about the savage butchery of war again.

While the chapter about Waterloo is equally interesting, I will confess that I gave up on the Somme after some pages – mostly because it was too monumentally depressing – and wasn’t too convinced by his final conclusions. But for Agincourt and Waterloo and a general idea of what battle means for the common man – read this book! It’ll open your eyes.

Great Non-Fiction: The Omnivore’s Dilemma

I admit that I am always tempted to roll my eyes a bit when Americans write about environmentalism and healthy living (a very green adolescence, part of which was spent in the incredibly wasteful consumer culture of the 1980s in the US, is probably at the bottom of my prejudices), but I’ve got to hand it to writers like Michael Pollan – they do it with much more passion and wit and much more enjoyably than any earnest German writer ever could.

In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, his book about the different methods of food production in modern America and their advantages and disadvantages, Pollan never, ever preaches at you, although I am sure that at times he was sorely tempted to do so. Instead, he goes on a quest for the origins of his own food, visiting hyper-industrialised corn farms (there’s a whole section about corn sex that’s a delight for plant geeks such as myself) and processing plants, cattle ranches and the evil stinking pens where cattle end their days, organic lettuce farms, an idyllic Appalachian farm that does pretty much everything right, and finally the California woods for some good ole pig hunting and mushroom gathering.

Does this sound weird? Actually, it’s both very illuminating (you’d never believe what sorts of “foods” can be made from corn) as well as entertaining. Pollan is a wonderful travelling companion through the world of food production – endlessly curious, very honest (at one point he reads a book about animal rights and is so impressed that he stops eating meat until he comes up with good enough arguments to refute the book), he’s a very good writer with extensive research to back him up and a knack for meeting the fascinating people. The self proclaimed “beyond organic” farmer whom Pollan helps to kill chicken and the Sicilian who takes him pig-hunting were among my favourites.

At the end of each chapter, Pollan cooks a meal from the food whose origin he has researched. The first meal is a McDonalds HappyMeal eaten in a car*, but by the end he’s progressed to a pig he shot himself (the hunt is described in great detail), mushrooms he gathered in the woods  and other home-grown stuff. I’ll leave it to you to find out why he didn’t use the sea salt he gathered in the salt marshes near San Francisco.

You will like this book if you are at all interested in your food and your environment or if you just want to read a good book. Seriously, it makes for stellar reading!

Another very good book by the same author is The Botany of Desire, a book that tracks the history of apples, tulips, marihuana and potatoes, yea, verily. While it was the answer to a plant geek’s prayers, The Omnivore’s Dilemma will appeal to more general audiences.

Great Non-Fiction: 1776

And look! Tall ships on the cover!

As a history teacher, I’d rank 1776 as one of the top ten dates everybody should know. Americans, of course, associate loads of mental images with this year. It is marked both by the Declaration of Independence and the beginning of the Revolutionary War and is truly one of the big turning-points in history.

Why, you ask, should you read an account of a long-ago war in a far-away country? Won’t it be just another boring story of tactics and crusty old generals? Reading David McCullough’s 1776, however, is anything but boring. Instead of crusty old generals, there’s a handful of completely inexperienced, yet highly enthusiastic young (and older) men who make the cause their own and act with dashing courage and astonishing perseverance – from the famous George Washington to lesser-known figures like Nathanael Greene and Henry Knox*. McCullough makes them come alive so much that even though the outcome of the war is a given to the modern reader, you are made to live through all the hopeful episodes and valleys of despair as though you were right there, in bad old boots and without anything to eat.

Talking of the outcome – before I’d read the book, I hadn’t been aware of how slight the chance to succeed was for the Americans  in 1776:

Especially for those who had been with Washington and who knew what a close call it was at the beginning–how often circumstance, storms, contrary winds, the oddities or strengths of individual character had made the difference–the outcome seemed little short of a miracle.

Subjunctive history thoughts are never far from the reader’s mind in this rip-roaring adventure tale. McCullough writes very accessibly, and the subject matter is so exciting that I was very disappointed to find out, when I was two-thirds through the book, that one third of the pages (which I was hoping would contain more adventures) was devoted to an extensive bibliography. It’s a work of history, after all – but Sir Walter Scott himself could not have cooked up a more thrilling and chivalrous tale.

Great Non-Fiction: The Ghost Map

All of us lucky people in the western world take proper plumbing and working sewers for granted and we’ve all learned about hygiene and microbes, so we remember to wash our hands frequently and would never drink out of the toilet bowl (unless we’re a cat, of course).

Now, sewage in 19th-century London (a city nearing 2 million inhabitants) – well, actually,  there wasn’t really any sewage. The first chapter of Steven Johnson’s utterly riveting account of the 1854 cholera outbreak and its scientific solution as proposed by a brilliant mind tells the story of how such a large city managed to exist without drowning in its own excrement, and what an army of people were concerned every night with carting out the unwanted substances.*

Small wonder that the city was an easy target for a cholera outbreak. At the time, however, no one knew how cholera was transmitted, and the idea of a bacterium as the cause was unheard of – unseen of, in fact, as precise microscopes hadn’t been invented. People died in droves, and no one knew why.

Enter John Snow, an exceptionally brilliant doctor with a scientific mind who had already done groundbreaking work on anaesthesia. If you are planning on reading this book, I highly recommend not finding out from somewhere else how Snow solved the riddle, or you’ll take away some of the fun. It’s a touching, exciting and pleasantly gross story in which science, perseverance and good local contacts triumph.

Who might like this book? If you are planning on becoming a scientist of any sort, or if you are interested in medicine, especially in infectious diseases, infrastructure or just like free spirits who dare to break the mold of conventional thought, this is the book for you.You are also much less likely to contract cholera once you’ve read it, though thankfully the disease has vanished from these parts.

For me, it was one of the most exciting reads of 2008.