June Reads, 2024

[sunlit_stone]

Full Reads

Facing the Moon: Poems of Li Bai and Du Fu, translated by Keith Holyoak


I am, in some sense, usually reading this, and will probably restart it soon. It's a very short book, and I like the translations a lot. They're done with a particular attention to the formal aspects of the poem:

In my translations, I endeavored to maintain basic aspects of the originals: fixed line lengths, lines as units, couplets as larger units, approximately the original rhyme schemes, and verbal parallelism within certain couplets. I let the number of Chinese characters/syllables in a line correspond to the number of stressed syllables in English, using a loose iambic rhythm. By adopting this correspondence rule uniformly, it is possible to let an English reader immediately see or hear what form of poem the Chinese poet actually wrote.

For the shorter short poems (4, 6, or 8 lines), I have written each line as two half lines, with 2/3 or 4/3 stressed syllables to match the natural breaks of the corresponding Chinese line. Each couplet of the original is set off as a separate stanza in English. In longer poems (all 5-character lines), I simply made each line include 5 stressed syllables. Following the Chinese originals, I made an effort to rhyme the even numbered lines (i.e., the final words of each couplet/stanza), sometimes also rhyming with the initial line. When necessary, I loosened the definition of “rhyme” by making use of all the standard techniques for creating partial sound similarities between word endings, even making do with what might be called “rhyming gestures.” Similarly, I tried to approximate verbal parallelism where it is present in the Chinese, aiming to match at the level of phrases, rather than word by word.

Which is of course an approach I appreciate, especially as Holyoak is skilled enough that the results are good poetry in English too.

Here's two of the poems, one each from Li Bai and Du Fu.

For Li Bai--I think I've posted this one before, but it really is one of my favourites:

"Going to Visit the Daoist Master on Daitian Mountain but Not Finding Him"

A dog barks
amid the sound of water;
peach blossoms
hang heavy with dewdrops.

In the deep forest
I glimpse a passing deer;
the rushing brook
muffles the noonday bells.

Wild bamboos
slice through green mist;
streams in flight
hang between emerald peaks.

Nobody knows
where the master has gone.
Left to wonder,
I rest among some pines.

And from Du Fu:

"Washing and Pounding Clothes"

I know you will never
return from the far frontier.
It’s autumn, and still
I pound on the washing stone.

The season turns,
and soon you’ll feel the cold
as much as I feel
the pain of being alone.

What else can I do,
left home to pound the laundry?
Beside the Great Wall,
I hope you have clean clothes.

I wield my club
with all of a woman’s strength.
Put your ear to the wind—
perhaps you will hear my blows.

Something about this one really gets to me. The way the laundry is imbued with a connection to the speaker's husband's circumstances, even as she knows he's too far away to be reached (and will never return)--"Beside the Great Wall,/I hope you have clean clothes." "Put your ear to the wind--/perhaps you will hear my blows." I'm being sentimental, but it makes me tear up a bit.



Whose Body?, Lord Peter Wimsey #1, by Dorothy Sayers

(This review also contains spoilers for the Julian Kestrel series, in particular the third book.)


Technically a reread, but the first time was a long time ago; more than a decade ago I think, which is to say, I was much younger then and I'd forgotten all the details. I'm not sure it wasn't in actual high school, though it may have been cegep. Regardless: I had the sense of having heard that Sayers was antisemitic, and this book was written in the 1920s, and when the murder victim was a wealthy Jew in finance--I winced. But honestly--in this respect, it was a lot better than I was expecting? He had fallen in love with a good Christian woman in his youth, but she loved him back and they got married, and since their daughter is Jewish (confirmed in a later book) I'm inclined to think she converted. He has a reputation as ruthless on the trading field, but also honest and trustworthy ("he might do you down, but he won't let you down"); he maintains his many small economies for himself, but he is extremely generous with gifts for his wife and daughter, whom he adores thoroughly and who adore him in return. I mean the characters show all kinds of casual antisemitism, even the ones who are being relatively pro-Jewish, but especially narratively it's nowhere near as bad as I was expecting.

...I couldn't help make the comparison throughout the novel to the third Julian Kestrel novel. The Julian Kestrel series is a detective series featuring Julian Kestrel, a dandy, as a detective in regency England. I mostly enjoyed the first book, rolled my eyes a lot at the second and said to the friend I was liveblogging it at that it made me want to write a detective series with a female detective where heavyset men wearing tank tops were forever falling for her. The fourth is kind of wild and very much its own thing. The third--

The third, written in NINETEEN-NINETY-FIVE*, features a wealthy Jew in finance--I beileve he's the only Jewish character in the book. He, I can't remember the exact details of the money transfer, whether it was money direct or just large loans on very generous terms, the murder victim. It turns out this is because he'd fallen desperately in love with the victim's wife, who
was, of course!, a virtuous Christian woman. He ends up paying the man a large sum of money to bring her to a house where she is trapped alone with him. He confesses his love to her. When she spurns him, his pride is so injured that he ASSAULTS AND RAPES HER.

WHAT. WHAT THE FUCK.

Anyway, it was completely horrible and very vile, and it stuck with me, and as I was reading Whose Body? it seemed to me that even though (iirc) the characters in Whose Body were a lot more casually antisemitic than the charaters in Whom the Gods Love, the narrative was much less so. If your novel written in the 1990s is more antisemitic than a novel written in the 1920s you are doing it wrong. God.

Other impressions of the book--

This is the first time we get to see Peter. He's a bit of an interesting character; I can see the connection to Miles, though they are also different in a variety of ways--I'm kind of tempeted to sum it up as saying that Peter is a lot more English and Miles is a lot more Barrayaran, but of course that's not all there is to it. Miles is also more powerful, and exists in a system of I think greater personal power than Peter does, and is of course the son and heir as opposed to the second son, and hasn't gone through WWI... It's not even that Peter doesn't feel responsible for things, because he does, but I think it's a part of him that's less, like, psychologically integrated with the rest of him than it is for Miles. It would be interesting to reread Mountains of Mourning against this series once I've finished it... I did appreciate that we don't only see Peter's perspective of things, even though he's definitely the dominant voice. I liked this passage in particular:

“Then why let your vainglorious conceit in your own power of estimating character stand in the way of unmasking the singularly cold-blooded murder of an innocent and lovable man?”

“I know—but I don’t feel I’m playing the game somehow.”

“Look here, Peter,” said the other with some earnestness, “suppose you get this playing-fields-of-Eton complex out of your system once and for all. There doesn’t seem to be much doubt that something unpleasant has happened to Sir Reuben Levy. Call it murder, to strengthen the argument. If Sir Reuben has been murdered, is it a game? and is it fair to treat it as a game?”

“That’s what I’m ashamed of, really,” said Lord Peter. “It is a game to me, to begin with, and I go on cheerfully, and then I suddenly see that somebody is going to be hurt, and I want to get out of it.”

“Yes, yes, I know,” said the detective, “but that’s because you’re thinking about your attitude. You want to be consistent, you want to look pretty, you want to swagger debonairly through a comedy of puppets or else to stalk magnificently through a tragedy of human sorrows and things. But that’s childish. If you’ve any duty to society in the way of finding out the truth about murders, you must do it in any attitude that comes handy. You want to be  elegant and detached? That’s all right, if you find the truth out that way, but it hasn’t any value in itself, you know. You want to look dignified and consistent—what’s that got to do with it? You want to hunt down a murderer for the sport of the thing and then shake hands with him and say, ‘Well played—hard luck—you shall have your revenge tomorrow!’ Well, you can’t do it like that. Life’s not a football match. You want to be a sportsman. You can’t be a sportsman. You’re a responsible person.”

(Especially because, if you'll excuse my Vorkosigan preoccupiation, that seems like a line that would be more likely to be spoken by Miles, than to him...)

And then there's the villain, one Sir Julian Freke; who killed Sir Reuben Levy, if Peter's analysis is to be believed, not only because Lady Levy rejected him (Freke) all those years ago, but especially because she'd done it in favour of (l'horreur) a Jew; it was a shock to the ego. I'm not totally sure what to make of his treatment by the narrative. He clearly feels he's a very cool fellow, who would have gotten away with it too if it weren't for that meddling Peter:

If you have read my book on “Criminal Lunacy,” you will remember that I wrote: “In the majority of cases, the criminal betrays himself by some abnormality attendant upon this pathological condition of the nervous tissues. His mental instability shows itself in various forms: an overweening vanity, leading him to brag of his achievement; a disproportionate sense of the importance of the offence, resulting from the hallucination of religion, and driving him to confession; egomania, producing the sense of horror or conviction of sin, and driving him to headlong flight without covering his tracks; a reckless confidence, resulting in the neglect of the most ordinary precautions, as in the case of Henry Wainwright, who left a boy in charge of the murdered woman’s remains while he went to call a cab, or on the other  hand, a nervous distrust of apperceptions in the past, causing him to revisit the scene of the crime to assure himself that all traces have been as safely removed as his own judgment knows them to be. I will not hesitate to assert that a perfectly sane man, not intimidated by religious or other delusions, could always render himself perfectly secure from detection, provided, that is, that the crime were sufficiently premeditated and that he were not pressed for time or thrown out in his calculations by purely fortuitous coincidence.

You know as well as I do, how far I have made this assertion good in practice. The two accidents which betrayed me, I could not by any possibility have foreseen. The first was the chance recognition of Levy by the girl in the Battersea Park Road, which suggested a connection between the two problems. The second was that Thipps should have arranged to go down to Denver on the Tuesday morning, thus enabling your mother to get word of the matter through to you before the body was removed by the police and to suggest a motive for the murder out of what she knew of my previous personal history. If I had been able to destroy these two accidentally forged links of circumstance, I will venture to say that you would never have so much as suspected me, still less obtained sufficient evidence to convict.

And Peter does seem somewhat impressed by him.

On the other, I do feel like Lady Levy's grief when they're excavating Sir Reuben does give some real emotional heft to the murder, and if we're evaluating Freke as cool I feel that it's pretty relevant that he was so busy writing down how cool he was he didn't actually manage to commit suicide before the police got him, despite his clear intention and Peter's warning, lol:

By the way, it may be of interest to you to know that I appreciated your motive in calling this afternoon. It conveyed a warning, and I am acting upon it in spite of the disastrous consequences to myself. I was pleased to realize that you had not underestimated my nerve and intelligence, and refused the injection. Had you submitted to it, you would, of course, never have reached home alive. No trace would have been left in your body of the injection, which consisted of a harmless preparation of strychnine, mixed with an almost unknown poison, for which there is at present no recognised test, a concentrated solution of sn—

At this point the manuscript broke off.

“Well, that’s all clear enough,” said Parker.

“Isn’t it queer?” said Lord Peter. “All that coolness, all those brains—and then he couldn’t resist writing a confession to show how clever he was, even to keep his head out of the noose.”

So I am not entirely sure that the narrative itself agrees with Peter's interest.

This exchange, when he goes to essentially warn Julian that he's been found out (with an eye to letting him commit suicide rather than being caught), but purely through the pretext of wanting some advice on his nerves, did make me laugh:

“Now, Lord Peter, I’ll tell you about yourself in quite untechnical language—”

“Thanks,” said Peter, “that’s kind of you. I’m an awful fool about long words.” 218

“Yes. Are you fond of private theatricals, Lord Peter?”

“Not particularly,” said Peter, genuinely surprised. “Awful bore as a rule. Why?”

“I thought you might be,” said the specialist, drily.

Overall it was interesting and I'm glad I read it, and writing this is making me think about the ways in which the story as a whole does not entirely agree with Peter at every turn, which makes me like it more; I read the next three in the series this month, and will probably read more in the future.


*Wikipedia says 1996, but the other sources seem to give 1995.



Clouds of Witness, Lord Peter Wimsey #2, by Dorothy Sayers

The Duke of Denver, Peter's older brother, has been arrested on suspicion of the murder of their sister Mary's fiance. Peter's sure he didn't do it, but there's certainly something he's keeping secret. And what is their sister Mary hiding...?


This was another one I'd read before, likewise ages ago; about all I remembered of it was the reveal that the Duke had been having an affair, and that this was revealed in part because the woman mistook Peter for him. I had totally and completely forgotten the Mary plotline, nevermind the Mary-Parker aspect! (Tbh I feel like I am not actually totally convinced by this romance--that is, if I list out each other's traits I can see why they'd like each other, but trying to play it together in my head I can't quite get it to work. But I did find it pretty cute, even if I rolled my eyes some that Mary's first socialist fiance had so very few redeeming features, and I'm curious to see how it plays out.) I enjoyed Peter's last-minute dashing around continents, risking the storm to save his brother, etc., and I did like the pair of scenes with his brother, first coming to see him in the dungeon and trying to encourage him to say whatever it is he's keeping quiet, and the Duke is very unimpressed with his desire to investigate:

"Bad luck, old man," said Peter, "but you're keepin' your tail up fine. Beastly slow business, all this legal stuff, what? But it gives us time, an' that's all to the good."

"It's a confounded nuisance," said his grace. "And I'd like to know what Murbles means. Comes down and tries to bully me—damned impudence! Anybody'd think he suspected me."

"Look here, Jerry," said his brother earnestly, "why can't you let up on that alibi of yours? It'd help no end, you know. After all, if a fellow won't say what he's been doin'—"

"It ain't my business to prove anything," retorted his grace, with dignity. "They've got to show I was there, murderin' the fellow. I'm not bound to say where I was. I'm presumed innocent, aren't I, till they prove me guilty? I call it a disgrace. Here's a murder committed, and they aren't taking the slightest trouble to find the real criminal. I give 'em my word of honor, to say nothin' of an oath, that I didn't kill Cathcart—though, mind you, the swine deserved it—but they pay no attention. Meanwhile, the real man's escapin' at his confounded leisure. If I were only free, I'd make a fuss about it."

"Well, why the devil don't you cut it short, then?" urged Peter. "I don't mean here and now to me"—with a glance at the warder, within earshot—"but to Murbles. Then we could get to work."

"I wish you'd jolly well keep out of it," grunted the Duke. "Isn't it all damnable enough for Helen, poor girl, and mother, and everyone, without you makin' it an opportunity to play Sherlock Holmes? I'd have thought you'd have had the decency to keep quiet, for the family's sake. I may be in a damned rotten position, but I ain't makin' a public spectacle of myself, by Jove!"

"Hell!" said Lord Peter, with such vehemence that the wooden-faced warder actually jumped. "It's you that's makin' the spectacle! It need never have started, but for you. Do you think I like havin' my brother and sister dragged through the Courts, and reporters swarmin' over the place, and paragraphs and news-bills with your name starin' at me from every corner, and all this ghastly business, endin' up in a great show in the House of Lords, with a lot of people togged up in scarlet and ermine, and all the rest of the damn-fool jiggery-pokery? People are beginnin' to look oddly at me in the Club, and I can jolly well hear 'em whisperin' that 'Denver's attitude looks jolly fishy, b'gad!' Cut it out, Jerry."

"Well, we're in for it now," said his brother, "and thank heaven there are still a few decent fellows left in the peerage who'll know how to take a gentleman's word, even if my own brother can't see beyond his rotten legal evidence."

As they stared angrily at one another, that mysterious sympathy of the flesh which we call family likeness sprang out from its hiding-place, stamping their totally dissimilar features with an elfish effect of mutual caricature. It was as though each saw himself in a distorting mirror, while the voices might have been one voice with its echo.

"Look here, old chap," said Peter, recovering himself, "I'm frightfully sorry. I didn't mean to let myself go like that. If you won't say anything, you won't. Anyhow, we're all working like blazes, and we're sure to find the right man before very long."

"You'd better leave it to the police," said Denver. "I know you like playin' at detectives, but I do think you might draw the line somewhere."

"That's a nasty one," said Wimsey. "But I don't look on this as a game, and I can't say I'll keep out of it, because I know I'm doin' valuable work. Still, I can—honestly, I can—see your point of view. I'm jolly sorry you find me such an irritatin' sort of person. I suppose it's hard for you to believe I feel anything. But I do, and I'm goin' to get you out of this, if Bunter and I both perish in the attempt. Well, so long—that warder's just wakin' up to say, 'Time, gentlemen.' Cheer-oh, old thing! Good luck!"

And then again at the end, after Peter's freed him:

"Excuse me, your grace."

It was Bunter. Bunter, miraculously, with his arms full of scarlet and ermine, enveloping the shameful blue serge suit which had been a badge of disgrace.

"Allow me to offer my respectful congratulations, your grace."

"Bunter!" cried Lord Peter. "Great God, the man's gone mad! Damn you, man, take that thing away," he added, plunging at a tall photographer in a made-up tie.

"Too late, my lord," said the offender, jubilantly pushing in the slide.

"Peter," said the Duke. "Er—thanks, old man."

"All right," said his lordship. "Very jolly trip and all that. You're lookin' very fit. Oh, don't shake hands—there, I knew it! I heard that man's confounded shutter go."

Reading this one (and the preface to the next book, which talks some about Peter's chilhood) did make me think of Game of Kings, and I wonder how much of Peter is in Lymond, though I have to say I like Peter a lot better than Lymond, and conversely I like Richard a lot more, and find him way way more interesting, than the Duke of Denver.

I was also very, very relieved that Mrs Grimethorpe escaped.

It was also interesting to me that the narrative treated Mary's fiance with as much sympathy as it did, more on which later.


Unnatural Death, Lord Peter Wimsey #3, by Dorothy Sayers

Peter hears a tale of something that may have been a totally natural death--or may have been murder. But the more he starts to investigate, the more he wonders if investigating was worth it...


This was another interesting one!

To start off with, warning for racism, in a I'm-pretty-sure-this-was-meant-to-be-progressive-for-its-time-but-aaaaaaahhhh way. Let's see. The murder victim was a nice old English lady, Miss Dawson. It turns out she has a distant cousin who is (gasp!!!) NOT WHITE. We learn this in a letter from a lady, Miss Climpson, who I think is meant to be a bit old-fashioned and at least a bit ridiculous, but fundamentally sympathetic and with some good sense; she is herself recounting the story of a former housekeeper who quit when victim actually (gasp!) invited him to stay for lunch, and who uses the fucking n-word in describing him.* Miss Climpson herself doesn't endorse this racism, or as far as I can tell the use of the word, but her defense it itself, well, it pretty much takes for granted that not having white skin is worse. I--how can I put this--I really don't know much about race and racism in 1920s and 1930s England; it would not surprise me if this was decent for the time but it's still unpleasant to read.

As to Cousin Hallelujah Dawson himself, narratively speaking it's kind of interesting; he strikes me as written to be as deeply unthreatening as possible. He's Christian, a Reverend in fact; he's slight, elderly, poor, but extremely dignified. He does not have any legal title to anything from Miss Climpson, because his grandfather lied to his grandmother about their being married; but after his SUGAR PLANTATION in Trinidad--this wouldn't have involved slavery as far as I can tell to be clear, given the timelines, but they're not exactly famous for good working conditions even so, and it's less something I'd expect to see today--anyway, after said plantation started to fail, they came to England, and Reverend Dawson came to visit Miss Dawson. To quote him: “She received me in the most charming way, and when I told her who I was—acknowledging, of course, that I had not the slightest claim upon her—she was good enough to make me an allowance of £100 a year, which she continued till her death.”

Also to quote him: “Was that the only time you saw her?” “Oh, yes. I would not intrude upon her. It could not be agreeable to her to have a relative of my complexion continually at her house,” said the Rev. Hallelujah, with a kind of proud humility. “But she gave me lunch, and spoke very kindly.”

You can see what I mean about the non-threatening!

Miss Dawson's heir and murderer, Mary Whittaker, did not continue the allowance. She does however send him ten thousand pounds at one point, as part of a trap to make it look like he arranged a kidnapping/murder >:/ He has no clue that that's why she's doing this and goes to deposit the cheque. Fortunately, the way things come out he gets to keep the cheque. The failing to continue to the allowance is treated by the narrative, correctly, as awful, and the fact that he gets to keep the ten thousand pounds a happy ending for him, to be clear; the narrative is very much on Reverend Dawson's side. But, well, it's very weird, as a modern reader.

Oh, one last note on this: so Mary tries to frame Reverend Dawson for a murder/kidnapping. Peter at first tries to make it seem like he's fallen for this, and get the papers to print this--to be clear, this would be the case of a man of colour killing one and kidnapping one innocent young white woman. You can imagine. Now, I can understand why Peter wants to make it seem like he believes this, he's trying to convince the murderer they fell for her trick; but the first thing I thought of in terms of the papers printing this would be how awful it would be for basically every other non-white person in England. Which could even have been incorporated usefully into the narrative, part of the story is Peter's concern that in investigating he's made things worse in general, but as far as I can tell mostly isn't actually addressed. This is perhaps a not terribly surprising lack, but I still didn't care for it.

Okay, enough about race: onto sexuality! Iiiii am pretty sure the murder victim is textually supposed to be a lesbian. I wasn't sure at first if this was actual authorial intent or just things that make the modern reader go "okay, yep, they're lesbians", but as I read on it became clear that not only does the author know about lesbians so do actual characters in the book, lol. It's not, I should say, completely impossible that they were just very good friends; but imo they definitely read as lesbians in the context of the rest of the text, including one of the modern characters, Miss Findlater, who is very definitely unquestionably a lesbian, and, unfortunately, in love with the murderer, and eventually killed by her. Which is especially interesting because Miss Climpson seems to think that being in a romantic relationship with a woman will probably not end well (though she's not thinking about murder, mind you), and tries to caution Miss Findlater about it:

“Love is always good, when it’s the right kind,” agreed Miss Climpson, “but I don’t think it ought to be too possessive. One has to train oneself—” she hesitated, and went on courageously—“and in any case, my dear, I cannot help feeling that it is more natural—more proper, in a sense—for a man and woman to be all in all to one another than for two persons of the same sex. Er—after all, it is a—a fruitful affection,” said Miss Climpson, boggling a trifle at this idea, “and—and all that, you know, and I am sure that when the right MAN comes along for you—”

“Bother the right man!” cried Miss Findlater, crossly. “I do hate that kind of talk. It makes one feel dreadful—like a prize cow or something. Surely, we have got beyond that point of view in these days.”

Miss Climpson perceived that she had let her honest zeal outrun her detective discretion. She had lost the goodwill of her informant, and it was better to change the conversation.

I...actually cannot tell, at this point, to what extend we're supposed to sympathize with Miss Climpson, and to what with Miss Findlater! That is, I'm pretty sure we're supposed to sympathize with Miss Climpson some, and her diagnosis of Miss Findlater's relationship with Miss Whittaker in particular as unequal is spot on; but Miss Findlater is also treated with some sympathy, and I can't tell if her point here is supposed to have any weight, or if I'm just overwhelmed by the sheer obvious justice of it. But the thing is--well, being in love with Miss Whittaker leads Miss Findlater to an unhappy end. But if we take the elderly Miss Dawson and her lifelong female very best friend as lesbians, which once again I really do feel is justified by the text--it did not as far as I can tell do them any harm at any point, whatsoever! Which would rather go against Miss Climpson's point.

(As a side note--I wish blockquotes preserved emphasis--I feel like you really need to see all the italics in Miss Climpson's speech to get the full effect here.)

On another note: I said earlier that there would be more later about the death of Mary's fiance in book two. As it happens, he fell in love with a beautiful woman who was mostly in it for the money, despite he himself not really having any particularly extravagant tastes outside of that, and cheated at cards to keep her, and planned to marry Mary so he could use her money to keep his mistress. And then he kills himself when she leaves him and it's mistaken for a murder. Which is to say: book one: murder victim is Jewish guy (who married a Christian woman), book two: "murder victim" a guy who cheats at cards and plans to marry money to support his mistress; book three: murder victims include elderly lesbian and young baby lesbian. And all of them are treated decently by the narrative. It occurred to me that, while this may not seem a particular natural grouping to a modern eye--in particular #2 does not belong with #1 and #3--it might in fact be, to someone in the early twentieth century. And I think their treatment speaks overall fairly well of the author, if so.

* I'm using the Gutenberg editions. I'm kind of hoping this is edited in modern releases.


The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, Lord Peter Wimsey #4, by Dorothy Sayers


This one was another one I'd read some of, though I think only the beginning; I had a vague sense of some old man dying in broad daylight, as it were, sitting in an armchair at the club, and that was all I remembered, or for that matter recognized. Impressions on this one:

- Wow, George is an asshole. The narrative has a lot more sympathy for him than I do. What the fuck, George?? The way he treats Sheila is just awful. I do realize he's in a shitty situation himself, and there are ways of behaving I'd be more sympathetic to; but this wasn't one of them. I can't exactly say I was disappointed he wasn't the murderer but I was definitely disappointed that his marriage is apparently going to continue. You can do better, Sheila!
- On the other hand, I really liked Miss Dorland. Especially--I feel like in a lot of stories being bad at art, having bad taste, is treated as a kind of character flaw which inevitably reveals much deeper moral failings. So I really liked that Miss Dorland is kind of a bad painter, not actually much of an artist, and is also a very moral woman, who cares a lot about doing the right thing, and stands by her convictions!!
- I am also once again not 100% convinced by the suggested romance between Robert Fentiman and Miss Dorland ("You don't realize how desperately lonely she has been. She had to take up that art business to give her an interest, poor child, but she's really cut out for an ordinary, sensible, feminine life"--I squint), but at the same time it's honestly very cute just how taken with her he is, and I'm cheering for them.

(The murder victim here does kind of break the pattern, but at least his sister married a manufacturer, leading to a lifelong estrangement that ended shortly before his death...)


Strong Poison, Lord Peter Wimsey #5, by Dorothy Sayers


There was a lot I liked about this and a lot I didn't like. Started with the things I didn't like:

- he built up a tolerance??? Really??? It does make sense since he'd had years to plan so it wasn't spontaneous, and I googled it and apparently arsenic immunity is not really a thing but Sayers might have had reason to believe it was (x). But really.
- I liked Harriet a lot, but I wish we saw more of her!
- I feel like there was a thread of the narrative on the many different perspectives on Phillip Boyes, which subsequently got totally dropped. Granted he doesn't seem to have been that interesting a character, but I did find it disappointing.

Things I liked:
- Meeting Harriet! She's great. I am entirely on her side vis-a-vis Boyes' proposal: ugh!! And Peter's proposal, too, of course. (And I have to say, really proposing like that well she was imprisoned...) But I do look forward to seeing more of her, and how their relationship develops.
- Miss Climpson does medium-ing! That entire sequence was great.
- Peter asking Parker about Mary; the way Parker at first things Peter is telling him to drop the connection, and then, wait, are you asking me about my intenions??? And the story finally moving forward on that front! I'm delighted.
- I am also and even more delighted about Freddy finally marrying Rachel!! Granted the announcement still has some casual antisemitism in it :/ But honestly--I'd expected the connection to be a passing thing just used to justify acquaintance/fill out connections in book one--and now it's still around and actually going through, and they're going to have a Jewish marriage and raise the kids Jewish--I really appreciated this.
- (And then of course--this could not possibly have been deliberate, given when it was written. But also, given when it was written--you do wonder how that might develop, in a decade or so, when WWII comes around...)
- Actual change, coming upon Peter; I liked this very much.



Pro Git, by Scott Chacon and Ben Straub


One of the fun things about this book is that it's also in a GitHub repo, and every new release generates its own new epub. I downloaded the latest when I started it, and since that was, god help me, the middle of March, it was probably version 2.1.422 or 2.1.423, which isn't terribly important but which I find pretty neat.

Anyway. The book! I read it because, while I could certainly do the basics in terms of cloning, pulling, pushing, adding, committing, branching, checking out, and googling whenever I wanted to do anything else, I knew that I didn't know quite a lot. I wanted to expand my understanding, not just in a "these are some useful commands" kind of way but in a much deeper way. I think I succeeded at this goal; there's still quite a lot I don't know, and of course I am forgetting more and more as time passes, but I think having the grounding was really helpful.

If you don't want to spend quite so much time on it, I think the primary chapters I'd recommend are 2 - Git Basics and 3 - Git Branching, for giving you a good sense of a lot of the basics. I'd also recommend 10 - Git Internals, which I found really helpful for giving me a sense of what the various git commands are actually doing internally, and I would really strongly recommend 7.7 - Git Tools - Reset Demystified, that is, the "Reset Demystified" section of chapter 7 - Git Tools. It really does demystify reset, and I found it very helpful for thinking about git more generally.

Other things I found neat: git bisect, which helps you binary-search for bug-introducing commits, is just the coolest fucking thing to me, especially in combination with passing it a script that can check for bad commits at which point it can run the entire search of its own automatically (!) I haven't had the chance to use it but man. This is so cool. I also set the default conflictStyle to diff3, which makes doing rebasing via command line much much easier. Honestly, I still use the IntelliJ GUI for bigger rebases, but I do now use the command line for the smaller ones. The tools for searching through the code and history look pretty neat; Git Submodules" look cursed but also fascinating.

It also took me a really ridiculous amount of time to read. I started mid-March and finished early-mid-June! That's almost four months! MoonReader thinks it has about 150K words, so it's about as long as a fanfiction I'd take a focused evening of reading to get throuh -_- It's no surprise that technical books take longer. That said, I do think the nature of the technical book has an impact too; it covers quite a wide range of information and is a lot more about going through various examples than it is a top-down explanation of theory. Something for me to keep in mind when choosing books; by the end I was pretty impatient to get on to the book I was going to read next, already.

Percentage Reads

How to Read Chinese Poetry, A Guided Anthology 0 -> 7%

Early Poems, by Edna St Vincent Millay, 0 -> 21%

Thinking In Systems: A Primer, 0 -> 11%

Programming in Scala, Fourth Edition 0 -> 15%

Comments

[hamsterwoman]

I'm not familiar with your completed reads this time (although I enjoyed reading the poems!) but yay Edna St Vincent Millay!

[sunlit_stone]

If you liked the poems, I'd recommend the book! It's not at all a long read, it's very short and quick, and it's cheap too—it's not even 4$ CAD on Kobo—but the poems are very good, and worth the read!

And yesss Millay :D I've just gotten past the preface and started on the poems. I'm guessing I'll have read most of them at one time or another, because I have the Collected Poems and iirc I read through the whole thing one summer, BUT it's certainly been a while and she's always well worth reading :D I'm looking forward to it!

(If you ever do read the Wimsey, I'm curious what you think!)

[larryhammer]

I really should get Holyoak's book. He's much better at translating these things than I am, enough so that he's the first translator to get me to wonder whether going 1 line to 1 line really is the best choice.

I have How to Read Chinese Poetry, as well as a couple other anthologies in the same series. They're really intended as classroom texts, but do work as reading with an intent to learn on one's own. And the translations are generally pretty darn good.

FWIW, Sayers has other lesbians other than the ones in Unnatural Death.

[sunlit_stone]

I highly recommend the book! It's not at all long, and it's very cheap—not even four Canadian dollars on Kobo—but it's well worth the read. (I did want to share the Chinese with the translations, but the downside is that the ebook, though it does have the characters doesn't have them as selectable characters.) Have you ever translated either of the poems I copied here? I'd be curious to see your translations, if so!

Tbh How to Read Chinese Poetry is a reread, but I do think I'm retaining more this time; having gone through the entire thing once is giving the introduction on the different genres and so forth extra clarity. We'll see!

Ah! That's interesting, good to know. I'm curious, how would you say the narrative treats them?

[larryhammer]

I've not translated either, yet, though I'm familiar with the Li Bai and believe it's in the queue to get to eventually -- not sure about the Du Fu.

The artists who are Harriet's friends are definitely treated sympathetically, as just another couple if even somewhat more bohemian than most of her in-the-arts crowd.

[sunlit_stone]

The artists who are Harriet's friends oh that's good to know, thank you; I'll keep an eye out.

I'm familiar with the Li Bai and believe it's in the queue to get to eventually I'll look forward to it!

[philomytha]

Oh yes, completely agree with all of your Wimsey opinions, I don't mind the bananas explanation for the arsenic in Strong Poison because that kind of thing happens all the time in murder mysteries, but I do remember having the exact same thoughts on my first read of it.

You may find this article on Sayers and antisemitism interesting (though it does have some spoilers for books you haven't read) which discusses it in the context of her personal life and has a lot about the ambiguity in Whose Body: https://momentmag.com/curious-case-dorothy-l-sayers-jew-wasnt/

[sunlit_stone]

Mithridates indeed! But I'm glad to know I wasn't the only one XP

Oooh, thank you! I'm still reading the books, so I'll save it for now, but I'm very curious to read it once I'm done.