The Little Dog Laughed

Yes, it was back to the charity shops and the local bookshop again today. Perhaps as punishment, it rained, hailed and thundered. We kept having to take shelter because of the risk of either drowning or zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz-CRACK. A couple of times one of my eyes got so full of water I couldn't see out of it.

One of my recent en-route books arrived: The Fall of Carthage by Adrian Goldsworthy. I shall hope to take better care of this one.

That aside, I picked up:

The Road Not Taken: How Britain Narrowly Missed a Revolution by Frank McLynn;
Napoleon's Wars by Charles Esdaile;
Gendering the Master Narrative: Women and Power in the Middle Ages, edited by Mary C. Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski;
Training in Observation and Tracking by Gilcraft, a book for Scouts and Cubs first published in 1927
and
Shipwrecked on the Top of the World: Four Against the Arctic by David Roberts.

Also took a lot of books to the Mind shop. The top ones got wet.

I finished the Donald Crowhurst book some days ago but have only just got around to putting my thoughts together. It's an interesting book and well worth reading if you have any interest in sailing in general, sailing round-the-world, or what can happen to people who are isolated from others for a long time.

I thought the authors did a good job of trying to put together Crowhurst's state of mind, although I think they overlooked his head injury as a possible contributor to his psychotic break. If his dopamine levels were already elevated, it might not have taken much of the Dexedrine known to have been on board to take him to the break point. As Crowhurst talks repeatedly of working long hours and/or through the night, it's possible he was taking the Dexedrine at times.

His desperate attempts to contact his wife made me very sad. Maybe if they could have talked, things would have ended differently. The poor guy was obviously looking for a way out right from the start.

The thoughts he wrote down after his break reminded me very much of Philip K. Dick's Exegesis. Not surprisingly, I suppose, as both were probably dopamine-fuelled. And the whole 'if you believe it, it will be true' approach that I discussed in an earlier post does seem to have been instrumental in events.

Talking to my father about the book, I discovered that he was at Cambridge with Nicholas Tomalin, and even knew him, slightly. Dad says Tomalin was a nice guy.

I'm a little surprised that Tomalin and Hall waited until they were some two hundred pages into writing the strange voyage of Donald Crowhurst before mentioning that Crowhurst's mother was a Jehovah's Witness. It doesn't seem to have occurred to them that this might be highly relevant to his state of mind.

*boggles*

If you're trying to understand someone's tendency to magical thinking, a religious upbringing might just hold some clues.

Not that we're not all prone to magical thinking. But imo religion tends to foster it, as otherwise reality and belief are intellectually difficult to reconcile. And there's no doubt that Crowhurst had a strong intellect, as well as an enquiring mind. He also had, apparently--and ironically--a well-formed conscience. Only magical thinking could reconcile such a man to a concerted campaign of deceit. And religion supports magical thinking: if you believe something hard enough, it will be true.

Poor guy.

I finished reading The Unredeemed Captive today, after much sustained effort. Author John Demos notes that he has preserved the spelling in the primary sources as far as possible, but I can't help wishing he (or his editor) had either converted the thorns to 'th' or had found some way of printing them that made them look less like y's. The constant struggle to render 'ye' and 'yt' as 'the' and 'that' (not to mention the few occasions when 'ye' actually was meant to be rendered as 'ye') made this book far harder to read than it should have been. It's tiresome anyway to find yourself concentrating on how something is written, rather than on what has been written.

It is ironic however that after I wrote my mild complaint that not enough background and context had been supplied, the very next chapter went into substantial detail about the Sault Indian community. Interesting stuff. Less interesting is the constant struggle between two branches of Christianity: the Puritans and the Catholics. Oh ye fir trees, what a fuss over minor distinctions of doctrine. The Puritans don't want Eunice Williams staying among the heathens and/or the Catholics and Eunice herself is scared to live among the 'heretics' (Puritans) again because it might put her soul, and the souls of her children, in danger. Clearly this is all very important to them, but it's wearying to the outsider. And stupid. Incredibly stupid.

Also, the incredible persistence of the family in believing that Eunice is a captive, when it's clear that she's staying in the Canadian community of her own free will, is downright annoying. They keep begging their God to 'let' her return and ignoring the obvious: she doesn't want to return. They're always hoping she'll visit them but it never seems to occur to them to visit her. Maybe there were practical obstacles to this, but, if so, Demos doesn't mention them. No, they want her to visit because they see that as a route to 'restoring' her to her family. Except that, to her, the Iroquois among whom she's lived since the age of six are her family. Demos goes into some intriguing details about why it might be more appealing to the young Puritan women--who form the majority of former captives who remain voluntarily--to live in the heathen rather than the Christian fashion.

At its heart, however, this book has a void. We learn much about Eunice's father, who left letters and sermons, and her brother Stephen, who left letters and a journal, but hardly ever from Eunice herself. One letter of hers--written on her behalf by someone else--survives. How much of its contents are her own words is impossible to fathom. The narrative is therefore like the moon in the old riddle that goes around and around the house without ever touching the house. It would have been more honest to have framed this as the story of the Williams men than as Eunice's own story. She's not here. She's off bringing in the corn.

I used to get home with whatever books I'd acquired during the day and dutifully update my Goodreads account. Since I trashed and burned my GR account, it's been hard to find somewhere else to attempt to keep track of even the TBR pile. I've tried a few places but none of them seem quite what I'm looking for. Which is, I suppose, another Goodreads. Only with not quite so much author-drama and much less Amazon.

However, in my online peregrinations, I came across the BookTrackr on the Worlds Without End website. It's only for SFFH but it does give a quick utility to make a visual check of what you have and haven't read. Provided you can remember what you have and haven't read (ahem). So I created an account and started turning books green as ones I've read or blue as favourites of the ones I've read. You can also track your reading progress through various lists (eg Hugo winners) if you so desire.

Anyway, in the course of this process I came across a book by Hilary Mantel listed as among the best SFF novels on a list created by the Guardian newspaper. I've seen this list before but if I noticed the Mantel book, it made no impression at the time. It struck me as odd this time around because Mantel is better known for her Booker-prize-winning historical fiction. I was surprised to see she'd written anything in SFF.

It turned out that my dad knew of the book, Beyond Black, and had in fact read it. Disappointing however to discover that he'd read it for his Reading Group, which relies on books borrowed from the local library, and so he didn't have a copy. Book-buying funds are limited (ie they're not infinite) so this was a bit of a bummer.

Then, today, while rifling through the £1 paperbacks in the Works, I found a copy of Beyond Black. This rarely happens to me. I even squeaked. Then I seized it in my hot little hands and required my husband to pay for it.

It would after all have been a shame to have come home with no books at all.

Other books recently acquired include:

What's Wrong With Eating People? by Peter Cave (my husband suspects Chapter 12 will have me incandescent with rage);
Beyond the Cyborg: Adventures with Donna Haraway by Margret Grebowicz and Helen Merrick;
Ancient Civilisations by Timothy R. Roberts;
The Strange Voyage of Donald Crowhurst by Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall;
Life in Ancient Rome by Nigel Rodgers
Caligula: The Corruption of Power by Anthony A. Barrett. A sneaky book that had managed to get itself knocked onto the floor and then hidden under the furniture, to the point where I almost decided I'd imagined buying it.