This is an old favorite, and as I’ve reviewed it many times before I’m
not going to say much about it; you can click on
Brian Daley’s name, above, to jump to a page listing previous reviews.

What it is, is a rollicking romp of a space opera. It’s not perfect but
it’s still an awful lot of fun. With my head completely taken over
by programming projects, I needed something both light and familiar to
relax with in the evening, and this fit the bill perfectly.

This book was much better than I feared it would be. It’s an
introduction to medieval literature that I bought it when I
was in Australia earlier this year, only because I’m a big-time
Lewis fan and had never read any of his literary work. I figured
it would be way over my head and dull as dishwater.

The facts are to the contrary, I’m pleased to say–Lewis on medieval
literature is just as readable as Lewis on any other subject. And he
explains many things I hadn’t understood, both in his own work and in
other reading I’ve done, and shed quite a bit of light on matters my
English Lit teacher in high school merely touched on. (Mrs. Martinson,
your Great Chain of Being lectures were not entirely wasted!)

I expected the book to be a survey of medieval literature, but that’s not
the case. Instead, Lewis attempts to capture the general world-view of
the medieval age–the Model of the universe shared by readers and writers
alike. In so doing he presents many examples from a plethora of authors,
and gives us some idea of what they are like, but that’s secondary. The
primary goal is that we should have some idea of the things the authors
would have taken for granted.

I won’t try to explain the Model; it took Lewis an entire book, so I’m
hardly likely to capture it in a blog post. But it has several aspects I’d
never have guessed. First, it was the synthesis of all extant written knowledge
by men who could not conceive that anyone would go to the trouble of
writing a book that was not true. Most books were old and venerable, and
were therefore seen as authoritative. And if all were authoritative,
then inconsistencies had to be made to fit. This led to allegorical
interpretations of many works that were never intended to be read that
way, and one wonders if it led to the rise of genuine intentional
allegory.

Second, the medieval world had almost no sense of historical period. We
are accustomed to clothing the people of history in period costumes; they
did not. They saw the Greeks, Romans, and Jews of history as men and
women more or less like themselves, with similar skills, similar garb,
similar institutions, and similiar habits. They perhaps knew less of
history than we do–but at the same time they felt much closer to the
Ancients than we do, for they perceived no essential gulf between
themselves and the folk of ages past.

I won’t say that Lewis has instilled in me a desire to go read lots of
medieval literature–but I enjoyed his book very much.

I bet you’ve never seen anything like this.

I’ve just uploaded the December Issue of Ex Libris Reviews.

If you’ve been reading this weblog all month, the only thing of note is a brief bit at the beginning–Ex Libris Reviews is now seven years old, and I’ve got a few comments on its history.

I have a couple of thriller series I keep up with if I happen to see them on
the racks at the grocery store. Patricia Cornwell’s Kay
Scarpeta series is always good for a gritty, gross read when you just
want something light and sort of entertaining. Jeffrey Deaver’s Lincoln
Ryhme series is another. The
kicker with this series is that the forensic detective, Rhyme, is a C4 quad
with movement only in the ring finger of his left hand. The premise is that
the enforced lack of movement helps him channel his razor-sharp intellect
into paths that wouldn’t be obvious to someone distracted with things like,
oh, working hands. This, of course, also forces him to have a host of
supporting players to help him solve the crimes he can no longer investigate
on him own. Prime among all of them is a working CSI, Amelia Sachs, who
walks the grid at crime scenes with Rhyme hooked into a cell phone
connection as she does it. And there is Thom, his immaculately dressed, gay
attendant, taking care of his bodily needs and making sure he doesn’t overdo
it in his desire to solve the crime. There are other beat cops and
detectives that float in and out but the main action almost always takes
place in Rhyme’s apartment/forensic lab with all sorts of cool equipment and
assistive devices. And it helps that a romance has developed between Rhyme
and Sachs which, thankfully, have the physical details of their love life
kept off stage.

In this installment, a boat full of fleeing Chinese dissidents is blown up
offshore of New York by a well-known smuggler in an effort to avoid capture.
Two families, a couple of individuals and the smuggler survive and then
mysteriously disappear into the Chinatown neighborhoods of New York. The
mystery begins with why he scuttled the boat and evolves into a desperate
chase to find the smuggler before he offs the two families. Fortunately, one
of the survivors is a Chinese cop who has a charming way with broken English
and some investigative methods that are not purely scientific.

I have to admit, I didn’t see the ending coming and was surprised. And the
Chinese cop kind of grew on me as the book progressed. I’ll probably read
the next one when it’s out in paperback. It’s a light read to curl up with
on the couch on a cold November afternoon.

Marsh’s next outing combines her knowledge of New Zealand and the theater
as Alleyn visits New Zealand to do counter-espionage work during the
early days of World War II. The action takes place at a seedy hotsprings
resort in a rural area of New Zealand, the temporary home of a diverse
cast: the vague retired colonel, owner of the resort; his foolish wife;
their mousy daughter; her uncle, an irascible doctor who sees Japanese
spies under every bush; a sharp businessman with his eye on the
hotsprings–and on the colonel’s daughter; a justly famous Shakespearean
actor, and his entourage; assorted layabouts; and an entire Maori village.

This is one of the first of Marsh’s books that I ever read, and it’s
different than I remembered it. I found the beginning exceedingly
tedious, but that might simply be because I had my head deeply into a
programming project, and found it difficult to concentrate on anything
else.

Overall, not a bad read, but not my favorite either.

My Notebook application has been getting a lot of attention lately, but it seems I’ve hit the big time; Notebook is explicitly mentioned in the Wikipedia entry for the word notebook.

If you’re not familiar with Wikipedia, it’s a collaboratively built on-line encyclopedia with quite a fantastic amount of information. It’s a fun place to surf.

Howdy!

I’ve just uploaded V0.91 of Snit, my Tcl object framework, to the Snit’s Not Incr Tcl home page. There are some important bug fixes and a couple of new features; see the README file for details, if you’re so inclined.

First, I have to say the only reason I picked this book up is because I
enjoy the Kay Scarpeta thriller series by Cornwell. It’s a closet pleasure
and one I usually don’t tell friends who know my normal reading tastes, but
there it is. So, when this one came out I browsed it a bit and decided to
wait for paperback before reading it

And I found I didn’t like it. At all. First, the book is badly written.
Really badly written. I had a hard time following her line of reasoning
because she jumps from one scenario to another with no logical path or
connecting point. She’s purporting to examine the remaining evidence and yet
she occasionally lapses into a fictional mode when describing the victim’s
thoughts. My biggest problem is with her analysis of her suspected killer,
an artist named Walter Sickert. With no real evidence, she tries to build a
profile of the adult based on some childhood operations that, again with no
evidence, traumatized him sexually and turned him into a psychopath. And she
uses his art as further proof of his mental state which seems to me to be
iffy at best. She makes glaring suppositions about his ability to fake the
various handwritings in the Ripper letters. She can’t actually put him near
the scene of any of the murders and since his body was cremated after death,
there is no possibility of using real DNA analysis of his DNA vs. what is
left on envelope flaps or licked stamps. How she could title the book “Case
Closed” is beyond me. She raises a few questions but really has no decisive
evidence one way or the other.

I also should have realized that the reason I don’t usually read true crime
novels or books is because I don’t generally care for the genre. Authors
include photos of crime scenes that are gruesome at best and Cornwell felt
it necessary to put photos taken of the Ripper victims in her book. They
were not pretty though thankfully fuzzy and in black and white. I have too
vivid an imagination to read books like this. I was expecting something a
little deeper and found instead something that is supposed to titillate in a
sick, twisted way. No thanks.

If you’ve not seen this, you should really go take a look; it’s one of the funniest bits of Internet humor I’ve seen. It’s one of the things that comes around in e-mail every once in a while, and every time it comes around I read it and chuckle.