The volume also included Beckett’s Act Without Words, which indeed has no dialogue. The whole pantomime seems rather like a post-existentialist satire of Camus’ assertion that the only philosophical question of any importance is the question of suicide. The lone actor, in confronting the futility of his actions, tries to commit suicide but even this option is denied him. Camus at least gives us the will to choose suicide if we so wished, but Beckett seems to be saying that we aren’t even permitted that escape. The actor ends up on the floor, paralyzed and unresponsive. What I would dub the modern nightmare.

The Immortal Game: A History of Chess, by David Shenk: The book calls itself a history of chess, but it doesn’t simply relate the development of the board game alone but frames it in the context of why people have obsessed over this game for centuries. Chess as metaphor, chess as cultural phenomenon, chess as a mirror of sociopolitical and intellectual history (e.g. the rise of “courtly love” under Eleanor of Aquitaine, the French Enlightenment and subsequent revolutions), chess as rational system. The book describes myths and legends associated with chess (the caliph who did not evacuate his burning palace because he was engrossed in a game of chess), as well as famous games (the “Immortal Game” of the title describes a match between Anderssen and Kieseritzky in the nineteenth century) and grandmasters (the personal history of Bobby Fischer). It also talks about the evolution of game rules and strategy over time–I was fascinated by the four historical “stages” in chess style–and the appearance of chess in literature and computer science. All in all, an excellently written book. Shenk likes to dwell on the implications of chess as a game representing the power of free will (versus games of chance, like backgammon) and by extension, the triumph of civilization and rational thought, which he freely admits carries a personal meaning for him in the wake of 9/11. I’m not sure if the more memoirist parts of the book strengthen or weaken it (after all, he also talks about how the obsession with chess can be all-consuming and how chess geniuses lose their sanity), but I did like reading about his own attempts to improve his chess game.

Vita Brevis: A Letter to Saint Augustine, by Jostein Gaarder (trans. Anne Born): In the introduction, Gaarder purports to have found and translated a letter written to Augustine from the “concubine” whom he mentions in his Confessions. I actually took him at his word at first, but if you read the book, it becomes clear that the letter is a fictional vehicle in which Gaarder can criticize Augustine and his influence on Christian theology. Despite Gaarder’s conceit of including “footnotes” citing the original Latin phrases, it’s clear that Floria, the supposed letter writer, sounds like Gaarder (or at least like Gaarder’s usual English translator) and has surprisingly modern ideas that coincide nicely with Western liberal opinions largely held today. I’m no classics expert, but I doubt that a letter originally written in Latin would ever “translate” into the style that Floria adopts. I suppose I’m annoyed because if Gaarder was going to make the pretense of having found a letter to Augustine as some sort of metafictional device, he could have done a much better job of it. It would have been brilliant if he executed the writing well enough to really make the reader believe his framing story of buying the manuscript at a book fair in Argentina. (Choice of country a nod to Borges?) As it is, all it becomes is a tiresome rant on Augustine’s extreme Platonism. Floria basically says (over and over again, while quoting extensively from Confessions) that believing in a Creator God who loved his creation means not denying the physical world and the facts of our physical existence; in fact, it is as much a sin to hate the world as it is to love it too well. Chesterton made the same point in his biography of Aquinas much more eloquently and with much more subtlety. Also, like most poor arguments, the whole book started making me sympathize with Augustine. I mean, I think Augustine’s conception of religion as divorcing oneself completely from the material world as much as possible is a little ridiculous, but I also think that he was genuinely trying, in his own fashion, to devote himself completely to God. And honestly, do we really need to blame all the excesses and mistakes of the Church on Augustine? As Chesterton points out, there are historical reasons for why Augustine’s brand of Platonic Christianity had such great appeal. Then again, I suppose we don’t like to accept that theology can have relativity without being untrue. (Oh, the poststructuralist paradox.)

The Jesus Sutras: Rediscovering the Lost Scrolls of Taoist Christianity, by Martin Palmer: The subject matter of the book is quite fascinating since it traces the history of early Christianity in China centuries before any Jesuit missions. It describes a Christian tradition that developed separately in the Middle East, India and central Asia and is hence not continuous with the history of Catholic church (and subsequent Protestant denominations) in the West. It’s unfortunate though that the writing wasn’t very compelling and used phrases like “the Church of the East”, which implied an orientalist attitude that grated on my nerves. I think the book was also extremely disorganized: Palmer kept jumping from his personal account of discovering the ruins of an indigenous Christian monastery in Western China, to recounting the history of how Christianity entered China and merged with Taoist and Buddhist doctrines, to summarizing and translating the “Jesus Sutras” (Chinese texts that refer to Christian scripture and liturgy) without providing an overarching flow to his argument. I wish he had chosen a more academic tone and stripped the personal commentary from his book. I also wish he didn’t analyze the Sutras prior to providing the translated text; it seems to be dodgy academic practice to try to bias the mind of your reader with a particular interpretation of a text (given that he can’t exactly assume that his reader is already familiar with the texts in question). Mostly, what I found most irritating was that he built up my expectations with his claims that the Sutras were an important contribution to spiritual literature. Granted, I have no idea how the original Chinese reads, but the English translation sounded awkward and uninspiring to me. Also, I didn’t find the blending of Christian theology with Buddhist and Taoist (more Buddhist than Taoist, in my opinion, despite the title) philosophy to be all that radical. It’s easy to find common points among all religious doctrines; the question is at which point do you end up generalizing so much that you end up becoming nondenominational. If Palmer had seriously addressed whether or not this “adulteration” of Christian theology can still be called Christian, I would have liked the book a lot more. (Are you still Christian if you diminish the historical existence of Christ and turn him into an abstract Savior? Conversely, are you still Christian if you emphasize the humanity of Christ and overlook his divinity? I don’t know the answer. To be honest, I don’t think I’m capable of grasping the dual nature of Christ; instead I slip into the fallacy of believing in two different Christs, one human and one divine.)

I should add that of course, one could say that Catholicism (and the Protestant sects which it spawned) is the adulterated form–and I think to a certain extent, that is Palmer’s contention. The Christian message has become distorted and politicized in “the West”, and hence we ought to look to “the East” to revive Christian spirituality and return to a more original form. But I find that whole attitude aggravating: Buddhism and Taoism have been equally subject to distortion, and I would presume a “Taoist Christianity” would be no different. No matter where you go, religion has been a tool for power.

Mike at Wrykyn, by P.G. Wodehouse: The prequel to Mike and Psmith, although I don’t know if it can rightly be called a prequel since I believe the two books were originally published together as Mike. The book talks about Mike’s first year at Wrykyn as he makes his mark through his superlative cricket skills, while juggling relations with his brother, an overbearing head of house, his roommate (an upperclassman known for getting into trouble) and the Wrykyn cricket captain. Schoolboy pranks included, although not as many as I expected, since the book is in fact mostly about cricket. I wish I knew more about cricket but the book is still enjoyable without any knowledge of the sport.

Leave It to Psmith, by P.G. Wodehouse: Switched from reading about Jeeves and Wooster to reading about Psmith, who is absurdly and delightfully verbose. He is able to get away with anything by simply never losing his composure; in the stickiest situation, he always makes everyone else feel that he has the upper hand. That’s the charm of a thoroughly arrogant character, of course. I suppose the trick is that he never irritates the reader with his arrogance, although other characters certainly find it infuriating. I liked that Wodehouse also finally created a strong female character, who is assertive and independent, without including any criticisms that come off as subtly sexist. (Female characters that are as spunky as Eve in the Jeeves and Wooster books come off as irresponsibly mischievous or domineering or scheming to entrap Bertie in marriage. Along the same lines, the weepy poetic female character in this story turned out to be a thief, whereas in a Jeeves and Wooster book, she would simply have remained soppy all the way through.) I also hadn’t realized that Freddie Threepwood was such an idiot; I read a later Blandings short story where he becomes much more competent.

The Lions of Al-Rassan, by Guy Gavriel Kay: About two years ago, Sai compiled a beautiful, haunting fan soundtrack for this book, and to this day, it’s probably the second most-played playlist on my iPod. I’d been meaning to pick up this book ever since, although I wasn’t sure what to expect since I had mixed feelings about the Fionavar Tapestry (Kay’s four-volume, classic high fantasy series), which I thought had excellent prose, interesting plot points, and really boring characters.

Well, I finally got around to reading The Lions of Al-Rassan, after buying a used copy at a local bookstore, and I can attest that it most definitely does not have boring characters. Granted, the main female protagonist, Jehane, isn’t particularly compelling (I mostly ignored her except for the moments when her know-it-all attitude grated on my nerves), but the story isn’t really about Jehane at all. She just happens to be the principal witness, so to speak, of the momentous meeting between Ammar ibn Khairan (”the man who killed the last khalif of Al-Rassan”) and Rodrigo Belmonte (”Scourge of Al-Rassan”). Although they come from opposing kingdoms and belong to different faiths, their friendship becomes the stuff of legends and ultimately, of tragedy. I kept going back and reading the scenes about the two of them together.

“Are you in love with this man?” she’d asked her husband once in Fezana that winter—more than half jealous, if truth were told.

“I suppose I am, in a way,” Rodrigo had replied after a moment. “Isn’t it odd?”

The line seems a little trivial out of context, but what does it mean, after all, to be in love? Ammar and Rodrigo are both great men, but they discover, probably for the first time, their only true equal in each other. Kay describes them as fighting together as fluidly as if they were two bodies controlled by one mind. How bewildering, how amazing to realize that you are not alone but have a counterpart in another human being…and how tragic to know that this one person—perhaps the only person—capable of knowing you entirely must inevitably end up as your enemy. For this book is tragic and ended up breaking my heart as surely as the music originally did. Perhaps it’s the theme common to so many great fantasy novels: the ending of an age, the passing of the ephemeral present into history. This book is about the fall of Al-Rassan, which will never live again except in memory, and I think it’s that awareness that makes Ammar’s poetry so compelling. Another layer of tragedy right there: after all, one could say that the decline of Al-Rassan began with Ammar’s assassination of the khalif and continued with his assassination of Almalik.

What Ammar says to Rodrigo who asks him to join the Jaddites in their Reconquest of the peninsula:

“What would I have you do? What you cannot do, I suppose. Go home. Breed horses, raise your sons, love your wife. [...] Teach your people to…understand a garden, the reason for a fountain, music.”

Special Topics in Calamity Physics, by Marisha Pessl: My college roommate recommended this book to me because she knew I was fond of intertextual references and allusions in my fiction. (I usually like clever books, even when they are too clever.) Anyway, the New York Times review made the character sound a little like Nancy Drew (perky, too smart for her own good, crime-solving, with gang of less-clever sidekicks who willingly tag along—please note that I’ve never actually read Nancy Drew and am stereotyping). But I started reading the book anyway since I generally trust my roommate’s judgment, and much to my surprise, Blue van Meer (the book is written from her first-person perspective) is actually very morose and is prone to overextended analogies and theorizing. A voice that I could very much sympathize with. The textual references were not nearly as impressive as I’d been led to believe. Every chapter is titled after a literary work, and Blue obsessively uses parenthetical citations for nearly any assertion she presents (very good academic habit, in my opinion), but the actual references themselves are mostly incidental and not necessary to understanding the book itself. They’re more to convey character than actual thematic meaning, i.e. not meant to be intimidating.

As much as I liked Blue herself, I found myself getting increasingly irritated with her in the latter half of the book. Why on earth did she continue hanging out with the Bluebloods when it was clear that she didn’t fit in with them and that they didn’t like her? The fascination of Hannah Schneider is one excuse, but Blue spends so much time analyzing how fake Hannah was, for all her fascinating ways, so I kept wondering why did Blue continue even when she knew better. Actually, that’s my problem with the whole book: Blue knew better, admitted she knew better, and yet still wound up in a situation that could only make her unhappy. (Was it just hindsight that made it seem that she should have known better? Was it adolescence?) In any case, the Bluebloods were intolerable. As for the explanation that Blue arrives at…well, it felt too overblown to be believable. Oh, it holds together very well because Pessl carefully sets up clues throughout the book to make the Nightwatchmen conspiracy theory watertight. But the tone of the book was so much about, well, ordinary high school life with an idiosyncratic twist on all the usual conventions, so the whole political radicalism kind of hit me from left field. Perhaps it was meant to leave that impression; maybe you weren’t supposed to completely believe Blue. But I closed the book feeling really dissatisfied, although I’d quite enjoyed the first half of the book, especially when it focused on her relationship with her father. Anyway, that general dissatisfaction also may be why I completely failed to sympathize with Blue over the clear psychological trauma that she must have received on discovering Hannah’s corpse.

(Oh, and Blue might be attending Harvard, but Pessl clearly has never gone to school there. Wish she bothered to do a little more research on that aspect of the book, since she clearly did a lot of research on everything else.)

Criticisms aside, I still think it’s an impressive first novel, and I liked Blue, even if I got frustrated by her. Which in itself is probably a testament to how much the novel engaged me.

Three Kingdoms, vol 1, by Luo Guanzhong (trans. Moss Roberts): Almost six years ago, I read the abridged one-volume translation by Moss Roberts and thought it was the most amazing epic I’d ever read. I finally got around to purchasing the full four-volume translation, by the same translator, and finished the first volume this summer. Many of the chapters that had been skipped in the abridged version were in this first volume, it seems, since I remember the scene where Cao Cao and Liu Bei drink tea together in the capital (Cao Cao makes his little speech about the heroes of the age) happening fairly “quickly” after Liu Bei gains renown in helping quell the Yellow Turban rebellion, while here, there are chapters and chapters of constant political and military maneuvering, as alliances are made and broken every ten pages. Hard to keep track of, but fun to read about. I was surprised to find how often Liu Bei runs away or pragmatically switches sides because the author of Three Kingdoms is supposed to be biased in favor of Shu but despite this bias, Liu Bei comes off as no more virtuous than Cao Cao. I mean, the author does insert moralizing statements on why Liu Bei is good and Cao Cao isn’t, but when it comes to actual actions, the bias is not apparent at all. Actually, more of the moralizing statements (and awkward justifications for why Liu Bei is a paragon of all Confucian virtues) come from later commentators, who are mentioned in the footnotes, rather than from the author himself. The footnotes are worth reading; Moss Roberts often includes some of the more elaborate interpretations from well-known commentaries, which I found very entertaining.

Zhuge Liang doesn’t appear in this volume at all; he’s introduced early on in the next volume. But despite his absence, there’s a lot of excitement in this first volume. Since the three kingdoms haven’t been established yet, there’s a lot of backstabbing going on. Plus, it’s nice to get more backstory for all of the characters; I didn’t pay that much attention to Wu when reading the abridged volume (being too enamored of Zhuge Liang, of course), so this time, I’m doing a more careful job of keeping track of all the characters.

It’s probably impossible for me to remember all the names and stories in the Samguk Yusa, but they’ve settled into a comfortable jumble in the back of my mind, and I think I’ve benefited from the reading. Over the holidays, I saw an advertisement for a historical drama and asked my parents what it was about; to my surprise, I recognized the story immediately as soon as they began describing it because I had read it in Samguk Yusa. I came out of the book with a couple of vague impressions, most particularly that Buddhism as religious practice is very, very different from the philosophical way we encountered it when studying Eastern religions in school. It’s not only the Western perspective; it’s that we cover Buddhist thought more than Buddhist practice (the concept of desire as suffering and nonattachment as freedom from rebirth, etc.). Furthermore, we don’t really explore Buddhism in detail after the Mahayana split, and although most teachers mention the term bodhisattva, no one actually bothers to explain the whole intricate mythology that evolved around them. The way in which older deities were incorporated into the new religion as bodhisattvas, for example, very much parallels the way pagan deities became Christian saints. In fact, the spread of Buddhism, which Ilyon describes in Samguk Yusa as a series of biographies of blessed monks who brought the religion to Korea, is similar to the spread of Christianity. Disillusioned Western students like to claim that somehow Buddhism is free of the political corruption and dogmatism that they dislike in organized churches, and more than ever, I found that this common fallacy could not be further from the truth. Kings often suppressed one religion in favor of the other, burning books and killing priests/monks (depending on whether they were Taoist/Buddhist). Evangelists bringing the new religion were frequently martyred, and once Buddhism achieved ascendance, there was just as much abuse of power as in the sordid annals of the Church. Also, Buddhist religion became filled with rules about magic, about self-mutilation and self-denial, about heavens and hells, about hypocrisy and orthodoxy—all very familiar when compared to Western history. But the core message, of course, remained the same.

I’m not trying to make value judgments about Buddhism vs. Christianity here. What I’m pointing out is that this is human, that the forms religion takes, both ugly and beautiful, in human societies are no different from culture to culture, from civilization to civilization. What one must judge is not the mistakes, or even sins, that people have made in the name of religion, but the underlying message of the doctrine. Modern intelligentsia likes to criticize organized religion for its flaws; I think the criticism is valid but I think the problems are not caused by the nature of religion itself but by human failings and are universal to any social structure of authority. Other impressions from Samguk Yusa: the sheer romantic chivalry of the Hwarangdo, the surprisingly sexualized stories of encounters with the Buddha, the symbolic motifs associated with the birth of royalty (all about the eggs), the repeated appearance of sea dragons, the heavy influence of the T’ang dynasty, and the frequency of flying monks.

The Book of Jhereg, by Steven Brust: My blockmate recommended Steven Brust to me last year, and I started reading Jhereg in the bookstore and fell abruptly in love. It still took me a while to finish the first three though because they were all in one volume which cost $16. I finally caved in and bought it, which is why it took me this long to finish it. I have to admit that Steven Brust’s writing style does not particularly appeal to me—I don’t dislike it, but he’s a bit more blunt and prone to exposition than I prefer. But that belies the actual careful structure of his writing, which seems careless, but upon further thought has not only considerable thought as to plot points (Brust is the master of the intricate plot, something that I adore in fantasy fiction), but also worldbuilding. Dragaera has an incredibly complex social structure and history, and Brust knows exactly where and when and what is going on. His manner of worldbuilding is less showy than the Tolkien imitators who invent half-completed languages, but it is a lot more thorough and dazzled me quite thoroughly. I think also the very modern voice that he adopts for Vlad is also a little deceptive: it makes you think that this is a very, hm, self-contained, narrow-scope fantasy, but the level of worldbuilding soon shows that he is actually writing an epic, although without many of the conventions of the subgenre.

The book that shook me the most in this first volume was probably Teckla, especially because I’m reading Freedom & Necessity as well, and both of them are in many ways about the same idea. But I think Brust handles the theme masterfully in Teckla—I mean, the unreliable narrator has almost become a gimmick these days, but Brust completely masters the use of the unreliable narrator in a way that I’ve never quite seen before. I think the difference is that many authors make the unreliable narrator into a deliberate liar or a subjective perspective to the point of a disconnect with reality. But Brust turns Vlad’s unreliability into the very things that most normal people are uncertain about and cannot agree on—Vlad doesn’t lose his grip on objectivity when it comes to events and people, but what makes him unable to present an objective voice is a conflict in philosophy. The frustration he feels at his inability to find common ground with Cawti and the other Easterners is something that we all encounter when we meet someone who has fundamentally different assumptions about life.

I have more to say regarding Vlad and revolutions—I much prefer Brust’s stance here than the slightly less conflicted (although perhaps more nuanced) one he takes in Freedom & Necessity—but I think I’ll save it for later. I.e. once I actually finish Freedom & Necessity. I very much want to read the rest of the series; an LJ friend of mine tells me that I should particularly look forward to Phoenix.