The Oceans and the Stars (Mark Helprin, 2023)

(493 pages) 

Respected career naval officer runs afoul of POTUS in a meeting because the officer can't do anything except speak with complete honesty. Assigned as punishment to be captain of a small ship - he had championed the prototype though it's decided no more will be built. So it's a one-of-a-kind vessel.  Things get hot in the Middle East and the protagonist takes the ship and a hastily-assembled crew of Navy folks and a half-dozen SEALS into action.  A lot of action!

And I very much liked the action sequences - lots of detail about operations and weaponry of the modern Navy, also the skillsets of the SEALs.  This was very good, I was impressed.  Seems like the author knows a lot about this.

Less good were the characters - this part of the book was comparatively weak.  The protagonist and his lover were idealized (the love story part very meh); the terrorists were without a shred of humanity; the law firm, naval career types, politicians including POTUS were completely shallow. Some of the crew characters were pretty interesting.

There is a court martial - this part was OK, of course his lawyer is superb-plus.

Some cranky comments here but I very much enjoyed the book and was tugged right along.

Kim (Rudyard Kipling, 1901)

Re-read of another previously-enjoyed book.  The Anecdotal Evidence guy continues to enthuse so I gave it another quick run-through.

Here are my notes from first read, they are a pretty good summary.

I had forgotten that the "Great Game" aspect was not central to the main parts of the book; this is a strength.  

Papyrus - The Invention of Books in the Ancient World (Irene Vallejo, 2022)

(384 pages) (gift from Paul Jr & Nedda)

So many interesting things going on; hard to summarize the book though the title actually does a pretty good job. I take books for granted. This explains lots about the path from oral tradition to writings to writings-in-book-form, and about how some of the oldest texts somehow survived.  The author does this in a consistently interesting way.

Lots of focus on ancient Greece - where it all started - lots on the Library of Alexandria and the Ptolemies (Alexander the Great local successors) spending lots of money sending emissaries in an effort to collect every book in existence.

Some thoughts - 

--How the ancient epics survived and evolved relying on memory and storytellers.  Once written down, the tale settles into fixed format - probably a good thing but still. 

--Why it makes sense that poetry and singing dominated when memory was the primary or only method of preservation - think of how we can remember poems and songs compared to prose. (From grade school, one of the few verbatim items I recall is six lines memorized from Whittier's Snowbound (a punishment for talking in class, some of the students learned quite a few lines).

-Papyrus as a legitimate marvel - but clumsy to work with, and the shelf life isn't that long.  Many re-writes needed for an old text to make it to Gutenberg, many opportunities for loss or error.

--Just the amazing-ness as humans transition from memory-reliance to a system that can preserve all knowledge for all time (with gaps that decrease over time).  

--Setting up library systems - goes back to Alexandria and beyond.  References to The Name of the Rose, of course. Handling, storing, preserving scrolls; arranging re-writes (which to choose?)

--A good discussion of the challenges of translation - an unavoidable necessity but one that necessarily creates something of a new work.

--Interesting discussion of Rome - so backward compared to Greece; Greek slaves could read and often ended up as tutors in wealthy Roman homes. Rome owned it - always acknowledge Greek primacy (though potshots about this being effeminate, of course).

--Development of the codex format - higher efficiency than scrolls.

--Censorship over the millennia.  Horace was banished.  Etc.

--The incredible fall-off after Rome lost its mojo.  A risky period, much was lost but the monasteries and the Islamic world eventually saved a lot (not in the scope of this book)  

My Antonia (Willa Cather, 1918)

This is another delightful re-read, though my initial read would have been prior to blogging about books.

Antonia is the daughter of Czech immigrants to Nebraska; she arrives with her family (the Shimerda family) on the same train bearing newly-orphaned Jim Burden, who will be living with his grandparents on their Nebraska farm just a short distance from the Shimerdas.

Jim is four years younger than Antonia; helps her learn English at the request of her father (a strong character who didn't adapt well to moving across the ocean); he admires and falls in love with Antonia after a fashion, though separation by age and life trajectory didn't permit anything to happen (other than a lifelong friendship, if often separated by distance).

The book is rightly famous for its descriptions of the Nebraska prairie and of life in those frontier days.  The Shimerdas were not well prepared and received quite a bit of help from Jim's grandparents in the early going.

I liked the role of the "hired men" on Jim's grandparents' farm - this rang quite accurate, there were many folks floating around like that in those days (and into the mid-20th century, declining as mechanization "took their jobs".)

The story isn't quite as interesting once Jim and his grandparents move into town (as they aged off the farm); arrangemenets are made for Antonia to get off her farm (overworked by her brother) and take domestic jobs in town.  We meet several other immigrant girls.  Antonia with a bad experience with a railroad guy that promised marriage. Jim eventually comes back to Nebraska and meets Antonia's husband and children.

Cather an absolute favorite of mine.