Jared Diamond, Viking Press, 2005

This book actually took me the better part of a year to read. In his studies of societal collapse, Diamond finds reasons for optimism; in his describing past collapses, it is difficult for me to find any.

Diamond is an engaging writer. With the exception of occasional passages where he throws out lists of numerical data, he paints very accessible pictures of civilizations both past and present.

As a researcher, Diamond loves to create enumerations (“these are the ten factors that determine success of an island society”), and, once he has them defined, he uses the model as fact. While I don’t doubt that he’s researched the factors, I’m not convinced that parameterization of highly complex, open systems is reasonable.

The most though-provoking parts of the book can be summed up by the question Diamond attributes to one of his students: “what did the Easter Islander think as he was cutting down the last tree?” Of course, by the point a single tree is left, it’s far too late to have any meaningful response. But where is the point where response is possible? When is it too late?

Diamond finds reasons to be optimistic. Unfortunately, I don’t feel that his research bears out that optimism. What do we have today that was lacked by the various failed civilizations he describes? It seems to me that we have two things: cheap, abundant energy, and widely distributed information. The former, however, is limited, and may fall into that “last tree” question above, while the information will whither without the energy to sustain its communication. Technology cannot save us without energy to drive it. And has human nature changed? Are significant numbers of people acting in a way that will lead to a sustainable population and way of life in this world? I don’t see it.

Ballyhoo, Buckaroo, and Spuds. Ingenious Tales of Words and Their Origins by Michael Quinon, Smithsonian Books, 2004.

The stories of words are fascinating and fun. As I labor to learn Spanish, and attempt to retain what little German I know (much less English!), finding the circuitous pathways between words helps me understand language. Knowing something of the history of a word not only helps in its correct usage, but also provides a better grasp of the more subtle connotation.

Ballyhoo, etc. is as at least as much a destroyer of myths of word origins as it is a provider of “factual” histories. It appears that etymology has a particularly notable tendency towards myth, or “folk-etymology” as Quinion has it. This doesn’t surprise me much, because telling stories to explain things is one of the things we humans do best — and enjoy the most. As wiser people than me have argued, narrative is a fundamental characteristic of human thought.

The book is rich with great stories that are, unfortunately, unsupported by available facts. In some cases, we are provided with authoritative origins, in some cases a collection of better references that hint towards the origins, and, in many cases, we are left adrift.

Quinion argues against incorrect usage of words, or uses that are based upon misunderstanding, but acknowledges that these incorrect applications gradually become correct through use. We language snobs and pedants may know that “a mute point” is incorrect (and may even expound on how the meaning of “moot” has changed through time), but, when all is said and done, the “incorrect” phrase may be the one that survives and becomes a part of the language. That mutability is what’s magical, fun, and, yes, threatening about language. And, inevitable, so “resistance is feudal.”

Angela Carter, 1987, Penguin Books

Reading a book by Angela Carter can be compared to having a dream where you are reading a book by Jeanette Winterson. Actually, that’s not strictly true. Carter’s books have a strong dream logic, but also a disturbing undercurrent of emotion that makes me, as the reader, feel like I’m tottering on the edge of sanity.

Love is no exception. Ostensibly a simple tale of a dysfunctional relationship, it is simultaneously detached and emotionally intense. It’s difficult to connect to the characters, and yet they are strangely compelling.

Dreamlike? Maybe it’s more like an unsettled awakening. Hours after putting the book down, I felt like I’d been wrested suddenly from a dream, which had quite evaporated except for a few shadows of inexplicable but profound dread that still flicker in the corners of my vision.

William Shakespeare, circa 1592, read as an eBook from Blackmask.com

This is Shakespeare’s famed hatchet job on old Richard Three, conjuring him as an evil genius and unparalleled manipulator, who is brought down (unsurprisingly) by his own crimes.

The play made me think of Firdusi’s Satire on Mahmud, where he instructs the ruler on how it is the writers who create great heros — or, in this case, tear them down. I don’t care to speculate on the virtues of anyone who managed to claim the bloody and oft-contested throne of England; I have no doubt that any ill things said of them have more than a kernel of truth. But Firdusi’s claims have weight here. What I know of Richard III is based upon Shakespeare alone, and Shakespeare tells me that he was an evil, twisted man.

Bart D. Ehrman, 2005, HarperSanFrancisco.

There are people who take the Bible to be the literal word of God, and then there are people who don’t. With the exception of some way-out whacked delusionals who believe that the King James translation is the literal, unaltered word of God (presented in Jesus’ Own English), both those groups have an interest in the history of the text itself.

Ehrman tells the story of how the text (specifically of the New Testament) has been altered through the course of the last few thousand years, and how scholars try to find what the original text read. It’s a fascinating problem, regardless of one’s religious beliefs. Even neglecting the fact that the Bible was part of an oral tradition before it was first written, the problems of propagation of unaltered information are many, and, coupled with translations between ancient Greek, Syriac, Aramaic, Latin, German, and English, are extreme.

This is not only a history of some of the major milestones in the translation of the Bible, but also a lightweight introduction to the techniques of textual criticism. The example blend in some critiques of the King James Bible, and also give something of a view into the early Christian world. Combined with Elaine Pagel’s book The Gnostic Gospels, I feel I’ve gotten a scholar’s glimpse of the early development of the Church.

As an aside, it seems that textual criticism has some of the greatest words. There’s hapax legemmenon, a word that is found only in a text (or the collected writings of an entire language), a word which Lisa had introduced me to. Ehrman adds “periblepsis occasioned by homoeoteleuton, which is the accidental skipping of a line when copying a text because two lines end similarly (and fool the scribe’s eye into thinking that the second line has already been copied). Phrases like this are sufficient reward for reading this book.