Book Beginning: In the Wake of the Plague by Norman F. Cantor

Book Beginnings is a weekly meme hosted by Rose City Reader. We share the first sentence (or so) of the book we are reading, along with our initial thoughts about the sentence, impressions of the book, or anything else the opener inspires.

In the sixth month of the new millennium and new century, the American Medical Association held a conference on infectious diseases. Pronouncements by scientists and heads of medical organizations at the conference were scary in tone. Infectious disease was the leading cause of death worldwide and the third leading cause in the U.S.A., it was stressed. The situation could soon become much worse.

As the world becomes more of a global village, said one expert, infectious disease could by natural transmission become more threatening in the United States. Here monitoring is lax because of a mistaken belief that the threat of infectious disease has been almost wiped out by antibiotics.

Whew. Talk about timely! I've had this book for quite a while now because as a former microbiologist I am very interested in the history of disease. The subtitle of the book is "The Black Death & The World It Made". Hence I thought it would be of historical interest. Now I'm thinking it might be more relevant to today's problems. We shall see.

Book Beginning: Plum Bun by Jesse Redmon Fauset

Book Beginnings is a weekly meme hosted by Rose City Reader. We share the first sentence (or so) of the book we are reading, along with our initial thoughts about the sentence, impressions of the book, or anything else the opener inspires.

Opal Street, as streets go, is no jewel of the first water. It is merely an imitation, and none too good at that. Narrow, unsparkling, uninviting, it stretches meekly off from dull Jefferson Street to the dingy, drab market which forms the north side of Oxford Street.

After reading "Quicksand" and "Passing" by Nella Larsen last month, I read an article about women writers of the Harlem Renaissance, and learned of Jessie Redmon Fauset's book,  "Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral". The quote on the book cover says "A fine example of the hidden Harlem Renaissance - where the women were writers too." I'm eager to read this book.

Otherness Explored

The Mountains of Paris: Awe and Wonder Rewrote My Life
David Oates
Oregon State University Press 2019
178 pages


I am more a reader of fiction or non-fiction science books, but occasionally I dip into other genres, especially when I read good reviews about a book. I follow Rose City Reader's blog, and she often spotlights authors from the Pacific Northwest where she lives. It was there I found "The Mountains of Paris" mentioned. My library didn't have a copy and couldn't borrow one from their network, so they nicely ordered two copies on my recommendation. Hurray for libraries!

For me this memoir was a fascinating evocation of otherness, a look into the mind of someone who is seemingly similar to me -- about my age, same country, both white -- and yet is vastly different in the way he thinks about the world. From the start I didn't love it, but I kept reading for this experience of otherness.

The writing is beautiful and reflects the fact that Oates is a published poet. He writes lovingly about Paris, a city I fell in love with when I visited it in 2007. He is also a very spiritual person who seems to feel things more strongly than I do. He writes about "awe and wonder", the sublime, and "a greater mind that we all share". None of which is very meaningful to me personally.

I think I have a more moderate temperament, without the high peaks and low valleys of emotion expressed in the stories he tells, especially the chapters labelled "memnoir". Perhaps I cannot directly relate to his experiences, but I felt it was important to try to understand his view of the world.

So, this book is well written with some gorgeous prose, and some of the stories Oates tells are interesting. (Plus it's about Paris!) It's just not my cup of tea; but try it -- you might love it!

A Miniature Victorian Novel

The Young Visiters or, Mr. Salteena's Plan
Daisy Ashford
Academy Chicago Publishers, 1991
First published 1919
102 pages


Nine-year-old Daisy Ashford's novella is a lot of fun to read, childish errors of spelling and punctuation and all. It's both short and entertaining enough to be read in a single pass. And if you are at all attuned to novels or TV dramas about the English aristocracy of 100 years ago, it is also quite funny, akin to P. G. Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster stories.

Walter Kendrick. a professor of English at Fordham University who was an authority on Victorian literature, assures us in his introduction that this is not just a children's story, but "also a Victorian novel in miniature, a tidy précis of English fiction circa 1890". It even has a double plot, one about love, the other adventure.

As for Ashford's spelling and punctuation, he calls them "hilariously idiosyncratic". She may talk about the "sumpshous" bathroom, items wrapped in "tishu paper", and a room full of "searious people", but she knows what those words mean and tries her best to spell them phonetically. Hey, she's nine!

According to Wikipedia, "The Young Visiters" has been adapted as a musical, a play, a feature-length movie, and a BBC television production. Not bad for a first-time author!

The is my entry in the 20th Century Classic category for the 2020 Back to the Classics challenge.

Book Beginning: The Young Visiters by Daisy Ashford

Book Beginnings is a weekly meme hosted by Rose City Reader. We share the first sentence (or so) of the book we are reading, along with our initial thoughts about the sentence, impressions of the book, or anything else the opener inspires.

The Young Visiters is the greatest novel ever written by a nine-year-old.

So, could you pass up a book with such an opening sentence in the introduction? No, neither could I. This is a novella written by a girl in England about 1890, but not published until 1919. Walter Kendrick. a professor of English at Fordham University who was an authority on Victorian literature, assures us in his introduction that this is not just a children's story, but "also a Victorian novel in miniature, a tidy précis of English fiction circa 1890".

Sounds like fun!

Linguistic Diversity

Languages: A Very Short Introduction
Stephen R. Anderson
Oxford University Press, 2012
135 pages


This book is part of Oxford University Press's "A Very Short Introduction" series, now 691 books strong. From Abolitionism to Zionism, from Lincoln to Rousseau, from Advertising to Sleep, and everything in between is discussed in a very accessible way in about 125 pages each. I read "Italian Literature" a couple years ago and enjoyed it, so now I'm searching out more on topics I am curious about, where I don't want to digest an entire 500-page tome on the topic.

I find it hard to summarize this type of book, so I'm giving you the publisher's blurb about it:

How many languages are there? Are new languages still being discovered? Why are so many languages disappearing? In this Very Short Introduction, eminent linguist Stephen Anderson addresses such questions as he illuminates the science behind languages. Considering a wide range of different languages and linguistic examples, Anderson provides the basic facts about the world's major families of spoken languages and their distribution around the globe. He explores the basis for linguistic classification and raises questions about how we identify a language. Considering signed languages as well as spoken, Anderson also examines the wider social issues of losing languages, and their impact on vanishing cultures and peoples.

The discussion about how many languages there are was fascinating. I never realized how hard it is to count them. Anderson gives a lot of analogies to biological systems that are more familiar than linguistic ones, and that helps clarify many of his points.

The section about signed languages is also very enlightening. Unless you happen to know a deaf person who signs, you probably don't understand how signing works as a language - I know I didn't. This is necessarily a very broad introduction, but it gives me a context for other language-related topics I encounter.

Rivers of Consciousness

Room Temperature
Nicholson Baker
Grove Press, 1990
116 pages


Maybe Nicholson Baker has to be experienced rather than summarized. First of all, there is no plot in the traditional sense. The narrator, Michael Beal, muses on life for 20 minutes as he gives his infant daughter, affectionately referred to as Bug, her afternoon bottle. The style is stream-of-consciousness, but here it's on overdrive. The stream relates not just things floating at the top of Michael's mind, but rather every little thought or fragment that occurs in his internal monologue. We get tales of Michael growing up, going to music school and college, dating, and as a young husband and father, mostly in snippets that weave in an out of the reverie.

And what a reverie it is! Michael is very learned, making allusions to literature, science, art, music, history, and culture. The NY Review of Books said of Baker: 

You didn’t read Baker for plot turns or the careful delineation of character, or even for ideas. You read him for sentences and similes that would take your breath away, for pages of description more exciting than any James Bond thriller. 

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2013/11/21/funny-serious-too/

Before this I read "The Mezzanine", his first book, which is a similar stream-of-consciousness story following an office worker on his lunch hour trip to buy shoelaces. Both of them are interesting and entertaining, especially if you admire the creative use of words. And it helps if you Google the various people and concepts that are new to you. They are also quite funny and quirky.

From various recent reviews, I understand that Baker's style has changed a lot in the 30 years since this early book was published. Now I want to check out more of his work to see where it has taken him.

This is part of my reading for the 2020 Mount TBR Challenge.