What I've Been Reading: Early 2016

As has been usual lately, I'm a bit behind on my blogging for various reasons. Since it's been ages since I last wrote about the books I've been reading, I want to at least go back and cover the ones that I read in the first few months of this year, other than Hillary Clinton's autobiography Living History, which I've already written about. Of course, I've managed to read a number of books since then as well, but those will have to be covered in a later post.

The Wizard of Oz by Frank Baum
Like almost everyone who grew up in the United States, I saw the Wizard of Oz film multiple times in my childhood, but also like most Americans today, I’d never read the book it was based on (which originally went under the full title The Wonderful Wizard of Oz). I finally rectified that recently, and I found that overall the book is as good as the movie, though they diverge in important ways. Baum’s original novel is quite short, but nevertheless there are a number of episodes that were not incorporated into the movie, such as the journey Dorothy and her friends had to take to see the Good Witch of the South (who simply showed up in Oz in the movie). Also, in the book the Winged Monkeys were not evil servants of the Wicked Witch, but compelled to obey the wearer of the Golden Cap; later they help Dorothy when she has the cap. There are other elements unique to the book here and there, such as the Wizard requiring everyone who enters the Emerald City to wear green-tinted glasses that are locked on to the wearer’s head until they depart. Another notable difference is that the Dorothy in the book is clearly much younger than Judy Garland (though Garland seemed also to be portraying someone younger than her actual age at the time the movie was made). But perhaps a bigger distinction is that many of the Kansas scenes in the movie are not from the book (Dorothy’s aunt and uncle are the only other Kansas characters, and the family’s life there is portrayed as much more bleak and impoverished), and the book does not imply that the whole thing may have been a dream. Despite their differences, the book and movie have a lot in common, including that they are both very good if not necessarily complex or profound pieces of entertainment. Certainly the book was good enough that I’d be interested in reading some of its sequels should I ever come across any of them.

Fallen Dragon by Peter Hamilton
This is a standalone novel by a science fiction writer who seems to be pretty prolific, judging by the number of books by him I’ve seen around. This particular book is set in a distant future where humans have mastered faster-than-light travel, which they’ve used to colonize a number of planets around our part of the galaxy, though at the time the novel takes place, the initial burst of colonization has ended. Since colonization ventures are expensive, they were mostly sponsored by large, powerful corporations under contracts which apparently entitled them a share of the colony’s production, and new colonization efforts have been largely abandoned as too expensive. In the novel, one giant corporation has bought up a lot of the founding corporations of the various colony planets. It sends fleets of battleships and highly trained soldiers to the planets and demands that they hand over a substantial share of their production, using force to take what it wants if there is resistance. The main story takes place on one of these planets, with the central character Lawrence Newton, whose background is revealed in flashbacks, being one of the soldiers in the corporate army, with a secondary protagonist being a woman in the colonial resistance. The story is fairly complex, with some interesting twists. It’s a good novel that combines elements of space opera with hard SF, and I enjoyed it enough that I’d like to eventually check out another book or two by Hamilton.

Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
This well-known novel by W. Somerset Maugham is in the tradition of novels like Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, in that it tells of the protagonist’s childhood and early adulthood, and his search for his place in life. However, there are some aspects that show that it belongs to the 20th century (though the early part of it), such as the much more prominent role of sexual relationships, which while not described directly are still made much more obvious than in older novels. Some elements of the novel are autobiographical, such as several points relating to the protagonist Philip Carey’s childhood, though often altered slightly from the reality of Maugham’s own life. Philip Carey can sometimes be a rather frustrating protagonist to follow because the reader really wants to shake some sense into him. Of course this is true for most good protagonists, as they are naturally flawed just like real people are, though in Carey’s case it gets a bit much, particularly when he falls for a woman who not only is clearly unattractive in terms of both her character and her appearance, but who even Carey himself thinks is unattractive even when he first meets her and who never does anything to change that initial impression. While it’s not unusual for people to fall for someone whose flaws they don’t originally see, or to gradually fall for someone whose attractive qualities are not obvious at first, neither of those situations is what happens here, so it’s a bit of mystery why he would fall for her at all. But that aside, the novel is generally deserving of its classic status, and is a much easier read than many others in that category.


The Later Roman Empire by Ammianus Marcellinus
This is generally considered one of the most important histories to survive from the late Roman Empire. The surviving portions cover several decades in the last half of the fourth century (up to 378 CE), though the missing books at the beginning covered the second and third centuries as well as the first half of the fourth, though presumably in far less detail, as there are more books extant then are missing, even though the period they cover is far shorter. In the existing sections, much of the focus is on Julian, an emperor who Ammianus clearly admired, though he also criticizes him in places. He paints a grim picture of the misdeeds of many Roman officials, from Julian’s half-brother, the Caesar Gallus, and several of the other emperors in the period covered to various high officials who lied, cheated, stole and murdered with or without the knowledge of the emperors they served. Like many ancient Romans, including earlier historians such as Livy, he believes in superstitious nonsense like portents, but in other ways he does a reasonable job of taking a fairly objective, rational view of matters. As a pagan, his admiration for the pro-pagan Julian might be considered mere prejudice, but he actually criticizes Juilian for one of his more anti-Christian actions (banning Christians from teaching rhetoric). He condemns many injustices, though occasionally is rather contradictory in this regard; for example, he acknowledges that it was the oppression of the local Roman officials that caused the Gothic rebellion that led to the disastrous battle of Adrianople which ends his history, but when a Roman leader in the east treacherously has his Gothic soldiers slaughtered before they can even hear about the rebellion, he praises that as a prudent act, if not a noble one. But while he is many ways clearly a product of his times in his prejudices and beliefs, he is a decent historian and one whose work is essential to anyone who wants to understand that period of history.