Booknotes 3.23 — Blog

Though I’ve been reading a lot (as you can see on the reading log), I’ve been rather slow writing these up. Hoping to get back on track soon.

Printing Types: Their History, Forms, and Use, volume 1, by Daniel Berkeley Updike, published 1937. This first volume looks at typefaces designed early on (1500–1800) in a few different European countries (Germany, Italy, England, etc.) and also examines how they were used. I read it primarily for the type specimens and sample pages and less for the commentary, which turned out to be a bit dry and snobby. Fun to see the variety of typefaces. Also, I learned that “out of sorts” meant the printer was missing some characters in the typeface.
A Life of My Own, by Claire Tomalin, published 2017. While I haven’t read any of Tomalin’s biographies yet, my wife has read her Jane Austen, and I figured I may as well start with Tomalin’s autobiography in the hope that there would be a lot about the biographies she’s written. There was some (less than I wanted), and those were the parts I enjoyed most. In her own life, there was a fair amount of cheating and tragedy. (Her husband! Her daughter! And that story her teacher told her about the child in India whose toes got cut off while crossing a road and who just picked up the toes and kept running! Whew.) Fun fact: Jane Austen and Samuel Pepys had the same banker, and said banker’s financial records for both are still available for research (or were when Tomalin wrote the Austen and Pepys biographies, anyway).

The Adventures of Pinocchio, by Carlo Collodi, published 1883, fantasy. What a weird little book. I’ve only seen the original Disney movie, and that was a long, long time ago. The morals of the story are laid on a bit thick. I suppose in hindsight that that shouldn’t have been a surprise to me. Also a surprise: the Talking Cricket’s fate early in the book. Whoa. Not a surprise: people being kind of violent back then. (Wait, what? You’re telling me that human nature has not in fact changed all that much since the 1800s? Oh snap.) The scene where Pinocchio refuses to take his medicine was funny. Overall, glad I read it.
Kindred, by Octavia E. Butler, published 1979, science fiction. Family history time travel, basically. For some reason I was expecting it to be boring, but it was compelling from the first page. And whew, that was a brutal, violent, and uncomfortable book. Slavery is insanely awful. Ugh. (This book reminded me, by the way, how effective fiction is in mentally simulating conditions one hasn’t experienced oneself — like what it might have felt like to be a slave.) A good book and well worth reading.