Booknotes 4.14

Almost Perfect: How a Bunch of Regular Guys Built WordPerfect Corporation, by W. E. Pete Peterson, published 1998, nonfiction. I grew up using WordPerfect (on MS-DOS), so this was a fun kick of niche nostalgia. (I don’t actually miss the days of distributing software on floppy disks, though, or when our 2400 baud modem connection to the local BBS cut off because one of my siblings picked up the phone, or the heavy monochrome amber CRT monitor we started with whose RS-232 serial cable would regularly get loose and disconnect.) This book is more about the business side, which I’m admittedly much less interested in, but occasional slivers of the technical side kept me going.

Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World, by Mark Kurlansky, published 1997, nonfiction. Fascinating read, whether it’s talking about early American history or the morbid hazards of fishing (frozen fingers, higher mortality rate than I realized) or the Basques crossing the Atlantic to fish cod. (Which I had no idea was a thing, and which particularly caught my interest as I have a line of Basque ancestors back in the 1600s.) Really liked it.

A Long Way Home: A Memoir, by Saroo Brierley, published 2013, nonfiction. Whoa, this guy’s story is crazy. He’s born in India, gets lost on a train at age five, finds himself in Kolkata, ends up adopted by a family in Australia, and then, as an adult, tries to find his original home by combing through Google Earth satellite imagery. Thinking of one of my kids being lost at that age like that is one big, utterly terrifying ball of anxiety. Good book, though.

In Search of Lost Time volume 5: The Captive, by Marcel Proust (translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff), published 1923 (translated 1929), fiction. Deep dive into the same toxic relationships. I didn’t know the word “panic” came from the Greek god Pan, by the way. Proust’s prose style still draws me in, elaborate and ornate, studded throughout with philosophical thoughts. For example (and note that most of his sentences are nowhere near this long):

From his smile, a tribute to the defunct drawing-room which he saw with his mind’s eye, I understood that what Brichot, perhaps without realising it, preferred in the old room, more than the large windows, more than the gay youth of his hosts and their faithful, was that unreal part (which I myself could discern from some similarities between la Raspelière and Quai Conti) of which, in a drawing-room as in everything else, the external, actual part, liable to everyone’s control, is but the prolongation, was that part become purely imaginary, of a colour which no longer existed save for my elderly guide, which he was incapable of making me see, that part which has detached itself from the outer world, to take refuge in our soul, to which it gives a surplus value, in which it is assimilated to its normal substance, transforming itself—houses that have been pulled down, people long dead, bowls of fruit at the suppers which we recall—into that translucent alabaster of our memories, the colour of which we are incapable of displaying, since we alone see it, which enables us to say truthfully to other people, speaking of things past, that they cannot form any idea of them, that they do not resemble anything that they have seen, while we are unable to think of them ourselves without a certain emotion, remembering that it is upon the existence of our thoughts that there depends, for a little time still, their survival, the brilliance of the lamps that have been extinguished and the fragrance of the arbours that will never bloom again.