Booknotes 5.20

Ethan of Athos, by Lois McMaster Bujold, published 1986, science fiction, 250 pages. Part of the Vorkosigan series. (I thought I was going in order, by the way, but apparently I somehow skipped this one and Falling Free. Whoops.) Enjoyed it, even if Miles isn’t actually in it.

The Marne, by Edith Wharton, published 1918, fiction, 70 pages. World War I from an American perspective, and as part of that, a meditation on war. Quite liked it — one of my favorites of Wharton’s, I think. This part amused me: “Her studies had probably been curtailed by the task of preparing a repertory, for she appeared to think that Joan of Arc was a Revolutionary hero, who had been guillotined with Marie Antoinette for blowing up the Bastille; and her notions of French history did not extend beyond this striking episode.”

The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer, published c. 1400 (translation by Nevill Coghill published 1951), poetry, 520 pages. I didn’t love it, for the same reasons I didn’t really like The Decameron (whence several of Chaucer’s stories came from): too bawdy. Though, to his credit, Chaucer’s characterization work is much better, and the frame story has interesting detours where people interrupt and derail the order of tale telling. Even so, I’m beginning to suspect that medieval lit may not be my thing after all, which comes as a surprise to me.

Unto This Last, by John Ruskin, published 1862, essays, 100 pages. Interesting essays on political economy, touching on ethical, humane economics. Some interesting ideas, like equality of wages regardless of aptitude (which seems kind of crazy but was still interesting to think about). And then I got to the end of third essay where Ruskin drops this: “My continual aim has been to show the eternal superiority of some men to others, sometimes even of one man to all others.” Ugh. Plop goes Ruskin into the interesting-yet-problematic bucket. But other than that it was worth reading. Some passages that stood out to me:

Men nearly always speak and write as if riches were absolute, and it were possible, by following certain scientific precepts, for everybody to be rich. Whereas riches are a power like that of electricity, acting only through inequalities or negations of itself. The force of the guinea you have in your pocket depends wholly on the default of a guinea in your neighbour’s pocket. If he did not want it, it would be of no use to you; the degree of power it possesses depends accurately upon the need or desire he has for it—and the art of making yourself rich, in the ordinary mercantile economist’s sense, is therefore equally and necessarily the art of keeping your neighbour poor.

And this:

And whereas it has long been known and declared that the poor have no right to the property of the rich, I wish it also to be known and declared that the rich have no right to the property of the poor.

And:

Consider whether, even, supposing it guiltless, luxury would be desired by any of us, if we saw clearly at our sides the suffering which accompanies it in the world.