Let's Do the Time Warp Wednesday

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What I've Finished Reading

Yes, my friends, remember how indignant you once felt when the Turks massacred more than the ordinary quota of Armenians, how you thanked God that you lived in a Protestant, progressive country, where such things simply couldn't happen – couldn't happen because men wore bowler hats and travelled daily to town by the eight-twenty-three. And then reflect for a moment on a few of the horrors you now take for granted; the outrages against the most rudimentary human decencies that have been perpetrated on your behalf (or perhaps by your own hands); the atrocities you take your little girl to see, twice a week, on the news reel – and she finds them commonplace and boring. Twenty years hence, at this rate, your grandchildren will be turning on their television sets for a look at the gladiatorial games; and when those begin to pall, there will be the Army's mass crucifixion of Conscientious Objectors, or the skinning alive, in full colour, of the seventy thousand persons suspected, at Tegucigalpa, of un-Honduranean activities.

Oh, Huxley! You got me! Only if I'd wanted to be lectured, I would have bought a book of lectures, wouldn't I?

Ape and Essence is a heartfelt howl against the mechanized evils of the twentieth century, and I couldn't care less. Which means I've gone and made Huxley's point for him, but what can you do? I'm not going to pretend I liked a book just because it correctly predicted my blasé reaction to its horrors.

( I read some other things too )

What I've Abandoned with Dizzying Alacrity

Julie, or the New Heloise. I got about sixty pages in and found that I just couldn't face the road ahead. Normally I'd say that epistolary form covers a multitude of sins, but you can't make up for boring letters with more boring letters. Sorry, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, you are not the asshole philosopher for me.

What I'm Reading Now

No Highway by Nevil Shute.

He said the Reindeer tails would come to bits in 1,440 hours, but he didn't know what an electric water-heater looked like. Could that possibly make sense? Did he know enough about real life to speak with confidence on anything?

Mr. Honey is an aircraft engineer who believes he's found a fatal flaw in the tail of a currently-flying commercial aircraft. He also believes that Joseph of Arimathea took Little Jesus to England for a holiday and that the world is ending in 1994, which you can figure out from the pyramids somehow. This, and his poor hygiene and difficulty thinking about the practical side of his theory, makes it harder than it ought to be for him to convince his bosses that the issue is serious. He's just been sent to Canada to investigate a plane crash that may corroborate his theory about the flawed tail. Now, in the middle of the Atlantic, he's learned that the plane he is traveling on is a Reindeer that has logged over 1400 hours -- meaning if his theory is right, it could fall apart any minute now.

Mr. Honey is not a complex character, but he has a strong appeal. I sympathize with him, but I can't help sharing his boss' opinion that if he would just comb his hair before the more important meetings and leave his theories about the Lost Tribe of Israel at home, it would be better for everyone. He has a young daughter and is equally charming and annoying as a father -- hapless in an inescapably gendered way, somehow unable to figure out the washing-up for four years straight now that his wife is dead (she seems to have been an equally simple soul, but with basic domestic competence, go figure). I'm worried about him, and everyone involved with this airplane company.

What I Plan to Read Next
Next in 99: The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen, the 99 Novels' very first female author! And some things from my bookshelf, and We for the sci-fi book club.