Book Recommendation Thread

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Sareth
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Re: Book Recommendation Thread

Post by Sareth »

Gilgamesh

Gilgamesh is considered to be the oldest story written down, as it was found on Cuniform tablets in Mesopotamian ruins dating back 5000 years. Reading it gives you an interesting look into the development of Western Culture, both in the amazing number of items that are assumed to be Jewish/Christian in nature that crop up in a story over 1000 years older than the Bible, and in the number of things different (such as the unapologetic sexuality in the sections dealing with Shamhat.)

Reading a good translation (I recommend that of Stephen Mitchell) really gives you a sense of two things. It helps you to begin to understand how truly old we are culturally, in that many of the things questioned in Gilgamesh (why we have to die, the meaning of good and evil, heroism, the relationship of leader and led, friendship, what civilization is or should be...) are things we question today. Many of the values shown are values we ourselves hold. It also helps you begin to see where we, as storytellers, come from. The nature of the story, the progression it takes, the elements it includes... while clearly archaic in it's nature it shows a clear ancestral nature to our own approach to writing stories, be they religious, fiction, or biography.

I highly recommend it.
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Boss Out of Town
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Re: Book Recommendation Thread

Post by Boss Out of Town »

I'll have to see if there's a good version of Gilgamesh in the local university library.

The Illiad and the Odyssey are also primal elements of Western culture and are both good reads if you get a good translation. John Keagan, Gwen Dyer, Victor Davis Hanson, and a lot of the modern military writers tend to interpret the human experience of war and battle as universal. That entire generation always wrote around the differences between, say, traditional European society, vs the Asiatic nomads, the Vikings, Apaches, and even the Japanese of the militarist era. Despite that caveat, we do have something in common with our cultural ancestors, with their individualism, with their mixture and distinction of warrior and civil aspects of culture. The Illiad, with its wonderful cast of characters, is the ur-story of the Western vision of war as constant tragedy, while the Odyssey captures the ideal of the adventurer as a thinking individual with survival and home as a goal, rather than glory or destiny.

On other historical topics, I was reminded by the oddities of our political discourse that the best book you will ever read about the American Civil War--the only one you need to read, if you are not interested in the subjuct--is James MacPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom. It is accessible to any reader and reminds modern Americans whose side they were on back then. Beyond the question of slavery and racism, the fundamental causes of the war, you learn how those fundamental causes created separate cultures in North and South, how that cultural divide made a political resolution impossible. I should emphasize that McPherson is a much better popular writer than my complex two sentence description of the books makes him sound.

Just finished re-reading, this past week, Gordon Prange's At Dawn We Slept, one of the two or three best books every written about Pearl Harbor, the beginnings of World War II in the Pacific, and the relentless path of mutual arrogance, cultural blindness, and miscalculation that led up that grand tragedy. Thirty years of meticulous research went into it. This is not a difficult read, but also not really popular history. Half the book is about the political and military chess game that led to the attack, about a quarter is about the battle itself, and the remainder is about the many investigations into the fiasco on the American side. Imperfect and very human misjudgment and flawed imagination are detailed month by month and eventually day by day and hour by hour until the clouds break over Hawaii on that momentous December 7 and people start to die.

Fiction wise, my wife and I both read urban fantasy, which is now one of the great markets for trash writing down at Borders Book Store. We like the better written ones, and our favorites are . . .

-- The early Laurel Hamilton (she gets too soap opera-ish in her later books)
-- Charlaine Harris's Sookie Stackhouse novels (much less grim than the TV Series)
-- Jim Butcher's The Dresden Files (a practicing wizard in Chicago with money problems and a porn-reading skull for a lab assistant. Smart, imaginative, funny, and much, much better than the TV series)
-- Kim Harrison's tales of Cincinnati witch Rachel Morgan (their titles are all puns on Clint Eastwood movies; Rachel is a better detective than Dirty Harry, while Jinks the pixy is a more interesting side-kick than Clyde the Orangutang)
-- Patricia Brigg's Mercy Thompson novels (a good-looking Volkswagen mechanic from Pasco, Washington who lives in a trailer, can shape-shift into a coyote and hangs out with werewolves? Sure, I believe it!)
History celebrates the battlefields whereon we meet our death, but scorns to speak of the plowed fields whereby we thrive; it knows the names of kings’ bastards but cannot tell us the origin of wheat. This is the way of human folly. --- Henry Fabre
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