Rules of Civility by Amor Towles

I’ve read this book before but I so much enjoyed rereading it almost ten years later. This time, I took the book slowly, reading just a few pages at a time instead of greedily gulping the story down as I so often do. Amor Towles is a magician with words and imagery. There were times where I just stopped and thought about how he had phrased things, how original and clever his metaphor is. This time too I felt that I recognized a distinct Great Gatsby influence, which I don’t think I was aware of before. The book is set in roughly the same period, and charts the entry of a working class girl, Katey Kontent, into the upper echelons of New York society. Its characters are thoughtless and hedonistic, and at times as arguably corrupt as Mr Gatsby himself. And of course a love story runs through as the backbone of the novel. I think I still prefer A Gentleman in Moscow, but both books are thoughtful observations of a class system – albeit one in the US and one in Russia – seen through the eyes of characters that you can warm to. Lovely, lovely, lovely. My favourite book(s) at the moment. I can’t wait to see what Amor Towles produces next.

Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe

The second in our non fiction group’s series was also disappointing. We all felt that Pascoe’s subject could have been presented in a much more succinct way. Having completed an undergraduate degree majoring in anthropology and had some experience working with Indigenous people, nothing in this book really surprised me. It all made so much sense. The development process of Indigenous culture is not dissimilar to many cultures around the world and it was no surprise that Indigenous peoples farmed land, managed animal stocks, saved seed, created art, travelled widely for ceremonial gatherings and so forth. Of course there were many details that we didn’t know – that Aboriginal people built stone dwellings in alpine regions, for example. I was especially interested in the records that the early white explorers kept, in which they observed the agricultural practices of the Aborigines. Of course, once settlers marauded across the land with their destructive farming practices, all that evidence was wiped out. I also found the sections about governance very interesting. But there was also a lot of unsubstantiated opinion in this book – what white settlers were thinking when they made certain decisions, for example. Unless Pascoe had access to records of these people’s thoughts, then it’s not wise to make assertions. We can imagine, but we can’t claim anything as fact without some sort of evidence. Having said all that, it’s a worthwhile book to read and different people will learn different things from it.

Golden Hill by Frances Spufford

This guy is in love with Henry Fielding – wordy, lush prose, swashbuckling and sometimes ribald adventure, innocence abroad in a big bad city….. The story is set in 18th century New York, a dark and dangerous place populated with thieves and drunkards at one level and political manipulators and spies at another. The protagonist arrives from London with a secret personal mission, not revealed until towards the end of the tale, and is thrown into this maelstrom of humanity. I didn’t love the plot as much as the telling, and it did take some concentration to get into the swing of the language – yes, pretty much like Fielding! It was an absorbing, entertaining read and really a terrific first novel for this writer. I’ll be interested to see what he comes up with in the future and whether he develops another authorial voice to match his subject.

Capital by Thomas Piketty

I read this for my newly formed non fiction discussion group. Or at least I read the first half of it! The theme of the book is that inherited wealth is the foundation of inequality. It’s a Marxist viewpoint. So, when a person inherits wealth, then they can invest those additional assets into further wealth producing assets. And thus wealth inequality not only continues but increases. It’s not a new story. His solution is taxation, specifically death taxes I think, but as I said I didn’t get to the end. Friends who know these things are quite critical of the book and his theories, but I am not well enough educated in the area of economics to do much more than observe the arguments. The group stopped halfway through because we all felt overwhelmed by the content, including all the formulae etc, but then we are all from a humanities background and chose this book to challenge ourselves. It sure did!

The Runaways by Fatima Bhutto

I heard Fatima Bhutto speaking at the Sydney Writers Festival this year, about both the problems that beset Pakistan and specifically about this book. She attempts to open people’s eyes to the phenomenon of young people leaving their homes to fight with militant Islamist groups through the medium of fiction. The book deals with three young people who leave their homes running from problematic lives, where they feel they have no place. You get both the back story and the story of their journey, in all its horrifying detail as they become ever more deeply embroiled in their situation. I didn’t enjoy this book particularly. I found it a very depressing read, not surprising when the real life situation is exactly that.

No Friend but the Mountains by Behrouz Boochani

This is a very hard book to read. It’s hard because of the story it tells, the flight of this brilliant Kurdish journalist, thinker and poet from persecution in his homeland and his incarceration by Australian authorities on Manus Island. Where he still is. It’s hard because he wrote his story as texts on his phone and sent it out via WhatApp. So what he talks about is the unremitting banality and boredom of daily life, interspersed with the horror of the third world conditions of mundane things like food queues and toilet filth, and then the flashes of hideous violence, torture and death of the inmates. Yet the language is beautiful, just beautiful. He escapes, in a sense, into philosophical musings. And there is something about Farsi that translates as poetry, probably the structure of the original language itself, which the translator has allowed to retain itself. This is a book that makes you angry, that you don’t want to read because it is true and it is wrong, but that you must read.

The Mongol Empire: Genghis Khan, his heirs and the founding of modern China, by John Man

Everybody has heard of Genghis Khan, and anyone familiar with Coleridge will recall his grandson Kublai Khan: ‘in Xanadu di Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree…’. And by the by, Kublai also conquered and united tribes like the Jin and the Song to create what we know as modern day China. John Man’s book about the Mongols who built an empire greater than the Romans, yet lasted only about 150 years before their line failed, is conversational and readable. I got more than a bit lost with the names of all the khans and their generals, their powerful and politically manipulative wives and the groups they led and those they conquered. However, the big picture emerges of a fierce and driven warrior group, who relentlessly invaded, murdered and pillaged all that lay before them. Man’s book looks too at the legacy of the Mongols, not so much anything cultural, because apart from their belief in a god called Blue Heaven in a sort of shamanistic religion, they did not impose any cultural values on the states they conquered. They were nomads, herders and warriors, not poets and musicians. Their legacy, rather, was how the world developed as a result of their empire building, to begin with their presence in the genetic makeup of 16 million men today, probably, Man says, because of their constant movement and the habit of giving beautiful women to the generals as booty. Second, Man believes the Mongols may have played a critical role in spreading the Black Death along what he describes as their ‘pony-express’ travel routes and because of their tactic of hurling plague infested bodies over the walls of an Italian port town they were besieging, from where it may well have been carried back to Europe. Third he believes that the Travels of Marco Polo, who visited China when the Mongols were in power, influenced Christopher Columbus and the rulers of Portugal and Spain, who were keen to find sea routes to the east once Constantinople had been captured by the Turks, closing the overland trading routes. He talks too about how a distant relative of Genghis, Timur (or Tamburlaine as the English know him), had a descendant called Babur who seized power in India and founded the Mughal dynasty that only ended with the British in 1857. And so it goes. There’s so much detail in this book that it’s impossible to remember most of it but it is nevertheless fascinating and I’m hoping remnants of what I’ve learned will pop up at the appropriate times.