FICTION: I read two interesting thrillers by Eric Ambler: The Light of Day and Dark Frontier. Dark Frontier was an earlier book and something of a satire which made it a bit of fun, while The Light of Day was a neat crime story where a driver gets blackmailed into working with criminals, then blackmailed by the other side to spy on his comrades. Deadline at Dawn by Cornell Woolrich is a great suspense novel about a man who committed a robbery but repented, only to return to the crime scene and find the victim has been murdered during the interval; his only hope is to find the killer before the body is found. The Bride Wore Black is another great Woolrich novel, this one concerning a woman with a carefully-plotted scheme to murder the men who wronged her and get away with it. The Princess Bride by William Goldman had long been a film I loved but I finally delved into the novel and enjoyed it a lot, it's very warm and funny much like the film. The pandemic inspired me to read Michael Crichton's The Andromeda Strain, which is an extremely well-crafted thriller. I read up on a number of Halo novels, the best of which were Halo: First Strike & Halo: Ghosts of Onyx by Eric S. Nylund and Halo: Contact Harvest and Shadow of Intent by Joseph Staten; I've been a Halo fan for so long, I'm amazed that the books keep bringing up new ideas I hadn't considered and offer information which casts the events of the games in a different light. I read The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle despite my general disinterest in H. P. Lovecraft, but as LaValle had crafted a meta-commentary on Lovecraft in this book it was a welcome and (I think) long-since necessary examination of how he wrote about black people.
AFRICA: No One Can Stop the Rain by Karin Moorhouse was a memoir by two doctors who served in Angola during the civil war; obviously, with my own interest in Angola, I found a lot of familiar moments in the book and I appreciated their particular outsiders' perspective on the nation and its people. African Perspectives on Colonialism by A. Adu Boahen had a great look at colonialism from the perspective of African authors, a perspective the other books I read on colonialism had lacked. Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire by Roger Crowley was concerned mostly with Portugal's activities in India but it also relates their early history in Africa and explains why their empire had the oddly uneven distribution that it did. The Fear by Peter Godwin was a memoir about the author's view of Mugabe's Zimbabwe in what ultimately has proven to be the decline of Mugabe's reign. The Lost Cities of Africa by Basil Davidson is a pretty forward-looking book for 1959 as the author attempted to vouch for Africa's rich pre-colonial history. An African Slaving Port and the Atlantic World by Mariana Candido is a history of the slaving industry in Angola's port Benguela. Despite my interest in Angola I frequently found it to be dry and heavy on statistics, but there were interesting historical snippets explaining how deep the slave trade ran in Angola. The Looting Machine by Tom Burgis is a tough look at how capitalism is depleting Africa's resources with little in return; it's one I'm going to recommend. I read The Lion of Judah in the New World by Theodore M. Vestal for a grounding on US attitudes towards Ethiopia's Haile Selassie to help me with an essay I'm planning - as I'd hoped, the book made good points on Selassie's appeal in the USA. The Decolonization of Africa by David Birmingham was a strong book on the end of colonialism, although it spoke more in generalities than specifics.
CHRISTIAN: Letters Never Sent by Ruth van Reken was a series of letters written by a missionary woman across her life - lettters expressing all the things she felt growing up but couldn't express. As I'm going into missions I felt it was important to hear about the kinds of challenges she faced. Washed and Waiting by Wesley Hill is a memoir of the author's experiences as a celibate Christian gay man; homosexuality is a thorny issue in the church but this book takes a sort of centrist view which is definitely different. The Pursuit of God by A. W. Tozer is a fine meditative book on awareness of God in day-to-day living.
EVERYTHING ELSE: Reinventing Hollywood by David Bordwell had an interesting perspective on the challenging storytelling methods used in 1940s Hollywood films. The Phantom Unmasked by Kevin Patrick made a strong case for the Phantom as the first true super hero and had a strong case for why he's been denied that honour. Writing with Hitchcock by Steven DeRosa looked at Hitchcock's relationship with screenwriter John Michael Hayes. It was a strong examination of Hitchcock's strengths and failings and what made Hayes such a good collaborator for him. Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury is a series of short essays on writing which Bradbury composed across decades of his life. At his best, Bradbury is very inspirational and his guidelines have helped inspire me for years. Inside Benchley was the last of Robert Benchley's humour books which I had to read and I had a lot of laughs getting through the book. Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow is the book the musical Hamilton is based on and as I've never really been taught much about US history it was particularly good to get a grounding in events I only vaguely understood. Recent current events led me to Umberto Eco's Five Moral Pieces, mostly to read his essay on fascism which explained the concept more fulsomely than anything else I've read. The Complete War of the Worlds by Alex Lubertozzi is primarily a history of Orson Welles' radio adapation of H. G. Wells' story, but it contained a terrific history of both works. Erich Maria Remarque: The Last Romantic by Hilton Tims is a fine biography of the author, a little light on what made him a great author but shed a lot of light to me on how his life inspired his works.
Tomorrow: Comics!
No comments:
Post a Comment