I just finished reading The Warlords by Matt Braun. It is a fictionalized account about the Germans funding Mexican border raids into Texas and raising and arming a small army to invade Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona in 1915 in order to distract the United States, triggering a declared war on Mexico, keeping the U.S. from entering the war in Europe. The raids were part of a plan to start a race war in Texas, the San Diego (TX) Plan, part of what was known as The Border War 1910-1917. The Plan of San Diego called for the execution of all gringo males over 16 years of age, then later on, Tejanos who refused to join the "revolution". There were a total of 30 raids that killed 21 Americans and did millions in property damage. Texan vigilantes killed over 100 Mexicans and Tejanos. The Rangers themselves killed more Mexicans than Mexicans killed Americans.
San Diego, Texas is about 85 miles inside Texas, west of Corpus Christi. The invasion part of the Plan of San Diego was thwarted by Texas Rangers and Army patrols, the raids ended after the U.S. recognized the government of President Venustiano Carranza. In the book, it ended with a federal agent and one of the Texas Rangers went into Matamoros and killed two of the warlords and captured two Germans. The Border War itself ended after Pancho Villa attacked Columbus, NM, triggering General Blackjack Pershing going after Villa deep in Mexico with almost 5,000 troops.
Edit: This is of interest to me, as my great-grandfather and his family were living on a farm near Donna, Texas, near McAllen from 1912-1916. I now wonder if those raids precipitated their return to Kansas.
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Sleep - the most beautiful experience in life - except drink.--W.C. Fields
Jeremy Irons played Humbert Humbert in Adrian Lyne's made-for-cable remake, which I plan on seeing after finishing this book. His narration is impeccable.
Finished A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf. Not sure if she was drunk while she wrote it, but I did enjoy the first reading as convoluted as it is.
Also caught up on some side reading with poetry by Allen Ginsberg ("Howl" and "Empty Mirror") and the novels The Cat Inside by William S. Borroughs and his collaboration with Jack Kerouac titled And the Hippos were Boiled in Their Tanks.
I just finished the main body of "the Tibetan Book of the Dead" by W.Y. Evans-Wentz and I am ready to start the appendix, and then the Addenda. I don't think I read the Index, other than to just scan it. .
__________________ The highest form of ignorance is when you reject something you don’t know anything about. Wayne Dyer
Jeremy Irons played Humbert Humbert in Adrian Lyne's made-for-cable remake, which I plan on seeing after finishing this book. His narration is impeccable.
Be wary: Adrian Lyne's version treats the abuse and pedophilia like a romance. Irons is a great Humbert Humbert but the movie's direction is shit. At least the Kubrik version is clear-eyed about who the villain is.
I found Jeremy Irons' version sufficiently icky, especially the rocking chair scene.
I'm reading The Last of the Barons by Edward Bulwer Lytton. It's a novel about Warwick the Kingmaker. Bulwer Lytton takes an interesting angle on Warwick's fall, painting it as either result or symptom of the rising merchant class & diminishing aristocracy. What intrigues me most is that no historian I've read has suggested it, but it doesn't read as being without merit. I am interested to see where he takes it.
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"freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order."
- Justice Robert Jackson, West Virginia State Board of Ed. v. Barnette
Currently on Rupetta. So far, I really like it. It's sort of an alternate history, with the departure point being the creation, in 16th century France, of an immortal artificial woman around whom a religion develops whose followers despise the weakness of the flesh and aspire to Transformation into deathless mechanical beings. It's also sort of a gothic horror thing about the relationship between life and death, that very effectively blends one protagonist's simultaneous anticipation and fear of her impending Transformation, her coping with her father's declining health, and a lot of gardening imagery. But, then, it's also about history and the creation and falsification of history. And, then, also, it's unusual in that all the major characters are women. Definitely one of the more interesting pieces of fiction I've read lately.
Finished this, and definitely recommend it. If I have a complaint, it's that Rupetta's physical properties are treated very inconsistently. In first person narration, she often refers to her leather skin, wooden limbs, etc., and yet she frequently passes for human, even, in at least one case, to a lover.
Currently on Hild, which is making me want to play Crusader Kings, despite being set like four hundred years earlier.
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"Trans Am Jesus" is "what hanged me"
Only the ebook is set in the modern era. This is the first of the Nero Wolfe mysteries:
The last time I was at my favorite bookstore, I bought editions of Beowulf (trans. Burton Raffel) and Troilus and Criseyde (trans. Barry Windeatt) off the discount cart, so I have more works to keep me in the medieval era if I want.
Also, just got Elaine Forman Crane's Killed Strangely: The Death of Rebecca Cornell in the mail Saturday. Crane is coming to Newport next week to talk about her latest project in the works, the tale of the attempted murder by poison of Benedict Arnold (not the infamous Revolutionary War traitor) by his wife. Apparently there was no law against attempted murder back in the day, but it was generally accepted as grounds for divorce...
Just finished and recommend, Gulp
Excellent, funny and informative as always. If you've read any of Mary Roach's other books you will love this one. It basically takes you from mouth to anus and explores the research and discoveries of the digestive track.
The Fault in Our Stars.
An easy to read love story of Hazel, a teen dying of cancer and her journey to discover the truth of what becomes of a pet hamster (if you've read it you will understand). Adorable, sad, amazing.
I finished the Wallander book, so now I'm moving onto The Origin by Irving Stone as an e-text. I downloaded it via Open Library, a resource I highly recommend.
The physical text I'm reading at the same time is Janet Browne's two-volume Darwin biography.
Currently on Hild, which is making me want to play Crusader Kings, despite being set like four hundred years earlier.
Finished this a week or so ago. This was one of those books where I was reluctant to start reading anything else, because I wanted my head to stay in this one's world for a while. I am totally in love with Griffith's depictions of the seasonal rhythms of life in the 700's, and her lovingly detailed descriptions of the natural world.
I also read and enjoyed Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation, the first book of his Southern Reach trilogy.
After seeing Michael Frayn's brilliant play Copenhagen, about the famous meeting between Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr in 1941, I'm now reading the book that inspired it:
And listening to this as an audiobook:
For those who want to see Copenhagen, it was filmed for TV with Daniel Craig as Heisenberg, Stephen Rea as Bohr, and Francesca Annis as Bohr's wife, Margrethe. It's compressed somewhat from the play as written by Frayn, which is a shame, but it's still very much worth watching.
Finished Crane's microhistory on Rebecca Cornell. Some of it was good, some of it was very speculative, and it is was repetitive in several places. For example, the story of the death-turned-into-a-murder investigation appears once near the beginning, ending with the execution of Cornell's son for matricide, then deja vu the same story of the investigation shows up again near the end to pad an explanation how the 17th century court system worked followed by speculation on what all the neighbors, jurors and Cornell's descendents were thinking from Cornell's death through Lizzie Borden and beyond. Yup, Ms. Borden was a descendent of Rebecca Cornell, but that has little to do with this story from the 1670s other than it's an odd coincidence...There is a good story here, but would be better quite frankly if it were a lot leaner and less bs; cutting the 80-100 pages of filler would be about right.
Also, have been assigned this to read for a "book club" at work that I have somehow found myself a member of without any signing up for on my part. Whatever. Think I got up to about page 8 when I noticed the footnotes were referencing other books the authors had written. Yeah! Who needs peer-reviews anyway? Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner!
Decided then that I am going to finish reading Clark's book first.
Re: What are you reading?
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