★★★★☆ Repays effort

Selected Poems

Robert Browning, Daniel Karlin (editor)

There are treasures to be found in Robert Browning's poetry but don't expect them to be laid out for you like the candies at the grocery store cash register. Browning is famously obscure. In his introduction to Selected Poems (Penguin Classics) by Browning Robert Daniel Karlin tells this story

Tennyson said that there were only two lines in [Browning's Sordello] that he understood, the first – ‘Who will, may hear Sordello’s story told’ – and the last – ‘Who would, has heard Sordello’s story told’ – and that both were lies,

which is unkind, but still pretty funny.

This Penguin Classics edition is a well-put-together book, as Penguin Classics always are in my experience. After a brief (3 pages) introduction, we dive right into the poems, in publication order, with the exception of the final poem, which serves as a kind of epitaph. There are notes after the poems themselves, which are a big help in understanding Browning's obscurities, if you read them. I add the caveat because they are not footnoted or linked to the poems in any way. In the kindle edition you can easily miss that every poem is annotated, sometimes extensively. I would advise readers to read the notes for each poem immediately before or after the poem itself, although you will have to manually flip back there to find them.

Some of the poems are brief, but the ones I liked most were the long story-telling monologs put in the mouths of fictional characters. The longest of these are novellas in verse. My favorites among these were probably "Clive", simply because it's a good story, and "Mr Sludge, 'The Medium'", which is an extraordinarily penetrating portrait of a scoundrel -- a charlatan who pretends to communicate with the spirits of the dead. Karlin's notes tell us that this monolog is based on a real person. Browning was nobody's fool. At 1525 lines "Mr Sludge" is, I believe, the longest poem in this collection.

Despite all Karlin's help, Browning is not easy to read. In my review of another difficult book, Cat Valente's In the Night Garden, I wrote these words

I have mixed feelings about this. It is not just that she offers rewards proportionate to the work she demands. More than that, the demand itself makes the reward greater. Having worked for something makes the thing more precious than something given for nothing.

They will do as well for Browning.

Amazon review

Goodreads review

Comments

★★★☆☆ A positive (maybe?) take on AI?

Better Living Through Algorithms Naomi Kritzer In this issue of Clarkesworld I am reviewing only the 2024 Best Short Story Hugo finalist "Better Living Through Algorithms", by Naomi Kritzer . This is barely science fiction, in the sense that an optimist could easily imagine this story happening right now, in the very world we are living in. Most people probably would not, however, because we are conditioned to always imagine Thinking Machines as A Bad Thing -- you know, Frankenstein's monster and HAL 9000 and the Terminator and about a million other stories. I find that trope tiresome and irritating, so I love an original take on how AI could go right. This is, it turns out, a fairly small scale "going right", but not the less interesting for that. It's a good story. It would not get my vote for the award (that would be "The Sound of Children Screaming", by Rachael K. Jones ), but this is a good story and I would not feel robbed if it won. Amazon

★★★☆☆ Two not-bad Hugo finalists

How to raise a Kraken in your bathtub P. Djèlí Clark One Man's Treasure Sarah Pinsker. In this issue of Uncanny Magazine I read only two stories: "How to raise a Kraken in your bathtub". by P. Djèlí Clark and "One Man's Treasure" by Sarah Pinsker . These are 2024 Hugo finalists: "Kraken" for Best Short Story and "Treasure" for Best Novelette. They were just OK, not great, and neither would receive my vote for the award. (My votes would be "The Sound of Children Screaming" by Rachael K. Jones for Short Story and "On the Fox Roads" by Nghi Vo for novelette.) "Kraken" was a disappointment. From the title alone you will guess at the subject and plot of the story. This didn't bother me, because sometimes the best stories in speculative fiction are those that start out obvious, but then break. Well, "Kraken" doesn't break. It was pretty much exactly the story I imagined when I read the titl

★★★★☆ A techno Wild Hunt

The Mausoleum's Children Aliette de Bodard In this issue of Uncanny I read and am reviewing only "The Mausoleum's Children" by Aliette de Bodard . It is a finalist for the 2024 Best Short Story Hugo Award. It's a good story, and although it wouldn't receive my vote (IMO Rachael K. Jones 's "The Sound of Children Screaming" is a better story), I would not feel robbed if "The Mausoleum's Children" won. The Wild Hunt is an element of the folklore of northern Europe (mostly) that has found its way into a lot of modern fantasy. The story is vague and Protean enough that it takes different forms in the hands of different authors. De Bodard 's take on it is fresh and exciting. (I must confess, however, that de Bodard doesn't specifically reference the Wild Hunt, so that connection may exist only in my imagination.) Like many versions of the Wild Hunt, this is a dark story in which children are made to suffer, so know that go

★★★☆☆ A more realistic Arthur

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court Mark Twain I think I was a ten-year-old kid when I read A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court for the first time. Like every other American kid who liked to read, I had read Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn . Honestly, I never loved Tom Sawyer . Huckleberry Finn was better. But then I went looking for more works by Mark Twain , and found his England novels The Prince and the Pauper and A Connecticut Yankee . I think A Connecticut Yankee was probably my favorite Mark Twain work. I was familiar by that time with King Arthur, mostly in the form of T.H. White 's The Once and Future King . A Connecticut Yankee was something different -- it confronted Arthurian legend with modernity. Arthur's court as presented in A Connecticut Yankee is a squalid band of ignorant brigands. There is no magic. Characters such as Merlin as charlatans. The only magic, in fact, is the real magic of technology, which the Boss c

★★★★☆ Michener does nonfiction

Kent State: What Happened and Why James A Michener As a writer James A. Michener was primarily (indeed almost entirely) a novelist. Kent State: What Happened and Why is, as far as I know, his only nonfiction book, aside from a memoir ( The World Is My Home: A Memoir ). However, it will feel familiar to readers of his fiction. Most of his novels are long, deeply researched transgenerational sagas. To assemble these he worked with a team of researchers. (These are rarely acknowledged by name in the novels themselves, to the best of my memory.) To write Kent State , he set his team to uncover the facts of the events of May 4, 1970, when National Guard soldiers fired into a crowd of students protesting at Kent State, killing four. (I remember the number because of the song Neil Young wrote about it .) The main thing I remember from Michener 's book Kent State were the profiles of the individual students, and his attempts to figure out from very sketchy evidence (including a lo

★★★★☆ Supernatural locked-room mystery

Winter Lost Patricia Briggs Winter Lost is the 14th novel in Patricia Briggs 's Mercy Thompson urban fantasy series. Mercy Thompson is the series that introduced me to urban fantasy and is still my all-time favorite urban fantasy series. This one didn't quite feel to me like a typical Mercy Thompson novel. The Mercy Thompson novels are, as a whole, very political -- not that they are about real-world politics, but in the sense that they involve the political machinations and palace intrigues of groups of supernatural creatures, the most important being fae, werewolf packs, and vampire seethes. Mercy, with her werewolf husband Adam Hauptman has, over the course of the the previous 13 novels, become the leader of an alliance of fae, werewolves, and vampires that seeks to ensure security in her local community. These political threads are present in Winter Lost , but really only in the form of unresolved conflicts from previous novels that continue to hang over Mercy

★★★☆☆ Differently normal

Beyond the Wand: The Magic and Mayhem of Growing Up a Wizard Tom Felton This memoir reflects the author’s life faithfully rendered to the best of his ability. These words appear above the copyright in the front matter of Tom Felton 's Beyond the Wand: The Magic and Mayhem of Growing Up a Wizard . Having just finished the book, I believe them. That doesn't mean I believe everything the book says is correct or true, only that I believe Felton has done his best to make them so. This despite his being an actor, that is, a person whose job description literally is, "I pretend to be someone I'm not." If he's acting a part in this book, he fooled me, too. Felton appears to be a genuinely nice guy. He's also, he would like you to know, normal. He grew up in a loving family, and although he became a successful child actor, he was never fanatic about it. Acting was something he did, not who he was. He would claim that he was never especially talented, but I thi

★★★★☆ The intellectual rigor of Kipling's Just So Stories with some of the entertainment value

Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't Jim Collins James C. Collins 's Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't is a report of a research study ostensibly designed to find out how a company becomes great. Here's the research design: Collins and his research group did a massive survey of the business literature. They combed it for companies that met their "good-to-great" criteria, which, somewhat condensed, were 1. The company shows a pattern of “good” performance punctuated by a transition point, after which it shifts to “great” performance. 2. The good-to-great performance pattern must be a company shift, not an industry event. 3. At the transition point, the company must have been an established, ongoing company, not a start-up. 4. The transition point had to occur before 1985 so that we would have enough data to assess the sustainability of the transition. 5. Whatever the year of transition, the co

★★☆☆☆ A confusing novelette

Introduction to 2181 Overture, Second Edition Gu Shi, Emily Jin (translator) In this issue of Clarkeworld I read only the story "Introduction to 2181 Overture, Second Edition", by Gu Shi , translated from the Chinese by Emily Jin . It is a finalist for the 2024 Best Novelette Hugo Award. It's a confusing and difficult-to-follow future historical pseudodocumentary, concerned mostly with the consequences of widely available cold sleep. There's also a mother-daughter story tacked on -- it transpires that the author of the first edition, one Xiao Miao, was the daughter of the author of the introduction to the second edition. It was kind of hard work to read and to believe, and I never enjoyed it. The translation felt a little awkward to me. I do not read Chinese, so I can't compare the English version to the original. However, we have sentences like these, The results indicated that Xiao Miao has advanced stage lung cancer. She was only twenty years old. That intrus

★★★★☆ How to corrupt a town, or a country

Der Besuch der alten Dame: Eine tragische Komödie Friedrich Dürrenmatt ** spoiler alert ** I lived in Germany for a year, in Bremen and Göttingen, May 1983 - July 1984. One of my goals during that time was to become fluent in German. To do that I read several books. When I started, I looked for brief, easy-to-read books, and one of the first was Der Besuch der alten Dame . Playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt is (or was at that time) regarded as one of the foremost German-language writers, and Der Besuch was a thin book. When you're new to reading in a foreign language, you read VERY, VERY SLOWLY, so thin books are attractive. The story is fairly simple. It takes place in the fictional small city of Güllen. The alte Dame of the title came from there. In her youth, she was badly treated by one of the men of the town and was driven out. Now old and fabulously wealthy, she returns to town intent on revenge. She tells the people of the town that she wants her old enemy murdered, and t

Search This Blog