Favorites of 2023: Books - Our year of Byron
Sydney Padua, The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage (Pantheon, 2015), p. 32. Image source: The Beat, the blog of comics culture
For the final Favorites of 2023 post, I offer my favorite books first read in 2023 that were not written by Agatha Christie. (If you are curious about her exclusion, she has her own post: Our year of Agatha Christie.)
Fiction
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Sydney Padua, The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage (Pantheon, 2015), pp. 30–317. In 2009 over a beer at a pub, animator Sydney Padua was commissioned by Suw Charman-Anderson, who was planning the first annual Ada Lovelace Day, to produce a short web comic on Ada's life. Ada Lovelace was the daughter of Lord Byron and his wife Annabella Milbanke; she was a mathematical prodigy who wrote what has been called the first computer program for Cambridge professor Charles Babbage's calculating machine, the Analytical Engine. She has become an icon for girls and women who code. But she was only 36 when she died of cancer. In the preface to Thrilling Adventures Padua writes, "Lovelace died young. Babbage died a miserable old man. There never was a gigantic steam-powered computer. This seemed an awfully grim ending for my little comic. And so I threw in a couple of drawings at the end, imagining for them another, better, more thrilling comic-book universe to live on in" (p. 7). Those "couple of drawings" grew into the 300-page Thrilling Adventures. Each adventure takes place in a steampunk alternate universe in which a full-scale Analytical Engine has been built. Over the course of Thrilling Adventures Lovelace and Babbage encounter the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Queen Victoria, the novelist George Eliot, the logician George Boole, and the world of Lewis Carroll's Alice stories. Padua's Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage is an exhilaratingly witty and imaginative journey through computer history and the Victorian scientific, political, and literary worlds. For my full-length post, please see The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage. |
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Ellen Wood: East Lynne (Oxford World's Classics, 2008, originally published 1861) Like half a dozen Victorian novels in one, East Lynne offers a dizzying array of narrative incident: unrequited love, false identities, mismatched marriage, murder, adultery, self-sacrifice, and two wrenching deathbed scenes. A hugely influential bestseller in the last half of the 19th century and for decades afterwards—Tolstoy had a copy of East Lynne in his library and drew inspiration from it for Anna Karenina (1878), and it was adapted as both silent and sound films—in the past half-century Wood's novel has fallen into relative obscurity. As I wrote in "My sin was great, but my suffering was greater," "East Lynne deserves a contemporary readership for its compelling story (including a jaw-dropping plot twist two-thirds of the way through) and its multilayered characters. They, like ourselves, act out of a mixture of motives, and discover that actions taken in the heat of an impulsive moment can bring lasting regret." |
Honorable mention
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Madame de Staël: Corinne, or Italy (Oxford World's Classics, originally published 1807) Lord Oswald Nelvil, a young man traveling in Europe to try to distract himself from deep grief, meets Corinne, a woman who dazzles the literary and social world of Rome with her poetic improvisations. The two fall in love, but both are wary of emotional attachment: Oswald because a previous love affair ended badly, and Corinne because she fears Oswald will want her to give up her life as an artist. This story of impossible love is just the sort that appeals to me. But Corinne, or Italy earns honorable mention rather than favorite status due to its heroine's many discussions of national and regional character, which are inevitably filled with stereotypical generalizations. In these we hear the voice of the author, herself a leading figure in Romanticism and in the liberal opposition to Napoleon Bonaparte. But these lengthy digressions—while undoubtedly reflecting conversations taking place in salons around Europe—have not worn well with the passage of time, and slow the momentum of its central love story. Byron, who met de Staël for the first time after this novel was published, wrote that she was "sometimes right and often wrong about Italy and England—but almost always true in delineating the heart, which is of but one nation of no country, or rather, of all." If only she had given less attention in Corinne to outlining in broad strokes the differences between the Italians and the English, or between Tuscans and Neopolitans, and more attention to delineating the heart. |
Nonfiction
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Sydney Padua, The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage (Pantheon, 2015), pp. 1–29. No, you are not having an episode of déjà vu. The final 290 or so pages of Padua's book are a steampunk fantasy of the Victorian era, and thus won a place in my Favorites of 2023: Fiction. But the first 30 pages are a straightforward biography of Ada Lovelace and her intellectual collaborations with Charles Babbage, inventor of the Difference and Analytical Engines. Ada was 17 years old in 1833 when she met middle-aged Cambridge math professor Charles Babbage. It was intellectual sympathy at first sight. Babbage was demonstrating his Difference Engine calculating machine, and Ada immediately grasped its principles. Babbage went on to design the even more sophisticated Analytical Engine, which used punchcards to govern its operations (the idea was derived from mechanical Jacquard looms). Ada, now Lady Lovelace, translated a French-language article on the Analytical Engine based on a lecture Babbage gave. To the 25-page article she appended 41 pages of her own notes, in which she included a method for calculating Bernoulli numbers using the Engine. Her algorithm has been called the first computer program. Lovelace may have become addicted to the opium prescribed to help her breathing difficulties (probably due to the smothering London "fog" of coal and wood smoke). Opium lowers inhibitions, and this may have been the reason she spent so many years trying to perfect a system for gambling on horse races (which, of course, failed, and caused her to lose huge sums). In 1852 at age 36 Ada was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and died two weeks before her 37th birthday. After her death Babbage made little further progress on the Analytical Engine. Never able to raise sufficient funds to construct it, he spent much of his time writing splenetic letters to London newspapers trying to whip up public campaigns against noisy street musicians and children rolling hoops on cobblestones. Babbage survived Ada by 19 years. Padua tells Ada's story with economy and graphic verve. Ada was a mathematician at a time when women were not considered by many men to possess sufficiently logical brains to comprehend the subject. She anticipated computer programming and its application to areas beyond algebraic calculations a century in advance of the development of the technology. It's a striking and too-little-known story, earning Padua's Thrilling Adventures a place among my nonfiction favorites too. |
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Jenny Diski: Why Didn't You Just Do What You Were Told? (Bloomsbury, 2020) One of the chief pleasures of reading the London Review of Books over the past three decades was finding a Jenny Diski essay inside. She started writing for the LRB in May 1992, and continued until February 2016, two months before her far-too-young death at 68. Altogether she wrote something like 215 pieces for the magazine (145 articles, 65 blog posts, and 5 letters); one appeared roughly every third issue over that span. But somehow her contributions felt rarer than that, more unexpected. They were always a special delight, generally read first, or saved for the last before starting all over again. She was bluntly honest, outspoken, and at times shockingly self-revealing. She did not mince words or suffer fools. She asked uncomfortable questions, of herself and us, and often found uncomfortable answers. She could also be very funny, in a dark and sometimes acerbic sort of way. Why Didn't You Just Do What You Were Told? is a selection of 33 of her pieces, chosen by her longtime LRB editor Mary-Kay Wilmers. They range from her very first article for the LRB, "Moving Day," to the piece she wrote in September 2014, "A Diagnosis," on learning of the cancer that would kill her 19 months later. (The Diski essays that follow "A Diagnosis" that are both "another fucking cancer diary" and an ambivalent memoir of being taken in as a troubled adolescent by the writer Doris Lessing were collected in another essential volume, In Gratitude (Bloomsbury, 2017)—a nicely double-edged Diskian title.) Here's a characteristically observant excerpt from "Moving Day," a Diary piece about about moving her ex-Live-in-Lover out of her apartment: There was only one moment of open disharmony in the whole event. It echoed the tension there had been all along. There was always an inequality of certainty about the project of us living together. He spoke easily about forever. I did not consider the week after next a safe bet. In recognition of our different styles I bought him an ironic bottle of wine when he moved in, chosen to be ready to drink in 1997, on my 50th birthday. It was partly a small gesture of risk, but mostly I expected to be doing exactly what I was doing with it today: popping it into one of the card-board boxes of his belongings, well before 1997. We stood in the doorway looking at the bottle in the box on the floor. He said he didn’t want it. I said it wasn’t mine, and neither did I. The stalemate was broken when I took the bottle by its neck from the box, and swung it (I like to think with some elegance) against the stone step by the drain in the front yard. A storm cloud accompanied the crash of breaking glass, and darkened the day with the threat of sudden, electric rage from each of us. It took a dangerous moment to pass over: but it did, and the milder breeziness returned. 'Nice one,' he said. 'Thank you,' I smiled, with a warm inner glow of satisfaction at the unlaunching of us. No sense crying over spilt claret. The image of unlaunching her relationship by the spontaneous smashing an unwanted bottle of wine is a brilliant Diskian inspiration. This first piece also talks about an absent daughter off on holiday castrating sheep (sometimes the ready-made symbolism of real life is so obvious that you need do nothing more to emphasize it); a sick cat at the vet's requiring a major operation; a visit to orangutans at the zoo as research for a novel in progress (Monkey's Uncle, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1994, in which an orangutan character named Jenny, who wears a tea dress and high heels, has an independent existence in the imagination of the main character); and her overwhelming desire to be by herself and write: This is it, then. Me in my space. Me and my melancholy. I do nothing. I get on with the new novel. Smoke. Drink coffee. Smoke. Write. Stare at ceiling. Smoke. Write. Lie on the sofa. Drink coffee. Write. It is a kind of heaven. This is what I was made for. It is doing nothing. A fraud is being perpetrated: writing is not work, it’s doing nothing. It’s not a fraud: doing nothing is what I have to do to live. Or: doing writing is what I have to do to do nothing. Or: doing nothing is what I have to do to write. Or: writing is what I have to do to be my melancholy self. And be alone. It's no wonder Diski became a regular contributor after this piece. It was a high standard to live up to—her own—but her subsequent work was always readable and usually much more. Inevitably some of the articles included in this collection have outlived the occasion for which they were written, but even her reviews of forgotten books are often entertaining—probably more entertaining than the books themselves. One recommendation: I found that my first impulse was to binge-read her essays, because so many of them are so good ("Moving Day" as Exhibit A). But I found that it was best to ration them to just one essay at a sitting. Like glasses of good wine, they are meant to be savored, not gulped down, and too many in a row diminishes, rather than enhances, their effect. |
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Iris Origo, War in Val d'Orcia (New York Review Books, 2018, originally published 1947). In the years leading up to World War II, Iris Origo—a wealthy Anglo-American born in Britain and raised in Italy—and her Italian husband Antonio lived on the estate of La Foce in Tuscany's bucolic Val d'Orcia. They had married in 1924, just a year and a half after Mussolini seized power and Italy became a fascist state. But their wealth largely insulated them from uncomfortable encounters with the fascisti, and they spent the 1930s restoring their historic manor. The world of dictatorship and war could not be held at bay indefinitely, though, as the events of 1943–44 proved. In July 1943 Allied armies invaded Sicily, and Mussolini was dismissed and arrested. By early September the new Italian government had negotiated an armistice, and an Allied invasion of the southern Italian mainland had begun. To many it seemed as though the war in Italy was about to end. Instead, the German army seized control, freed Mussolini and occupied Rome. The new government fled. The Allied advance up the boot of Italy was hindered by terrain, German defenses, and bitter winter weather. It wasn't until June 1944 that the U.S. Fifth Army entered Rome. The German army made a fighting retreat northward from Rome, and for several days Val d'Orcia became a fierce battleground. Origo's recounting of the events of these tumultuous twelve months—subsisting on rumors of Allied victories; traveling on roads strafed by Allied planes; providing food, clothing and medical care to partisans, deserters, and escaped prisoners (activities which could have led, had they been caught, to the Origos' summary execution); and huddling in the basement for shelter with the children under their care while shells and bombs fall around them—is riveting. No matter what perils she, her family, and the communities surrounding La Foce are facing, Origo relates them in spare, clear, dispassionate prose. It's a truly remarkable display of coolness under almost unimaginable circumstances. Her avoidance of emotionally heightened descriptions actually increases the reader's sense of tension. And as I read of her experiences eighty years ago as a civilian trying to protect herself and her loved ones in the midst of industrialized warfare, the news was filled with the destruction of Gaza and with drone and missile attacks on Ukrainian cities. The horrors Origo experienced are still with us. |
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Iris Origo: The Last Attachment (Pushkin Press, 2017, originally published 1949) We did not start out purposely with this object in mind, but in retrospect, both in fiction and nonfiction, this was our year of Lord Byron. He was the father of Ada Lovelace, an intimate of Madame de Staël (but no, not that intimate, so far as we know), and the subject of Iris Origo's The Last Attachment, the first publication of his letters to his married Italian lover Teresa Guiccioli. Byron met the 18-year-old Teresa at a Venice conversazione in April 1819. It was just a year after her marriage to Count Alessandro Guiccioli, a man forty years her senior; Teresa was his third wife. The marriage had been contracted, as was the custom, by Teresa's father to help further his political ambitions. Byron was 31 and a notorious seducer of married women. One of his lovers, Lady Caroline Lamb, had famously said of him that he was "mad, bad, and dangerous to know." So it proved. Teresa's meeting with Byron was love at first sight, at least for her. The night after that first meeting she waited until her husband was taking his post-dinner nap, then stepped into a gondola sent by Byron. In her later confession to her husband, Teresa wrote, "I was strong enough to resist at that first encounter, but was so imprudent as to repeat it the next day, when my strength gave way— for B. was not a man to confine himself to sentiment. And, the first step taken, there was no further obstacle in the following days." But this turned out not to be a two-week, or two-month, affair. In his first letter to Teresa after their temporary separation three weeks later Byron wrote, "You sometimes tell me that I have been your first real Love — and I assure you that you shall be my last Passion." Their connection lasted until he sailed for Greece in July 1823 to join its independence struggle; there, of course, he met his premature death in April 1824. Origo's cool, analytical style serves this sometimes overheated material well. Her focus is on the development of Byron's relationship with Teresa, rather than on extended analysis of Byron's published writing. (At the height of his affair with Teresa, and while living in her husband's house, he was composing Cantos III, IV and, after a pause of six months, V of his great poem Don Juan; there are some suggestive parallels.) Origo, unlike many others who have written about this period in Byron's life before and since, takes his relationship with Teresa as worthy of sustained attention, and proves it through her detailed readings of his letters to her. Many thanks to the friend who gave us both of the Origo volumes, rightly guessing that they would be of great interest. |
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Katherine Rundell: Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne (Faber, 2022) Katherine Rundell is perhaps the anti-Iris Origo. Instead of cool dispassion, she offers vividly expressed enthusiasm. If you want to know why you should read the poems of Donne, an Elizabethan soldier and Jacobean cleric, Super-Infinite will give you ample reason—Rundell's lively style and high-spirited advocacy are utterly infectious. If you are already familiar with Donne's poetry, Rundell does not generally provide lengthy analyses of individual works. Instead she aims to evoke in the reader the sensations that encountering Donne's poetry for the first time can inspire. Some of her descriptions can be over-fanciful or obscure, but most convey an excitement that at times borders on disbelief that a poet writing 400 years ago can speak to us so directly. Rundell also teases out some of the elaborate paradoxes that Donne constructed, and frames the work with resonant biographical and historical detail. There may be more in-depth and analytical studies of Donne, but none I'm aware of that is so readable. |
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Katherine Rundell, The Golden Mole (Faber, 2022). In February 2018 Katherine Rundell, adventurous spirit and scholar of 16th- and 17th-century British poetry, wrote a short essay for the London Review of Books entitled "Consider the Pangolin." Her vivid writing style combined with her unusual subject to compelling effect: The pangolin is known as a scaly anteater, because of its diet, and because it's the only mammal entirely covered in scales, but the description does not acknowledge the fact that the scales are the same shade of grey-green as the sea in winter, and the face that of an unusually polite academic. The tongue of a pangolin is longer than its body, and it keeps it tidily furled in an interior pouch near its hip. The name comes from the Malay word penggulung, meaning 'roller'; when threatened they curl into a near-impenetrable ball. Their defence mechanism has made them easy prey to humans; they effectively render themselves portable. Pangolins are currently the most trafficked animals in the world, their scales used in traditional Chinese medicines and their flesh eaten as a delicacy. . .Beijing customs have seized more than a tonne of scales being shipped into China; each tonne the equivalent of 1660 animals. It is a fact so exhausting, so dreary and grotesque, that it's difficult to fathom. We consume beautiful things. That essay was followed by eleven more over the next three years, about animals such as the lemur, the wombat, the narwhal, and the Golden Mole—as wonder-inspiring, and as threatened with extinction, as the pangolin. Those essays and ten more have been brought together in The Golden Mole, beautifully enhanced by the illustrations of Talya Baldwin. It's a book that everyone from a precocious child to a great-grandparent will enjoy and treasure, and the essays are the perfect length for reading aloud. Amazingly, it has no U.S. publisher, but copies are plentifully available from the bookshops of the London Review of Books and the Guardian, and you can also listen to an interview with the author at the London Review Bookshop. |
Honorable mention
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Hua Hsu: Stay True (Doubleday, 2022) College is a time of heightened experience. The tastes and aversions developed there, the late-night conversations held there, and the relationships formed there can be the most intense of our lives, and can powerfully affect us for decades to come. In Stay True, Hua Hsu writes about an unlikely friendship he forged at Berkeley in the mid-1990s with his dorm-mate Ken. Hua, the son of first-generation Taiwanese immigrants, cultivated an identity as an outsider: he wore thrift-store clothes, avoided parties and drinking, and listened to little-known bands whose records he discovered during hours spent trolling through used record stores. "I saw coolness as a quality primarily expressed through erudite discernment, and I defined who I was by what I rejected," he writes; he viewed "a bad CD collection as evidence of moral weakness." Ken's Japanese-American family had lived in the U.S. far longer, and he embraced mainstream culture without self-consciousness: he was "flagrantly handsome," wore Abercrombie & Fitch, belonged to a frat, had a blond girlfriend, and listened to the Dave Matthews Band. "The first time I met Ken, I hated him," Hua confesses. But, attracted despite himself by Ken's social ease, Hua begins to lower his guard, and over time their friendship blossoms. They develop their own rituals, codes, catchphrases, even a shared email sign-off: "Stay true." Stay True is a meditation on the meaning of their friendship and Hua's deep grief and sense of guilt at its irretrievable loss. Ken seems to have had a special gift for friendship, and existed as the gravitational center of a whirling social galaxy. No diminishment of Hua's feelings is intended when I find myself wondering whether he had the same place in Ken's life as Ken did in his. As a longtime Berkeley denizen I felt a special frisson whenever a student landmark like the South Side Top Dog or Tower Records was mentioned, and I may even have unknowingly encountered Hua in the 1990s while browsing record bins or used-book shelves on Telegraph Avenue. And I had many moments of rueful recognition at Hua's account of using his "erudite discernment" and alienation as means of keeping emotional distance from all but a select few—but also at his discovery of the way that, on the cusp of adulthood, we can so quickly form profound, life-altering connections. Ultimately, though, those transformative experiences are both universal and incommensurable. It was difficult not to agree with Hua when he concludes, "you simply had to be there." |
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Venetia Murray: An Elegant Madness: High Society in Regency England (Viking, 1999) In my full-length review, I wrote that Murray's book "could be subtitled 'Aristocrats Behaving Badly.' The upper classes of late 18th- and early 19th-century Britain ate and drank to prodigious excess, took drugs (snuff and laudanum), wore revealing clothes (tight pants and diaphanous gowns), spent outrageous sums pursuing the latest fashions, loved parties and disreputable pastimes (such as opera and theater, particularly if the actresses playing male 'breeches roles' wore tights that revealed their shapely legs), slept around, and were stupendous snobs. With material like this, Murray's An Elegant Madness is nothing if not diverting." However, I also wrote that "Murray is an entertaining writer, but not a careful one." There are occasional misstatements, as well as odd pronouncements such as "Gambling and politics were yet to be condemned as mutually exclusive occupations" (when did that happen?) or "living in debt was not only normal, but somehow rather chic. . .This attitude to money, so alien to the twentieth century, needs to be seen in the context of its time" (an attitude alien to a twentieth century that saw median U.S. household debt exceed $50,000?). Perhaps these are just examples of dry humor; if so, it's perhaps revealing of both Murray and this reader that it was impossible to tell. My post concluded, An Elegant Madness does not offer in-depth discussions of Regency politics, economics, fashion, arts, food, or sex. But despite its limitations, it is enjoyable, not least for its black-and-white reproductions of caricatures by Gillray, Rowlandson, Cruikshank and others. I recommend reading it as background to the novels of the period, or for entertainment. After all, we're not the ones the upper classes of England forced off the land, threw out of work, maimed or killed in their factories and wars, and left to starve. The passage of time provides a safe buffer for our amusement. |
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David Grann: The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder (Doubleday, 2023) As I wrote in my full-length review, navigation during the Age of Sail was an approximate, error-prone, and perilous business. So it proved for the crew of HMS Wager, which was separated from its fleet and shipwrecked off the western coast of South America during the 18th-century British trade dispute with Spain known as "The War of Jenkins' Ear." What follows is a gripping narrative of almost unfathomable endurance, fortitude and skill, but also of poor judgment, pointless conflict, needless violence and deliberate cruelty. Grann is an engaging writer with a compelling story to tell, but he is not above reporting both direct speech and the unvoiced thoughts of his subjects (both, of course, his own surmises or inventions). He also has trouble keeping track of exactly how many men have survived at each point, a failing I found more distracting than it probably warranted. The Wager has a fascinating coda, though. One of the few survivors of the shipwreck was a teenaged midshipman. Amazingly, after this shattering experience he went back to sea, this time as a captain of his own ship, and ultimately rose to the rank of Vice Admiral. His name was John Byron; one of his children was the profligate "Mad Jack" Byron, who became the father of both Augusta Byron and of her half-brother and lover George Gordon Byron, the famous poet. In Canto II of his narrative poem Don Juan, Byron drew on his grandfather's experiences to heighten the realism of a shipwreck scene involving his anti-hero. Thus history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, and the second as satire. |
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