Bookwi.se

Summary: The classic story translated by Emily Wilson, narrated by Claire Danes.

I have been preparing to go see Nolan’s version of the Odyssey for the past several weeks. First I read Stephen Fry’s retelling and then I mostly listened but also read a bit of Emily Wilson’s translation narrated by Claire Danes. I have listened to her narrate The Handmaid’s Tale and she has a fairly flat reading style that works for some kinds of fiction but not others. I think it works here.

Wilson translated The Odyssey into verse. Not all version do, some are prose. Generally I think that narrative verse should be listened to. I think that is the case in my favorite verse book, Brown Girl Dreaming. and it is the case with Malcom Guite’s Galahad and the Grail, which I am also reading right now. I tend to get both kindle and audiobook editions because I want to get a sense of the written version of the verse. So I do read about 10 percent of the book. But I mostly listen because these are intended to be heard.

I am not going to get into arguments about the quality of Wilson’s verse or whether Nolan’s version was a good adaptation. I am just not qualified for either of those arguments. Wilson fit the story into verse, there were artistic choices there and some content was shaved to make it fit into verse. Nolan was also adapting a story that has many versions to the screen and also made artistic and stylistic choices. Personally I think it is an artistic masterpiece that also had real misses in some of the choices. Visually I think it was very interesting. I liked the twin themes of grief about war and the concern about how his actions in war led to the larger rejection of “Zeus’ Law” and while I understand how that adapts the original story, I think it makes sense of a modern adaptation. At the same time, I thought Matt Damon’s performance was a bit too flat. And that I wanted the ethics to be a bit more foreign to our modern sensibilities. Not in a way that horrifies us, but rather in a way that shows the ancients as alien to our thinking.

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Summary: A retelling of Odyssey.

We are preparing to watch The Odyssey. We wanted to watch on IMAX and when we were buying tickets the best option was more than two weeks away. I am pretty sure I have never read a straight translation of The Odyssey, but I have read or seen a ton of adaptations. Some of those adaptations are pretty straightforward like O Brother Where Art Thou? and Sea of Monsters by Rick Riordan .

I have also read books “based-on” the Odyssey like Circe by Madeline Miller. But there are those that I didn’t identify as being inspired by the Odyssey, but I have found since that they were, like Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmin Ward and Cold Mountain by Charles Martin. But I think probably more common is the number of books that uses references to the Odyssey, like Daughter of Rage and Ruin by K. B. Hoyle. That book is a retelling of Jack and the Beanstalk, but she still references Cyclops as another famous giant as part of the quest. Many of Hoyle’s books are based on quests and so almost all of them in some way reference The Odyssey.

While Fry’s Odyssey isn’t a translation, it is a pretty straightforward retelling, with a few asides, some explanations built into the main text, and some humor. If you have previously read The Odyssey and want a better refresher than wikipedia, this might be right for you. I know Stephen Fry from his audiobook narration of Harry Potter and other books. And it was on sale on Audible so I picked it up because I was not sure I could get through the original before I saw the movie.

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Summary: Now that the main characters have been introduced, stories can be told. 

I needed something to listen to as I was doing some mindless work and the first two books in this series were available to listen to from my library. The series starts out in the novella length (about 150 pages each) before getting a bit longer in the later books.

As a series that starts with novellas, each of the early books does build and feel like “chapters” of a larger story.

I won’t reveal too much about the books, but the first book introduces “Murderbot” the Artificial Intelligence in a part robot, part humanoid body which is described as a “construct”. As a construct, “Murderbot”, a security unit primarily working to protect human exploration or mining projects, is deemed expendable. The first two books describe how it freed itself from its software restrictions and reveal that it was actually free to do what it wants to the humans that it needed to save.

And then it escape from the planet and went on the run from the corporation that own it, all the while trying to investigate its own history and what had been wiped from its memory. These middle books (2 to 4) feels like a 1970 or 80s wandering hero tv show. The hero is on a quest, but along the way helps people who are in need of help.

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Summary: An exploration of Artificial Intelligence through a evolutionary and metaphysical lens. 

I am not particularly interested in AI. I do not trust it to handle important data. I have used it primarily to test it for handing data at work and I tested it in a few personal projects, like this blog. There is lots of evidence that we should not hand over important work to AI without testing the result. One of my tests I asked Claude to look at my blog. A couple years ago I changed hosts and a lot of my image links broke. I have been changing them as I linked to older reviews, but it was just not something I cared about enough to spend the time to change hundreds of images. But that is a good project for AI. So I had Claude identify what posts needed updated images, I title my posts the name of the book being reviewed, so I had clearly identified book. I told it to size the image about 200 by 300 pixels. It took a while to get the right access to my blog and it took a couple of passes before it finished, but it made about 700 images changes to my blog. The vast majority were good changes, exactly what I wanted. But I had a means to test, by going to the media page on my blog and just scanning the images for obvious errors. It took me about 90 minutes to change about 10% of the images. There was one random red car picture. There were a handful of covers that were the right title, but the wrong book. And a good number that were the wrong language cover or where an image of a random page or the title pages in stead of the cover image. But I also had about 10-12 that were a random cover of the book of Common Prayer.

I have done a number of other similar experiments. And pretty consistently AI can get it about 90% right. But 90% right isn’t good enough for my work and it isn’t good enough for many other people’s work. While there was a recent study that tested AI against law professors to see who better explained cases (the AI won), there have been hundreds of cases where judges have been sanctioning lawyers who use AI and don’t check the citations because AI so commonly hallucinates. All of that is to say, I generally am interested in tech, but I don’t trust AI.

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Summary: A sweeping history of Black Social Gospel movement from the end of the Reconstruction through the 1930s.

This is the first of Gary Dorrien’s long books that I have read. I have read his memoir, which I think is one of his shortest books. And I took Homebrewed Christianity’s class on Gary Dorrien, Theology for Troublemakers. I have the second book in this trilogy as well as The Spirit of American Liberal Theology. But that is just scratching the surface of his writing. A friend I talked with last week recommended his The Remaking of Evangelical Theology and I want to many more including his book on Anglicanism. 

I think that The New Abolition is going to be too long and detailed for many readers, but this is a nuanced history. There are a lot of players to the story, some that are fairly familiar like Booker T Washington, Walter White or Ida B Wells, but many are lesser known like Bishop Reverdy Ransom or educator Richard Wright.

Raphael Warnock’s book tells a shorter history of the tension in the Black church between personal piety and social activism, but this is a much thicker history that grapples with ways that often the same people changed over time. WEB DuBois argued against Washington’s accommodationist tendencies but at other times used very similar rhetoric. Washington preached accommodation, but also quietly supported more active community organizing. Many arguing against the white supremacy of the time still accepted some level of racial hierarchy. Similarly much of the Black Social Gospel movement was either patriarchal in its assumptions, or was in favor of women’s suffrage, but still assumed a gender hierarchy or opposed gender hierarchy had regular affairs. There was a number of the social gospel proponents who were holiness absolutists who had very high standards of morality that seem to suggest a type of politics of respectability which also assume hierarchical class assumptions. And it was fairly common in this history to see alcoholism, which I think is in part a trauma response to the reality of this history.

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