Books I Read March 6th, 2022

I sell bread now, if you live in east LA get at me on instagram @insufferablebaker or email me to get on the list. That's an actual sentence I just actually wrote. Strange world. I read these books this week...

Country By Ways by Sarah Orne Jewett – Lovely, thoughtful nature writing and some slightly mawkish short stories of the sober New England variety. Someone could (has?) do a thesis on the connection between Jewett and Marilynne Robinson, which, if you don't know what I think of Marilynne Robinson, is a compliment.

The Friend of Madame Maigret by Simenon – How Maigret is this Maigret? I would give it three, maybe three and a half pipes, maybe four.

Housing First: Ending Homelessness, Transforming Systems, and Changing Lives by Benjamin F. Henwood, Deborah Padgett, and Sam Tsemberis – An overview of the current housing model by which California and most of the rest of the country/Western world operate. This isn't really the place for a longer discussion of the merits of this policy, though I will say in brief that it probably works really well in places that have places to put homeless people. Alas, LA is not one of those places.

Flight of Ashes by Monika Maron – A GDR journalist struggles with censorship, her obligations towards the communist state, etc. Maron's first work, it's not bad but I thought her later stuff worked this ground more effectively.

The Leavenworth Case by Anna Katharine Green – The back text of my Penguin edition suggests this as a precursor to Sherlock Holmes, but it's not really—it's a Gothic romance in the 'which beautiful sister with the dark secret will inherit the fortune' mold. I don't really love those, and I didn't really love this.

Alaric the Goth: An Outsider's History of the Fall of Rome by Douglas Boine – A revisionist history of a riot in Rome presenting Alaric and his followers as responding to the religious and ethnic intolerance of the then Christian state. One ought always be cautious of work which purports to see in some vastly different context contemporary political trends satisfactory to one's own political sympathies. The paucity of documentation about Alaric allows the author a degree of latitude to interpret the behavior of the man in a way which seemed to me inappropriate. Most of it was fluff, an occasionally interesting but fundamentally pretty scattershot discussion of the culture of 4th century Rome, and what remains is unconvincing by virtue of the fact that we actually don't seem to know almost anything of relevance about the man in question.