Books I’ve been reading

THE DIRT ON CLEAN: An Unsanitized History by Katherine Ashenburg is a look at standards of cleanliness through the ages prompted by the author’s discovery that contrary to legend, the Middle Ages hadn’t been uniformly a time when nobody took a bath (there were stretches in Germany where bathing became very popular and Moorish Spain even more so—though that later led to the Inquisition regarding regular bathing as proof of heathen belief). Ashenburg traces the rise and fall of public baths, indoor plumbing, toilet use (on being confronted with English
“water closets,” a number of Frenchmen at first just crapped on the floor), a bizarre 19th-century development called showering and, of course, our own current standards (“What does it say that the number of bathrooms is one of the first things that identifies desirable real estate?). A good job.
THE POISONED CROWN: The Sangreal Trilogy Book Three by Amanda Hemingway has a young planes-walker struggling to complete the McGuffin hunt assigned him by the supreme god-king of a dying universe, despite opposition from a malevolent water demon, a merman-selkie war, trying to figure out why he and his female best friend suddenly seem to find each other so irritating and the realization his mentor may not be the best person to hold these talismans (“Power-mad supervillain—sometimes the cliché fits.”). I was quite pleased with myself for realizing early on that Hemingway is also Jan Siegel, whose Prospero’s Children trilogy I much enjoyed (this is set in the same universe), so I’ll be getting volumes one and two eventually.
PLAYBACK has Philip Marlowe hired to trail a woman arriving in LA by train, only to discover he’s far from the only person dogging her footsteps, and that some of them have very nasty agendas. The plot here is slight, though Chandler keeps it interesting, and this unusually ends on a happy note as his lover from The Long Goodbye omoves to put their relationship on a more permanent basis. And that wraps up my Chandler browsing—someday I might pick up Poodle Springs (unfinished at Chandler’s death, then wrapped up by Robert Parker) but not now.
PEEPS by Scott Westerfeld is a good variation on Vampirism as Disease as a “carrier” of the vampire parasite (“We’re ‘peeps’—for Parasite Positive.”) for the centuries old Night Watch only to discover that vampire/host relationships are more complicated than he realized, and that there is much, much worse than nosferatu to fear. As someone with a good layman’s background in biology, I found the parasitology discussions a bit heavy, but overall pretty good, with some nice vampire touches (a side-effect of the infection, for instance, is that you begin to loathe everything you loved, so one peep, for instance, is now repelled not by the cross but by poster’s of Elvis).
THE CELLULOID SOUTH: Hollywood and the Southern Myth by Edward Campbell Jr. is something of a mixed bag, doing a reasonably good job in showing how Hollywood presented the myth of the Old South and its aristocracy and happy darkies, but not going much beyond that (which may be because it’s an early 1981 book and the analysis was fresher then) or at other aspects of the south in film, so that Angel Baby and In The Heat of the Night get less attention than Mandingo. And I’m really not convinced by Campbell’s argument that then-contemporary films such as Smokey and the Bandit should be part of the same Southern myth as Jezebel and Gone With The Wind (on the grounds it’s still about a proud Southerner standing firm against those who try to push him around). On the whole, The Reel Civil War did better with this topic.
THE ESSENTIAL DR. STRANGE VOLUME 2 was a pleasant surprise—the stories after artist and co-plotter Steve Ditko left were overall so weak, I was surprised how much they improved here. Roy Thomas handles much of the writing (succeeded by Gardner Fox and Steve Englehart) as Dr. Strange reunites with his lost love Clea, battles the Sons of Satannish (and I must admit, I did not expect the identity of the guy they unmasked as the leader) and his old foe Dormammu, then goes into a multi-issue battle against the Lovecraftian entity Shuma-Gorath (though for copyright reasons, they unconvincingly credit everything to Robert E. Howard’s horror fiction). On the downside, this shows some early examples of the tinkering that has gone on with Dr. Strange over the years, in this case Thomas making him a more conventional hero with a mask and a secret identity (Stephen Sanders). Overall, though, a pleasure to read.