CBR17 Bingo: Favorite – Both books are history books about fairly specialized, off beat topics – my favorite kind.
The World of the Shining Prince by Ivan Morris – 5 stars
For about a century about a millennium ago, a strange era flourished in Japan where a series of boy emperors were ruled by their in-laws (who were also their grandparents, cousins, and aunts), beauty was virtue, and the failure to catch the vaguest conversational allusion to a poem spelled social ruin.
This book is recommended as a handy historical companion to The Pillow Book by Sei Shōnagon, which I loved, and The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu, which I mean to read, and also just on its own because it’s an excellent read, so of course I read it.
The height of the Heian period is so alien in its aesthetics and social mores from our own time (and the cultures in which I’ve lived) that it’s an enormous task for Morris to first center us in this period, let alone to start helping us comprehend it. But he manages to do it (and along the way helped me understand how exactly Sei Shōnagon and her friends were able to afford their layers upon layers of silk robes, for starters), and does it in an extremely readable and amusing book.
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American Monsters by Adam Jortner – 4 stars
If art is a mirror to the attitudes of the era in which it was produced, then, argues Adam Jortner, the monsters of those eras reflect the unique fears of the times that produced them.
Horror is probably the one genre I’m interested in more for the history and the subtext of it than in its actual works (though I do enjoy a good psychological horror or ghost story every now and then). I do agree with Jortner’s premise, and so I was quite interested to see what all of these monsters might represent.
This is a short lecture series, starting in the time of the Salem witch trials and concluding in the present day with the dawning of Internet horror. Jortner is an engaging lecturer, and I enjoyed the variety of the subjects covered – ghost stories, moral panics, Spiritualism and Bigfoot and more. I would have enjoyed going a bit more in depth on some of the later subjects though. I would have been interested to hear more about his thoughts about serial killers and creepypastas for example.