I probably made a mistake by trying to read this at the beginning of a week off. I’ve attempted The Pickwick Papers twice before in the past year. Each time, the book eluded me, my interest in it slipping away before I was more than 10 pages in. Charles Dickens is, as usual, an excellent writer but one whose style is heavily idiosyncratic in a way that does not lend itself to the preferred prose styles of today. This, his first novel and serialized like most of his others, establishes many of the tropes for which Dickens becomes known over his impressive career.

The eponymous Mr. Pickwick is the leader of a kind of gentlemen’s club, and as the book opens, we see that he has persuaded the club to defray the costs of his rambles around the English countryside along with a couple of his friends. Over the course of about 700 pages, Dickens gets Mr. Pickwick into various scrapes and funny scenarios. Knowing that this book is a farce is extremely helpful in seeking to enjoy it, for otherwise you might conclude that the book is incredibly contrived and unrealistic. That’s rather the point!

See, this is entirely the reason I read 19th-century British literature. There are a few authors (particularly Eliot and Hardy) whom I adore and whose prose I think is truly exquisite. Dickens is passable at best, in my opinion—yet his characters, his stories, his ideas—wow! Seriously, have you read A Christmas Carol? There’s a reason it has been adapted so many times and—depending on which starving and desperate Dickens scholar you track down in their tiny office at the end of a disused corridor three wings over from the actual English department at your university—it was a hefty contributor to the renaissance of Christmas celebrations in Victorian England that resulted ultimately in many of the traditions we celebrate today.

But I digress.

I read 19th-century British literature because a great way to understand a time is to read about it from the lips of people who lived through it. As mentioned above, Victorian Britain was hugely influential throughout the world. Reading Dickens provides valuable insight into the shape of that society, the warp and weft not just of its political decisions but of the lives of the everyday people who moved through it.

As he does this, he loves to poke fun, to satirize and provide biting commentary. Much like Bleak House, my most beloved Dickens title, The Pickwick Papers places solicitors firmly in its crosshairs. There is a significant courtroom drama subplot here, complete with a fanciful and funny trial scene. Similarly, Dickens takes aim at the ridiculously stratified nature of debtors’ prisons—not just that people who could not or would not pay a debt were imprisoned, but that for rich debtors it was basically a kind of holiday where you could obtain anything you wanted from beyond the prison if only you wanted to pay for it.

In this way, there is so much enjoyment to be had from the cross-class depictions of characters Dickens delivers for us. From the wealthy, older Pickwick to his similarly well-off, younger companions to the youthful but poorer manservant that Pickwick engages, we have ourselves quite a diverse slice of urban English society. Many of the goings-on (from debtors’ prison to brawls over political newspapers and elections to Pickwick’s embarrassment at walking in on a lady’s room in an inn) might seem very alien and perhaps less amusing to modern readers, who lack a lot of the assumed context for these jokes. This is the Achilles’ heel of comedy, of course: it is usually far too topical, and over time its sting fades because our understanding of that which it critiques has faded too. Nevertheless, if you read carefully, I still think there is a lot of fun to be had here.

Really my dissatisfaction with the book is entirely subjective—it’s too long, too boring at times, and for some reason it really made me want to re-read Of Human Bondage (but I need a few palate cleansers before I tackle another huge book!). I suspect that if you like Dickens or Dickens-adjacent works, you will like The Pickwick Papers. If you tend to avoid Dickens like … well, like the Dickens, then this book probably won’t be the one that changes your mind.

Originally reviewed at Kara.Reviews.

To Explain the World has been waiting for me on my shelf for a few years. The trouble with these vast, sweeping histories of science is that, as much as I love them, more acute pop science and pop history books always take priority. You want to teach me about vaccines? You want to talk to me about environmental racism? Hell yeah, I’m down. But unless you’re Bill Bryson, your hot take on the last 2000-or-so years of Western science can wait.

But still, I am trying with some small success to get through the remaining physical books I have on my to-read shelf so I can make a big, celebratory purchase of many new books. So I dove into To Explain the World, curious and eager to hear what Weinberg has to say about the “discovery” of science, as he puts it. Weinberg is refreshingly honest about the subjectivity of his opinion, as well as the limitations of his writing. As a result, he furnishes us with an interesting and serviceable history—his writing skills do not always allow him to go exactly where he wants, I think, yet overall this book is a good read.

If I sound cynical about this book and others like it, it’s only because I’ve read so many of them. There's a predictable progression of greatest hits: Thales, Aristarchus, Pythagoras, Archimedes, Aristotle … then the medieval era, then the Renaissance, then the Enlightenment. Weinberg is hardly treading any ground that hasn’t been tread before, and while I appreciate his honesty about this, that doesn’t help me work up a lot of enthusiasm for it.

So what makes To Explain the World potentially stand out from among such a saturated subgenre? A few things, actually!

First, Weinberg’s experience as a physicist rather than a science historian means he definitely has an interesting perspective on this history. At one point, he confesses he has “no idea” how Archimedes accomplished something without calculus, reminding us that we are all incredibly influenced by our upbringing. Weinberg reminds us that when we look back at the accomplishments of the ancients, we should remember that their conception of the world was incredibly different from ours. Even if you don’t remember much science from school, even if you didn’t learn much about the scientific method, chances are you learned a lot more about how the natural world works than most of these Greek philosophers knew in their time. This has nothing to do with intelligence or even with the “progression” of our society—but it does have to do with the differences in how our societies are structured, and the fact that we have developed a systematic approach to society that is far more robust. Weinberg also cautions us that this remains true well into the centuries we might be tempted to think of as closer to “modern” times. Even Isaac Newton, to whom Weinberg devotes an entire chapter and lauds as perhaps the single most significant Western scientist, was interested in alchemy and religion as much as he explored what we now silo off as “proper” scientific pursuits.

Second, Weinberg is not afraid to get into the weeds of the whys and wherefores. To his credit, he hides most of showing his work in a Technical Notes appendix (which I admit, to my eternal mathematician shame, I only skimmed most of them). Even so, the main body of the book contains perhaps a little more math and science than you might be used to in a pop science book coming from a science communicator or historian. This is obviously a super subjective thing, so no shade if it’s not for you. But it is a nice departure from the trend to obscure the technicalities of science behind anecdotes and quips. Every author must calibrate their explanations to find their chosen balance between accuracy and comprehensibility. Weinberg leans towards the accurate, and this at least differentiates To Explain the World from the rest of the crowd.

Then we have Weinberg’s thesis. It is perhaps here that he is at his most ambitious. He cites Kuhn a few times (and even casually drops the fact he met Kuhn once, oooooh). Weinberg, as he hints at when he explains the choice of “discovered” rather than “invented” in the subtitle, believes that it isn’t really accidental that we developed science the way we did. He believes that there is an order to nature that made the development of the scientific method much more likely than not. To be clear, he is not suggesting a supernatural demiurge at work. Indeed, while Weinberg remains carefully diplomatic on the science versus religion divide, he suggests that our willingness to remove the supernatural from the explanatory playing field was a key step in the development of modern science. But really, what he is most proud of as a scientist is the fact that modern science now comprises robust theories that do not belong to any one individual, no matter how many giants’ shoulders that individual belongs to. Modern physics, his own field, is so complex an undertaking these days that we really can’t prop up the fallacious Great Man theory any longer.

I want to conclude with a critique not so much of this book but rather of this subgenre. Weinberg admits in his introduction that this book focuses on Western science, i.e., ancient Greece -> the Arab world -> medieval/Renaissance/Enlightenment Europe. He graciously name-checks China for developing sophisticated science and technology in isolation, for the most part, from the West; he also shouts out to the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. So at least Weinberg isn’t inadvertently presenting science as a uniquely European discovery.

But here’s my critique and my question: why do we keep letting old white dudes write these things (all love to Bill Bryson, but the question stands)? Deep down, I think I avoided this book—and am somewhat exhausted by such books—because it really is, as I noted earlier, a predictable progression of greatest hits. I really should be seeking out books written by Chinese historians about science and technology in China. Or Indigenous authors writing about the Americas, or about Africa, or Australia. I know these books exist, but if we can have yet more books about the history of European science from white guys, publishers can also print more of the alternatives as well. Because at the end of the day, even if my viewpoint of the world is radically different from that of “everything is water” Thales, Weinberg’s point is that we can trace a line from there to here. I am more curious about the cultures and ways of knowing in whose traditions I was not raised, and I would like to see more of those voices represented in our scientific histories and texts.

Like I said, that’s not on Weinberg. He’s doing his best to write what he is qualified to write, and he does a good job at it. To Explain the World is a book I would recommend, if this is what you want: a detailed, methodical survey of the discovery of Western science, predictable if you’ve seen it before yet still enjoyably unique in some ways.

Originally published at Kara.Reviews.

I’ve spent a great deal of time these past two years helping a friend revise her PhD. dissertation, which was about the history of sustainability in the Ontario forestry industry. Riveting, right? Anyway, one of the ideas she explores early in her thesis is that European settlers brought with them to the New World various prejudices regarding forests. The forest, in many European folkloric traditions, is a dark and scary place. We see this echoed in many a fairy tale. Julia Blake capitalizes on these traditions in The Forest. She weaves together an intricate story of passion, forbidden and unrequited loves and lusts, and cyclical prophecy.

Full disclosure: I received a copy of The Forest as a gift from the author. (I also received a free bookmark, so, you know, that’s definitely biased my review. Free books are one thing but send me a bookmark and I’m yours forever.)

The village of Wyckenwode has always existed on the edge of the eponymous and mysterious Forest. Only the Marchmant family and their duly-appointed Forester can enter the Forest; all other interlopers find themselves unable to travel very far inwards. The Forest exudes that subtle “old magic” familiar to readers of European folklore. The village has a timelessness to it, and a cyclical nature; people tend to stay in the village rather than leave it for work and life elsewhere in England. In almost all respects, life in Wyckenwode is veritably idyllic—that is, except for the intermittent appearance of the White Hind, which signals drama followed by death for at least three young people of the village. That’s where The Forest opens: the White Hind walks again, and naturally, we meet three young people who are perfectly positioned to be this cycle’s sacrifices to the darkness that lurks within the woods.

It took me a while to get into this book. Rather than dropping us in media res, the story opens with a prosaic dramatis personae as Blake walks us through the characters who inhabit Wyckenwode. Additionally, Blake’s prose style here is heavy on narration and light on dialogue. These two points taken together mean that, while the exposition is never overwhelming, you do have to absorb quite a bit before it feels like the plot is moving forward.

Once I became accustomed to the structure of the chapters, however, I came to appreciate what’s going on here. Many of the chapters are actually frame stories for a Forest-related folktale. After a couple, you begin to realize that the stories have these similarities to them, overlapping concepts or common themes that suggest some kind of common origin. I really like this portrayal of the fallible kind of collective memory that runs through old places like this village: each generation passes down the tales they heard from the generation prior, and with each telling the tales get a little mixed up, a little more muddled—yet they preserve some kernel of truth.

The Forest is therefore a kind of spiralling narrative. With each chapter, Sally, Jack, and Reuben learn a little more about the potential nature of the threat to Wyckenwode, thanks to these stories-within-the-story. Meanwhile, each must deal with their own dramas. Sally struggles under the weight of Jack’s overbearing, jealous romantic love when all she desires from him is a platonic, sibling-like love (can I ever relate to this subplot)—and Jack is not the only one interested in Sally. And Reuben is coming more and more into his role as future Forester, learning more about the mysteries of the Forest and wondering how this relates to the recent sighting of the White Hind.

Everything culminates on the night of the Autumn Festival, a most appropriate harvest-themed event for a story about forests and old magic. Here, too, Blake favours a spiralling approach to the action: rather than a single, climactic confrontation between good and evil, there are multiple, smaller confrontations. Each of our three protagonists has their chance to fight, struggle, and potentially succeed. Along the way, we finally learn the “truth” of what happened in the Forest all those centuries ago.

Then we get a denouement I was initially ambivalent about—I won’t get into spoilers, but it’s a HEA and at first felt too saccharine for me. (Also the age difference between Jolyon and his eventual bride… umm …?) Yet, looking back on it with about a week between me and the book, time has tempered my ambivalence down to a fonder recollection wherein the ending really just fits with the narrative structure I examined above. The whole theme of this story is about the absolutely batshit destructive nature of jealousy and envy, cranked up to eleven, and so naturally if you break that cycle you deserve a pretty good reward. (Also, for some reason aspects of this book reminded me of Hex, by Thomas Olde Heuvelt, which is much darker and much less satisfying a story, and that makes me even more grateful for the HEA.)

When you get right down to it, The Forest hits the spot if you’re yearning for a fantasy story steeped in traditional European tropes of magic, woods, and village life. Blake leans into these ideas hard, complete with chants and legends, allusions to fae creatures and changelings and the Green Man and other supernatural elementals of the forest—and this complete, intricate embrace of these tropes makes the story come alive. As Blake did with Erinsmore, she is reaching back into the traditions of her land for inspiration. As a result, this is also a great showcase of how white, Western fantasy authors don’t need to go around appropriating “exotic” tropes from other cultures to create their fantasy settings.

I’ll conclude by saying that there are serious Charles de Lint vibes here, and overall, this is a story for people who are looking for an escape from the problems of our real lives in the hopes that there might be magic just around the corner. The thing about old magic, especially the magic of forests, is that it’s never really gone. Sometimes, it’s just slumbering, waiting for someone—or something—to wake it.