Wednesday reading

I'm currently reading The Fall of the Dynasties: The Collapse of the Old Order 1905-1922 by Edmond Taylor. It's an old book now written closer to the Great War than to 2016. It is a little outdated being from before the Vietnam War and at times relying on a visceral understanding of the Cold War of the early 1960s to make the situation before World War I clear. Old codgers like me are more likely to understand that than even folks born in the 1960s who grew up when the tensions were a lot less, though we still called it the Cold War. Anyone who vaguely studied World War I in school should know the rough story: A bunch of ancient monarchies collapsed as the war was coming to its close. This book is a fairly decent next step into looking into what actually happened. It shows how those in power who were well aware that the Old Order was seriously in danger in the early 20th century, made things worse by trying to save the old ways.

There are a few oddities about the book. In particular near the beginning Taylor uses a bit of vocabulary rarely seen outside of a university-aptitude vocabulary test. Some of the political terms he used must have been fine for the World War I era but I would guess were less than clear by the early 1960s. Being a fairly broad history Taylor mentions many symptoms of crumbling societies, but doesn't do a lot of theorizing about how the state of affairs got to that point. It's something I think we would expect more of from a book written these days.

Still on reading, headline: Dan Brown working on young adult version of 'Da Vinci Code' via AP.

This set me back a bit. Why does Brown think he needs a special version for young adults? Pre-teens maybe, but young adults? What's he going to do, turn it into a manga? That would be interesting. Is he just going to dumb it down? Is he going to condense it by removing most of the romance-novel-worthy drooling over his chosen locations? That would have been an admirable goal for his original version. Or is he going to go into more excruciating detail in explaining to those poor dumb adults why those places are oh-so important. Maybe he's going to put vampires in it. The last time I passed by the young adult display in B&N there were still lots and lots of books with vampires. Whatever, I'm sure religious conservative parents who secretly read the original themselves will be just thrilled to have their high-school kids exposed to all that *blasphemy* in a convenient and easily readable form. ;o)