1. A YouTube channel I’ve discovered recently is Oceanliner Designs, which provides extremely detailed documentaries on famous ships and disasters at sea, illustrated with some very pretty animation. Of course Titanic is a regular feature, but the host also examines other famous liners, including Titanic’s two sisters, Olympic (the one survivor) and Britannic (which was lost to a mine while serving as a hospital ship) and their rivals Lusitania and Mauritania. He also sometimes examines warships, including Yamato and HMS Hood.

(I also just learned he has a second channel dedicated to aircraft)

2. If you have time, I particularly recommend his nearly 2-hour documentary on the Lusitania. I think even historically-minded people tend to think of the Lusitania only as the ship that tempted America toward war with Germany; we forget that she was a luxury liner in the same vein as Titanic with a long and venerable career of her own (including a dramatic brush with a rogue wave). In fact, she was the largest and fastest ship in the world when she was first launched, and she and her sister, Mauritania, ruled the Atlantic passenger from 1906 until Olympic burst on the scene in 1911.

Also, I had no idea just what a fiasco the Lusitania‘s sinking was. It makes one appreciate how efficient the crew of the Titanic was in successfully launching almost all the boats (though it’s not entirely the crew’s fault in the case of Lusitania)

Anyway, it’s a classy and very interesting look into the ship and her disastrous end.

3. I’ve started reading The Picture of Dorian Gray (another school book), which I have read before, but a long time ago. So far my takeaway is that Lord Henry’s cynical bon mots are getting very tiresome very quickly. That sort of thing is fun, and I enjoyed the first ten or twenty or so. But it’s every page and every line of dialogue from him.

I honestly suspect that may be intentional. I don’t know a whole lot about Oscar Wilde’s life and personality, besides the obvious (brilliant writer given to wittily cynical turns of phrase, struggled with homosexual tendencies and was condemned for sodomy, died soon after his prison term and entered the Church on his deathbed), but my own reading of the book is that it’s Wilde’s very real conscience struggling with his immoral tendencies, with Basil being ‘good’ Oscar and Lord Henry being ‘bad’ Oscar. With that in mind, I wonder if he deliberately overdid Lord Henry’s wit to show how tiresome this tendency of his could become.

Again, that’s just my reading, and I’m no expert. It’s a very good book so far; a strong, simple premise wrapped up in witty (and occasionally over-witty) prose. Five pages in and Basil and Lord Henry are already more vivid characters than anyone in Separate Peace. I especially appreciate the skillful way Wilde showcases Basil’s willingness to deceive himself into seeing only what he wants to see rather than what is really there (fitting for an artist), which will lead to his inevitable demise at the hands of someone he misjudged.

4. Certainly, the book showcases (and even the introduction in my edition acknowledges this) that for all his witty cynicism, Wilde was much more morally conscious than he’s often given credit for. A genuinely unrepentant hedonist or Libertine could never have invented the device of a painting that records the state of a man’s soul, nor used it as effectively as he does.

5. By the way, I almost never read introductions to novels. I usually find them to be a waste of time. I don’t care what some random professor or third-rate author has to say about the book: I want to just read the bloody thing for myself. Unless the intro is by someone I already have an interest in, or is likely to provide crucial background information, I usually just skip it.

6. I also tackled Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers recently, which is not on my school list, though I rather think it ought to be. It’s essentially a love-letter to the common soldier, imagining a future with a 100% volunteer military in which each infantry trooper fields firepower equivalent to a whole platoon and how such a thing might work. It follows a young man who signs up more or less on a whim to impress a girl, through boot camp to his first deployment, then to officer training and becoming a leader of men. It’s rather light on plot, but a very interesting examination of military life and values, as well as political and social realities, some good, some not so good, but all at least presented with enough intelligence to be worth reading.

7. By the way, the Terran Federation in Starship Troopers is not fascistic. There is some mild overlap, but (despite what Umberto Eco says), that’s not enough to call it fascism. The core doctrines of Fascism are “the State is all, nothing outside the State,” because the State manifests the soul of the nation. Merely advocating the community as prior to the individual – which is pretty much the only point of overlap – is not enough, because that would apply to every society. The Terran Federation is internationalist, where anyone from any country can sign up to serve (the main character is Filipino, though we only learn that at the very end, and his fellow recruits include Americans, Japanese, South Americans, and more: it simply isn’t considered relevant to go into detail of their nationality) and seems to have good relations with some non-human civilizations. More importantly, it’s 100% volunteer service, which is completely contrary to Fascist ideas, and while you need to serve in order to vote, you don’t have to serve in the military, but only in some branch of the civil service. The justification for this being that will ensure that everyone who votes has a mindset of putting the common good ahead of their own interests.

In other words, the Terran Federation is much more classically Republican – a way to practically implement founding American ideas/rhetoric – than it is Fascistic. Which makes sense given who wrote it.