Beach reading
A Quality Trash interlude.
Hello friends,
tl;dr: This week, I’m taking a break from my usual #content about partial knowledge, organisation, strategy, and things like that, to give you appreciations of three series of books featuring beautifully crafted prose on topics that are Not Overtly Serious — Quality Trash that is perfect for beach reading.
I got back last Wednesday from a month in the motherland. I spent much of that month working on a organisational design and strategy job, and all of it amazed/appalled at Singapore’s hedonic treadmill and humidity. But it was nice to be back after nearly five years away.
Since getting back, I’ve been wrapping up bits of work — the 20% at the end that takes much more than 20% of the time to finish. But it’s hard to really apply the shoulder to the wheel when every other email gets a vacation autoresponder. So, like apparently everyone else in Europe, I’ve thrown in the towel until September. Instead of industry, some home improvement, some beach time, and a lot of Quality Trash to be read on the beach (or at a crappy bar table under some plane trees with lots of heavily watered pastis).
Quality Trash
Trash is well-known to all, but what is Quality Trash? I say: books with beautifully crafted prose, on topics that are Not Overtly Serious.
If the book is explicitly about, idk, moral ethics or climate collapse or the atrocities of [name your armed conflict], it is automatically eliminated from consideration. The same if the writing is clunky and verbose.
Quality Trash frequently uses trope and stereotype — but only to build in unexpected ways on top of what appears to be thoroughly preworked ground. This apparently paradoxical combination of familiarity with novelty is one of its great attractions. Quality Trash may seem boringly conventional but isn’t.
It is also never purely frivolous or actually trashy. Serious Issues and Detailed Domain Knowledge sneak into Quality Trash under the guise of superficially absurd or airheaded plotlines devoted to art heists or sailing holidays in the Greek islands or sourdough bread. Quality Trash does not demand that you take it seriously to be read with enjoyment, but part of its Quality is that it can also be differently enjoyed when taken seriously. (And because I know you will ask: merely workmanlike but charmless prose is an automatic disqualifier.)
Trash is well-known because it is commonplace, but Quality Trash is vanishingly rare. For me, it is the best kind of beach reading.
Beach Reading
I like Quality cozy mysteries because cozies are often designed to be series, and Quality Trash is so rare. When I find a Quality Trash book that happens to be a cozy — some neat characters who interact with each other in appealingly interesting ways to solve some kind of mystery — I rejoice because the rest of the series will probably be Quality Trash too. Most cozies are just Trash, but below you’ll find three cozy series that are Quality enough for the beach at the end of summer.
The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox (Barry Hughart). Ostensibly a detective-and-sidekick series set in a semi-magical imagining of pre-modern China. In fact, it reads like a mashup of semi-obscure ancient Chinese archaeology, mythology, and history with modern heist/caper movies, presented old-school Disney style but with a bit of the flavor of Mel Brooks and The Princess Bride. Number Ten Ox (the brawny, earnest, ostensibly simpleminded young sidekick) is the naive narrator whose self-assigned task is to set down, with total fidelity to the events that he observed, a chronicle for posterity. This pretext allows the full range of dialogue (from the parodically classical to the most demotic), to be presented verbatim without feeling forced, and descriptions of scenes and events to be included which would otherwise seem hopelessly florid. The dialogue and descriptions are great because Li Kao is an ancient reprobate who is also one of the most reputed, well-connected, and wily scholars of China, Number Ten Ox is unconventionally sly and cunning, their adventures are absurd or improbable in cause and progress, they’re set in landscapes of (Chinese) painterly beauty, and deities and magical objects pop up frequently to do silly and amusing things. Hughart’s books were popular at launch but the series was smothered to death by the apparent incompetence of the publisher.
The Hilary Tamar books (Sarah Caudwell). These books feature four junior barristers (one from the Tax Bar, the other three from the same Chancery set) and a narrator, Hilary Tamar, an Oxford legal historian with an inflated sense of self-esteem. Jointly and severally, they investigate crimes that turn on fine details of British law, legal precedent, and history. Though it sounds impossible, this is a source of enormous amusement because it allows for Byzantine plot constructions that are absurd and often trivial. (Caudwell was a barrister and understood the deep absurdity of the law.) Tamar’s style is distinctively otiose (delicious), and they believe (their gender is never revealed) that they are the group’s coruscating, mystery-solving intellect. They present the young barristers as their less keenly-witted sidekicks. The reader may come to a more nuanced conclusion. Whatever the case, the young barristers are often the feet on the ground, in the thick of things as the investigations unfold. So, they send letters recounting actions and events from a cottage in the English countryside, postcards from ports around the Ionian sea, faxes from apartments in Monaco. The lagginess of epistolary communication (and the possibility of messages being lost in transit) offers opportunities for comic misdirection. And the epistles themselves sprinkle the books with profoundly different voices and ways of thinking, much snide social commentary, and knowingly middle-class accounts of low-grade scenery, “business” travel, and misadventure. Superb.
And of course, the Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin books (Rex Stout). In April 2020, at the beginning of the Covid-19 storm of uncertainty, I wrote an appreciation of the “kind of pleasant certainty they embody that can only exist in fiction. Though the books were written over an almost forty-year period, there are many threads running through them that seem improbably stable. (My suspension of disbelief here is entirely willing.) Book time flows on, but inside the brownstone, barely anything changes. This is not to say that Wolfe and Goodwin are unchanging characters—on the contrary, they evolve and fill out, as does their working relationship. And the Manhattan and America in which they work also changes. These are all more obvious when reading many of the books back to back, as I often do. Stout has managed to create the sensation of stability over time in spite of change, and this is a comforting thing.” You can read the whole appreciation at the end of issue #25.
Elsewhere
In July, we talked about what causal not-knowing is, why it makes strategy hard, and how it can be a source of strategic and tactical advantage.
I wrote about five ways we might not-know about the value of outcomes.
In September, we’ll be talking about how futurity affects not-knowing.
See you soon,
VT