Reading the 80s - 1980

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco (trans by William Weaver) is quite the tour de force. Taking the form of a mystery novel, it actually has more to do with the political and philosophical issues around the Catholic church in the fourteenth century. The reader looks through the eyes of Adso, a novice monk, whose master William of Baskerville (a clear nod to Conan Doyle) is acting as mediator between certain factions,  giving Adso lots of opportunity to try and puzzle out the politics and religious debates both from what he hears of the world and from the spats and the forms of justice he witnesses in the smaller world of the abbey. 

It's a big book - especially for something in the shape of crime fiction - weighing in at 500 pages, partly because Adso is lyrical in descriptions and inclined to provide great lists of everything he sees, and partly because of the sheer amount of work Eco is putting in to make us comprehend a world where heresy and witchcraft are considered far worse crimes than the string of murders the abbot has asked William to investigate.

Is it good? Yes. Would I have finished it if I weren't reading it for this challenge? I'm not sure. 

Life on Earth - David Attenborough. This is the one I already had on my shelves although I never read it before. It's unsurprisingly dated now - not because of the language (like a lot of people in 1980 Attenborough uses the word 'man' rather than 'human being' and also writes in the singular, as if we're talking about one man, not a group of people of different ages and genders, but that was how people wrote then and he doesn't do it now) - mostly because of the format. Almost every second or third page is a full colour picture, like an encyclopaedia, which is of course because there was no internet and not that many TV channels, so pictures had to be shown beside the text, because the reader wouldn't have seen these things before. 

The other thing that dates it is the lack of focus on DNA. It is mentioned, described - but not used. Animal relationships and lineage are inferred through skeletons, teeth, production of milk. I wondered as I read it how much we might know to be wrong or have confirmed right by now. It's been 41 years, and science has obviously moved on. 

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe - Douglas Adams. This is also from my own shelves and has been read multiple times, as well as listened to in the form of the radio play and (back in the day) watched on the TV. Perhaps too much, because I can now see the jokes coming a mile off, which obviously weakens them. Another factor in my not enjoying it as much this time is that because Douglas Adams was so good at noticing things that were happening around us all (digital watches, the proliferation of shoe shops) and weaving them into stories, inventing fantastical explanations, now the time of those things has passed, the stories no longer resonate as they did. 

Disaster Area, for example, the rock band so loud their fans listen in a concrete bunker, whose climax of the show is to have a stunt ship dive into the sun. The host at Milliways, reminiscent of every slightly unnerving TV show compere still floating around when I was a child.  That world has gone. It would be twitter now, and motorised scooters. It's a shame - more than a shame - that we'll never have the fantastical theories that could have been woven around those.