Bendrix reminded me of the utterly selfish protagonist in The Sea, the Sea, and I might not have made such an unkind parallel if my library copy hadn't been a movie advertisement announcing Ralph Fiennes, whom I avoid.
I did like the religious questing and the touches of the mystic, except now I might confuse Graham Greene with that priest-author...Andrew Greeley? Maybe not: his titles at Amazon look too wholesome. The one I'm thinking of wrote thrillers.
Anyway, I think the Invisible Library is no longer being updated, so I shall list new contributions here:
Maurice Bendrix, The Ambitious Host, The Crowned Image, and The Grave on the Water-Front; also, in progress, a life of General Gordon.
I've been playing geography games recently, and I have a bone to pick with a few countries of the world. Brunei is clearly an Arab-sounding name and the country therefore does not belong in southeast Asia. Similarly, Suriname belongs in Africa, not South America. Mali, Mauritania, Mauritius, and Malawi: did one person name all of you? What's the deal with Mauritius and Mauritania being not, say, the male and female halves of an archipelago, but a large chunk of land and a tiny island on opposite sides of a continent? But the worst offenders are the Guineas. Guyana and French Guiana are not Guineas but sound too much like Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Equitorial Guinea, and Papua New Guinea to escape my wrath. Does "Guinea" mean "equatorial"?--should I paint Ecuador with the same brush? Why does the island of New Guinea not hold all of Papua New Guinea?
The Lonely Planet's thumbnail history of Papua New Guinea says, "The first European contact in 1526-27 was by the Portuguese explorer Jorge de Meneses, who named the island Ilhas dos Papuas (Island of the Fuzzy Hairs). The Spaniard Inigo Ortiz de Retes later called it New Guinea because he thought the people similar to those of Guinea in Africa."
Hmm, Lonely Planet has a few useful thumbnail histories. Suriname was named for its major river, and the Dutch got it in trade with England for New Amsterdam. There's a trade it might have learned to regret.
How important is knowing about the three technological improvements in medieval European agriculture that improved the yield of feed from seed from something miserable like 2:1 to something that allowed for not only survival but growth, like 15:1 if I recollect at all,* compared to knowing about how the world currently is? Of course Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana were sugar colonies; of course the England, the Netherlands, and France enslaved East Indians, Africans, and Indonesians on their plantations. Well, it's important to know both. So my next time-sink will be at least these thumbnails and maybe more.
* These were the horse collar (previous harnesses tended to impede an animal's respiration), three-field rotation, and better plows. I'm not sure about that third one: though a heavier plow was necessary for soil in northern Europe (wetter and heavier than that within the Roman Empire's boundary where a light plow was adequate), I think I learned something more specific than "heavier."