Erratic reads steadily in 2014

In 2013 I read 82 books. This is my first year in Club Read and, while I'm hoping to make my way through at least some of the crammed TBR shelves (100+ books at last count), I want to read at a more leisurely pace and spend more time thinking and writing about what I've been reading. It will be good to get recommendations from other Club Read threads as well!

The TBR pile is a mix of mostly fiction and books about spirituality and religion. I'm a member of a book group which reads books on spirituality, so I'll make a separate listing for those.

Just to see how bad the habit of acquisition is, I'll make a separate post for the books that I buy throughout the year and add to the TBR shelves.

Some books from the TBR shelves that I'm particularly looking forward to:
Gossip from the Forest by Sara Maitland
The New Moon with the Old by Dodie Smith
Cheri and the Last of Cheri by Colette

Books from the TBR shelves finished in 2014: 23

Crystal Awareness by Catherine Bowman
Father Brown by G K Chesterton
The Last Magician by Janette Turner Hospital
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
Voices by Ursula K LeGuin
Stealing the Fire from Heaven by Stephen Mace
Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood
The Rainy Moon and Other Stories by Colette
Notes on a Scandal by Zoe Heller
ChristoPaganism: An Inclusive Path by Joyce and River Higginbotham
Contentment: A Way to True Happiness by Robert A Johnson
Miss Garnet's Angel by Salley Vickers
Etiquette and Espionage by Gail Carriger
The Return by Haakan Nesser
Tarot and the Tree of Life by Isabel Kliegman
Woman with Birthmark by Hakan Nesser
Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe by Fannie Flagg
The Inspector and Silence by Hakan Nesser
The Testament of Gideon Mack by James Robertson
Sin by Josephine Hart
The Betrayal of Trust by Susan Hill
Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
The Broken Sword by Poul Anderson

Thanks to lkernagh for sharing this challenge from Random House located here.

A Book with More than 500 Pages: Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood
A Forgotten Classic: Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
A Book that Became a Movie: Notes on a Scandal by Zoe Heller
A Book Published this Year: The Bluffer's Guide to Etiquette by William Hanson
A Book with a Number in the Title: The Seven Chakra Sisters by Linda Linker Rosenthal
A Book Written by Someone Under Thirty:
A Book with Non-human Characters:
A Funny Book: Crystal Awareness by Catherine Bowman (it doesn't say 'intentionally funny')
A Book by a Female Author: The Daylight Gate by Jeanette Winterson
A Book with a Mystery: Father Brown by G K Chesterton
A Book with a One-word Title: Sin by Josephine Hart
A Book of Short Stories: The Rainy Moon and Other Stories by Colette
A Book Set on a Different Continent: The Last Magician by Janette Turner Hospital
A Book of Non Fiction: ChristoPaganism by Joyce & River Higginbotham
The First Book by a Favourite Author:
A Book You Heard About Online: Etiquette & Espionage by Gail Carriger
A Best-selling Book: Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe by Fannie Flagg
A Book Based on a True Story: In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
A Book at the Bottom of Your To Be Read Pile:
A Book Your Friend Loves:
A Book that Scares You:
A Book that is More than 10 Years Old: Stealing the Fire from Heaven by Stephen Mace
The Second Book in a Series: Voices by Ursula K LeGuin
A Book with a Blue Cover: Struggling to be Holy by Judy Hirst

Books for January 2014

                           

Crystal Awareness by Catherine Bowman - complete; review at post 17 below
Struggling to be Holy by Judy Hirst - complete; review at post 18 below
Father Brown by G K Chesterton - complete; review at post 19 below
The Daylight Gate by Jeanette Winterson (library book)- complete; review at post 20 below
The Last Magician by Janette Turner Hospital - complete; review at post 23 below
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys - complete; review at post 24 below
Voices: Annals of the Western Shore by Ursula K LeGuin - complete; review at post 31 below
Stealing the Fire from Heaven by Stephen Mace - complete; overly wordy review at post 37 below
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote - complete; review at post 45 below
Girl Reading by Katie Ward (library book) - complete; review at post 47 below
Dolly: A Ghost Story by Susan Hill - complete; review at post 49 below
Laugh Your Way to Grace by Susan Hill - complete; review at post 56 below
Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood - complete; review at post 58 below
Knitting by Faith by Julie LeeSong Norman - complete; review at post 62 below

Your review made me laugh, and I love your choice of book topics. I think we'll have a good year reading each other's threads.

I first heard the term "Christo-paganism" just last month. Some backstory: I took a course on early Anglo-Saxon literature (Beowulf, Norse sagas, riddles, runes) this fall. We didn't just STUDY the literature. Over the course of the quarter, our professor gradually let loose that she is pagan, focusing especially on the Norse and the Egyptian pantheons. For her this literature wasn't just historically interesting, but unveiled a mode of being and living, a culture, that she felt we should (in some ways) go back to: small-scale tribal societies, connection with the earth, reverence for women and the feminine divine, etc.

Most of the English majors just thought she was odd. (She seems to be one of those profs who is so brilliant and charismatic that her eccentricities could slide.) As a religious studies major, I really got her wavelength though. On the last day of class I asked her where I could find out more (I had never met an educated pagan before) and she suggested I look into Christo-paganism. As a devotee of Jung, paganism isn't a big stretch, as one of Jung goals was rehabilitating many of the sacred symbols that monotheistic religions deem unusable.

Long story short, I'm curious what you think of ChristoPaganism.

>5 Erratic_Charmer:, I too laughed quite a bit at your review of the crystals book. I am also interested to see what you're reading in the religions category.

6> Thanks JD! I found the 14 categories challenge through your thread and will probably post over there as well. Still mulling over possibilities for category headings; doubtless inspiration will strike when I'm back at work tomorrow and supposed to be concentrating on something else.

Your Anglo-Saxon lit professor sounds amazing. Not that surprising in the context of an English department, to be honest; a lot of the Pagans I've met tend to be extremely book-y people (often to the point that we need reminders to put the books down and get outside - it's supposed to be an Earth-honouring religion, after all).

I was raised Catholic and went spiralling happily into Goddess spirituality in my early teens. About two years ago I befriended some truly lovely Anglicans at a Druid conference, members of a group called Forest Church here in the UK. Through conversations with them and a lot of thinking and prayer I've started slowly returning to elements of my mother faith. I'm still a terrible Catholic though! ;)

ChristoPaganism will be a slow read as I'm working through all of the journal prompts in it as well, but I might finish it this month. I read Jesus Through Pagan Eyes last year and enjoyed it a lot. As I recall about half of the book is interviews with different Pagan writers about Christianity and there's a very broad range of perspectives in it. I have The Path of a Christian Witch on this year's to-read list too. And Jung. Gosh. I should probably read some Jung, eh?

7> Thanks! I'm glad it was good for a giggle. There are a lot of very serious and moving books to read this year as well, but I have a feeling the comic relief doesn't end here - there's some Silver RavenWolf on the to-read shelf as well....

Count me in as another person laughing as I read your crystal book review!

Yet another person here laughing a lot at your review! Oh, goodness, what an unfortunate gift. I admire you for actually being willing to read the whole thing. But, hey, good to know you're not traipsing down the path of crystalline craziness. :)

I saw the title of your first book review of the year and thought to myself, "there's a thread I won't be following." That was before I read your actual review. And now I'm hooked on listening in on the conversation about ChristoPaganism. It's a subject I know nothing about, but which sounds infinitely more interesting than healing with rocks.

"particularly here in the UK where people tend to think I'm a harmless idiot at worst" Join the club, it's good to be out of the mainstream.

Enjoyed your excellent review of Crystal Awareness, I will be careful not to pick this up in a charity shop.

Thumbed as a warning to other readers.

I also enjoyed your very entertaining review. You won't find it on my shelf. :)

I'm another who laughed at your review of the crystals book.

Re: clearing the shelves. I too am trying to do that. The problem is that I have a fair number of books that have been around for years, and that I'm no longer all that interested in reading. The realist in me says get rid of them, reduce your TBR pile. The book hoarder in me says keep them, you never know.

Thank you to everyone who has expressed amusement at my first book review this year :) I keep worrying someone's going to jump in and go, 'Hey, that's one of my favourite books! How dare you hold it up to mockery.' Not yet. Big sigh of relief.

Husband decided that since crystals and computers are basically the same thing he was going to strap a Raspberry Pi to his head in an effort to raise his conscious awareness - but in Japan, as usual, they're several steps ahead:



10 > The 'whole thing' wasn't really all that long, especially with all of the groovy pictures, and I admit I did skim over some of the 'healing grid' instructions as they were pretty repetitive. If it had been a massive tome I don't think I could have managed!

I have a range of other crazinesses which should all become apparent soon enough :)

11 > Heh, I would have thought the same thing. I knew it was a weird pick as far as first impressions in Club Read go, but I figured, 'What the hell; I've got a day off work and want something bizarre and entertaining.' I'm glad the review has provided some amusement, and yes, please do come and watch us try to thrash out some sort of approach to interspirituality. (That being said, the ChristoPagan corner makes me a little nervous. First, I'm afraid I'll just wind up offending everyone (or worse yet, looking stupid!), and second, it is so new, such a fragile little thin-shelled egg of an idea that's still growing, I fear it might just die of exposure. But then, maybe it's not such a new idea after all (think of folk Catholicism around the world). And it's obvious hubris to act like syncretism is a new idea we just came up with...it all needs more research.)

12 > *alt culture high-five!* Long live counter culture! Thank you for the thumb!

14 > Oh gosh. I will face that problem when I eventually go and clean out my room back in Florida - there are stacks of books that haven't been relevant since I was an undergraduate. I've moved between countries a few times though, which tends to purge the hoarding instinct pretty thoroughly!

Echoing the chorus, loved your review on crystal awareness, that was very entertaining. Hope I can keep up with your thread, I suspect I will find it quite interesting.

**Previously I'd posted this review with the list of January books above, but I'm reshuffling the thread to give each review its own post. Sorry everyone!**



Crystal Awareness by Catherine Bowman

Since 2014 (or at least the first part of it) is a year of shelf-clearing for me, there are a certain number of books that I just need to slog through. Crystal Awareness is one of those books. If, like me, you're interested in spirituality and particularly dabble in more outre and Pagan subjects, you tend, after a while, to get lumped in with 'those New Age oddballs.' It's not the end of the world, particularly here in the UK where people tend to think I'm a harmless idiot at worst (in contrast to the American South where I used to get screamed at for being a devil worshipper).

The cringe factor creeps in when genuinely sweet, well-meaning people gift you with something that they think you'll really like. 'Hey, she's into crystals and that - what about a crystal book from 1980s Llewellyn Press!'

Obligatory full disclosure: I like crystals. They're shiny. They come in a range of excellent colours and shapes and the heft of them is reassuring. I've found that they work well to promote calm and happiness as does any other beautiful natural object with the added bonus that an amethyst cluster is more practical to display on one's desk than, e.g., a waterfall. I have a crystal tucked into my pocket most days because it makes me happy. I hang out at the local crystal shop. My book group meets there.

So far, so good. But I flatter myself that there's a long road of lunacy between 'I like decorating with quartz,' and, 'In the legendary civilizations of Atlantis and Lemuria, crystals were the basic energy source as well as being used for healing, teaching and interstellar communication' (Crystal Awareness, page 2). Really? Any historical or archaeological data to back that up? 'THIS IS MY TRUTH,' declares the frontispiece of the book, waving the wand of relativism and dismissing any critical questioning of the contents. Well, hokey-dokey then, that's a debate-closer if there ever was one.

Moving on past the highly questionable historical claims, there are some meditation and visualisation techniques - fine, albeit very basic - and instructions for how to cleanse and 'program' crystals: 'Crystals are portable computers with the capability of receiving, storing and releasing upon command. Even its (sic) programming is similar to that of a computer's' (page 37). I informed my husband, who works in IT, but he seemed less than convinced. I guess it's not his truth. There are also chapters on crystal healing arrangements, colour healing (again, very basic stuff), and jewellery making (unintentionally hilarious line drawings in this chapter). Most of the instructions end by advising to simply follow your intuition. If working with crystals is primarily about doing what you feel, one does wonder why the instructions are needed...

This sucker has actually run to 12 printings (my edition's from 2005), suggesting that it's a very popular introductory text. It doesn't look as if it's been revised, updated, proofread, or expanded once in all of those printings. The most useful information in Crystal Awareness has been reprinted dozens if not hundreds of times in other books on meditation, chakras, energy healing, you name it. If the subject interests you, maybe pick a book that's a little more up-to-date and a little less hokey.

One for the charity shop bag, and shelf space reclaimed!

**Previously posted in the 'January' list above**



Struggling to be Holy by Judy Hirst

This one's a bit more like it! The book first came to my attention when I was on a 'quiet day' retreat a couple of months ago. The vicar leading the retreat had brought along a selection of books for attendees to borrow and read during the day. Struggling to be Holy caught my eye because of the title - 'oh, it certainly is a struggle!' I thought. I read the introduction and the first two of the six chapters during the retreat and ended up buying a copy of my own later.

It's not a thick book, only about 120 pages, and nicely succinct. The six chapters, or 'reflections' as they're called, are about bringing our imperfections to God, desire, forgiveness, paying attention, friendship, and success and failure. Hirst draws on her personal experience and that of people she has counselled, as well as stories from Scripture, in each reflection. There are also very well-chosen quotations from novels, poetry, hymns, and other contemporary writers about faith throughout.

One of the things I really like about this book is that it doesn't try to do too much, although its themes are important ones. The main ideas of each reflection could be summed up in a sentence or two; I can easily take them away and mull them over in mind and heart. There isn't a word out of place. The tone of the writing is personal and friendly without being too informal - Hirst's background as a pastoral counsellor is apparent. It's also obvious that she's a woman of broad reading and much experience, but humble: one has the sense that she finds everyone else at least as interesting as herself!

I was thinking about discussing this one in the upcoming book group meeting, and what sorts of questions we might bring up, when to my surprise I discovered that there are discussion questions included for each reflection - they're just tucked away in the back, after the footnotes, in a smaller font than the main text. That seemed a little peculiar as they're easy to miss back there. Perhaps they'd be better placed at the end of their respective chapters; then again, they can be distracting from the flow of a book, so perhaps not.

Thumbs up to this one. I'm curious to see what everyone else in the book group makes of it.

**Previously posted in the 'January' list above**



Father Brown by G K Chesterton

The actual title of the Wordsworth Classics edition I have is simply Father Brown and it is 'all the favourite' Father Brown stories rather than a complete collection. For some reason the Librarything link is a misnomer. Even if this isn't an exhaustive collection, there are still plenty of stories, and very delightful they are too.

Reading Father Brown is a little bit like turning up a missing volume of Sherlock Holmes - the good Father makes similar brilliant deductions (or would those be inductions?) with his keen powers of observation and logic. Analytical powers aside, though, the two detectives could hardly be more different in character. Father Brown is unprepossessing and usually underestimated by those who do not know him well: 'he had a face as round and dull as a Norfolk dumpling; he had eyes as empty as the North Sea; he had several brown-paper parcels which he was quite incapable of collecting' (page 5). Of course his dumpy appearance is deceiving and criminals who think to take advantage of the priest soon find themselves outwitted....

The most appealing characteristic of Father Brown is not his intelligence, however, but his wisdom and compassion for other people in spite of his keen awareness of the flaws in human nature. Without making excuses for criminals he nevertheless extends forgiveness to them. A good part of his powers of 'detection' comes simply from his willingness to see clearly those people whom the rest of society looks through or down on. Catholic or no, one can't help feeling that Father Brown would be a wonderful person with whom to have a long chat.

What might be irritating to some (although I found it very interesting) is the way that Chesterton uses Father Brown as a mouthpiece to express his views on tradition, materialism, superstition, and so on - all in quite an orthodox Catholic fashion, of course! It blends so flawlessly with the character, though, that it hardly seems out of place. One of my favourite examples of this is in 'The Oracle of the Dog,' where Father Brown complains: 'It's part of something I've noticed more and more in the modern world... People readily swallow the untested claims of this, that, or the other. It's drowning all your old rationalism and scepticism, it's coming in like a sea; and the name of it is superstition... It's the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense and can't see things as they are.' (page 266) Intriguing stuff! I wish Father Brown had taken some time off saying Mass and solving mysteries to write out a reasoned defense of his theology. That would have been well worth reading too.

**Previously posted in the 'January' post above**



The Daylight Gate by Jeanette Winterson

This is a work of historical fiction based on the Pendle witch trials in Lancashire in the 17th century.

I'd previously read Winterson's Oranges are Not the Only Fruit and loved it, so I found The Daylight Gate a bit of a letdown. For quite a slim novel, there's an awful lot packed in here - John Dee, Edward Kelly, and Shakespeare all make appearances, as well as a host of other characters (good witches, bad witches, devils, prosecutors, ghosts, Protestants, and a Jesuit on the lam), plus no fewer than three love affairs and lashings of gore. The length of the book and Winterson's spare prose style are not really well-suited to such a busy cast and melodramatic plot. The depiction of the grim poverty of peasant life also makes an extremely odd juxtaposition with the fantastical scenes of magic involving the main character of the book, the lady Alice Nutter.

This could have been a better book if more time and attention had been spent on one or two aspects of the plot as it's written, such as the uneasy relationship between Alice Nutter and the local magistrate, Robert Nowell. As it stands, it's not a very good book and nearly as good as A Mirror for Witches, my favourite novel along similar lines (historical fiction about the witch trials, but with a fantastical element of real diabolic magic added).

Very nice review of The Daylight Gate - even if you did not like it that much...

I like Jeanette Winterson, but will probably give this one a miss, thanks for the review

>21 AnnieMod: and >22 baswood: Thanks! I really like Winterson as well; looking forward to reading some other books by her. The Daylight Gate was published by Hammer Horror Films, bizarrely, and apparently there's a film deal on it already, which may explain the buckets of gore.



The Last Magician by Janette Turner Hospital

A story of childhood friendship, love, secrets, and betrayal, set (mostly) in Australia and spanning two generations. There's a criminal underground (literally underground in this case), lush verbal depictions of photographic art, and all sorts of other goodies that play into the plot here as well.

A surprise hit! Well, not really a surprise. I really like Virago as a publishing house (one of the categories in my 2014 category challenge is completely devoted to Virago books) and the critical reviews on this book were glowing, so I figured Hospital would be a good bet for a new author to try.

It was sort of slow going at first. Hospital's prose is dense and dreamy and reflects the confusion of the narrator over the events happening in her life and the lives of her friends. It was such a stark contrast to the blunt prose of The Daylight Gate that I had trouble getting into it initially - plus, I'd sort of thought it was a fantasy novel and it quickly became clear that there are no magicians in this book, not in the traditional sense anyway! Somewhere in the first third of the novel, though, my impatience turned abruptly into excitement and I could not put the book down until it was finished. There are so many little twists and turns in it, so many secrets slowly revealed, that it's as gripping as a good mystery.

The title is not a misnomer - there are definitely fantastic elements in here. The characters and their obsessions are all bigger than life; at the same time particular small details (like a pair of earrings with blue glass beads) reappear in surprising contexts and become potent symbols in the world of the story. There's a wonderful sense of setting in The Last Magician as well - I can remember the places in the novel almost as if I've been there. It really is a world unto itself.

This could be the start of a beautiful friendship.

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

Sort of a piece of literary fanfic... Based on the characters of Jane Eyre, this is the story of Mr Rochester's first, mad wife, told from her point of view and his own.

Hmm. This book seems to generate some pretty passionate reactions, both positive and negative, but I can't say I feel terribly strongly about it. It's not something that will likely stay with me for the rest of my life (though it's a bit early to say for sure!), but I did enjoy reading it. The setting (post-emancipation Jamaica in the 1830s) was one of my favourite things about it: the impact of emancipation on the lives of both black and white people is explored in depth and the natural environment of sea, jungle, and mountain is gorgeously depicted, lush and threatening by turns.

The early days of the marriage between Antoinette and Richard are depicted as a hazy erotic dream - as the history of madness in Antoinette's family comes to light and distrust enters their partnership, Antoinette clings desperately to her husband and Richard comes to hate her.

The false note for me in this is Richard's character. Although he was duped in his marriage to Antoinette and so his bitterness and rage are understandable, Rhys depicts him in a truly unsympathetic light. He goes so quickly from being enchanted with his wife to treating her with sadistic cruelty that it's almost unbelievable. Maybe he was just as dreadful in Jane Eyre; it's been a long time since I read it. It still feels like Rhys has an active bias against him.

Apart from Richard and his abrupt about-face, the characters in the book are complex, interesting, and believable.

Enjoyed your last two reviews. The thing that lasts in my memory from reading Wide Saragossa Sea was the depiction of the natural environment, I also remember thinking it was good literature

Hope you beautiful friendship continues - it's wonderful to discover a new to you author.

Wide Sargasso Sea is on my list for the year, as is Jane Eyre. :)

By the time I got to the crystals review, I'd already read so many comments saying how it made them laugh that I was afraid I was going to be disappointed - but it still made me laugh! (Particularly your observation that a crystal is easier to have on your desk than a waterfall). I'm looking forward to seeing what else you pull off your TBR pile...

Oh, I enjoyed your other reviews too. Janette Turner Hospital is a name that keeps cropping up; looks like this one might be a good starting point.

>25 baswood: Thanks baswood! Wide Sargasso Sea definitely is good literature and I think the setting of the story really stood out as well. Give The Last Magician a try too if you liked Wide Sargasso Sea!

>26 .Monkey.: PolymathicMonkey, I'll keep an eye on your thread as I'm interested to know what you think of the character of Mr Rochester across both books. It's been years since I read Jane Eyre but there is at least one major plot point in Wide Sargasso Sea that just doesn't seem to mesh with Bronte's Mr Rochester.... I will say no more!

>27 rachbxl: *bows* Thank you! I don't pick on books just for being a bit out-there (post 3 has my acquired books for the year so far and there are already a few rather esoteric ones) but Crystal Awareness was just painful.

I'd certainly recommend The Last Magician; looking forward to reading more by Hospital.

Interesting, I will make sure I'm paying particularly close attention to everything when I read it, haha. Well you shouldn't have to wait very long, I'm thinking of getting to it soon; I think I've got 4 or 5 books in line at the moment (crazy, I normally never plan more than one or two ahead, but this year seems off to an odd start! :P) and then Jane will go next, and the Rhys will go shortly after that (probably not back to back, I think I'll do a little distance, but not much, just a couple books, let it simmer just a little bit first ;)). :D

Great reviews of The Last Magician and Wide Sargasso Sea -- the Hospital is definitely going on my wish list. I read the Rhys years ago, but don't remember too much about it -- probably time for a reread, if I had any time.

Voices: Annals of the Western Shore by Ursula K LeGuin

A fantasy story set in a city, Ansul, that has been brutally subjugated by an army of foreigners known as the Alds, who believe the written word to be sacrilege and consider owning a book a crime punishable by death. The narrator is a 17-year-old girl named Memer who lives in the household of the former ‘Waylord’ of Ansul. The plot centres around a hidden library with magical books, a visiting storyteller and lion handler who befriend Memer and the Waylord, and an ancient, mysterious oracular cave. All of these elements come together in political upheaval for Ansul and the Alds. Plenty of action; battles are fought on more than just ideological grounds!

This is a book that could be read by young adults, but while it’s not needlessly graphic LeGuin doesn’t pull any punches describing the misery of life in an occupied city: the narrator Memer was born of a woman raped by an Ald soldier, the Waylord is permanently crippled by torture, and oppression and slavery are widespread. There is beauty here too, however, in the Ansul god-shrines, in LeGuin’s observant descriptions of animal characters, and in the emotions brought up by poetry and song. It’s a bright, hopeful story overall, not a grim one.

Highlights include the simple but vivid world creation (I was particularly enchanted with LeGuin’s descriptions of the Ansul deities, shrines, and rites of worship) and the character of Memer as she struggles to discern the path of wisdom through her passionate emotions. There is a lot in here about the power of song and story to inspire and shape destinies, a theme naturally dear to the heart of any book lover!

This is making me think it’s past time to reread the Wizard of Earthsea trilogy.

Re: Powers, have you read the other books in that series? I think Powers is definitely the best of the three, but I'd say they're all worthwhile.

Le Guin is such an amazing writer :)

>32 bragan: bragan, no I haven't but I definitely would. I picked up Voices at a secondhand book shop without realising it was part of a series and I'm glad that I didn't know, otherwise I would have left it! I always try to read serial books in order but it really didn't matter in this case :)

>33 .Monkey.: Seconded. It's been far too long since I've read anything by her.

Good review of The Last Magician. I'll definitely keep an eye out for it.

I just recently picked up her Five Complete Novels along with Dispossessed, I've read two of them already from the library but now I've got the bulk of the Hainish series. :D

Stealing the Fire from Heaven by Stephen Mace

This is an engaging and interesting book that has really got me thinking. It's got me thinking that, on the whole, I don't like it very much, but then I'm still thinking about it.

Stealing the Fire from Heaven is, more or less, a book about ritual magic (magic that 'relies on the powers hidden away within each individual human being', to quote John Michael Greer) from the point of view of a chaos magician (chaos magic, according to Wikipedia, is 'a school of the modern magical tradition which emphasizes the pragmatic use of belief systems and the creation of new and unorthodox methods'). It's a nice-looking book, slim but full of information divided into tidy chapters, and illustrated throughout with drawings by Austin Osman Spare. Mace draws on techniques of both Spare and Aleister Crowley. The book is subtitled 'A Technique for Creating Individual Systems of Sorcery' and it pretty much does what it says on the tin.

In rough summary, Mace covers banishing and then moves on to creating sigils and using them to magical effect with Spare's technique of 'repression': basically this means deliberately pushing your intention to the subconscious part of your mind, where it can sort of join with the universal consciousness and effect changes in the world (yes, modern sorcery owes a lot to Jung). I thought this was interesting mostly because it's the complete opposite of the more popular and well-known technique of affirmations. Guess you couldn't very well try both on the same problem....

Moving on to where the 'individual systems' come into play, Mace describes in detail two methods used by Spare: automatic drawing and the creation of sacred alphabets. The idea is that rather than subscribing to a pre-existing set of magical symbols and letters such as are used in Qabalah, the would-be sorcerer uses these methods to bring to light the structures already existent in his subconscious, mapping his inner terrain, meeting his own angels and demons, and creating his own array of sacred symbols. Ultimately the magician seeks to gain communication with his 'Holy Guardian Angel' (what Jung would call the animus or anima, and what in New Age circles is often referred to as the 'Higher Self'): our point of direct communication with the unconscious and the best conceivable guide to the dark forest of one's mind.

I'm aware as I'm writing this that I'm leaving a lot of stuff out. The book is erudite, lucid, well thought-out and well-written, and those who think that anyone interested in magic and the occult can be lumped together with the Crystal Awareness fruitcakes would do well to read a page or two of it.

Now for the list of things that rubbed me the wrong way.

First of all, for a chaos magician, Mace seems more than a little obsessed with control:

'(the ritual) gives us the one thing that the person who treads this path needs: a way to keep his spirits obedient and in their place' (page 102).

'...once you define a spirit you can enter into a relationship with it - conjuring it, naming it, and binding it with a ritual Charge so it obeys your will' (page 81).

'Sorcery is the art of capturing spirits and training them to work in harness, of sorting out the powers in our minds so we might manipulate them and make them cause changes both within our minds and beyond them' (page 8).

Without question, getting your personal demons under control is a worthy goal, but the 'binding' and 'controlling' become such a repetitive refrain that one wonders whether Mace has some sensitive issues around the subject.

The 'chaotic' element seems to come into play more when Mace confronts tradition, which he generally does flippantly even when he advocates adopting particular traditional techniques. In the chapter on banishing rituals:

'...though (the Pentagram ritual) is very effective, it is symbolically dependent upon the Qabalistic system and hence unsuitable for anyone who wants to avoid hanging that Albatross around his neck' (page 15).

When discussing methods of yoga practice:

'We wizards don't do it that way. Why? Because it's boring, mostly, and any moron can think of better ways to spend his life than to sit absolutely still for six hours every day, and play priest for the other eighteen' (page 85).

'In traditional Hindu practice Yama includes things like non-acceptance of gifts and celibacy, but that's just a crock for simple minds and has nothing to do with us sorcerers' (page 86).

Hm. Must be nice for you sorcerers, standing head and shoulders above all of those simple minds who developed these traditions over thousands of years, but I'm left wondering: why the disdain for tradition? Do you think those who follow it do so for no better reason than fear, idiocy, or inertia? Isn't it at least possible that practices work better with more of their original context intact?

Then there's the question of ethics, always a critical one when talking about magic, because magic is largely about power and it becomes a question of what you do with that power. Mace seems to advise against using magic to work ill....well, sort of....mostly on pragmatic grounds...

'...the cops can't catch you for a curse...but then your karma might, or another magician, or all those devils on their way home from work...' (page 18).

Contrasted with a later selection from the chapter on creating talismans:

'This could be something like a love letter or a job resume, and the magical charge the wizard puts on it will be there to sway the mind of the recipient, impelling that person to grant whatever request he or she read on the face of it' (page 68).

Wow! 'Impelling' people to grant your requests? Does that not seem like a little bit of a friggin' grey area there, at best?

But then again, Mace follows Crowley in believing that the sorcerer need not concern himself with anything apart from the fulfilment of his True Will. In this new aeon, the model for human relations 'is that of stars in a galaxy. Each has its own course and proper motion... What we human stars must do is gain the skill to perceive our human environments with the same dispassionate precision that stars use to respond to their neighbours' gravity, and then apply it to guide our progress through our human space' (page 95). In theory, that might work, if you presume that human nature is benevolent (and that is an open bloody question, last I checked). But it's a metaphor: we are not stars, we're humans. There is no place in this 'new aeon' for compassion, only dispassion, and there's something gravely wrong with that picture.

Humility, respect for tradition, and surrender have absolutely no place here. To me that reeks of hubris of the ickiest degree. Even granted that 'our unconscious minds ultimately merge with the Mind of God' (page 18), and even if you have at moments managed to achieve that depth, that does not make you God.

Clearly this has been a very thought-provoking read, and I will probably hang onto it for a while at least to mull over Chapter 22, wherein Mace unpacks some of the central ideas in Crowley's Liber AL Vel Legis. But although the author is intelligent, creative, well-read, and eloquent....I can't shake the feeling that I'd want to avoid him at a party.

Fascinating. I am learning so much reading your reviews.

Excellent review of Stealing the Fire From Heaven but way outside my comfort zone.

>38 fannyprice: Thanks fannyprice. Glad to hear it! And thank you for actually reading that wordbrick of a review. I probably put in too many quotes from the book but I don't like to complain about something without making it clear why I'm complaining, if that makes sense.

>39 baswood: Thank you baswood. To be honest it was a bit outside my comfort zone as well. It was quite interesting especially as I didn't know much at all about Austin Osman Spare to begin with, but as it went on I found the creep factor steadily increasing.

I'm glad I read it and spent some time writing the review as I usually have a bit of a knee-jerk dislike of chaos magic, and mulling this one over made me unpack some of the reasons for that.

That being said, I absolutely LOVE The Illuminatus! Trilogy, which is sort of a seminal work as far as discordianism is concerned. It's much higher on the playfulness and lower on the a**holery though.

(Hmm. Is discordianism actually something distinct from chaos magic? Never thought about that before...)

>34 Erratic_Charmer:: Yes, all three books stand alone very well, so reading them in order is, fortunately, not remotely required.

Also, I don't know why I kept saying Powers when what I in fact meant was that Voices, the one you read, was the best of the series. Possibly I will blame chronic sleep deprivation.

Weirdly fascinating!

Your review gave me something to think about, actually several things. This sorcerey seems to be a kind self-psychological manipulation.

>43 dchaikin: That's certainly a valid way of looking at it, dchaikin. That reminds me too of The Little Book of Demons: The Positive Advantages of the Personification of Life's Problems by Ramsey Dukes.

Thinking I might need to exorcise a book-buying demon soon. We did a round of charity shops yesterday and although I gave away four books we came home with about twelve!

I'm a little embarrassed to add them to post 3 up at the top. Maybe I'll have to at least stop putting the cover art up before it turns into a ridiculously huge book wall.

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

A bookbullet inspired by the chat over at Polymathic Monkey's Club Read thread. The discussion reminded me of how much my mother always raved about this book and, although I just had a Kindle version of it and so it didn't help with any shelf-clearing, I had to drop everything and read it straight away.

Completely engrossing; very troubling. 'Troubling' doesn't even feel like a strong enough word. Of course since this is an account of a true crime you know from the outset broadly what's going to happen. Even so, the measured pace with which Capote reveals critical details (why did the killers gun down a family of four? how did they find this family in the middle of nowhere to begin with? how did they slip up and get caught? how, basically, did Smith and Hickock become murderers in the first place?) gives the book that un-put-downable quality that keeps you glued to the pages for hours.

Capote's descriptions of the people involved are absolutely masterful; with just a few sentences he can bring a personality to life, then manage to keep revealing fresh and surprising intricacies throughout the rest of the book. He seems to own the 'characters' so completely it's hard to believe the story isn't entirely his invention.

Of course, artistic license notwithstanding, it isn't invention. It isn't light reading, either. The book is in four sections: the first describes the Clutter family members' last day alive and the discovery of their bodies by two friends of the sixteen-year-old daughter. Heavy going, but it only gets heavier from there as Capote's narrative follows the Kansas investigative team and the two murderers in their 'race without a finish line.' The best elements of both fiction and non-fiction are here, from cleverly imagined dialogues to actual selections from personal letters and other fascinating documents. One of the most gripping sections, I found, was a criminal psychiatrist's evaluations of both Perry and Hickock (it was near the end, in the description of the court trial, so sort of a summation of everything that had been gradually revealed about their characters).

Very dark, very well-written, very, very good.

Nice review, glad you enjoyed it, and that I could help inspire you to finally read it! ;D

Girl Reading by Katie Ward

Borrowed from the local library on a whim as the critical reviews were very positive, plus, being a reading girl, I felt I could identify with the subject.

This book is in an unusual format: not quite a novel, but a series of seven very loosely connected stories. They begin in the 1300s and from there each one jumps forward a century or so. Each one has as its focal point an image of a woman or girl with a book. (Most of them are based on actual paintings or photos, and fun to look up.) The stories explore the characters in and around this image: how did the painting or photograph come to be? That's it, really: sort of a simple premise but a nifty work of imagination that allows for plenty of variety. There's an orphan girl living on charity, a deaf housemaid and her fraught relationship with the family she serves, a countess grieving her dead lover, a spirit medium and her twin, a self-absorbed lovestruck teenager, a young career woman at a crossroads, and even an art historian/programme designer of the future, with a sci-fi twist.

I like the premise of Girl Reading but feel like the stories varied in quality. The first couple didn't really grab me and didn't particularly have any closure for the characters, either, which was annoying. The third, 'Portrait of a Lady,' was much better (I'm a sucker for a good lesbian love story), and I liked the touch of the supernatural in 'Carte de Visite.' 'For Pleasure' was satirical and funny and reminded me a bit of Dodie Smith, although it wasn't nearly as kind and forgiving of its characters' flaws! Unfortunately the book ended on a rather weird note with 'Sibil,' a story which seemed to go in two directions at once. There was an element of psychological drama in it, crumbling relationship, etc., but then also the Sibil of the title: a computer programme which constructs a virtual reality world around a painting or photograph. The catch? It only works with six images (no points for guessing which ones). It seems like a very bizarre way to tie the preceding vignettes together, especially as it doesn't really have any bearing on the main conflict of the story.

Altogether not a bad book, but I wasn't blown away by it.

>46 .Monkey.: Yeah, good call on that one, Monkey! :D Intense, though. 'There but for the grace of God go I' and all that.

So now I'm at home alone as am having a sick day and the question is....do I dare start the Susan Hill novel with nothing to distract me?

OK, I did go ahead and read Dolly, but it was a bit pants!



Two cousins spend a childhood summer with their aunt at spooky old Iyot House in the middle of the fens. One of them, shy Edward, is the narrator of the tale. The other, spoiled and wicked Leonora, unleashes a curse with her furious tantrum over a disappointing birthday present.

Dolly: A Ghost Story was a bit of a let-down. I’ve read The Woman in Black and The Small Hand, also by Susan Hill, and both of those were much better. The trouble with Dolly is that, though creepy, the story just isn’t coherent. TWiB and TSH both featured not only frightening episodes, but also dark secrets from the past brought gradually to light. There’s mystery as well as horror in both books, and the creeping horror makes a kind of terrible sense. They’re a sharp contrast with Dolly, where it’s sort of suggested that maybe Leonora is possessed, but then again maybe not, or not always, and if she is then it’s never explained what spirit possesses her. I kept waiting for the big reveal of some dreadful event from the past, but it never came. Instead the story just stumbles forward on the premise that Leonora is a horrible child and is therefore cursed.

Edward makes a somewhat insipid narrator as well, and the plot device of ‘I did this thing because I simply felt compelled to do it’ is greatly overused.

Thanks for bringing Dolly: A Ghost Story to our attention. It seems many people find Susan Hill's ghost stories somewhat mellow, but since you have already read and compared this book with Hill's other two ghost stories, I suppose this might be a bit bland. However, I will probably still give it a try, as I rather liked the previous two.

Glad you enjoyed In Cold Blood. Too bad about the other two. Girl Reading sounds maybe a little too gimicky for me.

>50 edwinbcn: No problem edwinbcn :) I like Susan Hill also and as Dolly is quite a short book I wouldn't let a so-so review put me off either. You might like it more than I did.

>51 dchaikin: Heh, well, Girl Reading wasn't really a bad book, just kind of gimmicky, as you say. It does mean that all of the library books I've borrowed and read so far this year have been a bit disappointing - maybe a sign I need to read what's on my shelves instead! I do have Alias Grace on the go now and it's super, so at least that's got me out of the slump.

>52 Erratic_Charmer: I loved Alias Grace! I read it for my Feminist Literary Theories class in college, and I was blown away. I have several Maragret Atwood books on my TBR list :)

I was also inspired by Monkey's review of In Cold Blood and I bought a really cool edition from my favorite used bookstore. I'm even more excited to read it now that you posted such a great review!

I really enjoyed Alias Grace also (though it made me really want to know the absolute truth, which is, of course, completely impossible, agh!! haha), but I haven't figure out which of hers I should take out next from the library.

Mwahaha, my secret plan to get all of LT reading reading In Cold Blood is working exceptionally well! ;)

>53 kaylaraeintheway: I'm really enjoying Alias Grace as well. I wish I had more free time to read it this week. The first book of Atwood's that I read was The Handmaid's Tale and I really liked it.

>54 .Monkey.: (though it made me really want to know the absolute truth, which is, of course, completely impossible, agh!!

History is a total bugger like that :p

I'd recommend The Handmaid's Tale; it's a great book and I guess her most famous as well. I'd love to have some more people to chat about it with, especially the ending :)

Your secret plan is a sound one. I approve!

Laugh Your Way to Grace by Susan Sparks

I feel like I'm going to have to rack my brain for this one. I don't know that I can write a fair review of it, as the subject matter didn't really speak to me at all. Or rather, didn't have too much to say that was new.

The author, Susan Sparks, is a Baptist minister and stand-up comedian, and the premise of the book is that our spiritual lives would benefit from less self-conscious gravitas and more joy and laughter. For someone raised (like Sparks) in a stern hellfire-and-brimstone tradition where 'people never, ever laughed in church,' that could be a game-changer as far as spirituality goes. Personally I follow a broadly Pagan path with a lot of cheerful borrowing from different traditions and a lot of ribald humour about Maypoles, ladies' front bottoms, etc. This book is a bit like a 101 class and I'm in a religious group that's, like, professionally ridiculous.

On the other hand I also feel that, while often joyful, spiritual life isn't all hilarity, and that sometimes we go to church precisely for silence and solemnity. In which case, an event like Sparks relates wherein a little boy in her congregation belches loudly into the pulpit microphone during a sermon on Jonah and the whale (he's playing the part of the whale) would be more obnoxious than whimsical or charming. Joy and laughter-with in the face of suffering and oppression is potentially revolutionary stuff; laughter to the exclusion of all other emotional response is immature.

So, not hugely relevant to me as a reader, and also kind of one-sided.

>55 Erratic_Charmer: I'll definitely pick up The Handmaid's Tale when I go to the bookstore next week!

Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood

Hooray, finally another fabulous book!

Rather in the vein of In Cold Blood but with more obviously fictitious material, as the true crimes that Atwood writes of took place all the way back in 1843. Alias Grace tells the story of Grace Marks, a 16-year-old servant girl in Canada who was accused of the murder of her employer, Thomas Kinnear, and his housemaid, Nancy Montgomery. Her alleged accomplice, James McDermott, was hanged for the crimes but Grace's death sentence was commuted to imprisonment, and she spent close to 30 years in an asylum and a penitentiary.

Atwood's version of the story is told partly in the voice of Grace herself and partly through third-person narrative of the experiences of Dr Simon Jordan, a young doctor in the up-and-coming field of psychoanalysis who comes to interview Grace during her imprisonment. Dr Jordan commences with the grand goal of plumbing Grace's subconscious and restoring her 'lost' memories from the day of the murders, thus settling once and for all the question of her guilt or innocence. There are two main plot lines running throughout the novel. The first is Grace's narrative, including both her day-to-day life as a prisoner and her account of her life from her childhood in Northern Ireland through the time of the murders. The second is the story of Dr Jordan, who moves gradually from brash confidence in himself, his abilities, and the worthiness of his aims, to self-doubt and explosive confrontations with a few of his own repressed demons.

Not only are the characters and plot compelling, there's quite a lot of incidental history in here as well (which is great for lazy people like me who enjoy picking up facts painlessly). Grace Marks' life took place against the backdrop of the Upper Canada Rebellion of 1837, and the ongoing debate over her guilt or innocence tended to draw in issues of oligarchy versus democracy, established church versus Protestant branches, and so on. This becomes clear in the surrounding cast of characters in the novel, who all interpret Grace according to their own biases.

Margaret Atwood was first presented to me as a feminist author, so I tend to think of her first in those terms (although it's unfairly limiting). Alias Grace certainly has a lot of potent observations on the roles and relationships of men and women in the nineteenth century (but at no point does it feel like 'feminist politics' get the better of the story). The tension between upper- and working-class also drives the story forward, as does the fear of people (immigrants, migrant workers, the insane) generally perceived as 'outsiders.' There's this sense in which people are struggling so hard to relate to each other and failing wretchedly at it because of all the masks that they wear to deceive each other and themselves.

A big, sexy, complicated book, which I liked very much.

Great review, it's quite a read isn't it? It just kills me not to be able to know what really happened, though! She wrote such an immensely compelling version of events, and it's almost certainly the best account we'll ever have, but man I want to know!! Hahaha.

Enjoyed your review of Alias Grace

>59 .Monkey.: You know, the way that Atwood's Grace Marks describes events really reminded me of a psychological study referenced near the end of In Cold Blood - oh, I can't remember the mechanism involved now, but it was basically when someone who is generally sane but has survived abuse or some other serious trauma suffers an ego collapse and winds up commiting assault or murder in a dissociative state.... Do you know the bit I'm talking about? It would account for the memory loss and the bizarre M.O. of the Kinnear/Montgomery murders. Well, at least in Atwood's novel :p

>60 baswood: Thanks baswood :) I'm going to head over and take a nosey at your thread soon. I starred it at the beginning of the year as it looked like it was going to be a good one.

Knitting by Faith by Julie LeeSong Norman

This was a quite inexpensive (77p) little Kindle read that I picked up on Amazon just because it dealt with two topics I’m interested in, namely knitting and Christianity. Sadly it rather serves as an illustration of the old adage ‘you get what you pay for.’ The book is a very short collection of little essays, each one a reflection on some aspect of knitting, with a Bible verse or two crowbarred on at the end to make a simile. It’s not utterly terrible – Norman’s prose is clear and straightforward – but the whole thing needs proofreading and the ideas are generally more awkward patchworks than profound insights (Jesus as the master knitter? The second coming of Christ will be more eye-catching than the displays at your favourite yarn shop?). The book actually ends on quite a nice note, with a brief account of Norman’s trip to India as part of a missionary group, where over four days she taught a group of women to knit. Because she herself was outside the local boundaries of caste and religion, she was able to bring together women from disparate backgrounds who would not normally have interacted with each other. The women ended up agreeing to continue to meet on a regular basis after Norman’s departure. I would definitely be interested in reading a longer account of that journey, if Norman ever writes one.

I do need to reread Alias Grace sometime soon.

>63 RidgewayGirl: Me too! It was the first Atwood I ever read, and I went on to read all her other books (except the latest) and enjoyed them all. I think you're right, Erratic - to present Atwood as a feminist writer is too limiting, which isn't to say that she doesn't do a fine job of handling feminist themes. It's just that she does a heck of a lot more than that.

>58 Erratic_Charmer: I'm glad you enjoyed it! Not knowing what actually happened kills me, too haha

>64 rachbxl: I want to pick up The Edible Woman next just because it's her first novel. She's definitely made it onto my list of favourite writers :)

Books for February 2014

                 

The Rainy Moon and Other Stories by Colette - complete; review at post 77 below
The Summer Book by Tove Jansson - complete; review at post 78 below
The Bluffer's Guide to Etiquette by William Hanson - complete; review at post 82 below
Notes on a Scandal by Zoe Heller - complete; review at post 87 below
ChristoPaganism by Joyce and River Higginbotham - complete; review at post 90 below
The Black Sheep by Honore de Balzac - complete; review at post 94 below
The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim - complete; review at post 100 below
Contentment: A Way to True Happiness by Robert A Johnson and Jerry M Ruhl - complete; review at post 106 below
The End of Everything by Megan Abbott - complete; review at post 107 below
Miss Garnet's Angel by Sally Vickers - complete; review at post 108 below

Atwood tends to get pegged as a feminist writer or a dystopian writer or some other kind of writer by readers who have only read a couple of her books -- in reality, she ranges widely and richly from commentary on contemporary life, to historic fiction, to poetry, to environmental fiction -- always rewarding. I think my favorite is Cat's Eye, but I also love The Robber Bride.

>68 janeajones: Oh, I completely forgot that I've read Cat's Eye, too! Mostly because it's so different from Alias Grace and The Handmaid's Tale that I forget it's by Adler, heh. She's so fabulous.

I'm trying to keep February's reading goals a bit smaller than January's as it's a short month and I have rather a lot of knitting to do - Ravelympics 2014 is on and I have blanket squares that need to be done (our friends' 25th wedding anniversary is at the beginning of June and I plan to have a 5' square blanket done for them by then). I finished up a couple of projects in January too - might post pictures here later if I get around to it.

>67 Erratic_Charmer: - Your February list looks great - I loved All the Pretty Horses, and really enjoyed Notes on a Scandal too, even though the premise of it is rather icky.

Chiming in on the Atwood conversation - Alias Grace is one of my favourites of hers, and it was the one that got me started on seriously reading her work. My absolute favourite is The Blind Assassin, which is super complex and just gorgeous. I still have lots of her earlier novels left to read, because I'm more of a fan of her later work. Her poetry is really amazing too - if you are interested, her first collection is The Circle Game. It's fabulous.

Stats for January 2014

Total books read: 14
Books read from the TBR pile: 9
Library books read: 3
Kindle books read: 2

Books purchased, swapped, or otherwise acquired: 38 (I am a naughty, naughty girl.)
Tales from Ovid by Ted Hughes
The White Goddess by Robert Graves
Cassell's Latin Dictionary
No Destination by Satish Kumar
Memento Mori by Muriel Spark
Family and Friends by Anita Brookner
My Life as a Fake by Peter Carey
Duo and Le Toutounier by Colette
*Tarot and the Tree of Life by Isabel Kliegman
Tree of Sapphires by David Goddard
Learning Ritual Magic by Claire Vaughan et al
The Psychic Protection Handbook by Caitlin Matthews
*Laugh Your Way to Grace by Susan Sparks
*The Inspector and Silence by Haakan Nesser
*Woman with Birthmark by Haakan Nesser
*The Return by Haakan Nesser
Be Near Me by Andrew O'Hagan
The House of Doctor Dee by Peter Ackroyd
Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl
The Laughing Policeman by Maj Sjowall & Per Wahloo
Swimming Home by Deborah Levy
Death in Venice and Other Stories by Thomas Mann
The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas
A Rose for Winter by Laurie Lee
*Notes on a Scandal by Zoe Heller
A Morbid Taste for Bones by Ellis Peters
Creation by Gore Vidal
I Want That! How We All Became Shoppers by Thomas Hine
Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe by Fannie Flagg
Birds Without Wings by Louis de Bernieres
Identity and the Quartered Circle: Studies in Applied Wicca by Dorothy Louise Abrams
Sophia, Goddess of Wisdom by Caitlin Matthews
The Britannica Guide to the Islamic World by Ziauddin Sardar et al
The Poetry of Kabbalah translated and annotated by Peter Cole
Christianity: A Global History by David Chidester
The War That Killed Achilles: The True Story of Homer's Iliad and the Trojan War by Caroline Alexander
A Far Cry from Kensington by Muriel Spark
*The Rainy Moon and Other Stories by Colette

Longest book read: Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood (500+ pages)
Shortest book read: Knitting by Faith by Julie LeeSong Norman (approx 45 pages)

Knitting projects finished: 'Florence' lace scarf, 'Diamonds and Purls' shawl

>70 Cait86: Thank you for the recommendations, Cait. I definitely want to read The Edible Woman because it's her first but I will seek out The Blind Assassin and also The Circle Game as I've been looking for some poetry to get into!

As usual, the start of the quarter left me falling behind. I am impressed by your reading, Erratic!

One note: you mentioned that you wish Father Brown had written out his theology. I believe he did. It's called Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton, lol.

I am curious about your Celtic book above. Does it look like a legit source? One book I have had my eye on in Living Between Worlds: Place and Journey in Celtic Spirituality by Philip Sheldrake. Sheldrake is a former Jesuit, now Anglican priest, and a prolific scholar of Christian spirituality, so I assume the book will have academic rigor.

>73 JDHomrighausen: Aw, thanks! It's quality, not quantity, that counts (though I'd be lying if I said I wouldn't be chuffed to carry on at this rate...) Thank you for the link to the Chesterton! I'll keep an eye out for that one.

Does the Knight book look like a legit source? Hahaha, does it hell Ahem. At first glance it doesn't seem, shall we say, overburdened with academic rigour. It's another one of those gift books but it does look like more interesting reading than the crystals book. The Amazon reviews on it are quite divided. My own opinion of it will probably be weighted not only by whether the facts are verifiable but whether it presents itself as an anthropological text or poetry/inspiration.

Must dash to work; more waffling later!

Your great review of Alias Grace makes me want to re-read it immediately but I can't see it anywhere. GRRRRR!

>75 charbutton: Oh no! I hate it when that happens. It will find you eventually.

>73 JDHomrighausen: continued: Your mention of Philip Sheldrake jogged my memory; I have his Spaces for the Sacred on the shelf in Florida. (So he's an Anglican now? Interesting.) I can't remember everything that's on those shelves but am hoping to make a trip back this year and then I can add all the books. It will be about half academic texts and half children's/YA lit...should be amusing.

Continuing my ramble about academic texts... Others will disagree but in my view the Neopagan movement is at least as much about creativity as it is about revival of ancient practices (and quite rightly; no one should be in a hurry to perform human sacrifice like they did in the old days, and that’s just for starters). It's a new religion, or group of new religions, inspired by ancient myths and cultures (and Romanticism, modern psychology, and feminism, among other things) rather than something that went 'underground' for centuries (again, others will disagree with me on this). In that light it makes sense that a book like, say, Robert Graves’ The White Goddess has been hugely influential in the modern Pagan movement in spite of being more poetry than history.

What does get a black mark in my book is when a writer’s personal gnosis is presented as ‘the truth handed down from days of yore,’ or when a book is just plain badly written (quelle horreur!)

The Rainy Moon and Other Stories by Colette

I was mostly enchanted with this book of short stories - which is to say, not quite as enchanted as I had hoped to be, but still really quite. The translation of this volume is copyright 1958 and I think it suffers a little bit for being dated. The stories were written by Colette between 1937 and 1945, so one expects a certain amount of 'period charm,' but some of the slang words and phrasing are sufficiently out of date to be jarring. I also have Duo & Le Toutounier to read and the translation of that is from 1974 (also Cheri and The Last of Cheri translated in 1949 BUT by a different translator from The Rainy Moon), so it will be interesting to compare them stylistically.

Enough waffling about translations; on to the stories! Basically they are a mix of two different sorts: a few are pure fiction, but most of them are told by Colette in the first person and purport to be about people she knew at various stages in her life. All of the stories are told with a beautiful and nearly obsessive attention to detail: botanical description in particular, but also animal companions, showgirls' costumes, precise quirks of dress and facial expression. Take, for example, the description of her father's 'desk-furniture':

A pad of virgin blotting-paper; an ebony ruler; one, two, four, six pencils, sharpened with a penknife and all of different colours; pens with medium nibs and fine nibs, pens with enormously broad nibs, drawing-pens no thicker than a blackbird's quill; sealing-wax, red, green and violet; a hand-blotter, a bottle of liquid glue, not to mention slabs of transparent amber-coloured stuff known as 'mouth-glue'; the minute remains of a Spahi's cloak reduced to the dimensions of a pen-wiper with scalloped edges; a big ink-pot flanked by a small ink-pot, both in bronze, and a lacquer bowl filled with a golden powder to dry the wet page; another bowl containing sealing-wafers of all colours (I used to eat the white ones); to right and left of the table, reams of paper, cream-laid, ruled, water-marked, and, of course, that little stamping-machine that bit into the white sheet, and, with one snap of its jaws, adorned it with an embossed named: J.-J. Colette.

Colette is often quoted as saying, 'I cannot interest myself in anything that is not life,' and her loving attention shines through in every sentence. The reader has the sense that she was someone who really lived every moment of life to the full, with her eyes open wide. The lavish descriptions also have the effect of really making you feel present in early 20th century France: delightful immersion!

The 'pure' fiction stories (The Rendezvous, Armande, The Sick Child) weren't my favourites. They are as beautifully written as the others but the emotional themes are a little bit maudlin (though not without touches of Colette's biting humour).

With regard to the first-person narratives, I can never tell exactly how much is about things that really happened and how much is invention, which is part of their charm. There is usually a little twist near the endings, but not so much as to be gimmicky and always plausible enough to be believed. Disappointment in love is a recurring theme but the overall tone is not hopeless - rather, it's one of slightly cynical affection for characters whose love affairs are made and broken on the strength of a glance.

I'll be keeping this collection of stories to revisit from time to time.

The Summer Book by Tove Jansson

This is a wonderful book! I borrowed a copy from the library but will buy one for my personal collection in a flash if I spy it in a second-hand bookshop.

The Summer Book is about a grandmother and her six-year-old granddaughter, Sophia, and the adventures they have during the summer on a tiny island off the coast of Finland. The characters are loosely based on Jansson's mother, who passed away the year before Jansson wrote the book, and her niece. The island where they spent time is a real one which you can go and visit (this edition has some photos in the introduction). It's a tiny speck of land in the sea - according to Esther Freud, who wrote the introduction, you can circumambulate it in about four and a half minutes. The smallness of the island contributes something to the dollhouse-like delicacy of the prose: a page is given over to describing the minute landscape that Grandmother sees in the triangle between her outstretched arm, her hat, and some white reeds. One chapter relates how Sophia and Grandmother construct a tiny Venice out of stones and balsa wood in a marsh pool (and the subsequent disaster when a storm strikes and the sea rises!) Fans of the Moomin books will recognise Jansson's fascination with the world of very small things.

Jansson's keen perception of character and interaction makes Sophia and Grandmother fascinating characters as well. They are by turns kind, angry, independent, affectionate, irritated, irritating, and always genuine. The dialogue between an old woman nearing the end of her life and a young girl at the beginning of hers is frequently hilarious:

'You're a very good climber,' said Grandmother sternly. 'And brave too, because I could see you were scared. Shall I tell (your father) about it? Or shouldn't I?'

Sophia shrugged one shoulder and looked at her grandmother. 'I guess maybe not,' she said. 'But you can tell it on your deathbed so it doesn't go to waste.'

'That's a bloody good idea,' Grandmother said.

There's a bitter-sweet note to the book that stops it from being overly cute. The matter-of-fact references to the death of Sophia's mother and Grandmother's approaching 'deathbed' are less dark than Grandmother's bouts of depression and Sophia's childish outbursts that manifest in temporary but passionate hatred (sometimes amusing, sometimes painful to watch). Somehow, though, in their tiny shared world, the two very different characters always find a point of connection.

The Summer Book is a story about the love between grandmother and granddaughter, even when they behave in unlovable ways. Esther Freud and Philip Pullman are right in describing it as both wise and funny. Definitely one to keep and reread.

Enjoyed your excellent review of The Rainy Moon and Other Stories. I have got a copy of The Collected Stories and so the stories that you read will be in the collection. I am looking forward to reading them: I am a big fan of Collette and you describe the way she wrote really well.

Enjoyed reading your review of The Summer Book, it was one of my favorite discoveries of 2013!

>79 baswood: Thank you baswood. That's high praise indeed as I found Colette rather difficult to describe! I'm really looking forward to reading the other books by her that I have.

>80 japaul22: Thank you. The Summer Book has put Tove Jansson squarely onto my list of favourite authors :)

The Bluffer's Guide to Etiquette by William Hanson

I received a free copy of this book as part of the LibraryThing Early Reviewers' programme.

For anyone even the tiniest bit fascinated with the English aristocracy, this is a quick but informative and entertaining read. There are chapters covering introductions, dress, dining, online etiquette, birth, marriage, and death, among others. Readers, be advised: this is not a guide to the bare basics of good manners but rather an 'advanced' course designed to help you bluff your way in high society gatherings.

Hanson not only reviews many of the traditional points of etiquette (such as not cutting the 'nose' off of the cheese) but in many cases explains why things are done in this way (in the case of the cheese, it's because cheese makers hold that the finest part of a cheese round is in the centre: cut off the point of the wedge and you're taking the best bit for yourself). The snobbery is frequently shocking - to my mind, delightfully so, as Hanson's dry wit shines through on every page and had me laughing aloud more than once. For example, when advising would-be social climbers on Twitter etiquette:

We are frightfully pleased you have a new job, or new car, or that you've given birth, but all such life achievements should be underplayed and written about in a casual, offhand manner in order to show that you are above such things as melodrama.

My favourite chapter was about The Season and included a brief summary of each event during the social season (Chelsea Flower Show, Glyndebourne Opera Festival, and so on) along with advice on correct behaviour for each. At Wimbledon, for instance:

Do say 'The game of lawn tennis was actually invented in Birmingham, England, in 1865 by Harry Gem and Juan Bautista Augurio Perera.'
Don't say 'Wahey! I can see her pants from here.'

This little book is both interesting and informative and also manages to be quite funny.

Lovely review of what sounds like a lovely book. The Summer Book is getting so much praise in CR that I really need to get myself a copy.

The Bluffer's Guide sounds rather amusing, I love that "don't say" item, LOL!

I too love the "don't say" quote. The Bluffer's Guide to Ettiquette doesn't sound too bad.

There are 'do say vs don't say's sprinkled throughout the book and they're all quite funny. The tennis one made me laugh the hardest though. I might have to check out some more Bluffer's Guides. There's a Bluffer's Guide to Chocolate on this month's Early Reviewer list :)

Notes on a Scandal by Zoe Heller

This short novel, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, relates the scandal of a female teacher, Sheba Hart, caught in an affair with a 16-year-old pupil. The narrative is told by her self-appointed best friend Barbara Covett, a co-worker several decades her senior.

Impressively enough for a tale with a premise as shocking as sex between a teacher and a minor, it's Barbara who gradually comes to steal the spotlight and shock value. At the story's beginning, Sheba and our narrator are sharing a house together in the aftermath of Sheba's affair being made public. Barbara keeps a manuscript with notes on their day-to-day life and a timeline of events as she remembers them. Barbara is observant, erudite, and sometimes scathingly funny, but also unrelentingly judgemental and breathtakingly selfish. Sheba's obsession with her teenage lover eventually pales in comparison to Barbara's determination to have Sheba firmly in her power.

Like the most scandalous gossip in the real world, Notes on a Scandal leaves you greedy for more with every revelation, but slightly sickened afterwards. It's a good book, no question about that, but if you're reading it be ready to spend a lot of time in the ugly cellars of the psyche. I didn't find either of the main characters entirely unsympathetic - Sheba is ultimately very much at the mercy of the people around her, and Barbara's descriptions of the loneliness of spinsterhood are heartbreaking - but it's pretty squirmy watching the plot unfold. Compulsive, too.

Ooh, thanks for putting Notes From A Scandal on my radar!

Hope you read it and enjoy it, Fanny. We watched the film the other night with Cate Blanchett and Judi Dench. They had of course condensed the plot and changed some things, which always annoys me (never mind that they couldn't do it scene-for-scene without having a film that was about nine hours long) but it's very well cast.

ChristoPaganism: An Inclusive Path by Joyce and River Higginbotham

ChristoPaganism is a book with both strengths and weaknesses, which I'll review here. First, a word about the authors: Joyce and River have written two books prior to ChristoPaganism, Pagan Spirituality and Paganism: An Introduction to Earth-Centered Religions. The latter has been adopted by the Coven of Unitarian Universalist Pagans as a teaching text for their adult course on earth-centred religions, and the Higginbothams have led workshops and taught groups of various faiths about modern Paganism for a number of years.

This book is divided into three sections. The first is an overview of 'the outer landscape' - the spiritual cultures, if you will, of Christianity and Paganism. Paganism is given somewhat short shrift here, although readers completely new to it will benefit from the explanation of the wheel of the year and basic Pagan beliefs. The overview of Christianity, rather than focusing on basic Christian beliefs or exploring the various current-day denominations, mostly explores scholarship relating to the earliest Christian communities, painting a picture of great diversity and suggesting that not all of the earliest 'Jesus people' believed Jesus to be divine. My problem with this chapter (and it's one that will surface again) is that the Higginbothams rely heavily for their conclusions on the work of a few scholars, notably Burton Mack (whose argument that Jesus is best understood as a Cynic philosopher in a Hellenistic context rather than a Palestinian Jewish one is greeted with skepticism by most other scholars). They're also prone to make sweeping statements such as, 'Biblical scholars now acknowledge...that Ephesians, 1 and 2 Timothy, Colossians, Hebrews, and Titus were not written by Paul' (page 44) when my understanding is that the authorship of these books is still very much open to debate.

The following chapters, 'Mystery Religions and Christianity' and 'Monotheism and the Old Testament' are plagued with similar problems. The first outlines the theory of the 'mythic Christ,' the hypothesis that Jesus may not have been a historical figure at all but a purely mythological dying-and-resurrected God figure like many others in the near East. The scholars footnoted most heavily here are Alvin Boyd Kuhn (Shadow of the Third Century and Who is this King of Glory? and Tom Harpur (The Pagan Christ). Both were previously unfamiliar to me, but the publication dates of Kuhn's books (1949 and 1944 respectively) raised my eyebrows immediately; the scholarship can hardly be called current. In a review of The Pagan Christ, Robert Price notes that Kuhn is 'as far off the chart for most NT scholars as a historical Jesus was for the apostle Paul' (and then proceeds to demolish Harpur's book).* There are some just plain wild claims in here, such as that early Christianity was modelled after Mystery religions (and this after spending a chapter-long overview effectively deconstructing any idea of a unified early 'Christianity') because they held their meetings at night and kept their inner teachings secret (yes, well, Christianity was illegal at that time, after all). 'Monotheism and the Old Testament' relates how the people who came to be the Israelites were not monotheistic throughout much of their long history, and spent quite a while detailing similarities between the myth of Moses and the Pharaoh Akhenaten, the point of which passed me by.

In a nutshell, there are too few sources drawn on here, and many of them are decades old and/or outside the mainstream of accepted scholarship. If I'd turned in a paper as an undergraduate with a bibliography like this, I'd expect negative feedback on it. It stops just short of being sensationalistic, but there is a tone throughout the first part as if to suggest 'look at all these earth-shaking truths that were hidden from you by despotic Church authorities,' and that simply isn't the case.

The middle section of the book deals with 'the inner landscape' of personal and faith development. Here the Higginbothams draw heavily on Beck and Cowan's theory of spiral dynamics as well as the philosophy of the writer Ken Wilber. These are reviewed in somewhat exhaustive detail; boiled down, the argument is that as individuals develop their views become more and more expansive such that they can reconcile seemingly contradictory viewpoints by taking several steps back and looking at the bigger picture (the holon). As a simple example, the authors give the traffic laws 'no right turns on red' and 'right turns permitted on red.' Though polar opposites, both laws serve the common goal of promoting traffic safety. The Higginbothams argue that religious concepts can be similarly viewed.

I can see the point that the authors are making with their holon diagrams (although it is an oversimplification of the tension and uncertainty involved in walking more than one faith path), but I'm not sure what I make of spiral dynamics. They seem to be making the case that there's a correlation between mystical experience and becoming a student of world religions and mythologies. Offhand I can think of a few (dozen) saints and mystics who don't fit that particular mould.

The third and final section of the book was the most interesting and valuable to me, though I'm not mad about how it was presented. It consists of interviews with fifteen people whose faith identity includes both Pagan and Christian (and sometimes other) elements. The material seems to have been gathered partially from face-to-face interviews and partially from email list discussions, and in the book it's all edited into a long group 'conversation' between the authors and the volunteers. It's a little hokey and just seems like a strange editorial choice, but the views presented by the volunteers are very interesting. I've bookmarked a quote from one of them which seems to me to sum up what the Higginbothams are trying to get across with a great deal more effort in the rest of the book:

At this point in my life, I've decided not to cut myself off from any stream of spirituality that has meaning for me, however complicated or contradictory that may be.

I wanted to like this book but ultimately I'm rather disappointed in it. The authors spend so much time and energy on extremely hypothetical scholarship surrounding early Christianity and the Bible. It's not convincing and, more to the point, it isn't relevant. The case for interspirituality as a valid faith identity does not rise and fall on the question of, for example, whether Jesus was a historical figure or not. As a person who walks on this sort of blended path, I'm more interested in the experiences, practices, prayers, struggles, and inspirations of others who do as well. ChristoPaganism would have been a more satisfying book if more attention had been paid here.

Jesus Through Pagan Eyes was a better book on this topic. I'm looking forward to reading The Path of a Christian Witch to provide more of a perspective on plain ol' daily life and Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism for some heavyweight theological material.

*Price's full review is here and worth reading. Bart Ehrman has an even more biting piece on the mythic Christ hypothesis here.

Hm. Sounds like an interesting premise that went a bit flawed in the making. Hate when that happens!

Sounds like an interesting premise that went a bit flawed in the making.

And that sums up my grad school work. :D

LOL. I'm sure you're not alone there! :P

The Black Sheep by Honore de Balzac

The Black Sheep tells the story of two brothers living in Paris at the beginning of the 19th century, at the end of the Napoleonic wars. One, Joseph, is a gifted painter of good heart and upright character. The other, Phillipe, is a one-time soldier and all-around scoundrel. It is Phillipe who is the mother Agathe’s favourite, however, despite his drinking and gambling habits dragging his family into ruin. Phillipe’s depredations are the subject of the first part of the book; in the second part Joseph and his mother leave Paris for the small town of Issoudun in an attempt to claim the inheritance that rightfully belongs to Agathe, but which her brother is in danger of leaving to his housekeeper-mistress Flore and her lover Max, another thoroughly rotten character. Joseph and Agathe prove too naïve and straightforward to contend with the machinations of Flore and Max, but when Phillipe appears, Max may have finally met his match…

Treachery and double-crossing abound in this novel, and there is an exciting duel at the end as well. Villainy ultimately meets with vengeance, but virtue is by no means always rewarded. Balzac is not entirely cynical but he does paint a cruel picture of a world dominated by greed and social schemers.

This is the first book I’ve ever read by Balzac. I enjoyed it although it was a tiny bit heavy-going at times and felt very much like a period novel. According to the introduction, Balzac considered himself at least as much a historian as a novelist, and though the action moves along rapidly the author provides exhaustive details about battles and Bourbons, geography of the provinces, and, most of all, financial arrangements from the Parisian lottery to the fine points of inheritance law. Expect to see an awful lot of calculations in francs. This will appeal most to readers interested in the historical setting of post-Napoleonic France.

Great review of The Black Sheep -- sounds fascinating. Tove Jansson is marvellous -- particularly enjoyed The True Deceiver and Sun City along with The Summer Book, of course.

Interested to read your review of The Black Sheep I am still a Balzac virgin and so it was good to read your thoughts on a first read.

I enjoyed your review of The Black Sheep, especially since my introduction to Balzac was only last year and he wrote so many books it's hard to decide which ones to read. So far, my favorite is the first one I read, Lost Illusions, although I'm enjoying some of the stories in a collection I'm now reading. I do love "treachery and double crossing" though, so this might be one for me to look for.

Thanks everyone!

>95 janeajones: I still have lots of Tove Jansson to read, and must revisit the Moomins - nice to anticipate that :)

>96 baswood: I'll look forward to reading your reviews if you get round to any Balzac this year.

>97 rebeccanyc: I do love "treachery and double crossing" Oho, watch out for this one ;) I'll look out for Lost Illusions; thanks for the recommendation!

98 I already ordered it!

Time to play catch-up with some reviews here. February has seen plenty of reading but a lot of knitting as well, and it’s the latter that has cut into my review time (that and a dash of laziness on my part, no doubt!)



The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim

Four women escape the dreariness of March in London to spend a month in a flower-strewn medieval castle in Italy. Initially inhibited by social constraints and their own private concerns, sunshine and natural beauty (along with a series of gently humorous misunderstandings) help to bring them all into blossom.

I expected to love this book but ended up feeling a bit ‘meh’ about it – perhaps unfairly; it felt a bit like a Dodie Smith premise to me (big fan of hers) and so I kept comparing the prose unfavourably to Smith’s. It was a bit repetitive, which was a slightly irritating narrative device. Finally, I didn’t really like the way that the characters’ warming to each other was largely based on misunderstanding each other’s motives when in fact they would have been hurt if they could have accurately divined each other’s intentions (for example, the society beauty who keeps trying to be rude to everyone and fails to drive them off because her loveliness makes her seem benign).

I’m sure The Enchanted April has redeeming qualities that were lost on me. Perhaps, in this wet and windy February, I was just envious of the women in their gorgeous Italian spring!

I enjoyed The Enchanted April more than I expected to, so maybe it has to do with expectations. I read it so long ago I don't remember exactly why I liked it so much.

I really like Enchanted April, but I'm a big fan of the movie, so that may be a factor.

I liked the movie too, but I saw it after I read the book. Has anyone ever read Any Four Women Could Rob the Bank of Italy? I read it many years ago and for some reason I always think of it when I think of Enchanted April even thought they're completely different except for being about four women in Italy. It was a fun read.

Haven't read The Enchanted April, but read Elizabeth's German Garden last year, which was somewhat autobiographical. In it she was somewhat tongue in cheek about visitors and women's relations to each other, sweet on the outside while clenching her teeth inwardly. Could this have been the case here?

Yeah, I keep thinking, 'hmm, Penguin Classic, it must be good so if I didn't enjoy it I'm probably doing something wrong.'

>104 SassyLassy: ...she was somewhat tongue in cheek about visitors and women's relations to each other, sweet on the outside while clenching her teeth inwardly. That was definitely the tenor of a lot of the character interaction in The Enchanted April, and although it was presented humorously the cynicism of it sort of bugged me. Perhaps it was just the wrong book for the time.

Contentment: A Way to True Happiness by Robert A Johnson and Jerry M Ruhl

I've had this book on the shelf for a while and turned to it hoping for an antidote to the February doldrums. It's quite a short volume, easy to finish in the space of an hour or two, but provides good food for thought.

Johnson is a Jungian analyst and so uses story as a jumping-off point for his discussion of contentment - in this case, the story of King Lear, a tale of 'distorted expectations and painful illusions.' Examining just some of the interactions between the characters in the play, Johnson and Ruhl describe how psychological projection, artificial inflation of the ego, and obsessive attempts to control life lead to discontentment. The final section of the book reviews the 'gifts of contentment.' There are some simple exercises here to help the reader listen to the inner voice of the heart, but the description of the gifts is mostly comprised of folk tales and anecdotes that convey the wisdom of contentment.

Readers of strongly anti-religious bias may object to Johnson and Ruhl's reference to the inner 'divine voice' and discussion of the importance of connecting to a larger whole:

The original meaning of the word 'religion' is to rerelate or reconnect - to put back together again, heal the wounds of separation, and to make whole. Contentment grows, not out of pursuing self-interest, but from our capacity to connect to a larger whole - family, social groups, nature, and, ultimately, God. Some people have trouble with the word 'God,' but all that is really required here is a willingness to acknowledge a power greater than yourself.

Can atheists make use of applied Jungian psychology? Perhaps only strict materialists would find the above passage difficult to relate to - or perhaps not, as the fabric of society and culture provide many 'wholes' for the self to identify with.

Although a short book, this is one that rewards careful reading and can provide food for thought for many months, if not a lifetime.

The End of Everything by Megan Abbott

I was tempted into Megan Abbott's books by a review of Dare Me over in RidgewayGirl's thread. I like suitably dark fiction about adolescent and teenage girls and how they relate to each other. The End of Everything delivers in spades!

Lizzie, the story's narrator, and Evie are inseparable best friends, both right on the cusp of adolescence. One day Evie doesn't return home from school. As the police investigation proceeds and Lizzie gradually pieces together clues from half-remembered events in their friendship over the last several months, a dark picture emerges that makes Lizzie question how well she really knew Evie. Mysteriously wrapped up in these events are Dusty, Evie's beautiful teenage sister, and the feelings both Lizzie and Dusty hold for Evie and Dusty's father.

This was a very dark and occasionally graphic read. It reminded me of Notes on a Scandal except that the narrator in The End of Everything is innocent....well, more or less. Far from a straightforward story of a kidnapping, it explores uncomfortable issues of autonomy, sexuality, and power struggles between friends, sisters, daughters, and fathers. And if you're partway through the book and think you've guessed the twist - you probably haven't.

Miss Garnet's Angel by Salley Vickers

Purchased on a whim at Richard Booth's Bookshop in Hay-on-Wye, and very glad I did!

After the death of her friend and flatmate Harriet, Julia Garnet, a middle-aged atheist Communist virgin, decides to take an extended trip to Venice. The beauty of the city awakens long-dormant passions in Miss Garnet, both physical and spiritual: she falls in love, has her heart broken, forms friendships, and even has her vision opened to the presence of the angel Raphael. Her confidence soars to inflated heights and then is brought crashingly low by an unkind word or unexpected turn of events before she learns to handle relationships gracefully (well, sort of gracefully, at least!) Those of us who have been painfully introverted and gradually come out of our shells a bit will be able to identify.

The story of Miss Garnet and her friends is interspersed with, and runs rather parallel to, a narrative of the Biblical story of Tobit. The addition of the Tobit story is inspired not only by parallels with the events in Miss Garnet's narrative, but by a series of paintings in Venice's Chiesa dell'Angelo Raffaele which themselves depict the story of Tobit. The whole book is rich with description of Venice and its artistic treasures (and makes me want to drop everything and go running off to the city itself immediately!) The book of Tobit is part of the apocrypha, which (as Miss Garnet learns) comes from the Greek word meaning 'hidden,' and there's a theme of secrets revealed and a dash of esoteric lore running throughout this book - tantalising stuff.

Rather like The Enchanted April, this is a story of a woman who travels to Italy and unexpectedly finds herself amid the history and beauty of her surroundings.

#103 - I have read Any Four Women Could Rob The Bank Of Italy, but I can't remember anything about it other than the title...

109 Me either! (Other than that I enjoyed it.)

Enjoyed reading your thoughts on Contentment: A way to true happiness

I have no trouble with the paragraph on connecting to a larger whole, although I consider myself to be an atheist. I think it is very well put.

Your review of Miss Garnet's Angel is very tempting, and I will definitely look for that book when I get back to the civilised world.

Incidentally, did you notice that there is an edition of The Enchanted April for which Salley Vickers wrote an introduction?

>111 baswood: Thanks baswood. I have plans to read She: Understanding Feminine Psychology by the same author very soon. His books are brief but deep and quite thoughtful and I am finding them a nice introduction to Jungian psychology. Glad to hear your opinion on that particular passage as well; some of the Amazon reviewers criticised Johnson for being 'overly religious' so I had that in the back of my mind as I was reading.

>112 edwinbcn: I hope you enjoy it :) Which part of the uncivilised world are you in? And no, I didn't know about that edition; that's quite interesting!

I have a couple of books underway now but nothing that I'll finish by the end of the month, so it's time to wrap up and start making plans for March.

Stats for February 2014

Total books read: 10
Books read from the TBR pile: 5
Library books read: 4
Kindle books read: 1

Books purchased, swapped, or otherwise acquired: 10 (One in, one out, or at least one read; not bad but I'll need to do better than that to shrink the TBR pile!)
Guernica by Dave Boling
Birdsong by Sebastian Faulkes
Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses by Isabel Allende
*The Testament of Gideon Mack by James Robertson
The Ladies of Grace Adieu by Susanna Clarke
Called to be Angels: An Introduction to Anglo-Saxon Spirituality by Douglas Dales
Monsieur Rene by Peter Ustinov
*Etiquette and Espionage by Gail Carriger
Queen of the Great Below: An Anthology in Honor of Ereshkigal by Bibliotheca Alexandrina
Ritual: A Guide to Life Love and Inspiration by Emma Restall Orr

Longest book read: Miss Garnet's Angel, 400 pages
Shortest book read: The Bluffer's Guide to Etiquette, 128 pages

Knitting projects finished: Four blanket squares with Goddess pattern; Möbius cowl

Books for March 2014

             

Etiquette and Espionage by Gail Carriger - complete
The Return by Hakan Nesser - complete
Tarot and the Tree of Life by Isabel Kliegman - complete
Woman With Birthmark by Hakan Nesser - complete
All above books reviewed at post 125 below.
All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy - complete; review at post 129 below
Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe by Fannie Flagg - complete; review at post 129 below
The Seven Chakra Sisters by Linda Linker Rosenthal - complete; review at post 132 below

Congrats on your February knitting completions and reads. The blanket squares with the Goddess pattern sound cool. I with I could knit, but I know realistically I don't have the time or real inclination to learn, so I appreciate that there's people like you who do knit out there. that was off the topic of books

Thank you twogerbils :) I love digressions; don't worry. Knitting and reading are my two abiding passions. Wish I could do both at the same time!

Those are excellent! The colors are perfect, too.

lovely!

>28 Erratic_Charmer: I just finished it last night!
(Semi-spoilerish talk to follow, for anyone who hasn't read Wide Sargasso/Jane!)
I think I might know what point you're referring to, but I'm not positive. I'm not sure what I think of the book. I didn't dislike it, but I wasn't crazy about it. I think if it had been just some random characters I'd have liked it a lot more. But since it was supposed to be Rochester... It didn't feel like him. Like, for the most part, he doesn't really do anything that seems against his character, but even though we're supposed to be in his head for a big chunk, I don't at all feel like I understood who the unnamed character was. We get his motivation for winding up there (father/brother, money, pretty girl) but we get none of him. I guess you're supposed to have read Jane and have all the background you need on him from that but, I don't know, it needed more. I found her story quite interesting and kind of wish it had just been told from her, but then his side of it was needed in some respects so that wouldn't have worked out.
In any case, for the most part I liked Jane's Rochester. He was a little underhanded in some ways, but he seemed to mean well and tried to follow his heart, even if he didn't really do it in the best ways. Sargasso Rochester ...he wasn't a bad person, and he was young and naïve, but still, he lacked all the charm and charisma and vitality of Jane's, and those things should have been present. Yeah, I think that about sums it up. :P

>120 .Monkey.:, "he lacked all the charm and charisma and vitality of Jane's" Rochester. Interesting - maybe it's because I never found him charming in Jane Eyre, but I sort of saw the lack of these qualities in him in Wide Sargasso Sea as reflecting how Bertha Rochester saw him. Jane Eyre is Jane's perspective on him, so he will of course appear differently to her.

He certainly was rough around the edges, a bit too overzealous about particular things, but he certainly had plenty of charisma and intellect and was full of life and everything. Even if one doesn't like him as being callous about Bertha and his past, he's still a very vibrant character, and I didn't feel that at all in Sargasso. In it, Antoinette was in love with him, so it doesn't seem fitting that she'd see him as the kind of non-entity he comes off as, not until near the end after things have come to a head.

Work has been crazy lately - seven consecutive days at the office, ugh >.118 and >119 janeajones: Thank you so much :) I'm hard at work on the second section of the blanket now; hopefully I'll have some more pictures up soon!

>120 .Monkey.: etc For various reasons then, the depiction of Rochester is where Wide Sargasso Sea falls a little flat. I definitely see it more as a story told by/about Bertha rather than one that explains his character in any degree. And the (spoiler) whole adultery scene was just shocking and not in line with the Rochester in Jane Eyre, I thought...

Husband has promised me some spending money for Hay-on-Wye if I can manage not to buy any books until our trip there in April. I can, however, check out as many library books as I want, so there should be a spike in book borrowings in the next 6 weeks. I already have:

The Stories of Eva Luna by Isabel Allende
Painting Away Regrets by Opal Palmer Adisa
Last Man in Tower by Aravind Adiga
Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Yeah that's what I figured you meant. I think it was supposed to be at least partially due to her "poison" and the fact that she drugged him in the first place, so he lashed out. But I agree, I don't think it was so fitting. But yes, Rhys wanted to write about the Jamaican woman who she felt was very slighted in Jane's story, she wanted to tell what would have been a more accurate background for Bertha, without the English up-turned nose at the creole foreigner that she felt Brontë had done.

As the first part of March has been so very busy I've neglected my Club Read reviews - but naturally haven't neglected to read ;) Here's a handful of mini-reviews by way of a quick catch-up....

 

Etiquette & Espionage by Gail Carriger

A bit of light young adult fiction that I picked up to celebrate the return of the Leeds Steampunk Market on the first weekend of March! Gossip Girl meets Jules Verne meets True Blood (but without any of the more risqué elements of the latter). I smiled and laughed out loud at a few parts. I'm looking forward to reading the second volume in this series, Curtsies & Conspiracies (can 'Teacakes and Treachery' be far behind?)

 

The Return by Hakan Nesser

Swedish noir mystery, part of the Inspector Van Veeteren series: a mutilated body is found in the woods after several months. The inspector and his fellow police officers must discover the identity of the corpse before they can begin to put together a motive and find the murderer, but as they slowly uncover the facts questions are raised about murders that were declared 'solved' decades before.

 

Tarot and the Tree of Life by Isabel Kliegman

Fabulous! Kliegman is a wise and witty writer, not to mention a tarot genius. The subject of Kabbalah has become rather trendy these days, but I figured a book covered with praise and recommendations from different rabbis would be a safe place to start learning. Kliegman first reviews the Kabbalistic tree of life with its ten sefirot, or emanations, and the characteristics of each. She then devotes a chapter to each of the four suits of the tarot deck, covering all of the so-called minor arcana, and also the sixteen court cards. In the Western esoteric tradition there are believed to be parallels between the ten sefirot and the tarot cards with corresponding numbers. The links are clearer in some places than others, but throughout the whole book Kliegman's careful and creative examination of each card is a model of intuitive reading, and she brings her whole life experience to tarot interpretation: work and family, emotion and intellect. Anyone who doesn't read tarot could still get a hell of a lot out of this book; for anyone who does, I think it's pretty much essential.

 

Woman with Birthmark by Hakan Nesser

This is the third book by Nesser that I've read and rather different from the rest. Most Nesser mysteries are classic page-turning whodunnits. In Woman with Birthmark, the identity of the perpetrator is known from the outset. The motive is made clear about halfway through the book, and isn't especially difficult to guess before then. The overall feel of it is like a Greek tragedy: a series of events leading to a knot of a situation that is basically not salvageable. Grim, sad, and my favourite of the Nesser mysteries that I've read.

Catching up, but I wanted to say that I'm glad you liked The End of Everything. I have a copy of Miss Garnet's Angel, but I have no memory of why or where I got it. Good to know it's worth reading -- your review made it sound fantastic.

Just catching up with your reading, and enjoying your reviews.

I'm glad you liked Etiquette & Espionage - I am finding the series a fun one.

Without really planning to, I ended up reading two consecutive books both dealing with the theme of a ‘vanished way of life’ (and both very American too) but quite different in style.



The first, All the Pretty Horses, is a pure Western with a melancholy, dreamlike quality to the prose. It’s peculiar; because of the narrative style (no quotation marks around dialogue, Spanish interspersed with English, and long run-on sentences) I sometimes felt that I wasn’t following along very well, but having finished the book my memories of it are quite vivid. The landscape was described in particularly great detail and will appeal to anyone with a love of the Wild West. Plot-wise, a young (but highly talented) cowboy discovers that he won’t be inheriting his father’s ranch as he had thought, and so he and a friend ride south to Mexico. There are horses, gunfights, forbidden love, corrupt sheriffs, and basically everything required for the genre. It’s a lovely book, if a little heavy on the harsh realities of life…

After that it was on to Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café. I’ve wanted to read this book, like, forever, and recently grabbed a used copy in London. A bout of homesickness for the American South meant I couldn’t resist reading it any longer, and so it was time to put the library books aside for another few days. It’s a lot of fun. In contrast to the dreaminess of All the Pretty Horses, Fried Green Tomatoes has a chatty, gossipy tone, with lots of little narratives jumping all over the timeline of the 20th century. In an interview at the back of this edition, author Fannie Flagg says that she suffers from OCD and ADD – it shows, but that’s not a bad thing! Although the characters get more than their share of genuine suffering (much of the story takes place during the Great Depression, and there are black characters living in the American South of decades past – no more need be said), the overall tone of the book is upbeat and hopeful.

Reading through your posts, I liked your Ursula LeGuin recommendation of Voices. She's yet another classic author I haven't read yet, although I've always meant to read the EarthSea trilogy. I have some catching up to do.

>126 RidgewayGirl: Definitely, and I'm looking forward to reading some more Meg Abbott when I can get my hands on it. Miss Garnet's Angel appears to be something of a cult classic. Someday in the next couple of years I hope we can make a trip to Venice and I'll reread it then :)

>127 rebeccanyc: Thanks Rebecca :) I'm slacking off a bit but still going to put reviews up for everything I read!

>128 fannyprice: Looking forward to the next book in the series! March was a bit of a depressing month so I'm looking for light escapist reading at the mo.

>130 twogerbils: I've only read, like, a tiny bit of the LeGuin corpus, although I really like what I've read. I have catching up to do too!

The Seven Chakra Sisters by Linda Linker Rosenthal

A book club pick, this one. I've missed the last couple of meetings but I'm beginning to suspect they've gone completely off the rails.

Where to begin? OK. So this is basically an allegorical fairytale about the human body/spirit, or rather a New Age take on the same. The body is envisioned as a crystal castle on the side of Mount Iknowmenow ruled over by the androgynous Mother-Father Queenking and inhabited by their seven daughters, the chakra princess sisters (who all have catchy little names related to their main function, like Ahneeda and Ahluvya). Each princess lives on her own floor of the castle, with décor relevant to her particular chakra and with a personality to match the same. Everything rolls along swimmingly with spirit guides and magic rituals and superfood parties until the invasion of the wicked witch Kundameanie. With the seven chakra princess sisters rendered helpless, the crystal castle starts to crumble. To save it, the sisters must learn to work together as a team once again.

This is just so bad, and yet (like Wood Nymph Meets Centaur it’s transcendently bad. You can tell the writer’s got a message to get across, and puts in quite a lot of incidental tidbits of holistic therapy and so on, but it doesn’t take itself at all seriously (well, really, Kundameanie?! – there are just no holds barred on the silliness). I found myself groaning and laughing in equal measure but nonetheless reading voraciously. I really wanted to find out what was going to happen to the goofily-named chakra princess sisters! It was like being a kid again and watching Rainbow Brite.

Sparkly, cheesy, spacey, and sweet: this really shouldn’t work, but somehow does.

Stats for March 2014

Total books read: 7
Books read from the TBR pile: 5
Library books read: 1
Kindle books read: 1

Books purchased, swapped, or otherwise acquired: 1! :)
Viking: The Norse Warrior's Unofficial Manual by John Haywood

Longest book read: Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, 432 pages (but some of that is recipes and an author interview)
Shortest book read: Tarot and the Tree of Life, 245 pages

Knitting projects finished: Two blanket squares with triquetra design and nothing else (slacking there too)

Books for April 2014

           

The Inspector and Silence by Hakan Nesser - complete; review at post 139 below
The Testament of Gideon Mack by James Robertson - complete
The Stories of Eva Luna by Isabel Allende - complete
Last Man in Tower by Aravind Adiga - complete
Torn Shapes of Desire by Mary Anne Mohanraj - complete
Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh - complete

The Chakra Sisters book looks one of the of the most outlandish works of fiction I have seen in a long time! You say there's a message - what is it?

"It was like being a kid again and watching Rainbow Brite." Best quote ever. When I was a kid I used to write stories where every character's personality was wholly based on his or her astrological sign - I thought that a list of adjectives would really build good characters.

>135 JDHomrighausen: It's difficult to sum up, but I think it must have something to do with the power of love and the importance of staying grounded ;) Oh, and superfoods.

>136 fannyprice: :D A list of adjectives is a great place to start, but prose can be taken to the next level with the addition of favourite colours and foods! Speaking of which, I'm off to go suck on some lemons. I had a flopped job interview last week and my solar plexus chakra is feeling out of sorts.

A friend lent me All the Pretty Horses and I've put off reading it because I disliked The Road so much, but your review encourages me to look for it.

I'll be interested in what you think of Last Man in Tower, as I was disappointed by Adiga's The White Tiger.

The Inspector and Silence by Hakan Nesser

Inspector Van Veeteren’s dreams of retirement are interrupted by a series of brutal rape-murders of adolescent girls from the summer camp of the ‘Pure Life’ Christian sect. The head of the Pure Life sect vanishes on the night of the second murder and the investigation is brought to a halt when the remaining summer camp attendees and leaders refuse to say a word to the investigating officers.

I do usually enjoy the Van Veeteren mysteries but this one moved at a pretty slow pace, mostly because of that stubborn silence of key witnesses, and found the resolution of the mystery too dependent on chance to make a good detective story.

Stats for April 2014

Total books read: 6
Books read from the TBR pile: 2
Library books read: 3
Kindle books read: 1

Longest book read: Last Man in Tower and The Inspector and Silence tie at 432 pages
Shortest book read: Torn Shapes of Desire, 128 pages

Knitting and reading both went rather slowly in April (and I didn't put up any reviews) due to general upheaval. I've decided to go for a PhD and am very busy with the application process. There should be some interesting things up in May though for sure! :)

Books for May 2014

   

The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe - complete
Sin by Josephine Hart - complete

Oh I'm curious to see what you thought of The Bonfire of the Vanities. I loved it when I read it right when it came out, but I have a feeling it might seem very dated now.

>142 rebeccanyc: The Bonfire of the Vanities did seem a product of its time, but in a good way. Not 'dated' so much as vintage ;) The 1980s bubble economy, grab-all-you-can, keep-up-with-the-Joneses mentality is so fascinating to look back on (I say that but there are surely people for whom this is still daily reality!), and post-recession I do feel a certain smugness in being reminded, yet again, that stratospheric wealth guarantees very little actual happiness. I loved the writing style....so manic!...and exclamation marks....everywhere!!! The characters' inner monologues had me absolutely rolling with laughter. Wolfe has a very sharp eye for somewhat pathetic men trying to be impressive.

I won't try to catch up with the last half-dozen book reviews as I just fell behind for a couple of months, but I see you also specifically asked for thoughts on Last Man in Tower. You know, I can't remember The White Tiger all that well but I know I was also a little disappointed by it. Not so Last Man in Tower. It might benefit simply by being a longer book (400+ pages), as there's space for a larger cast of characters and more character development. The premise of it is that a group of long-term residents live in a dilapidated old housing cooperative in Mumbai. A developer comes along, seeking to tear down the tower and build a new block of ultra-luxurious flats. He offers every resident of the tower a huge sum of money to move, but the deal is only valid if everyone agrees to leave. Soon the only dissenter is a retired schoolteacher called Masterji, formerly one of the most popular and respected tenants.... You can probably see where this is going; a tragedy of almost Shakespearean proportions. I recommend it but maybe get in a pint of Ben & Jerry's and some comfort reading afterwards to restore your faith in human goodness.

Stats for May 2014

Total books read: 2
Books read from the TBR pile: 1
Library books read: 1

Longest book read: The Bonfire of the Vanities, 752 pages
Shortest book read: Sin, 192 pages

I did read bits and pieces of lots of other things, mostly related to a PhD proposal. That's all done and submitted now, but due to....stuff...I can't actually start the course earlier than next autumn :p I should be able to read at something closer to my normal pace now, at least, and post reviews as well.

Books for June 2014

                 

Hell's Angels by Hunter S Thompson - complete
The Betrayal of Trust by Susan Hill - complete
The 7 Aha!s of Highly Enlightened Souls by Mike George - complete
Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie -complete
The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood -complete
What is Medieval History? by John H Arnold -complete
The Broken Sword by Poul Anderson - complete
Into the Sea of Qi by Mark Popplewell - complete
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood - complete

>143 Erratic_Charmer: Thanks for those comments -- good to know, but I don't think I'll be rereading it anytime soon.

Stats for June 2014

Total books read: 9
Books read from the TBR pile: 4
Library books read: 3

Longest book read: Midnight's Children, 674 pages
Shortest book read: The 7 Aha!s of Highly Enlightened Souls, 128 pages

Getting back into the book-reading habit but I really need to start posting reviews again!

Books for July 2014

                 

The Red Book: A Deliciously Unorthodox Approach to Igniting Your Divine Spark by Sera Beak - complete
She: Understanding Feminine Psychology by Robert Johnson - complete
Angel by Elizabeth Taylor - complete
The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood - complete
Low Magick by Lon Milo DuQuette - complete
Theatre of the Gods by M Suddain - complete
Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami - complete
Affinity by Sarah Waters - complete
The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles by Ronald Hutton - complete

Stats for July 2014

Total books read: 9
Books read from the TBR pile: 5
Library books read: 2

Longest book read: She: Understanding Feminine Psychology, 81 pages
Shortest book read: Theatre of the Gods, 644 pages

Books for August 2014

               

Started Early, Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson - complete
Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy - complete
Green Magic: The Sacred Connection to Nature by Ann Moura - complete
Thunder God by Paul Watkins - complete
Wiccan Warrior: Walking a Spiritual Path in a Sometimes Hostile World by Kerr Cuhulain - complete
The Weather in the Streets by Rosamond Lehmann - complete
The Laughing Policeman by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo - complete
The Blue Girl by Charles de Lint

How was Angel? I read A View of the Harbour a while ago and didn't like it as much as I'd hoped but was interested enough to considered trying some more of her work.

I keep meaning to read some Elizabeth Taylor. I've had A Game of Hide and Seek on the TBR for a couple of years after learning about it here on LT.

Books for September 2014

       

Memento Mori by Muriel Spark - complete
Dare Me by Megan Abbott- complete
Bonjour Tristesse by Francoise Sagan - complete
The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid - complete

Books for October 2014

         

Queen of the Great Below: An Anthology in Honor of Ereshkigal edited by Janet Munin
The House of Doctor Dee by Peter Ackroyd
Knife by R J Anderson
Silent in the Grave by Deanna Raybourn
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
The Deadly Space Between by Patricia Duncker