9 posts tagged “books”
January
1. The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold
2. Paladin of Souls by the same
3. 1,001 Pearls of Buddhist Wisdom by Desmond Biddulph
4. The Zapruder Film: Reframing the Kennedy Assassination by David R. Wrone
5. Barbarians! by Terry Jones
6. No Horizon Is So Far by Ann Bancroft, Liv Arnesen, et al.
7. On Writing by Stephen King (R)
8. The Writing Diet by Julia Cameron
February
9. The Hallowed Hunt by Lois McMaster Bujold
10. Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson (R)
11. Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion, and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center by Michael Downing
I
enjoyed the Chalion series very much; I am finding that Bujold
Satisfies, even when she's not writing about everyone's favorite mercenary admiral ImpSec lieutenant Imperial Auditor and hyperkinetic pain in the ass. I also enjoyed Red Mars, which went down more easily on a second read; I'm working on Green Mars now.
The Zapruder Film and Barbarians! were both interesting historical reads. I undertook the former because I felt perhaps I should be better acquainted with the controversies surrounding JFK's assassination; after reading it, I decided I *shouldn't* become better acquainted, because it's exactly the sort of thing that will eat my brain and give me bad dreams. Sometimes maturity means backing away slowly from what you recognize is harmful to you.
Barbarians! is kind of controversial in its own right. Jones, a former Pythoner turned popular historian, argues that the Romans weren't the great civilizers of the ancient world, but rather the first effective spin doctors of history. By looting tools, technologies, and wealth from the surrounding peoples, whom they defined as worthy of conquest because they were merely Barbarians, they became a superpower and successfully wrote history so that they are the Good Guys, bringing cleanliness, clothing, and culture wherever they went. In fact, archeological discoveries increasingly demonstrate that the bog-trotting Celts actually built sound roads, invented soap, and gave the Romans the swords with which they conquered other peoples. It's a fascinating read that turns most of what we know about the ancient world on its head, including the early history of the Church.
No Horizon Is So Far is an Antarctic book which I read in protest against unseasonably warm weather. [g] It's the account of the two main authors' crossing of the southern continent by ski-sailing, which uses kite-like sails to speed skiing. You can read more about them at the expedition website.
Shoes Outside the Door really deserves a full-length book review, but it might not get one until I've read it again. It's an account of the first major Zen Buddhist center in North America, how it grew, why it blew up in 1983, and what keeps it going. What makes it fascinating is that it's an account written not by a journalist, but by a novelist, and in many ways, it's like reading a novel with a dozen different narrators, all of them unreliable. Other people raced through The Da Vinci Code, but this book, a group memoir of spiritual aspiration and betrayal, was the kind of book *I* can't put down.
What books did you love as a child?
Submitted by hearts.
The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. I read all of them over and over.
The Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander. The five books in this series were inspired by the great Welsh collection of myth and legend, the Mabinogion. Written in the twelfth century, it probably preserves much older material, including some of the earliest stories of King Arthur and his knights. The Prydain books are the adventures of Taran, a young man who is the Assistant Pig Keeper of a magical pig named Hen Wen. These also I read over and over.
In This House of Brede by Rumer Godden. I discovered this book through a Reader's Digest Condensed version and then read the original through my library. It's the story of a British career woman in the 1950s who gives up her post in Government to become a cloistered Benedictine nun. It impressed on me the idea that religious devotion and commitment were not necessarily confined to a) men or b) neurotics and fanatics; it also gave me a lifelong fascination with liturgy, chant, and monasticism for both sexes.
The Oz books by L. Frank Baum. I always preferred the movie version of The Wizard of Oz to the book, but I loved most of the lesser known later books--The Land of Oz, Ozma of Oz, Glinda of Oz. I loved characters such as Tik-Tok the Clockwork Man, Polychrome the Rainbow's Daughter, and the inventor Professor Wogglebug, T.E., H.M. (Thoroughly Educated and Highly Magnified).
The Lord of the Rings. I'm sure I read LotR more times than I read The Hobbit.
The Mabinogion Quartet by Evangeline Walton. These books, based on the Four Branches of the Mabinogi, the oldest stories, were published by Lin Carter in the seventies, when their author was already an elderly woman who had seen most of her work go unregarded. They're now available in an omnibus volume. Walton painted the gods and demigods of the Mabinogi in terms of a conflict between the matrilineal, earth-worshipping, Goddess-centered Old Tribes and the patrilineal, patriarchal New Tribes who had conquered and meshed with them. Her characters are vivid, her prose magical (and occasionally racy, at least for a child reader).
Reading:
--The Empty Chair, Diane Duane's final Rihannsu novel, in an early-release electronic edition.
--Bonewits's Essential Guide to Druidism. I am not a great fan of Isaac Bonewits, but two things cannot be denied: He is a decent writer, and he has been Johnny-on-the-spot in a great many Neopagan movements in the U.S.
--The Warrior's Apprentice by Lois McMaster Bujold, my second reading. I had forgotten just how insane her protagonist Miles Naismith Vorkosigan actually is. I'd rather cope with the psychotic liegeman who likes to kill things.
--Cordelia's Honor by Bujold. The first novel in the Vorkosigan series, actually a compilation of the first and third books written, which form a single coherent story.
Listening:
--The Complete English Anthems of Thomas Tallis, performed by the Tallis Scholars.
--The Great Service of William Byrd, performed by ditto.
--assorted recordings of consort music by Lawes, Gibbons, etc., roughly contemporary with Tallis and Byrd or a bit later. Ah, viols....
Watching:
--the first season of The Tick. SPOON!
--just finished the first season of Dead Like Me courtesy of Netflix and liked it so much I *bought* the second season, which I hope to crack open tonight.
--Antiques Roadshow and American Experience. Yes, you may think of me as a boring old person now, someone who gets excited by Antiques Roadshow.
--Secrets of the Dead.
Thinking about:
--what I'm going to have for dinner.
--what I ate for lunch and how there was rather too much of it.
--the books I'm reading, and their characters, and their themes.
--what sort of ritual I'm going to do for the Samhain/All Saints/All Souls season, and when, and why.
--a friend who is having some troubles.
--things I'd like to do that involve getting away from the computer and socializing with friends in non-virtual life.
Books, movies, music; what's in your top 5 right now?
Books
Cordelia's Honor: I've just finished my first re-reading of this dual novel, the beginning of Lois McMaster Bujold's chronicles of Miles Vorkosigan. I may be even more impressed with it than before.
Gaudy Night: When in doubt, I re-read this book. Sayer's finest Lord Peter Wimsey novel--mystery, romance, social critique, larded with literary quotations and providing some splendidly quotable bits of its own.
The Ode Less Travelled: Stephen Fry explains it all for you in this engaging, informative primer on writing traditional metered verse. (Yes, I mean *that* Stephen Fry.)
Movies
Dead Like Me: Not actually a movie, but the thing I've been watching with the greatest attention and greatest pleasure, of late. A teenaged slacker's afterlife as a "grim reaper", whose job is to release the souls of people about to die.
Eyes on the Prize: PBS recently re-ran this gripping documentary, now twenty years old, of the premiere events of the civil rights movement. It really makes you appreciate how much the laws have changed and wonder how much attitudes have changed to match them.
The Tick: SPOON!!!
The Twilight Zone: Every so often I order a few discs of this classic series from Netflix, and each time I rediscover *why* it's a classic. I think the secret is that it's not really television, at least not as we understand it now; it's really theatre transposed to the stage. The acting, the makeup, the sets, all belong in a black box as much as on a soundstage, and many of the actors who guested on TWZ, who went on to become fixtures in television, came to TWZ from Broadway and other theatrical venues. It's just plain *good*--drama, comedy, horror, fuelled by Serling's passion for characters and for ideas and the actors' willingess to give the small screen everything they had.
Music
English Anthems of Tallis: Exquisite, crystalline performances of works by The Man Who Invented Anglican Choral Music, sung by the Tallis Scholars. Thomas Tallis and his business partner William Byrd were among the first and certainly among the most influential composers to write for the new, vernacular liturgy of the Church of England.
Royall Consort Suites by William Lawes. Beautiful, complex instrumental music of the seventeenth century, featuring viols. I love viols. I don't like violins--too screechy. Viols are mellow. Lawes was a court composer to Charles I, who was overthrown by Cromwell.
The Great Service by William Byrd. Morning and Evening Prayer, set to music by and for people with attention spans. Suitable for performing in the presence of red-haired Virgin Queens. Magnificent.
Pretty much anything we sing in my church choir, which includes a fair helping of Tallis and Byrd.
And pretty much anything played on the big band show that airs Friday nights on our local NPR station. Even "Elmer's Tune".
It came about that I started reading this because I found myself alone at the laundromat on a day when I expected to have my husband's company. I'd come out without book or notebooks, so I went next door to see if I could find a readable magazine at the megalo-pharmacy, and I came back with the final book of Stevie's magnum opus, in paperback.
As I said, I'm a little more than halfway through, and I'm seriously wondering now whether I want to finish reading it. It's making my head hurt, and not in good ways. I can see what King is doing, and I acknowledge that what he's doing works for a great many readers--this series' popularity proves that--but I'm not sure it works for me.
What King is doing in the Dark Tower series is trying to create a monomyth that will explain, define, illuminate both his own personal life, especially in its creative aspect, and the collective life of the twentieth-century American culture that shaped him. He has taken a typically American mythos, the Western, and shaped it into a massive, Tolkienian epic-in-prose. Instead of the elves and dwarves, kings and wizards of European myth and legend, we have gunslingers, dusty desert towns, unreliable trains, mysterious old machines that keep breaking down, and references to such pop-culture touchstones as the songs of the Beatles and The Wizard of Oz.
More, King has inserted himself into this mythos, *as* himself. King the fictional character survives his encounter with a badly-driven van only because two of his own characters come from their world to his to intervene; they make this heroic effort because the remaining books of their saga *must* be written if the Tower, the central pillar of the cosmos, is to stand. The fictional King is a lazy goof-off who has written what came easily instead of what was essential, but in some deep sense, the universe revolves around him.
I want to like this series. I want to agree with King that it is the crowning achievement of all his work. I want to care about his characters--and indeed, even though I haven't read the whole series, I have several times cried over the last book, and I'm not even close to the end. But I'm not sure that I *can* agree with him. I think that this myth, this epic, does not work for me. I have looked at the end of the book (and I know that Stevie would smack me if he could, for doing so), and while I think the ending *is* inevitable, in terms of the story, I don't like it. I don't like the way it rings. I don't like what it says about me, or King, or the culture in which we live.
I don't know whether I'm going to finish this book, or whether, if I do finish it, I'll go back and read the other books I've left unread. It makes my head hurt. It makes me feel obsessed, and not in a pleasant way. I'm looking askance at these characters and wondering if I want to go the whole way, if I want to go down their road. And if I do, will I be able to come back?
"Either you look at the universe as a very poor creation out of which no one can make anything or you look at your own life and your own part in the universe as infinitely rich full of inexhaustible interest opening out onto infinite further possibilities for study and contemplation and interest and praise. Beyond all and in all is God."
Thomas Merton, Trappist monk, hermit, and writer, in the third volume of his posthumously published journals, A Search for Solitude, entry for July 17, 1956.
What books are on your nightstand?
The three books that are actually on my nightstand at the moment are Druidic and devotional.
A Book of Pagan Prayer is just that: a collection of prayers to Wiccan and Pagan deities, with an introduction to a theology of prayer in a pagan context. All the prayers are composed by the author, Ceisiwr Serith, who has been a member of ADF for many years and a notable thinker on pagan issues. I find it useful particularly for night-time devotions.
The third book I have by the bed is an illustrated hardback from the Thorsons First Directions series. I can't find it on Amazon (I bought it used), but the text is based on this book, Principles of Druidry. It's nice to look at the pictures and read a bit of something spiritual before falling asleep for the night.
Now, if this question means, "What are you reading?" rather than, literally, "What books are beside your bed?" the answers would have to be longer and more complicated! I am usually reading around half a dozen books at once, ranging from novels to poetry to pagan or magical nonfiction. But more on that later.
Over the weekend I finished reading Naomi Novik's Black Powder War, the third book of her historical fantasy Temeraire series. It's obvious that there will be more, and I'm looking forward to them. They are excellent brain candy: Not terribly rich thematically, which I suppose is my chief criterion for a book being more than brain candy, but well written, interestingly plotted, with engaging characters, and lots of fabulous clothing to boot. Not that they are completely without theme, but it's not as important an element as it is in, for example, the Young Wizard books. Nor is the characterization uniformly good for every character, but Temeraire is so delightful I can't help but think of him as a really, really big parrot. A meat-eating parrot with very short feathers. *g*
Just how big is Temeraire, anyway? It's bugging me that I can't quite form a mental picture of him from his size, but then, I'm not very good at that sort of thing.
Novik's new series is my discovery; my re-discovery is The Adventures of Brisco County Jr. It's so gratifying when you watch something you loved ten, fifteen, twenty years ago, and it's every bit as good as you remember. For example, I'm embarrassed now when I see Lost in Space; I love Dr. Smith and the robot, but that show was So Bad. On the other hand, I think Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids holds up really well despite the crappy animation--it was funny and witty and real.
Brisco turned out to be like Fat Albert--just as funny, clever, and warped as I remembered. And Bruce Campbell was so handsome! I don't think I appreciated his manly jaw back then. I appreciated Julius Carry's manly swagger as Lord Bowler. *g* It's like a cross between Bugs Bunny and The Wild Wild West in live action--as if the wise-cracking, self-aware rabbit with the Brooklyn accent had to be the hero of James West-type adventures. Once you see the scene in the pilot in which a train is held up by running it into a wall painted to look like the scenery ahead, you know exactly where you are, fictionally speaking. Even the commentary on the pilot was good, and I tend to find DVD commentaries either very dull or very annoying. Bruce Campbell's comments on how difficult it sometimes was to make a tv Western in the early '90s, when Westerns had been out of style for years, were quite interesting, and he didn't try to overwhelm the episode or the audience by being constantly funny.
Another unexpected discovery has been Hell's Kitchen. I don't like reality shows, as a a rule, but my husband I watched the last few weeks of this show with unholy fascination. I think the reason that it captured me when I normally have no interest in reality shows is that it had people competing at something intrinsically worthwhile--cooking--for a valuable prize that wasn't just money--the position of a head chef in a high-profile Vegas restaurant. Gordon Ramsay is a foul-mouthed son of a bitch, but he's a talented, charismatic son of a bitch who really wants to see people cook well and create food that looks as well as tastes good. I'm sorry the show is over and hope it will be back next summer.
I also took a look at the new Fox show Vanished. I was not impressed. Too fast, too loud, too herky-jerky, with sex, violence, conspiracy, and just plain confusion. I'm reminded that the word "obscene" etymologically means "off stage". It's possible to *suggest* stuff rather
than shoving it down the viewer's throat. I had a lot to cough up after
the premiere of Vanished.
