Take a Chance: The Mystic Grail

By -
The Mystic Grail: the Challenge of the Arthurian Quest, by John Matthews

This is my first 'Take a Chance' book, and it was #10 on the list: "Random Book Selection. Go to the library. Position yourself in a section such as Fiction, Non-Fiction, Mystery, Children. Then write down random directions for yourself (for example, third row, second shelf, fifth book from right). Follow your directions and see what book you find. Check that book out of the library, read it and then write about it." I picked that option because most of the rest require you to pick the title before you get to the library, and I was already there.

I went to the non-fiction section and decided to go to the second-to-last aisle, left-hand shelf, second-to-last section. I thought I would choose the smallest book in that section, because I knew it was going to be history and I didn't want to get a gigantic tome. Good thing too, because it turned out to be the section on the modern British royals and I could easily have gotten stuck with one of the biographies of Princess Diana. Diana books took up two shelves. British history came after that. The second-smallest book was 1215, a book on the Magna Carta that I've already read (and it's quite good), but the smallest book was The Mystic Grail, by John Matthews.

It's one of those artsy little books with lots of paintings and woodcuts, following the history of the Grail quest. It's nice enough, though schmaltzy in spots (for example: "It is only our failure to inquire more deeply into the nature of our own spirituality that prevents us from realizing the vision of the Grail in our lives"). Still, it has some good quotations from older sources and lots of nice paintings, a few of which are even not by pre-Raphaelites. My favorite candidate for sugariest painting is "Lancelot and Guinevere," by Herbert James Draper, which I've put below for you.






Comments

  1. GypsiJanuary 20, 2011 at 6:25 PM

    Looks like an interesting and pretty book! Grail mythology fascinates me.

    ReplyDelete
  2. JeanJanuary 20, 2011 at 10:28 PM

    Yeah, it was OK, but I've read better books on Grail mythology, to be honest. This was almost one of those gift-type books that you give to someone you don't know too well. It did have some good things in it though.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the source of the s
Read more