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Showing posts from October, 2019

CC Spin #21: The Bride Price

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 The Bride Price, by Buchi Emecheta Happy Halloween, folks, and happy Spin Day too!  I was very excited about this title, since I love Emecheta's writing.  I found out that she considered it her best novel, but it also had tragedy attached to it; she based the story loosely on her own life, but when her husband found and read the manuscript, he was angered that his fictional counterpart was a descendant of slaves.  He burned the manuscript, which was the only copy.  Emecheta re-wrote her novel, but changed the ending from hopeful to tragic, reflecting her changed feelings and her failing marriage. Aku-nna is a young teen when her doting father dies, leaving her and her mother and brother almost destitute.  The little family travels back to Ma Blackie's home village (Ma Blackie is much admired for her beautiful, extremely dark skin).  Ma Blackie becomes a plural wife to Okonkwo, a relative of her husband's, and Aku-nna and Nna-nndo go to school.  Aku-nna and her teacher,

The Bride of Lammermoor

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The Bride of Lammermoor, by Sir Walter Scott The Classics Club issued a dare to pick a spooky classic from our lists to read.  My CC list has already had most of the spooky classics taken, but I did have one left: The Bride of Lammermoor, by Sir Walter Scott.  I knew it featured a bride who goes mad and stabs somebody, and that an opera, Lucia di Lammermoor , was based on the novel.  Also, the novel was published in 1819.  But it's historical fiction, set at the end of the 17th century, over 100 years before Scott wrote it. Edgar, Master of Ravenswood, has been dispossessed of his ancestral property.  His father was a Jacobite and was stripped of his title and everything else, too.  Edgar has a single tower left to him, Wolfs Crag, and no money whatsoever.  He has to find a job overseas, because he's certainly not welcome in Scotland, but first he would like to take his revenge upon the man who persecuted his father and then got all the property: Sir William Ashton, a gra

Nonfiction November: Week I

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It's Nonfiction November -- which starts in October to make the weeks come out right -- and this week's post is hosted by Julz Reads .  Head over there to see everybody's posts!  This week's topic is Your Year in Nonfiction : Take a look back at your year of nonfiction and reflect on the following questions – What was your favorite nonfiction read of the year? Do you have a particular topic you’ve been attracted to more this year? What nonfiction book have you recommended the most? What are you hoping to get out of participating in Nonfiction November? Themes that cropped up this year have been: German/Eastern European/Russian history, as usual, with some literature thrown in too.  There is not enough time in my life to read all the history I want to, especially for that area.  I was particularly excited to read Tacitus, followed by A Most Dangerous Book , followed by Black Earth .  And Svetlana Alexievich is always a big deal to me; this year it was Secondha

Othello

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Othello, by William Shakespeare Erica at The Broken Spine has been hosting the tragedy part of the Year of Shakespeare, and so I thought I'd sign up for a couple titles.  I decided to read Othello , and hope to read Antony and Cleopatra too, before the end of the year. (The trouble I always have with writing blog posts about famous classics is...what do I say?   It's not like I'm going to tell you something you don't know.) Othello is a newish and excellent general in Venice, and he's a Moor.  He's been winning battles and impressing everybody, and he's just secretly married the lovely Desdemona, daughter of one of Venice's senators.  His ensign, Iago, hates Othello because the general promoted a younger man, Cassio, above him, and vows to have his revenge upon all of them with the help of the dissolute Roderigo, who wanted to marry Desdemona. Iago plays upon Othello's jealousy, implying that he knows that Desdemona is having an affair wi

Such a Strange Lady

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Such a Strange Lady: a Biography of Dorothy L. Sayers, by Janet Hitchman Fun fact: Dorothy Sayers really, really hated it when people left out the L.  Pretty much everybody leaves out the L. This was the first biography of Sayers to be published, sixteen years after her death, in 1975, and it was unauthorized.  It's an absorbing and witty biography, not too long or heavy, and it covers all the salient points.  I think a modern biography would make much of Sayers' friendships with the Inklings, while Hitchman almost completely ignores them, which is kind of refreshing.  It's an enjoyable read and I recommend it to Sayers fans. It's got the title because so many people Hitchman spoke with started off with "She was such a strange lady..." and indeed Dorothy Sayers was an odd duck, which makes her all the more interesting to read about.  There is quite a bit about her youth, which was of course fairly miserable; tall and awkward, extremely clever but not v

November Reading Events

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There are so many events coming up in November, I do not know how I will manage!  I want to participate in all of them!  But that is tricky.  Here they are: Witch Week is coming!  Hosted by Chris and Lizzie, this year's theme will be villains . As you know, Witch Week is the week between Halloween and Guy Fawkes.  And there's a readalong of Cart and Cwidder ! Brona will be hosting her popular and beloved AusReading Month event.  She has bingo!  I am signing up to read Jill Ker Conway's memoirs, The Road from Coorain and True North , both of which have been on my TBR shelf for a while now. I have been unaware of Caroline and Lizzy's annual German Reading Month -- how did I miss that??  This looks super-exciting because they have all these cool things to do, which I will almost certainly not manage.  Here's a rundown of their program: To commemorate The Fall of the Wall there will be an ex-DDR week. For the founding of the Weimar Republic, the badge

Tell Your Children

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Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence, by Alex Berenson This was a very, very surprising book on all counts.  Even the author was surprised!  I was too. Alex Berenson, journalist, was -- like a lot of Americans -- vaguely pro-legalization of marijuana.  He'd done it himself a few times, no big deal, and had the usual ideas: that pot is safer than alcohol, it's silly to get worked up about it, people don't die from pot.  His wife is a psychiatrist who specializes in criminality and mental illness, and one day when they were talking about a case, she casually mentioned that 'of course,' the perpetrator was high and had used pot his whole life.  "Of course"?  Yeah, they all smoke marijuana; the studies show a link between pot and violence.  --Wait, what?   So Berenson the journalist took a hint from Berenson the psychiatrist and decided to look at the statistics and the studies.  What he found completely surprised h

Babel

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Babel: Around the World in Twenty Languages, by Gaston Dorren Back in 2016 I enjoyed Dorren's Lingo a lot, so when I saw he'd written another book about the intricacies and quirks of world languages, I jumped on it. If you take the 20 most-spoken languages in the world (by mother tongue), you cover just about half of the world's population.  If you learned all of them, you could communicate with most of the world, since lots of these are spoken as second/third/etc. languages.  So why not take a look at the top 20 and see which ones are what ones and what ones are who? As in Lingo , each chapter covers one language -- he gives some basic statistics at the start, and then dives into whatever aspect of each language tickles his fancy.   He starts with #20, the smallest of the top, and the chapters are therefore numbered 20 - 1 instead of 1 - 20.  #20 is Vietnamese, which is a fiendishly difficult language if you are not Vietnamese, and Dorren knows this for sure beca

Underground

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Underground: A Human History of the Worlds Beneath Our Feet, by Will Hunt This was one of those books that just called my name when it showed up at work.  I like reading about under-cities... Will Hunt's house happened to have an abandoned tunnel running under it, and exploring that tunnel sparked a life-long desire to explore the underworld.  Upon moving to New York City, Hunt joined the many people who explore subway tunnels...and eventually he talked a publisher into paying him to write a book about underground explorations. Each chapter addresses a different part of the world and aspect of underground living.  There are the catacombs of Paris!  Scientific investigations into bacteria that live deep underground!  Hunt is privileged to visit ancient cave temples in Xibalba, a really ancient Aboriginal red ochre mine, and  even more ancient cave art in France.  He spends 24 hours alone in complete darkness in West Virginia.  He tells fascinating histories and tracks down sub

Busman's Honeymoon

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Busman's Honeymoon, by Dorothy L. Sayers I'd been meaning to read Have His Carcase , the Harriet-goes-hiking one, but I don't have it, so I read a different Sayers mystery that I haven't read for a long time. Harriet and Lord Peter have finally gotten married -- in their own interesting way, which involves circumventing sister-in-law Helen's plans for a proper society wedding and a Paris honeymoon.  No, the newlyweds have decided to sneak off and spend their honeymoon week at their new country house, Talboys, which they've only just purchased.  The former owner promised to have everything ready for them to move right in. Instead they arrive to a locked house; nobody is expecting them, Mr. Noakes has been gone for a week on business, and certainly nothing is ready at all.  There are even dirty dishes on the table.  Everything gets more and more fussed and ridiculous, as neighbors come clamoring in and chimneys fail to draw.  There is a lot of domestic comed

Professor Chandra Follows His Bliss

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Professor Chandra Follows His Bliss, by Rajeev Balasubramanyam I saw this reviewed fairly recently as an uplifting kind of a book that makes the reader happy, so I thought I'd give it a try. Professor Chandra is the world's foremost economist, and yet here he is, not winning the Nobel Prize.  Again.  Also, his wife left him years ago, only one of his three mostly-grown children want to talk with him at all, and he just got run over by a bicycle.  Forced into a leave of absence from Cambridge, Professor Chandra has to find something to do with himself. He starts with a four-day retreat in California, and then spends some time as a 'visiting scholar' in San Diego, learning how to do something besides work himself to death.  He gradually starts to try to mend fences with his children (letting them make their own choices is a help) and even his ex-wife, and finally starts to figure out that maybe work isn't the only thing out there.  He has always loved his fami

Book of Ballads and Sagas

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Book of Ballads and Sagas, by Charles Vess (and Co.) Back in the 1990s, Charles Vess did a series of comics/graphic novels in which he collaborated with various writers to produce versions of old ballads (plus one Norse myth story, thus the 'sagas').   Featured authors included Charles de Lint, Jane Yolen, and Neil Gaiman -- your standard 90s list of up-and-coming fantasy writers, in fact!   Now, those comics have been collected and reissued in a nice hardback edition, and if you were bookish in the 90s, this is guaranteed to give you some flashbacks. So here we have (quick count) 13 ballads, surely a lucky number.  Most of them are reasonably well-known to anybody with a passing knowledge of ballads; there is Thomas the Rhymer, Barbara Allen, The Demon Lover, The Twa Corbies, and Tam Lin.  They're frequently given extra detail -- I was rather tickled to see that in "The Demon Lover," the girl runs off with James Harris -- or considerably more backstory.   and

Ali and Nino

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Ali and Nino, by Kurban Said I am now so, so far behind in my posts, but I really want to talk about these books... Ali and Nino is widely considered to be the Azerbaijani novel; it's a movie and everything.  And indeed, it was a fascinating read and a good novel!  It was originally written in German and published in Vienna in 1937.  Sheer luck brought it back into prominence (instead of complete oblivion) after World War II.  But...who was Kurban Said?  It's a mystery!  At least, it was a mystery for a long time.  My edition says that Kurban Said was probably a writing team comprised of an Austrian baroness, Elfriede Ehrehfels, and Lev Nussimbaum, a Jewish man born in Baku who converted to Islam and had to flee to Europe during the Russian Revolution.   After Hitler took power, he moved from Germany to Austria, where he became an intimate of the baroness' circle.  Wikipedia has a very different opinion and says that at least half of this is nonsense.  It appears to

The Frontier Magic trilogy

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Thirteenth Child Across the Great Barrier The Far West, by Patricia C. Wrede This middle grade/YA trilogy is now several years old, but I completely missed it.  I like Patricia C. Wrede, who wrote the Dealing With Dragons books and generally seems to have a lively imagination.  The story stars Eff, and tells the story of her life from birth all the way through her mid-20s.  It's an alternate history world in which magic is real and the world abounds with magical critters, many of which are highly dangerous -- especially on the Columbian continents, which are crammed so full of lethal animals that exploration and expansion are extremely difficult.  In a frontier Columbia where history is very different from ours, Eff tries to figure out where she belongs. Thirteenth Child starts with Eff as a tiny little girl; her twin brother, Lan, is the seventh son of a seventh son, which makes him a powerful magician, but she is kid #13, and some of her relatives are convinced that sh