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Showing posts from 2021

Narniathon: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

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 The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe , by C. S. Lewis A delightful project, to read one Narnia book a month and discuss it.  Chris has posted his first discussion prompt, which I answered there, and now I'm going to set down a few of my more random thoughts about The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe . Well, we all know the story, in which four siblings find their way into a magical land ruled by an evil witch, who can only be defeated when the true king, Aslan, arrives and sacrifices himself to redeem the world from her grasp.  It's an exciting children's story that:  contains layers and depths that can be endlessly discussed, that  many people dislike or resent, and which also  features a rather gleeful hodgepodge of elements from every mythos, legend, and sweet shop that Lewis could think of.  I bet Lewis just liked the word wardrobe .   It is a funny and unexpected sort of word, which lends excellent rhythm to the title.  There are all sorts of ways to play with a w

2021 Challenges Wrap-Up

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I had some fairly ambitious reading plans for 2021, and while I'm pretty happy with what I did, I still wish I'd done more.  I guess that's always the way.  I felt like I had a hard time focusing on my reading this year.  Still, I had plenty of great titles!  Let's see how my challenges turned out... The World War II Reading Challenge at Becky's Book Reviews :  12/12 Choosing WWII as a focus this year was fascinating (although not cheerful) and cut my WWII reading pile almost in half.  I wanted to read 12 titles, one each month, and though I am on about page 3 of my December pick, I still got 12:  The Coming of the Third Reich, by Richard P. Evans   Ordinary Men, by Christopher Browning  Frauen: German Women Recall the Third Reich, by Alison Owings Midway: the Battle That Doomed Japan, by Fuchida and Okumiya Last Witnesses:  An Oral History of the Children of WWII, by Svetlana Alexievich For Two Thousand Years, by Mihail Sebastian Book Smugglers, by David Fishman T

Our Exploits at West Poley

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 Our Exploits at West Poley, by Thomas Hardy Did you know that Thomas Hardy wrote one single children's story?  It's quite exciting!  It's written like an account of a real event of his childhood.  It was written in 1883, and set in Somerset. Leonard, age 13, arrives at his aunt's farm for a holiday visit (although it's in early autumn, so I don't know why he's not in school).  His cousin Stephen is a couple of years older, and very willing to show off the caves in the Mendip hills nearby; the local boys like to get into a small one named Nick's Pocket, and Steve has found a way to get further in.  They're going to be explorers! The caves are wonderfully explorable; the boys have a grand time and find a cave formation they want a closer look at.  It's on the other side of a little stream, which they could easily cross, but it's more fun to divert the stream with a few stones and shovelfuls of sand, and let the water go down a chasm.  When th

Gods of Jade and Shadow

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 Gods of Jade and Shadow, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia In a remote Mexican village in the 1920s, Casiopea Tun is the poor cousin, made to skivvy for the rest of the extensive household run by her autocratic, though frail, grandfather.  Cousin Mart í n, the heir apparent, is especially nasty to Casiopea since she isn't servile enough to suit him.  And then she notices an old trunk in her grandfather's room, and opens it.  Inside is a pile of old bones, but once freed, they assemble themselves into... Hun-Kam é, Lord of Xibalba, the Mayan god of death. Hun-Kam é recruits Casiopea to his quest -- to find and reclaim his missing pieces, and to defeat his younger brother, Vucub-Kamé, who imprisoned him and usurped the Xibalban throne.  Well, maybe not so much a recruiting...although Casiopea is up for an adventure, she also has to go along.  A splinter of Hun- Kam é's bone lodged in her hand, and soon it will kill her.  Likewise, while her drop of blood revived Hun- Kam é, it also

CC Spin #28: Plum Bun

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 Plum Bun, by Jessie Redmon Hughes (1928) Jessie Redmon Fauset Jessie Redmon Fauset (1882 – 1961) was a prominent writer, editor, educator, and poet in African-American letters.  She edited the NAACP's magazine, The Crisis , from 1919 - 1926, and mentored many eminent writers, including Langston Hughes.  She then taught French and published four novels, Plum Bun being the second, and usually wrote about discrimination, passing, and feminism.  She wanted to portray African-Americans in a realistic and positive manner, celebrating Black culture and family.  While she was celebrated in her day, she was quickly forgotten as literary fashion moved on,  and she remained obscure for several decades until feminists revived her writing in the early 80s.  She's now recognized as an important part of the Harlem Renaissance.  The subtitle of this novel is -- intriguingly -- A Novel Without A Moral .  The title itself is based on a nursery rhyme, and I don't think I've eve

The Last Unicorn

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 The Last Unicorn, by Peter S. Beagle I've had a vague intention to read The Last Unicorn for many years.  The main thing that stopped me was that any time I see the words 'last' and 'unicorn' together, the theme song from the movie starts playing in my head and doesn't stop for days.  So in order to read the book, I had to mentally prepare myself for hearing that song for at least a week.  It's a very nice song, but it's not that nice! In the end, I even went and dug up other songs from the movie, which I have not seen in many years, but which I must have watched a whole lot as a kid, since it's evidently buried deep within my brain.   I remembered the songs, the voices, and much more.  I should really watch the whole thing, because now I'm curious about how various book events were translated (or not) to film. OK, so: a unicorn has lived in her forest for centuries, until she hears a hunter say that all the unicorns were driven away by the Re

Narniathon 2021/22

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 Chris at Calmgrove is hosting a leisurely tour of Narnia, starting this month.  Chris writes: ...we’ll be reading all seven titles of The Chronicles of Narnia in publication order, beginning with The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950). You will have a month to read each title at your own speed, in your own time, until the last Friday of the corresponding month when you’ll be invited to comment. Here’s the schedule: December. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. January. Prince Caspian . February. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. March. The Silver Chair. April. The Horse and His Boy. May. The Magician’s Nephew. June. The Last Battle . July . Optional read: From Spare Oom to War Drobe by Katherine Langrish. At the end of the month you’ll be invited to join a conversation here — and also on Twitter — about that month’s instalment. If you find yourself at a loss as to where to begin, I’ll pose three general questions which you can either respond to or ignore, as yo

The Sandman, part II

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 Sandman, vols. 4, 5, and 6, by Neil Gaiman, Sam Kieth, Mike Dringenberg, et. al  In my continuing project to read the complete Sandman : Season of Mists, 1991: Death points out to Dream that 10,000 years ago, he was a real jerk.  In an earlier issue, this story was told; Dream fell in love with a mortal woman from an early civilization, but in punishment for this illicit affair, her city was destroyed.  She killed herself in atonement, and her refusal to join Morpheus made him so angry that he sentenced her to Hell*.  Now he realizes that that was maybe kind of a mean thing to do -- so he's going to have to go down and get her out.  This is a difficult job, because Lucifer is angry at him and has vowed revenge. Lucifer, however, takes his revenge in a strange way.  When Dream arrives, Hell is empty.  Lucifer has thrown everyone out, and he announces his retirement and gives the key to Hell to Dream.  This throws everything else into confusion, as the previously-damned dead show

A Writer at War

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 A Writer at War: A Soviet Journalist With the Red Army, 1941 - 1945, by Vasily Grossman, edited by Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova Wow, this book packs a whole lot into what looks like a medium paperback.  It took me much longer to read than I thought it would! Over a year ago, I read a biography of the writer and journalist Vasily Grossman , and this was next on the list of his works that I want to read.   Grossman was attached to the Red Army as a journalist throughout World War II, and he always wanted to be on the front lines.  He was present for the early days of the invasion, the Battle of Moscow, most of the Battle of Stalingrad, the Battle of Kursk, and for much of the Soviet advance through Germany and Berlin.   This book collects Grossman's notes taken down in real time; it does not reprint the articles he wrote for the Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star) newspaper.  The editors give context to the notes, telling us what's going on and who everybody is.  The notes make up

Notes on a Silencing

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 Notes on a Silencing: A Memoir, by Lacy Crawford Lacy Crawford is about the same age as I am, a year or so younger.  She came from a semi-privileged background and her parents very much wanted to send her to a prep school and an Ivy League college, so at 14, off she went to St. Paul's, a very elite boarding school.  In this memoir, which loops back and forth through her memories, she chronicles her experiences -- finding her place, enjoying sports and friends -- and then the devastating assault from two 18-year-old boys when she was 15.  They bragged about what they'd done, and soon Lacy was not only traumatized and ashamed, she was a social pariah.  And then she got sick. What Crawford wants to talk about, however, is not so much the attack -- awful as it was, it is also not unusual as these things go, and she is careful to say so.  What really did the job on her, and countless other young students, was the school's reaction.  Faced with undeniable evidence that a young g

November Nonfiction IV: Stranger Than Fiction

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Week 4: (November 22-26) – Stranger Than Fiction with Christopher at Plucked from the Stacks : T his week we’re focusing on all the great nonfiction books that *almost* don’t seem real. A sports biography involving overcoming massive obstacles, a profile on a bizarre scam, a look into the natural wonders in our world—basically, if it makes your jaw drop, you can highlight it for this week’s topic.   I've read a lot of jaw-dropping non-fiction this year, so it's hard to pick.  I'm going to ignore the WWII titles, because so much of it is just inherently insane.  From the rest, I've chosen two titles, and the links go to my original posts: Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal :  De Waal chronicles the ineptitude of many of our attempts to categorize animal intelligence, and offers a whole lot of wonderful observations.  I wrote... ...critters are constantly surprising biologists with what they can do, and cognition seems to work on a

Lotharingia

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 Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe's Lost Country, by Simon Winder I have finished Simon Winder's fantastic trilogy about European history, and I love it so much that I will definitely be re-reading one of these days.  I previously read and wrote about Germania and Danubia with great joy.  Simon Winder is just right up my alley -- he pretty much just goes out and frolics around barefoot through the meadows of central European history, and his enjoyment comes through beautifully.  He knows that it's impossible to get a real handle on a thousand years or so of matter, and so he picks and chooses his favorite bits, and we just come along for the ride. Lotharingia is about the much-fought-over stripe of Europe that covers eastern France, western Germany, some of Belgium and the Netherlands, and Luxembourg.  It ends where Switzerland starts, pretty much.  Charlemagne's heirs divided the massive empire into three parts and Lotharingia was the middle part.  It conta

Guest House for Young Widows

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  Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS, by Azadeh Moaveni It's almost ten years ago now that ISIS became known on the world stage, amid such complex circumstances in Syria and the surrounding areas that I can't possibly sum them up here.  They included Syria's civil war, the disappointed Arab spring, and the war in Iraq.  And young, often educated Muslims started leaving their homes to join up with ISIS and the proclaimed caliphate.  Why?  In particular, why the girls?  Azadeh Moaveni, who has spent years embedded in these conflicts, wanted to get to know them and understand their stories.  Her book contains thirteen young women (out of quite a few more) from many different circumstances, and she narrates their stories with understanding.  Early on, the young people who joined up tended to be idealistic.  They heard about atrocities in Syria and wanted to stand against injustice and violence against their fellow Muslims.  They were told that the caliphate w

The Things She's Seen

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The Things She's Seen, by Ambelin and Ezekiel Kwaymullina Here's my title for AusNovember!  I've been excitedly waiting for it to wend its way through the library process so I could check it out.   This is a new YA novel by a brother and sister team.     Beth is dead, to begin with.  The only person who can still see her is her dad, who was so devastated by her death in a car accident that she stuck around in hopes of helping him get back on his feet.  He's a policeman -- a detective -- and he's been asked to investigate a house fire in a tiny country town that left one unidentified person dead.  A simple case for a guy who needs easing back into his job. Or perhaps not.  Beth is sure there's more to this than meets the eye.  The house was a group home for foster kids, run by an administrator and a nurse, but nobody ever saw the kids out and about.  The single witness to the fire is a girl who will only communicate what she knows in an elliptical, symbolic, stor