So long between updates! I’ve been traveling a bit, and then was obsessed with the NCAA basketball tournament, and am now recovering (I hope) from KU’s shocking loss in the second round.
Anyway, thankfully today provides a distraction: my review of Nell Irvin Painter’s History of White People appears in this Sunday’s Boston Globe books section. You can read it here.
A snippet:
The violence of ancient white peoples, lauded by the Greeks and Romans, was also attractive to those who claimed them as ancestors. Ralph Waldo Emerson, father of American transcendentalism, saw himself as a son of these Saxons (who, in the goofy myth-making this book so ably mocks, were said to spring from Germany and Scandinavia but bestowed their manly beauty and superiority on American whites by way of the early English settlers). In his 1856 book “English Traits,’’ Emerson writes of the qualities passed on by such virile white stock, including “good sense, steadiness, wise speech, and prompt action,’’ but also “a singular turn for homicide.’’ Strangely, he means this as a compliment, though observers from different backgrounds saw the same quality less favorably. Black Bostonian David Walker, in his famous Appeal of 1829, pointed out that “whites have always been an unjust, jealous, unmerciful, avaricious and blood-thirsty set of beings, always seeking after power and authority.’’ Painter avoids taking sides, but she wields a withering deadpan when delivering such quotes.
This is a great fun read about a totally bizarre and discouraging subject. I highly recommend it!
Jasmyn is about…well, Jasmyn (you couldn’t have guessed that, huh?) XD No, anyway, Jasmyn’s husband suddenly dies, and she begins a slow process of falling apart. But bizarre things start happening – dead swans fall from the sky at Liam’s funeral; a strange man she has never heard of turns up on her doorstep claiming to know her husband; she is haunted by dreams of feathers and roses. Jasmyn begins to uncover discrepancy after discrepancy relating to her husband, and nothing is quite as it seems. She enters a world of fairytales and magic, horror and splendour, but what is real? What is the truth?
The year is 1945. The war is over and 21-year-old Betty Lake has been invited to Europe to sing in a USO tour for American soldiers who now occupy Hitler’s Germany. The first nights performance is a hit. 
Tricia Goyer is the author of twenty books including From Dust and Ashes, My Life UnScripted, and the children’s book, 10 Minutes to Showtime. She won Historical Novel of the Year in 2005 and 2006 from ACFW, and was honored with the Writer of the Year award from Mt. Hermon Writer’s Conference in 2003. Tricia’s book Life Interrupted was a finalist for the Gold Medallion in 2005. In addition to her novels, Tricia writes non-fiction books and magazine articles for publications like Today’s Christian Woman and Focus on the Family. Tricia is a regular speaker at conventions and conferences, and has been a workshop presenter at the MOPS (Mothers of Preschoolers) International Conventions. She and her family make their home in the mountains of Montana.
It feels weird reading a book knowing that you’ll never find out how the author intended it to end. It also makes it hard to write a review of said book. Jane Austen started writing Sanditon in 1817, she stopped writing a few months later due to her declining health. We are left with the first twelve chapters of a novel. These chapters introduce a number of characters and a setting, but before the end of the manuscript you hardly know what’s meant to happen next. Yes, there is the smallest amount of intrigue to be solved and there are a few characters that seem to be set up to become entangled with the heroine of the story, Charlotte Heywood. Apart from that, who knows what Austen would’ve come up with? There are currently two finished versions of the novel, but I’ve decided to restrict my reading to the original twelve chapters. I remember reading one of the finished versions years ago and not liking it at all. Maybe I’ll end up reviewing the version I currently have at home, by “Another Lady”, in time.
While writing this post, I’m re-watching one of my very favourite Russian movies: Russian Ark. It’s a modern film, and it’s all set in the Hermitage. The narrator is a modern-day Russian who wakes up from an accident disembodied and transported back in time to the eighteenth century (there’s a strong implication that he’s a ghost). There, he meets another mysterious figure (who acts like the Marquis de Custine, who visited Russia in the 1800s and wrote an unflattering book about their European pretensions) , and together they wander through the Hermitage, seeing scenes from three hundred years of Russian history and having discussions about art. It’s a gorgeous film, with thousands of actors, and perhaps even more incredibly, all ninety-six minutes was shot in a single take. It’s a visual feast, and if you’re at all curious about the Hermitage, you’ll get a wonderful idea of its appearance. Anyway, I’d encourage all of you to watch it, and it’s made me incredibly nostalgic for St. Petersburg. Good thing I was already planning to start Doctor Zhivago today!
This was also a high-quality reading week for me; with one exception, every book I read I really enjoyed: four and five star reads all over the place. So let’s get started!
I reread Jane Austen’s Persuasion for the discussion on Literary Transgressions. As if I ever need an excuse to reread her! 
They’re also childless, which is unusual for an Austen marriage. I wonder if those two things are at all related. Anyway, since Austen usually focuses on the unhappiness that results from an unequal marriage, it was nice to see such a change. I hope that if I ever get married, my marriage is like the Crofts. Even after decades, they still do everything together, and Mrs. Croft has accompanied the Admiral on many of his travels.
Now for the exception to my book gushing this week! I picked up In Search of King Solomon’s Mines by Tahir Shah as part of the Reading the World Challenge, for my nonfiction selection about Ethiopia. Shah has written several travel books that sound interesting to me, so I was hoping I’d enjoy this one and want to read the others. Not so much. You know the Great White Explorers who ‘discovered’ the heart of the Dark Continent, and all that tosh? Well, people like Stanley are heroes to Shah. That might give you an idea of how he writes about Ethiopia. I was disgusted by his attitude, his writing, his racism and sexism and class-ism. The further along in the book I got, the worse all of this became. Not to mention, travelogues need some type of narrative thread holding them together, and this one’s thread was tenuous at best, with an utterly unsatisfactory ending. Needless to say, I’ll be avoiding Shah in the future.
Fortunately, at the same time I was reading a wonderful nonfiction book: Microcosm by Carl Zimmer. I already wrote about why I loved it, so I’ll move right along to another travelogue: Kinky Gazpacho by Lori Tharps. Now, I originally had expected a travelogue, but this is much more a memoir of Tharps’ connection to Spain, and the world outside of the States. It begins when she’s in elementary school, covers her high school summer spent in Casablanca, then her college year abroad in Spain, and goes later than that. I’m very happy that I didn’t read the publisher’s blurb, since if you read it you’ll know something that doesn’t happen in the actual book until the last quarter and which took me by surprise! Anyway, I loved this memoir. 
When I discovered I couldn’t renew it at the library, I immediately picked up Carpentaria by Alexis Wright. This was my first read for the Aussie Authors Challenge, and what a way to start things off! Wright makes the reader work in this book, but there’s a great reward if you stick with it. She’s merged Western storytelling traditions (aka novels) with more Aboriginale ones, into a book that’s untraditional and difficult, but also fascinating and a peek into lives led very differently from my own. It’s set in the coastal Australian outback, in a small white town and the Aboriginale community that surrounds it. Most of the story focuses on a few Aboriginale leaders, mainly men (but one awesome woman!), their lives and the events that bring them into conflict with the white Australians. For me, I loved the mix of reality with mythology (Dream Time is invoked several times), I loved the way the narrative wasn’t told in linear time, and while I was definitely confused on occasion, when I kept reading Wright cleared things up. I wouldn’t recommend this to readers who have to be constantly in control of their reading…with a book like this, you have to just ‘go with it,’ if you know what I mean. But if you’re willing to invest in the novel, and to work through the not-so-great bits (for me, pages 50-150 were pretty dull, but the other 400 pages made up for it), this is the kind of fiction that repays a close reading. It’s definitely one that I’d like to reread one day!
The other novel I picked up due to not being able to renew as The Bostonians by Henry James. I got this from the library not knowing anything about it, except that James wrote it. That’s good enough for me, since I have loved most of his novels that I’ve read. This one is no exception, and imagine my delight when I discovered it was set during the Reconstruction and about the suffragette movement! Two of the main characters, distant cousins, represent the most extreme versions that the movement brought out…Olive Chancellor is a well-off, independent Bostonian young woman who has decided to devote her life to the suffragette cause and pretty much hates men. Basil Ransom used to be a part of the Southern gentility, but after the war he ended up penniless and is now in New York trying to make his fortune as a lawyer. He subscribes to all the most backward beliefs of a patriarchal society (for instance, that the source of women’s happiness is making men happy). Both Olive and Basil say stereotypical things on a regular basis, and are both amusing and horrifying all at once. Torn between them is Verena, a beautiful young woman raised in the Bohemian lifestyle, who is a talented public speaker and suffragette. While she firmly believes that women deserve all the same rights as men, she also enjoys talking with the men she meets, and she doesn’t think that their whole gender is pure evil. Olive takes her under her wing, and she wants her to renounce everything but the Cause. Basil, meanwhile, wants to marry her and make her into a good little housewife. That’s where all of the tension of the novel comes from, and I couldn’t read fast enough to see how things would turn out! This lived up to my expectations of James, with its psychological nuances and sharply drawn supporting characters. While Olive and Basil represent stereotypes, they still feel like real people, which is entirely due to James’ talents. If you’re a James fan, I think you’re in for a treat with The Bostonians. If you’re new to him, I’d suggest starting with The Portrait of a Lady.
I read A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami in one sitting, in order to participate in Tanabata’s discussion. This is my second Murakami novel, but my first was Norwegian Wood, which everyone always tells me is nothing like his usual stuff. If A Wild Sheep Chase is more typical of him, I understand now! 
I’ve seen Cold by Bill Streever reviewed on a couple blogs, and I’m happy that I read it for the Science Book Challenge. While it’s not ’straight’ science, since it’s mixed with some personal observations and historical stories, I still think it’s a science book at heart. Within his theme of cold, Streever looks at everything from a horrible Midwest blizzard to the science of hibernation to various Arctic explorers to Snowball Earth and more. While his focus flits from topic to topic, the book’s held together by it’s chronological structure (each chapter in a new month, with the book starting in July, and Streever references what the weather’s doing in his home state of Alaska) and Streever’s tone. His writing is lyrical, and his enthusiasm for the cold really shines through. The book feels like a labour of love, and that certainly helps make it delightful to read. While at heart, my default is to warmer climates, I do love sitting outside when it’s in the 30s and 40s, bundled up in cashmere and silk, with a steaming thermos of hot chocolate and a good book to read. Cold is just that type of book!
I grabbed A Season in Mecca by Abdellah Hammoudi from the shelves on a whim for the World Religion Challenge, and I’m so glad that I did! It was a fascinating peek into the logistics of the haj* and Hammoudi’s writing veered from the intellectual to the everyday to the personal and back in a way I found very satisfactory. While I knew that the pilgrimage to Mecca and Medinawas one of the five pillars, I had no idea that the whole event was so orchestrated. I love that Hammoudi didn’t shy away from difficult issues, such as the treatment of women as the secondary gender, or the way that Saudi Arabia’s power has allowed the extreme sect of Wahhabism to dominate the Islamic world more than it perhaps ought to. I learned a lot by reading this book, and it’s one of those that makes me wish I was reading it with a book club, because there’s so much to discuss! It lived up to all my expectations and then some.
The Practical Nomad by Edward Hasbrouck is really a reference book for long-term, independent travel, but I’m sure those who know me well aren’t surprised that I ended up reading it cover to cover. 
The movie’s almost over! Which means I need to get moving and wrap this post up. 
I just finished Between the Acts by Virginia Woolf this morning, which I read not only because I love Woolf but also so I could read the nonfiction book about books The Things That Matter. This was Woolf’s last novel, and the preface by Leonard quietly broke my heart. It’s quite interesting; like Mrs. Dalloway it takes place over the course of a day, but it’s written in a different style. It starts out much more straightforward, about a family living on an estate in 1939, and then the focus moves to the village pagaent being held that day on their grounds. It’s a history of England, and the pagaent itself is full of pastiches that were fun to read and reminded me a bit of Orlando. There are several intermissions, during which we learn more about the characters as they wander about. While this isn’t my new favourite Woolf, I found it well worth a read and enjoyed every page of it. It’s full of quirky characters and unforgettable scenes, as well as meditations on the meaning of life and identity and history. What more could you ask for?
Finally, I finished Meet Me Under the Ceiba by Silvio Sirias, which I read to visit Nicaragua with the Reading the World Challenge. Now, Mr. Sirias was gracious enough to write a wonderful guest post on my blog, so I will admit that I began the book hoping I would like it. But I’m always honest in my reviews, so the fact that I’ve e-mailed the author a few times has no relation to what I’m writing about his novel. I say that because, this novel was incredibly good! It’s written in one of my favourite styles, wherein a main narrator has to piece together a story from talking to various characters and reading various documents. In this case, the story is the murder of Adela, a lesbian in a small Nicaraguan town. This book is full of life: each of the characters jumps off the page, Nicaragua itself seems to rise up around me (and I want to visit even more than I did before), and while it’s not a mystery, the book has enough urgency to keep you turning the pages. That being said, there are some hard things in this book. The prejudice Adela faces is hard. Even harder is the life story of her true love, Ixelia, whose body has been sold to any willing man by her own mother since she was 11. While the narrator is obviously repulsed, some of the people he’s interviewing (like her mother and the old man who eventually buys sole power over Ixelia) treat it matter-of-factly. There were moments when I was truly angry at Sirias for making me read these things; why did there have to be sexual abuse of children?! But then, I read the afterword, and discovered that the novel is based on a real case in Nicaragua, and that the real victim’s lover had the same history of sexual abuse. This didn’t in any way mitigate the horrible things, but it made me understand why they were in the novel and that they weren’t gratuitous. Sirias never plays things up to try to manipulate the reader’s emotions, which I think made the story even stronger. The sad things are told in a straightforward manner and calm voice, which allows the reader to be genuinely outraged. And there are happy moments too, and funny ones; I don’t want to imply that the book is unrelentingly sad. I’d highly recommend it to anyone who loves reading international fiction that really brings you to another place, or to anyone interested in LGBT issues, or to anyone who just enjoys a good story.
It has arrived! In the mail today (courtesy of The Ooze Viral Bloggers program) was After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters by N.T. Wright. I am very excited about this book and I intend on sharing my thoughts as I read through it over the next several days. Again, if you are reading this book right now please leave a comment so I can interact with your thoughts on the matter.
I have an interesting history with Kelly Link’s work. When her first collection, Stranger Things Happen, came out I read a ton of good reviews. I didn’t seek it out, though. I like so few short stories that I only read collections if I’ve already read something by the author and been really impressed. But I do sometimes read award nominees, so I read Link’s “The Faery Handbag” along with the other novelettes on the 2005 Nebula shortlist. I’m afraid I wasn’t too impressed. The story seemed like it was all style and no substance, the exact opposite of my tastes in fiction, short or otherwise. More on that in a moment. Later I read a second story, her novella “Magic For Beginners”, when it was also nominated for something, although I don’t remember which award since I didn’t write anything down and it was nominated for (and won) many awards. This time I was more impressed, getting caught up in the imagination of the fictional TV show “The Library” and intrigued by the story’s strange metafictional overlaps. Then the story ended without seeming to resolve anything. Frustrated, I wrote the story off as yet another one of those stories, so common in science fiction and fantasy, that is all setup and no delivery. An interesting story, certainly, but a tease.
Carrie Jones
“God has a plan for your life.”
This book has a little bit of everything that adds up to greatness! It is divided into sections on needlepoint, embroidery, and counted thread with each section including an introduction to the technique, its’ history, the materials needed and basic instructions on getting started. Each section concludes with an extensive stitch directory containing diagrams, close-up full color photographs and easy to follow directions. Also included are a variety of projects for each technique. This book is one in a series edited by Donna Kooler, founder,president, designer and creative director of Kooler Design Studio, Inc. It is a worthwhile addition to your library. 
At the foot of a waterfall on Tasmania’s Franklin River, river guide Aljaz Cosini lies drowning. In a torrent of images both horrifying and heart-wrenching, not only his own life but that of his forefathers pass before him. Through these visions we gain an idea of the torn, troubled, ruthless history of Tasmania, of the upheaval of lives removed from their roots, lives blighted by prejudice, lives subject to arbitrary cruelty, the cruelty of man but also the cruelty of a tough and hostile environment. Yet through all this and beyond all this, there shine through some shimmering moments of humanity: tree loggers rowing miles against the current, overcoming their own pain to save the life of a colleague who has had a terrible accident, Aljaz’s own valiant attempts to save the life of one of his clients. In between there is the story of how Aljaz comes to be where he is, his career as a guide on this treacherous river. His role as guide, whether on this river or in a more general sense, is questioned, is questionable, and through that the whole concept of guiding others is also called into question.
Planet BB
