Lory

This book is what it says it is: a big book of fantasy stories, by authors who have either created classics in the genre, or are well known for other types of writing but also dipped into the realm of the fantastic.

While some selections will be familiar to those well-versed in fantasy literature, others are more obscure, and the editors have made a laudable effort to counter the “Anglo bias” in most anthologies. With so many stories, if some are not to your taste, you need only move on and you'll be sure to find something that is. A real treasure for fantasy fans.

Finally got through this long, absorbing but very dark and tragic historical epic. For me it picked up in the last 100 pages when the narrator finally got to the period of her own life. As a bearer of family trauma, generational and national trauma, she becomes the recording angel of unbearable, unspeakable things, attempting to pass them on in a way that will not stifle but give impetus to an unknown future.

I found this even better than the first book - it could stand alone as it has the essential info about EI parents and other EI people, although anyone who is really struggling with these relationships will want both books. I thought the advice was very clear and practical. Time will tell whether it works in my interactions with EI people, but I'm looking forward to trying. I especially appreciated the detailed explanation of how EI people are hostile to your inner world, and how to reclaim it. It's been hard for me to feel I have permission just to have my own thoughts around EI people, but now I understand why, I know it's important to resist the takeover, and I will go into our encounters forearmed.

This was recommended to me by Deb of The Book Stop - as part of a recommendation service she offered. It was a great choice! I was enthralled by Shapiro's journey as she discovered and dealt with the fact that she had been a donor-conceived child, and how that hidden fact had shaped her life. It's fascinating to consider that we can build up a whole mental world for ourselves, as she did with her assumption that she was the biological child of an Orthodox Jewish father and product of his family line, that turns out to be an illusion. Shapiro has to deal with the psychological repercussions of this, as well as with the feelings of lostness and not belonging that she has had from childhood. She has to remake her shattered world and find a new relationship to much she had taken for granted.

Strangely, she never seemed to admit the idea that her not looking Jewish could mean she had been the product of an affair, even as she sensed something was wrong – with her, she assumed, not with the facts of her conception. The more complicated answer led her to a search for her biological father, a near obsession of which she gives us a blow-by-blow (or rather email-by-email) account. Another oddity is that though this obsession involves an acute awareness of how similar she is to her biological father, she never talks about her similarity to her biological mother. This may be because she was a sick, twisted narcissist whom Shapiro came to hate, but it seems to be a matter of protesting too much, or maybe too little. If you're going to put so much weight on one side of the biological equation, you need to also look at the other.

I was not aware of the murky history of donor conception, nor mindful of the ethical implications today. That was also very interesting to learn about.

In the end Shapiro finds peace with her heritage and returns her father to his rightful place in her heart. She dedicates the book to him, and I have no doubt he would be proud of her.

For some reason I just devoured this autobiography. Cleary's brief description at the end of how she finally finished her first book, after years of aspiring to be a writer, was interesting, with all the details she pulled from her life but changed, and the suggestions from an editor that shaped the final version. One can also feel reassured knowing that a woman who barely scraped through university with a D grade on her comprehensive exam can become a famous author! As a former English major, I had to laugh at her determined avoidance of Milton and her helplessness when confronted by a question like “Describe how English literature was affected by history,” never having really studied history.

There is lots about scrimping and saving money during the Depression, but no tone of complaint. It is good to remember how hard it was for people at that time, and to admire their courage and resourcefulness. The resilience of human beings is amazing.

The resistance of Cleary's parents to her marriage to a wonderful man who happened to be Catholic was terribly sad; their relationship continued to be a troubled one through this volume, and in the end she just had to cut loose and make her own life. Refusing to buy her eyeglasses, and shaming her for the amount of money her college education cost them, was just cruel. Again, Cleary does not complain, but it's clear that she was deeply hurt and confused by such unloving gestures. She must have created the warm, connected families in her books that she lacked in her own, showing how often writers write out of what they wish for, not only what they know.

I liked the ending, which cast a new light on what I had been finding annoyingly abstract, unnecessarily philosophical conversations of the “women talking,” their ruminations over whether to stay in or leave their abusive community. Why all this debate, just leave already! But in the end, the question I should have paid more attention to – why one of the women asked a man to record the conversations in a language they did not understand and could not read – was answered as the purpose for the whole exercise, which was quite a neat narrative trick. It almost made me forgive the absurdity of the style of recording, which was completely impossible; there's no way the transcriber would be able to write down word for word dialogue in the way he supposedly did.

Thematically, the question is how, whether, why one can forgive an unforgiveable act. This also was answered in the ending, which showed that one way, at least, is not to try to pay back the attacker, which only continues the cycle of suffering, nor to get back what he stole from you, which is impossible, but to give, give something positive to another who is suffering, give of yourself without being asked or demanded of or attacked. That is my personal experience as well, that difficult as it may be to open up and be vulnerable and real when you've been so wounded, it is the only way to stop the trauma from having control over you.

Wonderful book for lovers of books and libraries (aside from the trauma of reading about a horrible library fire), which has now provided me with a reason for wanting to go to Los Angeles, a place I never had the slightest wish to visit. Some sections, especially towards the end, were a bit thin and could beneficially have been filled out more. And Orleans's personal distaste for the lower classes does come through, as other reviewers have noted (she herself baldly states that she's afraid of homeless people), although the librarians don't generally seem to share her prejudice. Aside from these drawbacks, I found it full of fascinating information and stories and would gladly gobble up more “library books.”

Not a how-to guide, but more of a memoir about Roth's journey with compulsive eating, helping others to break free of compulsive eating, and unpacking the layers of trauma beneath the compulsion, which extended well past the point where she stopped dieting and started a career as a weight-loss guru. As she was helping others, she had to continue to find out the ways that she still was in need of healing herself. I like that she states that healing is really a never-ending process. I've grown suspicious of any path that suggests otherwise.

The basic message is that compulsions are a way to distance us from ourselves, and the hard but immensely rewarding work is to stay with yourself and not try to escape into food, love, or anything else. I agree.

I was reflecting as I read on how things have changed in the last years; when I was growing up the food obsessions mainly centered around gaining or losing weight, but now in addition to that there are all the health fads, the vegan, raw food, paleo, carnivore diets, the food sensitivities, and so forth. There is so much moralizing around that, the pressure to “eat clean” and so forth. Everyone seems to have their own idea of what is the one and only true way, and many of them are in direct opposition to each other. How can that be? It's just a new version of the religion wars. And as with religion, I believe that the real truth lies beyond all such superficial differences.

The “health-food” variety of obsession is more what I've been dealing with, because although I never got into the weight loss game, I was definitely a compulsive eater. And my guilt was more about eating things that were unhealthy, than things that were fattening. But even though I tried to be “good,” to eat clean according to my best understanding of what that meant, I had urges to binge on things I knew were “bad,” like cookies and potato chips and croissants – and even to eat too much of healthy things, using them to distance myself from my feelings. But I shoved my awareness of the unhealthiness of these urges aside and tried to tell myself they didn't matter, I was good enough, I needed a little fun now and then.

Recently my body started saying “no” and throwing out symptoms that forced me to reconsider my habits. To continue ignoring and abusing my body further, I would have had to ignore really uncomfortable things, and really abandon my true self and its feelings, and I guess I just decided I didn't want to do that any more. I decided to do what Roth says, to make a commitment to staying with myself, instead of going with whatever false savior of the moment was calling for me. To start noticing how I feel, and having faith in my ability to heal, to be nourished, to be filled, instead of panicking that I can never be satisfied and reaching for the nearest comfort food.

Eliminating certain foods was necessary as a step to reduce their hold on me, but it couldn't be just about not eating gluten or sugar or whatever because the real issue was that I was using those things to escape from myself. I could have continued trying to escape from myself using carrots or almond milk and those would eventually have become problematic as well.

Anyway, I think it would be interesting to address those issues – or maybe it's really just another version of the same thing. I am interested to read more on this topic from other angles. Food and psychological health are definitely intertwined and i want to know more about healing practices.

I read this in two parts, fair enough since it was published in two books ten years apart. I was surprised by how much the first part departed from Don Quixote's adventures to interpolate other stories from different people he meets along the way, and even a manuscript he finds (which may have been written by Cervantes himself, in a metafictional touch). The second part keeps the focus firmly upon the Don, because he has now become famous through Cervantes's novel (more metafiction), though a rival false Quixote is also abroad. His persona has hardened because of the self-consciousness this necessitates, but at least the story stays in one track throughout.

It was all very confusing and muddled, and I need to read it again to understand better what was partly obscured by my previous assumptions and ideas about one of the most famous books in the world. But I would already argue with anybody who sees Don Quixote as a benign, kindly champion of idealism and of the imagination, a notion that seems to be common. He's a coward and a fool, who can prate of great deeds but does nothing worthwhile. As such, he is probably a good representative for humanity, but the honestly self-serving Sancho is more palatable.

“The truth between two people always cuts two ways ... To love someone enough to let them go, you had to let them go forever or you did not love them that much.”

I enjoyed this sequel, the new characters as much as the old, and hope there will be another installment (a change in location to Chicago is suggested at the end...) The Golem and the Jinni work as metaphors for immigration, displacement, otherness and integration, as well as being touching and believable as characters in their own right.

Entertaining mystery set in Sicily, with a structure that could have been too confusing and contrived, but somehow worked for me - the “author” is the title character's nephew, a writer working on a family saga that never gets off the ground, who visits Poldi periodically and ends up writing about her amateur sleuthing adventures instead.

Lots of local color and an eccentric MC (based on the real author's real aunt) make this an amusing way to while away a few hours. I might try reading the next adventure in the original German, hoping not to get too derailed by Bavarian dialect.

Also great to have an older woman as the energetic and sensual center of the story, egging her nephew on to live life more fully, but her periodic bouts of depression and recurrent wish to drink herself to death added a jarring note. Also, her wig slipping off kept distracting me. What did she look like without the wig? Did this not interfere with her amorous adventures? The nephew wondered this too, but she did not answer him.

Reread this because Chris of Calmgrove mentioned it as a possible inspiration for the Chronicles of Narnia. There are talking animals, children named Peter and Susan, and a person entering a picture on the wall...no doubt it had its influence. But Masefield's writing is far more poetic than Lewis's and his storytelling is less straightforward. The tone changes frequently, from Nesbit-like kid capers to beautiful, dreamlike scenes of magic and mystery, to comic satire centered around a gang of thieves posing as clergymen. It's a bit of an odd mix, and left me a little unsure what to make of it all. Plus it ends up being a dream! Aside from Alice, this is a disappointing way for any magical story to end.

Wow. Devastating and so important. This is not just a relational trauma memoir but a record of a spiritual battle, a fight for the grounds of reality itself. A fight in which we will all, at some point, have to make our own stand.

Let me never, never, never try to hold someone hostage to my own world view. That is the genesis of evil.

“I could have my mother's love, but there were terms, the same terms they had offered me three years before: that I trade my reality for theirs, that I take my own understanding and bury it, leave it to rot in the earth.” Ch 39

THIS is what the struggle of the “end times” is about, not owning stupid hoards of food and gasoline and guns, but the ability to own your own thoughts, your own understanding, and through them to connect freely with others, not walled off in fearful isolation. The “end” refers to the end of the era when this was not fully in our own hands. Now it is. A terrifying, amazing prospect. And some have made it through, but many others are falling to the temptation to give themselves up, to bury themselves and remain dead rather than risk true life.

“Once justified, I thought the strangling guilt would release me and I could catch my breath. But vindication has no power over guilt. No amount of anger or rage directed at others can subdue it, because guilt is never about them. Guilt is the fear of one's own wretchedness. It has nothing to do with other people.” Ch 40

I was not that impressed by this popular historical mystery about a woman lawyer in 1920s Bombay. There were many interesting things to learn about this era, but the characters fell flat for me.

See my full review at The Emerald City Book Review. A copy was received for review purposes from the publisher. No other compensation was received, and all opinions expressed are my own.Set in Newport, Rhode Island, across more than three centuries, The Maze at Windermere takes us through a panorama of history as seen through the eyes of five memorable characters: a washed-up tennis pro, a predatory social climber, a budding novelist, a British spymaster during the Revolution, and an orphaned Quaker girl. Their stories are told in turn through several cycles, slowly revealing the similar themes and motifs that can guide such very different lives. At the conclusion, these narratives begin to meet and merge in a quicker and less orderly alternation, coming together into a whole that closes some gaps, but leaves some still tantalizingly open.

Having been at various overlapping times a bastion of religious freedom, a commercial center, an important military base, a playground for the rich, and a breeding ground for artists, Newport is a small but fascinating location from which to explore American history and culture. Smith's command of different voices and points of view is dazzling – including writing in the voice of the young Henry James, which would seem quite daunting for any novelist. He moves seemingly without effort from one narrative to the next, writing in sometimes in first person, sometimes in third person, completely changing his tone and style while somehow retaining a sense of the underlying unity of his story. It's quite an impressive achievement.

Fortunately, Maze never descends to being a mere parlor trick or showing off the writer's verbal facility. At its heart are questions about life, the world, and our place in it that play out differently for each one of us, yet are always the same throughout the mortal journey we all share. How do we form connections that leave one another free? How do we embody our desires in a way that honors the deepest parts of ourselves, and of the other person? Some of Smith's characters grow in their progress toward self-knowledge, while others make questionable moral choices. But by means of the healing distance of fiction, all stories can contribute to our own learning.

I was first introduced to the idea of the “nine cities of Newport” through Thornton Wilder's novel Theophilus North, which remains one of my favorite novels. The Maze at Windermere will go on the shelf alongside it as another marvelous evocation not just of this particular place, but of the puzzling, mysterious, frustrating, exhilarating endeavor we call life. I hope you'll enter this maze, and maybe find a new favorite as well.

Reviews and more on my blog: Entering the Enchanted Castle

My first Richard Rohr. I loved it and would have liked to underline something on almost every page. Probably need to buy my own copy so I can do that, and read it repeatedly.

My only caveat is that there wasn't actually much about “contemplative prayer” – i.e. what it is, or how to do it. That information has to be sought elsewhere.

This is one of those later DWJ books which has an interesting idea that isn't completely worked out in a satisfying way. The strange village run by awful Aunt Maria, with a gender war in the background, could have been a terrific setting, but it fizzled out in an over-hasty resolution with some loose ends that bothered me. I think it would have been more convincing that AM wanted Mig to be her successor, if she had tried to cultivate and win her over in the beginning, instead of ignoring and torturing her. The tension between two sides of a person who is publicly sweet and lovable and inwardly manipulative and abusive was not strongly enough portrayed, because it's obvious from the outset that AM is bad news. It would have been a much stronger story if Mig had been sucked in at the beginning and had to get herself free. The diary format could have reflected this, showing as it does everything from Mig's point of view - maybe the writing could have been a way for her to realize what was really going on, as in The Spellcoats. However, that is not the story that we have!

The repeated motif in DWJ books of a male figure who has been buried/asleep/separated into pieces and returns appears again here, also not as strikingly as in some other books. Makes me want to do a survey of this particular theme and write something about it.

Usually I try to choose books for my Around the World project that primarily represent one country, but this one is about the intersection between countries and cultures, linked by war, cultural dominance, and emigration. I didn't know about Korean immigrants as an underclass in Japan, and this multigenerational saga brought that history to life.

See my full review at The Emerald City Book Review. A copy was received for review purposes from the publisher. No other compensation was received, and all opinions expressed are my own.The Bear and the Nightingale was one of my favorite books of 2017, and just shy of one year later author Katherine Arden has produced a sequel – greatly pleasing those of us who are weary of waiting years for a follow-up book. And I'm glad to say that The Girl in the Tower is a worthy successor, showing no signs of a sophomore slump. A third book is already slated for August of 2018, which will no doubt bring the trilogy to a rousing conclusion.

Girl is a tauter and leaner book than Bear, with a more streamlined plot and fewer POV switches, but still with the atmospheric Russian setting steeped in both history and folklore that so enchanted me in the first book. What was built up over many chapters is now taken for granted in this second volume, with few new elements added, but characters and themes are extended and deepened. New readers will definitely want to start with book one, and not jump into the middle of the story, as they will miss half the pleasure of entering into Arden's half-realistic, half-mythological world. (And you might want to go get that book right now before reading the rest of this review, to avoid spoilers. If you like that one, I'm sure you'll want to continue straight on to the next.)

On the run from her remote village, where she's been branded as a witch by a malicious priest, Vasya encounters her long-lost brother Sasha and sister Olya and enters into a perilous deception that brings her into a treacherous world of shifting alliances. As she journeys to Moscow, powerful but vulnerable heart of her people's land, she must try to reconcile the old powers that still speak to her with the demands and prejudices of this urban world. An explosive climax brings secrets to light and sets the stage for further journeys.

I was especially glad that Vasya got to be reunited with her siblings, who disappeared from the action somewhat suddenly in the first book. Arden fruitfully explores the tensions between them, which arise from their very different upbringings and societal expectations, as well as Vasya's struggle to express herself in a world that represses and limits female power. Her relationship with the frost demon Morozko is also developed into a poignant Beauty-and-the-Beast story arc that yet resists falling into mere stereotype. And a wonderful new character is introduced in Vasya's niece, who, it seems, will play an even more important role in the third book.

I'm definitely looking forward to that one, and glad that we won't have a terribly long wait. In the meantime, if you enjoy the intersection of historical fiction and fantasy, this is a perfect winter treat for you.

I was completely absorbed by this “biography of a book,” the story of how the Little House series came to be, in a matrix of complex historical and personal circumstances that also illumine a great deal in the history and biography of America.

Rose Wilder Lane was clearly a disturbed person. However, without her I do not think this great work of American literature would ever have come to be, so we owe her a certain measure of gratitude. And it's sad that her own talent was overshadowed by her mental and psychological handicaps, which at the time went unrecognized and untreated, and funneled into her Libertarian obsessions.

Unexpectedly this book helped me to understand the roots of the increasing intransigence of conservatives in the perhaps necessary, but insensitive and short-sighted treatment of agricultural overproduction during the New Deal, which created an alienation and divisiveness that has only gotten worse.

I got through this, but it stretched my credulity – would Ada really have lived in the country for more than a year without ever having heard the words “plow” or “cousin”? The ignorance card was a bit overplayed in my opinion.

This was a fantastic, essential read. It was horrifying to learn of the cruelty exercised toward women in the name of “protection” and harrowing to read of what the author went through. Her description of her upbringing and how her own thinking changed was most fascinating. If only many more people, especially (but not limited to) men, could go through such a process.

See my full review at The Emerald City Book Review. The premise sounded irresistible to me, yet even though The Essex Serpent had all the ingredients for a book I ought to love, I had a hard time warming to it somehow. Perhaps this was partly because the constant switching of perspective also made it hard for me to settle into the story. Certain threads and relationships were not developed as much as I would have liked, as the zigzagging plot kept dropping one to pick up another. I remained oddly distant from the characters, and sometimes had the sensation of being told rather than shown about their characteristics; they felt intellectually constructed out of era-appropriate ingredients (paleontology, anatomy, consumption, sexual repression, etc.) rather than spontaneously living.

Unsettling is definitely what The Essex Serpent is all about, though, so perhaps this is an appropriate effect. And at the end, suddenly, the characters came together in a way that surprised me, bringing them to life more vividly. If the book had gone on from there for another hundred pages or so, I might have felt more connected to it.

The “therapy memoir” seems to be a new or at least an increasingly popular genre – a therapist tells the stories of her patients (in forms disguised for privacy) while threading in her own life journey and what she's learned through her work with others. Dr. Eger's is a remarkable and moving example, drawing on her experiences as a Holocaust survivor and pioneering psychotherapist for a riveting, page-turning, beautifully written and heart-wrenching chronicle of human suffering turned into wisdom and love. What she discovers is that we need each other in order to survive, a theme of the primacy and sanctity of human connection that I'm finding confirmed over and over again in various ways. Recommended to anyone who wants to find meaning in the darkness.