Lory

I've read this a million times, starting when I was about 13. As an adult, I notice how dull the story really is. There is no true conflict, only the emergence of a human weapon who is unstoppable. But it still holds magic for me as an image of a young woman slowly awakening to her inner strength. My favorite part is when Harry and Corlath turn their war-rage into healing power, something that can only be done through a relationship – ,the real magic that has faded in the long absence of a “damalur-sol,” I believe. Too bad there was never a further volume about the development of this impulse, I would have found that really interesting.

On the other hand, an absurdity I did not notice for many years is that Harry never menstruates! She never has to deal with that mess and inconvenience, as she's riding about for days and weeks through the desert, being an intrepid female warrior. But a real female warrior would have to deal with it. Maybe the drug she's given during her six-week training time suppresses her period. Or maybe her blood-letting sword is an image for the menses? At the age I first fell in love with the book, I wanted to forget about my period as well, so this was not an issue for me. But now, I want books that acknowledge all sides of our female physicality.

Perhaps sensing this omission (she once called The Blue Sword her embarrassing fantasy of her 10-year-old idea of the perfect life), McKinley made up for this omission with Deerskin, which goes far in the other direction, dealing as it does with taboo topics like incest and rape, and of course menstruation. I remember how powerful it was for me when I first read it. After that, sadly and strangely, her books became largely unreadable for me, with their convoluted language that tangled up some promising ideas in a jumble of words. But the earlier ones remain some of the touchstone books of my life, and I'll always be fond of this one even as I now see its weaknesses.

Originally reviewed at www.emeraldcitybookreview.com

Nobody can take an idea and run with it like Jo Walton. This is the writer who gave us a Trollopean social satire populated by dragons (Tooth and Claw), a country house murder mystery that turns into a chilling alternate history of a Fascist England (Farthing), and a coming-of-age story built around lots of science fiction book recommendations. With fairies. And Wales (Among Others).

Now, in The Just City, we have what sounds like the winner of a “wackiest premise for a novel” contest: a group of time-traveling philosophers from throughout history, led by a couple of Olympian gods, set out to turn Plato's Republic from theory into fact. Because this is Jo Walton, she has us hooked from the first chapter. This nonchalantly introduces us to Apollo, fresh from a disastrous encounter with the nymph Daphne. He goes for advice to his wise sister Athene, who keeps getting prayed to by people from all kinds of times and places to please help them create the Republic on earth, and needs to find something to do with them. It just gets better – and stranger – from there.

Apollo is one of the narrators of the story, in alternating chapters with Maia, one of the Masters whose prayers to Athene have entitled her to build and organize the city, and Simmea, one of the “children” who are rescued from lives of slavery to grow up under the Platonic system and aim at the philosopher's ultimate goal of pursuing excellence. (In an effort to learn some important things that he can't understand as a powerful god, Apollo has elected to be born as a mortal and grow up as one of the children as well.) So from three different levels of consciousness we see how the experiment is working out, and where some of the difficulties lie, especially after Sokrates himself comes to the city with his troubling questions.

The details of making the Republic a reality are largely the fun of the book. Thriving on a regime of exercise, art, and study, Simmea grows to love the city and embrace its ideals, while in a society based on equality of the sexes Maia finds a welcome release from the limitations of her previous Victorian existence. Appearances by real historical personalities are entertaining, as is the idea of rescuing some of the greatest lost literature and art – Botticelli's Winter, anyone? But some of the more bizarre notions on which the city is founded cause it to start to crumble as the years go by, and serious questions about the nature of the soul, individuality, and self-determination arise.

The fact that the Just City has problems is not a reflection on the achievement of Plato in The Republic; the masters themselves acknowledge that the dialogue was meant as a thought experiment and not as a practical blueprint. Taking the experiment a step further through fiction, though, causes the thoughts to be reactivated and reassembled in a new form, and that's not a bad thing. It definitely made me want to read Plato for the first time since I was forced to do so in school. I was less interested in the debate about artificial intelligence that comes to dominate the latter part of the book. I am willing to suspend disbelief for a lot of things, but the idea that robots can become sentient just from being around a critical mass of philosophers is not one of them.

This and a few other aspects caused me not to love this book as much as I could have (including several disturbing rape scenes). Still, I found The Just City to be a diverting, thought-provoking, mind-bending ride of a novel, philosophy degree not required. Thanks once again to Jo Walton for writing a book like nothing anybody else would ever dream of, and making it seem the most natural thing in the world. I'll definitely be reading the sequel, The Philosopher Kings, which is fortunately coming out in only a few months.

Nye, an accomplished poet who is the daughter of a Palestinian father and American mother, drew on her own adolescent experiences for this novel about a girl whose family moves to Israel. Liyana's adjustment to her new life and culture and her first experiences of friendship-turning-to-love with a Jewish boy are sensitively and poetically portrayed.

Reviews and more on my blog: Entering the Enchanted Castle

J'ai lu plusieurs livres de Laurain en anglais, et je voulais essayer cet écrivain en français. Je l'ai trouvé facile à lire, mais avec assez belle langage - parfait pour moi comme étudiante de français. L'histoire était assez simple, et le fin pas du tout surprenant. Le plaisir était dans les déscriptions, les objets et les scènes avec lesquels les personnages étaient occupés. J'imagine que ce livre ferait un excellent film.

I enjoyed this overall, but I was expecting something on another level based on the rave reviews. Ada at times seemed more of an object lesson in trauma response than a real person, and Mam was simply a cartoon character. Wish that she in particular had received a more nuanced treatment, as she surely had pressures and traumas of her own that made her the way she was. I also wonder if characters at this time and place would really say “okay” as much as they do.

It's been years since I read any of Beverly Cleary's books, but something prompted me to pick this up (probably a list of books by authors who died last year). It was wonderful! Now I want to revisit the Ramona books, which seem to have a lot of Beverly in them. Her troubled relationship with her mother was sad but interesting to read about, something that she seemingly kept out of her children's books.

Reviews and more on my blog: Entering the Enchanted Castle

Read for Daphne du Maurier Reading Week 2021 (and finished on her birthday!)

I enjoyed this memoir that covered du Maurier's early life, from childhood through the publication of her first book and ending with her marriage. It was fascinating to learn how she was already a storyteller from age four, wondering about and questioning the things and people around her, already creating her own imaginative world to escape the social mold expected of her. Her fascination with Cornwall and with the house Menabilly that figures so importantly in Rebecca and other novels is also interesting to learn about. But the writing gets sketchier and hastier at the end, as she finds freedom through her writing and then escapes on a boat with her new husband. The reality must have been more complex, but one senses that as in her fiction, she plays with both hiding and revealing information to the reader.

Reviews and more on my blog: Entering the Enchanted Castle

I read this alongside the more standard Stephen Mitchell translation and they are very different. At the end a note on translations revealed that Le Guin didn't care for Mitchell's; I'd like to read some of the ones that she does recommend.

At any rate, this was the first time I read this foundational spiritual text in any form, and it was a revelation. The “Tao of” everything is so trendy nowadays, but what does that actually mean? There is so much to ponder, a profound spiritual and practical guide to life. I'll be returning to this book in some form or other, I'm sure.

Le Guin's notes on her choices as a translator and what resonates with her personally are interesting. I would tend to disagree with some of her decisions, i.e. that a passage was an interpolation to be dismissed, or that her interpretation is necessarily the right one. With a text of this depth and mysteriousness, I think we have to be cautious in approaching it out of our cynical modern consciousness. However, Le Guin does not claim that her version is definitive, and her commentary gives fascinating clues into the source which eludes precise understanding. I would love to have had more of it.

Reviews and more on my blog: Entering the Enchanted Castle

I found this rather unremarkable considering the rave reviews. The characters are not very developed, especially the minor ones, some of whom are quite one-sidedly stereotypical (a “bent” boy, his bigoted father, an overweight neighbor). And Ove keeps wondering why his wife, Sonja, chose to be with him – I'm not at all sure either. They seem to exist in parallel universes.

The narrative flowed along and was pleasant enough to read, but in the end I was not very satisfied. The repeated suicide attempts were not so pleasant and could be triggering for anybody with suicide trauma. They were played for black comedy, which will be a matter of your taste and tolerance.

The title character of An Unnecessary Woman journeys mainly within the walls of her Beirut apartment, obsessed with creating Arabic translations of world literature that no-one will ever read, and circling through memories — of childhood and war; of her detested former husband; of his sister, her best friend; and gradually of long-hidden secrets that break open into a new chapter of her life. This rambling, chapter-less book is more an extended personal essay than a novel, and takes patience to follow, but may reward a patient reader with its insights into this neglected woman's world.

An early effort that hints at better things to come, after Wodehouse had honed his style and plotting further. This was pleasantly diverting but completely forgettable. In fact, I started to suspect I had read it already and forgotten it (but I'm not sure whether I had, or was just reminded of episodes from other PGW books).

See my full review at The Emerald City Book Review. You might think that a book subtitled “a personal history of Habsburg Europe” would be quite distant from our current preoccupations, would be dusty, nostalgic and quaint, irrelevant to the challenges we face today. You would be wrong.

This is a chronicle of the last few hundred years of the eastern part of the ancient Holy Roman Empire, which was ruled by the Habsburg family, generally located along the Danube river, and morphed into Austria-Hungary before its demise in the twentieth century. Over the entire length of that long period now hangs the shadow of the train wreck that was the Great War of 1914-1919. What happened there? How can we understand it, and how prevent it from happening again?

Those questions are not distant or irrelevant. They are ever more pressing, as the powers of division and conflict rise again, as tyrants and oppressed people struggle once more. As I read, I was repeatedly struck by the way things have not really changed all that much at all, and at the same time how hard it seems to be for us to process the way things really have changed fundamentally. Will we ever learn?

Winder writes in a jokey, conversational style that could cause one to dismiss him as lightweight and not serious enough for such a big topic. Whether you find it engaging or irritating is probably a matter of personal taste. This is not an academic study, nor does it claim to be. It is a personal rambling through some personal pleasures and preoccupations, and should be judged as such. I would not take it as my only source of information, but as a starting point and an occasional source of laughter or jolt of recognition, it's not bad.

For example, here is Winder's description of Franz Ferdinand (whose assassination set off the Great War):

Of course we will never know if he would have been a “good” Emperor. It may well be that he had just waited too long and that whatever qualities he might have possessed had long curdled, lost in a maze of ritual, uniforms, masses, and – above all – hunting. His shooting skills made him legendary, belonging to that disgusting and depressing era when even the aristocratic hunting expedition became married to modern military technology, unbalancing the entire relationship of hunter and hunted, so that shooting partridges became like a proto-version of playing Space Invaders.

Academic it may not be, but it is vivid and memorable. Along with a vaguely chronological overview of the Habsburg rulers, who were a largely unattractive lot with occasional amusing eccentricities, we get interpolated commentary about Winder's obsessions with things such as zoo architecture, folkloric villages, the music of Haydn, and much more. It's like rambling through a historical museum with a talkative, witty, and easily distractible friend.

I did not ever really understand what happened in the time leading up to the war. It was such a tangle of nationalisms and bad diplomacy that I could not wrap my head around it, at least without a few repeated rereads. But I did get this: nationalism is a dead end. Although Habsburg rule may have been terrible, the empire at least provided some room to move and interact and create to its diverse population, while after the empire fell, people were imprisoned in the narrow, dirty cells of their new nations. And of course, with a lot of people and entire ethnic/religious groups exiled, killed, or soon to be killed. We have to find a better way than this.

This is the kind of book I don't like to read as an e-book (which is what I did). I would rather have the whole book before me so I can refer to former sections, look at maps and lists of rulers with confusingly similar names, and mark favorite passages. So if you do read it, I recommend paper.

I might be reading it again at one point, and I'd definitely like to read Winder's earlier book, Germania. Have you read anything by Simon Winder? Would you like to?

See my full review at The Emerald City Book Review. As I read Excellent Women, the best-known work by the once-neglected, now widely praised English novelist Barbara Pym, I was reminded of another acclaimed comic novel that I read not long ago: Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis. On the surface, Amis's hard-drinking, buffoonish misogynist Jim Dixon may seem to have little in common with Pym's un-effusive, church-going “excellent woman,” Mildred Lathbury. But the two books shadow and reflect each other in a fascinating way.

Jim is an exercise in how uncongenial one can make a main character, while still attempting to elicit our sympathy for him. An English professor who apparently despises English literature, he goes on epic benders when he's supposed to be giving a lecture, leaves cigarette burns in the sheets when he's a houseguest, and is unable to disentangle himself from a woman he doesn't love or respect – she's marginally better than no girlfriend at all, it seems, in his “woman-as-object” universe. Some readers find him so awful, he's adorable; I just found him awful.

Mildred, meanwhile, is about as self-effacing as a character presented in the first person can be. Set in postwar London, the book opens with new neighbors moving in upstairs, and as Mildred becomes a witness to and sometimes participant in their disordered lives, so much more glamorous and seedy than her own, we find us asking ourselves what she really thinks about all this. Other characters in the novel are always eager to tell her what she should be feeling, seeming to find the sensibilities of an unmarried woman over a certain age to be public property; she quietly expresses annoyance at this, while baffling us with sideways expressions and half-uncoverings of her true self.

In both books, though, the opposite sex is a total mystery. The masculine Jim approaches this riddle with bluff and bravado, the feminine Mildred with puzzlement and a sort of understated obstinacy. Yet both stories left me with a sense of melancholy, a sadness that human beings must so often miss and misunderstand one another. This was in many ways the source of the comedy, as in a screwball plot where everyone is running in circles after each other, and yet there was an undercurrent of tragedy in spite of the guardedly optimistic endings. Can either Jim or Mildred ever find a satisfying relationship that gets beyond the surface differences which separate us? I'm not so sure.

Interestingly enough, the two authors had a friend in common – the poet Philip Larkin, who both provided the model for Amis's antihero, and had a warm admiration for Ms. Pym, whom he called one of the most criminally underrated writers of our time. This connection seems most suitable, as she helped me to see poor old Jim in a different light, and maybe even forgive some of his excesses. I'll certainly be seeking out more of her novels, continuing to ponder her subtle perspective on men, women, the gulf between us, and the fragile bridges that we might try to build.

Strange, disjointed tale with some compelling images and lines but overall not as satisfying as some of MacDonald's other works. Read because of C.S. Lewis's statement in Surprised by Joy of the powerful effect it had on him – one of those books that can be incredible when it hits you at the right time. It was not the same for me.

Excellent and highly unusual balance of spiritual and scientific wisdom, honoring both sides of the truth, in which artistic and rational methods are not in opposition but complement and complete one another. It's both/and, not either/or! If only more scientists would start to think this way, we might actually have a future.

I was only disappointed that Kimmerer is too dismissive of Western tradition and its contributions. Nothing is gained by categorically devaluing the Judeo-Christian worldview, in spite of the atrocities done in its name. It doesn't have to be that way. (Eve was an indigenous woman too!)

The best I can say of this is that it's not quite as irritating as Dragonhaven. Robin, PLEASE. Please quit with the parenthetical interruptions, pseudo teen speak, and weird invented slang. I know you can write clear, lucid prose and books that actually have a coherent plot, because you did so in the past. Was that a different Robin McKinley? I want the old one back!

Beautifully written, harrowing, and full of a sad awareness of the fragility of life, this left me with a real sense of what it would be like to live in 19th century Iceland — and extremely glad that I don't have to.

For some reason I thought Laurie Colwin had written a lot of food books, but it seems there is really only this one and the posthumous More Home Cooking. I enjoy Colwin's style – it reminded me of Peg Bracken's The I Hate To Cook Book, with its simple recipes and chatty commentary, except this should be called the I Love To Cook Book. Cooking-wise the book is of limited usefulness to me, since the recipes mostly involve things I can't eat or don't eat or just would never bother to cook. Glad I finally read it, and I'd gladly read more by Colwin, but it won't be one of those books that ends up changing the way I cook. (I'm already too set in my ways I guess.)

Reviews and more on my blog: Entering the Enchanted Castle

I do not think I will ever be a Christie fan. I'd read a couple of the early ones and was not impressed. So I wanted to try this, some say her masterpiece, and found it similarly ho-hum. I don't think it's just that the premise is so well known that the element of surprise is lost; I simply don't care about any of the characters, they are so clearly mere shadows made to hang the puzzle on. I enjoy mystery stories where, however preposterous the plot, the people ring true to me and I can feel some kind of connection to them. With this one, they were as anonymous as the china figures that got lost or smashed each time one died.

I'm going to try Murder on the Orient Express since I picked up a free copy of that, and maybe a Miss Marple story, and if those don't turn out to be better, I'm done.

This is a delightfully entertaining and thought-provoking book, embracing the cultural ferment of New York City at the turn of the twentieth century from a wholly original point of view. The golem and the jinni are immigrants: one arrives on a boat bereft of the master who has just awakened her and then suddenly died, while the other is accidentally set free from centuries of imprisonment by a tinsmith who tries to repair a flask from the old country. They must negotiate unexpected lives in this new, bewildering place, trying to find a way to survive and be themselves in a world that doesn't even admit that they can exist. Meanwhile, the forces that would rob them again of their newfound self-determination are closing in.

Though the two characters are very different – from the very elements of their being, earth and fire, to their moral outlook on the world – how they draw near to one another and form a kind of sympathetic alliance in their strange quest is a story both touching and thrilling. This is not a lead-footed allegory of the immigrant experience, but an imaginative leap into the questions that make fiction both fun and meaningful. Can free will be manufactured, or earned? Is love a phenomenon of feeling, or of action? What does one do if one literally cannot sleep? Through a wide array of characters and incidents, brought into play with impressive skill for a first-time novelist, Wecker gives the ring of truth to her fantastic story.This review was originally posted on The Emerald City Book Review

Reviews and more on my blog: Entering the Enchanted Castle

A dual-strand narrative with a difference – some may find the ending too cutesy-weird, but it was of a piece with the rest. Dark and involving, ultimately a narrative of liberation that brings to the fore the creative role of the reader as well as the writer. When ARE we going to get to read Jiko's life story? That's what I'd really like to know.

Americanah is book that was mentioned several times when I asked for contemporary fiction recommendations. This is a journey, away from and back to the heroine's country of Nigeria and her childhood love, along the way sharing with us her brutal, enlightening, comical, destructive, empowering experiences. An annoyingly didactic tinge crept in at times, but Adichie's beautiful writing and powerful sense of place pulled me along.

This was a lovely book! Jane is not the quirkiest or most memorable Montgomery heroine, but her release from an oppressive Toronto household into the beauty and freedom of Prince Edward Island makes for wonderful comfort reading. If the denouement reuniting her estranged parents (not a spoiler, it was obviously always going to end that way) had been arranged with more complexity and less narrative haste, it would have been truly excellent.

A historically inspired drama that moves back and forth between the famine-ridden Ireland and a ship taking emigrants away to America. To learn about the tragic history of that era was fascinating (though horrifying), but I was less impressed by the sometimes contrived and pretentious “literary” trappings. The “document collection” premise did not work so well as in O'Connor's Shadowplay, which I loved; it was too unbelievable, which distracted and annoyed me rather than being a playful enhancement.

The subtitle is misleading, as the book is more about the biographers of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes than about SP and TH themselves. Read as a break from the latest bio that I've been reading – Red Comet – and makes me appreciate the balanced perspective of that book, the first full bio of Plath that I've read. But I'm not sure Malcolm makes any amazing, earth-shattering points; she merely highlights what we should already know when reading biographies (but maybe forget all too often), that the true facts of a human life can never be fully known. A reminder to treat all such stories with respect, and to remember that there are two sides of every conflict.