August Reading

Because I am on vacation and because I may or may not have internet access at the end of the month, I’m declaring the end of my August reading today.  Worst case is that I pad my September totals by reading everything in sight over the next three days.  I read nine books in August, four of them nonfiction and three of them not nonfiction (which, presumably, is why those books are called fiction.  Go figure.).

 

Nonfiction first:  In the course of my year of butterflies, I learned about Maria Sibylla Merian, who is the subject of Kim Todd’s book Chrysalis.  Merian was an amazing woman who lived from 1647 to 1717.  She was an artist and a naturalist, one of the first to detail the process of metamorphosis from caterpillar to butterfly.  Additionally, she depicted the butterflies she drew and painted along with the plants they fed on and other creatures in the environment, an ecological awareness ahead of her time.  By the way, she traveled from Europe to Surinam in her fifties, accompanied by her adult daughter, to capture the butterflies of the rainforest at a time when that was pretty much unheard of.  Her reputation was, at first, very good, but was tarnished over time by those who pointed out her errors (how many famous men of the period had grave errors and managed to stay respected by future science?) and who denigrated her reliance on the accounts of indigenous people (racism much?) for the habits and habitats of the creatures she drew.  Her art is drop-dead gorgeous and please go look at it.

 

Which brings me to the second book, a slim collection called Insects and Flowers:  The Art of Maria Sibylla Merian by David Brafman and Stephanie Schrader.  It is “just” reproductions of plates from Merian’s work and, my goodness, they are stunning.

 

I knew precisely nothing about Gwen John before I read Gwen John by Alicia Foster.  That’s not true.  I knew she was an artist who also worked as an artist’s model to make ends meet.  Because I’m interested right now in the interaction between observers and observed, between art and subject, between creator and environment, I was, naturally, inclined to learn more.  She was a talented and hardworking painter with an eye for the intimate and private.  Her work with female models does not shy from the vexed question of whether or not it is exploitative, but it doesn’t condemn any side for the choices made.  Lovely pictures and clear text.  Would recommend.

 

Finally, I read Daring Greatly by Brené Brown.  I have a love-hate relationship with Brown’s works because I find them challenging.  We live in a society that rewards the shallow and unexamined over the deep and thoughtful.  Brown offers an alternative, wholehearted path.  She acknowledges that swimming upstream against the cultural currents is difficult, but also suggests that what we are doing now is unsustainable.  There are a few places where I personally think she is a little to willing to accept some unfortunate aspects of our current system, but those are quibbles compared to the potentially transformative power of what she offers.  Check it out.

 

I first read Ovid’s Metamorphoses in the fall of 1986, but that was a long time ago.  What with the butterfly thing, I thought it might be time to read the book again, albeit in a different edition than the one I read in college because I purged it from my shelves at some point.  It’s a weird book.  Content warning for rape, murder, gods and goddesses behaving badly, and a long diatribe against the eating of meat.  The stories are told in evocative language and I enjoyed the book, mostly.  I was left, however, hoping that no one ever happens to draw the attention of this particular batch of gods, either in a good or bad way:  it does not end well for anyone when the best outcome is to turn into a tree and the worst is to be killed and eaten.

 

I’m slowly reading my way through the collected works of Elizabeth Goudge because I find her books comforting.  The Castle on the Hill, however, was less comforting than usual.  It’s set during the second World War and includes children evacuated from London to the countryside, a superfluous woman, and a Jewish itinerant musician.  Gender and race and class stereotypes abound, although the plot somewhat subverts them.  That same plot has, for me, an unsatisfying ending, but others may disagree.

 

Speaking of comfort reading:  three more mysteries.  I love Ann Cleeves and Vera, so it is not surprising that I loved The Glass Room.  I have nothing new to say about how much I like the characters and the writing because they’re just exactly to my taste.  I somehow missed The Trespasser by Tana French when it came out, but I fixed that.  I was irritated for pretty much the entire first half of the book with characters behaving badly, but the payoff in the second half made me forgive it.  Would recommend.  And I polished off Louise Penny’s newest, The Madness of Crowds in two days.  Penny’s strength is in how loveable her characters are and how much her readers like to spend fictional time with them in Three Pines.  I thought the plot of this one was less fabulous than some of her other books (I figured out the ending, which I rarely do, and that implies that it wasn’t that surprising), but again, I read it for the comfort of Gamache and the rest of the Three Pines community.

 

Summer reading total:  20 books

Year to date total:  51 books

July Reading

July had only four books in it, but they were all good ones (and one of them was a collection, so I could probably count it as four).

 

I’ll start with the poetry.  (Disclaimer:  I know Paul Corman-Roberts in person and I am an unabashed fan and supporter of this awesome human and poet.)  Paul Corman-Roberts’s new book of poems, Bone Moon Palace is a book I will keep forever.  I copied darn near the whole thing into my commonplace book because it is that good.  My feeling about it is summed up in the conclusion to his poem “You Will Always Have Poetry”—“you will have poetry/and no one/will ever be able to take that away.”  In other words, you can have my copy when you pry it out of my cold dead hands.

 

On to nonfiction.  I read two books.  One was Gail Carriger’s The Heroine’s Journey (Disclaimer two:  I also know and love Gail, who is a generous and helpful person and a fluid and entertaining writer.)  Her book is an extremely useful look at a kind of story that is all around us and yet seldom discussed because some people keep banging on about the hero’s journey.  Not that I have issues with the hero’s journey, but the heroine’s journey is real and lovely and satisfying, too.  One of the things I love about Gail is that she is very careful to distinguish sex and gender—heroes and heroines are gendered roles that do not necessarily correspond to the sex of the characters who take on those roles (she cites Harry Potter as a heroine and Wonder Woman in the recent film as a hero, for example).  The book is useful for writers, readers, and just generally interested humans running around enjoying books and films and such.  It’s also funny and a pleasure to read.

 

The second nonfiction book I read was The Object Stares Back by James Elkins.  I read it in pursuit of my leisurely interest in artist models, but there is a whole lot more in the book.  Elkins is an engaging writer and only occasionally lapses into prose too male for my personal taste.  My favorite phrase in the book is his claim that “Seeing is metamorphosis, not mechanism” (p. 12).  He investigates how we see, what we see, what we don’t see, and more.  It’s fascinating, if not a light read.

 

Finally, I read the second volume of Ursula Le Guin’s Hainish Novels and Stories, which included The Word for World Is Forest, Stories, Five Ways to Forgiveness, and The Telling.  All of the works in this book have followed me around for days because she grabs hold of deep ideas and works them.  It’s a pleasure.  However, my very favorite part was in an essay called “On Not Reading Science Fiction” because she can throw some very good shade when needed.  Here you go:  “I have heard a man say perfectly seriously that the Native Americans before the Conquest had no technology.  As we know, kiln-fired pottery is a naturally occurring substance, baskets ripen in the summer, and Machu Picchu just grew there” (p. 760).

 

Summer total so far:  11 books

Year to date:  44 books