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