October 2023 Reading

  

Another month has passed.  I read five books in October, one of them a picture book, one nonfiction, and three fiction.

 

The picture book, The Making of Butterflies, was written by Zora Neale Hurston and adapted by Ibram X. Kendi.  It has fabulous illustrations by Kah Yangni.  It tells how God created butterflies to be the friends of the flowers.  It’s just plain beautiful.  Buy it for kids you love or buy it for yourself.  (My librarian kid told me I needed it and he was right.)

 

Charles Tart is The Guy when it comes to discussions of consciousness, at least in an academic setting.  I met him once, a long time ago, when he was a professor at Davis.  (He may still be one for all I know!).  His book States of Consciousness was written in the 80’s and it feels like it.  I had forgotten what it was like to soak in language that assumed that all humans were male.  I haven’t gone to look to see how things have advanced in the field of consciousness since then, but I expect that some of his interest in altered states of consciousness and their connections to psychology lives on in the current work on psychedelics and microdosing.  The book is surprisingly engaging for an academic work with footnotes and charts.  Much of it sets out a system for thinking about states of consciousness and then lays out possible paths for future research.  It’s probably not a general interest book, but I liked it.

 

A while back, my kid’s library had a fundraiser for which someone donated a depiction of the mad tea party from Alice in Wonderland made from Lego.  Of course I bid on it and I won it in the silent auction.  It came with an edition of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass with manga-style illustrations by Kriss Sison.  It is never a waste of time to revisit Alice.  I prefer the first of the two books, but there is much to love in the Looking Glass Country as well.  The illustrations were pleasant, but I found myself wondering what an illustrator who had not seen Tenniel’s illustrations, the Disney versions, or the ones from the Johnny Depp film would do.  It might not be possible to find such a person.  That said, a person who needed an updated sort of entrée into Alice’s world might gravitate to the story as illustrated here.

 

I’m not sure when or why I picked up The Monkey Grammarian by Octavio Paz.  I knew he was a poet and a Nobel Laureate, but, it turns out, he was also the Mexican Ambassador to India in the 1960s.  This is the setting for this book about Hanuman.  It’s also about meaning and language and all kinds of other stuff.  Here’s a sample:  “An inexhaustible flow of shadows and forms in which the same elements kept appearing—their bodies, their garments, the few objects and pieces of furniture in the room—combined each time in a different way, although, as in a poem, there were repetitions, rhymes, analogies, figures that appeared and reappeared with more or less the regularity of a surging sea:  beds of lava, flying scissors, violins dangling from a noose, vessels full of seething letters of the alphabet, eruptions of triangles, pitched battles between rectangles and hexagons, thousands of dead victims of the London plague transmuted into clouds on which the Virgin ascends changed into the thousands of naked bodies locked in embrace of one of the colossal orgies of Harmony dreamed of by Fourier turned into the towering flames that devour the corpse of Sardanapalus, sea-going mountains, civilizations drowned in a drop of theological ink, screw propellers planted on the Mount of Calvary, conflagrations, conflagrations, the wind perpetually amid the flames, the wind that stirs up the ashes and scatters them.” (p. 63-64)  So not exactly easy reading, but also so very beautiful.  Absolutely worth reading.

 

Finally, I read The Petrified Flesh by Cornelia Funke.  I have loved her work since I first discovered Inkheart and its sequels.  This particular book is the first in another series, called Reckless.  I bought the third book when I randomly came across it in a used book store and had to find the previous two before I read it.  There is also, I think, at least one more book in the series, but that is a problem for another day.  Anyway.  Funke tells fabulous stories.  This particular one involves two brothers (Jacob and Will) who find a mirror that takes them into a world where fairy tale things are real.  Not unlike the Grimms, actually.  The book manages to be dark without feeling depressing, probably because the characters are likeable as well as suffering.  No plot spoilers, but there are plenty of stakes and it’s exciting up to the end.  (Tune in next month to find out how the sequels are!)  Highly recommend.

 

October total:  5

Fall to date total:  13

Year to date total:  68