Ursula Le Guin. Once again, a deceptively simple story told by a mistress of her craft.
Blog
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Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books
Aaron Lansky. It’s not only amazing, it’s also inspiring and touching. Aaron Lansky is only a few years older than I. His life has been devoted to saving the literary record of the thriving culture decimated first by Hitler, then by Stalin, and weakened by assimilation and the good life of America. Of interest to book lovers as well as those interested in Yiddish culture.
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beppeblog: A few musings on John 2:1–11
A fine post on the marriage feast in Cana over on beppeblog.
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Clearing Land: Legacies of the American Farm
Jane Brox.
I want to say that Clearing Land makes me long for our agricultural past. But the farming past she describes so personally was never mine, nor my family’s–unless, perhaps, it was that of my Grandpa Sutton or of other, unknown, ancestors.
No, what it truly makes me long for, with its highly personal tone, is my own past, that time so easy to remember in golden tones that will never come again. It makes me grieve for a lost connection to place, and far more painful, for a simultaneous ambivalence for the place I once inhabited.
The natural beauty of Imperial Valley remains dear to me. But my real world–the irrigation, the agriculture, the dependence on driving, the feedlots and chemicals and watered lawns–have come to seem wrong.
Which is connected to the other emotional response I have to Brox’s book, apprehension for the future. How can we–humans, Americans, urban dwellers, take your pick–sustain our lives on this planet? We are too many, and we are heaped atop one another, and we make reckless decisions divorced from any sense of place or of connection to the earth.
How can we build big, sprawling cities on the most arable land? How can we allow economic systems to ruin family farms and replace them with absentee-owner corporations? How can we blithely consume foods that come from half a world away?
And what can I do about these things? It’s a mixed bag. I live in a city, but I take public transportation. I live in shared housing. I tend to give local and organic foodstuffs preference, although lower cost and convenience often win out.
It’s hard to wake up to reality. That’s why I’m grateful for books like Brox’s that open my eyes with beauty, grace, and subtlety.
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Something Rotten
Jasper Fforde. Looks to me like this is the end of this series. Thursday Next is such an appealing character, one hates to see her stories end, yet descending into utter crap would be worse. At Powell’s.
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The Language of Power
Rosemary Kirstein. It’s all becoming clearer now. The wizards call themselves “the Krue” and the language of power is mathematics (which the Steerswomen also know). This is certainly not the end of the story arc, but a lot is shown (if not explained). Here it is at Powell’s.
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Other People’s Rituals
The Revealer posts a press release they received for a National Witches Day of Prayer. Personally, I find the appropriation of the evangelical-dominated National Day of Prayer inspired magic-making (although the chant does have some lame poetry in it).
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The Lost Steersman
Rosemary Kirtstein. Curiouser and curiouser. I like the characters even more, and I still want to know what’s really going on. I hope there aren’t more than one or two more books before we get to the end.
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Dies the Fire
S.M. Stirling. What if. In this case, what if electricity and explosives suddenly ceased to work. That part’s never explained (there’s a blinding white flash that everyone sees)–space aliens? military experiment gone bad? magic? the gods? (One of the major groups in the novel are wiccans.) Lots of gore and fighting, a fair amount of idealism, and of course Bad Guys drunk on power.