By Claire Tomalin. Fantastic. What a glimpse Sam gives us into the Restoration. Of particular interest to me because Pepys is contemporary with the rise of Quakerism. I bought the book because of my delight in the Pepys diary weblog, and it lived up to my expectations to fill me in on Sam’s life in a readable fashion.
The Children of Herakles
Sunday a week ago I went to see the Peter Sellars production of Euripides’ The Children of Herakles in Cambridge. It was impressive and exciting. Here’s a good review of this production and also of the Fiona Shaw Medea now in New York.
Sarah Mapps Douglass: Faithful Attender of Quaker Meeting: View from the Back Bench
By Margaret Hope Bacon. With a foreword by Vanessa Julye. It’s really good to have this story published. Bits of Sarah Mapps Douglass’s story have been told before, but this pamphlet places what Margaret Bacon has found about her life into the context of the times and of her family and friendships. It makes clear a shameful part of Quaker history.
Jewish Spirituality: A Brief Introduction for Christians
By Rabbi Lawrence Kushner. A kind and warm-hearted book. It is brief, and I found it to be very pertinent to my own spiritual life.
The Reality Dysfunction: Expansion
By Peter F. Hamilton. The plot thickens. The characters continue to draw you in. But I stalled out upon buying #3. (I skimmed–a sure kiss of death in a page-turner. It was late at night and I should have just gone to bed, but you know how it is, turn one page, then “let’s see what happens”.)
Zen and the Art of Knitting: Exploring the Links between Knitting, Spirituality, and Creativity
By Bernadette Murphy. Not in any way a zen book, but the subtitle is accurate. She gets self-indulgent at times, but many of the women she talks to are very interesting (and they are all women).
The Reality Disfunction, Part 1: Emergence
By Peter F. Hamilton. A space opera in every sense. 588 pages and it’s only the first volume of six. A tad on the horror side, and a bit salacious, but it manages to be a page-turner.
A History of Hand Knitting
R
Media picks from New Internationalist
Galileo’s Daughter
By Dava Sobel. An easy, informative read. I was most shocked by the incidental details of life in early 16th-century Italy. And some details of modern progress came home vis-a-vis the foundation of Quakerism just a few decades later: no gravitational theory; only recently invented pendulum clocks; and of course the Inquisition still at work in Italy declaring a heliocentric world heretical.