What Am I Reading Wednesday - September 30 (The Oops, It's Friday! Edition)

[lebateleur]

It's been another Week. Thankfully, Friday is here at last. Here is what I was reading as of last Wednesday.

What I Just Finished Reading

The Patron Saint of Pregnant Girls – Ursala Hegi
Circuses and menageries, grief-induced magic, estranged spouses and star-crossed lovers, drowned cities, a bevy of devious old women and an order of rebel Roman Catholic nuns: The Patron Saint of Pregnant Girls shares motifs with books like The Night Circus and The Tower, The Zoo, And The Tortoise. But where those novels’ attempts at fantastical whimsy fell flat, Hegi hits all the right notes. Set in late 19th-century Germany, her novel opens as a freak wave sweeps three of a young couple’s four children out to sea. Crazed with grief, their mother throws the fourth in after the others, begging God to exchange his life for those of the eldest three; unable to cope with the loss, her husband runs away to join the circus.

It’s a grim opening to a book whose plot also includes child sexual abuse and domestic violence, homophobia, religious bigotry, and plenty of individuals who have to live with the consequences of doing bad things for the “right” reasons. The novel doesn’t pull punches with any of this, which isn’t to say it rubs readers' faces in a capital-M message; Hegi deftly lets the plot speak for itself, often to great emotional effect as the grieving parents' story interweaves with those of a circus seamstress and her neurodivergent daughter, and the renegade nuns who run an institution that's secretly much more than just a birthing home for unwed pregnant girls. I don’t want to give away more of the plot here. Suffice to say that the whimsy works in this moving and ultimately hopeful novel.

The Druids – Anne Ross
For over two decades, I’ve heard Anne Ross’s name mentioned alongside erudite and readable scholars such as Barry Cunliffe, F. Marian McNeill, and Stuart Piggott. Having just read my first book by Ross, I can only ask: was I being punked?

It will be difficult to convey to anyone who hasn’t read this book what a bad author Anne Ross is, but let me try. She writes as if she’s listened to informed people talking about some topic and is able to parrot some of what she’s heard to her audience, although without any indication that she understands any of it, or how it relates to other information.

She favors the passive voice and word salads. She consistently writes the word “role” as “rôle.” She concludes chapters with "summaries" that introduce information found nowhere else in the book. She reiterates the same disjointed pieces of information at random intervals, with no connective linkages.

I know I sound hyperbolic, so here are some sentences, chosen at random, from The Druids:

The future, with its evermore-sophisticated technologies, may reveal more wonders and a broader human picture.

One of the most rewarding disciplines is that of archeology in Europe and the British Isles, and this is increasingly the case.

Druidism flourished among the Celts of Gaul where Druidism had a long history, no one as yet knows quite how long; but they themselves believed their order to be very ancient indeed.

There can be no doubt that the Druids so constantly mentioned in the early Irish sagas, no matter how imaginary may be, the events they describe, played a real part in early Irish civilisation, the main features of which can be discerned.

Things did not change easily in the Celtic world. Sadly, that is no longer the case, and the end of the past has very nearly been accomplished.

To give you an idea of what all of this looks like in situ, here’s an entire paragraph, also chosen at random:

Without, I hope, appearing to step beyond the bounds of rational surmise, I have recently become much intrigued by Lepenski Vir, a site on the River Danube near a point known as the ‘Iron Gates’ (Serbia/Romania) (3). Although this remarkable settlement in wild, remote and almost inaccessible landscape, close to the wide reaches of the river, pre-dates the presumptive origins of the Celts by at least two thousand years, I want to briefly consider whether there is any evidence to suggest that it played some rôle as the cradle of Celtic origins. What evidence is there that could possibly justify such a tentative assumption? There are certain features which would seem, perhaps, to point to some sort of link with the much later Celts as we have come to know them. First of all, this settlement, in remote and difficult mountainous terrain, was build on the very verge of the River Danube. Danube itself is a Celtic name, as are many of the river names of Europe. It stems from a root dana which simply means ‘water’. Moreover, it is traditionally the favourite cradle of the Celts for scholars. The king of the tribe – who often was also a Druid – was an immensely powerful figure, but the Druid took precedence even over the king. In the early Irish written tradition we learn that: ‘no man may speak before the king but the king himself may not speak before the Druid.’ The Druids of antiquity claimed that their origins and their doctrine were extremely old. They were clearly not thinking in terms of two or three centuries but of perhaps two or three thousand years.

In case you’re wondering whether this made more sense in context, it was preceded by three pages of text directly lifted from Stuart Piggott and followed by a paragraph about the cult of the human head.

So, no.

Let’s try another paragraph.

As we have seen,^* the feast of Lughnasa was inaugurated by the pan-Celtic god Lugus, the Mercury of the pagan Celts. His Irish name, the Ildánach (‘the many-skilled’) testifies to the Irish belief in his unique powers and the legends about him are legion. As horse racing was a regular feature of the Lughnasa festival, it is worth noting that this god was accredited with its invention. There is an episode in one of the Dindshenchas stories which is difficult to understand. In this tradition, Lug drowns his horses in a loch. The reason for this is not given but it may be connected with the fact that riding horses across water was a regular sport at the later Lughnasa gatherings. The festival must have been widespread throughout the British Isles and in Europe. One of the finest stories comes from Cornwall and there are many tales of the ancient gatherings in Scotland, as well as traces of them in England and Wales. The Celtic culture was rooted in the land, which was from the earliest times venerated by the people and regarded as being under the protection of some powerful goddess who remained guardian of the land while the male gods moved when circumstances brought about tribal expansion or movement of any kind.

How is this connected to the previous section (about The Cattle Raid of Cooley) and the following paragraph (about immorality and drinking mead)? What is the connection of Lug drowning his horses in an Irish story to festivals elsewhere in Europe? What is the fine story from Cornwall? Or the other gatherings in the British Isles? What do female goddesses have to do with this? What does any of it have to do with anything?

Ross goes on to answer precisely none of these questions.

TL;DR: Having read this massively incoherent book cover-to-cover, I have no idea how Ross earned her reputation.

^* We have not, in fact, seen this at any point in the book.


What I Am Currently Reading

The Good Hawk – Joseph Elliott
What a palette cleanser, after Anne Ross.


What I'm Reading Next

I didn’t pick up any additional books this week, so I’m considering The Owl Service, Red, White, & Royal Blue, and The Broken Raven, which is the sequel to this week’s Elliott.

これで以上です。