What Am I Reading Wednesday - the "Monday After September 9" edition

Well, it was A Week at work last week. I've come to terms with the realization that I'm just not going to get these done on time as often as not during the Age of Covid.

What I Just Finished Reading

The Recorded Sayings of Zen Master Joshu – James Green
This book does what it says on the label: it’s a translation of Joshu’s sayings and little else. Reading the volume makes it very clear why—even centuries ago—such records were so often anthologized with capping verses and commentary; absent these elements, they read like an endless procession of “you had to be there” anecdotes, which is essentially what they are. Green does provide frequent footnotes, but they’re bare bones and often seem to explain the bits of the anecdotes that are already clear from context and ignore the references with which many readers are less likely to be familiar. Add to this Green’s inexplicable decision to use Wade Giles to transliterate the Chinese names (seriously, why is ANYONE still using Wade-Giles), and you have a book that’s probably of interest to specialists, but other readers would do better to pick up a good translation of the Blue Cliff Record or Mumonkan.

The Occult Book – Mark Greer
A good, easily readable introduction to major individuals, events, and systems of Western occultism over the last 5500 years. Each entry is a page long, with a related, frequently full-color, full page illustration on the verso. Green is remarkably willing to call out frauds as frauds and set the record straight on New Age sacred cows (e.g. Wicca faithfully preserves pre-Christian belief systems). This book is definitely about breadth over depth, but it does its breadth extremely well.

The Midnight Queen – Sylvia Izzo Hunter
Hunter nails the narrative voice: The Midnight Queen could have been written by Austen, or the Brontes, or Eliot...if they’d lived in an alternate Britain that wasn’t overrun by Danes, Saxons, and Normans after the Romans left and where Christianity never established a beachhead. It’s the best pastiche I’ve encountered since Susanna Clarke. Hunter nails not only dialogue, but the social mores and interpersonal relationships, all while incorporating some modern YA novel tropes in a period-appropriate and humorous fashion.

I really loved the setting: in The Midnight Queen, Scotland and Ireland are still independent kingdoms, and Brittany is part of England. Cornish, Welsh, and Breton are widely spoken. Greco-Roman paganism is the state religion, but the common folk still worship native deities.

The plot is also a good romp: the novel opens with Gray Marshall, of Oxford’s college of magic, being press-ganged into late night shenanigans that see him exiled to his professor’s Continental estate, stripped of his magic and fearfully aware of a shadowy plot with implications for the future of the entire kingdom. And there begins the dual comedy of manners/political thriller that forms the backbone of the plot. Add a fun cast of characters and you have a solidly good book.


What I Am Currently Reading

The Grey King – Susan Cooper
To wrap up my reread of the Dark Is Rising sequence.

The Graces – Laure Eve
A “magical high schoolers” YA novel is the dessert course I want after The Midnight Queen.

Marked – Sarah Fine
Thirty percent of the way through, and I will keep reading a chapter a day until I finish.

A Handbook of the Cornish Language – Henry Jenner
I finished the chapter on nouns and have moved on to adjectives and numerals.

The Silver Bough vol. 1 – F. Marian McNeill
After over two decades of trying to get my hands on a physical copy, I finally broke down and got the overpriced kindle edition.


What I'm Reading Next

Last weak I picked up a copies of Rosalind Miles’s Isolde.

これで以上です。