What Am I Reading Wednesday - March 17

This week's roundup happens to fall on St. Patrick's Day; ironically, although much of my reading is Celtic themed, this week's is not.

What I Finished Reading This Week

The Absolutely True Diary Of A Part-time Indian – Sherman Alexie
This book is compulsively readable; I finished it in under a day. Alexie’s unreliable narrator starts off in typical “woe is me” modern YA protagonist fashion: nobody has it harder, is less understood, takes more undeserved hard knocks than he. But read a few more chapters and it quickly becomes clear that things aren’t as cut and dry as the protagonist first sees them; read a few more, and the protagonist starts to realize this himself. It’s a carefully drawn and rewarding study in character growth, and deeply satisfying to follow over the course of the novel. Alexie’s portrayal of reservation life is similarly nuanced. We see its strengths (reflexive generosity, community, solidarity) and warts both structural (alcoholism, endemic poverty) and cultural (casual homophobia). Ellen Forney’s illustrations add additional depth. This one was definitely worth reading.

Skellig – David Almond
Skellig opens with a double whammy for fourteen-year-old protagonist Michael: uprooted by his parents’ decision to move into a derelict house they plan to fix up, his life is thrown into complete disarray when his baby sister is born with a life-threatening heart defect. Almond’s novel shines when he focuses on how these events affect Michael: his sudden alienation from his friends, the unintentional emotional neglect by parents preoccupied with worry for their newborn. It’s on much shakier footing whenever Almond pivots to magical realism, embodied by the titular Skellig, the mysterious quasi-human being Michael discovers sheltering in the property’s condemned garage. Michael’s interactions with Skellig and Mina, his precocious homeschooled neighbor, are written in overly stylistic language that detracts from the uncompromising emotional rawness of the family scenes. Skellig’s role in the story is clear from the outset, and I didn’t feel much about him one way or the other. I was much more conflicted about Mina: on the one hand, as a self-assured, intelligent female character, she’s awesome. On the other hand, she’s sometimes little more than a mouthpiece for Almond’s philosophical musings, and I can’t help but feel that with a bit more effort he could have reworked these into dialogue much more in keeping with a character her age, leading in turn to a stronger book. When all is said and done, I’m glad I read this, particularly for its subtle portrayal of intra-family dynamics, but I doubt I’ll feel the urge to read it twice.

London And The Seventeenth Century – Margarette Lincoln
London And The Seventeenth Century is well-written and highly informative. Lincoln has a knack for identifying and explaining the events and trends that shaped 17th century London’s development in approachable and entertaining prose. Readers will gain a solid understanding of how the interplay between England’s rulers, London’s government, and the city’s aristocracy, tradespeople and merchants, and impoverished residents shaped the development of city and nation. In examining this, Lincoln tackles both traditional subjects (defense, diplomacy, religion, trade) and cultural development (architecture, entertainment, fashion, leisure pursuits), and how each changed as the city endured civil war, foreign invasion, the great fire, and plagues. From debates about civil rights, gender roles, immigration, political factionalism, religion in politics, and socioeconomic inequality, there are a lot of fascinating parallels between that era and the present day, which Lincoln skillfully draws out. My review copy lacked all the maps and several of the illustrations listed in the table of contents, alongside other errors that I hope are corrected in the final proof. That said, this was still a fascinating and approachable read, and I recommend it to fans of history or well-written nonfiction in general.


What I Am Currently Reading

The Wicked Cometh - Laura Carlin
A little heavy-handed as of the first chapter, but still worlds better than Things In Jars.

Complete Book of Ceremonial Magic – Lon Milo DuQuette & David Shoemaker, eds.
This week I read “Polytheistic Ceremonial Magic” by John Michael Greer, whose The Occult Book I very much enjoyed. This essay is much more of a mixed bag. On the one hand, yay synchronism. Monotheism’s insistence on One True Doctrine (however any given sect happens to define that) doesn’t make a lot of sense (and isn’t so successful, judging from the frequent incorporation of other systems' deities, symbols, and rituals). But neither does Greer satisfactorily answer why anyone should want to incorporate various and sundry pantheons into a ritual structure based so heavily on the concepts of the tetragrammaton and pentagrammaton, particularly if one is going insist—as does Greer—on using only deities whose names are spelled with four letters for major parts of the ritual. (Nor does he make a great case for this. Of the examples he gives, "Jove" is not always spelled with four letters, and "Bast" only has four letters if transliterated into English, which begs the question of what to do about inherent vowels. And so on.)

The House On Vesper Sands – Paraic O’Donnell
I really should have waited longer to reread this as I remember pretty much everything about it, but it’s just so. Damn. Good.


What I'm Reading Next

It's been a week for acquiring books. I picked up Veike Kespersakis’ Calligraphy In 24 Hrs, James MacLaren’s Beginner’s Gaelic, Douglas J. Penick’s The Age Of Waiting, Martin Scott’s Death And Thraxas anthology, Eleanor Winters’ Mastering Copperplate Calligraphy, and Tyr vols. 2 and 3.

これで以上です。