Sat Nam! (literally "Truth Name"--a Sikh greeting)
And here are the reviews:
The Worm and the Bird by Coralie Bickford-Smith: A picture book for adults and sophisticated older children. The illustrations are in a limited palate of black, white, assorted golden browns and yellow and integrate the text extremely well. The worm is looking for more space, and the bird is looking for...well, the author never says, but you can guess. I'm taking it as an allegory of what striving ultimately comes to and of how life needs life. Not bad.
Holiday Cheer: Hiddensee by Gregory Maguire: The subtitle is A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker, but it's really more about the Nutcracker's maker, a foundling named Dirk who becomes a toymaker and Klara's godfather. It's a very rich, multi-layered, beautifully written and somewhat weird take on myths and fairytales, including Hansel and Gretel, plus Athena as the basis for the wise fairy godmothers. I found it a rewarding book when I took the time to read it carefully. I wouldn't recommend it for a quick fun beach read. But I recommend it highly as a book that pushes the mind and psyche in interesting directions. I'm kinda sorry it's over.
But it wasn't perfect. Notably, as someone of Middle-Eastern heritage, I can tell you that some facets of the Nastaran -- Dirk's inamorata who is Persian -- are somewhat off. She wouldn't have objected to other women in the house, she would have objected to extraneous men. She also wouldn't have used the word baklava when mentioning favorite childhood foods; that word is Greek; it's not the word used in Arabic, and wouldn't be the word used in Farsi. But I understand that Maguire used it for clarity. One caveat for people who have read Maguire's Wicked: I have not read Wicked, but understand it is a snarky remake of OZ. Not much if any snark in this one. Fine with me, but maybe not with people who are Wicked fans.
Tag Team: Warrior: Navaho Code Talkers with Photos by Kenji Kawano, Forward by Carl Gorman, Code Talker, & Intro by Benis M. Frank, USMC: Basically a photo album of 75 surviving code talkers with some of their quotes, plus other info. The photos are good quality black & white. Some quotes are too short to be interesting, but some detail amusing incidents, such as hearing a thump in a foxhole, looking around for the intruder or the grenade and discovering instead that a frog had landed on a fellow Code Talker's back. Other code talker quotes aren't so funny: at least two mention getting arrested by members of the US army as Japanese. The code talkers, it turns out, only served in the Marines...and only in the Pacific.
Gorman provides an inspiring story of how he met Kawano and how Kawano became the official photographer of the code talkers. Kawano is Japanese.
Frank provides some interesting info about the how the code talkers were started and how they were trained. Turns out there was a son of a missionary who was raised on the reservation and spoke fluent Navajo. When he learned that the Marines were looking for an unbreakable code, he essentially said
Have I got a unbreakable code for you!
I have another, hopefully more thorough, book on the code talkers which I hope to read sometime later this year. But this was a good warm up and I enjoyed it as an introduction.
The Prince and the Pilgrim by Mary Stewart: Mr. Siri and I watched a lecture series on Arthurian history and legends early this year. I read the Stewart's Merlin trilogy decades ago and liked them a lot; her writing brings early early Medieval Britain to life. So I decided to give this book a shot as it featured one of the less well known Arthurian sideshow stories.
Stewart makes the valiant attempt to push the story out of its High Medieval/Late Medieval guise and back into the early post-classical era (where Arthur's legend began), and does so reasonably well. There were a few slow passages, but not many, and her descriptive abilities are in full play, as is her ability at characterization.
Like a Novel, Only Real (also Freebies—a hand-me-down from my mother): The Zookeeper's Wife by Diane Ackerman: The first chapter or two of this book are slow, giving us the starting point before the WWII storm, but they are so filled with the sensual imagery for which Ackerman is renowned that they are well worth reading. And as the daughter of a zoophile, who has spent much time in San Diego's Zoo, I can attest that Ackerman's imagery is highly accurate. The rest of the book moves at breathtaking speed, very much like a novel.
Antonina and her husband Jan, the zookeeper and a leader in the Resistance, hid at least three hundred Jews in the Warsaw Zoo at various times during the Holocaust. Many (those who looked least Semitic) were hidden in plain sight, mingling with zoo visitors and/or appearing to be family servants. Others developed a nocturnal lifestyle, hiding in the zoo's empty cages or the "attic" (a storage room on the second floor of the zookeeper's villa) during the day and coming out at night. It's about as inspirational as stories get, and gorgeously written.
Girls Chase Boys Chase Girls (also Matryoshka Books): The Annotated Mansfield Park by Jane Austen, annotated and edited by David M. Shapard: I could put Mansfield Park in Matryoshka Books, since I have read The Jane Austen Book Club, a novel in which all of her mature novels are embodied and discussed by one or other of the characters. Thing is, while I remember the embodiments of Persuasion, Northanger Abbey and Emma, I don't remember much at all about the discussions or the embodiment of this one. But oh boy, does this Cinderella story have a bunch of love triangles, really a love triangle chain. Mr. Rushworth takes a shine to Maria Bertram, the cousin of our heroine. She isn't real thrilled with him, but likes his wealth and becomes engaged to him before she meets and falls in love with Henry Crawford. Mr. Crawford flirts with her mercilessly, as well as her sister Julia, but he doesn't propose to either of them, He in turn falls in love with Fanny Price, our heroine, to whom he does propose. She refuses because she dislikes him intensely, she disapproves of the way he's treated her cousins...and besides, she's hopelessly (and because of her poverty, it really is apparently hopeless) in love with Edmund Bertram, her cousin. Edmund in turn falls in love with Mary Crawford, Henry's sister, a VERY wealthy woman, who isn't really sure she wants to marry a younger son destined for the clergy. In the end (and if you don't want to know the ending, don't finish this paragraph), Henry runs off with Maria who had married Mr. Rushworth after Henry emotionally jilts her, and the scandal of that affair effectively bars Edmund from marrying Mary, and Fanny from marrying Henry, and since Edmund and Fanny have been friends since they first met, you can guess the happy ending from there.
The intricacies of this chain make this Austen's longest and most complex work. It may also be her most profound, because she's dealing with a main character who observes and thinks deeply. It's the only Austen novel to which Nabokov gave the time of day. Most (maybe all) Austen novels talk about the poverty potential for ladies who don't marry or who marry beneath them, but this is the only one to actually show that downward mobility in detail, with a good look at Fanny's impoverished genteel-gone-bad biological family. Some people dislike Fanny Price as passive or prudish, but I don't find her so. Her refusal to marry a seductive-rejective jerk is not the act of a man-hating woman, as at least one editor I've read has claimed, but a very relevant act for this era of MeToo.
My main quibble concerns only one paragraph, the fourth-wall-breaking opening to the final chapter. Usually I don't mind breaks in the fourth wall, but this one wasn't done all that well IMHO. Otherwise, it was a wonderful book, much faster than expected. I'm glad to have read it.
Despite the added length, I'm glad I got this annotated edition. Sure, there were times something was easy enough to figure out, but there were a number of cases where a word didn't mean what it means to us. And there are some very interesting historical notes. My favorite: when Fanny's girl cousins marvel that she doesn't know how to put together a map, I was impressed that children were taught to make maps...but that's not what it means; it means they learned geography by putting together jigsaw puzzle maps, and that, dear readers, is the probable origin of jigsaw puzzles.
Laughing Matters: The Herring-Seller's Apprentice by L.C. Tyler: So, after reading a lengthy classic, I figured I should treat myself to an amusing mystery. Take one part The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and put it in the pot with one part Bertie Wooster and Jeeves (Wooster played by hack writer Ethelred Tressider and Jeeves played by his literary agent Elsie Thirkettle, a foul-mouthed nightmare of an agent...but legit). Oh, and add a treatise on writing, plus a few essays on Ethelred's father into the mix.
Does the mishmash work? Yes and no. The yes is that the plot is interesting, even if parts of it were easy to guess early on. The ending zipped along.
But the no is problematic. The humor hid a great many clues. That meant that I had a choice between reading the thing slowly with an eye to the clues or quickly with an eye to the humor. Couldn't do both at once. And the essays on Ethelred's father, while funny and ultimately necessary to the plot, also stopped the action.
But I liked it well enough that I may tackle it's sequel sometime.
The Navaho Code Talkers by Doris A. Paul: Informative, but not well written.
Freebies (Also Out of the Park on First At-Bat and Vast Acclaim): Spider Woman's Daughter by Anne Hillerman: Mr. Siri, knowing that I like Tony Hillerman's mysteries, picked up this one by his daughter at our then-local little free library. It's her first novel – though not her first book—and it won the Spur Award.
It's wonderful. Enough chewy mixed in with the action for my tastes. You can tell that the Hillermans treat Navaho culture, religion, practice and thought with considerable respect. At the same time, they don't whitewash the problems. If you're going to use material based on a group of people to which you don't belong, this is the way to do it.
No Cliff Notes This Time: Silas Marner by George Eliot: A few years ago, while researching a historical novel that I'm just getting back into (maybe), I discovered the required reading list from 1909 (the year of my protag's first year of high school) for Oregon high schools. Silas Marner was one of the books required for the that first year. So I read it for research.
It's the story of a weaver who's betrayed in the worst possible way(s) by his apparent best friend...and apparently also by God. He moves to a new village, develops a miserly streak, loses his money, and soon thereafter discovers and takes into his life an abandoned toddler, a golden-haired little girl. And therein lies his salvation and his reintegration back into society.
It's not the world's fastest read. As I read the first part, I could think of all sorts of ways of rewriting the thing and making it interesting by contemporary standards. The end of the Part I made the beginning of Part II look like this was going to be an overly long epilogue, but after a chapter or two, Part II turns out to be what the book is ultimately about. Here's the quote: "When a man turns a blessing from his door, it falls to them as take it in."
I found it refreshing. Found the slowness useful, both for finding the useful research bits, and for developing a deeper understanding of what Mary Ann Evan (AKA George Eliot) was saying with her long and complex sentences. I would have liked annotations. But I'm not sorry I read this.
Holy Moly (Also Run for the Border): Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart by Alice Walker: I'd picked two books to (hopefully) read this year that are set in the partly Amazon Basin. Little did I know that this book is also partially set there.
It's a trippy book about a spiritual journey, which is my kind of thing. Unfortunately, it's also deeply flawed. Rather than a novel, it's more like a frame story providing a venue for a series of folks telling tales around the campfire (sometimes literally). Now, that's okay. It made some of the horror of some of those stories easier to read. But the way the main protagonist is presented throughout the book, acts to undercut some of the more cogent parts of the underlying message. Also the plot is flimsy and obvious from miles away. Nonetheless, I'm not sorry I read it.
Lol Random (Also Bits and Pieces): Twice-Told Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne: Back when I started doing the AW Book Challenges in 2017, I opened up the Gutenberg Project site and came up with this book. I didn't have a copy then, and don't care much for e-books, but I decided to read it the next time Lol Random came up after I'd gotten a copy. So here we are.
I'm not sorry I read it. There are bits I can potentially use for the book I'm researching. It also gives me a strong feeling of how much younger we are now that we're a chronologically older nation full of elders like myself. (He describes many old ladies as "withered," and withered I'm not!)
But I'm not sorry to be done with it either. The use of racial slurs was appalling (even when he was showing how the word "Savage" might be better employed describing Puritans than Native Americans). It was also deeply gloomy. How weird that Longfellow described the book as breathing of May! (Makes me wonder how terrible the literature of the period actually was,) The stories were written before Hawthorne became successful, and the sense that he's had his hopes smashed time and again pervades the piece. I came close to scrapping it several times. But I persevered, both for the research and so that I could type this up.
Blessings,
Siri Kirpal