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Just finished listening to "Anna Karenina" and am emotionally overwhelmed. My love for Russian literature is restored, and I want to read everything Tolstoy has ever written, with lots of breaks for frivolity before, after, and in between.
Halfway through "Pilgrim's Regress" and realized that I get really irritated at the use of not only French, but Latin and Greek in my reading. My wee, small mind wants to retaliate with accusations of hubris. That said, I love Lewis from what I've read previously, and though I don't think this is as good as his Narnia Chronicles, it is still a very clever work. Obviously the deeper meanings escape me, not having a classical, medieval, or renaissance education. Pffft.
I tried to listen to Kate Jacob's "Knit the Season" and just cannot slog through all the back story that she insists on at the start of her books. I loved her "Friday Night Knitting Club" but her sequels just turn me off. This author needs to learn that readers don't need to know everything thing about their characters at the start, and some things they just don't need to know at all.
The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. About 1/3 of the way through. Great survey of the discovery of the Atom and Atomic Physics in the early 20th century. Backgrounds of all the famous (and some not too famous) players. Not a light read but it flows well.
I have recently finished The Golden Ass by Lucius Apuleius (trans. by Jack Lindsay.) This a second century C.E. Latin novel, which is a picaresque series of adventures, punctuated with some usually cynical moral tales. I have had the book forever, and managed to successfully avoid it for years. However, I grabbed it for lunch hour reading, and found that I loved it. I doubt that many people would enjoy it, but the translation is exuberantly bawdy and darkly comic, though overall it is about a civilized world that has descended into lawlessness, where the rich lord it materially and legally over the poor, and where religion is an ultimate refuge...though one that clearly leads to political and social eminence. (I did wonder if Apuleius intended this latter development as a sly poke at religion, or if he was straight-faced about it.)
The other books was On An Irish Island by Robert Kanigel. This book is about the Great Blasket island off of the coast of Co. Kerry, Ireland. Its inhabitants were Irish-speakers who lived a very hard life fishing the ocean from frail tar-skinned boats and attempting kitchen garden farming. Early in the 20th century the island produced a small group of moving native autobiographical narratives. These enjoyed success in the early days of the Free State when there was a drive to restore the use of the Irish language to wider usage, and in English translations they found an equally large audience. The tiny community became a magnet for a series of adoring scholars and researchers, whom the islanders seem to have accommodated very simply but with great affection. And their autobiographies were the result of the encouragement and help given to their authors by a few of these visitors, and the intense bonds that developed between these naïve writers and their mentors.
The book spans the years until the final evacuation of the island in the middle of the 20th century. It covers the careers of perhaps a half dozen of these scholar visitors and their relationship with the islanders over the years, and it seems clear through letters, recollections, etc. that there was an abiding affection on both sides that lasted for decades, even as the island community and culture was dying. (And there were also two star-crossed romances with island women, one of whom immigrated to the U.S. and became a nun, and the other who married an island man, while managing to preserve a long, long friendship and correspondence with the outsider who had fallen in love with her.)
It is a very warm book, and requires no special knowledge of Ireland or the Irish language to appreciate.
Listening to: "On Self Esteem and Scholars, Witches and Other Freedom Fighters" by Gloria Steinem (Audiobook, CD, Unabridged) Less than an hour of listening, but overpowering from the first minute. If I ruled the world, I would insist that EVERY sentient human listen to this talk. God bless you, Gloria Steinem.
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