Reading-year’s end
You can now stream some of the old Asterix movies with Amazon Prime.
For example, Asterix and Cleopatra – an old staple of my family’s. It has one of my favorite scenes, “Queen Cleopatra’s Bath.”
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Karin has been looking after Samuel the last few nights so I can meet my annual reading quota.
Today I finished Doctor Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, which occupied me during many nights, five pages or so each night. It’s the best travel book I’ve read. Johnson closely observes the landscape and society of the Highlands and draws shrewd conclusions about Scottish ways of living. He makes insightful comparisons between the Highlands and other places.
His paragraphs are pithy and elegant and dense with literary nutriment.
He’s wonderfully modest. So many travel books are inward journeys; this one isn’t. Johnson is concerned with the ecosystem, with all of Britain, all of history; not with himself.
His longest discourse on himself is his closing paragraph:
I have to finish two more books:
(1) Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (a re-read);
and
(2) Terri Jentz’s Strange Piece of Paradise.
I’ve been reading Strange Piece for most of the year. It has 540 large pages of small print, and it’s quite a slow burn.
In 1977, at a state park in central Oregon, a man dressed as a cowboy attacks two transient female college students. He drives over them with a pickup truck and chops them with an axe.
They survive.
The axeman is never officially identified or charged with the crime.
In the 1990s, one of the victims – Jentz, the author – repeatedly returns to the scene. She investigates informally. She learns that the locals strongly suspect one of their own as having committed the crime.
Jentz shows us her stages of grieving, of coping with trauma.
Then we learn about the community that spawned this crime.
Slowly, warily, the suspect is approached. Jentz circles around him, encountering wounded women who’ve managed to pull themselves out from the whirlwind of his person. Then she peers into the storm and glimpses the emptiness inside.
I can’t tell you more than that. I still have 150 pages to go.
For example, Asterix and Cleopatra – an old staple of my family’s. It has one of my favorite scenes, “Queen Cleopatra’s Bath.”
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Karin has been looking after Samuel the last few nights so I can meet my annual reading quota.
Today I finished Doctor Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, which occupied me during many nights, five pages or so each night. It’s the best travel book I’ve read. Johnson closely observes the landscape and society of the Highlands and draws shrewd conclusions about Scottish ways of living. He makes insightful comparisons between the Highlands and other places.
His paragraphs are pithy and elegant and dense with literary nutriment.
He’s wonderfully modest. So many travel books are inward journeys; this one isn’t. Johnson is concerned with the ecosystem, with all of Britain, all of history; not with himself.
His longest discourse on himself is his closing paragraph:
Such are the things which this journey has given me an opportunity of seeing, and such are the reflections which that sight has raised. Having passed my time almost wholly in cities, I may have been surprised by modes of life and appearances of nature, that are familiar to men of wider survey and more varied conversation. Novelty and ignorance must always be reciprocal, and I cannot but be conscious that my thoughts on national manners, are the thoughts of one who has seen but little.♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
I have to finish two more books:
(1) Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (a re-read);
and
(2) Terri Jentz’s Strange Piece of Paradise.
I’ve been reading Strange Piece for most of the year. It has 540 large pages of small print, and it’s quite a slow burn.
In 1977, at a state park in central Oregon, a man dressed as a cowboy attacks two transient female college students. He drives over them with a pickup truck and chops them with an axe.
They survive.
The axeman is never officially identified or charged with the crime.
In the 1990s, one of the victims – Jentz, the author – repeatedly returns to the scene. She investigates informally. She learns that the locals strongly suspect one of their own as having committed the crime.
Jentz shows us her stages of grieving, of coping with trauma.
Then we learn about the community that spawned this crime.
Slowly, warily, the suspect is approached. Jentz circles around him, encountering wounded women who’ve managed to pull themselves out from the whirlwind of his person. Then she peers into the storm and glimpses the emptiness inside.
I can’t tell you more than that. I still have 150 pages to go.
