Wednesday Word

I recently finished reading The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack by Mark Hodder. There's one word that succintly describes what kind of book this is:

Steampunk: a subgenre of speculative fiction, usually set in an anachronistic quasi-Victorian alternate history setting. It could be described by the slogan “What the past would look like if the future had happened sooner.” It includes fiction with science fiction, fantasy or horror themes.

from Urban Dictionary

More on The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack soon.

The Farthest Shore by Ursula K. LeGuin

The conclusion to the Earthsea Trilogy

The Farthest Shore is loaded with even more of the same beautiful writing that I so enjoyed in A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan. Sparrowhawk, the great wizard and now the Archmage of Roke, has become aged, uniquely experienced and wise over the many years not covered by any of these novels. A greater problem than ever is brought before him: a problem with the function of magic and wizardry itself.

Sparrowhawk and a young prince travel long distances and to many exotic places. (My favorite is a floating civilization of people who live their entire lives on rafts far from any land.) The travelers consort with dragons, and face death many times and in many forms. As always, Sparrowhawk’s great abilities with magic must be the key to victory, but it is his bravery, self-control, intelligence and wisdom, along with those of his companion, that even make that possible.

The imagery and narrative style are really the most enjoyable aspects of this novel for me, even as they were in the other Earthsea novels. I think I’d love to read about a trip to the grocery store if it was written like this. The book is short but the journey of which it tells is long and hard. The descriptions are often dreamy, but still somehow lucid and richly detailed. There is a deep history in Earthsea from which to draw and a worthy future to protect.

I just love these books, and I’m sorry I did not read them earlier. LeGuin has created such a wonderful world full of fantastic places, relatable characters, bittersweet memories and powerful magic. I’d love to read the Earthsea trilogy again, but, alas, I have so many other books I should have read by now.

 You might also like: AWizard of Earthsea, and The Tombs ofAtuan

A Year of Books I Should Have Read by Now

By the Shores of Silver Lake by Laura Ingalls Wilder

By the Shores of Silver Lake is a bit less quaint and a bit more hard-core than the preceding books in the Little House series. Before the first two pages are over, we learn that the family has been sick, is still weak from that illness, and Mary is blind. The hunting has become poor near Plum Creek and the farm has not produced a good wheat crop. The Ingalls’s decide to sell the farm and move west toward a homestead in Dakota Territory.

The style of this story is colored not only by the transitions in the American West brought on by the rush to settle the empty spaces and the breaking of ground for the railroad, but also by Laura’s own changes in maturity and understanding. In some of the earlier books, Laura Ingalls Wilder, the writer, is giving us hints about the seriousness of situations that maybe the less mature Laura of the story does not understand. In By the Shores of Silver Lake, we can see that Laura has grown up enough to understand, worry, fear, and desire to participate in some of the more difficult situations. She is still a free spirit and bravely meets new challenges such as being “eyes for Mary” and “seeing aloud” for her, and quickly learning to walk steadily in a moving car during her first train ride.

The Ingalls’s life in their new home seems like it will be more challenging than ever, although not just because of the necessity of braving the elements under relatively primitive conditions. The world now seems to be full of what Caroline Ingalls calls “rough men,” the kind of people from which Laura and her sisters have been sheltered for most of their life. Caroline’s worries, warnings, and attempts to keep her daughters proper young women seem to be symbolic of another transition, that of decent American society itself. From my point of view, it seems like sheltered, genteel girls wouldn’t have much of a chance of survival in the environment in which the Ingalls end up in Dakota Territory.

Laura’s plucky spirit is probably up to the challenge. There are some foreshadows of her future life (she decides she must be a teacher to help pay for Mary’s education, and she gets her first glimpse of Almanzo Wilder, though she is more interested in his horses.) It seems that being the eyes of her blind sister helped to make her such and observant and descriptive writer. She is adventurous, more like her father, and, even if I knew nothing about these stories ahead of time, I think I’d be convinced she’s going to be just fine. Her poor mother, on the other hand, faithful and hard-working as she is, still seems to be in for a bumpy ride.


You might also like On the Banks of Plum Creek by Laura Ingalls Wilder

A Year of Books I Should Have Read By Now

The Ruth Stout No-Work Garden Book by Ruth Stout and Richard Clemence

I didn’t think I would be including gardening books in this reading journal. For one thing, I rarely read them cover to cover. I usually use them as reference material and inspiration (which I tend to forget or ignore), but Ruth Stout’s No-Work Garden Book was an exception.

It is wise to view the concept of “no work” gardening with a bit of skepticism, of course, and I didn’t really read this book hoping to master the secrets of growing vegetables without lifting a finger. I had heard of Stout through other gardening journals and sources and found her attitudes refreshing, her methods intriguing, and her words highly amusing. When I came across this book at the local library, I gave into my curiosity. When I had read the first few chapters, I knew I was going to read the whole book.

Stout’s “no work” gardening system involved permanently mulching her entire vegetable garden with leaves and hay. She just pushed aside the mulch to plant, never tilled, and pushed the mulch back around the plants as they grew. Since this mulch was organic matter, it constantly decayed and degraded and effectively served as a nutritive compost that continuously fed the soil and the plants. She did this for many years with fabulous success, much to the delight and dismay of other organic gardeners, experts, scientists and, eventually, followers and fans.

As intriguing as Stout’s methods are, the delightfully cheerful and sometimes quirky way she engages the reader is what made this book worth reading from beginning to end. Some of her anecdotes and phrasings are really funny and the text is surprisingly devoid of any of the crankiness or I-told-you-so gloating you might expect from a successful gardener of a certain age who has become (deservedly) set in her ways. The book was fun to read and I felt like I would have loved to have a conversation or two about gardening, or anything else, really, with Ruth Stout.



Coming soon: On the Shores of Silver Lake by Laura Ingalls Wilder


A Year of Books I Should Have Read By Now

Favorite Lines Friday

I've been messing around in the garden at least as much as I've been reading lately. Recently, I found this good piece of advice about gardening and reading in The Ruth Stout No-work Garden Book by Ruth Stout and Richard Clemence:

Read one garden book, if you must, but better not make it two, for they are almost sure to contradict each other, then you're sunk.

Lunch in Paris by Elizabeth Bard

A Love Story with Recipes

I thought I had read all of the food memoirs that I owned, so I borrowed Lunch in Paris from my aunt in order to have something “foodie” to read in this year of books I hadn’t read before. (I did find something else that I’d forgotten about and hope to get to soon.)

Elizabeth Bard decided to move to Paris for her fabulous man, and found that language was not the only obstacle to her easily fitting in. Among other things with which she struggled, she addresses values, medical care, careers, and politics in Lunch in Paris. The book is not, however, a few hundred pages of whining about how things are different in other places than they are in the good ol’ USA. It’s also not about how things are better in other places. It’s about finding a way.

Bard not only found her way through the markets and bistros and teeny-tiny apartment kitchens in Paris, but also a way to make her die-hard American ambition and optimism work in a place where such concepts were so foreign as to be nearly alien. In the end, it seems she neither gave up, gave in, nor forced her way through. She influenced her husband to successfully pursue a dream career that he had not been convinced was possible, but had to be more patient with her own success. She did things her more American way when she could, but often had to just accept it when “FWA, baby.” France wins again.

She also has a lot of great things to eat through the course of this story, and many recipes are included. What is most fun about this memoir, however, is the engaging style in which it is written. It is funny, ironic, witty and conversational. Bard’s optimism never seems to have waned, and, while I won’t say she gives us an exact formula for making difficult things work, she offers us a great personal example of how bravery, boldness and a little audacity can be combined with just the right kind of open-mindedness and compromise to create a meaningful life in an unfamiliar place. Perhaps a love of great food, however, can get one a little further in a place like Paris.

  

A Year of Books I Should Have Read by Now

Wednesday Words

There's a whole different vocabulary in the field of philosophy. Here are a few of the words I'm sure I'll be casually using now that I've read The Philosophers.

epistemology - the study or theory of the origin, nature, methods, and limits of knowledge

teleology - 1. the study of final causes.  2. the factor or quality of being directed toward a definite end or of having an ultimate purpose, esp. as attributed to natural processes...4. Ethics. the evaluation of conduct, as in utilitarianism, in relatioin to the end or ends it serves

metaphysics - 1. the branch of philosophy that deals with first principles and seeks to explain the nature of being or reality and of the origin and structure of the world  2. speculative philosophy in general  3. the theory or principles (of some branch of knowledge)  4. popularly, any very subtle or difficult reasoning