Favorite Lines Friday

Here are some interesting thoughts by Adso, the narrator of The Name of The Rose, about the great labyrinthine library at the center of the novel:


Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.



A Year of Books I've Read Before

Wednesday Word

Here’s a word that has come up enough times in The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco that I decided to get a precise definition:

 

narthex (när’ theks) n. 1. in early Christian churches, a porch or portico at the west end for penitents and others not admitted to the church itself.  2. any church vestibule leading to the nave

 

Apparently the shape of these entrances resembled the hollow stem of fennel, because the word comes from the Greek word narthēx, which is a giant fennel.

 

 

 

 

A Year of Books I’ve Read Before

 

Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende

Translated from the Spanish by Margaret Sayers Peden

 

Daughter of Fortune is the story of Eliza Sommers, a Chilean orphan girl of the nineteenth century who was taken in by an English family living in Chile. Her passions take her far beyond that home, however, and weave her in and among the lives of other extraordinary characters, over land and sea, through desire and pain, fueled by infatuation, stubbornness and an iron constitution. She eventually ends up in California during the gold rush, and, as in the words of her companion Tao Chi’en, “It seems that like everyone else in California we found something different from what we were looking for.”

 

Eliza’s character is not the only one we come to know in so much detail. There are many who affect her and are affected by her in turn who have strong personalities and interesting histories of their own. The back stories of these characters are rich in detail and bring to life practically the whole world as it was then. Europe, England, China, and North and South America formed these people, and, each in its own way, drove them to California. It hardly feels like it could have been possible for so much well-researched setting to fit into 400 pages.

I remembered some of the story laid out in this novel even though it’s been many years (more than 10) since I read it before. There are so many fascinating details and this is such a well-told story, however, that I think if I’d remembered every bit of it, I’d still love to read it again and again. Eliza and the other characters lead wholly interesting lives and, though those lives occasionally take grand turns resulting from extraordinary bad luck, misguided decisions and foolish pride, there is a logic to the progression of the stories that makes them believable to a captive reader.

This is just one of several novels by Isabel Allende that I’ve really enjoyed. (I also like Island Beneath the Sea, Ines of My Soul, and Zorro.) Like the others, it is a grand adventure story and depends on a heroine (or hero) who can pass on her details to those of us hoping to virtually escape our sofas and armchairs by reading about them. Allende’s novels are big, self-aware stories that recognize their own importance, peopled with admirable (if not always agreeable) characters who can live up to the creation of these stories. Like Eliza in Daughter of Fortune they seem to have experienced “the clear sensation of beginning a new story in which she was both protagonist and narrator.”

I love a big story. And Daughter of Fortune is a big, lovable story.

 

 

A Year of Books I’ve Read Before

August Reading

Well, it's deep into August already, but the good news is that I'm somewhat deep into my August reading list. (Okay, so I'm deep into The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco anyway.)

I've selected three novels for this month's reading and I'm also hoping to finish The Uplift War, which is requiring more effort than Startide Rising did.

Here is my re-reading list for the month of August:

   The Uplift War by David Brin, held over from July
   The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, which I'm enjoying even more than the first time I read it
   Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams
   Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card, in hopes of re-reading it before the film is released




A Year of Books I've Read Before

The Quest for Arthur's Britain edited by Geoffrey Ashe

The Quest for Arthur’s Britain gives us not only an overview of the development of Arthurian legend but a description of the search through history for documentary and archeological evidence of a real king Arthur. There are chapters telling us why we would bother even digging anything up to search for buried facts and there are chapters on those digs. Since I like reading history, folklore and about archeology, I really enjoyed this book.

I first attempted to read The Quest for Arthur’s Britain when I was still living in the town in which I grew up and frequenting the small but really rather nice library there.  I can’t remember whether I was in high school or in college, because I can’t quite remember when my fascination with Arthurian legend developed. I do remember that the physical volume on the library shelf was compelling to me. It was a bit beaten up with a re-taped binding and pages separating in packets. It seemed as though many, many interested readers had perused this book and I wanted to be one of them.

I was even more distractible then than I am now, so I didn’t actually read The Quest for Arthur’s Britain all the way through until several years later when I acquired my own, much newer copy (which is also a new edition.) I appreciated it more this time around for the simple reason that I appreciate the minute victories in archeology more now than I once did. The descriptions of the investigations conducted to find some trace of King Arthur mostly involve some small detail suggesting that someone lived in an area associated with Arthur at the around the same time that Arthur supposedly did.

 

So, this book doesn’t have the sweeping scope or the treasure-hunting adventure of C.W. Ceram’s Gods, Graves, and Scholars. What it does have, however, is a whole-hearted attempt to justify “the chief myth of the island of Britain.” Everybody (everybody!) has heard of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. While the charismatic military leader of Dark Age Britain who appears to have some roots in fact is a far cry from the Arthur of popular legend and literature, the evolution of the gigantic folk hero and the characters and stories that surround him is fascinating.

 

Coming soon: Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende 

 

A Year of Books I’ve Read Before