Tag Archives: bookreview

Real Scottish Fiction

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The crisp onions were making a great crackling,
and on a cold night the smell was enough to
draw water out of dead teeth.

If you decided to write a romance, chances are you’d put your muscular man and breathless heroine in the highlands of Scotland.  Don’t do it.  There’s a flood of fake Scottish mumbo-jumbo on the market.  Ditto for historical fiction. 

Here’s a better idea.  Read some authentic Scottish fiction, written by a Scot.  You cannot improve on Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped; I am especially fond of John Buchan and his sister Anna, who wrote under the pen name O. Douglas. 

The mother passed the cups of tea.
She had the natural air of
dispensing life’s mercies.

If you are sweet on Stevenson, if you love Buchan, Neil Gunn (1891-1973)  is another Scottish author worth a look.  Rick Steves, the travel guru, mentioned him in a guidebook.  Gunn is called “the most important Scottish novelist of the 20th century.”

Morning Tide, a coming-of-age story set in an impoverished fishing village takes you to the shore of the sullen, relentless sea and into the cottage of the MacBeth family. 

She could get up and lift a boiling kettle from the fire
while her husband was saying grace
without destroying the moment’s harmony,
as if wisdom dwelt also in her movements.

Life is harsh, difficult, but not without comfort of onions and the pleasure of practical jokes.  Twelve-year-old Hugh MacBeth is always hungry, often running, impatient with school, and coming to grips with the reality of a harsh life. 

He [the schoolmaster] was clever,
there was no doubt of that.
And he could speak seven languages.
Seven.  Ay, ay.
The old men nodded their heads.
Learning was a great thing.
They looked far beyond one another.
A great thing, learning.
A far and wonderful thing.
There was no denying that.
It was a strange thing, too.
Its strangeness excited them a little,
and its wonder.
Love of learning was in their marrow.

Gunn writes about the survival of the folk living in the fishing village.  The men leave in boats; the women wonder if they will make it back home.  Breakfast is always porridge; dinner is a question mark.  They stare death in the eye daily and yet clearly see the sweetness of life.  More Gunn here.  Particularly recommended to mothers (and fathers) of boys.

Russia by Car, Congo by Canoe

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[Reading these books is a part of my plan to read around the world.]

Where Nights Are Longest: Travels by Car Through Western Russia by Colin Thubron (re-issued as Among the Russians) will likely be more interesting in about twenty years.  A travel memoir written in 1983 before the dissolution of the Soviet Union seems dated now, but its historic value will endure.  

The road lifted and fell in great calm sighs, flowing between fields of maize and birch forest.  Here and there a line of willows traced the idling of a river…

My goal in my reading plan was to read and release, to clear off my bookshelves.  I didn’t account for Thubron’s elegant prose and cogent commentary. Alas, I must keep this book, if only to pick it up and feed on the phrases later. 

Three things I liked:  1) I saw the essential religious nature of life.  In the former Soviet Union the Soviet State presides in the place of God.  Thubron’s continual framing of the secular culture in religious terms fascinated me.

Small wonder that the usurping creed had to mimic them [pre-revolutionary churches].  All through Stalin’s reign public buildings subconsciously strained for religious effect, and frogmarched into service half the paraphernalia of classical paganism.    


Birth, marriage, death–there is no state ritual which can invest such moments with the same perspective as the Church does.  Secular funerals are desultory affairs, and state-run weddings ring hollow: not because God is not there–that cannot be helped–but because a spurious effort is made to keep the trappings of religiosity where the promises of religion don’t apply.  

2) The snapshots of quotidian life and the average Russian/Armenian/Estonian/Georgian citizen.  Thubron, a solitary traveler, has a talent for engaging folk in extended conversation.  He drank volumes of vodka–it seems to be a prerequisite to talk–but one gets an idea of how the common man perceived his life. 

3) I have a latent love of Russian literature.  I’ve read Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Chekhov and Solzhenitsyn…but they are a fading memory.  Thubron goes on a pilgrimage to homes, graves, and villages, visits with Pasternak’s daughter, takes in Tolstoy’s home, Turgenev’s estate.  After reading those chapters, I wanted to clear my schedule and immerse myself in those thick books full of patronymic confusion and clear thinking.     

My favorite quote is about the tension between the laws of hospitality and the laws of conscience:

His hand groped for a glass and I guessed that he was about to propose a toast to Stalin.  I think I turned white.  I made no move.  I imagined the evening’s camaraderie plummeting into wounded national pride and breached hospitality.  Yet no, I could not toast Stalin.

~        ~        ~

Facing the Congo: A Modern-Day Journey into the Heart of Darkness is, perhaps, a photo-negative of the book Endurance.  In it, men take on daring risks…and why? Because places are awaiting exploration. One story is set on the Congo River on the Equator, the other at the South Pole.  Both books speak of journeys taken with the knowledge that the final outcome may be death.

Jeffrey Taylor’s adventure is 90% existential self-actualization, a proving to himself of his own worth. Though he faces extreme physical hardship, especially suffocating heat, his greatest peril comes from traveling in Zaire, an unstable country made violent by the policies of the dictator, Mobutu. 

There is no evening on the equator. The sun falls promptly at six and rises at six: every equatorial night is the obverse in time of every equatorial day, a coin flipping now light, now dark, with a band of fifteen minutes of resplendent dawn or lustrous dark in between.

Taylor’s prose is graceful, but his perceptions often fall flat.  His descriptions of poverty are persuasive, his sketches of the Africans he meets fill your mind. There were sections of the river–cannibal territory–so dramatic, I had to read while I blew-dry my hair.  The tension dissolves into an empty ending with precious few lessons to take home. 

This book makes me want to read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, one of those classics which escaped my high school lit classes.  Thubron’s book makes me want to read all his travel books.

    

The Disappearance of Childhood

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Children are the living messages we send
to a time we will not see.

Since reading Amusing Ourselves to Death, I’m a sucker for anything Neil Postman writes.  His books are provocative, engaging and challenging.  While Postman chronicles many technological advances and their effects on children, he focuses on television, especially contrasted with reading as a source of information. 

We may conclude, then, that television erodes the
dividing line between childhood and adulthood in
three ways: first, because it requires no instruction
to grasp its form; second, because it does not make
complex demands on either mind or behavior; and
third, because it does not segregate its audience.

What Postman prophesied in 1982 has come to pass; the fundamental tenets apply to a culture of texting, tweeting and Facebook updates.   He says we have adultified children (in dress, entertainment, food, clothing and language) and childified adults (in same areas).

Postman paints a bleak picture.  What he suggests is to limit media’s access to children (not the other way around, hmmm) both by limiting exposure and content and by always critiquing what you watch/hear with your children.

But America has not yet begun to think.
The shock of twentienth-century technology
numbed our brains and we are just beginning
to notice the spiritual and social debris that our
technology has strewn about us.

From this book, I gleaned one of my all-time favorite quotes:

Watching television not only requires no skills,
but develops no skills.
As Damerall points out,
“No child or adult becomes better at
watching television by doing more of it.
What skills are required are so elemental
that we have yet to hear
of a television viewing disability.”

Since I read this book, I’ve noticed other people noticing the loss of childhood: this New York Times op-ed piece, this tabloid cover I saw at the grocery store.

While it is easy to cluck-cluck at this sort of thing, what is required is major resistance to our culture.

Resistance entails conceiving of parenting as an act of rebellion
against American culture…To insist that one’s children learn the
discipline of delayed gratification, or modesty in their sexuality,
or self-restraint in manners, language and style is to place
oneself in opposition to almost every social trend.

The Disappearance of Childhood.  Highly recommended.

Facing East

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Spiritual journeys fascinate me.  When folks move to a completely new paradigm, I’m very interested to know what, how and why. It seems to follow a trajectory of curiosity, questions, wondering, answers, doubt, more questions…and one day you wake up changed.

A father figure in my life left a fundamental/evangelical belief to join the Orthodox church.  In fact, several people I know have either converted to Orthodoxy or have considered it.  So I decided to read Facing East to better understand what appears a mysterious and very “other” faith.  Icons, incense, chanting, chrismation, standing for worship, prostration, saints’ days, long beards in black robes are images that came to mind when I heard the word Orthodox.  And yet we worship the same Trinitarian God.

Frederica Mathewes-Green is an excellent tour guide to Orthodoxy.  She writes in a warm, personal tone, with an exceptional ability as a wordsmith.  (I enjoyed her movie reviews and columns in World Magazine, back in the day.)  Facing East takes the reader through one year in the church calendar as a pilgrim’s journey.  By the end of the church you feel you know the folks of the mission church her husband leads.

What I appreciated the most in this book were the ancient prayers and hymns. 

In vain do yo rejoice in not eating, O soul.
For you abstain from food,
But from passion you are not purified.
If you persevere in sin, you will perform a useless fast.


When thou comest, O God, to earth with glory, and all creatures tremble before thee, and the river of fire floweth before the Altar, and the books are opened and sins revealed, deliver me then from that unquenchable fire, and make me worthy to stand at Thy right hand, O righteous judge.

When I asked a friend about the attraction to Orthodoxy she explained that she was tired of worshiping with her head only, like her faith was just something that went on in her brain.  She loved the physicality of Orthodox worship. 

Mathewes-Green is a compelling writer.  She throws in commentary on art by Christians, popular and not; you laugh and sigh at her distress when her daughter gets a nose ring. Catch some of her phrases:

Margo [choir director] is trying hard to get us aloft; the choir is sinking, singing ever slower and more and more flat.

From my perspective, there’s nothing sacrosanct about “dignified” hymns a couple of hundred years old. All of those four-lines-and-a-chorus hymns now have a man-made quality to me; they’re all us talking about various aspects of God or ourselves.  In comparison, the ancient liturgies have been washed through multiple centuries and cultures and have stood mostly unchanged; what endures has the scent of eternity.  It’s stone-washed worship.

[About a widow] Adversities hone her like flint.

For me, a writer, it’s more literally the hands and the head, because that’s all I’ve got.  I sit at my computer most the day, tapping…watching, absorbing, percolating, trying to transmit it all back on a little square screen.  No tools to do this with but fickle, ephemeral words, stacked on one another like figments in the air.  Sometimes I think I’d feel more satisfied at the end of the day if I could display some visible, concrete object my hands and head had made, no matter how humble–even if it was only a well-crafted chili dog.

The Eastern and Western church are often divided on the dates of the church calendar.  I’m glad that this year we will be celebrating Pascha on the same day.  To my Orthodox friends: Many years!

Nae the Best, Nae the Worst

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I had to push myself –more than once–to read this book.  I saw the cover (cheesy, I thought) and anticipated 703 pages of semi-cheesy writing.  But I love Scotland; I love Columba; I love Iona.  So I gave it a shot and was pleasantly surprised.  The Fields of Bannockburn roams through the history of Scotland in four sections: Columba coming to Iona; Kenneth mac Alpin uniting the Picts and Scots; Queen Margaret and her work of reformation; and William Wallace at Stirling Bridge / Robert the Bruce at Bannockburn.

Donna Fletcher Crow weaves the historical stories around a modern tale of three college students and their friend, storyteller Hamish MacBain.  While I dinna find Mary, Gareth and Brad’s story compelling, I enjoyed the way fiction can bring ancient history to life.  The inner thoughts of the main Scottish characters seemed anachronistic at times, but not so much that I had to stop reading.

There are several ancient prayers incorporated into the story. For example,

The blessing of God be on you,
The blessing of Christ be on you,
The blessing of the Spirit be on you.
O giver of the sweet honey,
O giver of the sour cheese,
O giver of the Bread of Life and Living Water,
Be with us by day,
Be with us by night,
Be with us for Thy service.

What really excites me is the author’s website, particularly the section My Life As a Reader. 

I had an ideal childhood for a reader. I was an only child, living on a farm. I would take a book out to the middle of the alfalfa field in front of our house, lay down flat and revel in the fact that God was the only person in the whole universe who knew where I was.    

My reading life has always gone by passions, finding a writer I loved, reading everything he or she (usually she) wrote, then feeling absolutely bereft when I came to the end. Much the same feeling as having a child leave for college, I later learned. My passions have included Norah Lofts, D. E. Stevenson, Mary Stewart, Rumer Godden, Elizabeth Goudge and Elswyth Thane with whom I carried on a delightful correspondence just before she died and I began writing professionally.

Donna Fletcher Crow, a former teacher of English literature, lists her most influential authors as Jane Austen, Dorothy L. Sayers, Barbara Pym, P.D. James, and Susan Howatch.  With a list like that, I’d say she is credentialed.

If gardening is your passion, visit Donna’s garden in Boise, Idaho.  A delightful meandering through links brought this great discovery:  The Plot Thickens, a blog devoted to novelists and their garden spots. 

How to Read Slowly

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Early on, reading became for me a way of life–
joyous, fascinating, refreshing, challenging.

I’m thankful, for my sake, that I read a borrowed copy of James Sire’s book How to Read Slowly.  It slowed me down.  Instead of marking and highlighting passages and turning pages, I read with a journal and pen and copied copious notes and quotes.  Instead of zipping through 179 pages in three evenings, it took me almost a month to complete. 

Sire writes for readers on every level.  If you like the idea of reading, but haven’t finished a book in a year, this book is for you.   If you enjoy reading, but sense there are better books, Sire will guide you.   And if you, like me, can’t not read, you will get a great refresher course on how to better do what we can’t escape doing. 

How to Read Slowly is a simple book.  He devotes a chapter each on reading non-fiction, poetry and fiction, followed by a chapter on contexts and one on finding the time.  Simple.  Really.

I was immediately captured by the dedication: To my father who in his eighties still reads voraciously.

Sire doesn’t just tell you…he shows you.  His chapter on poetry would make the most reluctant reader of poetry want to dip his big toe in the pool of poems.  Here’s a sample:

The Red Wheelbarrow
William Carlos Williams

So much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

Simple enough, right?  Yet Sire asks questions and makes observations which make me want to jump up and click my heels!  Visually, what do you see in this poem? Sire concludes, “Williams’s poem is like a still-life painting.  Quality presents itself quietly and yet persistently.  And, though we cannot say why we see, we see.” 

Excellent questions, superb commentary, quotes that express what I’ve always felt, more book titles to read: that’s what you will find in this wonderful read.

We will just have to realize that ignorance will always
be our lot and then get on with the task–often
a joyful one–of learning what we can
with the time and abilities we have.


You see, I have a problem. I read too much.
I pay attention to plot, image, character and theme
when I should be paying attention to wife,
sons and daughters, the peeling house paint
and the leaking toilet tank.
Actually, I need advice
about how to spend time not reading.


Here is where I believe reading becomes of most value.
We are not just bifurcating our lives into the dull
pursuit of information and world view on the one hand
and the exciting pursuit of sheer entertainment on the other.
We are putting together what should never be split–
excitement and knowledge, joy and truth, ecstasy and value.
Indeed, in such moments of reading we are living the good life.


Indeed, great books teem with peoples and lands,
with ideas and attitudes, with exuberance and life.
Let us take our fill, doing it slowly, thoughtfully,
imaginatively, all to the glory of God.

Making a Good Place to Live

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The culture of good place-making, like the culture of farming, or
agriculture, is a body of knowledge and acquired skills.  It is not bred
in the bone, and if it is not transmitted from one generation to
the next, it is lost. 113


There is a main road–not Main Street–that grew out of our small town, much like roads spawned in every town.  We call it “the Strip”.  Fast food restaurants, gas stations, box stores, service-oriented businesses and a few banks populate two miles of avenue.  Buildings are plopped at random angles to the road, all out of joint with their neighbors; instead of continuity there is discord, and most structures are simply ugly. 

I appreciated reading The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape because it helped me answer why an ugly urban/suburban landscape is so typical, so, so common.  The quick answer is a lack of connectedness, a lack of respect for the surroundings, a premium on convenience and a strong shot of individualism.

The organic wholeness of the small town was a result of common, everyday attention to details, of intimate care for things intimately used.  The discipline of its physical order was based not on uniformity for its own sake, but on a consciousness of, and respect for, what was going on next door.  Such awareness and respect were not viewed as a threat to individual identity but as necessary for the production of amenity, charm, and beauty.  These concepts are now absent from our civilization.  We have become accustomed to living in places where nothing relates to anything else, where disorder, unconsciousness, and the absence of respect reign unchecked. 185

Cars, televisions and the resulting cultural decay get a scathing condemnation. So do faux front porches and front garages.

The main problem with [the suburban sub-division] was that it dispensed with all the traditional connections and continuities of community life, and replaced them with little more than cars and television. 105
The least understood cost [of long commutes]–although probably the most keenly felt–has been the sacrifice of a sense of place: the idea that people and things exist in some sort of continuity, that we belong to the world physically and chronologically, and that we know where we are. 118
 

Nor do shopping malls escape prophetic wrath.  Kunstler points out that a vacuum of human contact and conversation led to the phenomenon of shopping malls.  Malls are little islands isolated from the community.  And if your dream vacation destination is Disney World (she rolls her eyes), be prepared to be disabused of some of your jolly ideas.

...new merchandising gimmick called the shopping mall…offering a synthetic privatized substitute for every Main Street in America. 108

The decay of property is the physical expression of everything the town has lost spiritually while the American economy “grew” and the nation devised a national lifestyle based on cars, cheap oil and recreational shopping. 184

Neighborhoods in Maine seem to me the best examples of good place-making.  New construction is architecturally designed to fit with the older homes; there are “greens” and “squares”–shared public spaces–built into many new subdivisions.   

This book is a diagnostic tool, not a solution manual.  The tone is quite pessimistic.  But if you have an interest in architecture, in sociology or cultural trends, you may find–like I did–much to ponder.

I just can’t stop myself.  Here’s one last quote:

Americans wonder why their houses lack charm. […] Charm is dependent on connectedness, on continuities, on the relation of one thing to another, often expressed in tension, like the tension between private space and public space, or the sacred and the workaday, or the interplay of a space that is easily comprehensible, such as a street, with the mystery of openings that beckon, such as a doorway set deeply in a building. […] If nothing is sacred, than everything is profane. 168

Swooning Over This Book, I Am

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Safe Passage has shanghaied me.  The minute I finished, I was ready for a second reading.  I want to send it to friends who live life with ferocious passion.  Or passionate ferocity.  The ones who dream, who wonder, who say, “what if?”  Visionaries who can execute a plan.  Friends for whom zest is more than a lemon.

Forget Thelma and Louise.  Ida and Louise will bowl you over.

The book covers three periods in the life of British spinster sisters.  Each one, alone, would make a dazzling book. The first period (1923-1936) paints their love of opera and initial friendships with opera celebrities.  The second season (1937-1939) narrates their travels to Germany almost every weekend under the guise of going to the opera in order to facilitate emigration for desperate refugees.  The third act (1939 -1950) gives a remarkable account of life in London during the Blitz and post-war operatic adventures.

Listen to me.

You don’t have to know, understand or even like opera to enjoy this book. Because the remarkable thing is how two typical office workers making £2 – £3 a week saved £100 each to travel to New York to see an opera.

It never occurred to Louise and me to suppose we might get someone
else to provide us with what we wanted, or to waste time envying
those who…could do with ease what we must accomplish with difficulty
and sacrifice. All our thoughts were concentrated on how we could do it.

First Louise bought a gramophone and ten records. When Amelita Galli-Curci made her English debut, Ida and Louise skipped lunches, scrimped to buy tickets.  They discovered opera.  Galli-Curci, their favorite soprano, only sang opera in America.  It was simple: if they wanted to hear her in an opera, they must travel to New York.  (I get this: I flew to Chicago to hear Yo-Yo Ma play the cello; our family and friends drove six hours through an epic snowstorm to hear blues singer-songwriter Eric Bibb.) Without telling anyone, the Cook sisters sketched a budget and systematically saved £1/week.    They continued to attend operas, queuing on camp stools for up to 24 hours in order to get cheap seats in the gallery. Rarely are such exacting frugality and such exuberant extravagance found in one personality.

But let no one suppose we were not happy. Going without things is
neither enjoyable nor necessarily uplifting in itself. But the things you
achieve by your own effort and your own sacrifice do have a special flavour.

They did something wonderfully naive: they told Galli-Curci their plan.  She was delighted, offered tickets and asked them to look her up in New York.  Thus began the first of many close friendships with the celebrities of the day. The Sisters Cook were commoners, plain British women (think Susan Boyle…before).  Yet their enthusiasm, their untrammeled joy must have been attractive, as evidenced by their host of friends.

Ida began writing romance novels to finance their opera habit.  A trip to Verona followed a trip to Florence; they traveled to Salzburg then to Amsterdam to see Strauss conduct.  Through their friendship with opera stars they became acquainted with Jews looking for an escape from the Nuremberg Laws.

And so, at the very moment when I was making big money for the first
time in my life, we were presented with this terrible need. It practically never
happens that way. It was much the most romantic thing that ever happened
to us. Usually one either has the money and doesn’t see the need, or one sees
the need and has not the money. If we had always had the money we might
not have thought we had anything to spare.
For an German adult to emigrate to the safety of England, a British citizen had to guarantee financial responsibility for life for the emigrant.  After Ida and Louise exhausted their resources, Ida took any public speaking invitation to inform people of the urgent need for sponsors.  Ida bought a flat in London for transitional housing for the refugees; the sisters continued to live with at home with their parents.  The sisters’ efforts secured safety for twenty-nine people.

When September 1939 arrived, their refugee work was over.  What follows is an extraordinary account of life during the Blitz.  An entire city worked during the day and slept in underground shelters at night.

One of my most vivid memories of that first night was the five minutes before
“Lights Out.” There were prayers for those who cared to join in, but no
compulsion on those who did not. Only a courteous request for quiet
for a few minutes. In the crowded, rather dimly lit shelter,
there was the murmur of a couple of hundred voices repeating
the ageless words of the Lord’s Prayer. And the not very distant crash
of a bomb lent a terrible point to the earnest petition, Deliver us from evil,
breathed from the farthest, shadowy corner.

Though Ida and Louise didn’t have the faith of Corrie ten Boom, there is a quote my husband has already used in a Sunday School class.  [When polio struck Marjorie Lawrence she had to give up opera and sing from a wheelchair.]

“What was it, Marjorie,” I asked at last, “that keeps you bright and courageous
in spite of everything? You must have some very clear and remarkable
philosophy to support you.” She smiled a little mischievously,
but replied without hesitation, “Well, you see, many people
believe in God and make themselves miserable.
We believe in God and have lots of fun. That’s all.”

Safe Passage is part Julia Child (if she took to opera like she did to cooking), part Oskar Schindler.
(Thanks to Frankie, reconnected friend from long ago and co-bibliophile; she lived through the war in London. I will always read the books you recommend.)

Little House on the African Highlands

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Sometimes she [Tilly, the author’s mother] spoke aloud in my presence
without exactly speaking to me; I was a kind of safety valve, helpful to
her feelings even in a passive role.

Pioneer stories capture me.  I cut my reading teeth on the Little House books; I have a secret desire to test myself in a lifestyle where one has to adapt, work hard, keep cheerful, play with pig bladder balloons and make corn husk dolls for one’s daughters.  Even though I’m a capital W-Wus, I like to secretly preserve the happy fiction that with courage and determination I could survive in the Big Woods.  

At such times, when all the furtive noises of the night beyond that
speck of firelight crept unasked like maggots into your ears, you
could feel very isolated and lonely.

The Flame Trees of Thika: Memories of an African Childhood is an extreme version of the Little House books.  When Elspeth was six her parents, Robin and Tilly, purchased a desolate piece of land northeast of Nairobi, hoping to establish a coffee plantation.  The year was 1913. Naturally, the mores and the customs of the Africans and the Europeans were not in sync.  Robin and Tilly have the friendship of other colonial settlers, but have to learn how to operate their “farm” with the native workforce they’ve hired.

Tilly was downcast; as with all perfectionists, it was the detail
others might not notice that destroyed for her the pleasure of
achievement. I doubt if she was every fully satisfied with
anything she did.  But she breasted each failure as a dinghy rides
 a choppy sea, and faced the next with confidence and gaiety.

Flame Trees differs from Little House in that you never fully hear the author’s childhood voice.  No other children appear, she never calls her parents Father and Mother and curiously Elspeth-Huxley’s first name- is never once mentioned, nor is a pet name like Half-Pint.  She has an exotic story, but Huxley’s prose made this book.  Rich, delightful, capable of expressing universal responses:

This declaration put a full-stop to the conversation,
as Hereward’s remarks were apt to do, whereas
with Lettice and Ian, or Robin and Tilly, talk would
volley gently to and fro until halted by some external event.

One story line, told with tact, of neighbor Lettice’s infatuation with Ian (as in not-her-husband) and the resulting tension, would never be included in Laura’s world.

“[Shooting] is much less alarming when you fire [the gun] off
yourself than when other people do,” Tilly explained.

“Like sins,” said Lettice.

“What sorts of sins?”

“Any sort. 
When other people commit them you are startled,
but when you commit them yourself,
they seem absolutely natural.”

Naturally, a book set in Africa will have mosquitoes and mosquito nets:

No sound concentrates so much spitefulness and malice
into a very small volume as the pinging of mosquitoes,
as if needles tipped with poison were vibrating
in a persistent tattoo.

I thoroughly enjoyed The Flame Trees of Thika.  I have half a dozen Africa books in my Read Around the World plan, and I am eager to compare this book with others on my list.

We Brake for Bakeries

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“I’m interested in the idea and fact of home.
I’m going to places where I have dreamed of living
and will try to settle down in each, read the literature,
look at the gardens, shop for what’s in season,
try to feel at home.”

Thus Frances Mayes introduces the idea behind her book, A Year in the World. She and her husband Ed traveled from their home base in Tuscany over five years and put the notes together into this charming book.  Their trips took them to mostly Mediterranean places: southern Spain, Portugal, Sicily, Morocco, France, Britain, Greece, Crete, Scotland, Turkey and several locations in Italy.

Mayes weaves her passions for reading, eating, colors, friendship, architecture, gardening, and people-watching into her narratives. She doesn’t drench the reader in wretched enthusiasm: if an experience is bad, she says so.  I reveled in her descriptions, particularly her choice of words to describe colors. 

The void I noticed in this book was the absence of passionate worship.  As a “doubter with strong spiritual interests” she is certainly interested in the role of many religions.  Had I spent time in each of those locations I would have cherished times of worship with like-minded believers. 

Mayes lush narrative invites lingering silences, pondering thoughts.  I’m going to string a necklace of her sparkling short sentences.

Two of my favorite words are linked: departure time.  

Breakfast is such a key to the culture.

We’ve gone quiet with disappointment.

The language uses many sounds that previously
I have heard only from the washing machine.

There’s choreography to traffic flow.

Often the thoughts tumble like coins in a dryer,
circling, banging, going nowhere.

The art of departure I may never master.

I have lived in places where art and beauty buoy everyday life.

The people fold themselves into their houses
the way they fold themselves away in their clothing.

Cheese would be reason enough for a trip to France.

How to translate sunlight into words?

We are drowsy as bees in the heat.

We brake for bakeries.