Monday, November 2, 2009

October's reading

Books I read in October:

72. Lost Paradise: From Mutiny on the Bounty to a Modern-Day Legacy of Sexual Mayhem, the Dark Secrets of Pitcairn Island Revealed by Kathy Marks 73. One Continuous Mistake: Four Noble Truths for Writers by Gail Sher74. The Silver Chair by C.S. Lewis (R) 75. The Day of a Buddhist Practitioner by Bokar Rinpoche (R) 76. The Squire’s Tale by Gerald Morris (R)77. The Squire, His Knight, and His Lady by Gerald Morris (R) 78. The Savage Damsel and the Dwarf by Gerald Morris (R?) 79. Parsifal’s Page by Gerald Morris (R?) 80. The Ballad of Sir Dinadan by Gerald Morris (R) 81. The Princess, the Crone, and the Dung-Cart Knight by Gerald Morris 82. The Lioness and Her Knight by Gerald Morris 83. The Quest of the Fair Unknown by Gerald Morris (R) 84. The Hallowed Isle Books III & IV by Diana L. Paxson (R)

It was a good month for reading chez Mommybird. (And I said the exact same thing about September.)  After re-reading The Silver Chair I felt I had satisfied my appetite for Narnia.  I think I like Jill Pole better than Susan or Lucy (although I like Aravis of The Horse and His Boy still better).  Lost Paradise was a new book display find; I might never have read it if it hadn’t been prominently displayed in the central atrium.  Kathy Marks covered the trials of several men from Pitcairn, where the H.M.S. Bounty’s mutineers settled, on decades-old charges of sexual assault and molestation, and investigated a closed, secretive culture built on men’s sexual access to young women with or without their consent.  It was exactly the sort of detailed and slightly horrifying coverage of history that grabs my attention, and I enjoyed it very much.  I also finished Diana Paxson’s Hallowed Isle quartet, which has whetted my appetite for her forthcoming Avalon novel, Sword of Avalon, due the first of December.  I may actually re-read The Mists of Avalon sometime soon.

What has put me ahead of my average number of books for the year was re-reading Gerald Morris’s wonderful Squire’s Tales.  Morris is a Methodist minister retelling the stories of Arthur and his knights, based primarily on Malory but weaving in material from Chretien de Troyes, the Welsh romances, Gottfried and Wolfram and all.  His twist is that his protagonists are all secondary characters in the originals, often people of his own invention.  The Squire’s Tale recounts the early adventures of Gawain from the perspective of his squire, Terence, an orphan boy who has been raised by a gentle hermit who has the gift or curse of remembering the future but not the past.  Terence’s unusual parentage makes him a recurring character in the series, along with Gawain, whose reputation as Arthur’s greatest knight Morris does much to restore.  Lancelot, Kay, Guinevere, and Gawain’s brothers also make regular appearances, along with a number of important Otherworldly characters.  Morris combines the chivalric Christian values of Malory–truthfulness, loyalty, courage, courtesy to all–with the faery mysticism of the older tales and leavens it all with humor and good writing.  These are young adult books that can be enjoyed by sophisticated child readers and open-hearted adults.

My first book for November is likely to be Rosemary Sutcliff’s lyrical and haunting Song for a Dark Queen, a retelling of the story of Boudicca which I first read at the age of twelve or thirteen and have never forgotten.  I’m also re-reading The Forge of Tubal Cain, on the Roebuck/1724 tradition of witchcraft in the United States.

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