It would behoove us to take any reviews this month that strike us as grumpy or nitpicky with a grain of salt, as I am going through some things that have made it difficult to immerse myself or take pleasure in reading the way. They are as true to my experience of the books as I can be!
Thick as Thieves by Megan Whalen Turner (2017)
#5 in the Queen’s Thief series
reread
buddy read
One of my favorite books in one of my favorite series, which I am making Izzie read for the first time. I can’t talk about the plot without giving too many things away (Izzie is very gracious with me snapshotting random lines and telling her “put a pin in this”). One reason I’m fond of this book in particular is that it was the first of the series I got to read immediately after it was published, but it’s also simply very good.
The Queen’s Thief world is a Mediterranean-inspired low fantasy. Folklore is woven through it, and when the gods show up they truly cannot be ignored, but most of it is politics and love stories. And exploring how love stories can happen in spite of and in-between politics. If you love tricksters and being able to reread a book and finding it practically new with insights you couldn’t have had the first time, well, Gen is my best beloved trickster and the reread value is unmatched.
The Waste Land and Other Poems by T.S. Eliot (1922)
reread
After Wallace Stevens, I was in the mood for Eliot. I picked this anthology up in high school at a used bookstore. I’ve revisited individual poems since then, but not reread the whole thing (it’s not long, though). Probably a good selection for a beginner interested in Modernism.
Murder in the Cathedral by T.S. Eliot (1936)
reread
Probably not good for a beginner interested in Modernism, but I do love it. Eliot’s play about the martyrdom of Thomas Becket. A few lines will be familiar to readers of The Four Quartets, as he recycled some of his ideas here (“Human kind cannot bear very much reality”). I consider it a formative poem.
Reading Genesis by Marilynne Robinson (2024)
Non-fiction. A Christian reading of Genesis, more or less start to finish. I’m not sure if I would call this Biblical commentary in the usual sense, but I found it insightful, especially in the first half. Robinson is very good at imagining what the composers of the Bible could have been thinking about the nature of God, based on the ways Genesis is both similar to other literature of the time and yet vastly different.
“[I]t is precisely because I take Scripture to be sacred that I leave it to Scripture to establish the meaning of the word sacred.”
Home by Marilynne Robinson (2008)
#2 in the Gilead series
audio book
Follows the same plot events of Gilead from the perspective of Glory, Jack’s younger sister. I’m torn on this one. There is certainly a lot more going on in the Boughton home than you glean from the first book. However, it seems to me that an installment so much longer might have had more to say about its narrator. Glory and the narrative are almost entirely preoccupied with Jack and Jack’s problems, which readers of Gilead already know in broad strokes. At the same time it did feel very true to my experiences, especially being (like Glory) one of what they call a large brood. For me, it dragged, though how much of that is due to reading about an elderly man dying while my grandfather was dying, I can’t say.
The King of Elfland’s Daughter by Lord Dunsany (1924)
One-hundred-year-old fantasy novel about the land of Erl, whose lord goes to Elfland to find a bride and comes back with more than the people bargained for. I put this on my TBR after reading Neil Gaiman’s essay on it in The View from the Cheap Seats, and I finally picked it up because I’m writing my own fairy tale. It is far closer to a fairy tale than to a modern fantasy novel; the narrator is omniscient, and individuals are viewed at a distance. And it really works, in my opinion. The quality of the writing is very beautiful. I read it slowly, not because I wasn’t eager to know what would happen next, but to savor it.
Untethered Sky by Fonda Lee (2023)
audio book
Fantasy novella from the first-person perspective of a young woman who bonds with and trains a roc, the mythical bird of prey. Reasonably engaging, but unfortunately, I’m not super compelled by magical creatures that are essentially just animals. Perhaps that is petless behavior on my part, but I lost the greater part of my interest when I realized the rocs were just going to be giant birds in this. I also thought, from (misinterpreted) early hints dropped by the narrator, that we were building toward a dramatic interpersonal conflict or even a political upheaval, so I found the ending anticlimactic, but that is likely my own fault.
Lila by Marilynne Robinson (2014)
#3 in the Gilead series
audio book
The story of Lila’s childhood, adulthood, and marriage. Takes place entirely before Gilead. I was hoping for more insight into what she would do after that story ends, but I love Lila and her narrative voice. She has a rich internal world. I’ve heard this called a love story, but I wouldn’t say it’s that. That is is, it’s not about Lila being gently wooed until she stops calling John Ames “the old man,” for instance, because she never does stop calling him that, but their relationship is complicated and tender.
Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi, translated by Geoffrey Trousselot (2015)
read for library staff book club
Four interconnected short stories set in a café in Japan from which people can travel in time. There are lots of rules (you can’t leave a specific seat in the café, you can only meet people who have been in the café before, you can’t change the present, you can only stay in another time until your coffee gets cold). The obvious question after hearing the rules is, what’s the point? The stories make the point that the connections you can have are still meaningful.
This was originally a play, as well as the playwright author’s first novel. Stylistically not my favorite, which may have been the translation or the author’s background, and I found a couple of the stories to be trite. But the concept certainly grabbed me, and it didn’t take long to read. Good for group discussion.
Euripides: Ten Plays, translated by Paul Roche (1998)
contains Alcestis, Hippolytus,* Ion,* Iphigenia at Aulis, Iphigenia Among the Taurians, Electra, Medea,* The Bacchae,* The Trojan Women,* and The Cyclops
*plays I have read before (in other translations)
I read Paul Roche’s translation of the Theban trilogy and liked it, but I’m not sure I like him for Euripides. He includes extensive stage directions and instructions for how he would costume and perform the plays, at some points making up his own verses and endings. If he did the same with his Sophocles translations, I didn’t find it as jarring, for some reason. I’m glad he’s enthusiastic, but I do think it made him a worse translator.
As for the plays themselves, I was happy to finally read the Iphigenia plays and Electra. I didn’t like the latter as much as Sophocles’ Electra. If I had to rank them from favorite to least favorite: Medea, The Trojan Women, The Bacchae, Ion, Iphigenia Among the Taurians, Iphigenia at Aulis, Electra, Alcestis, The Cyclops, Hippolytus.
Jack by Marilynne Robinson (2020)
#4 in the Gilead series
audio book
The story of how Jack and Della came to be married. Also takes place entirely before Gilead/Home, even though I still need to know what happens after that.
In my opinion, only this or Home needs to exist, not both; they cover much of the same ground (in terms of Jack’s character) in different ways. I think I liked it better than Home, but it meandered more and had less of a resolution. On the one hand, the lack of resolution works because you know what’s going to happen, but on the other hand: you know what’s going to happen. I wish it had been from Della’s perspective. Maybe that will come someday. Still, it’s beautifully written, as ever. I don’t think it added much that was new to the story, but it was a pleasure to read.
Taking the series as a whole (or as it currently stands), I have a lot of respect for Robinson’s writing, both her craft and her stories. Her characters always feel completely convincing to me as real people—not something I require in fiction, and so striking when it happens. I’ve complained about whether all the sequels were “necessary,” but they do build on each other. They are highly internal, pensive, and full of careful attention to language. I do wonder how they read to someone who doesn’t know the Bible well, since the characters are preachers or preacher-adjacent. All the audio book narrators were good. I’m going to be thinking about the series for a long time.