What's On Your 2020 Bookshelf?

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  • Caissa wrote: »
    Started Obama's new book today. He writes very well. Hard to daydream while reading it.

    Ms. Marsupial gave me this for Christmas and I look forward to getting started on it.

    I just finished reading Willa Cather’s My Antonia, which several people recommended here back in the Spring. I had never encountered Cather before, and I was impressed. Will look out for some of her other books.

    I’ve been revisiting some Dorothy Sayers, as an indirect result of our December book group thread. I read quite a lot of Sayers in high school, after I’d more-or-less exhausted our local library’s collection of Agatha Christie. I remember Murder must Advertise was my first encounter with her books - not her most ambitious book, but arguably one of her more successful in terms of matching achievement to ambition. Some of her later books seem to be trying to achieve something more - Gaudy Night in particular seems interestingly personal. Re-reading it though Wimsey’s presence seems a mixed blessing - she couldn’t really have left him out, given the way the plot develops, but his larger-than-life character doesn’t entirely seem to fit into the rest of the book.

  • Penny SPenny S Shipmate
    edited December 2020
    I've currently got three books on the go, with a couple of sides which have dropped from attention at the moment, having given way to some I saw reviewed in the Guardian.
    In my study I have "The Human Cosmos", a history of human interest in astronomy since the first person decided to add six dots above a picture of a bull in a Lascaux cave. I have reached Stonehenge. There are no illustrations in the book anywhere so some time is spent searching online for that bull (No.18, I think). Newgrange and Stonehenge I have in my head.
    In my bedroom I have "The Light Ages", which is not really a counterweight to the Dark Ages as it is late medieval, a study of monastic use of astronomy, the St Alban's clock, astrolabes and such. It does have illustrations, but would, I think (I haven't reached the place yet) have benefitted from a cardboard astrolabe in a pocket on the back cover. I am going to use an online source to construct my own, hoping I can cut it out carefully enough. It argues that as far as science was concerned, there were no dark ages.
    In my living room I have "Women in Medieval England" by Lynda Telford. This would not agree with the previous book as far as women are concerned. The author is of the opinion that for women in England there were two very Bad Things during the Middle Ages. One was the Norman Conquest, and the other was the Church, When combined together, as in the Post-Conquest "reform" of the Church, they became a Bad Thing squared, as, for example, rewriting St Cuthbert, who had had good relations with women, into a screaming misogynist who would do terrible things to women who dared to cross the line inserted into the floor of Durham Cathedral.
    A specifically Bad Thing was the rule of Theodore of Tarsus. Leaving aside that he arrived well before the Normans, and she had previously argued that women before the Conquest were treated as respected human beings with rights which once lost had to wait until the 19th century for partial restoration, she has taken particularly against him. Also leaving aside that other writers regard his effect on Christianity in the country as a very Good Thing. She cites his attitude to women's attendance in church during their periods, which goes so far against Gregory's advice to Augustine to leave it up to the woman to make aprayerful decision as to brand it a sin requiring a three week penance. (Which would actually make it a four week penance, wouldn't it?)
    She also mentions, though without a reference to her source, that he had very strong attitudes to women daring to want to be priests.
    This is where I get a bit Dead Horsey, but I want back up texts.
    I went online again on this one, and cannot find anything but a list of things mentioned in the Penitentials bearing his name but probably not his authorship. Some women have found his references to the sins committed by lesbians and posted them. The Society of St Wilfrid and St Hilda came up as approving him, but without quoting him, and a group in the States made a point of publishing their opinion on the subject on his day. (One very odd site had a BTL comment about him being much better for the white race than the other saint out of Tarsus who wanted to eliminate the distinctions between male and female, slave and free etc,and when I looked at the site's subtitle, I could see where he was coming from.)
    But nobody had a publication, in English, of what he actually said, and what he used to back it up.
    So I have two books with contrasting themes - the Church as a source of light, and the Church as a source of darkness.
    I've got a book on the Viking mind coming after a reprint. I'm dipping into a book on handedness, which I think started back in Lascaux but goes into the importance of left and right in politics and in the making of medicines. I can only take a bit at a time. (Ideas about men and women get in there as well.) And I am also dipping into Norman Cohn on "Europe's Inner Demons" I started well on that one, but because it cuts across my recent purchases I've dropped it for a bit.
    (After viewing an automaton clock presented by a German twin town, I am not sure that there is no connection between the theme of that book and something a Cohn would be very aware of. They made the Hansel and Gretel's witch's oven look, well, like an industrial sort of oven used in camps, and when I looked from that to the witch's features, I had the impression that the inner demons had not been properly exorcised.)
  • FirenzeFirenze Shipmate, Host Emeritus
    Just read a late Christie - The Third Girl published 1966. It perfectly encapsulates the harrumphing tone about Young People today all long hair can't tell if it's a boy or girl in their mini skirts and velvet trousers taking LSD and Purple Hearts the whole time - which I can remember from when I was a gel.

    The one sympathetic young(ish) character is heading to Australia where they Still Do Things Properly apparently.
  • caroline444caroline444 Shipmate
    edited December 2020
    I've just read Corvus: a Life with Birds by Esther Woolfson.

    She writes with respect and affection of the birds that have shared her life. A cockatiel, a dovecote full of doves, a starling, two canaries, a rook, a magpie and two crows, but mostly she writes about the charming, eccentric and intelligent corvids who have shared her home for many years. These came to her as fledglings which had fallen out of their nests, and most of them ended up as companions.

    "As I write, the bird is behind me on her branch. From time to time she mutters, a sound softly bearing the imprint of the wind and the movement of trees, gentle approbation or comment, like the faintest creaking of an ancient door. Soon I'll hear the fine clicking of her toenails on the wood floor as she walks across to stand by my desk. When I lower my hand to her, she'll press into it an offering. It will be a damp morsel of bread, sodden, its substance now almost unidentifiable, this daily token of what I hope is love. "
  • caroline444caroline444 Shipmate
    edited December 2020
    A slight distraction on this thread - but I am interested: How many books do you have? Including on your e-book device.

    I tried to estimate my library collection, and it is probably between 1600 and 2000 books.

    Over the years I have got rid of nearly all my books. Now I only have about eighty, and nearly all of those are books of artworks, or illustrated children's books. My book 'decluttering' was enabled by becoming a member of Goodreads. Now I do fairly lengthy reviews of all the books I've read and enjoyed, and usually I feel I've noted down the most important parts of each book, so getting rid of a book doesn't mean that I've 'lost' it. This is helped by the fact that nowadays I read non-fiction. Having said that, I quite miss the days when one or two walls of my house were covered with books. These walls give a house a heart.
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