A Professional Dilettante

Sunday book summaries are my casual log of what I’ve been reading this week. These are not formal reviews. They’re more my reactions and musings as taken from my journal when I complete the reading, and at times will contain notes about how they influence my thoughts on what I’m writing.

Foggy and chill weather most of the week led to getting more books read as a result of the lovely aches and pains of aging. As is usual with the Libby ebook library holds, I have dry spells with no books unless I go searching for something that is currently available, then a flurry when my holds are suddenly all available all at once.

That wasn’t the case this week, which was good because I had a couple of big nonfiction books to get through.

The biggest one was Troublemaker, a biography of Jessica Mitford by Carla Kaplan, and a wrap (at the moment, I still have one more book on hold) of my dive into the Mitford sisters. It’s taken me until now to do more than read the occasional article about their history for various reasons. Do I regret taking that long to delve into the Mitfords? Well, no, not really. The timing is right for reading that history. I had started to reread Jo Walton’s Small Change series (Farthing, Ha’penny, Half a Crown) when a reference in the middle of Ha’penny sent me off to do a deeper dig into the Mitfords.

Definitely an eye-opener about the era, and Troublemaker, along with Decca’s (Jessica’s nickname) own memoirs, is the most revealing about politics. My only regret about not looking into the Mitfords sooner is that Decca was an organizer after my own heart, especially given her preference for direct community service over ideology. However, my notes also suggest that I might want to dig into Dorothy Day next. I had read a little bit about Day a few years ago; maybe it’s time to look back into that.

The other big nonfiction read was The Three-Cornered War, by Megan Kate Nelson. It’s a very engaging and detailed history of the U.S. Civil War in the Southwest, primarily in New Mexico and Arizona. The three parties were the Union, the Confederates, and Apaches plus Navajo bands. She selects several main players from all three (four, actually because both Apache and Navajo viewpoints are represented) groups, based on diaries and other records available. Two of those represented are women—Louisa Canby, wife of (Edward) Richard Canby, a Union general and Juanita, wife of Manuelito, influential leader of a Navajo band.

Nelson also vividly shows the unforgiving nature of the Southwestern desert in her descriptions of the impact of drought on that country, drawing on the history of human settlement that rises and falls with the years of rain. The images she evokes of the failure of the Navajo relocation to the Bosque Redondo, centering on cutworm devastation of the corn crop are just one illustration of how well she weaves the environment into the work and brings the land alive. Which…she is an environmental historian and the book was a Pulitzer Prize Finalist, after all.

It’s also a timely book for me in a different way, because it made me think about significant parts of the second book of Goddess’s Vision, Vision of Chaos. Chaos will have a lot of scenes in high desert and grasslands, and The Three-Cornered War gave me a lot to think about fighting strategy in that setting.

I also finally got around to reading Octavia Butler’s Fledgling. What a ride…and a very powerful book with so many layers to it. Not just vampirism but racism. The impact of being stripped of one’s identity, including not being able to remember those who were nearest and dearest. The impact of trauma. And so much more. I will be spending a lot of time thinking about this book.

The Winter Knight by Jes Battis is a somewhat sweet modern retelling of Arthurian legend set in Vancouver, B.C. It’s very much impacted by the region, the academic setting, and a number of mythic elements involved with the main character’s work to find out who is killing the modern-day equivalents of Arthur’s knights. Arthur himself makes a brief appearance, and let’s just say that the characters are not quite those of legend, both in class and in the roles they play. Arthur is imprisoned for reasons not made clear, except that most everyone seems to think this is a good thing. The assorted knights of Arthur’s court have differing types of roles in society, some with power, some without. Some clearly remember past manifestations, others don’t.

The book moves along nicely and provides a satisfying read.

Lastly, I finished the first of my rereads of The Book of Earthsea, A Wizard of Earthsea. Though I try to dive into this big, beautiful collection of Earthsea every winter, it doesn’t always happen. As a result it’s been long enough that reading Wizard had a combination of pleasant remembrances and surprises. I always seem to forget just how vivid Le Guin’s environmental imagery is.

That’s it for this week. We’ll see if I remember to do this next week.