Daughter of Smoke and Bone

Daughter of Smoke & Bone by Laini Taylor
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Not to be confused with Shadow and Bone of Netflix trend. I really enjoyed this (more adult side of YA) YA story. The plot had me guessing where it was going continuously. There are flashbacks and different points of view and right in the middle it seemed like a vertitable vortex of literary puzzle pieces as p.o.v. and time and space shifted constantly. But it all works, and tells a pretty great love story at the same time. There is plenty to mine in this new world that Taylor built that overlaps ours, and she builds it slowly so that tedious passages of world building don't interfere with flow, yet the reader also doesn't have to slog through incomprehensibility trying to piece it together themselves, either. This is probably the greatest strength of the novel. And the world she builds is as rich as any myth (also love her multiple creation myths that highlight the different philosophies of the various species).

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When you know what you hope for most and hold it like a light within you, you can make things happen, almost like magic.

Frankenstein

Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

.Another classic I feel like I should have read. It was both what I was and wasn't expecting. I thought it would be more of a creation story but instead was more of a haunting. I thought about how this was written by a woman and what her "creation" could have been. I have not read anything about Shelley, (though I will put that on the list), but I wonder if she felt conflicted with her writing and her role as a woman. More than men, I think, women worry about how their business and creative endeavors affect their marriage, their kids, the expected roles we are supposed to play (including volunteering). It is also curious to me that much of it was set near the North Pole, a place that has been the setting for several thrillers I've read. It easy to see why it is a book alluded to often, and a pivotal book for women writers.

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It seemed to me as if nothing would or could ever be known.

Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.

Increase of knowledge only discovered to me more clearly what a wretched outcast I was.

the human senses are insurmountable barriers to our union.

But I am a blasted tree; the bolt has entered my soul; and I felt that I should survive to exhibit what I shall soon cease to be--a miserable spectacle of wrecked humanity, pitiable to others and intolerable to myself.

for I am fearless and therefore powerful.

And wherefore was it glorious?  Not because the way was smooth and placid as a southern sea, but because it was full of dangers and terror, because at every new incident your fortitude was to be called forth and your courage exhibited, because danger and death surrounded it, and these you were to brave and overcome.  For this was it a glorious, for this was it an honorable undertaking.

The Nine Parts of Desire

 

Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women by Geraldine Brooks
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Brooks does an excellent job of balancing history, current events, and personal anecdote in this nonfiction look at women in Islam. While I don't think she ever quite understood why a woman would elect to follow some of the Moslem practices voluntarily, her explanations of the Koran and how they are now interpreted were especially eye-opening. I agree that a political system that dictates a religion to its people will always lead to oppression, I also appreciated that some of the most heinous crimes against women in the Middle East are not actually part of the Koran or Moslem beliefs, but rather appropriated practices, or practices that have been corrupted.

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Educating the women so that they could read the Koran for themselves was the keystone in the Eriteans' patient campaign against genital mutilation.

Once, discussing cruelty, he cited intercourse without foreplay as a form of cruelty to women.

Women bear the brunt of fending off social disorder in the Catholic tradition because they aren't considered sexually active, and in the Muslim tradition because they are.

"If the men could come in here and be with us, they would end up dominating and telling us how to run things.  I prefer to run my own show."

Now, thanks to Hamas, women had been sent back home, to manufacture male babies and avoid waste in household expenditures.

The Blazing World

The Blazing World by Siri Hustvedt
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a novel made up of accounts, interviews, and journal entries that are more quotes than narrative and yet it was one of the most compelling, interesting, enjoyable books I've read in a while. Harriet Burden is a middle-aged female artist who feels she her art has been ignored because of her gender (and maybe because of her age and station, as well). She has several male artists show her work as her own, as a social experiment, and to vindicate her artistry as well. What results is not what she or the reader expects, I could feel her Harriet's frustration mount and almost hear her banging her head against the proverbial wall. Her art revolves around boxes with scenes in them, whose meanings are not always clear. I felt like the narrative was similar-- a series of boxes with scenes that put together make a whole, though there is still plenty of mystery left. This is definitely a book I will read again and again to try to put the puzzle all together, noticing different pieces perhaps, than the first time I read it, but somehow each time I know it will be a masterpiece.

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This amnesia is our phenomenology of the everyday--we don't see ourselves--and what we see becomes us while we're looking at it.

When I look at the picture now, I am struck by its banality, but also by how much it hides.  As a vehicle of memory, it resist inner reality.  The document of an instant, it records what we looked like then.  The high feeling that ran between us, the secrecy of our confidences, the pact of friendship we made--all of that is missing.

we know so little about ourselves it's shocking.  We tell ourselves a story and we go along believing in it, and then, it turns out, it's the wrong story, which means we've lived the wrong life.

In order to sell art, you had to "create desire," and "desire," he said, "cannot be satisfied because then it's no longer desire."  The thing that is truly wanted must always be missing.  "Art dealers have to be magicians of hunger."

I can't say it like she did, but she told me that people have different names for the same things, depending on what interests they have, but the words can also change how we see things.

Before long, she said, her answers and comments became his.  No one owns language.  Do we remember the sources of our own ideas, our own words? They have to come from somewhere, don't they?

I talked about fantasy then, which lies at the heart of my work with patients, but the inner world and the other world can be difficult to separate , and the place where they conjoin of divide has been a blurry business in psychoanalysis from the beginning.  We invent them, I said to Harry, the people we love and hate.  We project our feelings onto other people, but there is always a dynamic that creates those inventions.  The fantasies are made between people, and the ideas about those people live inside us.

And then maybe we attribute more vanity to beautiful people than to the plain, and perhaps that isn't fair.

Is pain more durable than joy in memory?

Human beings are the only animals who kill for ideas.

belief is a complex mixture of suggestion, mimicry, desire, and projection.

If we had no past visual experiences, we could not make sense of the visible world.  Without repetition, the seen world is nonsense.

People of Paradox

 

People of Paradox: A History of Mormon Culture by Terryl L. Givens
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a very well researched, straight-up history about the art, music, and architecture of the church. Looking at it so objectively can be a little uncomfortable at times for someone growing up in the religion, where criticism can be looked at unfavorably. Givens also seemed to consider good Mormon art as those that explore the paradoxes he sets forth at the beginning of the book, but I think there can be other tensions to explore and wonder if you must question your faith in order to create "good" art. Still, I have not come across such a dedicated history, and enjoyed delving into these parts of our history that aren't often discussed.

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Hold Still

 

Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs by Sally Mann
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Most memoirs suffer from name dropping, whining, and the humble brag. This memoir starts out with all these trademarks, but then it turns a corner and becomes intensely interesting and inspiring. From most enjoyable: 1) she tells how and why she embarks on some of the major photographic projects of her career--I especially enjoyed learning how hard she had to work to capture some images and others that were serendipity. 2) she waxes philosophical on photography--what pictures can and can't show us--interestingly, she posits that photos actually steal our memories 3) she elaborates about her ancestors and relatives who are immensely interesting with murders, affairs, drugs, wealth. She uses pictures to illustrate her words, which add an extra measure of interest and understanding. Very thought-provoking.

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photographs supplant and corrupt the past, all the while creating their own memories

When an animal, a rabbit, say, beds down in a protecting fencerow, the weight and warmth of his curled body leaves a mirroring mark upon the ground.  The grasses often appear to have been woven into a birdlike nest, and perhaps were indeed caught and pulled around by the delicate claws as he turned in a circle before subsiding into rest.  This soft bowl in the grasses, this body-formed evidence of hair, has a name, an obsolete but beautiful word: meuse. (Enticingly close to Muse, daughter of Memory, and source of inspiration).  

In fact, hardly anybody at Putney even had boyfriends and girlfriends.  I was suddenly living in another country where my currency was worthless, where all my hard-earned stock was downgraded.

Pain is a dimension of old civilizations.  The South has it.  The rest of the United States does not.  (John Keegan).

I realized the image inoculated me to a possible reality that I might not henceforth have to suffer.  Maybe this could be an escape from the manifold terrors of child rearing, an apotropaic protection: stare them straight in the face but at a remove--on paper, in a photograph. 

I believe that photographs actually rob all of us of our memory.

Photographs economize the truth; they are always moments more or less illusorily abducted from time's continuum.

These are not my children with ice in their veins, these are not my children at all; these are children in a photograph.

Part of the artist's job is to make the commonplace singular, to project a different interpretation not o the conventional. 

She kept the sorrows of there past hidden, like the stolen fox secreted beneath the cape of the Spartan youth in the Ancient Greek morality tale.  The young man, rather than reveal the dishonorable truth when waylaid by his elders, answers their questions with unblinking equanimity, all while squeezing the fox highly to him.  Finally the grown-ups are satisfied and allow him to pass, but by then the fox has torn the boy's abdomen to shreds.  I believe my mother discovered, like that stoic Spartan youth with the gut-gnawing fox, that when we cloak the past, like the fox, it will injure us.

The Platonic doctrine of recollection asserts that we do not learn but rather, with time and penetrating inquiry, release the comprehensive knowledge that came bundled with us at birth.

Richard Avedon...asserted that a photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he's being photographed and that what he does with that knowledge is as much a part of the picture as what he chose to wear that day.

It would be an interesting exercise to determine if there's some threshold number of photographs that would guarantee, when studied together so that signature expressions were revealed and uncharacteristic gestures isolated, a reasonably accurate sense of how a person appeared to those who knew him.

The Alchemists

The Alchemists: Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire by Neil Irwin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book may be a little dated now, but it is still a great introduction to size, scope, and function of central banks and bankers. I am embarrassingly ignorant of all these things so for me it was enlightening and educational. Irwin starts with the first central bank in Sweden in the 1660s and outlines the basic history and roles of central banks in everything from the Great Depression to the inflation of the Nixon years. Most of the bank focuses on the years from 2007-2012, during the bank bailouts, Greece's struggle, and the subsequent actions to normalize the economies since. I realize how entangled all the economies in the world are, and sometimes felt like it is good and right that these technocrats can figure out what needs to happen to keep the economies at an even keel. Other times I was amazed (and a little horrified) to realize how much power these few men hold. Holding the purse strings carries a lot of power--and the wrong decisions can cause economic disaster, depressions, war. Irwin definitely sides with the bankers, his portrayal shows them making the best decision they could at the time, and entrusts that they will learn by their mistakes. He points out that despite criticism, these three men (Berneke, King, and Trichet), averted the worst pitfalls of what could have happened. Although the book ends 10 years ago, (it was published in 2013), I still feel like I learned a lot and can understand the Fed's role and the different strategies it uses.

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