This past month, I read 4 books and listened to 2 audiobooks.
NON-FICTION:
Katherine ELKINS, The Giants of French Literature [interestingly, this is not available on amazon right now, you have giants of Irish or Russian literature, but not French!, so this link is to a public library catalog]
I found this audiobook totally by chance: another library user had left the catalog open to this item. It sound interesting and the person had not checked it out, so I did!
It’s part of the Modern Scholar Series, an interesting series of lectures on all kinds of topics, by excellent teachers.
This teacher focuses on Balzac, Flaubert, Proust, and Camus.
She highlights what’s specific to that author, presents some of his major works, and draws interesting parallels between these 4 novelists.
I have to say, though I read and studied most of the works presented here many years ago, these classes were better than most of the classes I received by French teachers back in France!
Madame Leon GRANDIN,
A Parisienne in Chicago: Impressions of the World’s Columbian Exposition
This book was one most fascinating. She came to spend 10 months in Chicago, as her husband was working on a big fountain for the Exposition.
She goes everywhere, looks at everything, and has funny and to the point comments between American and French life style and characters of the time.
Amazon.com review:
Review
“An excellent foreign traveler’s account of Chicago, the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, New York City, and travel by ocean liner and train. The book provides wonderful commentary on gender relations and the contrast between Americans and the French.” –Perry Duis, author of Challenging Chicago: Coping with Everyday Life, 1837-1920
Product Description
This fascinating account of a French woman’s impressions of America in the late nineteenth century reveals an unusual cross-cultural journey through fin de siècle Paris, Chicago, and New York. Madame Leon Grandin’s travels and extended stay in Chicago in 1893 were the result of her husband’s collaboration on the fountain sculpture for the World’s Columbian Exposition. Initially impressed with the city’s fast pace and architectural grandeur, Grandin’s attentions were soon drawn to its social and cultural customs, reflected as observations in her writing.
During a ten-month interval as a resident, she was intrigued by the interactions between men and women, mothers and their children, teachers and students, and other human relationships, especially noting the comparative social freedoms of American women. After this interval of acclimatization, the young Parisian socialite had begun to view her own culture and its less liberated mores with considerable doubt. “I had tasted the fruit of independence, of intelligent activity, and was revolted at the idea of assuming once again the passive and inferior role that awaited me!” she wrote.
Grandin’s curiosity and interior access to Chicago’s social and domestic spaces produced an unusual travel narrative that goes beyond the usual tourist reactions and provides a valuable resource for readers interested in late nineteenth-century America, Chicago, and social commentary. Significantly, her feminine views on American life are in marked contrast to parallel reflections on the culture by male visitors from abroad. It is precisely the dual narrative of this text–the simultaneous recounting of a foreigner’s impressions, and the consequent questioning of her own cultural certainties–that make her book unique. This translation includes an introductory essay by Arnold Lewis that situates Grandin’s account in the larger context of European visitors to Chicago in the 1890s.
David KING,
Finding Atlantis: A True Story of Genius, Madness, and an Extraordinary Quest for a Lost World
Another very interesting book, found on the month display of weird things at my public library.
It’s the life and work of Olof Rudbeck, a Swedish genius and eccentric character. Beyond his madness, there were some interesting parallels between civilizations, and you can also see that there’s danger at trying to absolutely find what you look for, pushing things a bit too much…
From Publishers Weekly
From Booklist
Center stage in this history of a history book is the rollicking, fantastical figure of Olof Rudbeck (1630-1702). After reading Rudbeck’s monumental Atlantica (1679), historian King unpacks its plausible but reckless chains of reasoning and reassembles the mass into a marvelous account of the Swedish scholar’s obsessions. Rudbeck was a professor of medicine at Uppsala University, and his restless mind seems to have seldom been idle. Rudbeck switched from physiology, in which he made his name as discoverer of the lymphatic system, to the study of the Viking sagas, just then coming to scholarly light. Connecting the sagas with the gods of Norse and Greek mythology, and with Plato’s lost continent of Atlantis, Rudbeck proposed an astounding theory: Atlantis was located in Sweden! Odd though the idea was, King explains that Rudbeck’s protomodern research methods in archaeology and etymology gained acceptance for his theory. Restoring this colorful eccentric to life, King reveals his talent for narrative flow and portraiture in a biography that will thoroughly inveigle history readers. Gilbert Taylor
MATTHEW THE POOR,
Orthodox Prayer Life: The Interior Way
This year for Great Lent, I asked my husband to pick up a book for me to read, and this is the one he chose.
It’s an excellent ook, presenting all facets of prayer, with lots of excerpts of the Fathers at the end of each section.
I loved it a lot, and copied lots of excerpts in my blog, you can find the posts in the 2 previous months.
Product Description
About the Author
Father Matta El-Maskeen (Matthew the Poor) is a monk in the Monastery of St Macarius the Great, Wadi El-Natroun, Egypt.
FICTION:
Philippa GREGORY, The Constant Princess
This is my 2nd or 3rd audiobook by P. Gregory. I thought I would read the whole series, but this time I have enough.
It’s basically always the same thing, same style.
I should really always be careful with popular authors…
Here is a more positive presentation:
From Publishers Weekly
As youngest daughter to the Spanish monarchs and crusaders King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, Catalina, princess of Wales and of Spain, was promised to the English Prince Arthur when she was three. She leaves Spain at 15 to fulfill her destiny as queen of England, where she finds true love with Arthur (after some initial sourness) as they plot the future of their kingdom together. Arthur dies young, however, leaving Catalina a widow and ineligible for the throne. Before his death, he extracts a promise from his wife to marry his younger brother Henry in order to become queen anyway, have children and rule as they had planned, a situation that can only be if Catalina denies that Arthur was ever her lover. Gregory’s latest (after Earthly Joys) compellingly dramatizes how Catalina uses her faith, her cunning and her utter belief in destiny to reclaim her rightful title. By alternating tight third-person narration with Catalina’s unguarded thoughts and gripping dialogue, the author presents a thorough, sympathetic portrait of her heroine and her transformation into Queen Katherine. Gregory’s skill for creating suspense pulls the reader along despite the historical novel’s foregone conclusion.
Sharan NEWMAN, The Devil’s Door
Here is another series I started some time ago.
Also historical novel, this time on the Middle Ages, but at such a better level than Gregory’s books.
Sharan, whom I met at Kalamazoo Medieval International Conference, does really her homework about theological debates of the time.
I was very disappointed when I finished the last book in the Brother Cadfael series, but this one is a very good replacement, with Sr Catherine.
From Publishers Weekly
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Kirkus Reviews
Fresh from her sleuthing in Death Comes As Epiphany (1993), 12th-century novice nun Catherine LeVendeur will leave the convent of Abbess H‚lo‹se and marry Edgar, student of the now frail Peter Abelard. The pair will take on dangers with derring-do to solve the curious murder of a young countess named Alys, whose death has something to do with property bequeathed to the convent and the tangled fortunes of a particularly nasty family. Among the puzzlements: Alys’s sister, a silent nun presumed dead to the world, and her bitter secret; the death and dismemberment of a mild gossip; an assault on a convent nun; the tangled motives of the dead countess’s horrid mother, who has lethal plans for snooping Catherine. Throughout, there are congenial chats with kin, the like-minded, and the high-minded. Catherine’s father, a “Jewish apostate,” has ongoing problems, as does the beleaguered Abelard, headed for condemnation by the Council of Sens. With richly satisfying settings, this smooth mystery is tight as a tambour. Top-notch sleuthing, classy with Latin saws and observations.