Eating Stone

"Homo sapiens have left themselves few places and scant ways to witness other species in their own world, an estrangement that leaves us hungry and lonely. In this famished state, it is no wonder that when we finally encounter wild animals, we are quite surprised by the sheer truth of them."

Ellen Meloy

Eating Stone

The world is a fantastic and complicated place, with fantastic and complicated creatures. Unfortunately, not much is known about many of these animals, pushed to the fringes before they are seen by many people. Southwestern bighorn sheep and one of these animals. Long thought to be on the declined and even extinct, they have in recent years made a comeback.

In Eating Stone Ellen Meloy describes her experiences with the Southwestern bighorn sheep, her observations from the river, back-country hikes. With beautiful prose and brilliant observations, she describes her connection with the wilderness and the bighorns and laments the growing separation of humans from the natural world, that the severance has left us spiritually lacking.

This book was spectacular, a truly amazing piece of nature writing. Her prose is beautiful, her story arc spectacular. Its a fantastic conservation piece examining the complexity of nature and the necessity for it. Everyone should read this book.

"That wild animals have largely moved out of our view is of a small note to many of us. We think, abstractly that they live out there somewhere, browsing or flying or killing or doing whatever it is they do, and we think that we are keeping them among us by the sheer force of our desire, even as we consume, insatiably, the places where they live."

Man in the High Castle

"They want to be agents, not the victims of history. They identify with God's power and believe they are godlike. That is their basic madness."

Philip K. Dick

The Man in the High Castle

We all play the "What if?" game. What if I had asked him out? What if I had quit this job, or gotten that one? What if that butterfly flapped its wings? Some "What ifs?" have small consequences, while others can be felt around the world. What if Guiseppe Zangara's assassination attempt had been successful? What if he shot Roosevelt in Florida in 1933?

These are the questions that Philip K. Dick asks in The Man in the High Castle. He shows us a world where the Allies lost the War, Germany and Japan control much of the world. Space travel has been achieved but television is still a work in progress in 1962. The US has been divided into the Pacific States of America (run by a puppet government controlled by Japan), the indipendent Rockies and Plains, and The United States of America (part of the German Empire). Death camps have been set up in New York. The governments are Fascist. 

The story follows several different characters, their stories weaving in and out. A Jewish man making a living in San Francisco after fleeing New York, a Japanese security agent, a German revolutionary trying to war Japan of impending attack, an American antiques dealer attempting to adapt to new markets, and a woman in the Rockies who is reading a book that tells what could have been. Their stories weave together creating a wonderful answer to the question of "what if?" while examining the ideologies and racism's that occurred after World War II.

I enjoyed this book. It was well written, adopting different voices for the many points of view that it follows. The characters were well rounded and unique, behaving believably as people might have had things been different. It was fast paced and exciting, one of those books you can't wait to find out what happens. I highly recommend it and I cannot wait to see the show that Amazon has made of it.

  

Fates and Furies

"Let me be the wave. And if I cannot be the wave, let me be the rupture at the bottom. Let me be the terrible first rift in the dark."

 Lauren Groff

Fates and Furies

Ever once in a while you read a novel that makes you fall so in love with the characters and takes you so by surprise that you find yourself thinking about it constantly for days after you've read it. Fates and Furies is one of these novels. Beautiful prose, fantastic storytelling, and one of the most interesting characters I have ever found in a book. Lauren Groff's writing style is fantastic, beautiful and absolutely unique. I've never read anyone who strings sentences together in such a wonderful way.

The story follows the lives of Lotto and Mathilde, two beautiful people who are madly in love with each other. The book follows the twenty-four years of their marriage through both of their perspectives. The result is a magnificent commentary on marriage, art, love, power, and how we perceive people. How we can know and not know a person.  

I loved this book. It builds beautifully, throwing in a twist that I did not see coming at the end. The characters were fantastically complex, and extremely relateable. The prose was beautiful, and the story structure was fantastically crafted, jumping forward and backwards in time.

 I highly recommend this book for everyone. Everyone.

 

  

Reading Lolita in Tehran

"Do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth."

"The desperate truth of Lolita's story is not the rape of a twelve-year-old girl by a dirty old man but the confiscation of one individuals life by another"

Azar Nafisi

Reading Lolita in Tehran

Fiction is important. It's a fundamental way to make sense of reality and practice empathy. The story of Iran in the past forty years is not one that we experience often in the U.S., let alone a woman's perspective. In Reading Lolita in Tehran Azar Nafisi tells of her experiences teaching western literature in Iran during and after the revolution, first at university, and later, in secret, holding classes in her home for her committed female students. She tells of their stories and their experiences as seen through the lens of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jane Austen, Henry James, and Vladimir Nabokov.

This book was phenomenal. Part memoir and part literary critique, it offers an incredible in-depth look at the experiences of women in the Islamic Republic of Iran, their struggles with the restrictions of their personal freedoms, their arguments for and against the wearing of the veils,their stories becoming linked with the ones they read.

The writing in the book was fantastic. Nafisi is eloquent, her sentences are beautiful, and she tells her story with an incredible amount of compassion, teasing out the nuances of her and her students lives in the broader context of the politics of Iran, through the revolutions, the Iran-Iraq war, and the religious and political rhetoric. 

This is a book that everyone should read if the are interested in the Middle East, women's rights, or western literature.