I was just checking when I last posted an input in this Blog and was surprised how long ago it was. So since it's almost mid-month, let's do an update. I've been a bit slow starting off the month and have left behind my promise to myself not to read any more books than 5 at a time.📚📚📚 LOL! Anyway, let's get a move on!
Just Completed
(I've completed only one book this month so far and given up on one...)
""Literature isn't reducible - not to summaries or quotations, or to any of these pleasures or values or states of being. And reducing literature is precisely what censorship does. With its ideological checklists or puritanical frameworks, it reduces literature to a shrunken, misshapen parody of itself. A novel teeming with voices and perspectives becomes a single 'message', or a wicked idea, a naughty image, or even a single, abominable word.'
On Book Banning: Or, How the New Censorship Consensus Trivializes Art and Undermines Democracy by Ira Wells is a thoughtful look at book banning, censoring, 'weeding' by right wing abolitionists and even by left leaning idealists. It's very depressing at times but it's so well-written and covers the area in detail, from the history of censorship and book banning and library burning to those people who write about the need to allow the distribution and circulation of diverse ideas.
The book starts with a historical look at book banning / censorship. The Greeks burned books of dissident voices. Julius Caesar liked criticism, permitting both oral and written criticism and responding to it. He published the proceedings of senate meetings, believing in transparency. But under Augustus, Rome's first emperor, things changed. He only permitted favourable commentaries. Anyone who voiced dissent was punished. They had all of their work destroyed, this destroying, often resulting in suicide or death to the victim. The Romans had another way of censoring dissenters, that being basically making the person a 'non-person'. Any record of their existence was wiped out. They didn't exist. (Reminds me of George Orwell's 1984). The Roman Catholic Church published a regular list of publications that were to be censored. Wells talks about the Comstock Act which we've been hearing more and more about the past years. Comstock was a relentless crusader for public morals and lobbied to have laws passed to prevent 'obscenity' from being sent through the mails. (the definition of what obscenity was being somewhat undefined)
At the other end, you've got Benjamin Franklin who established one of the first lending libraries in the US, the Library Company of Philadelphia; 30% history, 20% literature, 20% science, 10% philosophy, religion and miscellaneous. By 1800, there were 40+ lending libraries in the US. In Franklin's opinion, 'the libraries have improved the general conversation of the Americans, made the common tradesman and farmers as intelligent as most gentlemen from other countries...' Andrew Carnegie funded over 2500 free public libraries over the world.
I don't want to quote the whole book here, suffice it to say it's a great discussion of libraries and the pressures they are under. He highlights two different types of 'banning'. In Florida, groups like Moms for Liberty have lists of LGBTQ+, racial books, etc. that they feel should be removed from libraries, and get the support of the State government. They want to remove books, to white wash libraries to basically ensure their supremacy, to denigrate the 'other'. From the other perspective, the Peel School board has a policy of removing books that have been published in excess of 15 years ago. While trying to remain all inclusive, they feel that many classics and earlier books use terminology that makes their communities feel denigrated. So to that end, books like Anne Frank's diary, books by Maya Angelou don't make it to their shelves because they were published over 15 years ago. Instead of using these books to discuss and educate, they are 'weeded out'.
It's an ongoing battle between these forces. Wells talks about freedom of speech, which is the freedom to discuss your ideas, but not necessarily to shout them out just to hear your own voice. He mentions a discussion on 'freedom to read' which was quite interesting. I readily admit that I sometimes got a bit lost in the language but for the most part, the book was informative and very interesting and thought-provoking. I'm probably giving the story short shrift with my review, it's definitely worth reading.
Teachers and librarians need support and public funding, the politicians need to have the courage to defend reading, diversity, discussion of uncomfortable topics and to fight back at those from either side who want to hide the past, and to show the whole past, in all its grittiness and also to encourage all reading and proper discussion. The way things are currently, I'm not hopeful but it's worth fighting for. (4.5 stars)"
"Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein ends being a Did Not Finish (DNF) for me, I'm afraid. There is no doubt that Naomi can write, beautifully, in fact, but it just came down to the subject matter. It kind of just made me depressed.
The basic premise for this non-fiction novel is that one day Naomi Klein discovered that she had started being mistaken for another author, Naomi Wolf, or more correctly, vice versa. Naomi Wolf was a left leaning author dealing with women's liberation issues who had gradually (especially during the COVID years) become a serial fantasist, one spending her time on Fox news and Steve Bannon's War Room spouting anti-vax propaganda, etc.
They have their similarities and as she wandered through the internet, more and more, she found herself being confused with Naomi Wolf and found herself disappearing as a person, or a brand. She finds herself spending more and more time watching right wing propagandists and that becomes the crux (as I saw it so far, until I gave up the ghost) of her treatise, the ways in which people like Bannon and Wolf and others are making a mirror world of propaganda, making real life seem insignificant.
As I said at the beginning, Naomi Klein knows how to present a story. I just couldn't spend any more time in this Mirror World. I think you should judge for yourselves and give the book a chance. It just wasn't for me anymore.(NR)"
Currently Reading
"As an actress, Sippy Stokes was absolute death.' From the vain leading man to the rock star making his acting debut to the aging writer whose books were being chopped to death on the set of the 'Stanislas Braid' TV series, everyone seemed to hold the same opinion of the young female lead. And when she fell victim to a fatal backstage accident, shockingly few tears were shed. While dutifully performing his role as the dumb town constable Sergeant Clump, amateur investigator Charles Paris couldn't help but start asking questions on the side. What he found out made for riveting drama. Sippy Stokes had given someone a very good reason to cast her as a corpse - but her killing was only the opening act."
"St Petersburg 1917. The capital of the glittering Empire of the Tsars and a city on the brink of revolution where the jackals of the Secret Police intrigue for their own survival as their aristocratic masters indulge in one last, desperate round of hedonism. For Sandro Ruzsky, Chief Investigator of the city police, even this decaying world provides the opportunity for a new beginning. Banished to Siberia for four years for pursuing a case his superiors would rather he'd quietly buried, Ruzsky finds himself investigating the murders of a young couple out on the ice of the frozen river Neva. The dead girl was a nanny at the Imperial Palace, the man an American from Chicago and, if the brutality of their deaths seems an allegory for the times, Ruzsky finds that, at every turn, the investigation leads dangerously close to home. At the heart of the case, lies Maria, the beautiful ballerina Ruzsky once loved and lost. But is she a willing participant in what appears to be a dangerous conspiracy or likely to be it's next, perhaps last, victim? In a city at war with itself, and pitted against a ruthless murderer who relishes taunting him, Ruzsky finds himself at last face to face with his own past as he fights to save everything he cares for, before the world into which he was born goes up in flames."
"While still a teenager, Patrick Leigh Fermor made his way across Europe, as recounted in his classic memoirs, A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water. During World War II, he fought with local partisans against the Nazi occupiers of Crete. But in A Time to Keep Silence, Leigh Fermor writes about a more inward journey, describing his several sojourns in some of Europe’s oldest and most venerable monasteries. He stays at the Abbey of St. Wandrille, a great repository of art and learning; at Solesmes, famous for its revival of Gregorian chant; and at the deeply ascetic Trappist monastery of La Grande Trappe, where monks take a vow of silence. Finally, he visits the rock monasteries of Cappadocia, hewn from the stony spires of a moonlike landscape, where he seeks some trace of the life of the earliest Christian Anchorites.
More than a history or travel journal, however, this beautiful short book is a meditation on the meaning of silence and solitude for modern life. Leigh Fermor writes, “In the seclusion of a cell—an existence whose quietness is only varied by the silent meals, the solemnity of ritual, and long solitary walks in the woods—the troubled waters of the mind grow still and clear, and much that is hidden away and all that clouds it floats to the surface and can be skimmed away; and after a time one reaches a state of peace that is unthought of in the ordinary world.”
A ghost town, isolated from civilization by miles of scorching desert, has become a killing ground. Blood taints the sand and the stench of rot hovers on the humid air.
It’s a small patch of hell that Aleksandr Sokolovsky was born into. The son of the world’s most prolific serial killers, he yearns for a freedom he’ll never have. He comforts himself with the knowledge that death eventually comes for everyone. But he had never considered the Furies.
Summoned by years of pain and rage, the three demonic sisters have descended upon the ghost town. The creatures of Greek legend are real. Consumed by their desire for blood and vengeance, they rain down a reckoning. They delight in ripping their victims’ minds and bodies to shreds before offering a merciful death.
For most of his life, Aleksandr has been ready to die. But he’ll fight to his last breath to spare his younger brother and sister the same fate. Unable to battle the hellish creatures alone, Aleksandr is forced into an uneasy truce with Evelyn Figueroa, the woman his parents chose to be his first female victim.
Together they face an ancient rage that can’t be reasoned with or destroyed. Burning with an inferno of hatred, the Furies won’t stop until they’ve collected their debt in full.
A pound of flesh for every sin."
Years ago, when plagues and natural disasters killed millions of people, much of the world stopped dreaming. Without dreams, people are haunted, sick, mad, unable to rebuild. The government soon finds that the Indigenous people of North America have retained their dreams, an ability rumored to be housed in the very marrow of their bones. Soon, residential schools pop up—or are re-opened—across the land to bring in the dreamers and harvest their dreams.
Seventeen-year-old French lost his family to these schools and has spent the years since heading north with his new found family: a group of other dreamers, who, like him, are trying to build and thrive as a community. But then French wakes up in a pitch-black room, locked in and alone for the first time in years, and he knows immediately where he is—and what it will take to escape.
Meanwhile, out in the world, his found family searches for him and dodges new dangers—school Recruiters, a blood cult, even the land itself. When their paths finally collide, French must decide how far he is willing to go—and how many loved ones is he willing to betray—in order to survive."
Strangely enough, this renown reaches him at a most unwelcome time. Sent to officiate in a dispute in South America, he lands in the middle of a revolution, recognized, attacked and left for dead.
In fact everyone thinks he is dead--until he rises from his coffin, creating no end of trouble with the natives...for they certainly know a resurrection when they see one!"
So there you go, some book ideas for you. In my next post, I hope to start a new thread, a look at some of my favorite non-fiction novels. 😎 Enjoy the rest of your week.
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