Catching up on my reviews after a rather long gap. I've been reading the thread but lurking. Have been feeling overwhelmed with work (nothing new there!) but now Covid is forcing me to take a break 
Carrying over my meagre list very late:
- The Dark Is Rising, Susan Cooper
- The Red Parts, Maggie Nelson
New reviews:
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The Waning of the Middle Ages, Johann Huizinga, trans. by F. Hopman 4/5
I don't always post reviews of the work-related academic stuff I read, but this one I thought I would... Anyway, there are newer and better translations of this Dutch classic, but I read an old paperback edition of it which has been sitting on my shelves since grad school. It’s a wide-ranging, thought-provoking, interdisciplinary book about the culture of late medieval France and Burgundy. I had heard that this book was responsible for a lot of ill-founded clichés about the late Middle Ages, and indeed it does contain a lot of sweeping generalisations, but at the same time it brings the period to life in exciting ways, and the author is amazingly well-read. It was only the ending chapters which really put me off, with their earnest explanations of why late medieval literature is mostly rubbish, and not as good as Renaissance literature (though Huizinga does make exceptions for Villon, Charles d’Orléans, the Cent Nouvelles nouvelles and so on). As someone who works across the so-called medival and early modern periods, I find it curious that Huizinga persuasively questions the simple opposition between ‘medieval’ and ‘Renaissance’, but then ends up falling back into that categorisation himself, despite having demonstrated its inadequacy. This is very much a work of its time, but I found it absolutely worth the read. Much of the prose is gorgeous.
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Are We Having Fun Yet?, Lucy Mangan 3/5
I’m a Lucy Mangan fan (see
Bookworm), but found this a bit disappointing, although it was certainly a fun read. It’s a comically accurate portrayal of middle-class English family life revolving around primary school and small children. However, it needed more plot!
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Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin 5/5
I knew this was a classic of gay literature, but I didn’t realise it was also a story of Americans travelling to Paris to ‘find themselves’ abroad, and a questioning of notions of ‘home’. A profound, tender story that I will certainly reread. I find it extraordinary how much I identify with Baldwin’s characters. Everything he writes is about what it means to be human.
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The Matrix, Lauren Groff 4/5
I particularly loved the beginning of this novel, which was the bit most closely linked to Marie de France’s 12th century
Lais. Overall, it’s a wildly original imagining of Marie’s life, and while the Marie conjured up by Groff is nothing like the Marie I had conjured up in my own head (after many years of teaching the lais), that’s all right. A very sensual book, one that turns out to be less about the power of storytelling than about power itself, and about what a female-led community might look like.
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Some Tame Gazelle, Barbara Pym 5/5
Pym’s first published novel, this is a real masterpiece. In terms of pure enjoyment, this is the best thing I’ve read so far this year. It’s strangely calming to read about humans in a village observing one another acutely and worrying about the minor details of life. As always with Pym, the male characters are comically self-important, and much less good at understanding the women around them than the women are at understanding
them. Many of the characters read medieval English literature at university, and their pompous recycling of poetic themes and Latin quotations adds to the humour. Pym was so amazingly self-aware, even as an undergraduate. Love her!
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Translations, Brian Friel 5/5
I read this because my son is studying it for A-Level English, and I was blown away. Essentially, it starts with the
Odyssey and ends with the
Aeneid, and in between there’s a story about how the English are colonising 19th c. Ireland by renaming local Irish place names. And while the play is mostly in English, there is a communication barrier between Irish and English characters who don’t speak one another’s languages. ‘Barbarus hic ego sum, quia non intelligor illis.’ (In this place I am a barbarian, because they do not understand me’, from Ovid’s exile poem the
Tristia.)