Sunday Caught My Interest

The weather has turned just enough here that you need sweats in the morning and the evening but need shorts in the middle of the day. Himself puttered around the backyard and went on bike rides. Eldest did Tough Mudder in Seattle and survived.. Youngest went to Oktoberfest in Munich. I worked on organizing my scrap area. I finished three books this week, The Arrivals (which I did not like – a little too formulaic for me), Black Rain (I had to read this one straight through which made it hard), and Rules of Civility. I have also started The Lady Cyclists Guide to Kashgar (a little lighter than I expected) and Thanksgiving Night (which is somewhat slow going so far).

Here is what caught my interest this week:

This seems to be the season for reading classic Science Fiction authors that I haven’t read before. Sakura from Chasing Bawa reviews Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany published in 1966. After reading the review I went to Wikipedia and saw that Delany writes with reoccurring themes of memory, mythology, language, and perception – all themes that I fascinated with. Babel-17 is about a war where language is used as part of the enemy’s deadly force. A poet with a gift for languages is sent to decode the language encountering a group of misfits along the way to help her.

We are a jazz family – both boys played a total of 8 years in Jazz band in both middle and high school and Himself, when he has a spare moment, plays in a drop-in Jazz band and we have a lot of Jazz music lying around the house. So the names and music of Thelonius Monk and Charlie Parker, Miles Davies and Dizzy Gillespie are familiar to me. However, I have never hear of the “Jazz Baroness” who helped support Monk and Parker as well as other Jazz musicians. And that baroness came from the very wealthy and very proper Rothschild family. Hannah Rothschild has written her great-aunt’s biography, Baroness: The Search for Nica the Rebellious Rothschild. I found out about the book at Dove Grey Scribbles and it sounds fascinating. In the early 50’s Nica heard a piece by Monk and became enthralled with his work. She moved to New York and became a fixture of the Jazz scene eventually being disinherited by her family.  Definitely going on the list.

Buried in Print brings us a novel that appears on this year’s long list for Canada’s prestigious Relit prize, Six Metres of Pavement by Farzana Doctor. Many years ago Ismail Boxwala  made a horrendous mistake that led to the death of his baby daughter. This lead to heavy drinking, a divorce, and the knowledge that his neighbors will never forget what he did. After twenty years of living half a life he meets two women – one a new neighbor his age and the other a young woman in trouble, a woman who is the same age his daughter would be.

Finally Eva from A Striped Armchair reviews a book that is going on my list for Oldest – my fantasy reader. Saladin Ahmed, an award winning short story writer has written his debut fantasy novel, The Throne of the Crescent Moon. While Ahmed is American, his novel is “steeped in Arab culture”. Eva does mention that there is a lot of violence in this novel but I don’t think that will make much of a difference for Oldest and it would be nice to expand his fantasy reading into less conventional areas.

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