Not much yarn content recently

I’ve been having trouble with my right arm and have backed off on yarn stuff recently. But I’m getting lots of reading done, so I decided I would start posting the book reviews as blog entries as well as linking them on my “Books Read in [insert year here]” page. I’ll be backdating entries for prior books, but no one is under any obligation to go back and read my ramblings. Unless, of course, you want to.

EDITED TO ADD: Hmm. WordPress won’t let me back date entries. Or maybe I just can’t figure out how to do that. Okay, then, never mind. Forward we go.
EDITED AGAIN TO ADD:  Ha!  I figured it out.  Amazing what a little research in the FAQ will uncover.

Book review: The Bellwether Revivals by Benjamin Wood

Three of five stars

On the way home after his shift at the care home where he worked as a nurse’s assistant, 20-year-old Oscar Lowe wandered into a chapel on the grounds of Cambridge University one day to listen to the organ music.  After the service, as young men often do, he began chatting with an attractive young woman, Iris Bellwether, whose brother Eden was the organist.  From such chance meetings do lives change.

Iris and Eden were products of privilege: boarding school, music lessons, prestigious university education, with neither a thought to money nor concept of cost.  Oscar’s life couldn’t have been more different.  But his and Iris’s mutual attraction transcended the difference in their social backgrounds, and they swiftly fell in love.  Iris’s and Eden’s small group of friends made room in their closed circle for Oscar.  Eden, on the other hand, remained aloof, disapproving, with a penchant for insults so subtle Oscar wasn’t sure he actually heard them, or if he was being overly sensitive.

Over time, Iris began to confide in Oscar her worries about Eden: the childhood mistreatments, the obsessive behavior, the sheer hubris of his belief that he can heal people through music.  Convinced he suffered from a severe psychological disorder, she wondered if there was someone who could help:  in secret, of course, because Eden would never willingly subject himself to therapy.  Together, she and Oscar came up with a plan to have Eden evaluated, thus setting in motion the beginning of the end, and the tragedy that opens and closes the book.

Benjamin Wood’s debut novel is beautifully written, and somewhat reminiscent of Donna Tartt’s A Secret History.  He captures the opulence and arrogance of the Bellwethers’ lifestyle as seen through Oscar’s eyes, with echoes of Fitzgerald’s “The rich are different” ringing through the prose.  The living room at the Bellwether family home had “…the conscious extravagance of a hotel lobby;” Iris’s parents “…spent more money on cognac than most people could retire on.”  Oscar enjoys the luxury of becoming part of this privileged circle, but he is not seduced by it, and in the end, may be the only person who survives relatively undamaged.

Many thanks to Goodreads’ First Reads program for the opportunity to read this book.

Book review: The 19th Wife by David Ebershoff

Three of five stars

Okay, book first:  Well written and readable.  Although initially I enjoyed the 19th century storyline, I got bored with Ann Eliza’s story about 2/3rds of the way through.  She struck me as whiny, strident, and self-serving, which is only to be expected in an autobiography detailing her struggles as a plural wife and attacking one of the (then) fundamental doctrines of the Latter Day Saints.  As the book wore on, I became more interested in Jordan’s contemporary fight to save his mother from a murder charge than in Ann’s 19th century fight against “celestial” marriage and the Mormon church.

And now, a brief meditation on the fundamental issue of this novel, plural marriage.

As an advocate of personal liberty, I don’t think plural marriage is necessarily evil in and of itself.  However, as it was practiced by the Mormon Church in the 19th Century (and is practiced still by its bastard offshoots today), in which the man has multiple wives and holds all the power, it is blatantly discriminatory, demeaning, and harmful.  That’s not marriage, that’s concubinage.  That’s slavery.

To me, plural marriage must mean all parties involved have multiple spouses.

In other words, a husband doesn’t just marry another woman, or man, for that matter.  His current partner must marry her or him also.  And conversely, if a wife wants to marry another man (or woman), her current partner must also marry him or her.  All parties involved are married to each other.  Any children that result from the marriage are the children of all.  In theory, such a family structure makes a certain amount of sense.  Several working adults contributing monetarily to the household while one or two nurturing types stay home and care for the children and the house?  Sounds prosperous, comfortable, almost idyllic.  In Caprica, a television series hardly anyone saw, just such a marriage was depicted.  And, other than one of the spouses being a spy and another one a murderer, it seemed to work just fine.

Look, if multiple consenting adults want to marry each other and raise a family, I see no reason why they shouldn’t.  Human nature being what it is, though, I don’t hold out much hope for such an arrangement actually working in the long run.  Jealousies and rivalries will develop, factions will evolve, power struggles will ensue….sheesh, it’s hard enough being married to one person.  I can’t imagine dealing with multiple spouses.  (Go ahead, watch Caprica and see what happens in the above-mentioned plural marriage.)  And when such a marital arrangement falls apart?  I can’t even begin to imagine the unraveling of that legal tangle in a divorce court.

On a personal note, if my husband ever came to me with the notion that he wanted to add another wife to our household, he’d find himself out the door in a hurry.  I just asked him what his response would be in the opposite scenario.  His response can’t be printed.

Given that most of the United States can’t even bring itself to allow consenting adults of the same sex to marry, I don’t see much chance of plural marriage as described above becoming permissible at any point in the future, so speculation on its nature and effect on family and society is simply that:  speculation.  We can only go by history, and thus far history shows us only one form of plural marriage.  As portrayed in The 19th Wife, it’s not a pretty picture.

Book review: A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

Four of five stars

One day, while on an international flight somewhere over the Pacific, Bill Bryson looked out the airplane window and realized he knew virtually nothing about the ocean — indeed, the planet — below him. As he says in his introduction: “I didn’t know why the oceans were salty but the Great Lakes weren’t…I didn’t know what a proton was, or a protein, didn’t know a quark from a quasar, I didn’t know how geologists could look at a layer of rock and tell you how old it was…I became gripped by a quiet, unwonted urge to know a little about these matters and how people figured them out…and so I decided to devote a portion of my life to reading books and journals and finding saintly, patient experts prepared to answer a lot of outstandingly dumb questions.” This book is the result of his three-year quest to distill all general scientific knowledge into one easily accessible, readable, and above all understandable volume.

Bryson covers the construction of the universe and the deconstruction of DNA; reintroduces us to scientific pioneers such as van Leeuwenhoek and Mendel, Newton and Hooke; and terrifies us with volatility of the not so solid ground beneath our feet and the sheer number of bacteria we carry around on our skin. But he doesn’t just present us with facts. He also tells us how we discovered those facts: how we came to know what we know. It all makes for fascinating reading. His material can be a trifle dry at times, but Bryson does a good job of making even the most dessicated scientific idea entertaining. Plus, there’s the additional cool factor of the occasional lovely oddball word, like fossiliferous.

Other than required basic biology courses, I’ve never formally studied science. But I’m curious, and I’ve developed a grand fascination with the subject over the years. I often tell my husband if I ever go back to college, my course of study will be in one of the -ologies. If you’re like me and have the least bit of curiosity about the mechanics of the universe, you ought to read this book, too.