Karen Armstrong is probably our preeminent writer about contemporary religions, with books such as A History of God: the 4000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam; The Battle for God; Islam: A Short History, and Buddha. There are more, on English mystics, on the Crusades, a biography of Muhammad, and another of St. Paul. If all this sounds daunting, take heart. Her writing is not stuffy at all, but clear and often witty. And her latest book is the spectacular second part of her memoirs. Its title, The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness, is taken from T. S. Eliot's poem "Ash Wednesday", with its imagery of a seeker moving upward toward the light. Armstrong's first book about herself was Through the Narrow Gate, in which she tells of entering a convent in her native England when she was 17. She stayed for seven years, leaving after her order, which was a teaching order, sent her to study at Oxford. There she realized she could not continue as a nun and obtained a dispensation of her vows from Rome. Armstrong got two degrees from Oxford and became a teacher and writer. She also left the Catholic Church and turned her back on the idea of God. Read her account of her ongoing intellectual development. It is moving, suspenseful and eloquent.
This next book is a great gift for anyone trying to write with precision and accuracy. Lynne Truss is a British journalist and writer who has managed to make punctuation funny. Her book, which made the best-seller lists in England and the U.S., is titled Eats Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. Truss takes up the apostrophe, comma, colon and semi-colon, dash and hyphen and ellipsis (…), and more. She makes a serious plea: our attitude toward words in print is important, especially in a computer age when weird syllables and shortcuts are increasing on our screens. Learn the rules, as the artist studies anatomy, then break them if you must, and keep the end in mind – to help the reader understand. British and American punctuation vocabularies and practices differ a bit. We put a period where they put and end stop, and a parenthesis is a bracket. The book’s title involves a panda, of course. Read the back of the book jacket. And consider the role of punctuation in these statements:
A woman, without her man, is nothing.
A woman: without her, man is nothing.
In 1886 a middle-aged Londoner named Edgar Drake receives a strange request from an officer in the British Army. Drake is a piano tuner, specializing in French-made Erard pianos. The Army wants to pay him handsomely to come to Burma to tune an 1840 Erard grand, which had been shipped earlier by the Army to a Surgeon-Major named Anthony Carroll in the Shan states region. We wonder: why is this Dr. Carroll so worthy? Will Drake go? "An 1840 grand is beautiful, he thought ....and Burma is far." The Piano Tuner is the book about this adventure, which is inward as well as outward. The author is Daniel Mason, and the reviewers use words such as wondrous, haunting, profound, lyrical. Mason lived for a year on the Thai-Myanmar (current name for Burma) border, after graduating from Harvard in 1998, and when he came home he started medical school at the Univ. of California in San Francisco. Sounds like material for another book. This was a New York Times Notable Book.
If you met Alexander McCall Smith through The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency books that immediately followed, be aware that a fifth one is out. Its title is The Full Cupboard of Life and it also stars Precious Ramotswe, clearly the leading lady sleuth in her much-loved native country, Botswana. McCall Smith was a law professor at the University of Botswana and he now teaches medical law at Edinburgh University. Newly published in this country is another book by McCall Smith: Heavenly Date and Other Flirtations. This is a collection of nine stories, set in Africa, Europe, and Australia, all having to do with the trials of dating. Worth reading, but you may miss Precious.
Matthew Pearl started The Dante Club, his first novel, while in Yale Law School. He is the editor of the new Modern Library edition of Dante’s Inferno, as translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The characters in Pearl’s mystery care deeply about Dante, too; they are Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes and publisher, J. Fields. These men who work to bring the Inferno into English in America are strongly opposed by forces at Harvard who believe Dante's poem will poison American minds, particularly with its exploration of hell. Someone commits a series of murders based on Dante's circles of hell for different crimes. The literary group has to turn to detective work.
Time to sing the praises of a European mystery writer. His name is Henning Mankell; he's Swedish, and his books have been translated into English and 18 other languages only in the past few years, roughly ten years after first publication. Mankell writes police procedurals, if you want a category, and his protagonist is Kurt Wallander, an inspector in the small port city of Ystad in southern Sweden. Separated from his wife, barely on speaking terms with his daughter and elderly father, Wallander works very hard at stopping crime and violence. A version of Inspector Morse, perhaps? Faceless Killers involves a murder that may have been done by foreign workers. The Dogs of Riga starts with a life raft washed up near Ystad, with two well dressed dead men aboard. A part of the action moves to Latvia. The White Lion takes us to South Africa during Mandela's rise. Mankell is ingenious, masterly at creating suspense and atmosphere and definitely deserves attention. There are at least six other Kurt Wallander books.
Consider this if you want an unforgettable gift for someone who likes poetry: The Best Poems of the English Language, From Chaucer Through Frost. Harold Bloom is the anthologist; the New York Times calls him a "colossus among critics.” His chronological limits in this book are from Chaucer, born around 1343 to Hart Crane, born in 1899. One hundred eight poets are represented, plus faithful Anonymous, but only by those poets that meet Bloom's standards. "Essentially," says Bloom, "this is the anthology I've always wanted to possess." Selections from each poet are preceded by a few paragraphs of comment, not always laudatory. Of Matthew Arnold, Bloom writes: "Arnold, long admired both for his poetry and his literary criticism, was not particularly good at either." ("Dover Beach" is included, however.} There is also a 30-page introductory essay on "The Art of Reading Poetry." We're talking 972 pages here, not exactly backpack material, but it's worth the weight.
Have a happy holiday and thank you for giving and asking
for books -- that will encourage more books to be written.
-- Alice Racher
footnotes books featured: The books reviewed in footnotes are available in the lobby of the library for patron checkout. The bookcase is located just before entering the adult reading section next to the copy machine. Many thanks to staff member Karen Blackful for assembling, displaying, and maintaining these books for us.