The Ninth Hour by Alice McDermott is a delight to read. McDermott’s writing is warm and evocative, featuring vivid, relatable characters and spaces in which one longs to linger. Brooklyn and the Catholic Church of the 1920s come alive through her novel. At the same time, McDermott uses these very real people and the situations they face to challenge the reader to think about life, death, suffering and redemption. McDermott presents us with a world that we see almost exclusively from the perspective of women […]
Epic translation of The Odyssey
It has been many a year since I’ve read any of the Greek classics. I remember reading some plays back in high school (early 1980s), but I’m not sure I ever read the entirety of Homer’s Odyssey, and if I did, I most likely didn’t find much enjoyment in it. A classic of western literature and a staple of both literature and western civilization courses, The Odyssey tells the epic tale of a heroic Greek warrior’s 20-year quest to get home after the Trojan War. […]
Fight the Power
This short (115 page) treatise comprises two lectures which noted Cambridge academic and classicist Mary Beard delivered in 2014 and 2017. In these lectures, “The Public Voice of Women” and “Women in Power,” Beard examines the classical roots of the silencing of women’s voices and its effect on women in the modern Western world. Ultimately, in considering how women might truly become “voices of authority,” Beard suggests a reconsideration of “power” itself. In the first essay, Beard takes the reader back 3,000 years to demonstrate […]
Where the falling angel meets the rising ape
He’s had a near-death experience! We all have. It’s called ‘living’…. Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather was a Cannonball Read book exchange gift to me from Malin. On my wish list, I had indicated that I hadn’t read anything by Pratchett, and Hogfather is a delightful introduction to his world, aka Discworld. It’s a twisted and sometimes demented place, which means it’s quite a lot like the world we inhabit, except for the magic, gnomes, talking animals, etc. The action here is set on Hogswatchnight, which is […]