Lines in Books

 ‘Sorceress.’ I repeated the word slowly, drawing out each satisfying drop of sibilance. Flipping between two retellings of Medea's tale. 🔸 Bright Air Black by David Vann 🔸 Medea by Rosie Hewlett Medea killed the children she had with Jason when he cast her aside for another woman, a princess, and killed both the other woman and the woman's father — murders which were all planned and executed within a 24-hour period. In doing so, she thoroughly subverted Jason's schemes, after being entombed in their home for a decade, and escaped the what one might imagine would ordinarily have been the consequences of her actions — in some tellings, the gods provided a chariot for her to escape in leaving no doubt of whom they supported, although in Hewlett's, escape came by way of a dragon she had created. In all tellings, Medea's tale is a chilling reminder of what a person pushed to the edge can become capable of, and of how divine justice and accountability take into account...

O'Rourke is a poet whose work I love, and she brings her felicity with words to prose here, elucidating the experience of being ill as few other authors have done. She herself has what could be Lyme disease likely along with other issues but the story she tells is one which I suspect almost anyone who has any form of disability, chronic illness or a condition which doctors find hard to diagnose, to fix, and to bill would recognise. It is also a story which is becoming increasingly common particularly with so many people having developed long CoVID in recent years. Whether or not one has chronic illness or a disability or some other health issue which impacts one's quality of life, reading the book seems well worth the time it takes, perhaps particularly if one doesn't. It is incredibly hard to explain what chronic health issues are like to those who have no understanding of how difficult each day can be, and this book goes some way towards bridging the communication gap, I ...

We witness what human beings are capable of doing to each other. Having experienced the worst, we must live for the best. We have to turn away from the horror. We must fight our way out of the darkness, even if we do not live to see the light ourselves. The story of how a soldier became a priest after fighting in WWII. I enjoyed how gentle it was although I can't imagine that I'll read the rest of the series: the Grantchester mysteries which apparently tell of how the priest goes on to solve crimes.

In a tale entwined with the Middle English poems Pearl and  Sir Gawain and the Green Knight , a woman looks back at a period in her life soon after she lost her mother, who is believed to have walked into the water of a river, and comes to realise that she likely didn't do so because she was sad. Everything, she later realises, indicated that her mother intended to return that day but that the river, known to be treacherous, had swallowed her up as she went to visit a child who had died, a child of hers whom she didn't want to leave behind or forget.

Finally read Into the Darkest Corner about domestic violence years after its publication. Longish but the writing is so bland that it takes about 2 – 2.5 hours to breeze through. Begins / ends with court transcripts. Oscillates between two timeframes: the relationship and its aftermath.  Descriptions of the relationship are often explicit although they bored me out of my mind. That could have had something to do with the fact of domestic abusers generally being boring — almost all of them tend to pull the same crap in almost the same way. That said, this book providess a quick introduction to the ways in which abusers can be manipulative and socially isolate their targets, one worth reading for those unfamiliar with the mechanisms employed by abusers.  The aftermath I found more interesting: the woman abused develops OCD and PTSD. No surprise, really. She also enters into a relationship with a decent bloke. Slightly irritatingly, he happens to be 'some kind of shrink'; it tak...

We grow to understand that our wounds give life its richness, even when they hurt and bleed and show no sign of healing. We carry them with us, even when we do not think that we can bear them at all. A novel about the writing of the St Matthew Passion in the voice of one of Bach's students... 

"She had thought, for a while, that she’d lost the magic of it: the ability to immerse herself in another time, another place. It had felt like forgetting to breathe. But she needn’t have worried. Now, worlds, characters, even sentences linger – burning like beacons in her brain. Reminding her that she’s not alone." Three women from the same family living in different centuries all have their lives upended by vicious men intent on controlling them, and all of them manage to find ways to subvert their tormentors (in at least two cases, with the help of good men, it has to be said) & remain true to themselves.