July Reading

Back home in my garden 

While we were on the ship in the Mediterranean in July, I didn’t have time or energy to read. We were busy seeing ancient ruins, modern villages, beautiful island scenery, and just watching the water. Long plane trips are a good time to read, though on the two 9-hour trips between Boston and Athens, I mainly slept — one book each way including airport time! 

Since we returned, I have read a few books — especially my chosen follow-up to the trip, which was to read Homer’s Odyssey. Here are the books I’ve read recently.

Airplane Reading

Gary Shteyngart’s latest book, Vera, or Faith is different from his earlier books.
Vera is a ten-year-old girl with some symptoms of Asberger’s like flapping her hands,
and being very very intelligent, perceptive, and socially uncomfortable.
But there’s no medical theme, you have to diagnose her as you read. She’s a person. Good book!

During the trip I read two detective novels by Anthony Horowitz.
I’ve enjoyed the Susan Ryland dramatizations, as well as the third, newest one in the series.
I also liked one with another detective at the center. I suspect I’ll read more.

After the Voyage

Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s horror novels are (oddly) relatable.
I think I like the others better than The Bewitching: it’s too conventionally a horror tale,
with evil monsters and a naive smart girl to defeat them. It was just published.

When we came back, I wanted to read a book about traveling around the Mediterranean.
Odysseus was in a slightly different area, on the other side of Greece,
but nevertheless I found many of Homer’s descriptions very easy to picture, based on experience.
Notice that I read my old, dog-eared version of this ancient classic.

Detective Tom Janssen is entirely new to me.
I enjoyed One Lost Soul by J.M.Dalgliesh. It even has some pretty good food scenes.

Before the Voyage

Autocorrect: Stories by Etgar Keret is an interesting book by the Israeli author.
I read it and a couple others before we left, and I reviewed it July 9.

Blog post © 2025 mae sander

Recent Reading

Burma Sahib by Paul Theroux (published in February, 2024) is a novel based on the true experiences of a man named Eric Blair in Burma approximately 100 years ago. The story begins when Blair is 19 years old, recently graduated from the famed prep school Eton, where he was not at all happy. He has gone to Burma to become a policeman and an officer of the British Empire. This is in stark contrast to most of the other Eton graduates who would have enrolled at Oxford or gone on to something else very upper class, but Blair wasn’t upper class. His father had been a rather lowly civil servant in charge of a minor aspect of the British-state-run opium business in a nearby part of the empire. 

Theroux selects wonderful detail about life in colonial Burma. For example, I really enjoyed his descriptions of the occasional native meals that Blair tried, as well as very British food that the Indian cooks prepared: food that they wouldn’t eat themselves because they were vegetarians. For example, a lunch of “boiled fowl, mashed potatoes, and a slimy vegetable no one could name.” (p. 33).

Food often contrasts to the political environment in which Blair exists; consider this:

“And the other memory was of an occurrence at the end of the meal (veal chop, mash, brown gravy, bottled peas). The boat that had brought the arresting officers had also brought provisions: crates of wine, potted meat, packets of water biscuits, tins of salmon, and a chest of cheeses.   

 

“Wearing gloves, the khidmatgar placed a cheese board on the dining table next to Oliphant. Grasping a cheese knife, Oliphant tapped it on a large wedge of Stilton, lowering his head so that his slicked-down hair gleamed in the lamplight, scrutinizing the Stilton. All the cheeses on the board were sweating slightly, a moist double Gloucester, a damp cheddar, a softening brie…. 

 

“There were more shouts, a yelping from one person, a woman’s shrieks, and Oliphant paused. … And that was the moment Blair heard the ruckus—yells from the precincts of the pagoda, the frantic jangling of bells, hoarse shouted orders from the arresting officers. Oliphant did not look up but instead studied the cheese.” (p. 144) 

Basically, being a policeman does not suit Blair at all; he finds that he doesn’t fit in at all with the colonial society and its repressive racist greed. He also doesn’t fit in with any of the various Asian people he gets to know, though unlike most of his fellow policemen, he learns the local language and has a lot of sympathy for the people. In fact, he is stymied by the rampant prejudices, the cruelty, and the pettiness that he finds all around him. 

Blair wants to write poetry, but is never satisfied with his efforts, and begins to write stories about his experiences. I loved reading about this five-year period in Blair’s life. His growing awareness of people and relationships, as well as his many frustrations and humiliations, are portrayed in a very fascinating and effectively dramatic way — much of this due to the imagination and inventiveness of the novelist. As you may know, Eric Blair was a very real person who did in fact become a writer. His nom de plume was George Orwell.

The Soul of an Octopus (published 2016) is the third book by Sy Montgomery that I have read. The others were about turtles and dolphins. But in fact all of them are really about Sy Montgomery. In The Soul of an Octopus, of course, you can learn a lot about the lives of octopuses that the author encountered — especially a few of them that live in a large aquarium in Boston. You can learn a bit about natural history, about scuba diving to see more of these creatures, about the dedicated caretakers who work in the aquarium, and about scientists who study the sea. But most of all, you learn about the author. I wasn’t as conscious of this in the earlier books of hers that I read but in retrospect I think it was the same. Not that it’s bad, that’s just the way it is.

I expected to enjoy The Seventh Veil of Salome by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (published August, 2024). I was very disappointed. It’s a soppy story about Hollywood. Unlike Moreno-Garcia’s other novels that I’ve read and liked, this one didn’t have any magical realism at all. Not recommended!

I’m also rereading Moby-Dick, in the aftermath of my trip to the Galapagos.

Reviews © 2024 mae sander

Shared with Sunday Salon at Readerbuzz.

 

Recent Reading

 Some Short Genre Fiction

A nice short story by Silvia Moreno Garcia.
Although I usually am not a fan of this genre, I enjoy her work.
As suggested by the cover, there’s a wolf in the story.

First sentence of this book: “She’d always known her lover would come from beyond the forest. It was foretold when she cast a divination spell. It was a game she played with the other village girls—quaint superstitions passed from one generation to the next.”

I’m always vowing to read Sci-Fi, but I never really like it.

The last sentence of the book: “ We go forth to find this city’s singer, and hopefully to hear the greatness of its birthing song.” — From N. K. Jemisin "The City Born Great"

And One VERY Long Detective Story

The Running Grave

Writing as Robert Galbraith, author J.K.Rowling has produced another massive suspenseful detective story. Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacot, partners in a private detective agency, are working on several commissions, most dramatically the case of a purely evil cult involving a self-proclaimed prophet (nearly a deity to his followers) and numerous offensive and manipulative activities. The abuses of the brain-washed, imprisoned followers are revealed as Robin bravely endangers herself by embedding in the headquarters of the cult somewhere in the wilds of the English countryside. 

The Perils of Robin in cult captivity are almost (but not quite) overdone in the style of an old movie serial, or maybe like the classic perils of Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela (published 1740 as Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, and considered to be the first ever example of the modern novel). I couldn’t stop reading!

The strength of this long book is that as Robin subjects herself to the horrors of this cult, the depths of evil that a single person can do are laid bare. I remembered, as I read about the cult leader and his willing victims, about Voldemort and the Death Eaters. All right, I still admire the Harry Potter books. I also admire the extremely pointed and well-observed criticism of cults and their exploitation of weak human beings expressed in this novel. 

As usual, there is plenty of personal detail about the two detectives, especially the struggle Cormoran Strike is waging to get his weight under control in order to reduce stress on his missing leg. His unwilling but disciplined choices, such as fish rather than steak, and his strenuous resistance against his craving for hamburgers and chips, as they are called in London, are very painfully familiar — as well as the circumstances where his will-power crumbles and he eats (in Robin’s estimation) 5000 calories worth of McDonald's. An example of his giving in:

“While Robin was in Kensington, Strike was back in the Denmark Street office, eating his second Chinese meal in two weeks, this time a takeaway. He was finding the last stone to go before hitting his target weight very hard to shift, and while he supposed a nutritionist might tell him the reappearance of takeaways and pub food in his diet might have something to do with that, the lure of sweet and sour chicken and fried rice had proved too strong for him this evening.” (p. 767) 

I was amused by one lunch: Strike is treated by a wealthy client at Rules restaurant in Covent Garden, an old restaurant with “comfortable glamour.” In fact, our friends in London, who are super knowledgeable about the city, took us there, and indeed we enjoyed the tradition and glamor of the place. Our visit was the same year as in the novel, 2016. Here are my photos of this experience:

After I found a couple of novels in the Cormoran Strike series to be grotesquely violent, I had decided not to read any more of them. However, a couple of people I trust (including our London friend in the photo!) said this one was better, and they were right. I’m glad I read it.

Reviews © 2023 mae sander

Shared with Eileen’s Saturday Critters and with Sunday Salon at Readerbuzz

A Ghost Story: Silver Nitrate

Silvia Moreno-Garcia really knows how to write scary stories!
I did a detailed review of her novel Mexican Gothic here.

Lots of good stuff in this ghost-filled tale! Moreno-Garcia knows how to build suspense and horror, and how to embed the scary stuff in everyday concerns. The plot of Silver Nitrate is complicated and wonderfully worked out, involving a number of interesting characters with a variety of occult skills, all set in Mexico City in 1993.

The two main characters in Silver Nitrate -- Tristán and Montserrat -- are slowly swept into a ghost-hunting frenzy, as they try to lift a curse on a lost movie that was being filmed years earlier in a movie studio in Mexico City. The film had used silver nitrate film, an obsolete and dangerous medium. This explosive substance also, they discover, made a perfect vehicle for creating an elaborate portal to the world of evil spirits and occult intentions, as used by an adept and unscrupulous sorcerer and his followers. (But that's enough spoilers!)

Despite the pressures and the dangers Tristán and Montserrat face, they always manage to stop to eat and sleep and regain their strength. These mundane interruptions are very effective at prolonging the suspense that the author is building. For example, just after a grizzly murder, these two are walking along a street:

"The first week of December. It was the season to devour empanadas, eat rosca de reyes, and listen to the fireworks exploding late at night. He was hoping to drink all the way through the posadas—he’d work off the calories in January. It was not the month to be chasing after murderers."  (p. 156).

On a morning after the two of them encounter some very frightening things:

"Tristán plated the eggs. He’d found corn tortillas in the refrigerator, but he clung to his northern customs and preferred flour ones, so he warmed one for Montserrat but none for himself. They took the plates and the glasses filled with orange juice to the table. They ate quietly. The silence strained the ears." (p. 229).  

Or dining at the home of an elderly man who knows how to perform anti-ghost rituals they need to use, and who knows how to stop the attacks of the more and more threatening supernatural creatures in the story:

"The supper consisted of a watery chicken soup that had Tristán yearning for his mother’s lentil soup with chard and the comforts of his apartment." (p. 251).

Also fascinating: Nazi racism and theories of pure blood play a role in the motivation of the sorcerer's creation, and continue to affect the evil ghosts and evil survivors of the curse in Silver Nitrate. In her earlier novel, Mexican Gothic,  Moreno-Garcia similarly created supernatural monsters who looked like white men, and were driven by extreme views on the superiority of the white race and the inferiority of "the other." This is a convention I very much enjoy. As the New York Times reviewer expressed it: "Moreno-Garcia lays bare the compatibility of Nazi ideology with regional ideas of racial supremacy, discrimination against Indigenous groups and desires to mejorar la raza — 'better the race.'”

Note: The ghosts are real! The rivers of blood are real! The temptation to follow a ghost into the night is real! This is a genuine horror novel.

A Parallel Demonstration of Racism in Mexico

A demonstrably fake mummy displayed this week to the Mexican Congress, which is holding hearings 
on extraterrestrial life. DNA shows that this fake is made up of bones from several human and animal remains.

The history of this fake mummy, displayed to the Mexican Congress, is a long one. The participation of a number of fraudsters with faked credentials and lucrative social media campaign to support their "research" is depressingly predictable. In an article in Vox, “The true story of the fake unboxed aliens is wilder than actual aliens: All the greed, fraud, centuries of racism, and deteriorated llama skulls behind Mexico’s unboxed aliens.” author Aja Romano documents the fraud and the role of racism in enabling the fraudsters. I was very interested because it’s the same racist motivation that features in the novel Silver Nitrate.

Romano writes: “even beyond the travesty that is disturbing individual disinterred remains lie the centuries of societal attempts to diminish the glory of pre-Columbian artists and architects and turn their works into inconceivable ancient alien wonders.”

Interesting parallels thus seem to exixt between these various examples of sheer racism in South America and Mexico.

Review © 2023 mae sander.

Entertainments

A Concert: Shakti's 50th Anniversary Tour

The fusion music of the group Shakti featured at a concert at our local concert space, Hill Auditorium that we attended last Thursday. The University Musical Society of the University of Michigan presents a whole series of concerts each year: this was the first of the 2023-2024 season. The Shakti musicians are: John McLaughlin, Zakir Hussain, Shankar Mahadevan, Ganesh Rajagopalan, and Selvaganesh Vinayakram. The opener by Béla Fleck was also great.

Béla Fleck getting ready to play the banjo. I loved his version of “Rhapsody in Blue.”

Shakti — fantastic music! It’s Indian. It’s rock music. It’s indescribable.

A New Classic Film: Barbie

When Barbie drinks, there's no water in the cup -- it's all pretend play!

 A Ghost Story: Silver Nitrate

Silvia Moreno-Garcia really knows how to write scary stories!
Silver Nitrate is fun to read. Detailed review NOW HERE.

Remembering Fernando Botero (1932-2023)

Fernando Botero, "Mona Lisa," 1979. (source)

Fernando Botero, the Columbian artist, died this week. I remember him especially for his parodies of Mona Lisa. His obituary in the LA Times said that his "depictions of people and objects in plump, exaggerated forms became emblems of Colombian art around the world." (source)

UPDATE:  I posted a more detailed summary of the man and his work HERE.

 Fernando Botero, "Mona Lisa, Age 12," 1959. (source)

The NY Times described one of his early successes: 

"In 1961, the New York curator Dorothy Miller bought a Botero work, “Mona Lisa, Age Twelve,” for the Museum of Modern Art. It was a surprising choice, since Abstract Expressionism was then the rage, and Mr. Botero’s sketchy portrait of a chubby-cheeked child seemed out of place. It was placed on exhibit while the original Mona Lisa was being shown uptown, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art." (source)

Reviews and photos © 2023 mae sander.

Shared with Sunday Salon at Readerbuzz.

Shared on Monday with Elizabeth's Blog Party.

Halloween Classics

From the Food Network: A Black Light Cocktail (source)

My neighbors have started decorating their houses and lawns for Halloween, and everywhere I shop has Halloween candy. It’s time to think about the holiday, so I’ve been trying to make a list of classic literature for Halloween reading. Here are my favorites. I’ve read them all, mostly more than once, and enjoyed them, though some of them frightened me!

• Dracula — Bram Stoker, 1897
• The Legend of Sleepy Hollow— Washington Irving, 1820
• “The Raven” — Edgar Allan Poe, 1845
• Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus — Mary Shelley, 1818
• Macbeth— Shakespeare, 1606
• All the Harry Potter books —- J.K.Rowling, 1997 - 2011
• Halloween Party — Agatha Christie, 1969
• The Graveyard Book — Neil Gaiman, 2008
• Mexican Gothic — Silvia Moreno-Garcia, 2020 (reviewed here: Cthulhu Comes to Mexico)
• Anything by H.P.Lovecraft (lived 1890-1937) — If his creepy characters don’t scare you, his racism will.

I’m concentrating here on literary works. I know there are many others that I am less familiar with, notably Stephen King. Of course, tons of movies and TV specials also have Halloween or otherwise supernatural and spooky themes! And most of the classics that I named have been made into films, sometimes over and over again. Like there seem to be at least 60 versions of Dracula.

Blog post © 2022 mae sander. Images as credited.

Books I Read in August

While traveling and since I've returned,  I've read several books, but I've never taken the time to write any blog posts about them. The Kindle App makes it easy to have lots of reading material even while traveling light! So you can see above, my Kindle screen with books I've read. Before the month is over, I wanted to list and briefly describe them, but if I try to review them, I'll never catch up. 

• Hunting and Gathering by Anna Gavalda. I would call this a romantic novel, in a very French style. The characters are quirky and mainly lovable, and they develop deep relationships and commitments to one another in the course of the story. One of them is a hard-working chef -- unlike many American novels about Paris restaurants, this shows the painful and abusive side of life in a restaurant kitchen in Paris.
• Death in Brittany by Jean-Luc Bannalec. This is a great police procedural, set in Pont-Aven, Brittany, where Gauguin and other artists lived in the 19th century. The memory of the artists is at the center of this suspenseful murder mystery. I especially enjoyed reading about the wonderful meals that the characters ate, for example:
• "They ordered straight away, without much discussion. Belon oysters harvested from the river a few hundred metres away, followed by grilled monkfish with fleur de sel, pepper and lemon, washed down with a chilled, very young red wine from the Rhône valley." (p. 250).
• The Dance Hall of the Dead by Tony Hillerman. This is the second of the novels about policeman Joe Leaphorn, written around 40 years ago and still wonderful to read because it's so knowledgeable about the lives of the Navajo and Zuni people in the Southwest. And very skillfully constructed. Hillerman was a master! Over the years, I've read the whole series and I'm starting over.
• The Far Traveler: Voyage of a Viking Woman by Nancy Marie Brown. I reread this to connect with all I was learning about the Viking settlements of Greenland beginning in the 10th century. It was wonderful to learn about events that took place 1000 years ago in the exact locations that we visited.
• Quake: A Novel by Auður Jónsdóttir. I enjoyed this interesting psychological novel by an Icelandic writer. There are so many Icelandic writers -- considering the very small size of the country, and I'm planning to read more. The New York Times recently published a tempting list: "Read Your Way Through Reykjavík"
• The Daughter of Dr. Moreau by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. This is a scary horror story based on the work of H.G.Wells. Moreno-Garcia is excellent at turning the standard horror genre into something different, where women are more powerful and less victimized, somehow.
• The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G.Wells, one of the inventors of Sci-Fi as we know it. I had to read the original as well as the knock-off. This was first published in 1896. There are at least two movie versions, which also influenced Moreno-Garcia, I think.
• Ant Farm by James M. Jackson. When our fellow passenger Jim on the Explorer told us that he had written a series of detective novels, of course I had to read one. This is the first Seamus McCree novel in his series. I liked the hard-boiled style of the mainly first-person narrative, and I enjoyed the references to many types of birds (Jim is an avid birder) and also the numerous meals that he mentioned. Here's one of Seamus's descriptions:
• "I drowned my pancakes in maple syrup—the real thing from Vermont. Years ago Paddy [Seamus's son] had insisted I ditch the supermarket plastic-bottle stuff. He claimed maple syrup was the one sweetener that didn’t impede mineral absorption, or some such. I admired his eating habits, but usually didn’t want to emulate them. He’d live longer than I, but I was unwilling to give up meat to gain a few years of life expectancy. In this case, I didn’t care what his reasons were; real tasted better." (p. 83).

Jim Jackson and his wife Jan in the lounge of the Explorer.

Blog post © 2022 mae sander.

Cthulhu Comes to Mexico

Mexican Gothic, published June, 2020

In the New Yorker this week is a list of "The Best Books We Read in 2020." Staff writer Rachel Syme chose Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s novel Mexican Gothic, a story about events in El Triunfo, a small and mysterious town in Mexico, in 1950. A very creepy family live there, in a horror show of a house. At the beginning, Noemí,  a very innocent young woman from Mexico City, is sent there to rescue her cousin. The cousin, Catalina, is the wife of one of the residents of the house, and has sent a mysterious letter begging for help. 

Reading Syme's recommendation, I was convinced: I bought it yesterday and already read it. Here's what she said.

"What makes 'Mexican Gothic' so fresh is not only its cramped, crawly ambience...but also the fact that it’s steeped in a deep colonial history that haunts the narrative. Is the house in El Triunfo really sick? Or is it just tainted by colonizers who want to strip the land down to its bones? Moreno-Garcia deftly raises these questions and then brings them all together in a gory, monstrous, and utterly satisfying twist."

Mexican Gothic definitely belongs to the genre of horror fiction -- not a type of novel I usually read. Like anything that is simultaneously fascinating and horrifying, you can't stop looking, or in this case, can't stop reading. The English family that inhabit the threatening house, and have lived there for over half a century, aren't just living there: they are trapped by the house and it's poisonous and murderous past, but I won't reveal more spoilers. The Gothic elements definitely include sexual threats to the pure and untouched Noemí, as well as many other creepy features that may be similar to other horror tales.

One repeated theme throughout the novel is the captivating idyll of fairy tales, which Catalina, the older of the two cousins, would read to Noemí during their childhood. In their thoughts are constant references to Snow White, Beauty and the Beast, and Sleeping Beauty, and to the horror of fairy tales:

"She recalled, rather grimly, that certain fairy tales end in blood. In Cinderella, the sisters cut off their feet, and Sleeping Beauty’s stepmother was pushed into a barrel full of snakes. That particular illustration on the last page of one of the books Catalina used to read to them suddenly came back to her, in all its vivid colors. Green and yellow serpents, the tails poking out of a barrel as the stepmother was stuffed into it." (p. 86). 

Moreno-Garcia has written several earlier novels that refer explicitly in their titles to the works of H. P. Lovecraft, though I've never read any of her other books. Mexican Gothic has some powerful resemblances to Lovecraft's tales. Lovecraft hated non-white people, and his monster Cthulhu embodied an inexpressible threat to white people (blogged here). Mexican Gothic, in contrast, depicts a supernaturally evil monster who himself is a white supremacist from England. He's the cruel colonial owner of a silver mine where Mexican workers have slaved and died, and he espouses eugenic and other racist theories that Noemí's college major, anthropology, have made her able to dispute. 

Another aspect of the theme of racism is the pallor of the very white people in the horror household, in contrast to Noemí's native Mexican complexion. The first person from the house that she meets is the most extreme example: "He was fair-haired and pale— she didn’t realize anyone could be that pale; goodness, did he ever wander into the sun?— his eyes uncertain, his mouth straining to form a smile or a greeting." (p. 17). Later: "He seemed a bit ghostly, still standing by the doorway, with the glow of the lanterns and candles in his room lighting his blond hair like an unearthly flame." (p. 179). And a reaction of one of the English wraith-like people to Noemí: “And what a pretty face you have. Dark skin, dark eyes. Such a novelty.” (p. 236). 

The anti-racist reversal of Mexican Gothic from Lovecraft's hatred of dark people makes it somewhat amusing, though knowing Lovecraft's work isn't necessary to enjoying the novel -- there's plenty to ponder if you are just aware of current racial politics. Other parallels to Lovecraft's work also appear -- for example, the association of the monstrous paterfamilias of the household with overpowering stinks, also a feature of the horrors presented by Lovecraft, as well as other writers. 

The passive and uncooperative servants and townspeople in the novel also create an atmosphere reminiscent of the New England towns which Lovecraft's alien monsters terrorized. Very nondescript meals (English style) that Noemí is served also recall the dull food in these New England towns; her first dinner: 

"The plates were taken away in silence, and in silence there came the main dish, chicken in an unappealing creamy white sauce with mushrooms. The wine they’d poured her was very dark and sweet. She didn’t like it." (p. 28).

Or the next morning: 

"Breakfast was brought to her on a tray. Thank goodness she did not have to sit down to eat with the whole family that morning, although who knew what dinner might bring. The chance for solitude made the porridge, toast, and jam she had been served a bit more appetizing. The drink available was tea, which she disliked. She was a coffee drinker, preferred it black, and this tea had a definite, faint, fruity scent to it." (p. 37). 

And at the end, the theme of fairy tales reappears at a crucial moment in the action:

"The scene reminded her of a picture in one of her childhood fairy tale books, when the wedding banquet is in place and an evil fairy walks into the room. She recalled the table laden with meats and pies, the women wearing high headdresses, and the men in box coats with huge sleeves." (p. 256). 

As I mentioned, Mexican Gothic is so suspenseful that you just can't stop reading! While it has similarities to traditional horror tales, including the Greek myth of Persephone which it mentions, it also has a highly original slant on the usual forms.

Blog post © 2020 mae sander.