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NauenThen

What I'm reading II

Leap, by Terry Tempest Williams. Environmentalism, spiritualism, Mormonism, family—and Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights. One of the stranger books I've read, mostly riveting & brilliant, sometimes maddeningly tangential, although I trust her to wander back to something I can ground myself in. Seeing the Bosch in the Prado was a highlight of my trip to Spain last year, & now I want to go live in front of that painting for a month.

Paris to the Pyrenees: A skeptic pilgrim walks the way of Saint James, David Downie. Lots o' history & spiritual questioning.

The Wedding, Dorothy West. One of my granddaughters read it in school, I suppose in honors English, although they don't read Chaucer or Hardy or anyone I ever read. Not even Shakespeare, I think. Dorothy West was part of the Harlem Renaissance, & this novel is about race & class on Martha' s Vineyard in the 1950s, with long stretches on how everyone got there, back to the Civil War.

Recently reread Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Aw man, Hardy is so good! And a book called Time and Time Again, by an English actor & writer named Ben Elton. A quick but disturbing and unsparing alt-history.

There's more but I want to get home before the rain comes down, which it's starting to do...
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