Books

Surfacing was excellent. This is the second book I've read by Margaret Atwood, and the second I've stayed up late finishing. I will read more by her. Chris recommends Oryx and Crake .

He didn't love me, it was an idea of himself he loved and he wanted someone to join him, anyone would do, I didn't matter so I didn't have to care.

I found it anyway but I was afraid to let them out again. Because of my fear they were killed.

He was neither of the things I believed, he was only a normal man, middle-aged, second-rate, selfish and kind in the average proportions; but I was not prepared for the average, its needless cruelties and lies.

J.M. Barrie gave the rights to Peter Pan to the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children in London in 1929. He died in 1937, and in 2007, 70 years after his death, Peter Pan entered the public domain. England made a special rule that stageplays of Peter Pan put on in the UK would continue to pay royalties to the hospital.

The Power and the Glory gave me a lot to think about. I think I'd like to revisit it at some point and consider more:

• Does the whisky priest have faith?
• Is he a good priest?
• Is he a good man?
• Are the saints just like him? Are they an idea of a person that doesn't exist? In their final moments, were not they afraid, and aware of their failures -- as sure as the whisky priest of their inadequacy in the eyes of God? Does it matter at all what the saint felt -- or just -- that he is a symbol for the people?
• Same questions for Padre José, and for the lieutenant
• The depictions of children compared to adults are powerful. "The habit of piety" ..?
• The priest is never named. Nor is the one that comes at the end. Padre José is named; he has become just a man.

Some quotes I liked:

Presently she left the hut and he could hear her voice gossiping outside. He was astonished and a bit relieved by her resilience. Once for five minutes seven years ago they had been lovers - if you could give that name to a relationship in which she had never used his baptismal name: to her it was just an incident, a scratch which heals completely in the healthy flesh: she was even proud of having been the priest's woman. He alone carried a wound, as though a whole world had died.

How often the priest had heard the same confession - Man was so limited he hadn't even the ingenuity to invent a new vice: the animals knew as much. It was for this world that Christ had died; the more evil you saw and heard about you, the greater glory lay around the death. It was too easy to die for what was good or beautiful, for home or children or a civilization - it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt.

He had always been worried by the fate of pious women. As much as politicians, they fed on illusion. He was frightened for them: they came to death so often in a state of invincible complacency, full of uncharity. It was one's duty, if one could, to rob them of their sentimental notions of what was good ...

God might forgive cowardice and passion, but was it possible to forgive the habit of piety? ... salvation could strike like lightning at the evil heart, but the habit of piety excluded everything but the evening prayer and Guild meeting and the feel of humble lips on your gloved hand.

I won't give this a rating, for the same reason that people do not rate A Crow Looked at Me . In both cases, the person experiencing loss is an artist and is able to use their art to clearly communicate their feeling, but the art is secondary and almost unimportant in the face of that feeling; it's the medium they're able to use to express themselves. A Grief Observed has moments of beautiful prose, it is well structured, I enjoyed reading it, but much more importantly it is clear and honest and powerful in its honesty and depth of feeling. I understand the author's hope, his loss, his anger; that is, it would be a lesser as a book if it was not written by an experienced author, just as A Crow Looked at Me would be less if written by an inexperienced musician, but I don't know that that is the piece that matters if the result was the same, that they were able to express fully their feelings, journey; I am glad it is both beautiful and real; but real is all it needed, here. It is like understanding and rating a wail in the dark - well put, encompassing, understandable if you have felt the least bit of grief before. This book was well put, encompassing.

Also, listen to A Crow Looked at Me .