Tangled Mind

Greek religion does not promote morality. Piety towards the gods and the dead, not good behaviour, is its central aim. [loc. 350]

Read in fits and starts between other books, mostly for the fascinating factoids and descriptions of legal process in classical Greece. Presented as a handbook for time-travellers, How to Survive in Ancient Greece is good at highlighting some key differences: the improbability of growing old, the more equitable distribution of wealth (1% really wealthy, 1% really poor, 'the majority of Athenians are very poor by our standards'), the less equitable treatment of women. Entertaining, engaging, informative.

What faces a young swift is a metamorphosis no less than if it were a larval insect bursting from the chrysalis as a winged imago. What hatched as a toad-mouthed lizard has already morphed to a light-wreathed angel, but now it must go from a condition of complete reliance upon parents to independence, instantly and without alternative. It must launch itself from a dusty, dark roof and fly out to the Sun. There are no second chances. It is a one-shot deal. It must fly, but fly perfectly, having never done so. It must simultaneously learn to feed and do so immediately... [loc. 2361]

Mark Cocker frames his narrative as a single summer day, from dawn to dusk. He draws on history, physics and anecdote to support his hypothesis that 'it takes a whole universe to make just one small black bird', and his account is nature writing at its best -- discursive, poetic, emotional, scientific, full of anecdotes and unexpected facts. ( Read more... )

... this new queer writing was all about using language to weave connections: to a place (San Francisco’s Bay Area) and between people (real or imagined). All in the service of queer community politics. In the late 1970s, [Bruce] Boone and [Robert] Glück thought about calling it something. ‘How about New Narrative?’ Boone suggested as a joke. [p. 287]

Hester starts off at Prospect Cottage, Derek Jarman's house at Dungeness, with the vague notion of 'a larger project I had in mind, which would examine the importance of queer places in the history of arts and culture' [p.7].( Read more... )

‘Listen, and do not forget, and I will show you a mystery. It is not the sacrifice, whether it comes in youth or age, or the god remits it; it is not the bloodletting that calls down power. It is the consenting, Theseus. The readiness is all.' [p. 17]

Definitely a reread, and I can remember when and where I first read it: in the library during study period in my third year at secondary school. I also remembered encountering the quotations from this novel in the chapter-headings of Watership Down, my favourite book when I was nine or ten years old... I remembered most of the details of The King Must Die, despite not having reread in the last couple of decades: I had forgotten (or never noticed) just how many hints of other myths -- Orpheus, an anachronistic Agamemnon, Jason -- are present, and how much they are woven into the theme of goddess-worship.

‘All those great men. When Alexander was alive, they pulled together like one chariot-team. And when he died, they bolted like chariot-horses when the driver falls. And broke their backs like horses, too.' [p. 308]

At times heartbreaking, and at others profoundly unpleasant, this is the story of how Alexander's empire fragmented after his death. There are a lot of strong and deadly women in this novel( Read more... )

'Man’s immortality is not to live forever; for that wish is born of fear. Each moment free from fear makes a man immortal.’ The rose-red on the hilltops changed to gold. He stood between death and life as between night and morning, and thought with a soaring rapture, I am not afraid. It was better than music or his mother’s love; it was the life of the gods. No grief could touch him, no hatred harm him. Things looked bright and clear, as to the stooping eagle. He felt sharp as an arrow, and full of light. [p. 120]

This first volume of Renault's 'Alexander' trilogy covers the life of Alexander the Great from childhood (he's four years old in the first chapter) to the death of his father, King Philip of Macedon.( Read more... )

I'd planned this. (I plan everything, so you can bet I'd worked on how to do this.) (Not, mind you, that I'd entirely decided just how much to tell her.) (And about whom.) [loc. 602]

I was an avid reader of Laurie R King's Mary Russell books (in which an elderly Sherlock Holmes marries a young woman of considerable talents) -- my enthusiasm waned around Pirate King, and though I've read and enjoyed several novels in the series since then, there are definitely others I've missed. No matter! This, the nineteenth novel in the series, more or less stands alone (though there are clear and rather intriguing references to earlier books) and I found it engaging and fun, though (again) Russell and Holmes are separated for a good part of the novel.

The year is 1926. Mary has just returned from a wedding in France (cue a lot of namedropping: Hemingway, 'Scotty' Fitzgerald, Picasso...) when she's visited by her long-lost Uncle Jake, who she hasn't seen since before her parents died. ( Read more... )

...the lad has now decided that he is off to Athens to study Epicurean philosophy – which would only be true if Epicureanism taught the importance of getting as far from one’s parent and potential spouses as humanly possible. [p. 60]

Having greatly enjoyed Matyszak's 24 Hours in Ancient Athens for its blend of narrative, historical fact and wry observation, I decided to try another of his books about Ancient Greece. A Year in the Life of Ancient Greece is set a couple of centuries later than 24 Hours, in 248BC, and explores the lives of a small cast of characters: a farmwife, a diplomat, an athlete (it's Olympics year), a female musician, an escaped Thracian slave, a merchant who falls ill in Egypt, a young woman due to be married, and a builder of temples. It opens with a nice little scene outside the Temple of Hera at Elis, with a group of people sheltering from the rain and a temple attendant contemplating who, and what, each of them may be. Over the preceding twelve months (starting from the autumn equinox) we discover their stories and how they're connected.

‘The ones who have hoards don’t need to work, but the ones who don’t, well …’
Hoards. Like piles of gold or money. Why do dragons need money? They don’t shop for groceries or pay bills. It hits me that, in all my years learning dragon tongues, I’ve never questioned how dragons fit into our human society. [p. 180]

London, 1923, where there's a Peace Agreement between the British government and the Dragon Queen; where some dragons fought in the Great War alongside humans, but others massacred the entire human population of Bulgaria; where Vivien Featherswallow, seventeen years old and the daughter of respectable Second Class parents, will stop at nothing to ensure that she can continue her studies in dragon linguistics, and prevent her little sister from ever being demoted to Third Class. ( Read more... )

Sometimes I seem to recognise things, as if I’d dreamed it all already. Like ... this road through the orchards. The apple trees. Meeting you like I just did. The way the sun makes patterns on the gravel.I keep having the feeling that it isn’t new. People say autumn is melancholy, but I find it’s the spring that feels so old. [p. 153]

Hy Brasil is a group of volcanic islands in the mid-Atlantic: a former British colony, a former NATO base, a former pirate kingdom. It's hard to find due to magnetic and meteorological anomalies, and for centuries its actual position was a matter of debate.( Read more... )