2022/162: Cloud and Ashes: Three Winter's Tales — Greer Gilman

2022/162: Cloud and Ashes: Three Winter's Tales — Greer Gilman

By one and one they rise and stare about them at the timbers of the Ship, and at the wreckage of their world's mythology: a sickle, buried to the haft in sand; a sieve; a shuttle wound with bloodred yarn; a bunch of keys, rust gouted; ruined hay, a dazed goat browsing it; the rootstock of a thorn, salt-bare. The tideline is a zodiac. [loc. 5214]

This book comprises three works set in Gilman's mythic, allusive, alliterative world of Cloud: the short story 'Jack Daw's Pack', the novella 'A Crowd of Bone', and a full novel, Unleaving. Cloud is shaped and kept by its seasonal rituals, by its goddesses and its constellations, by witches and mummers and sacrifice. It is pagan and cruel and densely layered, and the stories here will bear rereading, not once but many times. Which is to say that I'm not sure I have understood more than fragments of those stories, or their underpinning.

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2022/163: The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat — Oliver Sacks

2022/163: The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat — Oliver Sacks

...our ‘evaluations’ are ridiculously inadequate. They only show us deficits, they do not show us powers; they only show us puzzles and schemata, when we need to see music, narrative, play, a being conducting itself spontaneously in its own natural way.[loc. 2829]

Neurologist Oliver Sacks' compilation of twenty-four of his most interesting clinical cases, organised into four sections: 'Losses', 'Excesses', 'Transports' and 'The World of the Simple'. ( Read more... )

2022/164: Tomb of the Golden Bird — Elizabeth Peters

2022/164: Tomb of the Golden Bird — Elizabeth Peters

‘You ought not have cursed Lord Carnarvon, Emerson.’
‘Bah’, said Emerson. ‘He was already out of temper with me.’
‘You threatened him with everything from dying of the pox to being devoured by demons in the afterlife.’ [p. 174]

The final novel, chronologically, in the Amelia Peabody series, Tomb of the Golden Bird follows directly from The Serpent on the Crown, and deals with the discovery and excavation of Tutankhamon's tomb in 1922.( Read more... )